Pain au chocolat

Sometime around midnight last Saturday my girlfriend Ali suggested we wake up early the next morning and get pain au chocolat on Fillmore Street. A pain au chocolat is a French croissant filled with a sliver of chocolate at its center. When Ali was living in Paris last year, she developed a highly refined sensibility for what makes a good pain au chocolat good and where to find the best of the good ones for a reasonable price. Fillmore Street, Ali assured me, boasted the best pain au chocolat she had tasted since her return from Paris. I happily obliged her request.

The boulangerie, it turned out, was just down-slope from Fillmore, on Pine Street. It had an apricot awning and a pastel blue coat of paint ornamenting its exterior, and the inside—with its beige stucco walls and its spread of pastries, tarts, and breads—felt perfectly Parisian. One of the employees was French, too, but behind the cash register was also a nice, albeit earnest, Asian-American woman and a young man of perhaps 20 with blond hair and the laidback demeanor of a surfer dude. He was the one who reached into the display case and pulled out a hazelnut pain au chocolat for me and a plain pain au chocolat for Ali.

“Right on,” he said as Ali signed off on her debit card.

We headed back up to Fillmore Street and ambled a few blocks north. It was a beautiful day. The sky was clear and blue, fluffed by the occasional cloud, and the pear trees lining the road looked lush and ready to blossom. The sidewalks were crowded with people: young couples with their babies, masters with their dogs, gymnasts with their yoga mats. Ali and I walked until we found a Peet’s Coffee that had a few seats open at the counter in the front windows. We secured our spots and settled into a wonderful, slumberous few hours where everything felt just as lazy as if we had been lounging at a café on Isle de la Cité. We ate our pain au chocolat. We drank tea. We tried our hands (and failed) at the crossword puzzle in The Times Magazine. We played checkers.

The store across the intersection from Peet’s was a black shoebox of a building, a Marc by Marc Jacobs that looked odd on a street lined by one- and two-story Victorian structures, all of them painted soft blues and yellows and greens. There was a black lady standing near the entrance of the black storefront. She was thick and rotund, covered almost entirely from head to toe with scarves and leather. She held herself with an air that made it hard to miss her, even from across the street. She could have been a prostitute or an aristocrat. Her hair was dyed the color of saffron rice. The 22 Fillmore bus arrived, and she got on.

There were three homeless men plying the intersection. The first was an overweight white man in his 50s who looked tired and sad and confused. He wasn’t asking for change. His beard was grown out and gray, dripping in a few spots with what appeared to be heavy whipping cream. There was also a dollop of the cream on his nose. His pants were too big, his fly halfway down, his shirt disheveled. The second homeless man was in a wheelchair. He had a large cast over his right foot, which was swelled (perhaps artificially so) beneath a yellow wool sock. All I remember of the third man was his rheumy eyes and the defeated way in which he asked for help.

A bus broke down on the opposite side of the street. The driver was Middle Eastern and meddling with some strings at the back of the trolley. He unhitched a lever and guided one of the bus’s two cables into the electric wires overhead, like a sailor raising a mast. He did the same with the second cable, then strode back to the front door of the bus and drove off up Sacramento Street. A while later, another bus stopped on the west side of Fillmore. The driver got out and performed the same routine. I saw three or four couples craning their necks from the back of the bus—looking up at the constellation of bus wires suspended over the intersection—wondering what exactly had gone wrong in the midst of all of that confusion.

A large, white, shaggy dog was resting beside the bench outside Peet’s. The dog’s master was a boy of only 16 or 17, dressed in red flannel pajama pants and a blue hoody. Dog and master alike had a serenely tranquil manner to them, as if they had just finished a session of meditation, and neither seemed particularly interested in the attention that a big dog in a city of toy breeds had garnered them. I asked the teen what the dog’s breed was, and he told me it was a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle, or a “Golden Doodle.”

“A Golden Doodle?”

“Yeah.”

“But how did he get so big?”

“He had big parents, I guess.”

I bid the young man good morning and went back inside.