Black fog png2/9/2024 Dramatic hills surrounded by water, tugboat hoots from the bay, and bridges that defy gravity grabbed me. Eleven-year-olds hike around Chinatown and Coit Tower, ride cable cars, and snoop around old mansions, library archives, and antique shops-without grownups. I loved the way its young characters explored San Francisco’s foggy beauty and pastel ethnic neighborhoods. Its plot is underwhelming to the Adult Me, but then the plot was never important to me as a kid. The frailer sister keeps asking for her missing green cat, which turns out to be a little statue containing a life-changing note from her long-dead husband. Meanwhile, in the spooky Victorian house just up Russian Hill, two elderly and mysterious sisters keep a bunch of Asian relics and a batch of secrets. In the book, a widow and her two young daughters move to San Francisco to live with her new husband, a widower, and his two pre-teen sons. It was an odd time-traveling experience, allowing me to consider my own pre-teen brain and realize how little of the book I accurately remembered other than its general vibe. I re-read its 188 pages, in large typeface. My original copy was long lost, but I ordered a used one from an online book dealer. Recently, I decided I wanted to revisit that place, and I went looking for Whitney’s book. Still, who could resist it? Was it real? At least some of it was and is. that is obsolete, or maybe never existed. Whitney presents a vision of a pre-hippie S.F. Whitney, writing for kids all over the country, displayed a skill, unburdened by kneejerk politics, that unearthed the magic of the place. Still, in gentler times, Mystery of the Green Cat, first published in 1957, celebrated San Francisco. It may sound childish to inject a middle-grade mystery book into a debate about today’s painful, intractable issues. I am always impressed by how there is no place in the nation like San Francisco, a benefit of its unusual topography and its spirit of social openness and innovation. It re-emerged as a magnet and cradle for talent and creativity, punching above its weight in music, art, literature, technology, medicine, alternative lifestyles, and stupendous business success. They never mention that San Francisco rebuilt itself, heroically, after the 1906 earthquake and fires that had leveled it. San Francisco is home to beat poetry, hippies, gay libs, Big Tech, Nancy Pelosi, political correctness, and pricey and beautiful architecture that made its critics’ own pale hometowns look like dumps-so now is the time to avenge all that. Too many seem to gleefully dance on what they hope will be the grave of a city they always resented for the scary things it represented politically, sexually, artistically. As the city loses tax base and tourist revenues while gaining pathologies and street crime, they predict the end is near. Ron DeSantis, and many other critics persistently push an exaggerated portrait of the city as a hellhole, where car thefts and fentanyl deaths, corporate flight, and retail closings fuel a so-called Doom Loop. Of course, parts of downtown San Francisco do face huge social problems-homelessness, drug addiction, shoplifting invasions. It’s important to remember the things that made, and make, San Francisco great-not for the sake of nostalgia or adolescent literature, but to ensure that a dark fog of disdain doesn’t block out everything else. I fear that San Francisco has gotten such a bad rap-borne of an often brutal, and mainly conservative, narrative about the city-that people have lost sight of its unerasable allures, and its irreplaceable spot in American history and culture. It’s a depiction that pushes back against the rampant San Francisco bashing in vogue today. The little paperback’s romantic portrayal of the City by the Bay grabbed me and never let go. Whitney, led me to develop an affection for that distant, hilly city on the Pacific coast: San Francisco. One book in particular, Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis A. Children’s and young adult literature let me imagine independence-meeting new people and exploring different places on my own. My family often visited nearby Manhattan but that was still off-limits for solo wandering. Those novels took me places, out of my crowded, insular hometown. ![]() I read them in bed or in a park, on winter nights or summer days. Best of all, they usually had nothing to do with schoolwork. A few weeks later, paperbacks arrived at school in wondrous boxes. I would carefully select books from a paper form distributed in class. For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog.
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