The fundraising campaign to assist Jackie Jones, our Bernal Heights neighbor and Alemany Farmer’s Market musical celebrity, was a massive success, raising $10,820 — twice the target amount — to help defray the cost of Jackie’s medical expenses and rehabilitation.

Neighbor Hannah Levinson, who spearheaded the fundraising drive, shares this update on Neighbor Jackie’s progress:

I went to Jackie’s house in Bernal this weekend; my second visit since the campaign ended.

I was hoping, of course, that she would be feeling better, recovering steadily. But I tend to forget that people in their 80’s don’t heal as quickly as people in their 20’s, and unexpected complications can arise from surgery. Jackie desperately wants to return to the market, but it seems like it may take some time for her to accept that she can’t return to the market alone, and that she will need someone to drive her and help her set up her instruments. She does plan to use some of the money from the campaign to hire someone to drive her to and from the market when she does go back. She mentioned that if anyone knows someone interested in driving her, she’d love to know!

I’d like to say that Jackie will be back at the market in one or two months, but the truth is that I really don’t know how long it will be. But I do know that she’s attending physical therapy multiple times per week, and she is doing everything in her power to gain her balance by practicing at home, with the help of home care (which she can now pay for in the long term, thanks to everyone’s generous support).

I also know that this campaign – and the support from her neighbors in Bernal, especially – meant the world to her. Some of her neighbors have offered to help — I’m visiting her next weekend and I will find out if she’d like any additional help or company.

Stay tuned for additional details. Meanwhile, along with all the Citizens of Bernalwood, we continue to keep Neighbor Jackie in our thoughts, with best wishes for a successful recovery. Likewise, we extend heavy-duty gratitude to all the donors who contributed to the fund drive, and to Neighbor Hannah for leading the charge on the fundraising campaign and outreach to Jackie. Her efforts represent Bernal at its very best.

PHOTO: Jackie Jones in 2006, by Telstar Logistics

Nice work, people.

Last week, we asked all of you to extend a warm welcome to Tony Quarrington, a British tourist and San Franciscophile who is vacationing in Bernal Heights.

This week, Tony reports that he’s definitely experienced the Bernal love:

It started within minutes of leaving the cottage on our first morning back in the city.

As we crossed Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights to indulge in a Progressive Grounds brunch, an elderly woman walking her dog launched a cheery “hello British people” in our direction. No sooner had we digested this unexpected salutation than she had moved on her way, satisfied, I hope, that she had made us feel immediately at home in the neighborhood.

And, less than a week later, that feeling has only grown progressively stronger.

I suspect that it has been partly fuelled by a request from the moderator of the Bernalwood website and associated Facebook page to make us feel welcome if we were spotted out and about.

If so, it has certainly worked!

But the reaction has still been remarkable. I feel like a minor celebrity every time I step out of the cottage.

But I think it has more do with the fact that the people in this neighborhood are just so nice and welcoming.

Yesterday, a woman leaned out of her car window as she pulled up at Cortland and Ellsworth and called out:

“Hey, are you the British guy?”

As I stood in my Grateful Dead t-shirt taking photographs of a sign explaining how to dispose of your dog poop, all I could muster in my surprise was:

“Is it that obvious?”.

But by this time she had moved away, though not without a friendly wave.

Perhaps she had recognized me from photographs.

Or rather assumed that the clichéd touristy garb and eccentric behavior had me clearly marked down as a crazy limey.

Either way, I was grateful (no pun intended).

Tony and his wife are here all this week as well, so… you know what to do.

San Francisco is a place, and a state of mind. If you were lucky enough to have been born here, well, then lucky lucky you that everything lined up so neatly. There are also many San Franciscans who were born someplace else. They live here, and they know this City is where they belong. They were born San Franciscans — it just took them longer to get here.

Then there are those who were born San Franciscans,  but don’t live here, and have never lived here, and may not ever live here. It’s a unique kind of romance to have with San Francisco, although it has all the pros and cons of a long-distance relationship.

Tony Quarrington is that kind of person. Tony lives in the UK, about 30 miles east of London. He’s thoroughly British, but Tony and his wife have fallen in love with San Francisco. (Well, of course.)  They come here as often as they can — ten times, at last count — and Tony runs an entire blog about “An Englishman’s Love Affair with San Francisco.” Crazy street-cred, right there.

This spring, Tony and his wife have returned to San Francisco for the eleventh time. But this time, they’ve decided to stay in a rather delightful neighborhood they discovered during their last visit: Bernal Heights.

During our tenth visit to San Francisco last June, we took the short walk one morning from our Noe Valley apartment to Bernal Heights, ascending the hill from Precita Park, having lunch at the Progressive Grounds coffee house and buying provisions for our evening meal at the Good Life Grocery before taking the surprisingly short stroll back to 28th Street.

We enjoyed the superlative 360 degree views from the top of the hill and the ambiance of this “village within the city” so much that we vowed to base ourselves on our next trip in what has subsequently been dubbed the “hottest neighborhood in America”.

That trip is now imminent. After a week’s skiing in Tahoe, we arrive on the first day of April (St. Stupid’s Day) at our Bernal cottage where we will be staying for the next two weeks.

Having already spent so much time here, Tony intends to go native in mainland San Francisco:

Being in San Francisco has become such a familiar and habitual (in the best sense of the word) part of our lives, somewhere we spend more of our time than anywhere else, other than our permanent UK address.

What has happened is that OUR version of San Francisco has shifted both geographically and metaphorically from the waterfront to the neighborhood we have chosen to live in for a few short weeks (oh, that it could be more).

