I Left My Heart in San Francisco

October 5, 2015 JG Leave a comment

When people ask where I am from, I tell them, “San Francisco.” It’s a spiritual truth as much as a literal one. When I left the Bay Area at age nine, I truly left my heart behind, and when I graduated from college just over a decade later, the first thing I did was flee westward to the San Francisco of my dreams.

In the intervening years, San Francisco had grown some, but it was still, fundamentally, itself. It was a place where all possibilities were possible – from miner 49ers to flower children and beyond. It was a city filled with active neighborhoods and the activists who loved them; of spicy eucalyptus pods dropped along the park; a place of historical hangouts and the leftover hippies who still hung out in them, as fervent in the 90s as they’d been three decades before. A place of ocean and fog, of salt that floats out each morning and in each evening on a sweet wet wind, burned off and on by a bright but not-too-hot sun. It was the Golden Gate, the Bay-to-Breakers, Alcatraz and Angel Island and Marin in the distance. It was, of course, a city of hills – hills navigated slowly by original Beetles and VW vans with bumper stickers of dancing bears and, ‘CoExist,’ and ‘dog is my copilot,’ and the Darwin fish. It’s where garage doors rolled up on a Saturday, revealing one sale after another; where you could start a fight on the Muni by insisting your burrito place is best; where grown men rode skateboards, not scooters; and everyone was a politician of some sort because we were all devoted to our systems of belief.

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Like dancing bears, only San Francisco-ized.

It is by no means surprising that this city of free love and the Diggers and Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead and acid-dropping and Black Panthers (I’m appropriating Oakland here) and City Lights and Spec’s and Fillmore posters and the thriving Fillmore district replaced by the yuppie Fillmore street and motorcycles not bicycles outside Toronado and the TransAmerica building and hip-hatted Willie and Jerry Brown and Harvey Milk and Margo St. James and free speech and SDS not LDS – it is by no means surprising that this is the place where tech went boom. It was as inevitable as the fire of 1906. Only a place of such possibility would yield a creative mushroom cloud of such impact as to bust the city it dropped on.

Last month, I was home in San Francisco for a wedding. It had been a while since my city and I had reunited for more than a night or two, and it filled me with conflict, and an overwhelming nostalgia. San Francisco was, and remains, my one true urban love affair. I love its grungy streets and random murals, the sound of electric busses passing and the streetcar on a track. I love the beach in the fog and a grungy coffee house in the spring. I love those Eucalyptus trees, and triplexes of railroad flats. But San Francisco, my San Francisco, is gone.

San Francisco still has a funky attitude – one funky people can’t afford.

It’s hard to be a dreamer in San Francisco anymore. Dreams there are incredibly expensive. In the mid-90’s, I shared a three bedroom flat in the mission with two other women and we paid $1350 combined. We were two blocks off Dolores Park and surrounded by stores of used stuff, semi-functional laundromats, a couple sketchy-marts, and the 500 Club.

In that same neighborhood now, a one-bedroom costs upwards of $3000 per month, and our combined rent couldn’t even get you a studio (I’m not exaggerating). The sketchy-marts are now smoothie bars and hi-end independent organic grocers and farm-to-table restaurants with lines out the door. The 500 Club is still there, but I doubt the same is true of its Addams Family pinball machine, or the regulars who camped out on the same bar stools, night after nigh,t with a bartender who resembled Pinhead. Friends who grew up in the city by the bay, who are married with solid double-incomes have been priced out, and in their places have come a new generation of dot-com and start-up youth who think it’s normal for a martini to cost $15 and will never know the inside of a true dive bar.

The “go west, young man,” dream is in our national psyche, for better or worse. We leverage it to create a new beginning when the going has gotten too tough or the odds are never in our favor. But where do we go to start over when the start-over west goes bust?

When I was looking for a place to settle, I was frequently asked, “why don’t you go back to San Francisco? You love it there!” I struggled with an appropriate answer because what my heart was shouting was, “because my San Francisco is dead.” Meanwhile the Los Angeles of my memory was calling.

