Will I Be ‘Man Enough’ To Cry When I Leave California?
My shedding of tears has a lot to do with my sense of self
Shortly before I left San Francisco in 2006 — after seven great years there — I cried like a baby. Sobbed actually.
And I remember exactly what made me break down.
My daughter was almost three at the time. We had Sesame Street on the TV; some random variation of a scene I had watched hundreds, if not thousands of times as a kid, then again as a parent, started to play.
It was the Sesame Street gang enjoying the social interaction and sense of community on their quintessentially urban Manhattan street. That’s a real place — a real street, now officially called Sesame Street in New York — that reminded me of the street where we lived in San Francisco.
21st Street, between Valencia and Guerrero.
Where my daughter was born. Where she took her first steps. Where I’d leave her with the neighbor, a Berkeley grad, who was also the adjacent neighborhood’s USPS mail carrier, a couple of days a week and head off to San Francisco State on my bike.
Where the lady across the street would hang out of her second-floor apartment window talking to neighbors down below.
