Home is where the heart is

Originally from Oklahoma, I moved to San Francisco in my twenties and lived there for three decades before leaving twenty years ago. Since then, I have lived in rural Oregon, Portland, and now Tucson, but San Francisco is imprinted on my memory: its sights, its people, its ways, and particularly the experiences good and bad I had there. Although I now live in the Sonoran Desert, I still have deep roots in San Francisco drawing nourishment from my life there. I consider myself a San Franciscan, not an Oregonian, not a Tucsonan, and certainly not an Oklahoman. I left my heart in San Francisco. High on a hill, San Francisco calls to me—still.

It took me a while to get to San Francisco in the first place. Following high school and college in Oklahoma, I moved to Michigan for graduate school. Afterwards I returned to Oklahoma and started down the traditional American path toward middle class “success”: landing a job, buying a new car, and joining the ranks of home ownership. The house I bought was a new one in a subdivision out near the Interstate, so new that I had to put in the lawn. At first I was proud of where I was in life, but I soon began to doubt the received wisdom of middle class America and wondered what in the hell I was doing with my life. I knew something wasn’t right. I kept thinking of the lyrics of a song of that era, “Oklahoma City Times,” referring to the afternoon newspaper in the area. The song never made the national charts, but it was a No. 1 hit with me, a call to engage the world:

I ain’t livin’ my life to go out with a whimper but a bang
I want someone to remember me by deed, if not by name
Who cares if I own a mansion or just a cabin in the pines
But I gotta be more than just two lines in the Oklahoma City Times

Here is a link to the song: ‘https://youtu.be/Rg3OLBR6P6s?si=wqzDxdwzdebn06Oj’

I knew I had to have more than just a two-line obituary in my hometown newspaper. I applied for jobs around the nation, and I was offered one in San Francisco. My wife found one, too, so we sold the house—with its fine new lawn—and moved there. We were modern-day Okies hitting the road for California. Unlike my kinfolk from the 1930s, though, we were not fleeing the Dust Bowl but rather a homogenized life.

In San Francisco, at first I suffered culture shock and spasms of homesickness. San Francisco was unlike any place I had ever lived. The unease I felt was due to more than just living in a dense urban area for the first time. Although I had grown up in a racially-mixed gritty area of Oklahoma City, this was different. Now I was living in a place with people from across the nation and around the world, an intriguing mix of cultures.

My wife and I settled in and slowly began to explore, visiting places we had long read about: the Golden Gate Bridge, of course, but also Alcatraz, Golden Gate Park, and Telegraph Hill. A walk through the Mission, Chinatown, or Inner Richmond made me feel like a stranger in a strange land with languages I had not heard before, signs I could not understand, and restaurants emitting all sorts of delicious smells.

I had to learn the ways of The City, the name the locals use for San Francisco. Public transportation was a necessity, but I had never been on a city bus before, much less a streetcar, much less the BART subway, much less a cable car. Further, parking often resembled a manic scavenger hunt, and drivers followed rules of the road completely foreign to me. On my second day there, I drove past the corner of Haight and Stanyan in the famous Haight Ashbury district of the 60s and saw a crowd protesting the opening of a new McDonald’s. A McDonald’s! Paraphrasing Dorothy after she arrived in Oz, I knew I was no longer in Oklahoma.

Golden Gate Park was my backyard. Ocean Beach and the Pacific were just two miles away over the hill to the west. I could hear foghorns from the Golden Gate Bridge from my house. I shivered in the summer fog and knew the frustration of not being able to grow tomatoes west of Twin Peaks. I could not see the Bicentennial fireworks celebration because the fog was nearly at ground level. I ate Boudin sourdough bread and drank Anchor Steam Beer. I saw Carlos Santana at Fillmore West. I found Burrit Alley where Miles Archer was murdered in Dashiel Hammet’s novel “The Maltese Falcon,” and I was familiar with the locations of the key scenes of the Dirty Harry films. I learned the San Francisco argot and word pronunciations: “the Avenues” for the Sunset District, “Geery” for Geary Boulevard, “Vye-CEN-tee” for Vicente Street, and above all not to call San Francisco “Frisco.”

