Tag Archives: San Francisco

Eating Dessert Can Help You Eat Better? Seriously?

Posted on March 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

I just celebrated my birthday with a scrumptious meal at a charming San Francisco restaurant. Sharing a fabulous candle-topped dessert with my companion was a slam-dunk way to end a perfect meal in a splendid restaurant.

Should I regret consuming that delicious dessert?

The answer, happily, is no.  I should have no regrets about eating my birthday surprise, and a recent study backs me up.

According to this study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and reported in a recent issue of TIME magazine, having an occasional dessert may actually be a useful tool to help you eat better.

Here’s what happened:  More than 130 university students and staff were offered a choice of two desserts and asked to make their choice at the start of the lunch line in a campus cafeteria.  The study found that those who made the “decadent” selection—lemon cheesecake—chose healthier meals and consumed fewer calories overall than those who picked fresh fruit.  Simply selecting it first was enough to influence the rest of their order.

Almost 70 percent of those who picked the cheesecake went on to choose a healthier main dish and side dish, while only about a third of those selecting fruit made the healthier choice.  The cheesecake-choosers also ate about 250 fewer total calories during their meal compared with the fruit-choosers.

Study co-author Martin Reimann, an assistant professor of marketing and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, concluded that choosing something healthy first can give us a “license” to choose something less healthy later.  But if you turn that notion around and choose something more “decadent” early on, “then this license [to choose high-calorie food] has already expired.”  In other words, making a calorie-laden choice at the beginning of the meal seems to steer people toward healthier choices later.

No one is suggesting that we all indulge in dessert on an everyday basis.  For many of us, the pursuit of good health leads us to avoid sugary desserts and choose fresh fruit instead.  But Reimann believes that choosing dessert strategically can pay off.  He advises us to be “mindful and conscious about the different choices you make.”

Will I order lemon cheesecake, a chocolate brownie, or a spectacular ice-cream concoction for dessert at my next meal?  Probably not.  But I am going to keep the Arizona research in mind.

You should, too.  Beginning your meal with the knowledge that it could end with a calorie-laden dessert just might prompt you to select a super-healthy salad for your entrée, adding crunchy green veggies on the side.

 

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Posted in birthdays, calorie-laden food, chocolate, eating dessert, food, health, lifestyle choices, psychological research, restaurants, San Francisco, sugar, sugar consumption, well-being

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You CAN Go Home Again

Posted on June 21, 2018 | 3 comments

Yes.  You can go home again.  I just did it.

After spending many (too many?) decades of my life in the Chicago area, I departed for San Francisco in 2005.  Forgive the cliché, but I’ve never looked back.

I had lots of good reasons to leave Chicago, and lots of good reasons to head for the West Coast.  At one time or another, I’d spent some of the happiest years of my life in California, and I looked forward to many more happy years in the Bay Area.

Thankfully, those happy years have become a reality, and returning to Chicago was never on my agenda.

Yes, I’d left behind some great friends and some family, too, and I did miss seeing them.  But I didn’t miss anything else in Chicago.

So why did I turn up there for a weekend in May?

Easy answer:  My older daughter (I’ll call her Mary) decided to celebrate her May birthday by taking her kids to Chicago to show them where she’d grown up.  She wanted to escort them to all of the places that had been important to her:  where we lived; where she went to school (from nursery school and elementary school to junior high and high school); where she spent countless hours at our lakefront park, our beach, our library, and all the rest.

And she asked me to tag along.

Of course I said “yes”!

After telling the kids story after story about these places since they were toddlers, we finally had a chance to show them what they’re really like.

So here’s how we spent the two full days we were there:

First day:  We explored the sites near our former home in a leafy suburb on the North Shore.  We first drove to the block where we lived; then to the elementary school two blocks away; to the even closer nursery school (like the one where I set a murder  in my fictional mystery, Jealous Mistress); and the small suburban downtown.  We frequently emerged from our rental car to get a close-up look.  Some things had changed; many had not.

We proceeded up the North Shore to look at New Trier High School, Mary’s alma mater.  Then we spent the afternoon at the Chicago Botanic Garden (actually located in Glencoe), a fabulous garden filled with astounding plants, a charming waterfall, three islands featuring Japanese gardens, and a remarkable sculpture of Carl Linnaeus.  Mary and I fondly recalled how much she, her father, her sister, and I had relished our countless visits there.

