Billets Doux

I was a feral child. As that kid, I pushed aside a summer screen and slipped out a second story window, grabbing the nape of a pine tree, jumped into space and rode that tree down to the ground under my window, and ran off to have fun. Son of a gun. We'll have big fun... After me, that pine tree was bent at the top like a fisherman's hook. I have always wandered off. Or drifted away.
I went west. took my time until I ran into ocean.
My first hour in San Francisco I almost ran over Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal pulled her out of my path.
On the Sunday night after the Loma Prieta earthquake I was double-parked and all alone in the center lanes of the upper deck of the damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge. I danced and sang for the glistening skyline until the chilly winds and vertigo said I should leave.
For fifty years I have been in awe of the Lady by the Bay.
The City was the older woman who woke up my life. She could have treated me better, but she never broke my heart. These days she is taking a beating. Gargantuan outsider money. Homelessness. Now a pandemic. She seems losing her joy.
San Francisco has always been much more than a setting for my writing.
Some years after arriving out west, in January 1978 Ross Macdonald wrote, "Fred Zackel's first novel reminds me of the young Dashiell Hammett's work, not because it is an imitation, but because it is not. It is a powerful and original book made from the lives and language of the people who live in San Francisco today."
For fifty years I have been writing love letters to the Lady by the Bay.
Fifty years?! That's a lot of love letters.
Want a goal? Write about...
The lives and language of the people who live in San Francisco today.
Let me share some billets-doux. Sweet letters to San Francisco. Read where you wish. In whatever manner you wish. For as long as you wish. A love that is undying is constant as the westerlies off the ocean.
Pleas enjoy the City by the Bay.