From East to West: A Six-month Retrospective

It has been 6 months and a handful of days since Andy, Apollo and I completed our cross-country trek to our new home here in Oakland. We have begun digging our metaphoric hole, and slowly but surely our roots are starting to grow. I have decided to dedicate the next X number of weeks to a retrospective of the first half of our first year here (where X = however long it takes.) These first six months might have been the most intense chunk of time we'll get while we are here. Things are starting to be more and more routine for us now, and we are adapting to our surroundings more. Thankfully things are much less stressful these days than they had been during our first few months, but as we become acclimated to our environment, our sharp senses for the new things will dull as we get used to our home. Starkly-new things will come less frequently as we get comfortable here.

As I started thinking about what I would include in this topic, my outline began to grow to an overwhelming length. I started writing, and it grew even bigger as I got into a groove. Double hence my decision to break this out over the course of a few posts. I doubt any of you would have read a giant one 'til the end, anyway.

I'll start today with locale and see when it feels appropriate to quit...

Places

We are loving our location here. It starts with our apartment. Last night, sitting in the two adirondack chairs my dad crafted for us, looking out upon our glorious view of Oakland, Andy and I declared that we are currently residing in the best place we have lived in yet. (For those of you who saw both our 3b apartment and the house, this place is a lot different than the trend we had going there.) Our building is up on a hill, so we walk almost straight into our third floor unit from the outside, going up as many steps as we go down from the street. On the back we have a narrow balcony, just wide enough to angle the adirondack chairs my dad made us to let them glide the way they were built to. From there we can look down on Grand Ave, a commercial street where people and cars bustle around. To the East we can see the hills of Oakland and Berkeley dotted with more houses, to the West Oakland's sky scrapers and the hills across the bay in San Fransisco. It is even beautiful when it rains. Rather than looking up and seeing the rain come down upon us, we can see the rain travel from the sky all the way down below as it makes its way to the Earth. On Sunday afternoons the live jazz from the cafe on the street makes its way up and whispers to us through our windows. Every time I put the dishes away in the kitchen I can hear the action outside and it gives me the feeling I am on top of the world, protected by a sunshine-filled safe haven.

Now that we're renting again, we can do home improvements for fun not obligation. We fashioned some shelves on the walls of the kitchen for cookbooks and canisters of bulk food and we hung our pot rack over the stove. The space in the kitchen is a lot smaller than the one from our house, but it seems like better used here and fits our personalities better. We did get rid of a lot of things we don't use enough to warrant keeping in our limited room. That goes for the whole place. We've only got a few closets to shove our crap and no external storage at all. But it feels good to be picky about what stays in the house because ultimately we have a lot less clutter and that helps my brain relax when I'm home.

We do live in Oakland where crime is high and murder is frequent, but our 'hood is quiet. We can take the dog after dark out without feeling in danger, and our neighbors are down-to-earth. Most of our immediate neighbors are renters, too. It's not until we get to a few blocks away when we start seeing the beautiful yards manicured by a bunch of migrant workers. Even those houses are modest, it seems like no one does their own yard work out here. I'll save a more detailed description of the array of homes nearby when I write about Andy's beloved-bordering-obsessive walks with Apollo.

(Pic from GLT's website)

I have never lived within walking distance of so many wonderful places. I have heard Oaktown referred to as the city of neighborhoods because it is as though a dozen or more little villages make up this one big city. The majority of these villages are almost void of the crime Oakland is famous for. We live on a ridge between two of these good places, each within walking distance, if we're willing to walk back up our bear of a hill. Right outside our apartment building we have a set of stairs that serve as our own secret passage way to the city. They lead to Grand Ave, a street lined with businesses, including the cafe I am writing in right now (I guess their website isn't quite ready yet. It is a new joint, I suppose.) About half a mile from our house is the Grand Lake Theater. Across the street from that place is the park where the Farmers' Market is each of the 52 Saturdays of the year.

(I found this pic on bgreenlee's flickr page. He's got great pics of the Bay Area in there.)

And right behind the Farmers' Market lies Lake Merritt, the jewel of Oakland that provides an excellent running path that tires Apollo out for an entire day. We can see Safeway from our kitchen window, but there is a new Trader Joe's on the brink of opening about a mile away. Andy has the car most of the time, but I don't mind (most days.) Anything I need from banking to a manicure to frozen yogurt is right down the hill.

Just over the Bay Bridge from us lies San Fransisco. On a low-traffic night it takes about 15 minutes and four bucks to get there by car, or 25 minutes and $7 to get there via BART. We've been surprisingly few times. I think maybe we still have it in our head that it's like the old hour-drive and T ride to Boston from our house. So far we have gone to SF to eat, of course. We've been spending more and more time with Nicki, who I went to high school with, and her (and now our) friend Lindsay. The big city makes me feel in part country bumpkin who's totally out of her element, but also in love with the action enough to want to live there. The sky-scraper part of the city is enormous compared to Oakland's. The streets are much grimier. But, there is something electric in the air that makes it feel as though the city itself is alive, and that is still completely exciting to me.

Just a few miles down the road in Plesanton--that's where Andy works--it feels like a completely different planet. Planet Suburbearon. Apollo and I spent the day there sometime last month. While Andy worked away the day in his cube, I sat working in wi-fi cafes in town. I get more work done when I'm not at home, so this was a fun way to spice things up for me. At cafe #1 before lunch, I was one the only woman between the ages of 20 and 40 without a toddler or two in tow. There were at least three of those, and they were all blond for some reason. They were on a mommy dates, I suppose. Their all-terrain strollers were all pimped-out with those big round tires and water-proof upholstery. And while one kid was strapped in tight and mommy was paying at the register, the older brothers had free time to stick their sticky fingers in any biscotti jar they could reach. They were allowed to have one to share with shorty in the prison seat, and of course you can guess who kept the bigger half to themselves.

I found this all amusing in the morning. In the afternoon, however, I felt déjà vu. After meeting up with Andy for lunch and a few frisbee tosses, Apollo and I headed back downtown. I saddled up in a big leather chair in cafe #2 only to be followed in shortly by the same pack of moms and their little boys in the ATSs. I would think it would be hard to make your own fun in a corporate coffee house at age 3, but they seemed to be doing pretty well with their set of matchbox cars. The moms continued to sip their flavored fruit drinks, just as they did before lunch. Whatever they were talking about was drowned out by the conversation of the 40-something women sitting in front of me talking about the plastic-surgery seminar one had recently attended. One day is fine, but I was reminded right then and there that P-town is not for me.

I haven't gotten around to mentioning anything about Berkeley, Emeryville, Walnut Creek or any of the other diverse cities that make up the East Bay, yet. (I have talked about Alameda in the past, though.) They are each noteworthy and unique in their own way, but I think I'll save any descriptions to those places for another installment in this series or another theme all together. For today, let me end with this picture...

(Orig version of this pic found here.)

It's not this particular sign I see almost everyday, but it conveys the same information as that one down by the lake that we pass on our runs. This sign is my most powerful reminder of where we are now. As the days tick by and we find our selves more and more moved into this place, it starts to feel more like our lives than our fabulous, exciting, incredible lives out here in Oakaland, California! It was definitely a thrill moving out to a place I had heard so much good stuff about. So many people told me I'd "love it" in the Bay Area. And sure, they were right. But life is life wherever I am, and that includes plenty of boring, run-of-the-mill days. So while the excitement has died down considerably since April, I don't think my sanity could have it any other way. And I always have this sign to look at and remember how lucky I am to give this place a try.