I hope this hauntingly beautiful video shot in San Francisco inspires copycats in Portland. Artist Paul “Moose” Curtis uses stencils and a pressure washer to transform the ravages of urban pollution and time into pastoral scenes. “Nature’s voice. . .is written in dirt like it would be written in blood,” he says.
My mother never made it west of the Mississippi. Until now. As I write, countless specks of her are in San Francisco Bay and the Pacific, bound for who knows where on the lunar whim of tides.
She’s used to the water. When she died in 2003, my two brothers and I scattered some of her ashes in Apalachicola Bay a few steps from her house on St. George Island in the Florida Panhandle and in the lake where we grew up in Central Florida. The rest she wanted deposited in San Francisco. But she waited patiently in Portland, a protracted layover in a plastic container hidden away in my office cabinet. Atop the cabinet rests her senior class photograph (class of 1948, Bosse High School, Evansville, Indiana).
My mother – her friends called her Joanie – loved sentimental songs. When I was a kid, she played Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” over and over. This was her only connection to the city, and the images and emotions evoked in the 1962 song touched her in ways I don’t claim to understand.
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