The first day included mouth-watering meals at favorite spots like Walker Brothers pancake house (it’s called Palmer Brothers in Jealous Mistress), where we devoured its revered apple pancakes, and Lou Malnati’s, where we eagerly consumed some of the deep-dish pizza Chicago has made famous.

Second day:  We drove into the city and parked at Navy Pier, planning to hit some of the city’s highlights.  Navy Pier, renovated in the ‘90s as a playground for Chicagoans, was a great place to start.  We braved the hot sun and waited in line to board the Centennial Wheel, a recently redesigned Ferris wheel that now sports large enclosed gondola cars with huge windows providing magnificent city views.  We even bought copies of the corny tourist-rooking photo taken of us just before we boarded.  After lunch at a casual spot on the pier, we hopped on a shuttle bus to Michigan Avenue.  It dropped us off close to our destination:  the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River, where we’d take the renowned 90-minute architectural boat tour.

We indulged in treats at the Ghirardelli Square outpost in the Wrigley Building as we gazed at the historic Tribune Tower. Then we boarded the “First Lady” cruise to see the notable architecture along the Chicago River.  We were lucky to have a remarkably knowledgeable tour guide associated with the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

We marveled at the great architecture and the many stories about the tall buildings sited along the riverfront.  But there was one enormous blot on the riverscape:  a sleek 92-story building, so shiny it reflects the Chicago skyline on its stunning glass façade.  Unfortunately, the outward appearance of this otherwise beautiful building is sullied by the enormous name erected at the very top in enormous capital letters:  T—-P.

This building looms so large, and in such a prominent location along the river (on the former site of the Chicago Sun-Times plaza, where my high school choir once sang Christmas carols), that the name at the top infuriated me.  Weren’t the residents of Chicago, who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (she won over 83% of the votes in Chicago, while her opponent squeaked out 12%), appalled that they must confront this name on a regular basis?  Although a few mild protests have been mounted, the name remains.  But take heart.  The Chicago Tribune reported on May 30 that the real-estate firm advertising space in the building has chosen to downplay the name: Its brand-new brochure doesn’t even mention it.  Others avoiding any connection with the name include the building’s architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who refer to it by its address, not its name, on the firm’s website.

Still, if I lived in Chicago, I’d go further than that.  I’d organize an effort to remove that name from everyone’s sight.  I really would.

When we left the boat, we speedily walked south on Michigan Avenue, headed for Millennium Park and our dinner reservation at Gage, a gastropub directly across from the park.  After a great meal celebrating Mary’s birthday, complete with cake and candles, we made a bee-line for the park and its now-famous “Bean.”  After a good look around the park, we made our way back to Navy Pier to collect our car and drive back to our hotel.

Before heading to O’Hare for our return home, we managed to squeeze in encounters with several wonderful old friends and a few family members, along with a sentimental return to a favorite Evanston restaurant, Olive Mountain.

Did I forget to mention that we hit extraordinarily beautiful weather?  Sunshine and temperatures in the 70s reminded us of Bay Area weather, not the kind of weather we’d managed to survive in Chicago year after year.  We made sure to let the kids know that this weather was not typical for Chicago!

In short, you can go home again.  Not to make it your home again.  But to spend a delightful weekend visiting old haunts and new attractions.  Sharing the experience with good friends and loved ones makes it even better.

 

 

 

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Posted in Bay Area, California, Chicago, family, friends, memories, nostalgia, San Francisco, school, sunshine, travel, weather, West Coast

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A Snowy April 1st

Posted on May 15, 2018 | 1 comment

On the morning of April 1st, The New York Times reported that the city had woken up to an April snowstorm, “with about 5 inches of snow expected to produce slushy streets and a tough morning commute.”  The storm followed a string of storms that had hit the East Coast in March with heavy snows and damaging winds.

This New York story about snow on April 1st reminded me of another April 1st snowstorm:  The one in Chicago that changed my life.

