Generational

Nature, nurture and in between

We went for a hike in the Marin Headlands on Sunday. Up a steep trail and along a bluff, views of the Pacific, sun in our faces, wind at our back. Midday and the sky was a little hazy but still blue, the trails occupied but not crowded. An occasional cyclist zipped by us though most of the birds seemed to be taking a siesta. Periodically the sound of a Wrentit call echoed through the hills and a couple of Red-tailed Hawks stilled to the north before drifting out of sight. Mostly we just reveled in foot-fall on solid ground and the stunning views of the ocean. The fall hawk migration, one of my favorite times of the year, is just around the corner, so I’ll be in the headlands more often. And while I’m anticipating the sight of more birds in the sky, I wondered how the devastating wildfires in the Northwest will impact this year’s migration¹ along the Pacific Flyway. Would they disperse early? Where were they flying now?

We finished our hike and headed to Fort Bakers to meet up with a few other friends to see our pal Emily and the Vivants play their monthly gig at Travis Marina Bar, another venerable gem of a Bay Area establishment.

Beyond the boats in the marina, we had a post-card view of Horseshoe Cove, the Golden Gate Bridge and part of the San Francisco skyline. Less than 300 years ago, none of these structures existed. In the 1770s, one of the first Spanish ships anchored in the cove, meeting and forever changing the lives of the native Coast Miwok tribes who lived there. Less than 100 years later, the US Army bought the land and set about building Fort Baker, the pier and nearby batteries and didn’t leave until 2000! Amid all this, in 1959, the Marina Bar and Presidio Yacht Club were established.

Inside the bar, people were two-stepping, celebrating birthdays with nautical-themed party favors and enjoying the sights and scenery. Jen marveled that a place like this still existed, all wood-paneling and fading yacht club burgees, vintage photos and paintings on the wall.

I used the bathroom and saw this throw-back image of Elizabeth Taylor:

The photo reminded me of my mother, who was born three years after Taylor, in 1935, a product of the same era, and likewise a staunch believer in the power of lipstick. A formative memory is of her inspecting the latest lipstick colors at the drugstore, testing each shade on her wrist, one by one, to see what worked best with her skin tone.

Back at the table we all laughed at the poster’s directive. I wondered if my mom had ever been inside the Marina Bar when she was living in the city in the years before she married? Susan told a story about her mom, once giving her similar advice, albeit from her home in Michigan, which she deemed wholly inadequate.

Put your lipstick on and pull yourself together.

Tough love, circa late 1950s/early 1960s. Tough love from a generation of women doing what they could with the very few rights they had². Ugh, another story.

Being in an old-school establishment with a world-class view, talking to friends, listening to real people playing real instruments was a balm. I’ve had a sense of mourning for the past couple of weeks. The fires, both in the northwest and in Europe, the rampant use of AI and its impact on wildlife habitat, what I take joy in and value, and what much of the world seemingly does, and how easy it can be to turn your back on the past, even as everything before us has added up to the present has been weighing on me, despite my good life.

A week earlier, we were at a music party where several of us realized that our parents had all been contemporaries, born and raised in San Francisco around the same time, and living in the same or adjacent neighborhoods. None of them apparently knew one another that we could tell, and none of them were still alive to ask, but it was interesting to think how their offspring had all ended up, decades later, sitting together in a song circle. Had our parents passed one another in the streets? Had they ridden a city bus together? Listened to the same Elvis records, maybe? Dated?

I imagined my Dad’s life in the Avenues, and my mom’s in the Mission District. My Dad was 10 years older than my mom and had married somewhat late for those times. We knew little of the nitty gritty details of his before mom, before us. I thought again of how many questions I failed to ask them while I could, how history gets lost before one has a chance to value the information it contains, and just how much a life, each individual life, contains.

I was at that party the day after seeing one of my nieces, and family, in all its permutations and patterns, was especially present in my mind. What gets encoded whether you’re spending time with your family or not? What gets ingrown if you don’t step out of the pattern and choose a different route?

Unlike the hosts of the music party, my family has a long history of fragmentation and fracture and estrangements, catalyzed by immigration and various wars and how those imprints have played out in the latest generations’ experiences of the pandemic and current crises. I’ve spent much of my adult life choosing family and opting out of starting one for myself. But as I get older, and see how much family informs a life regardless of how connected you are, I am more interested in re-assembling where possible, as much for understanding as much as any sort of idealized outcome. Information, alone, is not knowledge, to paraphrase Einstein³, but it’s a necessary piece of the puzzle. Once you have the information, you can choose whether to do the same thing or do it differently.

This past July marked the 25-year-anniversary of my dad’s death, one of my life’s earthquakes. Twenty-five years is a lifetime. My niece was a young child then, and now she’s a beautiful young woman. She had a hazy memory of the memorial, at the house where I’d grown up with her mom and the rest of my siblings.

In many ways, my dad’s death was my real entry into adulthood. On the day of his memorial, we buried half of his ashes under one of his favorite oak trees and I read a short poem. I recall I wore a pink shirt that matched the amaryllis that were blooming on the sides of the driveway. There was food and drink at the house and after a contentious meeting among we siblings, another aftershock, the beginning of further rifts.

I told my niece some family stories from my perspective, what I knew, what I had ideas about, hoping to give her some puzzle pieces, information, she might add to her own whole as she saw fit.

At the Travis Marina Bar, I fished around in my bag for my (matte, neutral) lipstick and applied a fresh coat.

1. New Research Forecasts the Impacts of Fire on BirdsNew Research Forecasts the Impacts of Fire on Birds https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/02/new-research-forecasts-impacts-fire-birds

2. “5 things women couldn’t do in the 1960s” https://www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things

3. “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom.” — Albert Einstein