Migrations

My neighborhood: "Hey, I can see my house from here!"

After living in Toronto for 17 years --prior to that a year in Rome, several in New York, one in Virginia-- I drove my rental truck over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco 19 years ago today. My lover of that era, Jeff, had moved here a few months ahead of me. He had had a hugely humiliating and very public firing as director of the largest AIDS organization in the country, GMHC in Manhattan, and was trying to find a new footing far away from all that. We had planned to moved to California eventually, but fate and history moved that date up.

Although I had fallen in love with this city, my arrival was not a happy one. I had not seen him in almost three months, though we talked on the phone every day. But when I got out of the truck after my nine day drive across America, he just stood there and said hello and never touched me. No hug, no kiss. Nothing. For three days. The next six months, as I searched for work and he deteriorated under the pressure of his own unemployment, our relationship fell apart. I discovered that he had found someone else; never did admit it. I still avoid walking on the block where we lived because it reminds me of those days: arriving with such hope and finding collapse instead.

I eventually got a job and moved into the little place where I still live. Shortly thereafter, I met Thomas.  In the ensuing years I have know ebb tides and flood tides, love and loss, tough times and times that still leave me speechless with gratitude.

This is a beautiful, beautiful city. As long as it's in my power, I would live nowhere else. Over the last years, I have found myself feeling very much an outsider to the politics of the place and "Chinatown", B's all-too-accurate name for the Castro ghetto where I live, though very familiar and convenient, often strikes me as pretty extraterrestrial. One writer described it as "a refugee camp with potted plants and nice architecture." But the weather, for this man who has still spent two thirds of his life in place where winter means snow and dead trees and freezing temperatures, is a continual miracle to me, so temperate. Including purple flowers. The topography is stunning; I never tire of it. And the human size of the place, on almost every level...well, I don't take San Francisco for granted.

I am glad in many ways that I started out in life as a New Yorker. At their best, New Yorkers combine a clear-eyed and blunt assessment of the world with a capacity for humor and quite astonishing kindness. And I am glad that I wound up here on the other coast. The one real disadvantage is that my family remains on the other side of the continent. I kinda wish they have not stopped there, but had emigrated out here instead. Because there's a thick and old layer of San Francisco, the ordinary "native peoples" that you don't hear about on the tours, who are very much like New Yorkers. My old landlord. B himself --the man actually says "cuppa cawfee"-- and his family. (I remember all the ways in which I got to know his home town with him.) All the good stuff of that Original Thirteen Colony metropolis, but here, with way better weather, a smaller and more human scale of life, and views that fill the eye with wonder. It's a measure of my affection for this place that I sometimes wish that it was here that I had been born.