Old folks and youngsters

Walking along the Embarcadero to the ballpark at lunch last Friday, past Red’s Java House and the pier warehouses, was a palimpsest on all the walks I’ve done like that over the years, since I was introduced to Red’s by William Talcott.  The sweep of the promenade is the same, though it seemed wider today for some reason — it does that when there are high clouds covering the sky and the Bay Bridge is captured within that dome, but clearly.  At the ballpark rather than turning back I took Second Street, again the palimpsest but this time a palimpsest of modifications within the basic theme, the street a kind of fugue on commerce and where people go for lunch.  Nothing lasts but everything’s the same.  Everyone seemed to be “a kid,” meaning a post-millennial, kids in their twenties, which had me counting the years to figure out whether they could be my grandkids or great-grandkids.  Fixing on an age of parenting at 23, as was the case with Mom and Dad when I was born in 1957, had I followed their example I’d now have sixteen year old grandchildren, so no great-grandkids yet, and certainly none in their twenties, but the distance was great, not so much in terms of what they know or how they think, which is pretty uniform in San Francisco, I’m not much different from them in that way, but in the mere duration and enduring of events, whether measured by the narrative of mediated news or in the character of the city and the Bay Area itself, invisible changes that become visible, changes that aren’t changes, and changes that finally are changes.  How are they to trust that what I point to as experience is that and not a fabrication meant to divert from the main event or the thrust of what’s being done to them by forces beyond their control.  When I was in my twenties I certainly didn’t hold my world in common with people in their sixties: one the one hand their lives had a different weight, the result of great wars and technological change I suppose; and on the other hand I supposed their experience to be merely residual to my own.