As vacation souvenirs go, it is an odd one: a black, cotton tote bag with blood-red letters that say, “It’s As Real As It Gets — San Francisco General Hospital.”

I had not intended to spend one minute of my two weeks in California in General or any other hospital. Far from it. I had plans, big plans. They included a silent, monastic retreat, a dozen dinners and lunches with old friends and colleagues, a couple of museum visits and at least a full day of clearing runaway vines and bushes from my badly neglected backyard.

Woven in and out of all those happy activities, I’d also reserved lots of time for just walking around a city in which I lived for three decades and which I love as deeply and passionately as any man I’ve ever called my own.

Instead, my two weeks in San Francisco became the embodiment of an old joke. You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

On the third day of vacation, my cell phone rang with the news that an elderly but vivacious dear friend from my former parish had fallen in her garage. Paramedics had taken her to the Emergency Room of S.F. General, the city’s huge county hospital.

With her closest blood relative in Seattle, and most of her kin on the East Coast, my friend suddenly was in need of the extended family she had built over a half-century in California — people like me and the other parish women who belonged to our coffee-and-wine social group, the U.C.W.’s.

(It stands for “Uppity Catholic Women.” Even the bona fide nuns among us dwell in the liberal-feminist wing of our mother church.)

My crowded agenda became like one of those Magic Slates from the 1950s; the plastic page was lifted and everything written on it vanished. In and out of consciousness, my injured friend came first. All else was negotiable.