BAY AREA ​NEIGHBORHOODS

A PANDEMIC VIEW OF MY NEIGHBORHOOD--
THE EVOLUTION OF A BEAR AND A WINDOW
A Photo Journal
​by Tina Martin

A friend and neighbor, Anya, called me in early April, telling me her little boy, Bophi, wanted to look for Comfort Bears in windows. Did I have one?
 
I did, in fact — Mama Bear; so-called not as a reference to “Goldilocks” but to my own mother.
 
After Mother died in 2011, her partner of more than forty years had Bears made for us from articles of her clothing—items that we associated with her. I knew I wanted to put her close to a window looking east out at the garden because she had said in her Advance Health Care Directive that if she ever had to move to a care facility, she wanted to be outdoors as often as possible. But when she developed paranoia along with Alzheimer’s, she was afraid to go outdoors. I kept Mama Bear by that back-bedroom window looking out for eight years, until the pandemic created a need for Comfort Bears in our front windows.  
I then moved her to the living room window looking west, across the street at Larsen Park and then on to where our country ends at the Pacific Ocean. I simply propped her up on a small quilt on top of the sofa and assumed that she would soon topple over. But we could say, if prone to making sophisticated literary allusions, “Someone’s been sitting on my sofa, and she’s still there.” She’s been very steadfast in her comforting of passersby, and she’s also had a pleasant change of view. ​
​When Earth Day came around, I dressed her in a tee shirt saying "Mothers Out Front," an environmental group I belong to, propped the book Eat for the Planet on her back, and added posters showing the Earth and quoting a line from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “Oh, Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
 
More changes came to the bear’s window on April 22nd, after I participated in two San Francisco events. There was a city-wide sing-along to “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to thank our frontline workers and to buoy our spirits. Up went a sign—a musical note in the form of a heart with a flag staff, saying Thank You to frontline workers. In the evening, Heather Knight and Peter Hartlaub of the SF Chronicle hosted a Total SF virtual party, a viewing of the movie Inside Out.
 
We were to make an SF pizza, something disparaged in the movie about a family from Minnesota looking for decadent comfort food who are contemptuous when they see broccoli pizza instead of a topping made up of dead animals. We could either make something meant to be far too healthy like edamame pizza, or we could create one depicting some SF icon.
 
By that time, I’d walked to several beautiful places: Grandview Park to see the sunrise, Ocean Beach, Golden Gate Park, and Stern Grove, diagonally across the street from my house, so I made a collage pizza I could feast on with my eyes, if not my mouth.  
​In the movie Inside Out, the characters SADNESS, DISGUST, ANGER, FEAR, and JOY are battling for control over the pre-teen who’s homesick for Minnesota. After all of us participants pressed Play at 7:00 pm that April 22nd night, we saw that JOY triumphed over those other emotions, and I saw that all I had to do was add a J and a Y to the O formed by the SF collage-pizza, and I would have JOY.
My Bear and my front window were evolving, adding an early-May Plant-Based Party to raise money for food banks and encouraging us to Eat for the Planet. 

​My BFF sent me a rainbow from Arizona.
​Then came the death of someone I loved dearly–whose kids I’d baby-sat from the time I was ten until I was sixteen every Friday when she and her husband went to Temple. I’d read a Letter to the Editor suggesting that we put a star in our window for anyone we knew personally who had died of Covid-19, so I put up a star for Eileen Gertz. I also put up on the window a copy of an angel she did in charcoal, something I saw on the walls of their home every Friday I was there.
A neighbor tells me that mine is the only house on the block that has a bear in the window, but when I walk around the corner towards West Portal, I see bears, pictures,  and messages in a lot of windows--truly signs of the times--neighbors comforting neighbors and speaking out for racial justice. Work with CCSF’s African-American and Affirmative Action Task Force began before the killing of George Floyd in late May, but it intensified after that.  Another organization I belong to (OWL) joined forces with SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and EJI (Equal Justice Initiative).
Since I had the word JOY formed from photos of places I’d walked to in San Francisco, I made collages from other walks for other words. From photos of Mountain Lake, Lake Merced, and other places, I formed HOPE, LOVE, and FAITH, particularly for a favorite uncle who was in hospice care.
​I now have more than twenty friends or relatives who are dealing with serious health issues, and when one of them was in the hospital, I noticed that if I borrowed from HOPE, FAITH, and LOVE, I would have HEAL.  
Looking out the front window, the Bear sees the white concoction created by fog and the ash from the terrible Northern California wildfires, so I think I’ll leave HEAL up for a while. 
Here is my photo collage of how the bear and the window have evolved over the past few months.  
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Before Tina Martin retired in 2014 from CCSF, where she taught ESL for 32 years, she taught and/or trained teachers on five continents--Oceana, Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia. She has a son, Jonathan, born in 1979 and now living in NYC, with whom she founded the JoMama Book Club in 2007, leading to once-a-month discussions on Google Chat. She is currently hiding her memoir, Everything I Should Have Leaned I Could Have Learned in Tonga, from all but her closest friends, while writing the sequel, Letters of Apology for My First Memoir. She’s also working on a piece of fiction, Sisters Sheltering, which takes place in San Francisco during the pandemic. Three nonfiction pieces she wrote appear in anthologies, and two others are online.    

Other works in this issue:
Fiction
​Nobody Knows: A Pandemic Interlude
Vertical Divider
    WE WELCOME COMMENTS
Return to the Table of Contents
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.