The sort of item Herb Caen used to label “Only in San Francisco”: When I called to reserve a cab for Peggy last night and I gave the driver the address on Tiffany Street he said, “Is that ‘Epiphany’?”

“Tiffany,” I said, “like the jewelers.”

When I told Peg she laughed and said, “That’s the sort of thing that would sound false if you put in a short story.” Right. Like so much of what happens to us in life – really? Isn’t that just pushing it a bit, buddy?

Taking Franny to college last week would have been quite enough for one movie, or story, a truly bittersweet experience of feeling pride and a sense of accomplishment for getting her to a good college (Reed) and the dread of letting her go, of returning to the empty nest, of having days formerly built around her now rudderless. So how inappropriate, in the everything happens at once sense to get a call from Adam and John E saying they had just had their visit with the oncologist in San Francisco and Adam’s first round of chemo was scheduled for Monday.

I mean, come on, life: Choose a lane.

Fortunately I had been planning on being with him while he underwent chemotherapy and had put feelers out looking for a place. The flight attendant with the apartment on Tiffany was accommodating, as she has been since first we talked, and made haste to get her stuff out of this apartment and into her new one before I arrived Sunday. (Part of her kindness is due to having lost her husband to lung cancer four years ago.) And thanks to Irene, which cancelled all flights to the east coast anyway, Peg detoured here for a few days with me and is only now on her way to the airport and back to NY to face the empty nest without me…

The good news is that this round of chemo will probably be the only one; in what they call prophylactic treatment (which always makes Adam laugh) they gave him one cycle of carboplatin yesterday while he sat in a barcolounger in the infusion center SF General, and I sat in a vacant one across from him, answering my email. Adam has been nervous about the whole procedure, as I would be, and I think may have felt it was all a bit anticlimactic. We were out by lunch time and he was here on Tiffany in the afternoon, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and waiting for the side effects – nausea, inertia, hair loss.

In the meanwhile, I am working from my temporary outpost, catching up with Real Eats editorial (already a day behind), trying to finish a screenplay, revising a collection of stories my agent thought needed tweaking, and getting back to the Derrick Ashong project that has been in limbo since the Arab spring began, along with his new job at Al Jazeera English. The new editor at Hyperion wrote just before I came to SF wanting to know what was happening. Good question, buddy.

Peg and I went up to the Colombia Gorge after dropping Franny and took a couple of day hikes in the shadow of Mt. Hood. Though we had found what looked like a good loop in a guide book in Hood River, a park service ranger gave us an even better one when we stopped for our day pass, one that included two waterfalls and fields of wild flowers and more silence that you’ll find in heaven. Leaving the ranger station with our new directions I said, “I have always depended on the kindness of rangers.” You couldn’t put that in a story either.

If my grandchildren ask me what I was doing when I heard Osama bin Laden had been killed — something the talking heads of CNN kept insisting they would as they tried to fill the dead air before the president’s formal announcement last night — I will have to say, “Watching Treme on HBO.”

The second show of the second season had already been interrupted — about 2o minutes in the network began to broadcast what looked like a dressing room scene from the Lady Gaga special, or maybe it was a Time-Warner glitch — and I was worrying that the show was losing the thread a bit already. By and large I love the series the way I love New Orleans itself, with a somewhat blind eye to its shortcomings (sentimentality being the most glaring) and a finger-popping enthusiasm for the music and the food.

And the food stuff got a big kick in the pants this season when Anthony Bourdain was hired to write the subplot of Kim Dickens’s chef as she endures an exile in New York under the iron toque of a Nazi chef (played by Victor Slezak) who says things like “Listen to your fish.”

But then our daughter came downstairs to say that someone had just tweeted something about bin Laden’s death, and we changed channels to watch the slow build-up to Obama’s address to the nation. In its aftermath questions are arising — how come the Pakistani’s didn’t know that he was living so close to one of their military bases? and how come the US buried him at sea when someone should have known the Arab world would want to see the body (have you ever seen one of those terrorist funerals, where the crowd tries to tip the casket over to kiss the dead guy’s garments?)? But for a moment there at least one of the longer running stories in the US news seemed to have a satisfactory conclusion.

I never got back to see the end of last night’s episode of Treme. I’d ask you not to ruin anything for me but at this pace, it will be months before anyone else dies. Though there are a few dark clouds on the horizon and if I was a female fiddle player I’d be watching my back.

I was in San Francisco last week, visiting my son, and we took in a matinee of Hanna (which I thought was all that, for the record: Fun for the whole family, Truffaut’s Wild Child run though a blender with Heidi and the Bourne Identity). Leaving the mall we passed a Border’s bookstore in the final two days of its everything-must-go bankruptcy sale.

I can’t resist a sale, especially when everything is marked down by 80%, but the vultures had been past many times before us. Though I did manage to get four of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robichaux mysteries for seven dollars (talk about value for money!) most of what remained was the dregs of the dregs, lone copies of sports biographies and books by Sarah Palin. They were even selling the bookshelves. I’m sure with the right offer I could have taken one of the employees home with me.

