The streets of San Francisco.
It begins on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. The year is 1977. The hour is around two in the afternoon. It is the month of August. The restaurant is called Zim's. Sally works there. She asks what I'm doing here. Looking for somewhere to live, I say. She and her husband live a few blocks away. At 964 Eddy Street. In the evening I move in. I move into a big beautiful house in wood. Built in 1880.
Two days earlier, I sat in a Greyhound bus and rolled over the Bay Bridge. The night was dark. But I see the light. I see San Francisco. I see the Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Santana. Big Brother and the Holding company. Steve Miller. Boz Scaggs. Sly Stone. Jann S. Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. Hunther S. Thompson. City Lights Books. I see what I had been longing for. I now understand that it was there and then perfect T was born. A few blocks from the Golden Gate Bridge, a few hundred yards from Tenderloin, a breath away from Fillmore West, a few steps to the tram on California Street, Jack Keuorac and North Beach. In the middle of everything.
Perfect T. On or off, doesn't matter. As perfect off as on. Always in sync with you and your life. In harmony with light, in harmony with darkness. Happy celebrating, happy comforting, always there to care. Three hours past midnight, dinner or brunch. Perfect T is with you wherever you are and wherever you are going. And maybe that's exactly what Levi Strauss thought, when in 1853 he stitched together the foundation of what we today know as Levi's. No one can tell with certainty. Regardless, we weave together all the threads in perfect T. Made of as much cotton as dreams. Yours. Mine. Ours.
The doors to 964 Eddy Street are always open. No one is shut out from the warmth, from the community, from the family. Everything is possible, everything is close and tangible even that which is far away. So is the feeling. Every day filled with opportunities to give and receive, affirm and enrich. Every fiber, every word, every color, all the colors of the rainbow. Every day a gift, and every day a tribute to life. What a wonderful world this could be. With a perfect T. Why not? Enjoy.
