The Bench Behind Peets in Laurel Center

February 2005: Even though there is a huge garbage dumpster right next to it, your head bangs against a bathroom window, and the view is of SUVs fighting for parking spaces, I still always claim the bench behind Peets Coffee when the sun is out...

Unfortunately, Laurel Center, the small-town, main street strip mall four blocks from my San Francisco flat, fronts on the north side of the street. That means neither Peets nor Starbucks, nor the new Rigolo French Cafe, or the even newer Le Cubana coffee cafe, each of which optimistically sports an outdoor bench or table or two out front, ever catches a single ray of sun.

When you live in a foggy city that promises California sunshine but often delivers damp chill, you will run out of the house at a moments notice to snare a sunny bench next to a dumpster. If you manage to claim that bench on such a day in, say, February, and sit there with your pasty face turned to the sun for 10 or 20 minutes, you get to consider yourself the luckiest person in the world.

Next to Peets used to be the Laurel Cafe where I often brought my two kids for frozen yogurt twists: swirling two-tone mountains of icy (low-fat!) vanilla and chocolate as big as their toddler forearms. A perfectly nice gentleman of ambiguous sexual identity used to work there. He had 2-inch fingernails that we always imagined must serve some purpose that we could likely never comprehend in our bourgeois naiveté.

There was also a wonderful children's bookstore called Quinbys, where my eldest stocked up on Oz and Madeline D'Engle, and Hearthsong, a toy emporium where you could buy beautiful imported educational playthings made of wood and jute rope, French baby dolls, sturdy oak dollhouses, and billowing purple and pink squares of silk that my girls used for tents and costumes and shawls.

Now these children's enterprises are gone, which seems rather incongruous, since there are far more strollers, and far more children in this yuppified neighborhood than a decade ago. Now there's a Chicos, and even the science-oriented Imaginarium toy store finally closed last year (acquired and destroyed by Toys 'R Us). But the wonderful 5&10 remains. It is that store, with its coloring books and candy and brooms and pencils and hairclips and laundry baskets, pots and pans and valentine cards, that makes this feel like home, like a real place, like a town where people live.

Today while I sit behind Peets cupping my cappuccino, sweating because the sun raises the temperature 10 degrees from the day you dressed for on the North side of the street, I think of Judith Cushner and Laurel Hill School.

Looking south across the parking lot you're only blocks from the wild, wonderful co-op nursery school where our youngest spent her threes and fours, frequently posing as John Lennon, humming baby-voiced Beatles tunes while sporting a cap from Amsterdam, a fringed suede Jacket from a vintage store on Van Ness and red converse high tops. Judith was the director there for 20 years, a small, tough, outspoken woman who was unwavering in protecting and championing the unorthodox, progressive, child-loving, child-respecting approach of the 49-year-old co-operative pre-school over which she stewarded.

At Laurel Hill boys and girls lined up half-naked in the long urine splattered bathroom, taunted each other with poems about pee and poo, yelled F***K with abandon. The teachers, including a lovely, older woman with pink cheeks, slim graceful hands and soft, curly yellow hair that she wrapped in a kerchief on windy days, and an expansive, bearded young man who never wore shoes, would calmly take a child aside and suggest that they think about how they made others feel when they chose their words. Kids only had to sit and listen about once a day and they were almost never made to stand in line and learn to contain their enthusiasm and accept that they were not the center of the universe.

Laurel Hill was a celebration of joyful childhood where kids ran and played and made art and gathered in clusters and conspired and cried and built stuff and tore stuff down. When they were sad or out of control they received quiet, confident adult attention. But most of the time adults relied on watchful waiting, urging the kids to find ways to amuse themselves, solve their own problems, and work out their social conflicts. Kids did the stuff that kids did in the old days when there were neighborhoods and empty lots and roving gangs of peers. Laurel Hill was more like life than school, albeit in an intense, occasionally over-whelming concentration—40 cacophonous three and four year olds in one place at one time.

As an institution born of progressive optimism, Laurel Hill has stubbornly held onto the idea of participatory democracy with all of the attendant sturm und drang. The school is truly a co-operative, and every parent has to work in the classrooms, attend educational and policy meetings, and pitch in to paint the walls and balance the books. There is nothing more passionate and potentially irrational than a group of anxious parents concerned about their children and their childrens' school. The battles are legendary, as succeeding generations questioned and challenged everything from fundamental school policy (how do we cope with children who bite) to what kind of swings to purchase for the play yard, to parsing long-term decisions like whether to add a pre-k classroom. Judith's job was to balance parental emotion with institutional preservation: to steadily maintain the "Laurel Hill Way" and still appease, hear and engage parents. And she seemed to have succeeded remarkably well.

We lost Judith to cancer last year (she also championed medical marijuana laws and was a plaintiff in a groundbreaking California case), and hundreds attended her memorial service. I think of her all the time, especially when I sit outside Peets, even though I hadn't seen her in years, since my daughter is now 16 and has passed through two more schools and a lifetime of experiences since her Laurel Hill days. But I still have the friends I made at Laurel Hill, and feel as if I should be able to walk in there and have it all be the same—the water-logged sand box, the tiny kitchenette were I assembled snack when it was my turn to help out, the Buddha-like calm of the senior staff, the unnerving chaos of the wide-eyed lost boys madly ringing the play yard on their tricycles.

That kind of education, the stubborn respect for the prerogatives and magical reality of childhood, and belief in the wisdom and open grace of children, is a rare and endangered species. And institutions that honor children, rather than attempting to shape and mold and mature them, are almost impossible to maintain. Parents these days want phonics for four-year olds, French lessons at five, complete with Miss Clavel's orderly lines.

As I sit on my bench by the dumpster and sip my coffee, mulling the changes in this neighborhood, in this city, I hope that Laurel Hill, that cacophonous, retro, light-infused San Francisco icon, can hold its free-thinking ground, dig in its heels, and continue insisting that kids have a right to be kids.