Letter #2
Where do I start?
Dear San Francisco,
Where do I start?
I know, I should start at the beginning. But that’s always tricky, right? If it were easy, Lewis Carroll’s King in Alice in Wonderland would have been a sage rather than a beloved pompous fool: “’Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, very gravely, ’And go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”
You and I know there are too many beginnings and ends to saddle them to definite articles. So, can we go with Seneca instead? "Every new beginning comes from another beginning's end.” In the summer of 1995, we were both at the beginning of an end, weren’t we? Did either of us know it?
Yours is easier to peg than mine. You had at least five acts under your belt in the 175 years before we met. And that’s skipping the generations when first Spain and then Mexico claimed you, never mind the 5,000-ish years when only the Ohlone knew you. In 1848, you were home to just a handful, but that changed fast – you rushed to gold and silver the next year, and statehood the year after that. Then came your ports, rails to reach you, your first “Big One,” a world war, your two bridges, another world war, and the boom that built your left flank and let you kiss the Pacific. All before you welcomed Beatniks; hippies; counter-culture warriors, activists, champions for rights and freedoms rattling the country’s cage; and leaders who showed the way from the early days of AIDS.
Have you always been stuck in fast-forward?
I think I thought so. Anyway, I quickly came to love that about you. Or maybe I just fell hard for the version of you I moved in with in 1995, because that was a fast-forward from my days growing up in New England and from my time on a college campus disguised as a country club. I didn’t realize that you – a place of motion and metamorphosis to me – were calcifying around me.
Do I sound like an ungrateful chrysalis? I get that …. And I know how much you’ve done for me; it’s just that … these days, sometimes I wonder if maybe you tricked me when we met. Hooked me with the “you” I thought I was meeting when you were at – let’s be honest, past – the end of your last beginning. Or maybe I tricked myself; I was the one reading Tales of the City on MUNI in 1995 for the first time, almost 20 years late, right? Either way—
—Me? What about me? Oh, OK, that’s fair, I should try to put myself under the microscope too ….
In July of ‘95, I guess I was at the beginning of the end of a planned career path, even if I didn’t know it. Maybe that was because of you, though, or what I thought of you: remember my taste of conventional success that summer? An internship at a fancy law firm that wildly overpaid me to sit in a fancy corner office gazing at your two bridges, eat fancy lunches with those who fancied themselves fancy, and … do very little work. Bridge views aside, you can’t blame me for getting the impression that your downtown was just a place to go when I had to leave the Haight and the Castro for 8 hours each weekday. A place to mill around with everyone else trying to figure out how long they had to stay before they could go back to their neighborhoods ….
And remember, I was at the beginning of another end: my attachment to the east coast. (Also your fault.) Except for the following year I spent detaching from law school, I never lived back east again. You had a hold of me, and that was it. I felt like I was off and hurtling headlong into the what’s-new, the what-else, and the what’s-next. Pretty quick pivot for me, from living linear to running in a bunch of different directions at once. With you. We had something, didn’t we? And I was happy that way. You were too, right? Then why did you have to go and—
—What? No, you’re right, we can talk about change next time. And guess what? Remember our first place together? The one we sublet from a guy at law school downtown heading east coast for the summer to push paper around there, while I made the reverse trek to do the same thing in San Francisco? Well, the other day, I drove by the building. OK, I drove by it twice. OK, I parked and got out and walked around and took pictures. Hasn’t changed, right? I know, not true for the rest of the Buena Vista loop, but still ….
The view from our park at the top of the hill hasn’t changed either.
And our two go-to dive bars on Haight are still there! And— What? Oh, I know, I need to move on. And I have. Or – well – I will. But not until we sort some things out. We haven’t even started talking about the turn you took. So, get ready for that.
Talk more soon ….