I loved the cultural mix of the city. Neighbors on my block were from all over the world. Next door was Ruth, the widow of a British admiral, who had to flee Singapore when the Japanese invaded. On the other side, Cristina was from Madrid and her husband was from Northern Germany. Across the street was a woman from Iran and her next door was from Morocco. Then there were the Parks of Korean heritage and the Okinos of Japanese. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a Ukrainian Jewish couple moved in just down the street, next door to a couple from New York City. Ronaldo, the owner of the repair shop where I took my cars was from El Salvador, and his best mechanic, Pepe, was from Guatemala—if it rolled on wheels, Pepe could fix it.

In many ways San Francisco was and is an Asian city with large numbers of residents whose heritage is Chinese, Filipino, Korean, etc. My younger daughter attended a Cantonese preschool. I recall her asking why she was the only kid with “lello” hair in the school. Both daughters were in a Cantonese language immersion program in their public elementary school. I marched with the school’s float in the huge San Francisco Chinese New Year parade six years running. I still speak a few phrases of basic Cantonese I learned at the time. One of my favorite experiences was watching Chinese funeral processions through Chinatown. The processions I saw were arranged by Green Street Mortuary in North Beach, a former Italian neighborhood which had become increasingly Chinese. A scruffy Italian brass band would lead the hearse and family car, playing standards like “The Old Rugged Cross.” Passengers in the family car would throw white script from the window symbolizing money the deceased would use in the afterlife. Watching it was an experience simultaneously familiar and foreign.

And then there was variety of food in the city. I would go regularly to La Palma Mexicatessen in the Mission to buy thick, hand-made corn tortillas still hot from the grill and eat a couple on the way home. I bought Chinese pork buns for lunch when I worked near Chinatown. I liked lumpia and pancit from the Philippines and papusas with curtido from El Salvador. I had Indian food for the first time in my life at Gaylord’s, and later became of fan of masala dosa and idli sambar. I occasionally had coffee at Caffe Trieste in North Beach, where I encountered espressos, cappuccinos, and lattes for the first time.

I savored the literary side San Francisco. I attended readings of many famous poets including Robert Hass, Galway Kinnell, Gary Snyder, and even Alan Ginsburg. I shopped regularly at City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Street near North Beach, where I would occasionally see Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder. I remember the fine poetry section up a set of narrow stairs, political books in the basement, and magazines and literary journals from around the world on the main floor. I was part of a book group for 16 years that reflected the cultural diversity of the City.

I commuted to work on Muni, the San Francisco transit system, at first riding the old green and white PCC streetcars which had been in service since the late 1930s. When I arrived, the fare was 25 cents, recently raised from 15 cents. Eventually those old streetcars were replaced and then replaced again, and the tracks were moved underneath Market Street. All five streetcar lines (J Church, K Ingleside, L Taraval, M Ocean View, and N Judah) were almost always packed. I usually caught a K, L, or M car at the Forest Hill Station in the middle of the Twin Peaks Tunnel (You can see the station in the first Dirty Harry movie). I still remember a sign on the N Judah at the time the old PCC cars were being replaced:

Oh, the N car line is eight miles long,
Judah, Judah.
Oh, the N car line is eight miles long,
Out Sunset way.
Gonna lay new track.
Got new cars on the way.
Paid my money, got my Fast Pass now.
Guess I’ll ride on the K!

A common sight on San Francisco public transit was would-be riders yelling and gesturing at bus drivers who skipped their stop. Then there was the joke that the No. 6 Parnassus buses were like whores because they traveled together at night, so that instead of a bus every 15 minutes, four would arrive simultaneously after an hour-long wait by the riders.

I still had a car, though, and faced the challenges of parking and of having to move my car for weekly street cleaning. Like any life-long San Franciscan, I learned how to park free in North Beach on a Saturday night. Occasionally I had to visit the Department of Motor Vehicles office to renew a license or sell a car, an event wildly different from anything I had experienced in Oklahoma. DMV was a colorful place, crowded with people from all over the world, driver’s manuals in a half dozen languages, test takers sneaking answers from their friends across the room, people pushing and shoving in the long lines. After going there, it was easy to understand why driving in San Francisco was such an interesting and sometimes terrifying undertaking.

