Welcome to a New Year! I don’t really do resolutions, but the season has found me feeling reflective. I’ve been thinking about friendship—what has been on your mind these days?
When I was growing up, making friends felt like a natural process—you went to school with kids your own age, you played together at recess, someone said, “Hey, you want to come over to my house?” and you went and played games and had adventures. There were clubs to join, sports to play, weekends to hang out, places to bike to—it may not have always been a smooth thing, but friends could usually be found a phone call or door knock away.
Maybe it wasn’t that way for everyone, but as the youngest of three kids growing up in a town full of families (when parent-organized playdates were unheard of), I always felt like my friends and I were free to get together when we wanted. And as long as the grown-ups weren’t watching, no one would be the wiser about some of our shenanigans.
Then came my twenties and I was in a new city, meeting new people, getting new jobs, establishing a life along with folks who were in the same phase in their lives as I was—finding our paths and becoming friends with those who were on the same path, at least for a while. And some of those friends remained friends even after we went on to do other things. I met some of my best friends while working in bookstores, people who were as passionate about reading as I was—and whose shared experiences became the foundation of lifelong friendships.
After having kids though, it seemed like it became more difficult to make true friends, at least for me. Parenting is so much about following the lead of your children. Not in the sense of that they call the shots, but in the way of attention—seeing them as individuals in their own right, finding out who they are and how to make a safe space for them to grow into their best selves. That can take a lot of energy, and I found for myself at least, that making friends based on my own interests became more difficult. I met lots of great people who were parents of my kids’ friends, but because most of my time was spent caring for others—which I chose to do—my own interests were put on the back burner, as it were. I kept the flame alive, but I wasn’t able to stoke it in any major way; there just wasn’t time.
It wasn’t until I went back to school when my kids were old enough to not need (or want) me around so much that I was able to connect with people based on my own passions, which were in my case, writing and poetry. The time I was able to focus on getting my MFA rekindled my creative life, and I was lucky to find friends in the program at USF who are still my peeps today.
So it feels like there’s an ebb and flow to these things. And as I age into my “I Shall Wear Purple” phase, the question again rises—who am I becoming? And how do I meet the people who will rise with me? There aren’t the automatic communities of school or work or parenting to fall back on anymore.
I have written a little bit about my friend Trudy in a past Little Book House—she’s the one who introduced me to the Little Free Libraries in her neighborhood in “Books and Donuts in Polk Gulch” (April 29, 2025).
I love how Trudy and I met and became friends because it came about in such an unexpected way, and it made me realize that such things can still happen in this crazy world of ours—that we can meet the people who bring a new flame of friendship into our lives.
Trudy and I met in March of 2025, which wasn’t very long ago, but to understand how that meeting came about, I have to harken further back into the mists of time, somewhere in the early 1990s. (I almost typed 1900s, which in a way, feels equally ancient, haha.)
In those years, Pete and I used to go see a local singer songwriter, who went by the name of John Wesley Harding. JWH actually lived in our neighborhood, and I have a distinct memory of passing him on 24th Street by what was then Bell Market (now a Whole Foods). At the time, we didn’t know JWH’s real name, but we did know that he’d taken his stage moniker from the Bob Dylan album because one of his songs, “Bastard Son,” had the lyrics, “Bob Dylan is my father, Joan Baez is my mother, and I’m their bastard son.” He meant, of course, that he was the musical product of Dylan and Baez and that era of songwriting, and the words encapsulated a lot about what we enjoyed in his music—a kind of literary and musical sensibility along with catchy melodies and an irreverent wit.
In cds (cuz that’s what we listened to back then) like Here Comes The Groom, Why We Fight, and John Wesley Harding’s New Deal, we enjoyed JWH’s music, and we saw him live at The Great American Music Hall and even our local church, The Noe Valley Ministry. His shows were super fun and he told great stories in between songs, which was a harbinger of things to come, though we didn’t know that then. (Don’t you love 20/20 hindsight?)
But then we had kids, JWH moved away, and the river of life moved us more towards parenting and work, and less towards following our indie rock heroes. I’d occasionally replay my JWH cds in the car, but that was the extent of it.
Fast forward to January 2024 when I received an email from one of my favorite music venues, the Hopmonk Tavern in Novato. On the list of musicians coming to play was Wesley Stace, AKA: John Wesley Harding. After all these years, JWH’s name popping up had not been on my bingo card. The kids were all off on their own, Pete and I had been bopping around the country in our 2003 VW Eurovan, and JWH was playing in the Bay Area again! Was I down to go see him? Need you ask?
So in 2024, we had the pleasure of getting reacquainted with an old musical friend, Wesley Stace, who had dropped JWH to perform under his real name many years ago. The concert was awesome—Wes (as folks call him) was in fine musical form, playing from his extensive catalog of songs, his signature wit and musicality on full display in songs like “Starbucks,” where he opined, “There’s a Starbucks where the Starbucks used to be.” So much for nostalgia, haha.
