Leaving San Francisco

We didn’t know for sure what their lives were like before they came to our town. We watched them from afar, from high buildings, from shadowy cafes across the street. We watched them in the rain as they lined up for their buses, with their backpacks and their sensible shoes, their skinniness, their soft hands, their way of walking which was arrogant in its sloppiness, as if they could barely contain their contempt for a world in which a person had to walk, as if it were only a matter of time before they would come up with a better way, like floating on invisible wings. They rode extravagantly efficient bicycles costing thousands of dollars and weighing less than a loaf of bread. As citizens, they lobbied for the things that mattered to them: Bicycle lanes, safer streets. They gathered in online groups to scan their neighborhoods for suspicious behavior. They opened a bakery on Noriega where the bread was inedible. Their friends flocked to the terrible bakery and ate heavy, half-baked dough. They dismantled San Francisco piece by piece and replaced it with replicas that were easy and inexpensive to make and contained visual references to the San Francisco they had heard about. They bought houses at Noriega and 46th Avenue because the commute on 280 was easy. They bought hot rods and guns and flew American flags not on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day but on other days too, as if to say, Hey San Francisco, this is how you do it now, you fly the flag, you buy a gun, don’t you know anything about America? The truth was, no, we did not know anything about America. We had come to San Francisco to forget about America and over the years had mostly succeeded until these new people arrived to remind us.

If you weren’t rich, you were desperate and frightened. San Francisco had become an opulent gulag of traffic and money. Everyone was either unexpectedly rich or unexpectedly poor. Unable to imagine any other future, we said one thing at dinner parties: Yes, you could sell, but where would you go? We could not imagine an alternative life. We gazed out from behind steel bars of our own imagining. We dimly sensed our own cowardice, our own fear, our own lack of imagination. But years before, when we had moved to SF we had acted on the opposite qualities: Courage, imagination, trusting our instincts! Our instincts would have to come to the fore once again. We would have to make another leap. Finally in 2015 our desperation became too great. We were hitting bottom. We hatched a plan: We would flee. We would just go. We knew our days were numbered. It was just a matter of someone saying it out loud.

And so we fled. We fled like tenants in their pajamas fleeing a burning building.

You could say we left San Francisco because America had changed and that America’s change was a natural change and our decision to leave was a natural change. You could say that we had come to San Francisco as young people because it is a city for the young and that we would leave when we were no longer young. You could say that in leaving we were admitting defeat, that we had not been smart enough, had not seen the future coming, had not acquired more wealth while we had the chance, that we blew it, that we should have been more ambitious and nimble in our work lives, that while we pretended we were leaving out of choice we were in fact being weeded out in a Darwinian process of selection, that like aging lions on the savannah we had lost a step and were surpassed. You could say that for all our intelligence we didn’t see the future that was right in front of our eyes, and even if we dimly sensed it we did not respond to it with anything like the furor and resolve it required, that even though we knew America, even though we ourselves were deeply American and so we knew in our bones how it worked, even though we knew that in America you’re on your own and if you don’t see the future coming, it will steamroll over you, we still let it happen. You could say that we were unrealistic. We wanted things to stay the same even though we knew they were changing and when they changed we refused to reinvent ourselves once again because reinventing ourselves in response to this change felt not liberating but stifling. We could have created new sustaining rituals for ourselves but we didn’t want to. We wanted the San Francisco we loved and it wasn’t there anymore. You could say that in the search for affordable real estate we had unwisely moved out of the spiritual heart of Bohemian San Francisco, the Mission and the Haight, and had gone to the Sunset where it was safe, thinking that was a wise and practical thing to do, whereas in reality it was the beginning of the end. You could say all these things and they would all be true.

Castiglion Fiorentino san francisco

Cary Tennis, your writing has touched my heart and mind for years – from back in the Salon days when I first encountered your profoundly compassionate wisdom and sensibility; eventually I couldn’t contain my affection for your writing and began to read it aloud to my husband and he, too, came to love your writing.

In your very gifted role of advisor to the troubled, I have written you a letter that has grown and shrunk in repeated transformations over many years but never sent it. I am convinced you could offer needed wisdom but I’m afraid you wouldn’t want to or couldn’t and I guess, in a paradoxical way, you do help because even though I don’t send it, I write it and “you” read it…. and so it goes.

One of my husband’s oldest friends, his college roommate, his best man at our wedding, died last year in his San Francisco home where he had lived for many years. His ashes were scattered in that area that he, an Indiana boy, had come to love and consider his home. We had lost touch with him over the years and after his passing we learned many things about his life that we had never before known. He was not one of the rich people who went to San Francisco, far from it, but he had a home and a job and friends, and had roots in that edge of the country.

It is a particular kind of longing and ache when a place you have loved and wanted to stay in and didn’t really want it to change because it made you happy just the way it was, even though you could complain and gripe about this or that thing that was annoying, but deep down you still loved it like you love someone who is so dear to you and so “always” to you that you can critique without fear of the loss – until the loss happens. Sometimes it’s a hometown, the place where all the memories began, where the smells and foods and places and people and changes in light and the way the river or creeks and woods looked and felt become part of your own bones and spirit. Sometimes it’s the place where your parents took you every summer, back to their home to visit the folks of their hometown, back before you ever were, and you get a glimpse of times and places and people from even farther back, like some kind of archaeologist or time traveler.

You begin to notice the changes. Big, fancy houses go up where small bungalows once sufficed. Small houses where the factory workers lived begin to collapse as if their knees could no longer hold them up. The boxes thrown up in the late 1940s for GIs back from the wars and their wives and new babies are boarded up and trashed now, maybe burned down from drug-stuff. The big fancy houses of another century where, realtors used to say, “lumber barons” used 15 different kinds of wood and imported marble from ITALY and stained glass from dismantled churches in, oh, say, England, are now carved up into 20 apartments, shabby and uncaring of the marble and glass, except maybe to sell for drugs or, maybe, food.

Then Mom and Dad can no longer take care of the old homeplace. Brothers and sisters have scattered to the winds of the earth. Ashes get scattered. Houses fall. Lots are vacant. Weeds grow. Cats roam and dogs breed and attack interlopers. We sit at screens staring at a website called FindAGrave and look for the graves of people we are told were “our people,” but we never knew them and the names are strange: Dovie, India, Jeremiah, Maudie, Lela….

Well, Cary Tennis, you have lived in Italy for quite a while now. It’s a funny thing to feel that you miss someone you never really knew and someone who still touches your heart and spirit with his writing, but that’s the way it is. I guess someday I will send that letter to you, maybe somewhere in Italy, from here, somewhere in America. America, where we seem more lost and displaced as people rooted and stuck where we are than people who are on the move all over the world. The changes in America are baffling, disheartening, unimaginable. American flags flying not on the 4th of July or Memorial Day, you wrote, but that doesn’t even touch on Confederate flags flying in places where they never belonged to the Confederacy, and yet they make a statement about what they belong to, who they are – and it is not America, is it. We don’t know what America is anymore and America doesn’t seem to know either. We can’t make sense of this world. We are, at last, glad to be old.

Thank you, again and again, for your beloved communications. Stay well. We are glad you are in this world.