I was a witness to its darker events, too. As a hospice patient volunteer in my free time, I saw firsthand the tragedy of the AIDs epidemic and its effect on the City. I was at Candlestick Park in a third base box seat waiting for the 1989 World Series to begin when the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck. A row of houses in my neighborhood slid down a hill and another, just a block away, burned down when a water heater tipped over and the ruptured gas line caused a fire. I wept when Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk—they were my public officials. I was deeply moved by the Jonestown mass suicide since Jim Jones and the People’s Temple on Geary Boulevard were a fixture in San Francisco at the time. I also followed stories of some of San Francisco’s notorious crimes. I looked up the house where the Trailside Strangler, David Carpenter, lived with his parents. I saw the bullet holes left by the Symbionese Liberation Army, accompanied by Patty Hearst, when they robbed the Hibernia Bank on Noriega Street. I tracked down the site of a couple of Zodiac killings, which occurred just before I arrived

I was a student of San Francisco’s history, as well, and explored many traces of that history that remained, including cottages thrown up after the 1906 earthquake, the road bed of the railway line to Land’s End, the Union Iron Works shipyard, United Nations Plaza, a spring in the Presidio that was a source of water for soldiers and residents in the mid-1800s, the cemetery in Mission Dolores. I knew where Ansel Adams lived as well as Diane Feinstein and Robin Williams. I met a man who was born in 1901 and whose father was killed in the 1906 Earthquake, and another who attended the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition and World’s Fair in 1915 as a teenager, as well as the Golden Gate International Exposition and World’s Fair on Treasure Island in 1939.

I ran at least 40,000 miles over its hills and down its streets: Twin Peaks, Nob Hill, the Mission, the Excelsior, the Sunset, the Richmond, Parkside, Ingleside, Golden Gate Park, the Haight, Pacific Heights, Ocean Beach, the Presidio, everywhere. For many years on Thanksgiving morning, I ran from my house to and across the Golden Gate Bridge. I was even hit by a car once, though luckily not hurt.

I became the father of two native San Franciscans, daughters who speak with the accent of the City and who survived thirteen years of San Francisco public schools. While still in high school, one volunteered at the costume shop of the San Francisco Opera and at Mother Jones magazine and the other worked at Dudley Perkins Harley Davidson—where she gathered plenty of material for her own stories. Both learned not just to drive in San Francisco but to drive cars with a manual transmission—they could even parallel park on the steep hills. Growing up there helped form them into tough, independent women.

I realize that nostalgia blurs memories and gives them a rosy hue. It is easy to dwell on those pleasant thoughts and gloss over the challenge of living in San Francisco. Many of the things that made San Francisco unique and enticing also made it a difficult place to reside. Several factors contributed to our decision to leave.

Getting around the city was a struggle. The transit system was more fitting to a third world country than to a well-to-do compact city. Parking could be an expensive nightmare, and I considered parking tickets as a necessary business expense. While traffic in San Francisco was difficult at times (actually with its one way streets and timed lights, it was easier and quicker to cross San Francisco than Tucson), getting around the Bay Area became increasingly frustrating. The potential for traffic backups was always a consideration, and several times, my wife and I cancelled plans in route to an event because traffic across the Golden Gate, San Mateo, or Bay Bridge was too backed up for us to arrive anywhere close to on time. After moving to Oregon, I realized that that state had half as many people as just the Bay Area.

