Love and revolution

July 26, 2007

Dear Patty,

Going to California for a visit can end up being more like a pilgrimage than a vacation.

Our friends Gail and Charlie have returned from their first trip there. Gail's son lives in Oakland. They put 2,212 miles on their rental car, zooming south to Los Angeles and north to Arcata, the town where I lived in Northern California.

Charlie might have explored the night life a bit more than Gail did. Most mornings she bought two muffins at Trader Joe's and gave one of them to the same wizened, dreadlocked homeless man at the wharf. He never spoke, just ate his muffin while she talked. She left San Francisco wishing she knew his name.

Gail and Charlie happened upon an art gallery voted the best in San Francisco. All the artists, more than 100 of them, are developmentally disabled and work in a studio at the back of the gallery. Charlie, an artist himself, was awed by their creativity.

In Arcata they tried to find my friend Julie but couldn't. She has sold her design stores to spend more time at her house on a cliff above the harbor in the tiny fishing village of Trinidad.

Charlie and Gail went to my old hangout the Jambalaya, where remarkable poets once paid tribute to love and revolution. It is now an upscale eatery, a tribute to polished surfaces.

They also landed in the middle of the Saturday morning farmers market on the square, a weekly profusion of music and flowers and organic vegetables and people who wish each other well.

Gail brought me rocks from Julie's beach in Trinidad. They brought DC a Chinese wall hanging with dragons because she loves San Francisco's Chinatown so. They brought me a T-shirt from City Lights Bookstore, unchanged since the days when the Beats hung out there in the name of love and revolution.

San Francisco is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Our friends had to go to Haight-Asbury.

In the Haight they found a poster made by an artist who lives there. It's a peace sign and a quote by Abraham Lincoln: "There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war except its ending."

DC is helping with vacation Bible school at her church this week. One evening the kids received miniature nets and ate snacks shaped like fish to spur a conversation about Jesus being a fisher of men. Last night they served blue Jell-O and Teddy Grahams to talk about Jesus walking on the water.

For DC vacation Bible school is a gift of love, a subject Jesus spent some time on. He didn't talk about hate except to say: "Love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike."

The Haight is a different way to look at hate. Hate is an emotion, a point of view that divides the world between things we love and things we hate, between people we love and people we hate. Where does a mute homeless man belong in that world?

Hating war does no good, in fact only makes war more possible. No, the Haight said, love peace.

Surely something new is percolating in San Francisco so many years after the Beats and the Summer of Love. Gail left awed by the "feelgood kindness" she encountered.

Loving-kindness is the Buddhist belief in extending good will toward all, even those who harm us. Keeping up with Jesus and the Buddha is tough, even in California.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.