Another billboard has claimed the corner of Van Ness and California. "It's the Cheese," it declares. A tourist in Hawaiian print is posing with an orange chunk of processed variety found in any supermarket. Large commercial cheeses like these aren't threatened by mandatory pasteurization, but if new regulations pass, what will happen to the quality artesanal ones? ...

The wren tit has a curious song. Hold a ping-pong ball about a foot above the table. Let it go, noting the series of hollow plunking sounds the ball makes as it bounces, each successive plunk coming harder on the heels of the last as the ball bounces itself out of energy and back to silence. Trade those plunks for chipper little peeps, and you have the wren tit's signature melody.

I hear it when I wake up this morning, and know I've overslept....

A few blocks from the tourist line for the cable cars at Powell and Market, there is another line. At the cable car line, clothes are clean and people talk and there is energy. In the other line, the line to the soup kitchen at Glide Memorial Church, clothes are dirty, as are faces and hair and hands; there is little conversation; and there seems just barely enough energy to stand in line in the hot sun....

The town sits on a shelf of land overlooking a treacherous coast. The prevailing winds, westerlies, whip foam from the breakers rolling in off the Pacific to dash against dark rocks that jut out of the water like shark fins. For the sailors manning the dog hole schooners fetching lumber south to rebuild the badly shaken, burned city of San Francisco ....

It is summer in the city, and the line for the cable cars at Powell and Market is long. No one but a tourist would have the time or patience for such a wait. In fact the younger tourists, accompanied by older tourist-parents, don't. They wander off in search of cold drinks, anything but the company of parents....