I left my heart….
Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate the day! As I said before, the mulitculturalism of the Bay Area makes folks sensitive to others who do not.
One of the last things that I saw on the TV news last night was the work of photojournalists, who interviewed, on camera, folks in San Francisco who work and live in and around Union Square. By “live,” the photojournalists meant “the homeless.” There are, of course, many reasons for living on the streets. Some of the stories were heart-wrenching, others, much less so. Some are forced to the streets. Some choose the streets. Others escape to the streets because they have nowhere else to go. There are probably as many stories as there are homeless people. And there are many more homeless people this year….
Earlier in the newscast was an interview with the pastor of St. Ignatius Church, who spoke of the importance of delivering a message of hope to the faithful this year. He is, of course, absolutely correct. Without hope, people plunge down the rabbit hole of despair, and commit acts that are often hard for the rest of us to understand.
The newscast was filled with stories of Bay Area people coming to the aid of homeless children who need warm blankets, people who need food, people who need a warm place to sleep… stories that make you feel very proud to be a human being, stories of faith, hope, and charity. Bay Area people are among the most generous people I have met, as a generalization. Perhaps there are just so many people here that the generosity of some makes such a strong impression. I join others in thanking them for their generosity.
I am not generally fond of cities, and I prefer the natural world. Of the cities I have visited, San Francisco is my favorite. In reading a book entitled “Type Talk” by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen, I stumbled across a possible reason why. The book is about Myers-Briggs personality types, as determined using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a “test” that has been taken by hundreds of thousands of individuals. In the book, the authors speculated about assigning personality types to cities. San Francisco had my personality type, representative of about 3% of the U.S. population.
My deceased mother-in-law always loved San Francisco from afar, and especially, the Golden Gate Bridge. About a month after her retirement and slightly before an anticipated visit to the Bay Area, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and could not make the trip. My wife visited her mother in the Mid-West with a borrowed 6-inch section of cable bundle cut from a Golden Gate Bridge cable replaced during maintenance… so my mother-in-law was able to see a piece of the bridge she loved, before her death.
Not all cities evoke the kind of (usually positive) emotion that San Francisco does. I can say that I am fortunate to live and work in the Bay Area, but I really made the choice to pay the costs and reap the rewards.
Those of you who know me very well will understand it when I say that part of my heart is walking through San Francisco as I write these words, on this Christmas Day.
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo™
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