Since all of my fun Los Angeles memories take place on vacations, I figured I should come down from my temporary encampment in Washington State and check it out. I intentionally went to dinner during rush hour traffic, to see how bad it was (not fun, not horrendous). And then, while having lunch with a friend I’ve known since the sixth grade, the lightbulb turned on.

“LA is great,” he said. “I love it here because you can decide to do anything you want, and people will help you make it happen. Want to start a line of vegan baby clothes? Great, how can I help? I know a dude who went to Harvard and decided he really wanted to be a dog walker. Done. You just put it out there and work on it, and people are on your side.”

Now, granted these are ridiculously Californian examples, but the lightbulb went on: a place where all possibilities are possible. Not everyone’s dream will come true. But in LA, your dreams aren’t over before you find a place to lay your head.

My heart is still in San Francisco. It always will be. It remains the city that launched a thousand dreams – my own alone. It will always have its funk, its fog, its coffee and its political vibe. I will always want to be there, when the lights go down in the city and the sun shines on the bay (or when Journey is playing a concert). But I’m creating a life in the new San Francisco, a city with a vibrant history of its own, where museums are popping up amidst the bright lights of movie premiers and the dark corners that yield a crisis-launching number of homeless. We lack funding, and water, but we have enough palm trees and dreams for everyone. Come join us – we’ll help you make your dreams come true.

Life Skills, On the Road, Tourist, Traveling, United States

Where I’m From

April 17, 2014 JG 1 Comment

Three months before I turned 40, I spent a month obsessively looking at new cars on craigslist. When I realized I was perfectly happy with my 12 year-old stick shift station wagon, I left the cars behind and decided just to pierce my nose, like I’d wanted to do since I was 14. Suddenly, I was freed from the socially-acceptable expectations of mid-life, and welcomed into the decade that would allow me to just be me. Midlife crisis narrowly averted.

Not even a full state from Texas, a crisis of an entirely different order arose. I took refuge from a torrential downpour at a café on the Taos plaza, and got to talking to a woman about her dog. Naturally, she asked me where I was from. A normally chatty human being who can carry on a conversation with anyone from the Pope to a wall, I was struck silent. I didn’t even stutter; I just couldn’t answer. I was faced with a geographic identity crisis.

For the eight, mostly uncomfortable years I lived in Dallas, I told people, “I live in Dallas, but I’m from California.” This is the technical truth – I was born in San Francisco, and consider myself a Californian – but it isn’t the whole story. I arrived in Dallas a full seven locations after I originally left my home state. As a result, I’m a committed recycler with aggressive driving skills, a very northeastern way of flipping the bird, a New Yorker’s style of walking through a crowded urban center ignoring everyone around me, a Northwestern desire to be outside even when the weather fills with rain and wind, and a Texan belief that my boots and a good buckle should work for any occasion. When I say, “I’m going home,” I could be referring to Seattle, San Francisco, or Dallas. But I don’t know how to tell someone where I’m from, because choosing one place feels like a lie.

I hoped this issue would resolve itself when I left the country, but it got worse. Complete strangers took a kind-hearted interest in the specifics of my personal history, and weren’t satisfied when I told them simply, “I’m from the United States.” People in other countries know a surprising number of US states; they also watch a lot of bad tv. Texas is on the map for Dallas (the original), Walker Texas Ranger, and George Bush. Telling people I’m from California garnered a lot of, “I’ll be back,” “oh…Ah-nald,” and, “California?…Hollywood?” So I tried Washington.

Cold, beautiful west coast

Understandably, it’s confusing to foreigners that the state of apples, Starbucks, and the Olympic peninsula is both not the same as the capital city that shares its name, and is located on the other side of the country. I didn’t bother correcting people who responded to Washington with, “ah! Obama’s house,” until the questions about DC got too involved, and I would confess that I was actually from an entirely different place (though I’ve lived in both).

