From a particular tree shaped like a bear, I’ve been watching for over 30 years——
Of course, there would be a a bear-shaped tree standing watch over California. But this one, has really seen a thing of two, and before they cut down his father-and his father has seen all the way to the gold rushers, and I’m sure his father was seen by the natives here, and they were probably real friends-before they cut down him to clear some land for housing, his father planted him on the edge of this park overlooking the Bay, and Bear Tree has always been thankful for where he was planted.

I wish i would’ve met his father, but I only know Bear Tree, and would like to meet his daughter as well. Trees, as you must know, stand much longer than us, and know and remember more. But old Bear Tree has gotten thin recently, so I wanted to tell what I heard thus far for the last 30 years or so, from him. He watches ever the San Fran Bay mostly, but also remembers the stories he’s heard along the way……

What bear tree knows:

Bear tree wears sunset daily
Bear tree stares out over the bay to keep watch
Bear tree is the bay watcher
Bear tree saw the 60’s and long before
Bear tree had kids smoking pot and writing poems beneath his branches
Bear tree survived the pandemic
Bear tree saw the city become a ghost of herself
During Covid. But even before no one could afford to be here,
He overheard.
Bear tree sat alone when the Mission district went silent
Bear tree sat over the city of homeless in all her many parks
Bear tree remembers the white charcoal circles like sports lines of isolation, he said, making alienation overt and a rule!) that distanced us all from one another-but let us look into one another’s circles, and our own, to consider what was really there-back, when under
Shut down. When kids couldn’t play in parks, and all was masked for a while
Like fog over the bay, he would say, until it clears.
The mouth of humanity was finally closed for a second
Just as to not gasp. Mandatory sabbath. Mandatory Sabbath, he heard
From a vacant synagogue. For all of us, together, for once.
“A forced global monastic silence to consider
And this one not for war” as Bear put it.
A re-calibration of inner spiritual marketing, he heard
On Market street. A silent white poppy flower slowly decending underwater, was that moment,
He heard from a young girl poet, in lower Haight, who wrote her way through and out of
The pandemic.

“Most wars, happen over there, but this one was in the
Entire lungs of humanity”, he overhear from an older Italian man was writing on a bench in North Beach-

the City of Light book shop just behind him.

Even Bear was shocked by the irony.

We all had to beat or not beat as one. Bear liked that line
And knew it even when he was younger, before the Black plagues went viral.
Finally, a shared suffering. Local and global, the same air
The same pastels, the same sunsets, all together under and shared red moon.
And so many partial and full ellipses he had seen by then.
So many orange skies, and disco lights playing on the surface of seas.
And flags and flags, risen and buried in that self same sea.
People become nations and nations become drowned in the same water
He was watching-he said to me once, on a deep night, when even I
Was smoking a long pipe out on Pier one. Thinking about why we love the Japanese now, but then they were our enemies. To the point where, to the point
When, to the point, even we tried to extinguish them. But, Bear kept watching.
He heard about when Wall Street crashed again, he heard way too much of the false hope of trading. He heard even that wealth would be like a Messiah.
He didn’t flinch. He just kept watching the Bay, until he saw the dolphins play.
He just kept watching.
When 911 came, he was not surprised. He glanced over the skies to see if planes
Might also make it way out here—the land of surfers where people only hear their own waves, as he put it. They did not make it so far out.
“We are so ‘far out’, out here.” He joked with me, after years.
“But we make symbols well—the Paris of the West, they tell me.”
His humor somehow, remarkably intact (though his right and left legs shaved back from years of wind, and park renovations, I’m sure) I love her deeply, but we are a joke,
He whispered to me once, as I had a small campfire in his park.
And the real church has done the best here maybe, havening us all.
St Francis may have left us something to recall. And that’s the last word I recall
Bear Tree saying to me, before I moved to Texas. But I remember the rest.
Bear tree as a kid can even remember the deployment after Pearl Harbor. And his dad Big Bear Tree remembered all the gold rushers frenzy
His Father those who lived here before the Europeans brought chocolate and
Their love for gold. Baby bear tree has heard the long story
And keeps looking out over the bay this evening in pastel’s glory
Standing on a dark purple fog line that seems to never end.
Bear tree is looking bare these days, but has a little girl-she may
Have moved across the Bay to get a different angle, or….
She’s run off somewhere like those kids in the 60’s, he thinks-
She stood watch with him for eras…
But she’ll return to see the rest of the story, he’s sure
Tonight bear tree is watching the elections, and hoping for the best
So he can keep watching over this bay.
I met bear tree only 30 years back, and he got taller over time
But now he looks thin, but determined as they say. Bear tree won’t die
He told me. My leaves will just blow into the bay, and my skeleton
Become art, before the great fires comes
“Bigger than men’s wars,” he says.
But he’ll keep watching, he told me.

I only spoke out to Bear once, and asked him this question:
Why do you keep watching?
What I think I heard him say in the windy foggy bay was:
“I am a Bear”.

(Bear tree is still standing watch over the Bay, to this day, he’s seen a thing or two, but it takes a while to get to know him. His daughter has since been found in Oakland, and seems to be working her way back home. What she will do on her call is yet to be determined by any of us, Im sure).