City by the Bay

How I miss my city by the bay. As a teenager in San Francisco, most of my days were spent inside, with my sister, recording scripted episodes of Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Untouchables…

How I miss my city by the bay. As a teenager in San Francisco, most of my days were spent inside, with my sister, recording scripted episodes of Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or The Untouchables - the full length nineties movie about Al Capone starring Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Andy Garcia. I was not out at Point Reyes hiking, nor was I taking in the surf and seagulls at Aquatic Park.

It was only until I went back, later, after college, did I begin to understand what a special city my hometown was. I had grown up since those days listening to The Monkees in our makeshift recording studio in my sister’s room. I had been to Germany and back, picked up smoking, and had a deeply melancholic poet boyfriend whose moods I was always navigating. We lived in a small crumbling house on De Haro Street on Potrero Hill, sandwiched in between the homes of rich gay men with antique Mazda Miatas and sub-sidewalk patio gardens that smelled of jasmine and the public housing projects behind us between Carolina and Wisconsin, that I passed at night to get to my restaurant job at the Greek restaurant over the hill.

I walked so much in those days, mostly because I didn’t have a car. I would walk and think; walk and think. It seemed that my strides dictated my words and I would return home, or eventually get to a bus and take time to write what had rumbled in my head as I traversed the hills. I had watched my melancholic poet boyfriend do this as a methodology in New England and later in Boston - walk and write - yet in his case he would recite Seamus Heaney or some other Irish poet and mimic the style into an original poem. He told me my writing was amateurish so I would walk and think - and write - and consider how to make it more like his. I read a lot of poetry and connected with my mother in the first real way since my childhood. She enjoyed that I had a literary boyfriend even if he was distant and his family was slightly intolerable with their suburban racism.

I shopped at Rainbow Grocery with the Rastafarians and the juicing fanatics and I spent time with my dear friend Milagra at speakeasies and coffee spots. I soaked up all that was my hometown: its salty air and breezes, its bright sun on our dry, rocky desert backyard home to black widows and Jerusalem crickets; its dirty urban sidewalks in alleyways plastered with bright murals and taquerias; the rough cantinas blaring ranchera music next to the donuts and Chinese food spots. Mostly, however, it was the long walks over high hills to vistas and back down steep ravines - my eyes were rich with sights and topography and I never failed to see something new as I crested the streets I knew well - I had my favorite climbs and descents.

Years later, I would resent my parents for having raised me in such a rich city - rich with its vistas and cultural life. It seemed impossible to lie anywhere else - nothing else compared. Today, I think about it often as I have now lived just as long in the Pacific Northwest. I think about how it all got too expensive to move back after the nineties, when the dot com industry took over, seemingly overnight to those of us who had been there for decades. Mostly I think about the sunshine and the salty air, how living on a bay among the hills informs one’s sense of possibility and perspective - almost anywhere I went there was a new identity to try on, a new backdrop.