In the spring of 1970, I was already questioning whether I wanted to spend another year in Chicago.  My work at the Appellate and Test Case Division of the Chicago Legal Aid Bureau had its good points.  I was co-counsel with a lawyer at the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU (who happily became a lifelong friend) in a case challenging the restrictive Illinois abortion law, a law that made any abortion nearly impossible for all but the most affluent women in Illinois.  Our case was moving forward and had already secured a TRO allowing a teenage rape victim an emergency abortion.  A great legal victory!

But the rest of my life was at a standstill.  I was dating some of the men I’d met, but I hadn’t encountered anyone I wanted to pair up with.  In fact, I’d recently dumped a persistent suitor I found much too boring.  Relying on old friendships led to occasional lunches with both men and women I’d known in school, but the women were happily married and had limited time for a single woman friend.  I tried striking up friendships with other women as well as men, but so far that hadn’t expanded my social life very much.

I also haunted the Art Institute of Chicago, attending evening lectures and lunchtime events.  The art was exhilarating, but good times there were few.  When I turned up for an event one Sunday afternoon and left a few hours later, planning to take a bus home, I was surprised to see almost no one else on Michigan Avenue, leaving me feeling isolated and (in today’s parlance) somewhat creeped-out.  (In 1970 Chicago hadn’t yet embarked on the kind of Sunday shopping that would bring people downtown on a Sunday afternoon.)  Similarly, I bought tickets for a piano series at Symphony Hall, and a series of opera tickets, but again I many times felt alone among a group of strangers.

I still had lots of family in the area.  But being surrounded by family wasn’t exactly what I was looking for just then.

So although I was feeling somewhat wobbly about staying in Chicago, the question of where to settle instead loomed large.  When I’d left law school three years earlier and assumed a two-year clerkship with a federal judge in Chicago, I’d intended to head for Washington DC when my clerkship ended.  But in the interim Tricky Dick Nixon had lied his way into the White House, and I couldn’t abide the idea of moving there while he was in charge.

My thoughts then turned to California.  I’d briefly lived in Los Angeles during 8th grade (a story for another day) and very much wanted to stay, but my mother’s desire to return to Chicago after my father’s death won out.  Now I remembered how much I loved living in sunny California.  A February trip to Mexico had reinforced my thinking that I could happily live out my days in a warm-weather climate instead of slogging away in Chicago, winter after Chicago winter.

So I began making tentative efforts to seek out work in either LA or San Francisco, cities where I already had some good friends.

What happened on April 1st sealed the deal.  I’d made my way to work that morning despite the heavy snow that had fallen, and I took my usual ride home on a bus going down Michigan Avenue to where I lived just north of Oak Street.  The bus lumbered along, making its way through the snow-covered city, its major arteries by that time cleared by the city’s snow plows.  When the bus driver pulled up at the stop just across Lake Shore Drive from my apartment building, he opened the bus’s door, and I unsuspectingly descended the stairs to emerge outside.

Then, it happened.  I put a foot out the door, and it sank into a drift of snow as high as my knee.  I was wearing the miniskirts I favored back then, and my foot and leg were now stuck in the snow.  The bus abruptly closed its door, and I was left, stranded in a snowbank, forced to pull myself out of it and attempt to cross busy Lake Shore Drive.

On April 1st.

Then and there I resolved to leave Chicago.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.  I made up my mind to leave the snow-ridden city and head for warmer climes.

And I did.  After a May trip to the sunny West Coast, where I interviewed for jobs in both Los Angeles and San Francisco (with kind friends hosting me in both cities), I wound up accepting a job offer at a poverty-law support center at UCLA law school and renting a furnished apartment just across Gayley Avenue from the campus.

The rest is (my personal) history.  I immediately loved my new home and my new job.  Welcomed by friends, both old and new (including my brand-new colleagues at UCLA), I was happy to have left Chicago and its dreary winters behind.  And six weeks after arriving in LA, I met the wonderful guy I married a few months later.

What happened next?  I’ll save that for still another day.  But here’s the take-away:  a snowstorm on April 1st changed my life.  Maybe it can change yours, too.

 

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Posted in Art Institute of Chicago, California, Chicago, family, law, lawyers, legal assistance to the poor, Los Angeles, LA, Mexico, New York City, Nixon administration, politics, president, San Francisco, snow, snowstorms, taking buses, the White House, UCLA, Washington DC, weather, West Coast, winter weather

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They’re My Blue Jeans, and I’ll Wear Them If I Want To

Posted on May 31, 2017 | Leave a comment

What?  I’m supposed to give up wearing jeans because I’m over 52?

