I don't think I fully appreciated how much the summer months suck until I had school-aged children. I love my children (of course!), but I do not love summer camp. The hours are shorter than school, every week seems to require a different camp in a different part of the city, there are lunches to make again, and with two kids there are two drop-offs and two pick-ups across San Francisco every day. By the time I actually get to my laptop, I already feel behind.
The other morning I was driving Eden to camp across town. She is currently obsessed with "Let It Grow" from The Lorax, so we were listening to it on repeat, and I mean actually on repeat because every time it ended she wanted to hear it again.
There is a moment toward the end when the song gets enormous. The gospel singers come in behind everyone and it builds into this completely over-the-top crescendo that, somehow, someway, for a kid's song, hits me somewhere deep. At that exact moment, we were coming through Haight-Ashbury, down Clayton toward Waller and then over to Masonic, and I started watching the people outside my car.
There was a dad on an e-bike with his kid on the back, popping off the bike while he waited for traffic and then popping back on again. A woman in workout clothes was walking her dog with a coffee in her hand. There was a man dressed casually but clearly heading somewhere for work, and because this is San Francisco in 2026, I wondered if he was on his way to some AI office. Does somebody look like they work in AI? Or maybe he is a CPA? Two younger guys were finishing a run together, maybe heading toward the park. Shouldn't they be at work already? Wait, I'm not even at work...
Then I stopped at a light and watched a group of complete strangers gather at the crosswalk. They didn't know one another and they weren't together. They were simply waiting for the same light to change, but from where I was sitting they looked like a group nonetheless.
The song was building again and I was suddenly so aware of all of them. Everyone had somewhere they needed to be, just like I did, except I knew absolutely nothing about where any of them were going.
Meanwhile, I was inside the car with Eden in the back seat, calculating how much of my workday had already disappeared. I'm seeing them, I'm one of them, and somehow I'm also separated from all of them inside this little steel-and-glass bubble. Then Eden asked me to play the song again. And there was another crosswalk with another collection of people going somewhere.
I spend a fair amount of time wondering what we're all doing here. I mean the big here, not San Francisco, although there are days when I wonder about that too. I certainly didn't find the answer while driving to summer camp.
But for whatever reason, I couldn't stop thinking about how little I actually knew about any of the people I had just watched enter into a slice of my own life. The dad on the e-bike was probably thirty seconds of my morning. I had no idea where he was going, what had happened before I saw him or what happened after. He had no idea that a woman driving by with her daughter had noticed him at all.
And that was true of every one of them. They were each experiencing a life as complicated and consuming and completely real as mine, and I had access to almost none of it. There are millions of private realities unfolding simultaneously and, for the most part, all we ever get are these tiny exterior glimpses of one another.
I think what got me was that there was actually nothing unusual about any of this. It was happening on an entirely ordinary morning, and presumably happens every morning. I had just happened to become quiet enough inside my own head to notice it.
For thirty seconds, that dad and his child became part of my morning. Maybe I was the woman in the car who became part of his. Or maybe he never noticed me at all.
Then Eden asked me to play the song again.
