Laguna de Santa Rosa, (colored pencil drawing)

My first real outing using colored wax pencils. Learning as I go. Not having the right paper may prove a challenge. It’s all about that bend in the road leading you ever on. Following the shores of the old laguna bed—reduced to that line of trees in the distance. Soon, winter floods will restore some of the memory of that ancient lakebed. 

I need a dry place to store a closet’s worth of art supplies—mostly for teaching—plus a few boxes of books would be grand. I miss not having my art supplies nearby—even if I rarely use them.

Elephant Mountain, 4 views (tempera paintings)

Elephant Mountain & fog, (tempera on cardboard)

While waiting to present a poetry workshop, I chanced upon an arts workshop at the Jewish elder home and I painted the morning away. Five visions of Black Mountain. This is the only way I know how to heal after tragedy. Art has always been my first language. Tempera, or cheap gouache on cardboard. Yes, cardboard. I'd run out of painting surfaces, this was supposed to be my painting palette.

A note on Medieval spices

The early Medieval era, when the Irish epics were first recorded, wasn’t quite the gastronomic desert we imagine it today. Sorrel sauce, and sour verjuice was used to flavor meats, as were rose hips, sloe plums, bitter cherries, crabapples, pears, huckleberries, bilberries, bog berries (a type of cranberry), and juniper berries; coriander seeds were used, as well as caraway, fennel, and mustard seeds; lots of pot herbs were used, such as young tart pine needles, heather, woodruff, and many types of mint—also mushrooms, garlic and onions. Rose petals were a popular dessert flavoring too.

Caraway seeds and greens were used, both as a spice and a pot herb. Any Roman potherb or spice that was introduced and easily grown in Britain would also have been readily available. Main spices used during the British Middle Ages were introduced during the Crusades, but some were introduced to Britain by the Romans. Roman cooks traditionally used aromatic herbs (dill, coriander, cumin, chervil, laurel, carrot, parsnip, lovage, rue, anise, mint, mustard, oregano, savory, myrtle...). I would imagine rosemary was also used as well as geranium and carnation, or pinks. Spices included pepper, silphium or laser, saffron, turmeric, cardamom, ginger and nard. Cinnamon was considered a medicine. I imagine clove was also a medicine, as was sugar!

I once hosted a medieval Celtic feast for my final project at UC Berkeley, using traditional ingredients. Toasting the oats for shortbread produced a strong vanillan flavor, as would using fresh pine needles, etc. We discovered that leached ashes were also used as leavening agent, when eggs weren’t available. Kind of a primitive baking soda, or powder. (See pearl ash, or potash—there's a reason why it's called potash!)

The medieval Irish roasted their oatmeal, and then flattened the hard grains in a saddle quern (think rolled oats) before making their famous griddle cakes. Roasting the oatmeal imparted a strong vanillan flavor. Just because we think of vanilla as a modern flavor, it doesn’t mean the compound itself didn’t exist in other foodstuffs. Epic hero Cú Chullain roasted his oatmeal on an iron griddle for his oatcakes before going into battle. Medieval Britons primarily used rose water, etc., and later saffron, as a custard flavoring.

In Germany and Scandinavia, during the end of the Middle Ages, powdered deer antler was also used as a leavening agent (ammonium carbonate) for hard cookies such as Springerle, Liebkuchen, and Hartshorn. (Leavening could also be made by distilling hair or decomposed urine.) Apparently the ammonia odor as they were cooking was memorable. Cookies as strong medicine....

Contrary to popular belief, Essex was not the original place where saffron was cultivated. Greece, maybe. It comes from the Middle East, especially Iran. Saffron is a Persian word. Saffron was the costliest of all medieval spices, more costly than sugar. The English word "saffron" probably stems from the 12th-century Old French term safran, from the Latin—safranum, from the Arabic za'farān, from the Persian word zarparan meaning "flower with golden petals".

Saffron as a color is also mentioned in medieval Ireland as a dyestuff, but other plants were also used to achieve that color dye, including gorse and brassica. The color itself, regardless of its plant origin, was called saffron, which is a well-attested classical reference. It doesn’t refer to the edible crocus sativus, as the edible crocus is not native to Britain. And it sounds like crocus wasn’t introduced until ca. 1560, when the bulb first appeared in the Netherlands. It didn’t become a common garden plant in Northern Europe until ca. the 1620s.

Speaking of medicine, you can get a fair indication of spices used during the Middle Ages by looking at the medicinal cures from the Middle Ages...Rosa Goidelica. (now I can't find a reference to it....I know it exists as I once spent an afternoon reading it in the Rare Books basement of the Doe Library at UC Berkeley). One of my favorite recipes for a toothache, eat a cinnamon-infused chicken—but it must also be eaten at the crossroads. Apparently saffron rice was another medicinal favorite. Wherever  did they get the rice from? That sort of dates it, timewise, along with noodles—to the age of Marco Polo.

Any spice popular in Rome would’ve made its way into the cooking pots of Britain. The Greeks and Romans were aware of cardamon (a member of the ginger family) and used it as a perfume, and it was well known in Egypt and the Middle East. The Indian spice could’ve been reintroduced by way of the Vikings several centuries after the Romans pulled out of Britain.

Poems for Armistice Day

Susie Terence and I read in the atrium at the Jewish Home in San Francisco. We had a rather small, but dedicated audience. I read The Poet’s Vest,  Pro-Found Memory Banks, and Poem for the Man Who Loved Falcons plus the classic Armistice poems listed below. As we were in an atrium, with three storied balconies above us, as I closed my set by singing an Eric Bogle anti-war song, No Man’s Land, the size of the impromptu audience tripled. In the distance, a hunched over woman sat in a wheelchair. She looked familiar, and then I realized who it was, but by that time I was too late. Her handler had wheeled her off. I regret that I never got a chance to go over and say hello to her. Clients were visiting with me and I didn’t want to be rude. Besides, Susie was in full Bubula mode, reading something Yiddish from her memoir. It was my old poetry teacher, Diane diPrima. She died soon after.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS
John McCrae (1872 - 1918)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Sunday is Veteran's Day, called Armistice, or Remembrance Day in the U.K. This year is the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, which was called "The War to End All Wars". It didn't take. Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian doctor serving on the Western Front, wrote In Flanders Fields after the Second Battle of Ypres, in 1915, for a close friend who died in battle. He wrote the poem, graveside, after conducting his friend's burial service. McCrae caught pneumonia in January, 1918, and died two weeks later. His poem, In Flanders Fields has become a leit-motif of the War, and is recited each year at Remembrance Day ceremonies around the world.

