Stalking Wonder: Farewell to 7th Avenue

Oh, friends, I’ve been absent round these parts. Once I turned in my final manuscript for the book, things got busy. There was all the life maintenance deferred during deadline, and my mother’s 70th birthday—which I think you’ll agree deserves some celebrating. And there’s been the minor problem of having run out of space on my hard drive and being unable to download photos, but mostly there was San Francisco and 7th Avenue to deal with.

Yes, 7th Avenue. Isn’t seven a nice and lucky number?

Nine years ago this month, I moved into San Francisco. It was the height of the dot-com era and housing was hard to come by. Open houses drew forty to sixty people, some of whom showed up with checks already written for the first six months of rent. Others offered to pay more than asking price. At one open house I was given a questionnaire that put the sorority rush process to shame.

I was lucky, I was offered two houses (apparently I'm good at sorority rush). They were both in the neighborhood I wanted, both in my (limited) price range, and I turned them both down. My friends thought was crazy. "You don't know what it's like here now," they told me, "you've been in Japan a long time. You might not find anything else in your price range. The city has become expensive."

“They just weren’t right,” I told them. I wasn't being picky, I just had a feeling my house was still out there.

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday I read the listing for 7th Avenue.



I started calling it “my” apartment before I even saw it, before I even talked to the women who were looking for a housemate. I just knew. When they asked me to meet them on a weekend morning I agreed, though the last thing I wanted to do was go into the city where I had been working all week.

Ten minutes into the conversation they started talking about me as if I already lived there. “Do you want me to take a walk around the block while you discuss it?” I asked them.

“No,” they said, smiling broadly. They knew too.



That is how I ended up in the big Edwardian flat, half a block away from Golden Gate Park and on a direct tramline to my office at the publishing company. That is how I met Meg, still a dear friend, and how I fell in love with the fog as it rolls over the Sunset District and gets tangled in the tall cypress trees in the park. I could see the tops of those trees as I lay in bed, and at night I could hear the foghorns. I had grown up a stone’s throw away from San Francisco, across that red bridge, but it was exciting to be living in the city at last.



The flat was huge—two living rooms, two fireplaces, a formal dining room with big, fancy double doors that rolled shut with the sound of thunder. It was built in 1910 and all the doors were made of solid redwood. If you had to take them off the hinges—as you do to get furniture in or out—and you happened to drop one of your toe, you'd limp for a week and a half.



As lovely as it was, it was also inexpensive, a rare thing in this city of high prices (I won’t tell you how inexpensive, it would pain you). The landlord hadn’t raised the rent in over a decade. We took this seriously and made a point of bringing in roommates for whom this would be a boon—teachers, students, those working in nonprofits, arts, social work. The city had become expensive while I was gone, very expensive.

In the beginning there was a gang of us living there. I was delighted to be living with people, after seven years of living alone, and loved the rituals that developed. Wednesday night, without fail, was West Wing. On Mondays we sometimes went to very bad movies (we may or may not have smuggled beer into the theaters, which may or may not have made the films better). Sundays were often spent on the couch of our downstairs neighbors, where I discovered that the only thing better than watching Sex in the City with girlfriends, is watching it with gay men.



We were all fairly busy with our own lives, but the times together were fun. I remember one evening when, after a few drinks, we realized the dog needed to be walked (yes, there was even a dog who napped all afternoon in the sunny patch on the dining room). We bundled up and headed to the park in high spirits. There we rolled down grassy hills, laughed madly, and enacted our first game of fantasy baseball where we pretended to pitch an imaginary ball, running the bases in the ball field while the imaginary crowd went wild. Then we put on heels and spent the rest of the night drinking sangria in a tapas bar.

There were parties too. Holiday parties, birthday parties, a fondue party where I nearly burnt the house down (don’t ask, it’s embarrassing). The dining room had high wainscoting around it and on top of the ledge were twenty-five small votive candle holders. When we had parties the candles were lit and the whole room simply glowed. In those moments I felt rich and drunk on life.



It all seems hazy and golden now, those days of twenty-somethingness. It wasn’t always rosy. There was heartbreak, jobs lost and found. There were mismatched roommates and dirty dishes in the sink. It was life, with its pleasures and hard knocks. But on days when the knocks had been particularly hard, there was this house to come home to, and often a friendly face to chat with while curled up on one of the sofas. There were cups of tea and glasses of beer and conversations with neighbors on the stoop. At the best of times, it felt like a family.

I went to grad school while living here, writing papers late into the night, and I started my freelance business here. My roommate bought me a teapot to mark the occasion—and the tea strainer you see in the banner photo above. She explained that I no longer needed to take my tea with me in a commuter cup. I still remember how very odd it felt that first morning when everyone went off to work and I stayed home. Can I really do this? Am I allowed?

Over time there were fewer roommates. When Meg moved out I took over the second bedroom as my office, working in a room that was drenched in golden California light every afternoon, so bright I had to buy curtains so I could see the computer screen. There was a year and a half where it was only me living there, though I never liked it. The house was big and rambling, meant for people; it felt lonely to be there alone.



That was the year I got sick and started this blog. I spent days at home, staring out my window at the treetops in Golden Gate Park, watching the wisps of fog curl like tendrils. When I felt strong enough I cooked for friends, who came over for dinner when they were done with work. My friend Cheyenne and I once spent an evening immobile from exhaustion—her from a demanding job, me from illness—lying on neighboring sofas, staring at the flames in the fireplace.

Then, when I began to feel better, I decided to leave. I never thought I was moving away permanently, I simply decided to go to Seattle for the summer. It was to be a break from San Francisco, nothing more. Then I would come back to this city I love, to a house that had become home. I never thought Seattle might be longterm.

But life has a funny way to making up its own mind. I did come back, but I left again, and then again. For the past two years I’ve been here only sporadically. I’ve come and gone, and it’s come to be that I have two homes—one on 7th Avenue that contains my furniture, another one in Seattle that (usually) contains me.

When I moved to Seattle the younger sister of a friend of mine moved into 7th Avenue, staying in one of the empty bedrooms. She’s in her twenties and excited about living in the city. The first weekend her friends came over. I heard them laughing in the bathroom as they got ready to go out and I smiled. I remember those first dazzling days of living in San Francisco, the sheer giddiness of this beautiful city. When they left I told them to have fun and I meant it. They will have fun, and they will have hard times, that’s just the way it is. But I know she has a home to come back to at the end of the day. Sometimes that makes all the difference.

I spent this past week packing up my furniture, my books, the artwork I had left behind when I went to Seattle. As I wrapped glassware and candlesticks I remembered the times—good and bad—the parties, the conversations, the meals and cups of tea and jokes shared around the dining room table. This place has been my home, but it increasingly doesn’t feel like home anymore. When I come back now it feels like visiting a college dorm or first apartment.

Ah, yes. I remember that time in my life. It was good, but it’s over now.



The furniture I packed this week—things that were swaddled in blankets and lifted onto a truck—is coming to Seattle. It will be put into a garage to wait until I’ve found my next home. I don’t know where that is yet. Sometimes it scares me, this leap of faith I’m taking. I love San Francisco and I loved my life there. It is and always will be home. But sometimes it’s good to leave home—not easy, but good.

At least I hope that it is. I hope that it will be for me.

As for 7th Avenue, I’m not turning in my keys just yet (did I mention: seriously amazing rent deal?). It’s a hard world sometimes, I might need to run home again. I’m glad it’s still there; I’m grateful.

Thanks, 7th Avenue. I was lucky, indeed, to have found you. I hope to be lucky again.