While in San Francisco over the weekend for a series of Web development meetings, I had a chance to meet up with Michelle. She and I go way back. We first met on a mutual friend’s front porch in 1979, when our parents were strategizing which public magnet school we would attend in Pittsburgh. As it turned out, our houses were just two blocks away from each other in our city neighborhood. We attended fourth and fifth grades together, shipped by bus far across the city, and reunited again for high school. We spent a lot of time hanging out together, spending boring summers wondering what to do with ourselves, and pulling our hair out over calculus homework.
Michelle works for the city of San Francisco now, having spent time in the comptroller’s office, and now in the human resources department. She calls herself a bureaucrat but, being a cities major, her work fascinates me. I’m sure she uses a lot of math, too, which I find doubly impressive, given all those afternoons wrangling over numbers together as teens.
My flight west was the first I’ve taken since 1999. I had no desire to go anywhere by plane after 9/11, and with a few young children in the mix, a task like flying appeared daunting indeed. I would need to be strongly motivated to get on a plane. And this time around, preferably without children.
The purpose of this trip did it for me, as well as the wonderful destination: a city I adore, and had only visited once (in 1993, on a cross-country road trip), and conveniently, the home of most of the group in the series of meetings—thus, less expense in getting us all there.
Most of my time was spent at the San Francisco Baha’i Center, but on our last evening in the city, we were able to take off with Michelle to her lovely home in Berkeley—a rent-controlled apartment she’s been lucky to have for several years, left over from her grad-student days. After catching up on years of not seeing each other or really even knowing what we were mutually up to, she took us to Plearn, a well-known and vast Thai restaurant in close proximity to the university. It appeared to be a regular haunt of Tiger Woods. The Pad Thai and green curry were excellent.
As it turns out, Michelle may come east this spring, visiting the Pioneer Valley, where she attended college, and where I now reside. So after years of not seeing each other—I believe it had been about 12 years—we may see each other twice in two months, on opposite sides of the country.