At the end of August I arrived at my 59th birthday, and I feel myself to have grown into my old soul.  I live and work in San Francisco, where I was born at the University of California Hospital on Parnassus Heights at the end of the Summer of Love.  I was reared here and have lived and worked here ever since, except for five years of study at UCLA in Los Angeles, and three years at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.  

There are those for whom San Francisco is terra incognita, which they often fill with the sun, palm trees, and beaches of Southern California 400 miles to the south.  There isn’t much sun here thanks to the fog and clouds; there aren’t any palm trees except those that were planted full grown in recent decades to fool tourists (so they have to buy jackets, gloves, and scarfs at Fisherman’s Wharf once they are here); and the beaches? Well, they are good for walking in overcoats or for surfing and swimming in wet suits.  Others believe the entire city is LGBTQ+.  While there is a grain of truth here, it is far from the whole story.  If you happen to have familiarity with San Francisco, please skip the next three or four paragraphs–you already know what I’m about to say.

The truth is the first Europeans to settle here were Spanish soldiers and Franciscan missionary friars in 1776.  One can still visit the old mission chapel and graveyard, with a small museum; and, the old commandant's house at the Presidio, until recently a military base, and some 1776 cannon and their embankments.  The spots now occupied by antebellum forts along the coast are the same as the original Spanish fortifications.  They came up here to keep the British and the Russians out.  Two hundred miles north there are Russian forts, and, closer in, is a town named Sebastopol.  After Mexican independence in 1821, the Mexican government tried to laicize the missions, and open the region to civilian settlement, around the village of Yerba Buena there were ranches and farms.  The locals identified themselves as “Californios.”   On 9 July 1846, during the Mexican-American War, the USS sloop Portsmouth docked to witness the Bear Flag Revolt, and the proclamation of the Bear Flag Republic.  Two co-alcaldes/mayors were appointed, Jose de Jesus Noe and Lt. Washington Allon Bartlett (spoke Spanish and was familiar with the law).  They renamed the village, San Francisco.  The village became a city in 1849 thanks to the California Gold Rush.  Almost no gold mining actually turned a profit, fortunes were made in selling and reselling mines to others, and in provisioning new arrivals: Wells Fargo Bank, Levi-Strauss & Co., the Bank of Italy/Bank of America, Del Monte Foods, Transamerica Corp., Anchor Brewing Company, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Folgers Coffee, Hills Brothers Coffee, Southern Pacific-Union Pacific Railroad, Hearst Corp., Chevron Corp., Bechtel Corp., Swensen’s Ice Cream, Rolling Stone, and many many others profited off speculators, as many companies still do today.  Indeed people here often say they are prospecting for outside investors (beware).   For more than 175 years, this small, compact city has been the financial center for the US west of the Mississippi River, and the largest port on the US Pacific Coast (now across San Francisco Bay in Oakland).

In the last 50-60 years wealth exploded along with Stanford, Berkeley, Genentech, and Silicon Valley.  It is a cosmopolitan, port city, “a European city,” and an East Coast city transplanted onto the West Coast, though here there were many tribes who had to work together if they wanted to get anything done.  Transplanted Bostonians; immigrants from Britain, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Russia, Sweden, China, Japan; Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians, Baptists, Buddhists…none had the resources by themselves for major projects.  

San Francisco has always been a city of immigrants.  In my boyhood everyone seemed to speak an old-world language whether from their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and in some cases even great-great-grandparents.  In my grammar school class of 36 children there were people from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Malta, Greece, Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and everyone mixed and learned from each other.  In high school, though mainly Irish and Italian, the diversity was amplified, and everyone mixed and learned from one another.  Now, over one-third of kids in San Francisco attend private schools.  I would be surprised if it was much lower than that 40 or 50 years ago (if anything, many private schools have closed since then).  These private schools tend to differ markedly from public schools.  To begin with, they are hardly regulated by any government agency and are free to do as they wish.  They tend to be more academic and competitive, and many classes that are offered in public schools are not offered in private ones.  Students have to work a lot harder, they are far less cliquish and fraught than public schools generally, and what cliques there are are pretty permeable such that many students will be at home in various subgroups rather than one.  But in the 1970s, most kids and their parents watched PBS, went to foreign movies at the movie houses, drank espresso and coffee in the coffeehouses at night, browsed bookshops – none of this was a put on, it was just what people did.  

My friends and I had the freedom to explore the city, which was another school in a sense.  A trip downtown to Union Square at that time on the streetcar or cable car might include stops in wonderfully curated bookshops, the Mechanics’ Institute Library, the Alliance Francais, the Goethe Institute, the European Book Co. which was the West Coast distributor for foreign language books.  Men’s clothiers of that era have all disappeared, save one, Cable Car Clothiers (founded in 1946); department stores like Gumps, which was then like a museum attic of furnishings and antiques from the Far East, the Olympic Club, tea in the King George Hotel mezzanine (a no fuss place with London efficiency), looking at maps in the Rand McNally Store or the World Affairs Council Library.  You might understand why a local columnist named Herb Caen called it "Baghdad by the Bay.”  Today much of that is gone, and it is more a city of transient students and corporate workers, skewing young.  For fairly accurate depictions see Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought or Wes Anderson’s 1999 movie Rushmore.

