You can’t go home again

I feel privileged growing up across the bay from San Francisco, many Americans’ favorite city.

I I loved taking  my cousins, from Los Angeles, who could see Chinatown, Fisherman’s  Wharf, the beach and Market Street all in one day.

But I had mixed experiences the two times I lived in the city. I spent three months  in the seedy Tenderloin District when I got a summer job as a busboy at Manning’s Cafeteria in 1959.  It was a thrill seeing the San Francisco Giants regularly in their second year, with Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey.

But My father never should have allowed a 17-year-old to live there. When a drunk tried to climb in my hotel window from the fire escape, he was lucky I didn’t push him five stories to the ground. He got mixed up and had entered the wrong room.

I moved back in 1970, when I was transferred there by The Associated Press after I got tired of writing about gambling in Las Vegas. What a contrast! The Indians occupied Alcatraz, police were getting shot by radicals, students were demonstrating against the war. I got a whiff of tear gas myself covering a protest at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. I loved taking a cable car to see a press conference by famous lawyer Melvin Belli.

 My sister helped me find an apartment overlooking Ocean Beach with a big bay view window in April. But the fog rolled in by May and the sun hardly ever shone again until September. My huge picture window was covered by sand and salt all the time. And what ever happened to summer? I had sinus headaches all the time moving through the various climate zones  to visit my parents’ house in the East Bay.

After a year and a half, why would I accept a transfer to muggy Washington, D.C., from paradise on earth? For one thing, I didn’t like my current boss. And why wouldn’t a cardinal accept a transfer to Rome? Of course he would go. Look at the athletes (Aaron Rodgers, Joe Kapp) who left the temperate Bay Area for places like Green Bay, Wis., and Minneapolis.

I realized then that place isn’t all that matters. I worked all day and was too tired in the evening to do much. Saturdays were chore day for laundry, etc. So there is Saturday night for partying with friends and Sunday for leisure visits to the great sites. I could do that in Washington. Of course, the people you associate with matter too.

Maybe that’s why I never moved back, and why I am happy now in the opposite of San Francisco, Cluster Springs, VA.