Washington State

The irony of all this is that it actually doesn’t matter. In earlier eras, outside of Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and great migrations, people rarely moved far from home. Now, we’re in a shrinking global community, where constant population flux consistently alters cultures, blending them across geographic boundaries, until good barbeque isn’t just found in the south and good bagels aren’t held captive in New York. The San Francisco of 2013, with its dot com billionaires and microapartments for a million dollars, isn’t the San Francisco of 1993, with its distinct neighborhoods, affordable housing, and hippy funk. (When people ask me if I’m moving back to San Francisco, I feel compelled to point out that San Francisco isn’t there anymore.)

And yet, for all this movement, for all this homogeneity of culture, place matters. When I go out for coffee, place matters. Am I walking there, biking there, driving there, or taking public transportation? Is it Dunkin’s coffee, Starbucks coffee, local coffee, organically sourced and priced up coffee? Or maybe it’s Turkish, Thai, or Vietnamese white coffee? Is it hot or cold? Is it smooth roasted, or bitter? Am I standing at the coffee bar chatting with neighbors, sitting at an outdoor café under a heat lamp, or grabbing it to go while I drive off someplace?

Place matters for the most simple things, because it’s the simple things that form who we are. The personality of a place shapes our approach to the world; it demonstrates for us how we absorb information, how we respond to stimuli around us, and how we view what we see moving forward. Thirty years ago, when I moved from the Bay area to Boston, this mattered a hundred times more.

I left a place of cold oceans with rough surf and foggy-day picnics on the beach, of yoga and recycling and home-made peanut butter, and went to the land of green pants with blue whales, classmates related to passengers on the Mayflower, and ‘one if by land two if by sea.’ As a result, though I longed regularly for the west coast of my childhood, I was raised using the T, rooting for the Celtics, watching my first baseball game from the Fenway bleachers, and busing out to Great Woods for one concert after another. There is no mistaking that these experiences gave me some of the independence that I enjoy when I travel, and that the longing to get back to the other coast, to see what was beneath me when I flew from one to another, gave me my desire to actually buy a plane ticket and do it.

New York subway

So when I tell people I’m from California, I feel like I’m disrespecting half of my roots. And I feel like my roots have more than two halves. Didn’t summers on a small island in Puget Sound teach me to love reading, staring at the water, and the smell of fresh wind? Didn’t college in New York help me understand that I can only do cities for a moment before I shut down? Don’t we continue to grow, to absorb place and its personality, and to change as a result, throughout our lives? I didn’t move to Texas until I was 30, but didn’t it warm me a bit, teach me a about expressing myself respectfully to people with opposing viewpoints, and help me understand myself better? Isn’t growth and absorption of place the only thing that explains Madonna’s fake British accent?

For all the shrinking of the world, place still matters. The more we create these hybrid humans who herald from multiple cultures, possibly without much leaving their own, the more confusing the question ‘where are you from’ will become. I, for one, am looking forward to it, so I’m not the only one suffering from a geographic identity crisis.

Crazy Dallas weather

Europe, Life Skills, Uncategorized

The Van Gogh You Know

April 1, 2014 JG Leave a comment

You think you know Van Gogh. Don’t we all? His sunflowers, the time in Arles, his self portraits, and of course, the dreadful ear. Maybe you’ve heard about the recently discovered Sunset at Montmajour, or the record-setting price ($39.9MM) Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers won at auction in 1987. This is the Van Gogh that most of us know. In Amsterdam, however, here’s what I learned: we don’t know Van Gogh.

When I was young, my father brought me a poster from a Van Gogh exhibit. It was the ubiquitous painting Bedroom in Arles, and I loved it. I found peace in its broad brush strokes and strong outlines, both hallmark Van Gogh, and the unapologetic use of color, which in this piece, he specifically chose, “to suggest a certain rest or dream,” as he noted in a letter to his brother. And of course, I loved that the blond wood frame bed closely resembled my own bunkbeds, recently unstacked to accommodate my imminent adolescence.