My parents lived in a neighborhood called Bernal Heights, on the slopes of Bernal Hill.  The land had been the farm and ranch of a don/senor Bernal.  In the 1970s it was mostly a working class neighborhood, with colonies of hippies, and it still has the city’s oldest lesbian bar.  Some of the hippies became wealthy tech people, early Burning Man sorts.  In the 1980s the neighborhood was gentrified, and by the 90s it boasted the highest per square foot residential real estate prices in the city.  It’s a very green village, with small row houses on small lots that sell for millions of dollars, in spite of the fact that parking is problematic on very tight, narrow streets.  We belonged to St. Kevin’s (Catholic) Parish, in the charge of a wonderful older Irish priest, Father O’Malley.  I went to the public kindergarten nearby.  Then to a parochial school attached to St. James Parish and run by Dominican sisters who had not gone crazy in the 60s.  The sisters were world class teachers and dignified women.  But by the time I got there, there weren’t many of the originals.  The lay teachers were a mixed bag, some excellent, some not so much.  Still, it was a solid grammar school education, a good beginning.  After that I attended the local Jesuit school, St. Ignatius.  A revolution had taken place, but there were still vestiges of the old Jesuit order of study: freshman public speaking run by a great teacher, a still formidable debate team thanks to the same teacher, and lots and lots of classic British and Irish literature. One of our great teachers, Bill Morlock, had a career in Intelligence.  Some of the authors we read in Symposium date back to these years: John Henry Newman (Idea of a University), Henry Adams, Miguel de Unamuno, Garcia Lorca, Orwell, Borges, among others.  

But even in “Baghdad by the Bay” I was one of those displaced immigrants, both geographically and in time, much like the people who filled the People’s Institute classes in Manhattan and engaged in lively, serious conversation in the 1920s.  Though I was born here, my parents were not American, and though I could still request and be granted Nicaraguan citizenship, I was not reared or educated there.  As the Mexican comedian Mario Moreno Cantinflas would say, “neither from here nor there,” which has its advantages, and a human condition we Catholics think afflicts everyone.  But I mean something deeper.  

My father had come here accidentally in ‘57, he had been involved in a tragic accident, and his family quickly sent him here, where an older sister and brother-in-law had been granted political asylum.  Roberto, the brother-in-law, had been a Nicaraguan Air Force pilot who refused to follow the dictator’s unlawful order.  My father settled into a life here, but frequently went to Nicaragua.  My parents met for the first time in Nicaragua at a party in 1965. They married the following year and settled in Nicaragua.  My father’s family were old-fashioned gentry, very frank in speech…  The only books most of them ever read were either ledgers or stud books.  My mother’s family were intellectual, scholarly, and diplomatic.  My mother was afraid her family would not take to her husband and that there might be friction between them, and she let him talk her into trying San Francisco.  They moved when she was seven-months pregnant with me.  We tried twice to return there as a family, but the first time there was a major earthquake in the capital city, and the second, a civil war.  In the end returning would have been disastrous, especially for my younger brother and me.  But each summer, we would travel to Nicaragua with my mother to her parents house for three months. People in my family tend to marry late and have children late.  So I, the eldest, was born in 1967, my mother in 1930, and her parents in 1893.  My grandparents house was of the large, Mediterranean type built around courtyards, and the household ran like clockwork.  My grandfather had a multilingual library.  He was one of five supreme court magistrates 1956-1970, they had a rotating presidency each year, and he twice presided over the court.  Before that he had served as a senator, a deputy in the lower house, an appellate circuit judge, governor plenipotentiary of the Atlantic Provinces (the Eastern half of the country), chief of cabinet, war minister, president of the Conservative Party, diplomat in Europe, DC, Mexico City, and other places, lawyer, and criminal prosecutor.  Apparently he never lost a case.  Most Americans might be surprised to know that every dictator in the history of Nicaragua has belonged to the Liberal Party, and the only party that ever had a serious constitutional republican project for the country was the Conservative Party.  In any case, even the Somoza dictators called my grandfather “the Master,” a sign of respect and deference, even though the first dictator Somoza Garcia jailed him many times.  After he retired his friends wanted him to join them in the Corresponding Academy of the Language (Corresponding the Real Academia Española), but he declined.  Unlike many of his colleagues he did not have the backing of a large, rich clan.  Zúñigas tend to not be so prolific.  Still, when he spoke quietly and thoughtfully, galleries filled.  He had come from a very good family, but had no money.  That seems to be the pattern with Zuniga men: each generation starts over.  His father, who died young, had been a musical composer who led a chamber orchestra.  Against the advice of relatives, his mother and her two sisters, also widowed young, had divested themselves of a very large estate that later became a jewel.  While some of his friends and relatives studied at the Sorbonne, Oxford, Salamanca, in Rome, he studied at a branch campus of the National University that operated in the city of Granada until 1952 when the dictator shuttered it.  It was housed in an early XVI C. Franciscan Convent, with enormous cloisters, which is today a historical museum.  Situated above the shoreline of Great Lake Nicaragua, it receives the lake’s breezes, making it a wonderful place to study.  When my grandfather was there from 1908-1913, an education in civil law was broad and classical.  I was very close to him, and at that time, for me, there was the Lord and then there was my grandfather.  I wanted the kind of learning he had, even though I could not quite articulate what that education was.  I was told much later that he had offered to take charge personally of my education, and my parents declined, but that would have ended in my ninth year when he became ill with Parkinson's, Alzheimer’s, and atherosclerosis.  

