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Showing posts from January, 2016

The flowers are still in their hair

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When I went back to San Francisco at Christmas, I was expecting a crush of techies jostling for cafe space or elbowing me out of the BART. I predicted one long gloomy trip as I struggled to relate to millennials or Gen Zers too focused on their smartphones to notice they were tripping over my Birkenstocks. Hey, I don't really wear Birkenstocks (not that there's anything wrong with that), and it was too cold and rainy in the Bay Area to have worn them anyway; but apart from that, I sensed that the Old Guard was still very much in the power position in my city. Take, for example, my cabbie in Pacific Heights. I'd just left a very classy hotel I'd reviewed , and after a bad experience on the trip was sharing my concerns with him. We ended up talking about the changing face of the newspaper business in the city, sharing names we both knew, and then laughing our way into the Richmond. I didn't have a ton of money for a tip, but clearly, this Old Guard San Franciscan w