I recently came across a preposterous study conducted by CollectPlus, a UK parcel-delivery service, which asked 2,000 Brits this question:  When should people stop wearing jeans?

Answer:  Age 53.

Even the marketing director at CollectPlus was baffled by the results.  Catherine Wolfe told the Daily Mail, “Denim is such a universal material and, with so many different styles available, it’s a timeless look that people of all ages can pull off.”

The newspaper didn’t disclose such relevant details as the age of the participants in the survey.  Who were these people?  How old were they?  Where in the UK did they live?  To make any sense out of this study, we should know details like these.

What did the participants reveal?  Almost a quarter of them admitted they haven’t yet found their perfect pair, another 29 percent have given up the quest for that perfect pair, and six percent admitted that they’ve been reduced to tears in the search for it.

Once they’ve found their ideal jeans, however, they hold on to them, and 33 percent say they’ll wear them practically anywhere, including the theater or a dinner party.

Do these devoted jeans-wearers really expect to give up their beloved jeans when they turn 53?  I doubt it.

Although my own go-to pants are slim black fabric-blends, my wardrobe also includes some skinny jeans.  I sported a pair last week during a visit to Yosemite National Park. My semi-washed-out jeans were clearly the best choice for Yosemite.  They protected me from insect bites, spilled food and drink, and potentially hazardous falls onto jagged rocks and other obstacles confronting me during my hikes.  (Luckily, I avoided any mishaps.)  When I hiked alongside Yosemite Falls, one of the park’s spectacular waterfalls, its watery mist hit my clothes, but my jeans’ cotton fabric dried quickly in the mountain air.  And I had pockets galore in which to stash any small items I needed en route.

In short, they were perfect.  Why would I ever want to abandon them?

Here in San Francisco, we treasure the legacy of blue jeans, thanks to Levi Strauss and the jeans empire he and his partner created in 1871 (they patented their design in 1873).  The Levis Strauss Company is still a big presence in the city, and Levi’s descendants are among the Bay Area’s most prominent philanthropists and civic leaders.

You may be surprised to learn that the Levi’s company maintains a vast collection of historic jeans in its San Francisco archives. And to celebrate the 144th birthday of blue jeans this year, Levi’s hosted a bunch of special events around town, including the launch of their first-ever skinny 501s for men and women.

Give up my skinny jeans?  Never.  And I think at least a few other over-50s agree.  Last week, I watched singer-songwriter Paul Simon perform on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  Simon, who’s 75, was wearing a pair of skinny jeans that looked a lot like mine.

Bravo, Paul!  It’s great to see you still singing, still writing new songs to sing, and still wearing skinny jeans.  “Hello darkness, my old friend?”  Well, maybe.  If they’re dark blue skinny jeans, that is.

 

 

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Posted in aging, blue jeans, Britain, denim, exercise, fashion, getting older, hiking, jeans, Levi's, London, music, Paul Simon, San Francisco, travel, TV comedy, walking, Western U.S., Yosemite

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Happy Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2016 | 3 comments

Happy Christmas!  That’s what the Brits say, right?  I’m thinking in Brit-speak right now, thanks to recently immersing myself in the world of Victorian London, and I haven’t shaken it off just yet.

The occasion? I showed up at this year’s Great Dickens Christmas Fair & Victorian Holiday Party, held every year at San Francisco’s Cow Palace.

I’ve always associated the Cow Palace with the Republican convention held there in 1964.  The one where Barry Goldwater gave his famous acceptance speech, including the memorable line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”  I remember watching him say those words on TV while I was at home with a high fever.  The whole experience seemed like a feverish nightmare.  A candidate for the presidency of the United States saying those words!  To a Democratically-inclined young person in 1964, Goldwater’s words were shocking.  (Fast forward to 2016, when much more inflammatory speech was hurled at the nation almost every day by another candidate for the presidency.  One, unlike Goldwater, who got himself elected.)

