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Ten Years Gone
Dec. 16th, 2015 11:51 amAs of last Saturday, Emm and I have been living in San Francisco for ten whole years. That fact just occurred to me the other day as I was reading the local news on SFist.
Wow, ten years! We barely escaped winter storms before we left early on that Monday morning on December 12, one of our friends driving us to Newark Airport. Emm was busy with multiple work-related travel engagements, so it was basically on me to find us a decent starter apartment, which we eventually did a month previous. We'd done a major culling of our belongings before the movers came; I let our New Jersey friends dig through a goodly amount of my cds that I would not be taking with me (no worries, I'd already ripped them to my PC by that time). I'd sold my car to a local garage and we relied on carpooling until the transportation company came to take it for us.
In a way it was more of a tabula rasa for me than the move down to NJ was. I'd been a New Englander my entire life up to that point, so a move to the opposite coast, starting a new (and newly married) life, and even taking a new track on the Day Job front, was probably one of the bravest things I'd done to that point. I really had little to no idea what the future had in store for me. I mean, other than me continuing on my writing. And even that was in flux; I'd pretty much stuttered to a halt on all projects and had to start over from scratch. [Shades of ten years earlier, when I'd moved back home in '95 and had to relearn how to write. There's a good chance this was the same situation.]
How do I feel, now that I've been in this city for a decade? Well, have to say I still love it here. Never a dull moment. A few frustrating ones here and there, just like anywhere else, but for the most part I've come to see this city (and most of the Bay Area) as home turf now. I feel like a local now: I know my way around, I understand the moods and the movements, I have favorite corners of the city, and I have not gotten sick of driving around this area at all. I may not have close friends here, but I have a lot of acquaintances. We've become regulars at some of our local stops. And damn it all, it never stops being so picturesque! :p
Wow, ten years! We barely escaped winter storms before we left early on that Monday morning on December 12, one of our friends driving us to Newark Airport. Emm was busy with multiple work-related travel engagements, so it was basically on me to find us a decent starter apartment, which we eventually did a month previous. We'd done a major culling of our belongings before the movers came; I let our New Jersey friends dig through a goodly amount of my cds that I would not be taking with me (no worries, I'd already ripped them to my PC by that time). I'd sold my car to a local garage and we relied on carpooling until the transportation company came to take it for us.
In a way it was more of a tabula rasa for me than the move down to NJ was. I'd been a New Englander my entire life up to that point, so a move to the opposite coast, starting a new (and newly married) life, and even taking a new track on the Day Job front, was probably one of the bravest things I'd done to that point. I really had little to no idea what the future had in store for me. I mean, other than me continuing on my writing. And even that was in flux; I'd pretty much stuttered to a halt on all projects and had to start over from scratch. [Shades of ten years earlier, when I'd moved back home in '95 and had to relearn how to write. There's a good chance this was the same situation.]
How do I feel, now that I've been in this city for a decade? Well, have to say I still love it here. Never a dull moment. A few frustrating ones here and there, just like anywhere else, but for the most part I've come to see this city (and most of the Bay Area) as home turf now. I feel like a local now: I know my way around, I understand the moods and the movements, I have favorite corners of the city, and I have not gotten sick of driving around this area at all. I may not have close friends here, but I have a lot of acquaintances. We've become regulars at some of our local stops. And damn it all, it never stops being so picturesque! :p
