Putting Pen To Paper

I was surprised when I looked out the window this morning...
hanging olive tree there was a tree hanging in the sky. It was doubly strange because I have lived in San Francisco a long time, and I thought I had already seen everything. But, obviously, I haven't.

I know my head can get a little big at times, so an occasional reminder like this is good for me. After all, it has been a good three weeks since the last reminder, when my neighbor drove up in his "new" BMW Vixen motorhome. Surely you can imagine that somebody who has already seen everything might be scratching his head about that one. What the hell is that!? There were just 600 of these built, back in the '80s. I took photos. had a long conversation with my neighbor
BMW Vixen about it, and now I'm an expert on BMW Vixens too.

We all love San Francisco, but there are things we hate: It took the parking police just three hours to cite the Vixen for a parking violation. You'd think they could cut a vehicle like that some well deserved slack.  After all, it exists, here on this spot on Telegraph Hill, which has never ever seen anything like this before, and will probably never ever do so again.

But, rest assured, I expect no
car stuck under tree parking police this morning. Even if the street is completely clogged by flat bed trucks double parked on the street carrying 70 year old olive trees. It is a great day for San Francisco: we lost all our trees when the city burned down in 1906, and we never really bothered restoring them, we just paved the city over instead. Nobody is going to complain about the new neighbors. Well almost nobody.

One neighbor, quite idiotically, tried to pass a truck. She tore a branch off a tree and scratched up her car in the process. Then she got jammed, and made an even bigger mess backing out.

Hey -- this is a city... these trucks belong on a farm -- how am I supposed to know how to drive with something like that on the street!?!? 

I'm sure the truck drivers wished they were on a farm... they had to back out to make their way home.

Any good know-it-all will tell you more is better, so yours truly wasted no time getting out on the street. I took photos, interviewed the landscape architect that ordered them,
transplanted olive trees and now I'm an expert on transplanting olive trees too. I did know they were olive trees, or should I admit, I figured it out. There were olives everywhere, the street had black stains where they got smushed. Has to be olive trees, right? I'm told they're all female trees, so there won't be any olives shedding onto our sidewalks in the years to come. But we have a big mess on the street today.

The trees are being installed as part of a renovation. It's the $7 million mansion at the corner -- first listed for a whopping $14 million back during the Dot Com boom. The place was on the market for years -- everyone on the block was saying they'd buy it if they could only win the lottery. It's finally been bought, and the new owners are spending millions more on renovations.  Now they have a Mediterranean style grove of olive trees screening in their privacy.

It's incredible, the trees are beautiful, and this time I'm sure I've seen it all.