Siegfried Sassoon's poem, Suicide in the Trenches, was composed in response to his witnessing the atrocities of WWI, on the Western Front, and Sassoon, a much decorated soldier, became a focal point for dissent when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his Soldier's Declaration of 1917. Instead of idealizing war, he was the first poet who spoke of the atrocities he had witnessed first hand at the Front, in vivid detail—which landed him in a military psychiatric hospital where he met fellow soldier and poet Wilfred Owen, who ironically was killed in 1918, one week before Armistice.

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES
Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Moving a hundred years forward to time present, a poem of UK poet laureate (2009-2019) Carol Ann Duffy, The Wound in Time, caught my attention. Even though few surviving  members of WWI are still with us, and ditto that for WWII, we are all still wounded by war. Her second poem as Poet Laureate, Last Post, was commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, the last two British soldiers to fight in World War I, is worth a look.

Last Post makes explicit references to Wilfred Owen's poem from the First World War Dulce et Decorum Est. It imagines what would happen if time ran backwards and those killed in the war came back to life; their lives would still be full of possibilities and filled with "love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food."  Wiki, 

Last Post opens with Wilfred Owens' first two lines:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning....

Itself, which is a line borrowed from the Roman poet Horace– Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ("It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"). Memory, remembrance, in memoriam, these notions have fed a self-fueled war machine since Classical times.

Duffy is a Scottish poet/playwright of Irish parentage, who was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow's version of Hell's Kitchen, wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

When she was 16, she met Adrian Henri, one of the Liverpool poets, and decided she wanted to be with him; she then lived with him until 1982. "He gave me confidence," she said, "he was great. It was all poetry, very heady, and he was never faithful. He thought poets had a duty to be unfaithful." Wiki

I guess Adrian was successful, as he seemed to put Carol Ann off men for good, but I can attest that he was a charismatic pied piper, having met him at Poetry International in Rotterdam in the mid 1990s. Adrian and I shared a common bond in that we both worked in the schools teaching kids poetry. I gave him an armful of student anthologies. Perhaps some of Adrian's work rubbed off. In 2011 Duffy spearheaded a poetry competition for school children, dubbed Anthologise.

Many assume that, Scottish-Australian poet-songwriter Eric Bogle's No Man's Land is a reference to the Battle of the Somme, which celebrated its centenary in 2016, but Eric, a great storyteller who immigrated to Australia, penned this song in response to sectarian violence in Ireland. I first met Eric in Sebastopol for the Celtic Festival, ca 2000. At the time, he said that he wrote it during the Vietnam War, but it wasn't even about WWI. Bogle gave the fictitious dead soldier an Irish name to counter the anti-Irish sentiment in Britain during the 1970s. In an Irish News interview, in 2106, Eric said:

"I’ve often said that there never was one actual soldier called Willie McBride that I wrote about. I didn’t sit by the grave of a Willie McBride to write the song, that would be bulls**t. But I wanted to remind people that a lot of Irish lads had died fighting for king and country during WWI as well because when I wrote it in 1975, the IRA bombing campaign on the UK mainland was in full swing and there was a lot of anti-Irish feeling about and I just thought, ‘Well, here’s a wee subtle dig at the haters. “It was so subtle that most people missed it, of course,” he laughs, “but I don’t like to harangue or shove a point down people’s throats in my songs."

Eric often follows No Man's Land up with And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, (1971) a reference to Gallipoli, and the futility of war. In 2015, Eric played a concert at the site of the slaughter at Gallipoli, something he had previously refused to do because “the thought of singing for all those ghosts has always intimidated me.”

THE WOUND IN TIME
Poem on the centenary of Armistice Day 2018
Carol Ann Duffy (1955-)

It is the wound in Time. The century’s tides,
chanting their bitter psalms, cannot heal it.
Not the war to end all wars; death’s birthing place;
the earth nursing its ticking metal eggs, hatching
new carnage. But how could you know, brave
as belief as you boarded the boats, singing?
The end of God in the poisonous, shrapneled air.
Poetry gargling its own blood. We sense it was love
you gave your world for; the town squares silent,
awaiting their cenotaphs. What happened next?
War. And after that? War. And now? War. War.
History might as well be water, chastising this shore;
for we learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.
Your faces drowning in the pages of the sea.

NO MAN'S LAND
aka The Green Fields of France, or Young Willie McBride
Eric Bogle (1944-)

Well how do you do young Willie McBride?
do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside
and rest for a while 'neath the warm summer sun
I've been walkin' all day and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
when you joined the great fallen of 1916.
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Willie McBride was it slow and obscene?

CHORUS
Did they beat the drum slowly,
did they play the fife lowly,
did they sound the death march
as they lowered you down
did the band play the last post and chorus,
did the pipes play the "Flowers of the Forest"

And the beautiful wife or the sweetheart for life
in some faithful heart are you forever enshrined
and although you died back in 1916
in that faithful heart are you forever nineteen?
Or are you a stranger without even a name
enshrined forever behind a glass pane
in an ould photograph torn tattered and stained,
fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?
CHORUS

Now the sun shines down on the green fields of France
a warm summer wind makes the red poppies dance
The trenches have vanished all under the plows,
there's no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land,
the countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
for man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
to a whole generation that was butchered and damned.
CHORUS

Now Willie McBride I can't help wonder why
Do those who lie here do they know why they died
Did they really believe when they answered the call
did they really believe that this war would end wars
Forever this song of suffering and shame
the killing, the dying, was all done in vain
for young Willie McBride it's all happened again,
and again, and again, and again and again.

My 2018 California Arts Council CAC panelist application

I have worked my entire life in the arts, both as a visual artist and as a poet, teaching people of all ages to access the power of self expression. I have received 7 individual CAC AIS grants including one artist in libraries grant at Napa State Hospital. I have been part of several multi arts CAC and NEA grants, as well as a pilot evaluation grant with Philip Horn. I was on the roster for the Montana Arts Council AIS program as well. I have worked with Herb Kohl, and many other arts educators, and have taught poetry and art residencies in CA and abroad to students of all ages and abilities. I am area coordinator for CalPoets in the East Bay, and I work with diverse populations. I am widely published, and have had numerous art exhibitions, and have been a cultural worker all my life. I have received two regional NEA fellowships, and have collaborated with artists and musicians. I was nominated Poet Laureate of Sonoma County. I have produced literary events for two decades, and coordinate the youth poetry reading for Watershed Festival.

