Christmas on Nob Hill

Even a Christmas curmudgeon's heart quietly melts when the holiday lights that adorn the trees in San Francisco's Huntington Park are illuminated atop Nob Hill in early December.

In the shadow of the Gothic grandness of Grace Cathedral, the lights match the reassuring elegance of all those white bulbs on the lawn of the Fairmont, a block away on Mason, yes, with those famous cable cars rattling by, all wreathed in evergreen. Gazing down California Street, toward downtown, we see the smart, sharp outlines of white lights that tightly frame the Embarcadero Centers. This is when San Francisco, all dressed up, looks courtly, and graceful. This is how I like to see The City. The town stands tall in the crisp, cool night. I feel like a grown-up on nights like this.

I love to be in the Big 4, the classy bar & restaurant in the Huntington Hotel during the holiday season -- and every other season. "This is the best saloon in San Francisco," David McCullough told me one night earlier this year.McCullough, you might know is a historian. (Oh, THAT David McCullough!) He wrote famous biographies of Truman, John Adams, and 1776. He told me that he's excited about a new project: a book about the grand old, and great hotels of the United States. He's the man to write it. A lot of history came out of these places.

That's why I love hotel bars, and hotel lobbies (my favorite hotel lobby in S.F. is the Fairmont, we can endure the ghastly gingerbread house for the kids' sake). Like airports, hotel bars provide a mix of anonymity, and gemütlichkeit. That just means friendly but I get a childish kick out of knowing how to type ümlauts. You could say that I'm an ümlaut lout. But I digress.

McCullough is the perfect fellow with whom one should be sequestered in a bar or an airport. He can talk about everything, and anything, and make it all exciting. We went from Pittsburgh, his hometown, to Oscar Levant (also from Pittsburgh) to Cole Porter to his first job (at Sports Illustrated), and just how talented the Big 4 house pianist, Michael Parsons, really is. Not only will Michael always play "Two for the Road" for me every time I drop in, he has a splendidly vast repertory, and an uncanny ability to never play the same song in the same way, even after all these years.

"Two for the Road" is a tune by Henry Mancini, and it's got to be one of the saddest songs in the world from one of the saddest movies (in which Audrey Hepburn's marriage to Albert Finney suffers a painful demise). I'd love to start a radio station that plays only sad songs -- K-GLOOM -- or something like that. Oh, my. I fear I've been digressing again, and I started out to write a cheery piece this month. Parsons was playing Kurt Weill's "Speak Low When You Speak Love." Most people don't know the lyrics were written by Ogden Nash. Even McCullough didn't know that. That's one time I could tell David McCullough something. And certainly the only time I could tell David McCullough something. Forgive me for savoring the moment. I wish Mr. McCullough were around for this holiday season. I would be great to see him again and exchange arcane stories -- well, I could listen, anyway. But I hope he's home on Martha's Vineyard with his family. I often find disparate, dispirited people wandering around the hotels this time of year. I live a few blocks away from the cluster of Nob Hill hotels, one of the most elegant pieces of real estate in the world. So the Big 4 is really my local watering hole. There I mingle with the travelers, one for the road. I am indebted to San Francisco because I can stay at home, and still feel like I'm visiting a strange city. I like it best this time of year, with the lights, the chill in the air, and the restless, homesick out-of-towners.

One chap sipped his Scotch the other night, and looked pensive. He said it had been a hard year, a turbulent year for a lot of people.

"I'm here on business from New York," the man muttered. "I miss my kids but I'm glad none of them is in Iraq."

Another Christmas, another war. I thought of the lights across the street in Huntington Park, and that old World War II song that Andrea Marcovicci likes to sing, "When The Lights Go On Again All Over the World."

I suggested to the New Yorker that he take a walk in Huntington Park across the street. That might cheer him up. Every year I look for that elusive couple who meet there secretly. Or so I imagine they meet secretly. Sometime you just have to invent people's stories for them. Over the years, I've come to recognize them. I imagine their double life, and marvel at its illicit longevity. As the California Street cable car rattled by, there they stood again, as they had last year. They never notice me as they embrace near the Huntington Park fountain, that dear, ridiculous, rococo thing with the turtles and dolphins that I've come to admire. In the frigid western breeze, you can hear the flag flapping atop the Mark Hopkins. The half-moon, showing itself through the clouds, hovers in the black sky.

I overhear her whisper hopefully, anxiously, to him, "This is going to be a wonderful Christmas this year, isn't it?"

He murmurs to her with all the courage he can muster, holding her with all his might, "Yes, my darling, it will be the best."