Tapestry of Fortunes and Greens

When I worked for Williams-Sonoma, a thousand years ago, I'd walk from Ghirardelli along the water and over the hill to Fort Mason. I'd get in line at Greens To Go, consider the salads and the sandwiches while the line inched forward but always order the same thing: black bean chili in a heavy paper cup. I'd take it outside, sit by the water, and feel lucky to work in San Francisco even on those days that I hated my job.

This week my dear friend Sylvie is visiting San Francisco, where she, too, worked a thousand years ago. We went to Greens and there was no line at all. (This worried me: there should be a line.)

We bought Tassajara Rice Bowls (chili spooned over rice, why did it take Greens so long to come up with THIS?) and goat cheese-fig pizza (with flash-fried basil leaves), corn-tomato salad, and lots of peanut butter cookies and then we ate by the water, listening to the waves lap against the piers, and trying to ignore the droning helicopters hovering over the America's Cup boats. A lone, fluffy grey gull watched us with beseeching eyes.

Walking back to the car I spotted a pencil on the ground, a yellow Ticonderoga, new, unmarked, and sharpened to a perfect point. I bent down to get it and held it up. "There is nothing wrong with this pencil," I said. "Look at it!" Sylvie raised her eyebrows but I tucked it into my bag anyway.

We said our goodbyes and I stopped at a bookstore where the new Elizabeth Berg was waiting. Bought the book, headed home, and started the book right away. In the first few pages, the narrator, Cece, asks her mother's friend Cosmina to tell her fortune:

" ' Your task will be to learn in what direction to look for life's great riches, and not to deny the veracity of your own vision.'

I stared at her and whispered, 'What does veracity mean?'

She leaned forward and whispered back, 'Truth.' "

I never mark books but I couldn't help it. I had to get the yellow Ticonderoga and to lightly, lightly underline these words. Life's great riches. Sitting beside the water with the city at our backs, rice bowls warming our hands, sharing the easy conversation that comes with a thirty-year friendship. Life's great riches.

@copyright Ann Krueger Spivack, 2013