San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, December 2, 2001
John M. Hubbell, Chronicle Staff Writer

The gospel singers were packing up, the gardener who tends the National AIDS Memorial Grove had already taken his bow. The mud grew still worse underfoot. And here, after an hourlong ceremony yesterday, sat Manny and Margie Martinez, appearing at first glance as if the 70ish couple had taken a wrong turn on the way to the Japanese Tea Garden. But they were in Golden Gate Park, quite definitely, with purpose.

The South San Francisco couple had gathered with about 100 others under a plastic tent and slanting rain because they could not be anywhere at all with Manny III, the middle of their five children, who was claimed by AIDS in 1995 at age 38. In a way, Manny's father said, they were there to absorb who their son had been.

"Every time I come down here, I get this way, sooner or later," he said, head bowed. "I wish we had him back. The only way we can be with him is coming down here."

San Francisco found itself at a familiar intersection of remembrance and mourning yesterday, dwelling on the 18,605 AIDS victims taken from its midst and the disease that continues to shape its conscience.

The gathering in the soggy grove, a philanthropic undertaking in a cranny of the park's southeast quadrant, marked another year with more deaths, no cure and a recent dramatic spike in the number of HIV cases among U.S. gay men.

"As we stand united against terror, we must stand united against this global pandemic," said Linda Tillery, whose Cultural Heritage Choir had many a mud-caked sneaker tapping to a cappella spirituals. "Why do we have to be savaged and ravaged to be united? People have to die on the hundreds of thousands before people respond to their needs."

While treatments have extended the lives of those with HIV and AIDS, "it's also because certain individuals have had hope -- that hope has run through their veins," the Rev. Ron Swisher of Oakland's Taylor United Methodist Church told the assemblage.

AIDS turned 20 in a year of war and recession. World AIDS Day itself fell yesterday as suicide bombers maimed Jerusalem and the world mourned the man who had penned "Here Comes the Sun." Optimistic national news of the hour included the capture of a suspected serial killer.

Meanwhile, San Francisco remained saddled with a stalker of its own, with 8, 879 citizens currently afflicted with AIDS as of June, the last month for which statistics were available.

And yet it has become a story, many said yesterday, that somehow manages not to be much of one anymore.

"Sadly, I believe it's off the radar right now," said Trey DeGrassi, the grove's program director. "It's secondary not only to what happened on Sept. 11, but also due to the advent of protease inhibitors in 1996. A lot of people don't see it quite as serious as before."

Those gathered at the grove spoke of a different reality. Sophia Lambert of Los Angeles cradled a portrait of her deceased son, Andrew, as her husband, Greek Orthodox minister Peter Lambert, spoke of the need for parental compassion. Margie Martinez thumbed through her wallet to find an aging prom snapshot of Manny III that might have made him wince.

What felt at times to be an affirmation of life was still inalterably moored to death. As board member Gina Gatta presented the grove's community service award to Jim Greenshields, a longtime kitchen worker at the city's Coming Home Hospice, she praised his attentiveness to patients' final days.

And yet AIDS "certainly isn't the topic of conversation of the smart set anymore, for sure," he said later. "If you bring it up with a lot of people, you'd clear the room at a party."

Meanwhile, he said, the hospice sits at peak capacity.

His work there, Greenshields said, is like "a train station."

"While they're there," he said, "we try to give them a sense of structure.

They go out the door and the train pulls out."

Terrence Smith, the gardener whose handiwork met with praise yesterday, said he understood as metaphor how the grove does its work. The much-derided storm had given rise to earthen scents; just behind the tent, a leaf-shedding elm glowed resplendent at winter's approach.

"There's a lot of spirits running around here," said Smith, 44, a native San Franciscan who remembers when brambles clogged a place where maples and pines now stand. In the morning, "I come down here at 6, 7 -- you can feel it.

"I'll just find people sitting here, staring off into the heavens, taking a moment to remember. They leave little trinkets. I leave everything," he said, "and it goes its own course."

Email John M. Hubbell at jhubbell@sfchronicle.com.

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