I have worked with underreprrsented and disenfranchised communities for the past 20 years in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose, and am familiar with the matrix and the needs and cultural sensitivities of underrepresented communities. Through poetry I have taught kids to read while allowing them to develop their creative self expression potential, giving them tools to give them voice. I have worked with public and private school kids, involuntary shut-ins, elders, and disabled populations. Though not formally trained, I am conversationally fluent in Spanish, and have taught residencies where English was not the dominant language. Perhaps the most diverse workshop I ever taught was to cultural workers in a mental hospital in the Netherlands (I also taught in the USSR, where I headed up a poetry and art exchange) where we had not one language in common. (We had a minimum of 5 unrelated languages. I had to think outside the box, as English was not the lingua Franca. I also toured with Ken Larsen, of Rural Arts Services bringing arts programming to isolated CA communities from Covelo to Colusa County. Through Poetry Out Loud, I have trained two Contra Costa student poets to place in the CA state finals, and coordinated POL in Alameda County for 7 years.

VERMILLION LIGHT

Vermillion afternoon light
filtered through lace curtains,
Sunlight stained by smoke,
strangely silent & beautiful.
Almost no traffic on the roads.
So quiet out today.
Cold red sun, a strange winter eye
bathed  in orange light.

Paradise is Lost

Vermillion skies, angry red eye of the sun—fallout from the Paradise fire in the Sierra foothills of Butte County fueled by the Diablo winds. Years  of prolonged drought, an unusually hot summer, and no rain in sight has turned California into a tinderbox. This is the face of global warming. The air is so thick with smoke on the coast 200 miles away, it hurt to breathe. Ash was falling like grey snowflakes this afternoon. The afternoon sun was  absolutely vermillion, the iPad couldn’t catch it, so there’s a vermillion halo around the sun instead. But the sun itself was a mad inferno of an  eye.

I left the window open last night. I feel like I have the flu. My throat is raw, my chest hurts, and I had the sweats. Didn’t dawn on me that the smoke was affecting me. I know the smoke begins to fall from the sky after midnight, and the AQI index returns to normal, but even still.... what was weird, was that there was no frost, we’re in a vast smudge pot. Salmon colored skies this morning.

Someone said the #Paradise #CampFire was up to 70,000 acres in 24 hours. I fear there is nothing left of Paradise. It took the Carr fire nearly a week to get that big. There’s nothing left of the town of Paradise. See the photos below. Our new normal. Yes, and ash was falling on me this afternoon. Like rain.

Paradise is Lost. A useless rain, these tears....

Nicasio Reservoir, bridge, photos

The old bridge, drowned creek bed, and retreating reservoir. I keep circling my quarry, looking for the quintessential bridge photo. This one’s close. I will make a drawing of it, I think. There’s more water in the Nicasio reservoir this year than in years past, the old bridge is just beginning to show itself this week. It usually shows up in October if it’s a dry year. The Canada geese and pelicans patrol its shores, the box turtle is busy sunning himself on the cement pylon of the old bridge, and the deer come down en masse to drink along the old roadbed. The coyote, however, is late to the potluck.

Samhain, a cross-quarter festival

Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh! Happy New Year. May the Gates of the Otherworld stay open long enough for you to escape the coming darkness. And mind the Galoshins!

Astronomically speaking, Samhain should be celebrated November 11, which means that gates of the otherworld are open until November 16. Beware!

Modern calend dates are somewhat meaningless as the Julian calendar was off by ten days when the Gregorian calendar was introduced.

In the 8th c., Samhain was shoehorned into the Christian festival calendar of saints, and the original Roman festival of the dead that was celebrated in in May, and later, the Mexican El Día de los Muertos (originally celebrated in summer) was added to the mix. (See my rant, El Dia de los Muertos was moved atop our Day of the Dead/New Year.

Blame Pope Boniface IV for that mass conflagration of holidays to the dead now celebrated on Nov. 1 & 2.

The Celtic fire festivals are held on the cross-quarter days, midway point between the solstices and equinoxes. Samhain means summer’s end. It is part of a harvest-pastoral, or hunter’s festival calendar. Imbolc is the beginning of spring (first milk) and Beltane is the beginning of summer, followed by the games gathering festival of Lugnasa. And the church tacked on a whole slew of saints to each of these festivals in an attempt to desecularize them. Didn’t exactly work.

There is some thought that the festivals predate the coming of the Celts, which is plausible, as the Bell Beaker folk were sometimes called proto-Celts—at least by my anthropology professor. However, the megalithic standing stone monuments wouldn’t record any astronomical alignment to denote the timing of these fire festivals as they’re aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, not the cross-quarter days.

According to the early medieval Irish epics, that reflect an earlier oral tradition, Samhain was equally celebrated in Ireland, and much of the modern Halloween tradition was introduced to Scotland from Ireland.

Whose? I did a Google image search via Sean Folsom, no luck.

The Celtic wheel of the year with the cross-quarter days, nestled between the solstices and equinoxes. Samhain, the end of summer and the beginning of winter, is a harvest festival, (Halloween), followed by Imbolc, or spring (first milk), and Beltane, (May Day) or the beginning of summer, and Lugnasadh, the time for the great games and clan gathering—which lives on today as the Highland Games. Lughnassad (no double s, btw—) or Lunasa, is the festival of Lugh, is the beginning of August. It lives on in Ireland as the Puck Fair. Someone’s thrown in some other festivals. Oestara was not a Celtic festival, nor was Litha, or Yule, but Mabon was celebrated on the continent. It’s a bit of a mishmash, as someone was trying to shoehorn Roman, Germanic, and astrological signs into one thing. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not an antikythera...you can’t mix apples and oranges and a box of thumbtacks and expect it to make a fruit salad

After the fall

Last day of the Celtic year, While moving boxes of medieval Celtic books to the garage,  rather than do a header, I took a spectacular backflip and skidded down the front steps, trying to protect my knee. I sort of rode it out on my back and tailbone, surfing like a skateboard champ. I have a bloody nick on the front of my tibia and a foot long bruise, clearly I also landed on my shinbone as well. Then I flipped over like a fish to give the other side of my body equal exposure. 

And then, later in the day, I got  clobbered by a demented box of art supplies stashed on the highest shelf of the closet. I took the brunt of it on my left arm, not once, but twice. The second time, a crate of Xmas stuff leapt off the shelf and smashed my right arm. Since I was officially bleeding from long scrapes on both arms, I just gave up. I think those boxes were going for the jugular and carotid. Or maybe my head. I said, sheesh! Third time’s a charm. 

Don’t disturb the closet ghosts on Samhain. Needless to say, I didn’t get much moving done. Some days are like that. There will be hell to pay tomorrow. I may have landed on my back but now I also have a big bruise on the front of my shin. I must’ve flipped like a cat, mid-air. All those years on horse, and donkeyback have taught me how to fall. No tailbones were involved, but it hurts to slouch in the lumbar zone. And sitting in a chair or a car seat is uncomfortable. My arms are sumo buff and bruised. When I go down for the count, I do it with verve and style. But I hurt in some very odd places.

