Pivoting in San Francisco & Rome
Turning right instead of left, or heading South instead of North, centers my thoughts and alters my creativity in unexpected ways.
When I used to live in San Francisco, I walked every day from our apartment in Cow Hollow straight down the hill to the Marina. Like a horse trotting around a race track, I would reach the Marina’s docks, and, habitually, take a left, always lured to the beach near Crissy Field.
One day, after a month of walking during the Covid lockdown, when it felt as if very little made sense, I often thought about trying to see things from a different point of view. And, on that walk, I decided to change my daily habit, and, instead, pivoted to the right.
What revealed itself was a side of San Francisco that I had never seen before in the three years I’d been living there. I was exposed to another beach where veteran polar-bear-swimmers braved bracing plunges in wetsuits. Where families set up morning picnics with kids desperate to get out of the house. Where sea lions floated among glimmering white-caps. Where winds whipped across a walkway that spiraled out onto the Bay like a musical coda. Where an old, weathered wooden sailboat remained permanently docked in front of Ghirardelli Square. Where Alcatraz looked like an inviting Airbnb rather than a former jail. Where the Golden Gate Bridge gleamed in the distance as the connective vein of a metropolis to its arteries of Sausalito and Mill Valley. Where a homeless man fished and sold the day’s catch to make some spare change.
With one pivot, my compass shifted. It wasn’t just different in what I saw but in what I smelled (sourdough bread fumes emanating from certain houses with open windows, eucalyptus trees whispering in the breeze along Fort Mason’s borders), in what I heard (fog horns in the Bay, seagulls crying for fish, sails flapping in salty winds, a homeless woman begging for milk for her baby) and in what I touched (sand chips from a Giuseppe Penone exhibit of a fake log, sprouting daisies on the Marina’s mound, splintered wood on the docks). All of it led me to think about different issues, landscapes and lives, and added spontaneity to what had become monotony.
Recently, in Rome, I’ve also pivoted. Since January of this year, I have forced myself to get out of the house to write twice a week in a library I love on the Janiculum hill. Because my kids go to school close to the library, I drop them off on library days. Rather than sticking to my former daily routine of leaving them at the train station and then driving North to head home, I now head South.
On our morning commute, we revel at the Rome that passes by our windows as if it were a timeless movie somewhere between A Roman Holiday and La Dolce Vita.
As we bump over cobblestones, pot holes and poorly-paved streets, we whiz past the Villa Borghese, slalom down Via Veneto, wave at the American Embassy, pass a Bernini fountain or two, and glance at the Thermal Baths of Diocletian casually settled in front of a Warner Brothers movie complex. We wiggle our way past Santa Maria Maggiore, and often get stuck at a traffic light where we have the very view of the Roman Forum that Edith Wharton wrote about in Roman Fever.
There, we finally take a left, and are rewarded with the Colosseum. As we drive closer and closer to it, we round the bend feeling as if we could crash into it as an homage to Tom Cruise’s latest car chase in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Eventually, we barrel past Constantine’s Arch and the Palatine Hill. We then find ourselves blocked by more non-synchronized traffic lights at the Circus Maximus. To our left, we admire the line-up of international flags that celebrate the countries represented of the building we are idling in front of that belongs to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization. Always late, we then speed down the street named after the Aventine Hill, and end up at the front door of their terra-cotta-colored school.
As my kids spill out of the car while I push release forms at them for their school trips to Pompeii and the Palatine Hill, I have no patience for their early morning groans. My school field trips, I tell them, were to Salem, Massachusetts (the witch trials!) and the mill towns of Connecticut (the industrial revolution!). I remind my daughter that the opportunity to attend an evening concert a couple of nights ago in the Pantheon is not to be taken for granted.
At her age, I gloated in seeing James Taylor perform at Tanglewood. At 15, she should understand that listening to a string quartet play Beethoven next to Raphael’s tomb is not the average teenager’s Wednesday night.
After leaving the kids at school, I carry on driving to one of Rome’s seven hills, home to the umbrella pines and endless acres of the Villa Doria Pamphili. I slide the car in between a fleet of camper vans that, in its inertia, has taught me how to remain parked all day for free. In my bi-weekly visits to the place where Galileo first demonstrated his telescope in 1611, I’ve started to recognize the area’s inhabitants as I’ve become one myself. I spot priests and nuns walking to work at the nearby Vatican. I observe school-kids carrying backpacks heavier than their own body weight and devouring a morning slice of pizza bianca. I step around beaten-up mopeds lying next to ancient walls like abandoned paint cans.
As I approach the library, I smell freshly-mowed grass and become hypnotized by the buzz of a noisy lawn-mower, which reminds me of my brother coveting a John Deere tractor in the fields of the Hudson Valley where I grew up. As I enter the courtyard of the library, the sound of a trickling fountain makes me thirsty and the echo of birds chirping reminds me that spring has come too early this March.
I hang up my coat for the day next to Burberry, Loden and Barbour jackets, and make my way to a back, corner desk made of cherry wood, which I have come to claim as my own. I sit in a wooden chair with a golden label nailed to it, dedicated to one of the library’s former directors, a colleague of mine from my first job in Rome. Dusty books with bindings of multiple colors in Latin, Greek, Italian and English cocoon me in my writing nook. I recall how proud I was to possess my very first library card in elementary school, and realize I feel the same way about my newfound middle-aged one.
It’s only 9am. I’ve fed and walked the dog, served the kids breakfast and driven them to school, left my husband to get to work on his own, had un caffe’ macchiato al vetro at the local coffee shop, made two phone calls to friends, and driven from one side of Rome to the other.
I exhale. And, I begin to write this.
At the end of the day, I’ll return to unmade beds, a dishwasher to be emptied, a dog in need of more walks and more food, an empty fridge, kids’ homework, a dinner that needs to be improvised for four, and more dishes to wash.
I’ll return to a house that has been neglected for a mind that needed to be nourished. And I’ll think how it was worth the pivot, the taking of a turn in the other direction that detours from routine.
I appreciate the noise of my life in the sound of silence. By experiencing contrasts, I value their richness. But, the only way I see them is if I pivot.
P.S. Please admire the new heading of my newsletter, doodled by my writer friend, Phoebe Fry, whose Substack newsletter, The Dish, you MUST follow.
Love the tour if Rome!
Thank you🥰
Sheila,
Lovely, passionate, interesting, wonderful to read after my coffee.
Dimitri