Tag Archives: moving

I Miss You Sweet San Francisco

I spend a lot of time walking around the hills in El Cerrito looking out at the city (when there’s no fog).

I miss the city and all it offered, from the sunset over the clusters of Victorian-style buildings to the ocean being on all three sides of me.

I loved the kitschy downtown area I always avoided. Coit Tower with all its stairs. The fact that the fog came through all summer, blanketing everything in a Gotham-style wonderland. That tourists always came to town in shorts in July, and we would laugh at them.

I miss long walks down Clement street with all the little bubble tea shops, markets, and vietnamese-style pork buns freshly made while you waited. I miss Green Apple books and their abundance of indie books, cd’s and movies. I miss being able to walk and walk until you hit the ocean less than 7 miles in most directions. I miss living on my own little self-made island away from family and all the stupid people I grew up with. I miss being completely independent, not reliant on anybody’s house or money. I miss how skinny all that walking made me. How people didn’t shove food down my throat and I could eat however I wanted and it was o.k.

I miss being able to come home to my Victorian apartment building and feel so safe and secure on the second-floor with the windows open overlooking the park and the street traffic below. That I could sit in the bay window and watch life go by while reading a book. The cool breeze any time of the year. The fact that we never really needed heat or air conditioning.

I miss that I could throw a rock and hit a good restaurant. The fact that there was a Burmese-Style restaurant right down the street along with Vietnamese Fusion, Japanese Sushi, a Russian Bakery, and a real cafe you could sit in with your computer all day long if you wanted.

I miss the sense of being a part of something bigger. Never feeling alone because I was surrounded by people all of the time. For once in my life not needing to run to somewhere else to get away from the redundancy of suburban neighborhoods and mind sets.

I miss the feeling of finally finding my people. Of running in the park and finding a buffalo reserve and a conservatory of flowers and a museum all in the same two mile-stretch along with a windmill and a beach.

I miss the laughing lady who used to be at the Cliff House. All of the seafood restaurants at Pier 39.

I loved that you could do anything from biking to running to hiking within an easy walk or drive. The roller skating dancers in the park. Kites everywhere on blustery spring days. The festivals and the street parades. Pride and Folsom Street Fairs. That most of my acquaintances had outgrown their native religions and closed-off mind sets of their youth. The kitschy bistros and boutiques. How there were so many different enclaves and neighborhoods with their own unique themes and energies.

I miss the safety in numbers. I miss the masses of musicians, artists and writers that clustered in every neighborhood. All the stupid Hipsters in the Mission District. The poetry slams and the open mics everywhere. That I always ran into old friends from all over the world.

I don’t know why I ever left. And I don’t know if I will ever be able to go back. Now I understand that saying, “I left my heart in San Francisco.” I will always miss the only place I ever really belonged.

The cost.

just breathe.

This is life, these moments. The hand of my husband, soft and warm, in mine. The dusty bedroom full of clothes and strong-willed cats. Boxing up the possessions that weigh us down. Signing 80 hours of my next however many months away to work on my grandpa’s house in exchange for rent while we hunker down, safe in the hills with the eucalyptus and redwood trees shielding us against the view of the city and it’s economic storm clouds down below.

This is my life, rusty as my breath tastes coming fast as my heart pounds through it’s thick walls of sinew and flesh and blood. As I drop the person I care about most in the world off at the airport for a business trip. As I drive away, after lingering in the park zone as long as I can, watching him go.

This is the cost. Everything I believe in, everything I am, wrapped up in his arms before he kisses me goodbye.

We’ve lost so much these last months. Job, apartment, money, health, our dog’s leg to the trust and faith of surgery.

What we’ve gained, as the world has constricted around us like the throat of a viper on two tiny mice, is the only thing we really had all along. Each other. Trust. Patience. Love.

And in moments like these, my heart skips a beat as I realize just how much more I have to lose.

Bonafied Berkeleyite?

My computer has been down for a while again (monitor gave out, waiting for new one to come.) and everything I own (books, cd’s, dvd’s, clothes, who knows what else) is in boxes. Then there’s this family funeral thing, starting two new jobs (and maybe another internship, I still don’t know) and I am completely lacking in the cool topics on my blog department.

I reminisce to the month of November when I was so bored at my job that I could come up with some new and engaging rant on a daily basis – whether it was eating bananas in front of my coworkers to sippin syrup. As I don’t have the old job or health care for that matter, neither of those topics are relishing at this point.

In other news, Berkeley is a trip. You just don’t know until you’ve lived here. There are so many overgrown yards, gray-haired activists, crazy bike riders, Obama posters as big as cars and extremely overpriced grocery stores I just can’t keep up.

Every other week there are people protesting in trees, with the police building barricades around the trees for the sake of who? The people in the trees? The people outside of the trees? Is everyone in Berzerkeley just up in the trees? Egads. I don’t know.

My dog loves the neighborhood. So many places to defecate. So many cats to sniff. So many bicycles to be afraid of. So many randomly barking dogs tied to the front steps while their owners are gardening who jump at us only to be choked to death and spun backwards by the leash while their owners hold their jaws closed and go tsk tsk Foo Foo!

We found out the windows in our apartment had been painted shut, along with the beautiful brass hinges from the original doors. Luckily my Father had a trusty pocket knife and his handy screwdriver “Big Bertha”. We were able to open a couple of the windows. Not that we necessarily want them open. Because of all the greenery there are more varieties of mice and spiders than I ever saw in the valley.

If I come back as a spider I am surely in trouble. I have smashed a brown one, a black and red one, some daddy long-legs (oh and please, save me from the pest-rights people who are going to come banging down my door as soon as this goes live) and amply sprayed a very large ugly brown something until it finally backed away from the window. I think it would have helped more if I had an amplifier. “BACK AWAY FROM THE WINDOW SPIDER! I CAN SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND I DO NOT APPROVE!”

The former tenant was growing eggplant, edamame, peppers and long japanese cucumber, none of which have survived. There are surrounded on all sides by Milk Thistle and my dog. I could find more use for the Milk Thistle than I could for the defunct rotting vegetables my dog keeps hacking up on the carpet.

We plan on growing stuff – as soon as we obtain a rake and a spade and all that gardening stuff. I want to grow cherry tomatoes and some cool herbs. For cooking. Not for the other stuff those Berkeley people smoke. Na-uh. I’m wack enough as it is.