My life for the past 20 years...

My life for the past 20 years, as I've known it, has come to a drastic end. A man, unable to deal with his past, depression, rage, has decided that I'm part and parcel of the problem. I need to go. Kicked out like a dog after 20 years of service. With not even a bone, let alone, severance pay. I, who have sacrificed and subsumed so much of my own life for his needs, I who have struggled to keep him afloat, to keep him clothed and fed, to keep his house a home, but all that was swept under the rug at the end of August. In a manic rage, he lost all semblance of humanity or compassion. Since Labor Day, I've been giving away, and rehoming my things, letting it all go—and living between friends' houses, sometimes sleeping rough in my car or on couches. Since then, I've lived a nomadic life hanging out by the side of the road, or in parking lots. Volunteering at the senior center. I thought this relationship was until Death do us part. I had made a promise to God that if he lived after the car accident in June of 1997, I would stick it out to the very end, no matter what. For months, we didn't know if he had brain damage, the injury was so severe, I didn't know about the ingrained depression until much later. It was hidden behind a wall of injury. Nor did I see the actor's classic narcissism dressed in dazzling bipolar raiments. I've not yet written about this separation. I've been too numb, in shock. I found out the bitter details from his friend Yehiel, that he wants to step out. See someone else. No one on the horizon though. Just grief waving her skeletal hand, saying, Come hither. Come hither. So much for the saying, if you love someone, let them go. Kick her to the curb instead.
 

Summer’s End

We’re fast approaching the end of the Celtic year, Samhain, or Summer’s End, which marks the half way mark, or cross-quarter day between the equinox and the solstice. The night when the boundary between this world and the otherworld are thinnest. The night of the great bonfires, where my great-grandfather ran his cattle between two fires to purify them (the other cross quarter day was Beltane)—the smoke was probably also a great pest deterrent. To be fair, the celebration of the cross-quarter days predates the arrival of the Celts, but they took to the custom like ducks to water, or sparks to flame.

In 609AD, Pope Boniface IV decreed November 1 as All Saints Day, or Allhallowmesse, thus placing a Christian spin on the Celtic celebration of Samhain. And since the festival lasted several days, we have Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day as well.

The Irish brought the vestiges of Samhain, rechristened Halloween by the church, to America, and to Scotland. In America, Halloween took off and became the secular extravaganza it is today, thanks to the candy industry, who saw a profit was to be made. During WWII, American GIs stationed in Germany, put on a Halloween festival in a castle, thus reintroducing elements of Samhain to its original Celtic homeland, and also back to Ireland as well.

We associate Halloween with zombies and characters like Frankenstein, but that story was penned during one dreary dreecht summer in Geneva by Irish lass, Mary Shelley, on a bet to produce a ghost story. Galvanizing the dead fits right into the premise of Samhain, or Halloween when the gates to the otherworld are open, the cauldron of plenty could raise the dead, and anything was possible.

Photos of my mom and Sean Ritter who killed himself 11 years ago.

How beautiful my mother looks in this photo with her new fiery redhead granddaughter Tiffany, and her son Sean, who ended his life 11 years ago, today, rather than face a draconian 3 strikes prison system. He went to prison at 21, on two counts of drug possession charges. He got into a fight in a parking lot, thus breaking his parole, so he went home and shot himself in his garage rather than return to Pelican Bay.

Sean was my half-brother, but raised as a cousin as my childless aunt Toddy who desperately wanted children and couldn't have any, or so she thought. After she adopted Sean, she had three kids of her own. Sean's father was a Dublin man, that's all we know. Somebody my mother met at the No Name Bar in Sausalito. Perhaps he was a sailor, a carpenter, or someone just passing through. He must've been a redhead or a strawberry blond like Sean. My mother never saw him again, but I'm sure she was reminded of him every time she saw Sean. Is the father still alive somewhere in Dublin, we wonder. What was his name? Who were his people? Did he ever know he had a son in America?

In the photo, my mother has no breasts, a cancer survivor, the implants will leak and bring back the cancer, it will grow undetected behind that wall of silicone. She will die of a heart attack after her first round of chemo October 23, 1994. This month is such a melancholy time for me, as my grandmother, and mother also died during the final days of October, also the end of the Celtic year. My grandmother died Oct 28, not quite Samhain, Summer's End, but close enough for the transition when the door to the Otherworld opens. Half way between the equinox, my mother's birthday, to the solstice, Samhain is the beginning of winter, or the dark half of the year. We will light a bonefire for them so that they may see the way forward.

My mom, Maureen Reilly, sister Kathleen (Toddy) Ritter, sons Myles, Sean, baby Tiffany & Judy Ritter.

SGVCC Heart of the Valley, honoring Richard Sloan

Right after I broke up with NoNeil, I moved back to my roots, that is the San Geronimo Valley where I stepped back into a community that I hadn’t revisited since the 1970s. In 2016, I had already reacquainted myself with that is the San Geronimo Valley Community Center food bank, where I became a volunteer and helped serve senior lunches. When I first began volunteering, I had no idea that it would become a lifeline, so when this event honoring Richard Sloan was planned, I knew I couldn’t afford to attend it, so I asked if I could document the event. They were thrilled. 

I first met Richard and artist Donna Sloan when they moved onto our road in 1965. They had a young child, Bryn, and I was the default babysitter and housecleaned. Through the Sloans I was turned onto many ideas including the work of JRR Tolkien, and Phil Ochs.Through Donna and Richard, I became politically involved, I joined his peace and freedom party in 1970 and volunteered as a sign painter for Barbara Boxer’s, Marin county supervisor campaign, etc. so the Sloans were formative in my growing up years. But after Richard Nixon got elected, because of our split third-party votes, I became a reluctant Democrat. Never again.

Donna was instrumental in setting up the San Geronimo Valley Art Center in the old office of Lagunitas School, my alma mater. The building has been public use as a school because it couldn’t be retrofitted. The San Geronimo Valley Art Center morphed into the community center. Full circle. Note bene:Often times the loudest mouth wins the credit for the record. Jeanne Berensmeyer did not the art and community center.  Sloan did, I was there. I was a volunteer.

Spiderwebs and fogbows (photos)

The mad eye of the sun at dawn rising from the mist, wild geese conversing among themselves while grazing on the dew-laden first winter grass of the season.

The field was covered with myriad globe spider webs, drowned in dew, each one unique, the rising sun turned them into a vast crochet fest of dainty handkerchiefs or lace anticamassar prisms on the deep armchairs of the lake reeds. I remember how my aunts would cover their heads with lace hankies before entering the church. Ah, Sunday morning, what tangled webs we weave...

