Hyde Street

Don was at my apartment on Hyde Street in San Francisco, chopping vegetables, wearing a white shirt and jeans, when I got home from work. I took the hairband and let loose his long, curling hair, putting it on my wrist. Then I set the table in front of the window looking east and poured from a bottle of organic Chardonnay. Don had made pasta with pesto, steamed corn with zucchini, cauliflower and mushrooms and a few sunflower seeds. 

Just before eating, we went up on the roof and looked out toward the west where the sun had set in flaming gold. The water in San Francisco Bay to the north was very bright. Don said he wouldn’t tell me why it looked like this. He wanted it to remain ”magic” for me. The city was spread out in front of us in many mauve shades. The moon hadn’t risen.

It was October, so warm that all of the restaurants on the street had moved tables outdoors on the sidewalk under the ficus trees. After dinner, we took my laptop out and found a quiet place to sit and have tea and dessert. The moon had come out, shining full and silver down on us. But we were hardly there. We were deep in a script we were working on, in Redondo Beach, having Sunday dinner with the Bairds and Davises, characters based on Don’s relatives. We had been working on the script that became “Life’s Wicked Road” for several weeks. I knew these characters well now, but not their idiom. Don provided that.

Don was coming to the city once a week for tai chi practice, but the script was taking over. It was so exciting to see this thing grow between us! Topping off this amazing evening, we did first and second section of the slow set in a tiny park set between apartment buildings, just to say we had done it. The moonlight poured down, making it bright enough to see.

I lived for 50 years in and around San Francisco, often not in the city. But all the tides washed us in and then out. It was the city of my youth and freedom. Don’s too, though slightly later. But my last apartment there, at the top of Russian Hill, was perhaps the quintessential urban home. And an evening having tea outdoors on a civilized street the epitome of the city experience.

The idea of home is a romantic notion, bound to memories of where one grows up, where one’s family is mostly settled, even, for some, where their dead are buried. The concept of an ancestral home is familiar in literature, but I think it is from a time when the world’s population was considerably smaller. If we are lucky, there may still be some family seat which can take in the individuals who have left when the going gets rough. But large family groups living together for generations can result in somewhat feudal relationships. Most of us want a life, and a place of our own.

Of necessity then, it is helpful to think about what we require in a home. Hardly any other question is as important as what calls to us about place and what sort of home we can make there. But we must be honest about it. So many people have now had an experience of being evacuated, of taking their most precious possessions and bedding down in emergency shelters. Climate change may bring about migrations of many sorts. We should all be ready to simplify our lives to accommodate the growing numbers of people in the world and threats to other species. E.O. Wilson wondered whether humans could be restricted to half the earth, leaving the other half to the natural world.

Even as a child, I did not have what some would call a “fixed abode.” We moved from one small Midwestern town to another, never staying long enough to understand the entrenched economic and class relationships of the farming families. Which made it easier when I mostly lived in rental housing in San Francisco to attach myself provisionally, though attach myself I did. Wherever the teapot and the toaster were was home.

Thus, examining what my inner self requires in terms of that sacred word “home” is interesting. Americans of my generation have been itinerant, taking our excellent educations wherever they would be valued. Usually not in small towns. Every place I lived had its advantages, and I made the most of them. I never owned a car, so my apartments were often chosen so I could easily get to work. A car was a liability in our crowded city. There was no place to put it.

The Hyde Street apartment had been solidly built, probably about 1920. It had hardwood floors, big windows, four quite large rooms and a working fireplace. For the first time I bought furniture, including a beautiful bed. What I missed in that apartment, was the big wild Golden Gate park, which I had previously lived beside. But from Hyde Street I could walk to work, down to catch a ferry to Angel Island, to an excellent grocery, even downtown if I wanted to. The neighborhood was full of extraordinary restaurants. And of course there were buses to tai chi class, the library and anywhere else I wanted to go. I had friends whose homes I could walk to! 

Briefly, the Hyde Street apartment was just right, set in San Francisco, a jeweled city on its peninsula beside the Pacific. What I need from home is the experience of dailiness. Thus the teapot and the toaster. I need to see how one day stacks up against another. I watch a few friends take off in big land cruisers, happy nomads, but I don’t envy them. Home is the shell within which to protect and rejuvenate the tender self, as well as a place to strike off from and enjoy the wide world. It is the finite place within which the infinite mind locates itself and reaches out to the Indra’s net of my people.

This finite place is increasingly smaller and in cities. I am quite happy with a monastic apartment at this time. If you keep it simple, it will change with the seasons and life going on around it and you will not get tired of it, as in the Japanese tea houses whose simple decor changed for every occasion. It would be nice to have enough space to entertain and have a garden, but you can also meet friends in restaurants and in public gardens. The best cities do not neglect these amenities.

But home is also where Don is. We have moved to Los Angeles County, a network of small communities with a population of ten million. Though the four seasons in Los Angeles are reputed to be earthquake, fire, flood and riot, we live in a 100-year-old house divided into four apartments, which doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. And somehow the collection of so many people in one place makes for an easy camaraderie which can be as deep or as shallow as you want it to be. Our script for “Life’s Wicked Road” is finished, of course, and would only take a couple of million bucks to produce.

I always thought Los Angeles would be tough to live in, so dependent have I grown on wild spaces. But its underlying desert is everywhere apparent and it has desert skies. Also, if I am honest, I have to admit that my legs are a little more constrained, requiring my mind to do more of the walking. I am a little less desperate about moving in space. Thus, teapot and toaster in their appropriate spots, I make the most of where I find myself.