San Francisco is a city of calm and rebellion. As the old song says, there are gentle people there.
People go to bed early, it is sometimes hard to find a restaurant that stays open beyond 10.30pm.
Every morning, groups of Chinese people are to be seen calmly performing t’ai chi in unison in Washington Square Park. At our yoga class, our teacher serenely guides us through contortionist poses, encouraged by a soft gong and whispers of “namaste”.
There are jolts to the calm, such as at 3.56am on a Monday morning. We were awoken by the shake of windows and a severe wobble to the wooden building. Then a phone app leapt to life warning “earthquake take cover”. Which we did, enacting an often joked-upon escape routine, looking for the emergency bags. But then stopping and saying “what do we do now?”
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The takeaway the following morning was that although the quake was not the Big One, it was serious enough at a magnitude of 4.3 across the bay in Berkeley to pay attention to. As the mayor said repeatedly on Instagram, “What’s your plan for the next one?”
There are other jolts in the calm. Within hours of recent shootings, a local San Francisco elementary school went into lockdown following a phone call. It prompted what is termed a “shooter” alert, and its plan.
What this meant in real life was that when the alarm went off, the school’s children, aged about four to 11, were instructed by the teacher to huddle together in one corner of the classroom, covering each other in protection against what might be a stranger, trying to shoot them. Some of the children had phones of course and little whispers flew in that tangled corner.
“There’s a real shooter, but I need to go.”
Down the corridor in the row of small toilets, the instruction signs say if the shooter alert goes off, you immediately climb up on to the toilet seat and stand, opening the cubicle door slightly and leaving it ajar, and you don’t say a word. This is so you can’t be seen or heard from someone prowling outside the door for as long as it takes. In this instance it was at least an hour before the all-clear was called. And then the little children returned to normal the following day at school in their classrooms because this plan is not abnormal.
Since then, I’ve heard of a local school that had two such alerts in recent years. To my astonishment, both “shooters” were real and both people were known to the school.
Flags flew at half-mast in the city for the children who were shot dead in a Minnesota school in late August. And the news moved on.
Within days, the city’s flags were at half-mast again for another shooting victim. The shooting was shocking not just because Charlie Kirk was famous, perhaps for all the wrong reasons, but because his killing was immediately online for all to see in its gruesome detail.
In the hours after the shooting, an older woman hugged her dog in an Italian cafe and expressed her horror at it all.
“This doesn’t happen in other countries, what is wrong with this country?”
She took a call; she said it was from a friend on a newspaper. She put down the phone and shook her head.
“He’s writing a column pointing out how awful he was, I said, look he’s just been killed, he has a family, leave it,” she shook her head.
Since then I have not heard one other word expressed in public about the shooting of Kirk. In bars, restaurants, parks, beaches. No one wants to go there.
After a day or two it was as if the San Francisco Chronicle sensed the mood and led with the death of a hero of Hollywood.
The headline declared: “Robert Redford embodied an American ideal and often lived the part too”. An obituary followed on the life of the politically liberal actor and director.
While trying to buy the paper, I grappled with the mechanics of the antique street machine with a fistful of quarters, before a man came to my rescue.
“Good souvenir, and good to see him knock the other stuff off the cover,” he said, releasing the paper.
[ Irish biographer on Robert Redford’s Dublin daysOpens in new window ]
Our yoga teacher paused the other day and wandered off while coercing us into more contortion.
“Now the warrior pose, war, so curious, warriors, queens, archers, history is full of them ... inhale, and rest ... and now we have, can you believe it a department of war. I’m sorry, excuse me, no politics ... and breathe and exhale.”
Namaste.
