Contact her at naomimarcus@sfseniorbeat.com The patient stormed out of the doctor’s office and headed straight for the reception desk, banging on the plexiglass partition that separates patients from receptionists in this busy Mission District primary care practice. Kattia Balestier, the lead front desk worker, looked up calmly at the 60ish, red-faced, glowering man. “You were ...
Have you ever wondered about retiring to Mexico? Not me, no expat life for me. But I wondered how it would feel to go home to Mexico again. More than sixty years after leaving, I spent October in my childhood town of San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico. In an amazingly ...
In San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, before the internet, match.com, and social media, flower stands downtown were one place a boy could meet a girl. Harold Hoogasian met his wife, Nikki, in 1974 at his dad’s Post Street flower stand, where he helped out. She’d accompanied her dad, a funeral director, who’d come ...
When his mother, Lucrezia, was diagnosed with cancer, then 25-year-old Frankie Gaetano Balistreri cared for her at home. She craved her favorite Sicilian dishes and called out her wishes from her bed. “ ‘Frankie, pasta con sarde!’ ”(Pasta with sardines); “ ‘Frankie, sfingi!’ (powdered sugar donuts with ricotta filling) “I was running back and forth, ...
He was in the sixth grade and really wanted to be in the school band. But his parents told him there was no money to buy or rent an instrument. His older sister was dating a guy whose brother had a trumpet in his closet. The horn soon made its way to the wannabe musician ...
When 17-year-old Jose Heriberto Garcia came courting the young girl who’d become his wife, his future mother-in-law was so outraged that she ran him off her property – waving her pistol and shooting at his feet. “I beat it out of there, oh si, senor,” Garcia recalled. “I came back the next day to state ...