The one glaring exception I saw was a whole shelf packed with Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great. This best-of collection, culled from the magazine’s glory years (the seventies) may have been poorly packaged — the cover is all text where the Nat Lamp at its zenith excelled at graphic covers as memorable as great print ads (“If You Don’t Buy This Magazine We’ll Kill This Dog,” et al) but I think humor as topical, and of the time, as theirs was doesn’t stand the test of time.

I smiled flipping through the pages, more at the memories invoked (drunk, stoned etc.) but it meant as little to me as the Spy collection did a few years ago — and absolutely nothing to my son, who lives for college-style comedy. (And shows no sign of ever leaving college.) Like old episodes of SNL, they’re just not as funny as they were then, when we were drunk stoned etc. and the apocalypse was upon us daily.

Today’s youth have Jon Stewart and Colbert, who can make successful comedy of the sort of economic freefall that presaged a Borders bankruptcy. Their books were long gone from the shelves.

It’s a tough time for NPR. First they fired Juan Williams in a sloppy and public fashion, and then CEO Vivian Schiller up and resigned after James O’Keefe (the man who played a pimp in the ACORN offices) taped a high-level NPR fund-raiser disparaging the Tea Party. If you can imagine.

Okay, the exec in question, Ronald Schiller (no relation to Vivian) made a point of saying he was stating his own opinion when he told O’Keefe’s actors (masquerading emissaries from a pro-Muslim group looking to give the network a million dollars) that the Tea Party had hijacked the Republican party and they were racist. The second point seems demonstrably true, but certainly defensible as opinion, while the first just seems slightly inaccurate. If the GOP has been hijacked it’s been a rather willing hijacking (think of the kidnapping in The Big Lebowski) from a pummeled party looking for some mojo.

All of this comes as some of those same GOP members are looking hard at the amount of money the federal government gives public broadcasting, PBS and NPR, annually $420M last year. And the irony is that, as a regular NPR listener (and subscriber) I think they actually try harder to be fair and balanced in their news coverage than almost any news organization out there, the New York Times included. Seldom do I hear a  report of anything political that does not strive to give equal weight and time to the conservative position, and never do I hear the reporters (not guests or commentators mind you) betray a bias. For that you go to Fox or MSNBC.

Which is exactly why NPR is so necessary and so in need of support (including yours, if you haven’t coughed up lately). As much as my personal political beliefs skews to the left, I get tired of the MSNBC way very quickly, and was kind of relieved when Olbermann finally left. He was like that crazy uncle of your friend’s in high school, who you dreaded being in the car with  because of how he drove when he was yelling at you about Cambodia or whatever. And with the leg-twitching and eye-popping, he started to seem like a truly crazy uncle…

The slightly smug I-went-to-a-better-school-than-you voices of NPR’s announcers notwithstanding, their news coverage trends toward topics beyond the beltway and the bicoastal regions — and has been, for instance, refreshingly Charlie Sheen free in recent weeks. It would be a shame if they lost the federal money due to this — but it’s about two percent of their budget and frankly could do a lot for fundraising efforts. Why I can hear the pitch right now…

Let’s assume US Rep. Peter King means well by calling hearings on the dangers posed by Muslim extremists in the US. (Okay, given King’s track record you can’t assume that but bear with me.) Doesn’t this seem like the job of the behemoth-sized Dept. of Homeland Security and all the internal agencies monitoring such activities? When did this become a matter of congressional oversight, and what good could even a well-meaning committee do?

The answer of course is a) it is b) it’s not and c) none whatsoever. But King, largely on the defensive now (as Russell Simmons announced to a rain-soaked crowd of protestors in Times Square yesterday, “We’re bigger than Charlie Sheen — we are the number one trending topic on Twitter!”) started accusing unnamed members of New York’s Muslim community of not playing ball with the FBI when they were investigating evil-doers planning evil in area mosques. It’s up to him to fix it, I reckon. That’s why he’s the King.

The good news in these sad show trials the GOP is mounting in the House (look for Darrell Issa to start subpoenaing every one in the White House who has ever done anything soon) is that they smack of desperation on the party’s part. It’s as if they collectively said, “Well, what about Joe McCarthy move? He ruled the airwaves for a while in the fifties!” And with right wing intellectuals like Ann Coulter defending the dead witch hunter, maybe they think they’re onto something. How many Muslims does your average Americans know?

The fear card may not play this time, though. First of all, the growth and disapora of Muslim Americans has made it harder to stereotype anyone in a burka. (During the floods in KY last year, a woman in labor was rescued by a Muslim man who helped get her the help she needed. I read about it in Reader’s Digest!)

Secondly, if this is their build-up to next year’s election, I don’t think most Americans, worrying about their jobs (or lack of), their towns going bankrupt, their schools closing etc. are going to blame the Paki next door. Islamophobia will grow if unchecked, but this is one of those cases where I think people are actually smarter than the pols who would push the buttons. King, thou art a knave.