I’m in love with the monstrous globe spiders, such amazing creatures. There were so many webs, I wanted to run amok but I had to stay at right angle to the rising sun in order to see them. Just like rainbows....the closer you get, the more you change their angle, the mor elusive they become.

 I also saw a fog bow, a first. I thought I was imagining things, it was like the intense wings of an angel. I expected to see a vortex of light. Truly a Turneresque moment. No color, but an increased intensity of light. Of course, I searched for the best vantage point, and wherever I went it followed me. I realized that I was my own best vantage point. So I followed it to the old shoreline of the lake until I found what I liked. Truly a metaphor for the rest of my days....

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival 2018

23rd annual Poetry Flash

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival

Stand up for the Earth

Saturday, October 13th

from 10 AM to 4:30 PM

at Civic Center Park,

Martin Luther King, Jr. Way 

in Berkeley, California.

watershed@poetryflash.org

Free to the public, bring low chairs, blankets, picnic on the grass.

Strawberry Creek walk hosted by Chris Olander begins at 10AM 

Meet at the corner of Oxford and Center streets. 

Featured readers: Iris Dunkle, Maya Khosla, Joan Gelfand,
plus eco-dance by Sharon Coleman with Barry Ebner on guitar at the grove.

Plus book signings and poetry writing and art events at River Village.

Readings:

We are Nature reading (open mike sign up at noon).

1:15 PM: River of Words youth reading an awards with Robert Hass, 

1:30 PM California Poets in the Schools student reading 

with Maureen Hurley, Brennan DeFrisco, and other CPITS teachers.

2 PM: welcome
Big reading: Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Leanne Sullivan, Maya Khosla, Joan Gelfand, CS Giscombe, Tonga Eisen-Martin, Forrest Gander, Ellery Ackers, Robert Coats, Iris Dunkle, Chris Olander, Gwynn O'Gara, and more.

4:30PM closing ceremonies, grand finale.

Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival is a collaboration with Robert Hass, US Poet Laureate, 1995-1997, Poetry Flash, and the Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmers' Market, Pegasus Books, Moe's Books, East Bay Express, Poets & Writers, Berkeley Civic Arts  Commission, Zellerbach Family Foundation.

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What would Boudicca do? (on reading Rebecca Solint’s essay onthe appointment of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court)

She will slay her opponents with a spear and finish them off with a long sword. She will lead a massive uprising against the occupying Roman forces. Then she will ride roughshod over her daughter’s rapists with her chariot. She will fight bravely. She will not be silenced. She will not go down without a fight. She will die for her annexed land to uphold honor and justice. She will die for equality—and the right for a woman to rule her own kingdom. Long live Boudicca, queen of the Iceni. We are what will happen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica

Groundcherries by any other name

CNN posted a slouchy article on the process of genetically modifying groundcherries, a species of tomatillo, for commercial harvesting. I think the headline, Groundcherries, the latest modified fruit scientists want you to try, was designed to get a rise out of readers. Anything for a few hits on Facebook. If the header didn't grab your attention, the synopsis was even lamer: They taste like pineapple, but also like vanilla. They're "tropical" but also a bit like a tomato. A bit like a tomato? they're such close cousins, they're practically Irish twins.

I’d chalk the article up to uninformed journalism, replete with bad headlines, or bad tastebuds, or both. Of course, the CNN journalist Arman Azad might not have had anything to do with the epic headline fail. Could be a wonky editor. I can't answer for their tastebuds. Vanilla? Really?

Of course, most Facebook readers lost their collective minds. If the headline hadn’t read “modified” would all the howling Facebook readers have had such an adverse knee-jerk reaction? One could almost hear all those knees smacking their owners in the chin. Don't knock out all your teeth in the process.

Groundcherries (Physalis peruviana) are not some kind of new frankenfruit. Modified does not mean inter-species spliced GMOs, no foreign fish, or alien fungus genes inserted into your tomatoes or groundcherries. People have been domesticating tomatillo species for millennia. If anything, they should be dubbed heirloom plants—even though they're considered to be weeds the world over.

Cape gooseberries, or Inca berries, Physalis peruviana, take some time to ripen.—Wiki

The CNN article nattered on about the significance of scientific development of a more compact groundcherry bush with larger fruit, and more fruit clusters. Talk about burying the lead sentence! If the CNN journalist had merely called the process “domestication” then there probably would have been no flappy Facebook furor. Talk about the five Ws of journalism gone awry. Never bury the lead.

The real problem is developing a commercially viable crop, so that Physalis peruviana can be harvested and shipped. It's just not commercially viable as is—wild grown. Harvesting, shipping, etc., is problematic, as the big rambling bush likes to flop about and lay down on the ground, and randomly drop its fruit—hence the name—groundcherries.

Cape gooseberries, Inca berries Physalis peruviana, yellow ones are the sweetest.

As to gene manipulation, any food you eat has already been modified. Call it domestication, cultivation, or breeding—whether by natural selection, farmers, monks, or scientists... Everything we eat has been modified, unless it's completely wild.

PETRICHOR

Strange sound on the roof.
First rain of the season.
Acrid odor of petrichor.
Portent of things to come.

10/1/19

Outside cat wanting in

Outside cat knocked at the door wanting in when the rains came. I kid you not. she had many things to say, of which I only understood the feed me now command. She settled in for a nice skritchy pet job, insisting on getting between me and my iPad, then she wanted back out, but balked when she saw that strange stuff was still falling from the sky. I had to toss her out. No 3 AM kitty alarm for me. She ambled off into the night grumbling about the housesitter’s epic failings.

Actually she's quite sweet, but skittish. She was a feral rescue, so she likes the front door to be open at all times. Sugar knocked at the door, as if to say, what was all that strange stuff falling from the sky? Let me in! When she wanted out, she took one look and did an about face, I had to shoo her out. No 3AM kitty wants out potty call for me. Catnapping is such hard work.

Stranded on D St. Epic AAA tow fail

AAA keeps changing the ETA time. I am sitting in the hot sun for an hour, broiling, watching the turkeys cross the road. Hood is up and not one single person has stopped or even slowed down, and I e been sitting here over an hour. Some people have come close to sideswiping me in their hurry to get out of town. Lovely city folk. Finally a guy from Novato A&C towing (contract AAA) hauled me to Nicasio. We stopped at the cheese factory for a pit stop. Loo and food. He’s diabetic, and his blood sugar is off. Mine too, I haven’t eaten all day. Apparently nobody wanted to come out to Petaluma, right on the edge of town. No tips. I mean, really. The turkeys were more sympathetic. I’m stuck in Nicasio, at my cousin’s and need to get it to my mechanic in Oakland today....getting it towed with some fancy AAA finagling. Then we’ll see. Hopefully it’s the distributor cap, or coil.

