closing

Here and then gone

Nothing is perfect and everything changes.

On my first father’s day, we walk through Tai Hang to a sushi spot we use for celebrations. There’s a specific kind of place we frequent for our own occasions, those moments we want to mark together as a couple. Most people have one, I think. For moments like promotions, birthdays, anniversaries, and just good days of freedom that require something more than the usual, yet still familiar. For these moments our tastes range to the esoteric, to the nice but not fancy. Since our move to Tai Hang in 2018, No. 13 Sushi Bar has hosted quite a few of these moments. With some quiet back alley seats, welcoming staff, and incredible tuna rolls we’ve spent enough evenings there to know exactly what we want before we sit down, and to have the staff remember our faces. Or we had. No. 13 is gone now. A sign on the door offers only a “lease expired, thanks for the good years” note that’s both cute and unsatisfying. I give a silent thank you to the staff as we turn away.

Wandering elsewhere for food we talk about change. Life, in so many ways, is change1. This first father’s day exemplifies that. Clara’s expressions just shy of a year are so much more than six months prior. People, like the places they construct, change over time, and the new can not come without loss. Fineprint, the coffee shop we used to live upstairs from, replaced something I can’t recall our first few months in the neighborhood, and now feels like a fixture.

Of course some of this change, like the loss of 2nd Draft, I’d undo if I could. We all have points of personal concern, and without everyone’s sacrifice nothing would change. And yet it would, because people age. The families that run the car shops will eventually turn over, sad as it is to consider. The dai pai dong’s too, as they have many times before. Neighborhoods will gentrify and fall into disrepute. Will they become inhospitable, or will they simply become home to a different clientele? In Hong Kong the answer is the latter, new housing displacing old walk ups, new restaurants with marble’d bars displacing old worn wood ones. Many of the new ones will fail, too ambitious, too fancy, too niche. And too few of them will be like No. 13, just expensive enough to have great fish, yet playing Eminem a bit too loudly to attract a truly posh set of patrons. Instead it was us and some other folk who liked loud dinners, a few families celebrating graduations, and the occasional casual business dinners over sake and cigarettes in the alley. I wonder where all those moments will happen now, and how long it will take all those other former customers to known of the closing.

To the staff, then, who took care of us for years as just part of the job, thank you. We’ll miss you.

Despite the inevitability, some changes we do morn.

  1. “All that you touch
    You Change.
    All that you Change
    Changes you.
    The only lasting truth
    is Change.
    Olivia Butler, The Parable of the Sower↩︎

Closing time

“Studio closing, equipment for sale inside” says the sign, handwritten on an piece of A4 paper.

It’s a quiet end to a dream.

For more than ten years my friend has run a recording studio here, at 7th and Howard. He worked hard to make this dream a reality, by finding space, by saving money, by living in odd spaces to afford the building’s rent, by scrounging gear, by making trades and finally by meeting bands, by inviting musicians into his achievement, and helping make their dreams in exchange. He has worked odd gigs on the sides to cover expenses, and invested so much of himself in building what he hoped would continue.

Helping sort some boxes, pull down some lights, and throw out some small portion of the past ten year’s accumulation, I am glad to be here. Sad, too, of course, at the small failures. Sadder still at our approaching middle age that makes the failures real, makes us have to decide finally if this business is a life, or just a section of one. We are no longer twenty five, hoping to achieve things one day. Instead we have to look at forty and determine if where we are is where we want to be in another ten years. And if not, we have to figure out how to leave.

In a SOMA evening, the kind of breazy warmth rare to San Francisco, we carry trash cans out into the night. Bottles and cans, from clean-up crews of the week prior, are set aside for the scavengers who wait patiently at the other end of the block for us to close the door and give them space.

Inside, climbing a rickety aluminum ladder with a caution my younger self would not have shown, I remember so many other evenings like this, building or taking down, in so many strange spaces across the North East. Theaters, mostly, but also churches, bars, warehouses, and the occasional alley. In a sense, this is just one more show whose run is finished, one more set to be deconstructed in so much less time than it took to build.

Leaving later, down Howard on our bicycles in the night, I feel the post-show low too. I wonder where I’ll see my friend again, now that we’ll no longer bump into each other walking down the streets of the Mission or SOMA at odd hours. I wonder where we’ll get to build again.

And that question lets me smile, makes me happy. Because on our last parting, in Boston in two thousand one, I couldn’t forsee meeting at a friend’s house in San Francisco eight years later, to play Magic and Mario Kart again, as though nothing had changed.

Many things have, of course, and more will for both of us. Adventures are to be cherished, though. The freedom to say goodbye is hard to come by.

At the end though we don’t use that word.

“See you somewhere,” we say instead, after a hug. “Maybe Berlin.”