​POETRY    
          
"As we drive down Market street,  -  -  -   - "
                               Photo by Weebly.com                                    

It's Tops - A San Francisco Remembrance
by Jane Barrier

​​As we drive down Market street, I notice the
‘It’s Tops’ sign on the blue turret of the eccentrically oblong blue building.  
 
Now smothered in placards denoting closure; when it was a living, breathing, 
hub of grub, the hours were:
     8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
     8 p.m. to 3 a.m.
8to3 8to3 Get it? I kept forgetting the hours.
 
A line of hungry folks would snake from relatively flat parking-lot concrete to small
slanted steps up into the body of 
It’s Tops. 
 
Sort of like Wotan and the other gods embarking onto the ship to Valhalla in the Ring Cycle . . .
well, ok, maybe not so much god & myth, just people ready for breakfast.
 
People of all shapes and sizes tried to fit into
booths that were of all shapes and sizes,
and onto stools at little tables seeming suspended and hewn to their particular corner of wall.
Each of us felt lucky when a spot was snagged.             
 
Ah, humanity! I breathe you in along with bacon and eggs and pancakes and coffee.  
Let the devouring begin.  
 
A dust-up occurs as 2 almost-customers 
loudly voice disappointment and disgust at the prices asked for such standard fare.
 
After a couple of audible tsk tsks (ouch)
while looking up at the menu, 
the man and man
then left; acrid smoke of self-pride filling a
sudden vacuum.
 
Our wiry little maitre-d leaned over the front counter and uttered an ‘up yours’
in defiant 
resignation.  
 
I had always entertained the thought that the guy at the front counter;
and the cook in the depths of the little black square that hinted at kitchen;
were two that had been there for years.
Had seen it all and done it all.
Ilk of the Paris Commune; standing for the right of It’s Tops to exist!
​To continue feeding the masses without trepidation,
fidelity to all under the aegis of 
IT’S TOPS.
 
In my mind it still exists 
and so, too, they.
Vertical Divider
​​Jane Barrier is currently a retired computer programmer who has been living with MS for over 30 years. She enjoyed acting in local theaters until multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in 1990, curtailed her trodding the sidewalks, much less “the boards.” Thanks to OLLI instructors in poetry writing, and an offshoot group of students who formed to hear and comment on each others’ work, her feeling for poetry has been reinvigorated.

Jane is a first time contributor to Vistas & Byways in this Spring 2023 issue. 
Vertical Divider

We Welcome Comments
Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
Vertical Divider
​Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to theVistas & Byways  ​volunteer staff.