Monday, November 20, 2006

I've Only Just Begun

It's been 4 years since I left this bucolic street in San Francisco and came East across our great country. 14 months after 9/11 and I was on my way to New York.

So many changes since then: in me and in the country and with friends and family. Now, I'm a regular writer on my friend Porter's blog (goofyblog), but I feel the need to break out with my own as well.

Liberty Hill is the neighborhood in San Francisco just east of the Mission, just west of the Castro, just down the hill from Noe Valley and just south of Dolores Park. It's a little-known set of blocks in one of the finest sections of the City. I lived there for almost 7 years into the first part of the 21st century.

After spending my whole life in California, I needed to venture out and try things elsewhere. Change is the only constant in life and that's been true for me in spades. Strangely enough, I had 3 friends on that block who all left within 12 months of my departure. Johnny went to India to live permanently. He died there a year later of pancreatic cancer. Ken moved to South Bend for a job after his fur business closed in the City. I visited him once going east, then later coming back from the east. He moved to Connecticut a few years ago, but not before staying in Chicago, Alaska and Yonkers. Jeff moved to Thailand to be with his 28-year old girlfriend in Chaing Mai. I guess he's doing fine. He loved Southeast Asia and at the end there, hated San Francisco.

He thought he was too old for the City and he was probably right. The neighborhood we lived in was full of the wealthy. Tracy Chapman lived across the street until she, too, moved on in Summer of 2002. I like her music and whenever I hear it I think of Liberty Street and of San Francisco. Once I heard her song, Heaven's Here On Earth, in a bar in Virginia City, Nevada, and got instantly homesick.

The other day I heard some of her tunes playing somewhere here in NYC. Her stuff is so simple, so elegant. Her mansion was on the market for 2 months at a $2 million asking. We took a looksee while it was being shown and discovered that she had made the top floor into 2 apartments, though you had to descend the staircase and use her front door. That finally explained the older white guy we used to see coming down the outside stairs.

Tracy was really economizing!

My intention with this blog is to expand the postings I've been putting on goofyblog and to post material that might geared to the goofyblog audience. I'll still post there. But I'll put more of my own imprint on the postings here.

And off we go. . .

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