I read this on the wall of a particularly dive-y bar in Oakland, Calif., so you know it must be true:
‘Hay tres cosas en la vida: amor, dinero y salud.’ There are three things in life: love, money and health.
When I was younger I would have wholeheartedly concurred with the first, taken issue with the second and been totally oblivious to the third.
My generation, the boomers, has had a weird relationship with money. Our Depression-scarred parents were obsessed with security and comfort so naturally we were scornful of security and comfort. Middle-class life was a velvet coffin, Henry Miller’s ‘air-conditioned nightmare.’
In Woody Allen’s latest movie, the main character (Owen Wilson channeling Woody Allen) wants nothing more than to walk the streets of Paris in the rain. His fiancée and her snooty parents roll their eyes. Rain, in this context, as in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ symbolizes exposure – the embrace of experience rather than the retreat from experience. As young romantics, my peers and I heartily concurred: no taxis, umbrellas, galoshes or slickers for us. We wanted to get wet – to sleep under the stars and wander unencumbered by property and obligations.
Or so we thought. We wanted to want to get wet but we had grown up warm and dry and clean, snug as a bug in a rug, as my dad would say. As we transitioned out of our 20s and into our 30s and 40s, comfy accommodations and good meals looked better and better. And those amenities required money. Thus did the boomers, according to The New York Times, become the most conspicuous consumers of all.
Instead of trading comfort for experience, we wound up buying comfort and experience: whitewater rafting trips featuring gourmet meals. (One company in Oregon one-upped its competitors by paying a string quartet to come on its trips. No ‘Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore’ around those campfires.)
What we’re struggling with now, as we head toward our retirement years, is the desire to live more simply, for ecological, ideological and financial reasons, while still living well.
So yes, money.
And health, of course, now that we can no longer take good health for granted.
But in the days since I saw the words of the prophet written on the barroom wall, I’ve been wanting to add to the list of the bare necessities.
Warm sun and cool breeze – At midsummer it’s normal for most of the country to be baking or steaming in 90-degree heat, but here in Northern California, the natural air-conditioning is working the way it’s supposed to: the coastal fog comes in close enough to cool the air but stays far enough off-shore not to block the sun. The result is gloriously bright, fresh, great-to-be-alive days, perfect for hikes, which brings me to my next addendum to the cosas-en-la-vida list.
Beauty – A couple of days ago we hiked a thin spit of land between the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay at Point Reyes National Seashore. The views of blue water and blue sky and cliffs and crashing surf and wildflowers and Monterey Cypress were exquisite enough, but there were also elk, hundreds of them, often quite close to the trail, and gray whales breaching and, just before sunset, one long-tailed weasel, a masked and cinnamon-colored animal I had never seen before, scampering across the trail.
Is it greedy of me to want to add these two items to the list? Hay cinco cosas en la vida: amor, dinero, salud, calido sol, brisa fresca y belleza.
I suppose one could recast warm sun/cool breeze as beautiful weather and move it into the beauty category along with the beauty of landscapes and the beauty of art (a boatload of Picassos are on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco while the Picasso Museum in Paris is being remodeled).
But then where do we put dive bars? OK, I won’t add dive bars to the essentials list; instead I’ll just tell you that the bar in question is the Alley, on Grand Avenue. It’s something of a local landmark, famous for its piano bar, its collection of several million business cards affixed to every available surface and its haunted house décor.
So now you have two things to do next time you’re in San Francisco: Poke around North Oakland and, while, you’re at it, Berkeley (the East Bay doesn’t get its due), then take the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge across the bay into Marin County and find your way up to Point Reyes. I can’t guarantee that you’ll see a weasel or a whale, or that there will be warm sun to counteract cool breeze, but you will see the tule elk and experience enough beauty to make you want to scribble in Spanish on a barroom wall.