Bedroom in Arles

For years since then, I have still loved Van Gogh for the same reasons – his boldness, his outlines, his color. The crazy flawed humanity that accompanies the desire to remove one’s own ear. At some point in college, I learned where he fit in the larger canon of artists and I’m sure that it made perfect sense, but over time, those are the things I forget. The color, the vision, and the sense of calm they bring are a sense memory that sticks with me.

What I got when I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam was far more than I expected. With so many of his the works so close together, I could understand the development of Van Gogh as an artist – one, I learned, who died when he was only 37, and was most prolific during the last decade of his life, which ended in 1890. While I recognize him for these more well known works that have been easily accessible to me, I discovered much more of his beauty in smaller, quiet pieces, like Sloping Path in Montmarte.

Sloping Path in Montmarte

I gleaned a bit of his sense of humor in his Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, which is familiar now as the cover of the David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. When I learned that the details of cadavers (anatomically accurate) were part of Van Gogh’s art schooling, and that he added the smoke as a humorous act of rebellion or boredom, I enjoyed him – and this painting – even more. How Sedaris must have loved learning this fact given his own adoration of smoking and his exclamation that he loved Paris because you could smoke everywhere, including the waiting room of the hospital. I loved it for entirely different reasons: I could imagine my grandfather, an accomplished painter and irreverent soul, doing the same. And there I am, closer even still to this painter who died a century before I graduated high school.

Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette

Where the museum really wins is in the science. Want to know how art historians determine whether the artist was mixing his paints and creating his works plen air or back in the studio? It may be something that never occurred to you, but even those who aren’t into art will love the pigment analyses and microscope images of sand grains embedded in the art that help determine where it was created, and with what. It’s common knowledge that artists reused their boards or canvases, but in Amsterdam, you can see the x-ray photographs of cross sections of canvases revealing multiple layers of paint that confirm more than just the masterpiece on the surface, and you can view the recto and verso of boards with practice paintings, including some of the many birds nest series.

This is barely scratching the surface. Speaking of surface scratches, want to know how different an art may look over time, or how it is restored after years of exposure damage the paint? There’s an app for that. Really, there is. In the museum, there is an iPad set up with my beloved Bedroom in Arles, and on multiple touch points I could be enlightened about restoration work, letters about the painting between Van Gogh and his brother, and see the Yellow House in Arles in which the bedroom lay. The app is available for free in the App store; just search for Touch Van Gogh (there is also an android version for the rebels out there).

I suppose I could learn all of this by reading the beautiful coffee table book on Van Gogh that I have in storage, but it isn’t the same. There’s a magic to playing with these interactive exhibits and then walking out into Museumplein to catch the tram home down Marnixstraat, with the canal at your side. If you can catch a glimpse of a windmill in the distance you can imagine the reapers who may have worked beneath it. It’s part of the magic of the place, and brings with it the magic of the person who created the art. And that, my friends, is worth the $39.9 million, but costs a whole lot less.

Tree-Roots, van Gogh’s last and unfinished work

On the Road, Uncategorized

Are YOU My Cemetery?

September 14, 2013 JG 4 Comments

Sea Stacks in Bandon

I’m chasing my ancestors down the path of their history, backwards through the towns they settled along highway 42 in Oregon. The route wraps around the south side of the Coquille river, starting with the warm fog that twists its way around sea stacks in Bandon and heads into Pleasant Valley, where the sun blinks through overcast skies.

My goal is to visit the graves of my grandmother and her family before tearing north on I-5 to make the 9 pm ferry for the San Juan Islands. But a 20-year absence from this part of the country and a couple well-placed questions from my mother have got me reinventing that kids book I used to read in kindergarten, “Are You My Mother?” Instead of a bird asking every living animal or machine if I belong to it, I’m a human screeching off the highway every time I see a sign for a cemetery.

“Are YOU my cemetery,” I asked this morning, after taking a hard left and tiptoeing through the remains of Coquille, to arrive at the Masonic Cemetery. Coquille’s main street looks like a movie set – a stately bank, sculpted storefronts, and too many empty windows in front of which few people move. The cemetery is so small and non-descript I couldn’t believe the Masons claim it. I u-turned illegally in front of the high school marquee announcing registration dates and head back to 42, conspicuous in my dirty black foreign wagon with the Texas plates.