It was great hearing Wes sing, of course, but part of the fun was also hearing the stories he told between songs. Wes is a great raconteur (more on this later), peppering his performance with anecdotes about how the songs were written, or who he’d met along the course of his decades-long career. There were tidbits about playing with Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez (who was delighted to be his mother in “Bastard Son”), and others—not in a grandiose way, but in a “isn’t-life-a-kick-in-the-pants?” way. In “The Top of the Bottom,” he puts it this way: “The label and Payola got me on the charts / My new management had me by the private parts / I went on strike, took the initiative / Forgetting that I didn’t have a single thing to bargain with / I lost my nerve, my fall was glorious / The lawsuit was eternal and laborious,” and ends with: “I’m getting bored of talking shop / that’s how I got back from the bottom to the top of the bottom to the top of the bottom to the top of the bottom.”
Fast forward again, this time to 2025 when I noticed on Facebook that Wes was playing at Hopmonk again, this time with his pal, the actress and singer Mare Winningham. I immediately got tix, then noticed an FB post from Wes that a friend of his from San Francisco needed a ride to the Novato gig. Since we were already going, I dmed Wes and said sure, we could give his friend a ride. I figured it would be nice to have the company, and maybe said friend would have some fun stories about Wes. Even if the friend was a dud, it was only a couple of car rides, so either way, it was no big deal.
Boy did we luck out because Wes’s friend turned out to be Trudy! She arrived at our house a whirl of energy and a golden mane of Pre-Raphaelite hair. We talked the whole way to the Hopmonk and it turned out she was a huge reader and loved little free libraries. She had fantastic stories about the music scene in the 1990s/2000s, having been the photographer for 415 Records, KUSF, the Bay Area alternative weeklies and other publications. She later sent me a couple of negatives from the photo shoot she did of Wes for his album, JWH’s New Deal—so cool. Even though our paths had never crossed back in the day, Trudy knew almost every reference I made to working at A Clean-Well Lighted Place for Books when I first lived in San Francisco and it seemed like our lives ran in parallel universes during those years, which made meeting each other now all these years later feel like a minor miracle.
The Wesley Stace/Mare Winningham show was awesome—Wes, of course, was quintessential Wes, and it was fun to see Mare—the iconic actress from St Elmo’s Fire, and a gazillion other movies and tv shows—flexing her musical chops. (She even played the lap guitar on an acoustic version of Nirvana’s “All Apologies.”)
We had a great time, and after the show I even got a moment to fangirl the great actor, Anthony Edwards (Goose from Top Gun! Dr. Mark Greene from ER!), who, when I told him how much we had enjoyed his work over the years, charmingly replied, “Thanks, but I’m just here to carry Mare’s guitar.”
By the time we got back to SF after the concert, Trudy and I were already making plans to go on a Little Free Library field trip in her neighborhood, one of the few that I had rarely visited, even after living in the city for so long. I was excited to go to Polk Gulch with a local who could guide me to the right spots—it felt like the friend gods had dropped a gift right into my lap, haha.
Together, Trudy and I have eaten donuts together and explored the Little Free Libraries of Polk Gulch and the Fillmore District. The picture at the top of this substack comes from a LFL on California Street that has a Little Free Dog Treat Box in addition to its book house. The two LFL’s closest to Trudy’s place are affiliated with churches—the one on Van Ness that I wrote about in my April 29th, 2025 column, and this one, on Gough and Bush Streets:
I love that The Metropolitan Community Church (Yelp rating of 4.8 stars!) has a Little Free Library where you can find things like The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris, as well as Confucius: The Analect, translated by Arthur Waley, The Mayor of the Tenderloin, by Alison Owings, and The Confucian Odes, poems translated by Ezra Pound. One of the other titles that caught my eye was This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness, by Laura Munson, which kind of sums up life, yes? Whenever I think I’m stuck in solitary rut, the Universe often sends something—or someone!—into my life that helps me forge a new path, or move forward on the path I’m already on.
And it turns out that in addition to being a kickass singer songwriter, Wesley Stace is also the author of several novels, one of which—Charles Jessold, Considered As A Murderer—I found in a Little Free Library in Noe Valley!
Alas, I forgot to take a picture of it at the LFL, but here is the book, along with a copy of the Wesley Stace edited collection of Music Stories (published by The Everyman Library—and he even signed it for me!). So if you’re in the mood to read a baroque tale about a composer who shoots his wife and kills himself the night before his first opera is performed, set in London in the 1920s, get to it! Wes has written several other novels as well, so if you like reading about all kinds of music, he’s your man/author.
Looking back at what I’ve written this week, I feel that books—like friends—can come to you at any stage of your life. Like a true friend, books will meet you where you are, see you truly, give you solace, entertain you, and keep you company when you need it. New books can invigorate your world and bring you new energy. Old books can be like old friends, trusty and comforting. Every book, like every friend, adds depth and richness to your life in its own special way. May you always have the one you need—book and/or friend—by your side!
Until the next Little Book House, happy reading!
Thanks for reading Little Book House! LBH is reader-supported—if you’d like to see more, please click on one or more of the button(s) below:
Books mentioned in this post can be found at Bookshop.org: New Friends, New Little Free Libraries.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.