Kiddie passports are a big pain in the neck. Both parents have to be present, as do all the children. You have to bring along original birth certificates, social security cards, a multitude of forms you have spent hours wrestling with ahead of time on a hopelessly user-hostile website, exactly correct photographs, and a checkbook - because they don't take cash or credit. This is exactly as much fun as it sounds: less than a fender-bender, but more than a root canal.
It took us about an hour. After we were done my wife had to go to a meeting, and I wanted to find a way to kill a couple more hours with the kids, so we could all go home together. First, though, we had to find parking.
San Franciscans complain about parking a lot. Too much, really. I usually scoff at their whining, having burned several months off my life span in cumulative block-circling time on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, begging God for a parking space or an easy death. This time, looking for a space in the middle of the day in San Francisco's North Beach, I began for the first time to sympathize with the parking-whining of my fellow Friscans. But then, just as I was ready to give up, a space appeared, and I grabbed it.
The kids needed to pee, of course. We were only a block or so away from the foot of Lombard Street, with its flocks of tourists but, oddly, not many businesses nearby. Right behind my parking space, however, was a church, with the gate to its cloister wide open, and a pretty fountain beckoning us.
So in we went, looking for a bathroom. What we found was the surprise.
We had stumbled, for the first time and serendipitously, into the San Francisco Art Institute. The front of it looks like a Romanesque church, complete with Tuscan-hill-town clock tower. That's where we entered.
Around the corner was the Diego Rivera Gallery.
Peeking in, I could see the usual clot of ironic art-student sculpture mounted on ironic unfinished wooden crates, so I figured this was just some exhibition space named in honor of the great muralist Diego Rivera. It was only after I wandered into that gallery, still looking for the bathroom and following my kids, that I found out how wrong I was. Because when you enter the Diego Rivera gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute - when you wander in off the street, through open doors, passing no security checkpoint and paying no fee - you come across this:
We had stumbled into The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. It was painted there on that wall by Rivera in 1931, and looks as fresh today as it must have then.
After admiring the fresco I made my way, reluctantly, out of the gallery. There was an open office, so I intruded politely to ask about a bathroom. "They're down by the View," the guy in the office advised.
"The View?" I asked.
"Just go down the long hallway. You'll see what I mean."
What he meant was this:
Okay, that's a view all right. The back side of this art school masquerading as a quaintly faux-Romanesque chapel is a bold, poured-concrete modern slab with a 360-degree open air vista of perhaps the most beautiful urban waterfront in the world.
That's what I mean by 'surprise.' All of this in the course of an afternoon of unpleasant bureaucratic errand-running and mundane parking and bathroom issues. No, I'm not a native San Franciscan - but I feel like I sure have gone native. And, I keep telling my kids, "you don't know how lucky you are." No, they don't, naturally. We never do, do we?