On a typical Sunday, the family would go to mass, then my spinster aunt would take the children to a movie matinee, and the ice cream parlor afterward.  We would go home for lunch, with the sons and daughters and their families visiting.  After lunch, we would lie on the cool, stone floor reading.  I loved the Sunday literary supplement to the newspaper La Prensa, its slogan was “a university in the pocket.”  Its editor was Nicaragua’s foremost man of letters circa 1932-2002, Pablo Antonio Cuadra Cardenal and the staff writers were superb.  I could understand almost none of it, but I still liked reading it for some reason.  This is where I first came across names like Michael Polanyi, Stefan Zweig, Friederich von Hayek, Vilfredo Pareto, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erwin Panofsky, Alberto Giaccometti, Ernst Junger, Andre Malraux, Henry Green, Karl Popper, Salvador de Madariaga, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Julian Marias, and many others.  Some of them I would read much later.

Looking back at my hispanophone reading lists, they seem much more catholic than our standard, parochial American fare.  My extended family and their circle was highly literate.  (The only place in America where I’ve most seen and felt this was the inn that served as faculty brunch room for the University of the South in Sewanee TN, where I could hear seven different languages being spoken at different tables.)  Another thing to say about that time and place is that the past hadn’t vanished in Nicaragua, but was there before my eyes.  They still have grave robbers there, here I read about them in Edgar Allen Poe; there, when I drive and stop at an intersection, I can still see other cars, motorcycles, bicycles, horses and their riders, and oxcarts all at the same time.  It is almost overwhelming to face two centuries of transport all at once.  And the old world continues in the customs, the manner in which people relate to each other-–a Roman embrace rather than shaking hands sometimes, putting rooms at rest before retiring for the night, exchanging garden plant cuttings with friends – colonial customs of which docents talk about to tourists in Annapolis’s great houses.  And the old colonial customs remind me of the fact that Americans don’t like to discuss class, so they shift real class distinctions to pretended ethnic and national ones.  In any case, that Nicaragua too was swept away by decades of “socialist revolution,” and is now for the most part in my memory.                  

At the end of high school I was flooded with marketing materials from colleges and universities.  I couldn’t tell one apart from the others.  They all seemed to say we’re a very nice resort in which to spend the next four years.  But then, there was St. John’s College.  Unfortunately, I was a stupid 17 year old boy and the St. John’s catalogue in black and white with blocks of dry text, seemed a bit boring.  Only after I had suffered the travail of the UCLA Economics program and worked for some years did I finally make my way to St. John’s College in Annapolis.  It was there that I finally figured out my grandfather’s education, the good old Liberal Arts came to life in the actual practice of them.  

Symposium was intended by its founders as taking the St. John’s seminar to the streets, to more people who may not have had the opportunity to go to such a college.  But veterans and returners were always welcome.  Two Johnny women moved to San Francisco, perhaps not entirely unlike the entrepreneurs who served the speculators of ‘49, and established Symposium as a brick and mortar bookstore, with a meeting place in the back.  At the time, I was heading the Northern California Alumni Chapter, and helped them a little bit to get started.  One of their husbands, David, also a Johnny, refounded Symposium San Antonio, Texas, as an online community, which continues in its current iteration.  So I’ve participated in, and co-led symposia for twenty years.  For me, the great books and the liberal arts are meant to be shared, to be a social, collegial undertaking.  I love participating, co-leading, leading, and working with my colleague Jason Happel to organize and help run Symposium.  

I’m very grateful for the blessing of having found a community of serious readers of serious books, which offers serious, and fun, conversations on them.  We are one of the few organizations who read closely, in small bites, which gives us the advantage of being more sustainable for working adults.  Our reading is roughly comparable to a St. John’s language tutorial, extended and unhurried  For instance, we might read Don Quixote, the Iliad, or War and Peace over twenty-four or thirty-six weeks rather than one or two.  I’m grateful as well for the many good, close friendships I have made through Symposium.  I treasure that we are small enough to be a community, not some sort of impersonal academic bureaucracy or commercial enterprise.  I’m very glad I stuck with it, and have had the opportunity to improve as a reader and an interlocutor, thanks to my fellow inquirers.