Back to the Cow Palace.  It’s an indoor arena known as a venue for dog shows, sporting events, rodeos, and gun shows.  The Beatles appeared there twice in the ‘60s (and U2 at a special event in October 2016).  I’d never been there before.  But there I was, along with my two daughters and two granddaughters, entering the world of Dickens’s London.

Dickens was an early favorite of mine.  During my teen years, I read David Copperfield and Oliver Twist and became totally enamored of the characters and plot development in both.  (I also read, or tried to read, A Tale of Two Cities, during sophomore year, thanks to Mr. Hurley.  Every girl in our class, including me, had a major crush on him, the only good-looking under-40 male teacher at our high school.  But the book was a poor choice, even for the best readers among us, because it demanded a knowledge of history we hadn’t yet acquired.  When I returned to it years later, knowing something about the history of that time, I found it quite wonderful.  Still, it was and is very different from any of Dickens’s other works.)

Later I moved on to reading more and more Dickens. Bleak House, an indictment of the law as practiced in Dickens’s London, was a favorite.  I saw Oliver performed on stage and in the movies and saw countless dramatizations of his other stories, including the perennial A Christmas Carol.  The 1982 BBC mini-series of Nicholas Nickleby, starring Roger Rees, was especially memorable.

In short, I was—and am—a Dickens fan.

So off I went to the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, not quite sure what to expect.

What I discovered was a whole world of people who turned out to enjoy dancing, music, and theatrical performances inspired by Dickens and the culture of his time.  At least half, possibly more, were dressed in the Victorian fashions they would have worn when meeting Dickens himself.  Perhaps many of these fair-goers like the theatricality of dressing up this way, pretending to be in a different time and place, no doubt escaping the reality of their everyday lives.

A host of vendors offered Victorian-style clothing and hats; many Victorian-clad fair-goers may have purchased theirs at earlier fairs.  Vendors also sold things like second-hand books (some by Dickens), jewelry, vintage photos, and scented items, along with food and drink.  My granddaughters were taken with the stunning dresses, and their mother bought one for each of them on the condition that they wear them as often as possible.

We headed for a few of the performances, including a charming version of traditional Christmas carols (yes, the singers were in Victorian garb), Irish and Scottish dancing, and a typically-British “music hall” comedy.  An over-18 version began after ours and attracted a lot of people waiting in line outside the music hall as we departed (we had two under-18 girls among us).  Finally, we were treated to Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball, where fair-goers could themselves get on the dance floor and twirl to the music of Victorian London.  Just before we left, a beautifully-costumed Queen Victoria showed up, along with her retinue, to wish us all a Happy Christmas and a Good New Year.

The Dickens Fair was tremendous fun.  And it had a bonus:  it reminded me of two special times in my past.  When my husband-to-be Herb and I first began dating, we discovered that we not only lived in the same apartment building near UCLA (where we were working) but we both were also great fans of Charles Dickens.  (In London years later, Herb and I made a beeline for the only house still standing where Dickens lived and wrote.)

Herb somehow garnered tickets for a live performance at UCLA by the British (specifically Welsh) writer and actor Emlyn Williams.  Best known for his plays Night Must Fall and The Corn is Green (both frequently revived on stage and made into notable films), Williams also worked on screenplays for directors like Alfred Hitchcock and acted himself in a number of films.

When we encountered Williams in early 1971, he was touring with his one-man show, in which he portrayed Charles Dickens, bearded and outfitted in Victorian attire, reading excerpts from his famous novels.  (Some say he began the whole genre of one-man and one-woman performances. He appeared in New York as early as 1953 and no doubt appeared in London even earlier. Probably best-known to Americans is Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain.)  Herb and I were entranced by Williams’s stellar performance, and I followed it up by giving Herb a new biography of Dickens as his Valentine’s Day gift.  (Not very romantic, but Herb loved it.)

Ten years later, we learned that Williams-as-Dickens would be performing close to our then-home on the North Shore of Chicago.  At the Northlight Theatre production in Evanston, Illinois, we reveled once again in his zestful reading of Dickens’s writing.

The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is perhaps Dickens’s most memorable character.  Let’s remember what Dickens wrote toward the end of A Christmas Carol.  When Scrooge discovered the joy of helping others, “His own heart laughed.”

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, I send you this wish:  May you have a laughing heart today, and every day to come.

