1
Gretta found a heart on Mission.
Red and beating and lonely, tucked into the narrow breezeway between two boarded up buildings, the heart lay on the filthy concrete next to the remains of a shattered six string.
She picked up the heart and tucked it inside herself, safe next to her own beating heart, and its sweet melody filled her head and lightened the weight of the backpack on her shoulders.
She bent to adjust the straps of her sandals, old friends comfortably molded to the shape of her feet by the long miles and years they had walked together. The sounds of the city, people and cars and seagulls chasing each other inland from the bay, harmonized with the heart’s timid song and energized her old bones. She straightened her spine and let her feet carry her toward Haight and the library nestled in its eclectic midst.
She side-stepped the boisterous patrons of an open-air sports bar on Duboce, the celebration of their team’s victory spilling over like strong whiskey to the sidewalk and adding fuel to the trash can fires at the curb. She kept the tender heart safe from the crowds on Market, so intent on their destinations they failed to notice her fragile cargo. She walked past the meat markets and the taquerias on Haight, and the colorful murals that camouflaged buildings long past their prime with joyous art celebrating life and death and rebirth, and all the time she felt the heart she sheltered growing stronger.
Her sandaled feet came to rest at the base of a staircase, the cracked concrete steps leading up to a wooden door warped by damp air and nighttime fog. Gilded letters on door’s windowpane, faded over time, looked as new and fresh to her as the day she’d painted them.
She climbed the stairs, her joints creaking, and produced an old-fashioned iron key from her backpack. Bent, arthritic fingers slid the key slid in an equally old-fashioned lock.
“We’re home,” she whispered to the heart, and it trembled as all hearts did when faced with the unknown.
The old wooden door protested the intrusion as she nudged it open, taking her time. Hearts and doors and all things battered by the world deserved gentle treatment, and Gretta was in no great hurry.
She breathed in the welcoming smell of well-used books, rows upon rows of them packed on narrow shelves, and her own heart smiled. Dust motes floated in the air like notes freed from the constraints of staff and clef and beat, performing for a cherished audience of one. Gretta rewarded them by humming a tune she’d learned from the timid heart inside her.
“It’s time,” she murmured to the new heart inside herself. It fluttered, but Gretta soothed it as she would a frightened kitten facing an uncertain future. She turned the little sign in the door’s window to “Open” and gave herself and her precious charge over to the comforting world of her library.
2
Gretta had come to the city in her youth, a wild child drawn, like all wild children of her time, by the promise of love and joy and freedom.
She had music of her own then. Vibrant, living music that filled her head and flowed from her fingertips to whatever instrument she had at hand, and there had instruments too numerous to count.
Exotic instruments, like sitars and tambura and dilruba, baglama and kemence and ud. Guitars that spoke of a heritage of fine craftsmanship and loving creation when she touched them, and violins whose weeping strings made her cry.
She’d let her own heart soar free to sail over the whitecaps on the bay and past the Golden Gate and out to the vast ocean beyond. In the evening it always came back to her, riding on the fog that blanketed the city, and it shared with her all that it had seen and heard and experienced.
She slept with others like herself in parks and along sharply slanted streets where shopkeepers appreciated the crowds drawn by the music, and she ate rich food steeped in the ethnicity of the
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