Oh, San Francisco

The City by the Bay seduces me over a forty-year relationship

Oh, San Francisco.

The first time I saw the City by the Bay was in 1984; I was nineteen years old, and the man who showed me the city was to become my one true love.

We had been conducting a long-distance pen-pal relationship via letters during my freshman year of college at Boston University and had not acknowledged that we were having anything other than a friendship. 

After a series of disastrous decisions that ended with me dropping out and becoming homeless, I took a plane to LA and stopped briefly at my grandmother's in Santa Barbara. She had an ask-no-questions-make-no-judgments open-door policy, for which I was grateful. From her musty-smelling living room, I called Mike on her wall-mounted phone with the long curly cord; it was the first time I’d spoken to him since he gave me his address on Kauai, and I left for college. In the intervening year, he’d moved to California while I went off to sight-unseen Boston with unrealistic stars in my eyes.

"Did you mean what you said about showing me San Francisco?" My voice trembled as I tangled my fingers in the cord. "Because I'd really like to see it. I’ve heard it’s beautiful."

"Yes. Come on up!" His enthusiastic response thrilled me. 

I had somewhere to go, someone to meet, and a fun place to see; I was desperate for all three of those things after my epic crash-and-burn.

I hung up the phone and in a jubilant, terrified panic, realized I had fallen in love with him through our letters; it was, after all, 1984. Such things happened back then.

The next day I got on a Greyhound bus to San Francisco.

I stayed with friends of his, and soon got a job helping at their in-home daycare. Each day we had off Mike showed me San Francisco, the place where he was born, much in the manner of a magician producing perfect experiences from beneath a fog-gray cape.

Fisherman's Wharf was not the commercial tourist hub it is now. Back then, it was a few seafood restaurants and a row of shanty-like tents, counters, and tables with various kinds of seafood fresh from the bay resting on beds of ice in battered coolers, behind glass to keep out flies, or bubbling in pots over propane stoves.

We elbowed our way forward to one of the tents selling Dungeness crabs, Mike chose a couple hot from the pot, bought a tub of melted butter and a fresh baguette, and then we drove in his old white station wagon surfmobile (nicknamed La Bomba) to watch the sunset from the roof of one of the buildings at Fort Point, located beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

The fort was blocked off and unrestored in those days, encircled with a chain-link fence. Mike knew a peeled-back corner and we squeezed through it and trespassed up onto the pitted cement roof of the old fort, sitting on a Mexican blanket to eat my first-ever Dungeness crab and San Francisco sourdough. We watched the sun go down, gleaming on the struts of the Golden Gate bridge, and snuggled against each other (platonically) in the cutting wind.

View from Ft. Point…Photo by Sasha • Stories on Unsplash

Another day, Mike took me to the zoo. We wandered the gray cement aisles between the cages, ignoring the pervasive smell of fish from the penguin exhibit and eating cotton candy from a shared cone of it. I was depressed by the sad tigers, miserable in the chill, until we rode the carousel.

I'd seldom been on one before, and as we whirled around and around in a sphere of light, happy music tinkling in the background, I couldn’t quite believe I was here in San Francisco, falling in love with a handsome, amazing man riding a gilded lion as I galloped beside him on a golden-horned unicorn. 

(I was very young and romantic. I’m a lot less young now, but just as romantic.) 

Another time, Mike took me skimboarding on Ocean Beach, the huge swath of sand and dunes that define the western edge of San Francisco. Both of us wore wetsuits like seals, and ran across the hard silver sand, leaping onto the boards and wiping out spectacularly (me) and carving a turn off the lip of an incoming wave (him.)

After I'd bruised myself enough in the shockingly-cold water, while Mike kept surfing I walked the beach and filled my hands with perfect sand dollars. I made a mandala design with them on the beach; I'd never seen so many big, unbroken ones in my life, and as I lay them out it felt like I was leaving a mark on the sand of San Francisco.

Another time, Mike and I hiked up steep streets and stairs to Coit Tower; looking out at the view of the city spread below us, in the lee of the stone promontory he held my hand. I was giddy with joy.

A month or so later, we ate at an actual sit-down restaurant near Ghirardelli Square the night before I left to go back to school. He'd proposed to me, and we were engaged, and outside in the shadows, he kissed me for the first time. 

San Francisco had wrapped its foggy magic around us and bound our hearts together.

Years later, married, we lived in the little town of Fairfax in Marin County on the north side of SF, and our son was born there. 

My younger sister Bonny visited us, touring colleges, and one terrifying day, I drove her alone into San Francisco in my battered little 1969 stick shift Karmann Ghia to look at an art college she was considering. I was so terrified of the traffic and the steep street inclines, at one point, I pulled over to the side of the road and cried. 

She has gleefully never let me forget my poor driving skills. (In my defense, I got my driver's license at age twenty after growing up in the jungle on Kauai. To this day, the San Francisco traffic, hills, and parking terrify me.)

Bonny didn't end up going to that art college, but many years in the future, her daughter is now a student at an art college in San Francisco. What a full circle! I love seeing my niece on my visits there--which are frequent. 

This brings us to now, forty years later. 

Bounded by water, the city hasn’t expanded much but it’s grown upward, and denser, gentrified heavily as a tech hub for the United States. 

Our scientist daughter has made San Francisco her home for the last ten years, and as a family, we've made new memories in the city: her wedding in San Francisco's Stern's Grove, followed by children born in the birthplace of their grandfather Mike and great-grandparents, Everett and Shirley. Many outings with our grandbabies have made the parks, zoo, train, the Japanese Tea Garden, and the California Aquarium at Gate Park familiar and beloved.

That said, you have to be alert in San Francisco. It's a city after all, and it has a lot of problems: overcrowding, high prices, homeless, and lots of trash blowing around that includes random needles in the street. I once stepped in a pile of human excrement next to a parked car, and that shit was really hard to get out of my shoe.

Even so--the cable cars are always running to carry you to the top of a hill, over to massive, wild, wonderful Golden Gate Park, or down to the ocean. In San Francisco, there's lots of room to breathe and every permission to be your most colorful, individual self.

Whether I drive into San Francisco along Highway 101 from my new home in Oregon or fly in over the Bay enjoying the patterns of the salt ponds and the traffic pouring like a river of light over the Bay Bridge… I've found a place that has seduced even me, who doesn't like cities, into a deep fondness that's pretty close to love.

Have you ever been to San Francisco? Comments are open!