Bliss Buys remembers (oral history) Sonoma County Stump

Simone Wilson, Bliss Buys & Joe Leary, 1980. Maureen Hurley photo

I ran into former Sonoma County Stump founder and editor, Bliss Buys after a poetry reading, the Petaluma Poetry Walk. Bliss, Simone Wilson and I had lunch at Dempsey’s and reminisced. I am sorry to say that I did not take any notes, it was a whirlwind visit. A blast from the past. Simone and I booth cut our journalism teeth at the Sonoma County Stump. There was so much more catching up to do, as I hadn’t seen Bliss since the Stump folded in 1981, when I was new to writing. I worked at the Stump from 1979-1980 until it folded.

I had a camera, I happened to live near the Sonoma County Stump office, I wandered in once day to see what I could see, and next thing I knew, I was given the centerfold to create a double-truck spread on Sonoma County poetry, and a deadline—and the rest is history. —The Paper and the Sonoma County Stump

Bliss and I met up in Petaluma the next day as she needed to meet up with her clients, to renew ads for a antiques periodical she had founded in 1989. It was so enthralling to trail after her as she visited a plethora of Petaluma antiques stores. The antiques guide went from a small Sonoma County monthly throwaway tabloid newspaper to an annual West Coast guidebook. Bliss was touching base with her clients.

Bliss wrote this synopsis in a Facebook group, Russian River History and Memories, “Our first office was on River Blvd. in Monte Rio where we got flooded. The last one was over the Mexican restaurant in downtown Forestville. At one point, we were located behind the Rio Theater in Monte Rio. We had an office on Hwy. 116 north of Sebastopol (where the late, beloved Joe Leary came onboard), one in Guernewood Park (where we got flooded again). There were two periods when we couldn't afford an office and worked out of my home, once in Pocket Canyon (where my partner was Patrick Lanzing), once on Trenton Rd. in Forestville. I wish I remember the last name of the designer of the masthead...John something. The theme was borrowed from a painting by Joan Miró depicting a tree stump that has one of its roots firmly gripping the axe that did the job. Probably the most complete collection of The Stump that exists, went to the museum at Sonoma State University. It may even include some of the very first editions, when Jack "The Carpenter" Husband started it and I was the typist. Deadlines were typically all-nighters. We typed the text, cut out the columns and pasted them with melted wax on big galley sheets. Those copies might still be there, in some dusty corner of the SSU storeroom. We had a good run—more than ten years. 

What follows is an ad hoc oral folk history interview with Bliss at her son Jay’s house on Pepper Road, Petaluma, reminiscing about the past. As is with most verbatim conversations, it’s sometimes disjointed, but one of the things I’ve learned about collecting oral folklore from my UC Berkeley professor, Dr. Alan Dundes, is to not try and fix syntax, grammar, or timeline. Nor interrupt.... Akkk!

Lost sock

. 

A sock caught in the act, inside out. Nearly got away with it, incognito.

I, who was feeling lost, said, oh look, a lost sock. Wait, that’s MY sock!

Divesting myself of things

Someone asks me, do you know where you’re going? No. I’m into the wind, as they say. I will be housesitting in Sebastopol for a month. I’ve still got a lot of stuff to process. It takes a lot of time to properly decommission a small cabinet, or bookshelf, let alone, a room in a house where I’ve lived for more than 20 years. Baby steps. I take it in small chunks, and then fill my car, and then farm it out. When I get it all processed, and sorted out, then I’ll find a storage space and reunite it. Kitchen, hall closet, and living room are nearly done. So many memories. so much anguish and pain. Baby steps. I never want to see Neil again. Remember to breathe, let it pass through. Do not let it stick to you, I tell myself.

I have a Berkeley couch where I can stay,  midweek when I’m teaching..., I’d love to find another...

Children’s librarian was over the moon to get my signed book, Ring A Ring O’ Roses by legendary storyteller, Rockridge librarian, Gay Ducey, I trained with her a long time ago.

Petaluma Poetry Walk (photos)

Petaluma Poetry Walk. See full Google album here, or here.

Fire on Mt. Barnabe

My biggest nightmare, a wildfire broke out near my family home and I can only watch from afar. Trying to reach my cousins was impossible. No cell service. The cell tower is on the top of Mt. Barnabe is out because of the fire. Surrounded with flames. The small side valley, Arroyo/Barranca Road, where I grew up, could easily become a firetrap. Evacuation began right away as the potential for this wildfire to go rogue was huge. We heard from one cousin, James, who wasn’t home, but not the other, however, we're fairly certain he got out with the dog. Luckily the fire did not turn up Barranca Road, it headed south instead. TG.

It looks like the wildfire came up the shoulder closest to Devil's Gulch, where Sam Taylor's favorite white and only mule, Barnabe, was buried. Then the fire burned all the way up to the lookout, then headed down the mountain on our side of the ridge to the right, which means the Nunes Ranch homesteads was threatened, plus a few newer homes in the trees, as it headed back towards Lagunitas again. Had it burned straight across, along the ridge that separates us from Nicasio, we wouldn't have stood a chance. The wildfire spread so quickly, that within minutes, the entire park side of the mountain was engulfed in flames— one of the evacuees, Dave Cort, said the flames were 100 feet high! Within two hours CalFire said it was 80% contained. Phew.

Virginia Rae interview: Sausalito's Gate 5 Theater & beyond

Vee Rae (Virginia Rae Kane) was an actor friend of my mother's at the Gate Playhouse Theatre in Sausalito during the late 1950s- early 1960s. I was young, still in the single digits, so my memory was sparse. But my first blog pieces in 2007 were on Gate 5, Tiki Junction, and also Juanita, which led to this post.

The photo that started it all. My mother, Kellé Reilly (later it was Kellé Green—

her stage name as there was already an actress, Maureen Hurley in SAG), 

Richard Knablin, Skip Rognlien and Vee Rae, Christmas, 1960. 

(Photo by Chris Gracida, courtesy of Richard Knablin.)

Somehow my mom's friend, Richard "Dik" Knablin stumbled across my blog post in 2009, and contacted me which led me to an email from Vee Rae. He sent me a photo of my mother with him and Vee Rae, and the memories came flooding back. Wow!

So this interview is a decade, or more like a lifetime in the making. Also, my drama teacher from College of Marin, James Dunn just passed away, he was also part of the lively and vibrant theatre scene in Marin. Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.

