Minding the House
It was August in San Francisco. A thick layer of fog lay over the city and the sky did not open up all day. I sat on the floor in front of the white enameled gas stove in our apartment, occasionally turning on the oven to warm up. I was reading, perhaps a Russian. Perhaps Turgenev’s First Love. It must have been the weekend or I would have been at work. What sustained me in the early 1970’s were my sister Solveig, with whom I was sharing an apartment; great literature, with which I was filling in the gaps in my education; and the city itself. Of course I longed for warm summer nights, and we did get a few in the fall. But the city was home, in endlessly varied ways. We lived in a one bedroom apartment, which meant two large rooms, one for each of us, a kitchenette and bathroom. We were experimenting. What did one really need? A mattress on the floor, or a studio couch under the bay window covered with an Indian bedspread, a kitchen table. I lived in several similar apartments. If we n...
