Portsmouth Square Stories: Tales of a San Francisco Childhood

The Sacredness of Childhood... and the way kids get "It"...I wrote these tales in the late 1990s because Americans had lapsed in shielding the sacredness of childhood: too many milk-carton kids and amber alerts, and parents who feared allowing their kids to "free-range" play.Why was my own childhood so safe - so sacred? It was because the adults in our nabe' silently conspired to watch over us. Thus, Portsmouth Square Stories is a collage of my sacred childhood memories, circa 1950s, in the historic International District of San Francisco:Beatnik families, Barbary Coast strippers, Financial District professionals, the Italian North Beach community, odd-ball locals like Hootman Puncher, Killer-Diller, and Hostess Molly who holds court at Sam's Dry Cleaners, Filipino & Chinese shop owners, and our local Hall of Justice denizens - policemen, detectives, bail bondsmen, lawyers, and jailbirds - all agreed on one thing "We protect kids."Our idyllic childhood summer days were occupied with catching baby crabs by hand at Fishermen's Wharf, picking summer raspberries on Telegraph Hill, feeding sea lions at Playland by the Beach, catching butterflies, bumble bees, potato bugs, and pincer bugs in Portsmouth Square. In the Square, local writers and painters sunned themselves as they waited for the world to recognize them, mothers sat with babies, and harmless local drunks quietly sipped their Thunderbird port.Just as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fall into place, the reader re-lives how as children, assembled the world in fragments of perception. In the end, a seemingly disjointed narrative “ ...will all come together... ” for the reader, as clearly and as exactly as in a more typically crafted narrative. Told from the perspective a 10'ish-year old child named Billy, and while everything actually happened, it’s not always clear even to this author the exact summer of a particular memory, or was it a fusion of similar events over several summers. But that is just so like the way a child sees the world before she or he “ ...figures it out... ” into a first paradigm: before a child starts to chart things by day, month, and later by school year and new teacher or the new TV series, or holidays.But poignantly, we ran free during those halcyon summer days, protected by this conspiracy of the sacredness of childhood. Our community of adults silently watched us, protected us, entertained us, and gave us chores to earn money. This motley gathering cast a magical spell onto our play and over our days in Portsmouth Square...and beyond into every part of San Francisco.Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.