I was able to glean information on Skip Rognlien and Les Abbot, thanks to Google. I found a few reviews that mention Vee and other actors in the ensemble (Bill Edwards, Jim Holiday, Vickie Frazer, Sharleen Lambert, Diane Santich, John Rose, Jack Brennan and J. W. Cheetham, see newspaper archives at bottom), but nothing in print on my mother who worked so tirelessly behind the scenes with costuming, and she was also in most of the plays as well. I only have a few stills of her.

Letter to Yehiel on leaving Neil

To Yehiel Ben Benyamin        9/5/18, 11:33 PM

Dear Yehiel,

We had a blow up last month because I tried to pay a portion of the rent directly (which I've done in the past), and he lost it and told me I had to move out. No forewarning. And so I did.

End of year CAC reports

Well, that's done—2 California Arts Council final evaluations for John Oliver Simon's residencies I inherited—nearly killed me.

When John died in January, I had no idea that my artistic teaching inheritance would be to administer both of his CAC Artists in Schools grants (without a final, or completed copy of either grant—like how much the actual award was vs the grant request. How much to spend, where).

So administering those grants was like a stressful game of sleuth where I wasn't always sure where the money was coming from, or how much I could spend. Or where. I'd wake up at 3AM in a panic more nights than not. Oh, and John spent some of the grant too, which left a deficit.

Then, I had to match both grants dollar for dollar—not knowing the final amount or what most of the line items even were. Of course, I couldn't ask John. I had to reinvent the grants, find new sites, find new money. Like starting from scratch, but worse.

 And he liked to play fast and loose with the matching dough. Cards held close to his vest. I had a couple of breakthroughs at 3AM, where I matched this pile to that, and then snuggled it up with the CAC match. I swear for a moment there I was channeling John.

After teaching, producing anthologies, readings, managing my co-poets for the project, I was saddled with the final online evaluation process in May....But the CAC didn't have it ready until the end of July. Two months. Not a clue as to what I was supposed to do.

Then, come August, I couldn't get into either CAC account, no final evaluation report was listed with either non-profit funder. I had to generate them. But I needed the contract number. More sleuthing....Holyfuch, John submitted both grants with one funder. No wonder there was no record. After untangling that SNAFU, I was able, with the grant numbers, generate the final evaluation report template.

By this time it was mid August. I was nearly hairless with grief. I've been doing nothing but this freakin evaluation process for two weeks. All day long. Every day. What could go wrong, did, early and often. I sent them both in at noon. One day under the final deadline. Phew. It should not have been this hard. A Sisyphean task.

Is it 5 O'Clock yet? I'm feeling a bit fishy. How was your summer?

My project at Emerson. Photo quality is poor (old camera) as I accidentally drowned my new camera in tea the day I found out John died. I had dreamt his death the night before, so I was doubly spooked.I was originally invited in to teach 6 art classes. I wound up teaching the entire semester. Kids were resentful that John wasn't there, they gave me grief  for weeks. It didn't register that he had died. When I turned over the residency to Sophie for the last 6 weeks, she said the did the same with her....wanting me back. They hung all over me like koala bears when I came back to observe Sophie. Progress was made in the most unlikely of ways.  

I'd rather have a drink!

A funny circle of closure, for sure....right about where i came in, in 1984. Oh, John! Right up to the very end....

Teaching at Emerson ES after school with no teacher support  was so challenging, I very nearly quit several times. I gritted my teeth and held on for dear life. Last time I saw John was in that room. I couldn't let go. But I just wanted Wednesday afternoons to go away. Forever.

We had such a sweet goodbye in Dec, on the solstice. We held each other, and all the past was forgiven. We said I love you, and truly meant it. Then he was gone. I had dreamt his death the night before he died. He came to visit, we had wild on the road adventures, traveling, car stolen (that really happened to us in Merida....). And then he was gone, leaving me to fend for myself. I was stuck in  Lodi again...no way home. He still visits me in dreams.

That City by the bay: by any other name

During a TGIF moment, a woman named Erika posted a whimsical iPhone photo of the Transamerica Building, replete with sunspot bubbles, on Facebook, and called it Frisco. People lost their shit. It was a landslide against. But old monikers die hard. 

One reader said, "frisco, the word that sounds like a brand of lard, sucks. everyone is entitled their opinion. You can be an outlier, but just know that people will make fun of you for it. Sorry not sorry," 

 I get weird connotations too: Frisco/Crisco, Friskies with Crisco.

Another reader tried to establish a quasi terminus post quem by stating that Frisco, Texas was...

So named because part of the Frisco rail line, originally incorporated in 1876, ran nearby. Care to guess which city's name is in the full name of the line? Frisco is in Texas only because it was here first. You do realize that the place in Texas was so named because part of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway a.k.a. the Frisco line ran through the area."

True, Frisco, Texas was named after a railway line, but wasn't named after the city of San Francisco. Frisco, Texas was called Frisco City. And the train system never left the Midwest. Not only that, it was named after another San Francisco landmark, a name of a mountain range that predates the founding of San Francisco. 

That same someone who headed up an unsuccessful campaign to rename the Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton, then tried to call in the race card, saying it was a class system. He said only the cocktail set call it by its full name, while the African Americans in the Divisadero, and the Latinos in the Mission call it Frisco. 

Well, I beg to differ. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Besides, the Mission was Irish, it was not always Latino. That came much later. It is not a class thing, it’s more about old San Francisco vs the influx of outsiders that began arriving during the 1970s.

He said

A 175-plus-year stream of San Franciscans have addressed their city with this term of endearment. What also is true, though, is that the longshoremen of the 1860s and the African-American residents of the Fillmore district, a century later, never were going to have the approval of the cocktail-party set. Antipathy to "Frisco" often has been an index of class snobbery."

Well, speaking of presentism, lifting a theme from today's social milieu and blanketing the past with it—about all we agreed upon that people from outside SF called it Frisco—primarily sailors who didn't live here. A frisco was the place where you got your boat repaired, it was not so much about the city's name. Frisco stems from an old Icelandic term for safe harbor. And equally for 175 years, people have been objecting to outsiders calling it Frisco. Nothing to do with demographics, or cocktail party sets, as he put it. Not class snobbery either. But if it fits his agenda....

He said:

"There are number of theories about the origins of "Frisco." Peter Tamony's little article, "Sailors Called It 'Frisco,'" in the July 1967 number of the journal Western Folklore, is worth checking out. No agenda here. It's fine that many have been schooled to have a distaste for "Frisco." But, they should be honest enough to admit that it is, in fact, an issue of taste. When they step into language policing, to say that it is objectively wrong to say "Frisco," they are out of their depth."

So you know I looked it up, only to find, he lifted it out of context from an article. Tamnony was merely strengthening the sailor reference. How folklore works, is what's passed down. More people grew up with the full name vs. using the moniker Frisco. It had nothing to do with working class vs the hobnob set. It's not a matter of taste, status, or even language policing, it's a subcultural trait. And it's not cut and dry either.

