To be eighty-nine on the day of a full moon. To be walking without a cane. To hear giggles and laughter and loving words all around her. To stop midway descending the stairway named after her and show off her colorful socks. There ought to be a song that’s called “I Love Adah”.
She gives steady hugs to all, with champagne in one hand and flowers in the other. She wears a long white jacket that has hand-painted stairways of San Francisco. Once she asked me if I knew how many stairways there are in the city. “Eighty? A hundred?” That sounded like a lot to me. “No,” she rolled her eyes, “Over six hundred.” And she had walked them all. Her book, Stairway Walks in San Francisco, is in its 7th edition.
A child counted ninety-six steps. Another counted ninety-one. On the top of the stairway at Waller and Broderick is a bronze plaque: Adah Bakalinsky, Queen of San Francisco Stairway.
I like the EVERYDAYS you write about. There’s enough drama in the alloted 24 hours
to hang a poem on or take an extended nap sitting up or standing on one’s head.
I’ve never stood on my head long enough to go beyond , “Ten thousand times
I.ve done my best
Thank you for coming out to the stairway And alls to do again.” And your blog. The person who found it
I met for the first time today. He and his wife had “done” several stairway walks on visits to their son and we had a correspondence going. They truly know the City and hope to settle here. There is something in their personalities some special quality not religious, something very caring I felt it keenly. I should do better than this, oops, I just looked out the window but see nothing but fog. love adah