Vesuvio Mural

While taking a bus tour of San Francisco in the fall of 2009 we disembarked at several spots and went on a short walking tour. One was in Chinatown that I featured in my post last tuesday. Another excursion took us down some narrow alleyways where the walls were all painted in murals and stones containing some innocuous verse were embedded in the sidewalks. I stopped to take the following photo.

The verse in the mural reads:

When the shadow of the grasshopper

Falls across the trail of the field mouse

On green and slimey grass as a red sun rises

Above the Western horizon silhouetting

A gaunt and tautly muscled Indian warrior

Perched with bow and arrow cocked and aimed

Straight at you it's time for another martini

To this day I do not know if our tour guide failed to explain where we were or if I was distracted and missed the information altogether. But, when I got home I tried to look up the author of above verse with no success. I then googled the word Vesucio and got a huge surprise.

What I learned had me pounding my head and going "Duh, how stupid can you be." I had been in North Beach across the street from the famed City Lights Bookstore and this mural was on the wall of the famous coffee house "Vesuvio" that played such a big part in the good life of the Beat Generation.

I am linking this post to the meme Color Carnival.

To join the fun or to check out all the colorful entries of other players, visit Maria and her friends at Color Carnival.