If all we want to do is “hang out” at the apartment in the morning, watch the news on KRON4 while catching up on household chores, before strolling out to a local café for lunch, followed by food shopping and a return to the apartment for a glass or two of wine on the outside private deck, then so be it. We might then have dinner in the apartment – or try out one of the local restaurants. Or we might decide to take a trip downtown and eat in Chinatown or North Beach.

We feel no pressure to conform to the expectations of others, to be perfect tourists (if that is not an oxymoron), although, inevitably, as the trip draws to a close, the realization will again dawn on us that we haven’t seen and done as much as we would have liked!

But what of our stay in Bernal?

It would be disingenuous to claim that we will be spending the majority of our time in the neighborhood. But we will be exploring the celebrated stairways and gardens, not to mention every square inch of the hill itself, and patronizing the cafés, restaurants and stores (but, sadly, not Badger Books). And we could not visit without seeking out bargains at the Alemany flea and farmers’ markets.

Okay, that right there is pretty much the backstory of EVERY San Franciscan who has ever ended up in Bernal Heights. All of us, at some point, retreated from the waterfront to settle in to the high-altitude rhythms of Bernal Hill. Which is to say, all of us, at some point in our ancestral history, arrived here as mere visitors. Unless you’re Ohlone, in which case, yes, you were totally here all along.

So… if at some point in the next two weeks you encounter a British gentleman floating through Bernal Heights with a big happy grin on his face, please do smile back, and share some local wisdom or a secret or two. He doesn’t live here, but he may be a terrific neighbor — someday.

The SubletSF blog chronicles the adventures of Neighbor Valerie, a young woman exploring San Francisco while subletting space in several apartments around town over the course of a year:

My name is Valerie. I’m 25 years old and a founder of Rice Paper Scissors, a pop-up Vietnamese cafe. I cook, organize pop-ups in alleyways and warehouses, as well as monthly underground dinners. I’m a sometimes writer for The Bold Italic.

After stints in Divisadero, Inner Richmond, the Mission, the Marina, and Chinatown, fate has brought Valerie to Bernal Heights, which has been good for her equilibrium:

Finding a Home in Bernal

Bernal is a series of stairways and hills, of weird streets with names that seem like the residents build and named themselves. Bernal is a series of backyards you can peek into, of amazing vistas — the neighborhood where you can see all other neighborhoods.

Bernal has dogs, families, and alien-looking plants that make you feel like you’re on Mars. Things grow wild here, I’m convinced, due to the lack of bum piss.

I found my Bernal sublet through a friend of a friend. The master tenant texted me a fuzzy picture of what looked like a unfurnished top floor room with a peaked ceiling and one window. Nothing else. I was sold on the 2 megapixel photo.

Located on Florida and Precita, it was the first single family home I’ve ever really lived in, in San Francisco and otherwise. My roommates included the master tenant’s 20-year-old daughter, his brother, and Nico — the sweetest Border Collie I’d ever met.

I called my room the Hobbit Hole because of the low, peaked ceiling. It was the closest I’d ever come to my dream room: it had nothing in it but great sunlight, it retained the daytime heat, and boasted a beautiful view of Potrero Hill.

For my furnishings, I set up a clothing rack, a milk crate for a table, and two camping chairs and a camping pad for a bed that the folks at Alite kindly lent me. Outside my window was a private roof deck, where I spent many mornings hanging out before work and many nights camping outside in an Alite tent.

Having my own space was a relief after the past few months. Right before Bernal, I experienced a small bout of anxiety. Walking down the street would make my heart race for no reason; the world seemed too busy and like it was changing too fast for me to grasp. I was unsure about most things in my life — I was tired, lonely, and cold.

Maybe it was because I had been working till 3am almost every night, then skating home to a freezing room in Chinatown where I had to crawl into bed with my roommate and her cat (which I was slightly allergic to.) Combined with nine months of moving around SF, two failed romances and two months of the death flu, copious amounts of whiskey and subsequent regrettable decisions – the instability of everything had finally caught up to me. I started seeing a therapist to deal with it.

A little peace of mind and stability was what I was searching for — and I found it in the Hobbit Hole.

It’s sweet. And familiar. She writes stories of boozy urbanism and romantic confusion that send us tumbling down the memory hole of youthful Mission District folly:

We finally happened when I moved to Bernal a few months later. I was loitering around 22nd Street when I bumped into Donald and his friends at the Latin American Club. I politely asked how he’d been and if he’d decided on New York. He was going to leave in May. We realized we were going to be neighbors during my stay in Bernal, and joked about how we would throw rocks at each others windows and find ladders so we can climb through, just like in Clarissa Explains it All.

That night continued with peanuts and whiskeys at The Homestead. I suggested we go back to my office and eat Girl Scout cookies but we ended up making out the whole way back to his house.

On our first date we sat on my Bernal roof deck on a hot spring day, admiring Potrero Hill together along with Nico, the house dog. We biked through Bayview and ate at Taco Bell and rode back as the SF fog settled in at its usual hour. We awkwardly hooked up on the camping pad I used to sleep on the floor. An alliteration outlined the agenda for our next date, “Pupusas, Pies and Premium Crush,” where we watched the awefulsome movie camped outside on the roofdeck with string lights and a bottle of whiskey.

That particular story ends on a sad note, but the blog is fun stuff, and the photos are terrific too. There’s something timelessly San Francisco about the SubletSF odyssey, with its tales of bohemian exploration that have been a fixture of the local terrain at least since the days when Janis and Carlos were partying just around the corner.

Mostly though, it’s cool that she is enjoying her time here, and allowing us to see Bernal through her eyes. Welcome to Bernalwood, Neighbor Valerie.

PHOTO: Top: The Hobbit Hole, by SubletSF