Private Geography

A photo of our neighborhood should accompany this brief post, but there isn't one on this, my travel laptop, so here's a 2010 pic of Sylvia looking bad.  Sylvia's not beautiful, but she's unremittingly cute, and I love it when she looks bad in photos, like the candid shots of stars that tabloids are so fond of printing, where the star looks awful.  BRITNEY SPEARS LETS HERSELF GO.

In preparation for this week's trip to Portland, I just made an appointment to get my nails done.  Kevin asked, "Where is this place?"  I replied that it was next to where Laura Brun lived.  Even though Laura hasn't lived in San Francisco for years, I guess 14th Street near the Safeway will always be designated for us as where Laura Brun lived.  I was thinking how couples have secret vocabularies, and how so many of Kevin's and mine are about local geography.  "Where'd you leave the car?"  "By Mark Bingham's."  Mark Bingham, you'll remember, was the only San Franciscan on Flight 93, the SFO-bound plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania in the 2001 9/11 attacks.  His office was located a block over from us.  Another local landmark we often mention is the sap-spitters, as in "The car's down by the sap-spitters."  The sap-spitters are a couple of trees, who when they first were planted, would drip goo all over the car, so if you parked there you had to get the car washed.  The sap-spitters seem to no longer spit sap.  Another landmark is "the fake driveway," a favorite of ours for it looks like a driveway but isn't so it's often available to park the car.  Now it's time to get back to work, so anyway, hi!