Familiarity’s spectrum

Meditations on loss, habit, and routine from San Francisco All-Star.

I spend my first evening in San Francisco taking the train out to North Berkeley. Swaying along in a packed BART car of commuters, feeling my ears pop as the train goes underneath the Bay.

The city isn’t new to me, and he meant it in the context of first-time destinations where you don’t speak the language, but I think of the logic Dylan holds to that there can be nothing so daunting and rewarding in equal measure as navigating transit in a place you don’t know. I think there are still shades of it in places you’ve been and know to navigate, but in returning it takes a little while to shed the feeling of being an outsider to local customs. Which sides the doors open on at which stations, what the etiquette and technical process is for entry and exit, knowing station order by heart and bus stops by neighbourhood markers. All the things that make you feel less conspicuous, that make getting around a rhythm and not an activity.

Besides the commute, I am later to meet Adam because I stop to snap photos of nearly every live and sprawling plant, tree, flowering shrub, all exotic to me by virtue of their being alive and green in February. Days later, a man who drives me to an All-Star event will point out how novel our circumstances from a hundred years ago, that we can choose to travel and see green plants in winter, or move where we like to change our situations.

With Adam there is a flurry of catching up before we settle into the routine of conversation. How familiar for how relatively short our knowing each other. The same will go in the coming days for people at every point of familiarity’s spectrum — Shanon, Warren, Taylor and Holland, OJ, Dan, Alan — and about these relationships I think how little it can take to strike up the easy ones and how easy it is to prolong the good.

I know I’m thinking about social routine, and habit, coming into All-Star because I’m thinking about someone I just learned I lost before getting here. About the last time I saw him in Florida, years ago, the makeshift road trip he made us out to Sanibel Island and how the moon there hung half and flipped over, being closer to the equator and far from the woods where we met as teenagers. The shells of horseshoe crabs scattering the beach at night, the trawlers crawling out in the Gulf with their running lights blinking, his voice and laugh deeper then but lighting up bulbs in my memory the same. The rhythm of spending time together again despite the distance of our lives.

The ease of routine, especially with people, comes in the expectation that it and they will always be there. The trust that you can fall back in at some future, yet-to-be consciously considered date. I try to think of the world without him and the promise of picking up that routine again as eventuality, that I’ll never be able to. I try even in the air, at cruising altitude over the Sierras blanketed with snow and cut from the tethers of the ground’s false permanence. I can’t.

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The feeling in San Francisco is always one of have I seen this/been here/passed by before, and the likelihood it will be true for how dense and small the city. That kind of deja vu not distressing, but a comfort. That I can conjure up how I remember feeling on this same street corner at 17, or in front of this painting last fall, breathless reaching this plateau one October, howling down Russian Hill at 28.

Walking home through the Panhandle close to midnight, quiet of the streets cut through by an occasional motorcycle otherwise the silence is dense as the low fog settling around the thick trunks of redwood and eucalyptus trees. They reach taller and older than most of the houses lining the park, remnants of the Gold Rush, you gotta figure, rung ‘round their insides.

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This All-Star, maybe more than others or maybe just more that I’ve paid attention to, I’ve seen complaints of its undoing. That in the weekend’s routine, its corporate habits have finally overstepped or outshined its basketball.