Smaller and different and totally the same. That's what it feels like to be here in my home town of San Jose. Got in yesterday, drove to my old neighborhood, past the Winchester Mystery House, down Moorpark, past Blackford High which is now part of Harker Academy but at one time was just another public high school in the Campbell Union School District. Eased past the house I grew up in. So strange to think a different family lives there now, in the same house, the same rooms. And how it's not the same house the same rooms anymore. The trees are there, but look unloved, unclimbed.
And yet, Mount Hamilton still looms to the East, and the Santa Cruz Mountains shadow the west, like they always have and always will, for at least a few more millennia. The air yesterday had that fresh Bay Area thing going which happens from time to time, where you can see for miles, and just breathing it in feels like drinking a tall glass of spring water. There is a life force in the Bay Area, and it just is.
There is something about returning to where you grew up that reminds you of who you are, who you were, and who you want to be. About seeking out places and people who are still part of your life. And also seeking things that no longer are, and that feeling of how it must be some kind of magic trick, this not having everything being just as it was. Like maybe, Blackford is still Blackford, Carrow's is still Carrow's and not a Denny's.
Maybe Life really is a dream.
Well, in today's dream, I'm sitting in a hotel that is right where there used to be a 7-11, which was my main place to get comic books when I was a kid. Comic books and Slurpees. Behind it there was a vacant lot that had been turned into a sort of dirt bike track with little ramps we could jump our bikes over. I don't know who, but someone, some Johnny Appleseed of bicycles, roamed the South Bay and turned all the vacant lots into places you could do your best to endanger your life by riding really fast and then taking flight on little ramps made of dirt.
This same Appleseed seemed to have a penchant for dirty magazines, as there was always a stash in all these vacant lots. We had the one behind the 7-11, another one over near Manor Market, one near the Mormon Church over on Borina Drive, and many others.
San Jose, at least the Strawberry Park area, was a magic realm full of danger and dirt of all forms.
I am here to collect things out of storage from when we sold the house I grew up in last year. Also to see old friends, go to the beach and gaze at the Pacific and hear the Sea Lions, eat the best Falafel sandwich known to man, and wander the past, catching up with ghosts and phantoms, letting them know where I'm at and asking them what it all means and meant, to live and die, to be here, in this town, this world, this motel room that once was a 7-11.
I feel the urge now to take a walk along my old paper route path.
And to find some coffee.
I remember, when the house on Belvedere was my home, waking each morning very early, and already my mom would be up, and the coffee would be percolating on the stove, and I would lay in bed, knowing a cup of life would be waiting for me downstairs as I started my day.
On.
Here's a song. It's Corral Nocturne from Copland's Rodeo. It makes me think of bicycles and huge oak trees and the cool morning air, of neighborhood cats and the world lighting up as the sun rose, filling our little houses all the same with gold and glory, of a brief moment each day when all the madness of the world was confined to the papers in my bag, and a new day was open. I didn't have the easiest life. I don't think anyone does. But I did have golden mornings and dirt tracks for my bike, and a best friend and a dog, and a mom who made coffee, and music like this.
Enjoy.
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