Excerpt
Foreword by Mark Bittner, author of the book
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and subject of the movie of the same name:
Back in the days when I was living on the street, I survived by doing various odd jobs. One of the most common was cleaning houses. I made a habit of perusing the library in every house I cleaned, and I nearly always found a copy of Stairway Walks in San Francisco on the shelves. For some reason it grabbed my attention. Maybe because the author had such an interesting sounding name. Or maybe because I never got out of the City and I saw the book as a portal to exotic locations that were within my reach.
I knew a few of the stairways in the book-the ones on Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill-and they were among my favorite routes. I always envied those fortunate enough to live there, and never imagined I'd end up being among them. In 1988, I moved onto the Greenwich Steps, and, except for one year, I've been here ever since. This is where I met the wild parrot flock that changed my life.
For a long time my friendship with the birds was a private affair that only neighbors and the occasional passersby knew anything about. Then one day, I heard a knock on my door and found Adah Bakalinsky standing on my porch. While giving a guided tour of the Greenwich Steps, she'd seen me feeding the parrots. She wanted to know whether I had any slides of the birds. I said, "Well, yes. A lot." Adah said she'd like to set up some slide shows for me. I was reluctant, but she asked so sweetly that I managed only a feeble protest. Those shows changed everything. Because of them I wrote a book. I also met my wife, Judy Irving, who made a popular movie about me and my crazy-winged friends. All this happened because Adah pays close attention to and nurtures the worlds she writes about in her book. Read it, follow the tours, and discover the hidden corners of the real San Francisco. You never know what might happen.