The Fool on a Hill: A Stroll in My Vertical Neighborhood
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning round
That about sums up my daily walks on San Francisco’s Bernal Hill. (There’s a Beatles tune for every occasion.) It’s not that I’ve become a guru, like the Mahirishi Mahesh Yogi, who briefly bedazzled John and George (who then both took wicked revenge on the giggling spiritual leader). But my head is constantly spinning around ever since my stroke in 2017, and my vision is off-kilter too. So taking an afternoon spin around my steep neighborhood is always a crazy kind of trek, and today it had me singing about that other fool on a hill.
My life is a daily strain. Who’s isn’t? Despite my “deficits” (I love those accounting terms), I still count myself lucky to be alive. So much has happened in my life in the past three-and-a-half years. So many wonderful (and occasionally terrifying) events in the lives of family and friends — not to mention America at large. I’m here, I’m alive — in fact I feel more fully alive than I was before my medical catastrophe.
It’s true, I can’t hop in a car (or plane) and take off somewhere fun or exotic. My physical damage (and the pandemic) has made me more house-bound. And so my neighborhood has become my domain. From the top of Bernal Heights, I can see the world (or at least most of my city). I contain multitudes, and so does my limited empire. Increasingly bold coyotes, dog wranglers herding packs of canines, young women with crowns of curls speaking a language I’ve never heard before, techies talking a language I wish I’d never understood, dancers rehearsing their spins and leaps.
And now, as I near 70, it’s time to reinvent myself, again. Am I retired? Not quite. I have one last history book coming out in June — another hill I’d have struggled to climb without the help of two co-authors, my sister Margaret Talbot and my brother-in-law Arthur Allen. By the Light of Burning Dreams should have been a casualty of my stroke — a bolt that struck my head just as I was about to start writing. Instead it will soon be published — a final statement on my activist generation and how we tried to move history forward.
Changing America — this beautiful, this monstrous beast of a country. For most of my life, it was something I thought we could actually accomplish — and we did, in ways major and minor we did. But we radicals never took power. Some will read our book and conclude it’s a good thing we didn’t. Perhaps, in some cases, we weren’t ready to lead. But we were never allowed the chance — even our best and brightest, like the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Seale, Bella Abzug, Tom Hayden, Fred Hampton, Shirley Chisholm. They never allowed these brave, visionary men and women to get close to the pinnacle of power. (Or when they briefly did, they violently removed them.)
Now we have a president who doesn’t just imitate our rhetoric. He actually seems to be trying to put our ideas (some of them) into action. (I would love to talk again with Tom, to hear the reaction of the Port Huron Statement author to President Biden’s Congressional address.) And so maybe, in our graying dotage, the beast is shuffling slowly in the right direction again.
What do I wish for my sons and their anxious generation? A sense of the euphoria we once felt, long ago, when we thought we could bend the U.S. Empire to our will. Failing that, I wish them the serenity I feel every day when I walk upon my hill. The spring flowers are blooming, the coyotes are running free. We’re alive in the world. And we can still imagine a better world.
