How to Wash a Cat Read Free

his haystack piles in the hopes of finding a single, precious needle of antiquity. If they were not up for this task, he would grumpily direct them to one of the many well-lit, neatly arranged stores down the street.
    “Amateurs,” he would harrumph with derision at the end of this oft-repeated rant. To my untrained eye, the Green Vase showroom looked a lot more like a flea market than an antiques store, but I kept this opinion to myself.
    The Green Vase sat in a quiet corner of downtown San Francisco, just to the north of the financial district, in a neighborhood called Jackson Square. Tucked behind the city’s signature Transamerica Pyramid Building, this area was mostly forgotten by both local San Franciscans and the city’s crowds of tennis shoe tourists. Only a few pedestrians and the occasional delivery truck shadowed its sidewalks. A sophisticated hush blanketed the (mostly) high-end antiques stores that filled the shady, tree-lined streets.
    Amid this placid, sanitized atmosphere, it was hard to imagine what the scene had been like during the raucous days of the Gold Rush. But in the warm, comfortable kitchen above the Green Vase, Oscar’s stories brought the colorful characters from that time to life.
    According to Oscar, gold was first discovered in the Sierra foothills in the spring of 1848. As more and more nuggets began rolling into San Francisco, rumors of the California El Dorado circled the globe, escalating in scale on each re-telling. Reports of miraculous riches, sparkling in the riverbeds for anyone to scoop up, spurred many to hitch a ride west by any means possible.
    Before long, a desperate mass of humanity had inundated San Francisco. This eternally optimistic crowd had convinced themselves that they were but one day away from hitting the mother lode. While they waited for that eventuality, they spent their meager vials of painfully collected gold dust in this ‘anything goes’ corner of the city.
    Saloons were crammed into every spare foot of available space—in ramshackle buildings, lean-to shacks, and leaky canvas tents. These establishments offered patrons far more than a good stiff drink. Gambling, prostitution, and tawdry sideshows were the norm. Blatant criminal activity carried on unhindered by any police deterrent. The unwary were quick to lose their shirts, if not their lives.
    Nowadays, the historic Jackson Square neighborhood contains some of the only buildings to have survived the infamous 1906 earthquake and the subsequent firestorm that swept through the rest of the city. Three story red brick structures predominate, with many having undergone extensive renovations. Elaborate ornamental trimmings frame the windows, eaves, and gutters of several of the storefronts.
    Uncle Oscar couldn’t have cared less about such architectural details. He was far more interested in the people who had calculated, connived, and caroused their way through this corner of the city. He knew everything there was to know about everyone who had come to San Francisco during the Gold Rush.
    Oscar had read countless books on the topic, studied every historical map he could find, interviewed local historians, and sifted through the remains of endless estate sales. He was well known at the San Francisco library, where he had combed through their entire historical documents section. His knowledge on the Gold Rush period was encyclopedic.
    After dinner, Oscar would dig around downstairs in the store, bring up a recently acquired item, and entertain us with a lively narrative about its past and the people who might have used it.
    I am sure that the ghosts of the free-spirited characters from Oscar’s stories still wander other parts of the city, but they have long been expelled from Jackson Square.
    A collection of high-end art galleries and antiques stores have moved into this once derelict, now dressed up, neighborhood. Rows of pretentious storefronts line the streets, displaying a range of high-priced