JL said:

To the contrary, Mo, it is precisely BECAUSE preferences about the name of the City are "passed down generationally" that these preferences become, and are, a matter of taste, status and language policing. I don't challenge the point that "more people grew up with the full name vs. the moniker Frisco." I simply am saying that THAT FACT, such as it may be, does not give those who weren't trained to tolerate "Frisco" the right to badger those who do use "Frisco" into some kind of submission, as though the "Frisco" crowd is "doing it wrong."

So, according to JL, those who say Frisco are allowed free reign, and a pat on the back because they feel justified in calling it Frisco, but those of us who learned it as San Francisco must stay mum because he says so? De gustibus non est disputandem; call it what you will, but expect a reaction.

I pointed out that there are 14 place names called Frisco, or Frisco Station, or Friscoville, none of them were originally called San Francisco, then shortened to Frisco, and they're named after a St. Louis, Missouri train route that didn't even go to San Francisco. Ever. "Despite its name, it never came close to San Francisco." It never even left the Midwest.

For the record, there's a town called Frisco, aka Fresco, in Alabama, Frisco, Arkansas (no train), Frisco is a Colorado mining town, as was Frisco, Idaho (no train), Illinois, Friscoville, Louisiana, Missouri (trains), Frisco, North Carolina on Hattaras Island (too watery for trains), Oklahoma, Pennsylvania (no train), Texas (train), Tennessee, Utah, a  mining town named after Frisco Peak in the San Francisco Mountains, named BEFORE San Francisco was founded, I might add; and Frisco, Virginia.

Yes, dahling, calling San Francisco Frisco is a bit problematic. It could refer to some place completely different. If you want to live in Frisco, consider moving to one of those states. Then it won't be an issue.

JL went on to say:

"The narrative that San Francisco natives and residents never have, or don't, call their city Frisco is both tired and false. The term has a long, storied history here dating back before 1850."

I repeated: The only problem with your train story, is that it never came to SF. And not once did I say that San Francisco natives and residents never have called their city Frisco. I said, it wasn't a class issue, that was too cut and dry, because many working class people, my own family included, never called it Frisco.

Many of those Frisco place names were derived from other places: In 1629, Spanish friars founded a mission at Oraibi, a Hopi village, in honor of St. Francis, 65 miles from the San Francisco Peaks. The Franciscans gave the name San Francisco to the peaks to honor St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of their order.

The San Francisco Peaks, and the San Francisco Mountains both lent their names to several hamlets. Frisco Mountain, Washington, got its name from a mining camp, as did Frisco, CO, UT, etc. Frisco Coloradans are quick to defend their town's name, saying it's NOT named after San Francisco, CA, but that it's an acronym.

"Frisco, CO, wasn’t named after San Francisco. The name Frisco is desired from the letters associated with the St Louis- San Francisco Railway company. You have the FR from Francisco, IS from St Louis and CO from Company!" Frisco Colorado History Facts

So, the point is that the moniker, Frisco, did not originate in San Francisco. It's an exogamic term. Accretion. Like those barnacles on the ships.

The name of our city, San Francisco (est. 1769), was derived from the Latin, San Franciscus—full name: Mission San Francisco de Asis (1774), which was later dubbed, Mission Dolores. And it brought much sorrow for the Ohlone and Coast Miwok tribes.

Saint Francis of Assisi was a Frenchman. Frank, France, or Francis means a "free man." Oui! San Francisco's first European name was Yerba Buena. Good herbs. The island we now call Yerba Buena was called Goat Island. What, goats?San Francisco was also called The Golden City, after John C. Frémont dubbed it Chrysopylae in 1846, before the Gold Rush. It was also called The Golden City, or The City, probably because nobody could pronounce Chrysopylae. The Yelamu Ohlone names are lost. One candidate is Ahwaste, "place at the bay."

San Francisco was also called the Barbary Coast, and coined Bagdhad-by-the-Bay by Herb Caen. Though we refer to SF as a she, and Francisco may be a masculine name, in the City, gender is fluid. 

Herb Caen, the Pulitzer Prize–winning San Francisco Chronicle columnist, was adamant that no one call his "fair city by such a sliced-up moniker." Herb Caen, "the voice of San Francisco," wrote a a sequel to his 1949 loveletter to his multicultural adopted city, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, entitled Don't Call it Frisco in 1953, "named after a local judge's 1918 rebuke to an out-of-town petitioner ("No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles")‍." He said “the F word” as “a salty nickname, redolent of the days when we had a bustling waterfront.”

Caen's column appeared in the SF Chronicle for nearly sixty years (with a brief defection to The San Francisco Examiner). Everyone turned to his page first, then, read the news. "Herb Caen" (archive) was the longest-running newspaper column in the country, until Caen's death in 1998.

Caen also coined, or popularized the terms Beatnik, hippie, and Beserkeley. A thousand words a day with Caen's trademark ellipses "three-dot journalism banged out on his "Loyal Royal", defined our city. June 14, 1996, was designated Herb Caen Day. He had that much influence. He didn't call it Frisco.

Herb Caen articulated it best.

You don't call New York, York do you? Nor do you say Kong. Or Angeles. Or Diego. Maybe Moscow should just be 'Cow. And while we're at it, let's cheapen St. Louis to just Louis. Why should San Francisco be shortened?

For the most part, only people from out of state, the recently arrived, or the tragically hip call it 'Frisco. There are exceptions. But it still draws ire. And it's also an old saw. There's even a sitcom called Don't Call it Frisco.

You also need that apostrophe BTW, as 'Frisco is a contraction. Otherwise it could refer to those 14 other cities legally called Frisco.

I found this 2006 story by Sean C., a frequent contributor to Trip Advisor:

"The city is named for Saint Francis, one of the most loved Catholic saints. Apparently, that word was shortened to "frisco" and was used by sailors to refer to a place where a sailing ship could be scraped, repaired, and refitted. The Court of Historical Review convened to decide if such a nickname was acceptable. The court ruled that the name of the city was San Francisco and that no nickname should be tolerated."

LOL it's the law!

Pancho (or Paco, Chico, Cisco,) is a diminutive Spanish baby name for Francisco. But Ess Eff is not a baby. Then, by way of parallel structure, in English, we oughta be calling The City St. Frankie, San Pancho, but not 'Frisco.  Just don't call it San Poncho, or San Pacho! SF may be free and easy, but nothing is ever truly free. One way or another, there's always a price to be paid, la mordida. Absurdum infinitem.

Can you imagine Tony Bennett singing, "I left my heart in Frisco"?

Me neither.