Tales From the Big 6-0 #1: My Magical History Tour of San Francisco
In Which I Turn Sixty and My Substack Turns One
This is the first in an occasional series about what I discover in the first year of my Big 6-0 decade. It’s been less than a week, but so far, so good. In fact, I think I might be able to make this the best decade yet (except for the sandwich-gen elder care), in which I will learn to love myself and others better, publish more, and swim longer. Please subscribe and share with your friends approaching similar cliffs of insanity.
I turned 60 on January 2nd. I’d been dreading this milestone for most of my 59th year and compensated by doing things that I was scared to do, such as trying ice swimming, a Catalina Channel relay swim, getting my first tattoo, and starting my Substack.
It seems fitting that Words & Water should turn one the same week I turn sixty. I seem to be Benjamin Buttoning my way through post-menopausal life and now returning to the brave, creative, and playful young child that didn’t get much airtime when I actually was a young child.
An older friend who shares the same birthday called to wish me well and when I groaned that it was ”the Big 6-0,” he laughed.
“What are you talking about?” he cracked. “You’re swimming more at sixty than you did when you were thirty.” And I realized he was right. I am swimming more, and better, now than ever in my life. I am also writing more, and better.in
Thirty years ago, I walked into Tosca on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco and the Green Street Mortuary Band started playing for me, launching a surprise birthday party planned by my sister Hilary and our father, Warren. By then, my dad and I had reconciled from the stake he put in my heart when he had fired me a couple years earlier from our magazine, The Argonaut. At thirty, I thought I knew everything. I had already lived a full life of adventures with college in New York and becoming a journalist in Rome. But the path to becoming me was really just beginning. That January of 1995, I was the managing editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the alt weekly where I established myself as a city journalist separate from my father‘s legacy of writing. It is also where I would soon meet Chris, my future husband (still married!). We would be married within a year, and quickly start our family business, The FruitGuys, and then our family—first our son Lucien, then his twin sisters Fiona and Simone.
60 Minutes for 60 Years
I dove into this 2025 birthday by swimming 60 minutes in San Francisco Bay’s 53-degree water with my friend Elaine Van Vleck (who hits 60 in a few weeks). We share a goal of swimming 60 miles for the Dolphin Club’s Polar Bear, a cold water swimming challenge (no wetsuits) that runs from December 21 to March 21 (more on that in another post). When we came out of the water, Chris, Hilary, my niece Ava, Simone, and Fiona popped a bottle of champagne on the beach. Turns out champagne is quite a good cold water recovery drink, which we enjoyed in the sauna.
My Magical History Tour of San Francisco
After lunch, they took me on a magical history tour of my life. Each stop was prefaced with a limerick-clue text from Ava:
Formative years, you had
no fears, drinking lots of
beers with all of the
queers
selling your stash of hash
for cash—your early years
went by in a flash!
263 Castro Street, the Castro
“What’s that smell?” Chris asked as we parked across the street from my childhood home. Then I discovered that I had stepped in dogshit earlier. Yuck! Good luck, right? I asked Hilary as she helped me clean my shoe. “Look, there’s a dead body,” I said casually and everyone gasped when they saw what I saw: down the block a body bag was being taken out the front door of a house and loaded into a San Francisco coroner’s van. I made the sign of the cross for the deceased. ”Dog shit and a dead body? That’s dad saying happy birthday,” H said, and we both laughed because dogs and death were the two things he most loved and most feared in his human life. So much history in this beautiful Victorian, like when my friend Holly and I once rolled 100 joints from pot she had lifted from her dad Paul Krassner (who was holding it for Mountain Girl, Jerry Garcia’s girlfriend) and then sold it on Castro Street. How did I manage to sneak out of that window and climb down the front of the house all those times without killing myself? Apparently I was a foot taller and invincible between the ages of 11 and 17. We walked down the steep hill to Cliff’s Variety Store, where Hilary and I used to enter their annual Halloween costume contest (H won first place for her potato sack costume in the early 70s and was booed by drag queens), and the girls bought me a tiara.
backpacking from the
mountains to the beach
in the classroom,
mouthing off to teach
don’t worry about a
grade—
just try to get laid!
The Urban School, the Haight
Urban was still a hippy school when I first walked into the Gumption theater building-turned-school back in 1978. My undiagnosed ADHD made me a nightmare student, class clowning my way through four years of gradeless, experiential education, mapping the geology of the Marin coastline with sand collecting; falling in love with John Steinbeck and tripping on acid while camping on the beach for our marine biology final field trip; reading John Muir, backpacking his trail and getting snowed out before the summit of Mt. Whitney. This was the birth site of first loves, lifelong friends, and learning.
back from New York, back
from Rome—
time to find a man, and
make a home!
You met at the Slow Club,
but things moved fast…
with your ‘50s pedal
pushers and your fine ass!
520 Hampshire Street, the Mission
When Chris and I met, the Guardian was in a building in the Mission, above the Slow Club. I ordered their birdbath-sized martinis whenever I could afford them. Chris says he first saw me at deadline, signing off on pages in the hallway in a sleeveless shirt and pedal pushers that he will never forget. He worked in advertising and I in editorial, on the other side of the journalism purity wall that still existed in the mid-1990s. We‘d slip outside separately and steal kisses on illicit romantic walks. We kept the whole affair secret for three months before going public and inviting most of the paper to the wedding six months later.