I grew tired of the San Francisco political system. Over time I began to realize that San Francisco is not so much a liberal city as a city with mostly liberal policies that is run by various interest groups, a sort of West Coast version of classic East Coast or Chicago machine politics, with wink and nod favoritism and internecine power struggles among those groups. There were ethnic organizations reflecting San Francisco’s multicultural nature. There were fiercely loyal neighborhood associations suspicious of any perceived threat to their part of town. There were organizations representing the growing political power of gays and lesbians. There were powerful unions, contemporary examples of San Francisco’s rich labor heritage who were tenacious supporters of their members. The result of this combustible mix was a political system that created policies that to this day cause people from outside the City to shake their heads. I experienced that system first hand when I ran for school board in 1992. I was an idealistic and earnest parent of young daughters in public schools—and an innocent political neophyte. I came in fourth out of about eight, with the top three vote-getters taking office. In running for office in San Francisco, I learned how political sausage was made there, a process as ugly and nauseating as that metaphor implies.

One of the biggest factors in our decision to leave was San Francisco’s growing affluence and the changes that affluence brought. My wife and I arrived at the tail end of the heady, innocent days of flower children, Haight Ashbury, and Jefferson Starship. Although we were government employees, by stretching our budget to the limit, we were able to buy a 40s-era row house in the Sunset. By the time we left, however, the City was well on the way to metamorphosing into an expensive playground for highly-paid employees of firms like Google and a bedroom community for prosperous techie commuters to Silicon Valley. It had become nearly impossible for teachers, social workers, nurses and others who are the mortar of society to afford to live there. Years of conversations about real estate prices in San Francisco took their toll on me, so that I walk away or change the subject when I hear similar discussions in Tucson.

As our frustrations with San Francisco grew over the years, we began to talk seriously about moving elsewhere. I still had the same restlessness that was a force in my decision to leave Oklahoma thirty years before—a chronic rock in my shoe. When our younger daughter graduated from high school and moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona, we were left with no children at home and no familial ties to the City. That was our catalyst to act. Rather than choose a place and then move there, we decided to make an adventure out of the process. We sold our house, bought an old motorhome, and traveled around the West for five months visiting cities that sounded like interesting places to live. We had a cat and two dogs, and our journey made “Lucy and Desi and the Long, Long Trailer” look like Masterpiece Theater. It was a grand adventure, and in retrospect, a somewhat frightening one since we were in our late 50s at the time.

We ended up in south central Oregon where I took a job working at a university directing a state-wide renewable energy program. My wife returned to the law, telecommuting to her former firm. At first, we liked the small city and the change from the pressures of San Francisco and the Bay Area. Over time, however, I came to realize what I had given up in leaving San Francisco, that San Francisco had been my home, and that having left it, I had become homeless in a way. I grieved for what I had given up, but economics and other issues made it impossible to return. Further, I was wise enough to realize the truth of the title of the Thomas Wolfe novel: you can’t go home again. Here is a post on turn-stone about the sense of homelessness: https://turn-stone.com/homelessness/

Twenty years after leaving, I still miss San Francisco, but I realize that the San Francisco I love disappeared long ago and lives only in my memory. Further, I know that my memories have been distorted by time, polished and tinted a rich sepia tone. I recall a line from the made-for-television movie, “Lonesome Dove,” in which the old cowboy Gus says to a young woman who desperately wants to go to San Francisco, “Life in San Francisco, Laurie, is just life.” That is absolutely true. My time there was just life. I have little desire to even visit the place it has become. When I think of San Francisco these days, I still feel twinges of mourning for the life I had there. Yet I also believe that San Francisco left me as much as I left San Francisco.

Yes, I regret leaving San Francisco, but I realize three things. First, regret is a useless and harmful emotion. Second, at the time we made our decision to leave, I felt it was the correct one, and I have had an interesting life since for having made it. Third, my life could have been otherwise but it wasn’t. So be it. That said, when I hear a recording of Scott McKenzie singing “San Francisco,” as corny as it is, I still get a lump in my throat. Here is a link to the song: ‘https://youtu.be/7I0vkKy504U?si=fkhWtGatXFhawPGo’

A look at contemporary SF:

‘https://youtu.be/8qdfoWiiN6c?si=KlzNyjrx8UtJWdV5’

Photos and videos of SF about the time I lived there:

‘https://youtu.be/tCG9ANTVP5A?si=wR1TnXPsiTR6JqwR’

‘https://youtu.be/jhpva9cnDJI?si=X5vbD6PAJ6sl6fgO’