Claudia Cole Bluhm

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LIBERTY STREET

I’ve walked Tennessee Valley three times since it opened up last Monday. The trail has grown so lush and green during its Covid hiatus – nothing trampled. Bunnies scurry across the path. The trail ends at a beach, where I put my bare feet and hands into the surf and felt like I cleansed months of antibacterial disinfectant – the cold saltwater a salve for all the compulsive handwashing and my chapped psyche. For moments, I almost felt free.

When I was maybe six – seven – eight years old on Liberty Street in San Francisco, I felt a kind of freedom. Probably too much for that age – what would now be called unsupervised. It was more of a norm then. On rooftops four stories up, hopping over backyard fences, roaming blocks and blocks away from home.

I knew the inside of every Victorian on our post-WWII block. From the Scottish Catholic Callaghans next door and their ten kids who went to Most Holy Redeemer and wore uniforms and whose house always smelled like haggis and cabbage. Across the street, the Franz’s, who had escaped the Nazis. Their grandson, Robert from London, who visited during the summertime and spoke with a British accent.

The Azevedos – the nightclub singer dad who spoke Spanish, slept late and walked around in boxer shorts, and his Irish wife, Molly, who wore colorful muumuus. And their beautiful children – two girls who all the boys had crushes on. The older one won dance prizes on American Bandstand; the younger one, a singer just like her dad; and two boys who all the girls had crushes on.

The Puerto Rican family down the street were cousins of the SF Giant’s first baseman, Orlando Cepeda, who played basketball with the kids when he visited and once brought over Willie Mays. The Czechoslovakian single mom with her daughter, a classmate who had long braids and only three fingers on each hand from thalidomide. I remember holding her hand during folk dancing in school and trying not to notice. The German Lutheran Werths, who took me to church, where I sang O Tannenbaum in German – much to my Jewish father’s dismay. My shiksa mother thought it was hilarious .

I was always going to church, believing I needed to be redeemed and save my family from hell and the fire that burned forever. That was June Callaghan’s influence. “Yer father’s a Jew; you can tell by his nose. Yer gonna go ta hell.” Obsessed with rosaries, I stole one from June Callaghan’s older sister Marie’s dresser. Marie never noticed, maybe because she had moved on to the making-out-with-boys stage. Patsy Callaghan and I would spy on Marie and her beaus kissing on the living room couch through a keyhole.

There was Linda Avila – I think her father was Spanish. One day, she poured catsup on her younger sister in the basement and made me cry when she told me it was blood, and her sister was dead. And the Irish Kilkarneys at the corner of Liberty and Castro Street. The older boy hung out with Eddy Mullens, who took me up to their fort on Billy Goat Hill and showed me how to play strip poker when I was eight.

I don’t remember the name of the people who lived in the house where the parents were never home – also on Castro near Liberty. Where all the big kids gyrated to 45 rpm records and made out all over the house after school. Where Denise Choroski and I jumped on the double bed in what must have been the parents’ bedroom. One of the older boys took Denise and me down to the basement once and showed us a dead kitty in the freezer. We both screamed. He later joined a gang and was arrested for murder.

Frankie and his parents lived on the corner. He was from the deep South and always said, “Bless your little pea pickin’ heart,” which my Dad said was like Ernie Ford.

I often walked home after school with Maria Santiago, whose tongue click-clicked when she talked about her Grandma Guadalupe from Mexico who had recently died. Maria opened the door to her flat with a key she wore around her neck. Once, she led me down a dark hallway to a framed photograph of her Grandma hanging on the wall. She looked like Snow White, encased in glass with radiant blue eyes, rose tint around her lips and cheeks, and a yellow glow around her dark hair. Maria told me to watch for the eyes in the photo to move – that was how her grandmother would speak to her from the beyond. We waited and waited, and when I finally saw the eyes move, chills ran down my arms. I figured Grandma Guadalupe must be a saint.

I went to Most Holy Redeemer Church with Patsy Callaghan and read the story of Saint Bernadette in her Catechism book so many times I knew it by heart. Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, who was downtrodden, poor and sickly, who went back and back to the Grotto to see the vision every day, even when no one believed her.

I knew all the facts about the saints: how long they had been buried before their bodies were discovered, always in miraculously preserved condition years later. I knew how beautiful they were and how much God loved them. I lengthened my name to Claudia Denise Ann Marie Sarah Bernadette Kolsch to keep myself from going to hell. But I had never heard anything about moving eyes.

I also went to church with the Cassadys, who were Unitarian. Their daughter Nan became my best friend. Her father, who always had neighbors over to discuss politics, was wrongfully accused of being a Communist. Her mother let us help make blackberry pies from scratch. Nan and I always got into trouble – mostly for laughing. We burst out giggling when Mrs. Cassady pointed out the artistic aspects of nude bodies in paintings and couldn’t keep ourselves from cracking up in church.

The Cassadys lived next door to the French Trelauns, who I didn’t know because they didn’t have little kids. Sometimes I played with Fern Karpilow, a classmate who lived around the corner. Her parents were artists. Fern had little sisters, and I watched Fern’s mother like a hawk to learn how to change diapers. She was always teaching us things. Their house always smelled sweet – like crayons and apples. They were Jewish from Brooklyn, New York – just like my Gram.

I babysat for the ballet dancers who lived in a flat on the corner of Liberty and Castro Street. I imagined they were Russian because my ballet teacher, Mrs. Parks at The Academy of Ballet, said Russians were the best dancers – but I don’t think the couple on the corner were really Russian. I would steal cookies from their cookie jar while their infant slept. I didn’t babysit long – just while the parents went to the store. I always seemed to be babysitting, although how anyone could leave an infant with an eight or nine-year-old – even for ten minutes – is beyond me.

The red house three houses down from us was where beatnik families moved in and out. I got my first kiss from Matt Stahl when I was six or seven years old, up in my parents’ walk-in closet when his mother and mine were downstairs having coffee. When the Stahls moved out of the red house, the Hilders moved in. I played with the Hilder children, whose parents were permissive and didn’t make their toddler Julia wear a diaper. The Hilders were really worried about a nuclear war and introduced me to Peter Paul and Mary – who became my new religion after I decided Christ was a hoax like Santa Claus and rosaries were just glass beads. During nuclear drills, when we hid under our desks at school around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Hilders and PP&M’s songs seemed to make more sense.

After my Tennessee Valley walk, I started thinking about all this – trying to remember a time when I felt free – but what occurred to me was all the immigrants I grew up with in San Francisco. I remember my Dad talking about his whole mespucha, his family, and how he came from a long line of Russian peasants who fled pogroms. He said even in his generation in San Francisco’s Jewish Fillmore District, the buddies he went to school with were Italians, Irish, Jews, Greeks, Negros . . . All sorts of ethnic names – in his generation – and mine.

We are a nation of immigrants. And as difficult as my childhood may have been at times, I miss the tapestry of Liberty Street, as good and free and refreshing as sinking my toes into the cold saltwater at the Tennessee Valley beach.