I was born in San Fransisco when the bay was full of cruisers   Where the west wind smells of fishing boats for fifty miles around   My father wore a crew cut, he was lean and he was handsome   And my mother wore a sash of yellow roses on her gown      They would walk me down from Green Street   Pass cathedrals on the hill sides   And the carillons could fill the hearts of any one in town   I remember how they looked then, when their eyes were always living   When my father loved a girl with yellow roses on her gown      Then we moved to Placid County where the weather was a joker   And I watched my parents laughter turn from amber into ice   But my father never stumbled, he would tell me things would change soon   He would bear and bear the insults of a pair of loaded dice      And my mother stood beside him though her heart was on the hill side   Of a city where a soldier and his lover better die   And at night amid the whisper of the pines and [Incomprehensible]   She would cry into the sash of yellow roses on her gown      Now my father's living eastward by the Sacramento river   And he swears to me he's happy with his practice and some land   In the springtime and the summer when the fog is off the valley   I visit him on weekends, his grass is overgrown      Sometimes after dinner, I will gaze away the evening   In the attic at a sash of yellow roses on her gown