Measuring Time by the Yard
This Labor Day began with me driving to the neighborhood I lived in 9+ years ago and retracing my old training route, even stopping in each restroom just to relive old memories.
It starts at an elementary school that didn’t exist when we first arrived, and now it is no longer a public school (I think). The children go to the former middle school campus where I used to drop off kids during the morning carpool. The bushes lining the parkway are now trees that create a nice canopy along a shady walk. And the hill up Angelique is just as formidable, though to this day I cannot take the shortcut up Candy Rose Way without remembering that awful Sunday when I saw the fires consuming homes as I ran.
These neighborhoods and parks were built in the 1990s and it shows. There are open public restrooms and water fountains that still work. Where I live now, built out the decade prior, no one apparently thought to build facilities for families attending soccer and softball games. The lack of public transportation, I'm sure, is intentional too.
The voyeur in me couldn’t help peering down into backyards as I rounded upland side trails and noted mature furniture had replaced the plastic Playskool picnic tables. It was nice to again see the few For Sale signs touting "Nice View" instead of "Bank Owned." I didn’t even notice the final incline, thinking of a middle-aged man who for years walked two miles up and down this hill with his Starbucks cup. He was one of the few who ever said hello as I passed.
I last swung by my old home, where I saw my former next-door neighbor in the shared driveway washing her car, her young son beside her. Only after I was coming down the re-landscaped entranceway (what happened to all the magnolia trees?) did it dawn on me her son was that age when we moved and must now be at the new middle school. I had waved to a subsequent son I never knew had been born.
I have never lived continuously in any place as long as I have San Diego. My entire childhood and, until here, adult years were marked by moving, sometimes as often as six months and usually every 3-5 years. It feels a little weird and a lot nice to witness a place grow up gracefully. It’s people too.
It starts at an elementary school that didn’t exist when we first arrived, and now it is no longer a public school (I think). The children go to the former middle school campus where I used to drop off kids during the morning carpool. The bushes lining the parkway are now trees that create a nice canopy along a shady walk. And the hill up Angelique is just as formidable, though to this day I cannot take the shortcut up Candy Rose Way without remembering that awful Sunday when I saw the fires consuming homes as I ran.
These neighborhoods and parks were built in the 1990s and it shows. There are open public restrooms and water fountains that still work. Where I live now, built out the decade prior, no one apparently thought to build facilities for families attending soccer and softball games. The lack of public transportation, I'm sure, is intentional too.
The voyeur in me couldn’t help peering down into backyards as I rounded upland side trails and noted mature furniture had replaced the plastic Playskool picnic tables. It was nice to again see the few For Sale signs touting "Nice View" instead of "Bank Owned." I didn’t even notice the final incline, thinking of a middle-aged man who for years walked two miles up and down this hill with his Starbucks cup. He was one of the few who ever said hello as I passed.
I last swung by my old home, where I saw my former next-door neighbor in the shared driveway washing her car, her young son beside her. Only after I was coming down the re-landscaped entranceway (what happened to all the magnolia trees?) did it dawn on me her son was that age when we moved and must now be at the new middle school. I had waved to a subsequent son I never knew had been born.
I have never lived continuously in any place as long as I have San Diego. My entire childhood and, until here, adult years were marked by moving, sometimes as often as six months and usually every 3-5 years. It feels a little weird and a lot nice to witness a place grow up gracefully. It’s people too.
