Rod McKuen

I was looking at Google Maps. I wanted to know the name of the bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland. I have driven across that bridge in times long past. It's a segment of I-80 now, but it wasn't always. When I drove across it, it was just called the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge. On the east end of the bridge I-80 connects with I-880, while on the west end of the bridge, I-80 blends into US-101. Halfway across the bay there is an exit from the Bay Bridge down to Treasure Island.

My attention wandered to the north end of San Francisco. That is also the terminus for the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. When I traveled that bridge, I paid a toll to use it. I wondered if the toll booths were still there.

Just beyond the north end of the Golden Gate bridge , US-101 skirts past Sausalito. That was the stomping ground of poet Rod McKuen. The critics didn't like his poems, but I and millions of others did. McKuen wrote music, too. "Stanyon Street" was the name of a poem and a song, in addition to being the name of a street in San Francisco. I bought several of his books, though I don't know what became of them. I would never have thrown them away, but life has a way of robbing you of things that you want to keep.

I discovered McKuen through a nurse in a hospital where I was a patient for three weeks. That was in '70 or '71. She loaned me one of her McKuen books, and I liked it enough to buy several of his books. Maybe it was the era, the age, or my own age. Maybe, and I think this is the reality, it was the zeitgeist of the late '60s and early '70s. McKuen tapped into that generational mood.

Rod McKuen died in January, 2015. He was 81.

And the nurse? I dated her a few times, but she was twenty-one and in love with a man of forty-five years. Our dates were fun, at least for me, but I knew there was no future in a relationship with her. So I let her slide into my history, and she lives there along with Rod McKuen's poems and my trips to San Francisco and memories of the Embarcadero and Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf.