Going Home

For the past four days here in San Francisco I've been replaying the tape over and over. "We've settled in well", "Yes, he loves his school", "Chicago is a fabulous city", "It's so wonderful to see the kids with all their cousins", "My practice is going great", "Our quality of life is better", "I'm happier there". All of it true. I'm glad we moved. I like living in Chicago. In so many very important ways, it's better for us.

And yet this was my home for almost ten years. The formative years of my marriage and career. Where my children were born. Where most of my family is. Where I have old, dear friends; I am known to them and don't have to spend half our time together explaining who I am and why. I can drive around San Francisco without a map or even having to think about where I'm going. When I walk into a coffee shop I recognize the staff and note that one of them is uncharacteristically friendly and register surprise, wondering about this apparent personality transformation. I dodge a great many people, pretending not to see them, as I talk intently with the friends I have chosen to see on this brief visit.

I recognize passersby whose names I never knew; even the homeless people are so familiar to me that I hear their voices and know their words before they speak to me. A brilliant pink sunset streaking its way over the ocean makes me stop the car just to take it in; how I could've forgotten what the light and sky here look like I do not know. I see a stone building that was my home only a few months ago, and yet in its front windows stand the back of a huge ominous-looking television screen and a tall wooden bookcase. Don't they know we don't watch TV? And that the big bookcase belongs back in the office, not the living room? How will the boys watch the garbage truck out those windows on Friday morning? How will I wave to them from down below when I'm going to work?

It was in this context that I have haunted former client's homes, my old office, and Golden Gate Park this weekend. Had meals at my favorite places and reconnected with family and friends. Stopped in for an appointment with the hair dresser I went to for all of those years here. And danced tippsily with friends at Liesl's wonderful wedding reception. For stretches it felt like I had never left and at other times I was a near stranger in this place where my own full life seems to have continued on without me.

And so as this last day has worn on, the melancholy has set in. One place still too new to feel like "home", the other place always a home to me but never to feel the same. If home is where the heart is, then my heart is split down the middle tonight with one half many hundreds of miles away, nestled in a sweet little blue house with my sleeping family and the other half perched happily up high in a palm tree on Dolores Street, drinking good coffee and watching the moon rise over the San Francisco skyline.