Walking stories

Relishing trees and friendship

January 2, 2024

For Greenberg, the real holiday galas have begun.   Peeing on the Christmas trees abandoned on street corners along our regular route seems to fill him with seasonal joy. 

There are tall, lush trees, having been cut down in the prime of their natural lives, probably put up and trimmed by the weekend after Thanksgiving and given prominent display space in front windows.   They lie next to small, sparse ones, toddlers when their lives were cut short, then dragged home, perhaps, just in time to be  displayed before December 25.

The mighty and the meek, stripped of their ornaments, lie there together naked on the sidewalk, waiting for city workers to pick them up in the post-seasonal tidying of the sidewalks. They’ll all wind up together, ground up together for compost given away to gardeners. It’s probably the only time in San Francisco that anything or anyone can be put to a single purpose without a big civic fight.

The dogs, too, agree that this is a good thing.  I don’t know if it’s the piney smell of the trees themselves – like some kind of men's cologne that’s sold at Walgreens – or the smell of all the hands that have hung geegaws on them, or the smell of the cookie crumbs on the little fingers of kids who unwrapped gifts under them, or the smell of the pee of the first and following dogs who have discovered this urinary fiesta.  (I’m taking pride here in putting together the words “urinary” and “fiesta.”)    But compare-and-contrast sidewalk discussions with owners of other neighborhood dogs  have revealed that they, too, relish this seasonal leg-lifting opportunity.

While Greenberg enjoys the presence of those trees, each sighting filling him with a sense of purpose and joy, I am awash in memories.    I  grew up in a neighborhood that was mixed Jewish and Italian, and our block went all out for Christmas.  We didn’t have lawns for displays of fake reindeer, but houses were ablaze with lights, and recordings of Christmas carols blared from speakers stationed on second-story balconies.  I sensed that the electric menorahs Jewish neighbors placed in their front windows were some kind of effort to fight Yuletide fire with Chanukah fire, but  our family was into no such copycat game.   There was no wreath on our front door.

Although we dutifully gave Christmas presents to our teachers and postmen and garbage men, and although many of my parents’ friends had Christmas trees, my parents said that the trees I so admired at friends’ houses were “not for us.”  When we sang Christmas carols at school, I would join in heartily, but just move my lips, without singing,  when Christ was mentioned in a lyric.

In all the traditional trappings of Christmas, it was the trees I envied the most.  I was always an artsy kid, and I knew that given the chance, I could create a thing of wonder for our own living room.  

From year to year, I changed my mind about the tree’s decor:  Multi-colored bulbs or all one color?  Tinsel? Popcorn and cranberries?   Clouds of fake fiberglass snow that would cut your fingers if you touched it?  I yearned to be set loose so I could tackle such a project.

Years later, when The Chronicle put up an artificial tree in the lobby, and left it for days without any ornaments or any plans for ornamentation (I asked), nobody asked me, but I leapt to an unspoken challenge.  For two or three years, I took it upon myself to festoon the tree.

I would come downtown early, borrow a ladder from the custodial staff, and create ornaments out of balled up pages of the pink section, held in place by rubber bands, decorated with bows from scraps of ribbon I’d collected in my desk drawer,  and hung from the tree with bent paper clips.  It was quite lovely, and for that first year, it was a surprise from me – the  tree-hungry Jewish person – to my fellow staff members.

Abetted in subsequent years by pals who added their own ornaments,  I think I did this for three years.  No one in charge said anything to me about it, except for the building manager, who in year four asked – without ever saying thanks for the previous three years – when I was going to do it.

That was the end for me of a very short-lived tradition. 

Since then, as I have progressed into geezerhood, my elf aspirations seem to have disappeared.  When Greenberg rushes over to a tree on the sidewalk, all I can think is thank goodness I am Jewish (a complicated thought at this particular time in the world), and I don’t have to buy a tree, drag out the ornaments, hang them from the branches, monitor the thing to make sure it doesn’t get too dry, pack up the ornaments, sweep up the needles and heave the tree back outside, down the stairs and to the street corner.  

 I’m far too busy nowadays for that chore, scraping the excess wax out of my menorah and watching an episode of “Vera” I’ve seen twice before. And then, of course, there’s the dog-walking. That takes up a lot of time, which is a luxury I have these days.  And that time allows me a lot of good things, like getting to know more neighbors and fellow dog-walkers, and talk with them about why our dogs are pretty much pushing each other out of the way in their enthusiasm for peeing on the discarded  trees.

In my professional days,  I used to walk to work, mostly at the same time every day. And I would see the same people – painters looking to be hired outside the Kelly-Moore store, for example, and a crossing guard outside an elementary school – nearly every day.  We would say good morning, and nod.  And I would think, what a special and easy kind of friendship this is, where we feel nothing but goodwill to the new friend.   Our conversation never gets beyond a hearty “Good Morning” in English or Spanish, or perhaps a few words about the weather. We don’t know each other well enough to know each other’s problems.  

After we got Greenberg, a little more than four years ago, I was delighted that making the rounds with him resulted in making new friends, some of whom we have seen outside the dog-walking routine.   I joke that remembering the neighbors’ dogs’ names is a better mental work-out for me than the NYT crossword puzzle.  

The new friendships have deepened, and in a few cases light-hearted chit-chat has deepened, too. It touches me.   And it seems to me that the pleasure of our sociable encounters has  come along with a real exchange of revelations and emotions.  There are jokes, of course, but there are also revelations of trouble, tragedy, illness.  So along with the pleasure of friendship comes empathy sometimes, and sadness, too.

In my post-professional life, such  friendship has been so bright and shiny and comforting in the offering, reassuring me that I am okay, whether or not I am invited to the opening of the Opera.  But it has also come with the price of caring, as the sharing of good times inevitably comes along with the sharing of hard ones.

A Christmas tree, beautiful and glowing in the front window, comes with all the responsibility of setting it up, tending to it, disposing of it.  In the end, there on the sidewalk, it is still giving pleasure, if only to canine admirers whose joy is akin to yours and mine when coming on a clean restroom during a road trip.

Savor the pleasure of what you encounter on the sidewalk, whether human or arboreal, whether lasting or fleeting. Happy New Year. On Broderick Street yesterday, I found a buck.