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Friday Slide Show: North Beach 2012 Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

25 November 2022

One of the side effects of Thanksgiving is observing the odometer turn over. The family has aged since last together. Youngster become adults, adults become aged, the aged disappear. You take stock.

Ten years ago on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we locked a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor on our Nikon D300 with a vertical grip attached and took the bus to North Beach.

The subplot is that the San Francisco 49ers (not to be confused with the Santa Clara 14ers currently using the name) were playing the Saints. Kaepernick vs. Brees.

We'd catch glimpses of that game throughout the afternoon as we wandered around town.

But what we were really doing was going back to our roots in North Beach after Thanksgiving. To the place where the people we had once known as children had been young themselves.

So the photo of the Stinking Rose isn't a shot of a fun restaurant. It's a photo of the black tile that was the facade of Lovotti-Rossi, Uncle Louie's pharmacy for decades.

We had lunch at Rose Pistola, now itself just a memory. Here's how we remembered it:

A bottle of Bliss sauvignon blanc with calamari on a bed of thinly sliced potatoes with fennel sliced very thin, too. That was served on one of the farinata skillets. I ask the waiter what happened to farinata (since it wasn't on the menu again) and he explains it wasn't being ordered even though there's been some fans asking for it. Then we have a sausage pizza in a red sauce with a very light crust. Wonderful. And we finish things off with a grilled mahi mahi on a bed of greens and big white Tuscan beans. Lovely. Joyce has an affogato and I have an espresso.

We haven't eaten like that in ages. And, with the subsequent demise of Rose Pistola, sadly won't again.

We walked around shooting Raw+JPEG but the JPEG was monochrome. It was fun even if the 50mm requiring manual focus led to the faulty focus of a few of these images.

Then we started our walk back to the streetcar that would take us home.

We walk up around Grant and back to Columbus and downtown (where a swarm of skaters goes by us) to the Sheraton where we stop for a drink and photos. That lets me see the second half. I think the 49ers are down 21-20 but I misread the zero. They're really up 28-21. And I see them score another field goal after a penalty calling back a touchdown and miss two more field goals as poor old Brees gets sacked and sacked. So it's a 31-21 win.

A drink at the Pied Piper bar in the Sheraton, that is. A special place to us. We would go there with our father and some potential business partner to discuss an arrangement of one kind or another with the Pied Piper reminding them what can happen when you don't hold up your end of the bargain.

It was very effective.

The shots we took that day seem, like the relatives we have lost, to be from another era. So the monochrome treatment (and nearly unnoticeable vignette) is just the thing.

We're so grateful for that day that we wish we could go back. But that's the bargain you make in life. Enjoy it while you can because there's no rewind. And that means making today as wonderful as we remember yesterday.


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