From the fruit of your
womb, a family did bloom
a great mother to all, your
business did boom
your extended family
grew, all through Yick Wo
your babies have grown,
no more diapers and poo
poo!
551 Chestnut Street, North Beach
Moving home as a single 27-year-old in 1992 after five years in Rome covering Italy and the Vatican for the Associated Press, Vatican Radio, and Newsweek, I found 551-C in the FOR RENT classified ads in the Chronicle. It was a garden apartment right next door to Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center, where my mom Denise was executive director and my future children would attend co-op nursery school. We sublet it when we moved to New York for our first year of married life where I did my Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia. When we came back, I landed a job as business editor at the San Francisco Examiner, discovered I was pregnant, and Chris started The FruitGuys in our kitchen. Pregnant with twins, we moved into a larger flat upstairs where Fiona and Simone were born during the dot com crash of 2000. I nursed them while stuffing invoices into envelopes for our remaining clients. Somehow we survived and the business did too. We lived a great North Beach family life, attending the Telegraph Hill Coop Nursery School next door and then walking the kids to Yick Wo Elementary school. Every Halloween, we went trick-or-treating at all the bars and restaurants on Columbus Avenue. Afterwards, we’d stop at O’Reilly’s pub where the kids coudl count their candy and the parents could have a drink.
conquered your fear, the
ocean is now dear
60 years past, and now
we’re all here…
swimming with the seals,
and writing with zeal
we hope you know that
we love you a great deal!
Aquatic Park
We returned to Aquatic Park, on the public beach next to the Dolphin Club. Each of the people I love most held a rock and spoke an intention for me and then threw it into the water where I swim each day. I cried at how much love and planning had gone into my day and that I could revisit this each time I swam. My love affair with the ocean has had ups and downs. I was almost drowned by a sleeper wave on the Sonoma coast when I was five years old. Then Urban brought back my fascination with all things marine and in college I continued my studies, sailed on a tall ship, and swam with sperm whales. Postpartum in my mid-thirties and perimenopause in my forties returned me to panic attacks with each bay swim, so bad that I stopped swimming for a few years. But I inched my way back and at 49, made my lifelong goals of swimming Alcatraz and the Golden Gate.
“My wish for you in your sixtieth year is that you are finally able to let go of dad, the tricky, hurtful parts of him, and only the love remains,” my sister spoke her intention, kissed her rock, and threw it into the bay. I burst into tears.
My six-year-old self let herself be loved by her sister and sixty-year-old me recognized how important it was that my sister supported me finishing my memoir about me and our dad. Sorry the Fu#k You: A Daughter-Father Memoir of Drink, Ink, & Catholicism will deeply affect her too.
traditions in this family run
deep, time for a drink at
your favorite keep,
one drink or ten, it’s not a
big leap!
let’s all raise a glass to Pia!
just don’t drink so much
that you get diarrhea1!
“Do you know which bar we are going to?” Fiona asked. There were several family bars that could have been this final stop but I figured it would be the one where we spent the most time with dad: Gino & Carlo. My daughters are now third-generation drinkers here, served by the second and third-generation owners. My 85-year-old mom Denise was there waiting for us, along with a crowd of friends.
Writing, open water swimming, and family are the three legs of the tripod that holds me up—my holy trinity. Faith is necessary for all three. Gratitude floods me for all the water that God, the Universe, the Great Goddess has sent under my sixty bridges, each decade with its delights and debacles.
My 60th birthday was magical in so many ways thanks to my sister, niece and daughters, but the biggest gift was one that I gave myself: accepting all the love offered to me. In the past, I’ve been overwhelmed when confronted with heartfelt emotion, tributes, and gifts. (A classic was when I turned 50 and Chris presented me with a gorgeous diamond and emerald ring. My response: “What the fuck?? Fuck you! What the fuck!!”)
Now Our Substack is One!
Now we are one and Words & Water has just begun! Putting my own stories out there, solo, terrified me at first. Most of my life I’ve written other people’s stories under the protective umbrella and built in audience of an established newspaper or magazine. Would I leave a typo somewhere like a wayward turd in a guest bathroom? Would anybody care? What was the point if I didn’t know what I was doing, how much I would write, or what about. Would anybody read it?
The community here on Substack has been such a wonderful tonic to the loneliness of slush-pile submissions. I plead with all my writer friends to come join our playground.
I’m so grateful for all of my readers and subscribers, especially the ones of you who have honored me by pledging a paid subscription for when, and if, I ever turn on a paywall. All of your likes, comments, and notes are an inspiration to me.
Now we are sixty and we can let ourselves have fun and be loved.
*I’m pretty obsessed with poop and poop jokes and think that diarrhea is one of the funniest, and most difficult to spell, words ever created.
What a wonderful trip through San Francisco and important places in your like. This was fun to read.
So brilliant! Congratulations on all the words and water. Here's to the next decade! 🎂