“Are YOU my cemetery,” I asked again, outside Coquille, when a cemetery sign pointed up a small hill to the Myrtle Crest Memorial Gardens. The hill and quiet atmosphere were promising, but the cemetery was new and compact, one small loop of road with grave markers on either side, and four groundsmen tending to the sprinkler system. One moved his truck out of the one lane so I could get by without running over the dead, and while I headed back down the hill I thought it must be true what they say: the only two things you can count on are death and taxes, and the death part is an increasing certainty in this part of the country, where the land is what you count on, and there isn’t much else.

View of Pleasant Valley from Norway Cemetery

In my memory, at least, MY cemetery sits high on a hill with a view of the valley and a two lane road winding beneath it. There are pine trees, and graves from the last century, and an A&W not far down the road. I remember thinking the last time I was here that this wouldn’t be such a bad place to spend eternity. But things have changed. The winding two lane road is now a six lane arterial, and the town of Norway, which I believe is where MY cemetery is located, doesn’t show up on my iphone map. Still, the road winds on. To the left, hills rise and fall, and to the right, the valley lies down, throwing up a lumber mill, new or abandoned, or a dairy farm, from time to time.

The Chandlier Drive-Thru Tree

They know what they are doing here, and they’ve been doing it for more than a century. Sheep and cattle graze the flat lands, timber is cultivated and felled on the mountains, and milled beside the busier transport roads. Always, trees are left bundled and tall along the most visible pathways, as if the pine curtain can hide a naked mountain of clear cut, or the low bush where trees begin to grow back, only to be cut again in how many years? 40? 50? Nothing will replace those that came down a century ago – like the ones along the Avenue of the Giants I drove yesterday on my way up California. There are no more “Drive Thru Trees” being grown, no more “One Log House.”

Mechanical memories of yesteryear

While I am gaping yet again at a truck cab speeding past, hauling his own back half on his mid section, the empty hitch and fork of a logging truck without the load, I see another cemetery sign out the corner of my right eye. As it registers, the turn-off passes on the left, blurred by the roadside leftovers dancing in the wake of the Mac cab. I take the next opportunity to pull off the main drag and circle back on old 42, slow, narrow, littered with mechanical memories of yesteryear. This is the southern Oregon I remember. This is my America.

Welcome to Norway Cemetery

I miss twice before making the turn. The new road is up ten feet higher than the old one. To get up the cemetery hill, you must first go down into a rut. “Historic Norway Cemetery,” the sign welcomes. Then validates, “circa 1875.” My grandmother and great aunts, their parents and aunts and uncles are where they were left. The view is little changed, though the trees slightly overgrown. A lone gardener tends to some of the grave sites.

I sit with my family, have my communion with the dead. The dog chooses my great-great uncle’s stone as a cool place to lay his head on a heating day. I update everyone on my sisters, my niece and nephews, who looks like whom and acts like who else. I sit in silence and look at the valley, then wander around the gravesites of pioneers. And then I head out, communion finished, twist back down to the new 42, and speed past the A&W to head north.

On the Road

Why Worth Packing In?

June 19, 2013 JG 3 Comments

Road Tripping – Diamond Lake, 1968

My grandparents were excellent travelers. They thought nothing of packing up the car like an ancient tetris game and heading out into the world from their Bay Area home base. In 1956, it was not uncommon for them to put my mother and uncle, their ‘spinster’ aunt, and Bronco the dog in the car and head up the coast to Oregon to check on the maternal family dairy farm, to Carmel for lunch and sandcastles on the beach, to the Sierras for camping and trout fishing, or to Arizona, Chicago, and later, the East Coast, where my mother was in college. Along the way, they managed to find Hopi ruins, Chicago’s greatest hauftbrauhaus, California’s widest redwoods – the best of what their world had to offer, without a guidebook.

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