Old haunts

I had to ask the concierge how to get to the Powell & Market train station. Once there, I had to ask how to buy a ticket and which train would take me to Church Street. Turns out nineteen years is long enough to forget all kinds of things, and plenty long enough to transform the face of a neighborhood. I did manage to get out on the correct side of the Church & Market station, and when I emerged from underground the first thing I noticed was the neon sign above Aardvark Books. Then it all came flooding back. I was twenty-three years old and settling in after a rocky first few months of the San Francisco experiment. I moved from upstate New York all the way across the country on the hunch that the “something more in life” I was longing for would be more likely to announce itself in an unfamiliar setting, and that once I discovered this something more it would knock me out of my low altitude orbit toward the deeper space of my personal potential. On an early expedition of my new neighborhood I wandered into this used bookshop, picked up a copy of Ken Wilber’s No Boundary, and officially commenced my love affair with eastern philosophy, growth-oriented psychology, and the city of San Francisco.

I lived in the Bay Area for five years before returning to the east coast. This period was the most intense and life-altering chapter of my life thus far, and the streets of San Francisco, specifically the Lower Haight neighborhood, have impressed themselves upon the core of my being. Curiously, I had not found my way back until this past weekend, when I had just a day and a half to run around town while my wife attended her annual anthropology conference. It rained hard almost the entire time we were in town, but during a brief break in the weather I did manage to hop that train to my old neighborhood, where I visited my old house on Waller Street, walked up Haight Street to Buena Vista Park, to Ashbury Street where I went to graduate school, then all the way up to Golden Gate Park.

Of course, much has changed since 1993. There is now a coffee shop (Bean There) directly across the street from my old house, as well as countless businesses up and down Haight Street that I swear I had never laid eyes on before. CIIS (my former grad school) has moved to another part of the city, but the old building still made my heart skip a beat when I stood in front of it. The streets still felt electric to me, the overall vibe of the town still filled me with a sense of hope and possibility. Eventually, the clouds gathered again and rain started to fall, so I hurried back down the hill to the train station. Before I left the old neighborhood though, I just had to pop into Aardvark Books. I went straight to the psychology section and, sure enough, a copy of No Boundary was sitting on the shelf, waiting for the next kid with his head in the clouds to pick it up.

It’s strange how years turn into decades, how the lines around our eyes creep in and eventually give us away, how a sense of hope and possibility that buoys us along for so long can turn into a sinking feeling in the pit of our guts. I’m not quite sure what to do with all that’s been stirred up by this walk down memory lane. Next week I turn 42, and it’s true, I miss that sense of hope and possibility, that feeling of anticipation that comes with believing that anything might be around the next corner, that something more might announce itself at any moment. For now I’ll just sit and watch the swirl of images rearrange themselves in my mind, let the rain soak me to the bone, and wait for the storm to pass.