 

 

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Posted in Barry Goldwater, Britain, Charles Dickens, Chicago, Emlyn Williams, English literature, fashion, holidays, law, lawyers, literature, London, movies, music, reading fiction, San Francisco, television, travel, UCLA, Victorian London, Wales

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John Grisham: Advocating Change via Great Storytelling

Posted on January 30, 2016 | 2 comments

I admit it. I’m a John Grisham fan. Ever since I read The Firm in 1991, I’ve read every one of his law-related novels, and I’ve relished reading all of them.

As a writer, I admire his highly readable writing style and the way his stories—filled with twists and turns–engage readers like me. As an erstwhile lawyer (like Grisham), I’m also in awe of his ability to skillfully weave legal issues into his stories.

Grisham’s latest, Rogue Lawyer, appeared last year, and I just finished reading it. What’s new in this novel is his protagonist, Sebastian Rudd, an extremely unconventional criminal defense lawyer who carries a gun and works out of a bulletproof van. Rudd, whose only friend is a burly paralegal/bodyguard, represents defendants other lawyers won’t. His encounters with a diverse group of atypical clients make up the gripping story lines that intersect in Rogue Lawyer.

What I found especially notable in this novel is Grisham’s focus on several significant issues that currently get some attention—but not nearly enough–in our current political and social climate.

Briefly summarized, here are some of the major issues Grisham highlights in Rogue Lawyer:

  • The corruption of our criminal justice system by some of the prosecutors, police officers, and judges who work within that system. Grisham focuses, for example, on what he sees as the rampant use of lies in court testimony by police and prosecutors. These lies, he makes clear, are aimed at convicting criminal defendants, fairly or not. Grisham unabashedly condemns the wrongful convictions that often result. As lawyer Rudd says at one point, “Getting a conviction is far more important [to these people] than justice.”
  • The use of phony “expert” witnesses in our courts. These witnesses are hired by lawyers to say what the lawyers want them to say. They “roam the country as hired guns testifying for fat fees.” Unfortunately, juries are usually impressed by these experts’ credentials and willing to take their testimony at face value, whether it‘s merited or not. Grisham writes that these experts brag about “their verdicts” (but rarely mention their “losses”).
  •  Human trafficking, which Grisham correctly calls “sexual slavery.” He points out, via one of his characters, that “[m]ost people in this country don’t believe there’s sex trafficking in their cities, but it’s there. It’s everywhere.” The traffickers “prey on runaways, homeless kids, girls from bad families looking for escape. It’s a sick business.” Fortunately, this issue is receiving increased attention. In San Francisco, a collaborative effort is taking aim at human trafficking, mounting an “awareness campaign” focused on reaching vulnerable teens.
  • The incarceration of one million “young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense,” the “unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years,” mostly for nonviolent drug offenses. This is another issue that’s garnered more attention in the last few years, giving us some hope for change.

I commend John Grisham for shining light on these issues. His status as a best-selling author gives him a bully pulpit of sorts, a platform for raising the awareness of his readers. He told CBS News in October that he hopes Sebastian Rudd will reappear in more stories, exploring these and other issues he’s concerned about. He’d even like to see Rudd become the lead in a TV series whose episodes could touch on a wide range of important issues.

I hope that happens. And I hope that, via his storytelling, John Grisham’s focus on these kinds of issues has a broad impact on the public consciousness and leads to changes we sorely need.

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Posted in criminal defense lawyers, criminal justice, expert witnesses, human trafficking, incarceration, law, lawyers, police, politics, prosecutors

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In Praise of San Francisco’s Weather

Posted on August 14, 2013 | Leave a comment

I moved to San Francisco eight years ago, and there’s much about the city that I truly love:  the breathtaking vistas, the natural beauty surrounding the city, the warmth of its inhabitants, and the rich assortment of parks, museums, theaters, concert halls, movie houses, restaurants, and shops.

There’s one more thing:  the weather.

I revel in the weather I’ve encountered in San Francisco.  After decades of living in a cold climate (mostly in Chicago), dealing with snow and ice for much of the year and heat and humidity for much of the rest, I relish the sunshine and cool breezes that San Francisco offers year-round.  People who’ve never lived in a cold climate can’t begin to imagine how difficult life there can be.  On many cold mornings I found myself crossing the bridge over the Chicago River, headed from the commuter train station to my office, snow and sleet blowing in my face.  No matter how many warm layers of clothing I’d wrap around my body, my face was largely exposed, bearing the brunt of the cold wind that persisted in hurling snow in my direction.

