SAVOR THE WORLD

 

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written October 16, 2020 SAVOR THE WORLD PREVIOUS BLOGS: TERRYBAUM.BLOGSPOT.COM PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED. IF THIS BLOG WAS FORWARDED TO YOU, YOU ARE NOT SUBSCRIBED. Here's the link to the Google Doc so you can do some campaign work! Write letters! It's very satisfying! And it works! ONE MORE DAY TO WRITE LETTERS! VOTEFWD.ORG letters get mailed on Oct. 17! Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.   — E.B. White On Friday, I woke up out of sorts, freaked way out, and down in the dumps. So I decided to spend the day savoring the world -- which for me means taking a long ramble with the pups. San Francisco is a particularly easy city to savor, which is probably why I have returned to it from my two attempts to start a new life somewhere else. First, we went to Upper Douglass Dog Park. Or I should say UPPER Douglass. It's not far, but there are four hills in between me and the dog park. I'm not talking some wimpy bump that might be called a hill in some OTHER towns. These are SAN FRANCISCO hills. I have named them (alphabetically) to encourage my ascent: Arrow, Backwards (I take a few steps backing up), CrowFlies, and Delirious. It's a very LARGE dog park....

Once I'm up the hill, it's easy to continue on to my beloved Glen Canyon.

...with wonderful views. You have to stand on a tree stump to get the view below.

As you can see, someone is sitting on the Jared Memorial Bench, so I had to keep going. You remember, Jared is the little boy who enjoyed that view in his too-short life. It was fortuitous that I kept going horizontally instead of descending into the canyon as I usually do because...

... I came upon some steps I had never noticed before. You can see them starting right behind Nikki.

And these steps led me to a beautiful community garden!

This garden had soil too poor to grow vegetables, so it contained flowers only.

So then it was back into the canyon, down and out past the playground, which had these rather strange creatures cavorting in it.

And then out the official entrance to the canyon past a historical marker that I must have passed so many times, but as I am always walking by the back of it into the Glen Park neighborhood, I had never really read it and understood the SIGNIFICANCE of it before:

THE VERY FIRST DYNAMITE FACTORY IN AMERICA WAS IN MY OWN DEAR GLEN CANYON! It was demolished in a huge explosion a year and a half later. That must have been something to hear. I can't even imagine. Quite a while ago, a house not too far from me blew up in the middle of the night, because of a gas leak. That was quite an event. The family woke up, heard something funny and got out of there in time. So no one was hurt. But a DYNAMITE FACTORY EXPLODING! The very first dynamite factory explosion in America, I'll bet! I mean, having the first dynamite factory near me is exciting enough. But the first explosion -- I was, and still am, all agog. It takes quite a bit to bring me to a state of agogness, me being a very sophisticated person and all, but that historical marker did it. Not everyone you know would have heard a dynamite factory exploding if they had been born 100 years earlier than they were actually born -- and only the day before my birthday! Agog as I was, I continued on. And I saw this bear in the entrance to a house.

I don't get it. I'm not very good at puzzles. So this is the Daily Puzzle Bear and the puzzle of the day is "thumb" spelled backwards twice and written vertically. Huh? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Well, maybe not GREATLY. But appreciated. The truth is, I'm not good at puzzles because I just don't CARE what the answer is. Or maybe I don't care because I'm not good at it. I am not intrigued. Well, maybe a little. Perhaps I was still too agogy from the historical marker to respond to the Puzzle Bear. The very first dynamite factory explosion.... You can't make this stuff up.

And on to one of the most beautiful fences in town...

I have never seen a fence like this anywhere else. Mostly, the Victorians have wrought iron fences. And the house itself is a beauty:

As you can see from the lights on inside, it's getting dark. I'm on my way home. The last memorable image from this ramble is this whimsical person with legs spread wide. I could not figure out how to fit the whole body into the frame:

The arrow-shaped leg is pointing to this:

Can you imagine, someone took the time to create this large, complex and transient chalk drawing in order to draw attention to these words of wisdom. Okay, everybody: Stretch right now! Oooh, that felt good. Bloggelinis, there is indeed so much to savor in this world. How lucky I am to have made this walk and to share it with you. Terry