If you’ve never confronted them, let me assure you that icy sidewalks and streets are extremely treacherous.  Many of those attempting to walk on icy sidewalks have slipped and fallen, breaking bones and suffering concussions.  Driving on icy streets is equally hazardous, resulting in countless collisions.  Luckily, snow and ice are non-existent in San Francisco, relieving us of the challenges and pitfalls of negotiating on ice both on foot and in a vehicle.  Even rainy days don’t bother me, and locals who complain about the occasional chilly weather strike me as almost comically unaware of the reality faced by Americans in almost every other region of the county.

Unless you love hot weather and can’t wait to hit the beach, summers in San Francisco are delightful.  The temperature almost never rises above 80 degrees, and humidity barely reaches a noticeable level.  The contrast with places like Chicago, Boston, and New York is striking.  On recent trips to those cities, I encountered uncomfortably high humidity, thunderstorms, and temperatures in the 90s.  Extreme heat and humidity has plagued much of the nation this summer, but here in San Francisco, we’ve been as cool as cukes.

Air conditioning?  In San Francisco, we almost never need it, while most other regions of the country, including many parts of California, rely on air conditioning to survive.  I remember some vivid examples.  On one sweltering summer day in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my husband and mother joined me at Ann Arbor’s famed outdoor art festival.  I was surveying the artwork when l glanced at my mother’s face.  It was bright red. The thermometer on a nearby building read 99 degrees, and the humidity felt just as high.  We quickly abandoned the art festival and fled to our air-conditioned apartment.  On a recent trip to Boston, I was barely able to drag myself from the Harvard Square “T” to my daughter’s air-conditioned Cambridge apartment just a few blocks away, when both the temperature and the humidity hit 90-plus.  And don’t get me started on places like Arizona and Texas.

Here in San Francisco we save the financial cost of air conditioning, not to mention any feelings of guilt arising from  its demand on our energy resources.  And we don’t have to suffer the physical jolt of going from intense heat to intense cold every time we enter a super-air-conditioned building.

Our weather has another stellar feature.  Because San Franciscans can revel in sunshine and moderate temperatures all year long, we can spend much more time outdoors than most other Americans.  We’re not confined to exercising in sterile gray-walled fitness centers.  We have much better options.  I wake up every day almost certain that I’ll be able to take a walk, hike, or bike ride before the sun sets.

I don’t even mind the San Francisco fog that occasionally envelops the city.  Au contraire.  I think it creates a kind of magical aura over the city.  So long you remember to carry a light jacket, and drivers are careful maneuvering their vehicles in the fog, it really doesn’t have much of a downside.  Besides, if you want to escape the fog, you need travel only a short distance from the city in any direction.  The microclimates surrounding us are almost always fog-free.

Of course, life in San Francisco has its flaws.  For one thing, housing is more expensive than that in other cities (with the possible exception of NYC).  Rents are high, and on the rise as the city’s economy gets better and better, while buying a house in the most desirable neighborhoods has become more costly than ever.  And San Franciscans are constantly under the shadow of “The Big One.”  Perched as we are on the Pacific Rim, the threat of a major earthquake never really goes away.

But those of us who live here are willing to take those negatives along with all the positive features of life in the city.  Count me in.  I’m genuinely happy in my new hometown and especially delighted with its weather.  And when I recently came across the following story, reprinted from the San Francisco Chronicle of July 15, 1937, I realized that my reaction to the city’s weather is very much like that of a famous writer’s over 75 years ago.

The Chronicle reported:

Ernest Hemingway arrived in San Francisco yesterday ‘to get cool.’ On his first visit to [the city], he gulped in a few cubic yards of fog shortly after stepping from a …plane at [the airport] and sighed: ‘Say, this is great. After frying in New York, stewing down in Florida and sweltering in Los Angeles, this is something….  I can’t for the life of me see why anybody would ever move out of San Francisco, particularly in the summertime.’

Hey, Papa, when it comes to weather, we’re on the same page!

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