Monuments

By admin | September 25, 2011

I’ve had a great time in San Jose over the past few days, and even took the tour of the Winchester Mystery House, something I’ve resisted for maybe 50 years, having last fidgeted through the place as a youngster. The WMH is a rambling, quixotic, 160-room Victorian structure that was built over a span of 38 years by Sarah Winchester, 1884 to 1922, when she died. Sarah was a blue blood from Connecticut and inherited a fortune when her husband passed.  He was William Winchester, heir to the great gun manufacturing business of the 19th century. Sarah’s husband’s death was preceded by that of their only child, a daughter who succumbed at a few weeks of age. Sarah was devastated by these deaths and felt her family was cursed, a supposition supported by a Boston medium who pointed to the thousands of ghosts of those killed by Winchester arms. The medium told Sarah that she could appease or at least find some refuge from the curse by continually, uninterruptedly building a house, 24/7. She could easily afford to do so … and she did in San Jose.

There are some impressive statistics for Sarah’s house: numbers of windows and doors, high costs. There are also anomalies to point to: the doors that open onto walls, the stairs that end at a ceiling, rooms for spying on the help, rooms abandoned in disrepair after the 1906 earthquake, which trapped Sarah in one of her many bedrooms for several hours. Underneath the commercialized novelty, you see the idiosyncratic vision of a single person. Sarah seems to have lived reclusively but in community with her servants and workmen, whom she treated well but from whom she would tolerate no argument. The house was her reflection, guided as she may have felt herself to be by the spirits to whom she owed a debt. It was innovative, singular, and confused.

In contrast, and contemporaneous with Sarah Winchester’s building activity, a neighborhood Portuguese community built the impressive Five Wounds church on the Eastside of San Jose, which was constructed between 1912 and 1914. I wanted to visit this church, having walked and driven by its large scale facade for decades. I showed up there the morning after touring the WMH, but the doors to the church were locked. There was another wanderer in front of the church, a middle-aged woman who looked Portuguese. Assuming she was a parishioner, I asked her if she knew about church hours. Turned out, she was from Portugal but spoke good English. She said that her daughter, who she bemusedly described as aggressive, had gone to rouse a priest from the rectory to open the doors.

Her daughter came back with a big, comfortable looking older man in civilian attire. She’d shaken out the Portuguese-speaking priest, who’s actually from Brazil. The daughter, the woman, and her suddenly materialized husband, joined the priest for a tour of the church. I was invited to tag along, happily receiving random English translations along the way. The walls and alcoves of the church were rich with large and detailed statuary of Jesus and many saints. The Brazilian priest described the lives of each of the saints to the Portuguese guests with an obvious heartfelt connection. The saints inspired and delighted him, even when their stories were difficult. The Portuguese couple—the man a tightly-wound, committed religious conservative and the woman open-hearted and accepting in equal measure—pronounced the church the equal of those that move them back home.

Sourced from ghosts or God, individual eccentricities or community devotion, it’s been a rare gift to walk through early 20th century artifacts that survive in San Jose, imagining minds along with the shape of matter they’ve wrought. In a place where history sweeps through with astonishing speed—bringing wheat, bringing orchards, then wiping them away, along with oaks and creeks and the slow pace of lazy waters—I’ve actually felt the past.

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Blind

By admin | February 8, 2010

Even as a kid I noticed that there were a lot of marital shenanigans going on in my neighborhood. My Dad was very committed and pure in his relationship with my Mom, but there were Dads of friends who had side women (even families) or tried their luck in bars whether for free or for pay, locally or distantly. Some men took their sons and sons’ friends to Nevada for newfound pleasures and others headed to San Francisco. There was a famous story of one of my friends’ fathers who went to “Frisco” and met a beautiful woman whom he took to a motel only to discover the beauty was a man, which resulted in violence. As boys, our talk was full of tall tales of conquest and a few years later we competitively shared information about who was able to do how much with whom, some of which was true.

Ours was one of those male cultures where we made what has been described as Madonna-whore distinctions about the young women in our lives, determining whether our attitude toward someone would be pure or prurient. Not to say that adolescent sexual interest wasn’t central, but rather to indicate how you might choose to handle it. I wouldn’t be comfortable talking about some of the behavior I saw, but I will say that–even though my own behavior was reasonable–I carried the attitudes I picked up on the street. Events that I recall now that just seemed part of life and were certainly short of overt violence, were, nonetheless, deeply disrespectful of another person, a tender shoot of a person, deserving so much better.

I got caught in the limits of my acculturation when I was a high school sophomore. I was in the journalism class and friendly with a fellow student named JoAnn. She was short and she wore glasses, which lacked the current cachet. If I had been smarter, I would have imagined her olive skin and clean smile without the glasses, but as it was, I felt no charge. I talked to JoAnn outside of class from time to time, and probably more frequently than would have been the case had it not been her intention. Somehow, I occasionally had a friendly walk with her to her house.

JoAnn’s Mom was always home. JoAnn had a brother who once helped me dispose of some car parts and her Dad was an appliance repairman or delivery route person; he had a clean and respectable workingman’s job. It was a new experience for me to sit in a kitchen with a friend and the friend’s Mom and actually talk about things that were interesting. For me, until then, there’d been my street life and sports life, my non-disclosure to my parents regarding the same, and my non-relationship of nods and facial expressions with other adults. I didn’t know what to do with being respected. A couple of times on Friday nights JoAnn and I rode with her Mom to someone’s house in a mysterious part of town, way down Leigh Ave I remember, fifteen miles into the unknown. We talked in the kitchen out there, too, picking right up. It was fun.

One night JoAnn and I were at a school dance and walked outside into some dark and private place behind a building. We talked as usual, friends, but even as I think about it now I can feel the press of JoAnn’s intention, pressing toward me, lips and wanting, even as we stood just talking. Since I can remember it, I must have felt it, despite my denseness and my idea that there was nothing I could do with this girl. Thing was, I couldn’t see her.

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Vista Points

By admin | January 16, 2010

When I watch or read coverage of events in Iran and now in Haiti, I have a simple response of the heart, an internal experience of good and evil in the one case or tragedy and heroism in the other. I was just watching Anderson Cooper reporting on CNN on the efforts by one of the LA County rescue teams in Port-au-Prince to save someone they believe to be a 10-year-old girl who’s been heard tapping under a building’s rubble. Her mother was crying and speaking semi-coherently nearby on the street. Anderson Cooper’s been onsite for several hours filming with his crew.

At the very instant of that report and in this very instant as I write, there are probably multiple people expiring throughout Port-au-Prince, the thousand stories, and there’s the larger story of confusion and delay and difficulty in getting massive help into the city. It makes me wonder why Anderson Cooper is spending his day where he is. Part of it, I think, is because he needs to. I’ve seen him struggle at various times in his reporting to resist breaking down into helpless frustration. He’s human. I think he wants to see a rescue; he wants to see the triumph of nobility and love; he wants to see the rescue of a little girl and the rescue of a moment of meaning from the countless other moments that collectively break our hearts and steal the comfort of meaning we normally assume. At least in the heart, a rescue starts to put the world back together.

As I watch these world-shattering events, I have the idea that it’s inevitable that the young people (and others) in Iran will triumph before long, which means anytime from 1-25 years. These people are educated, tech-savvy, freely expressed in their private culture, aware of the possibilities in the larger world, and united in courage. I also think it’s quite possible that Haiti will be rebuilt with a modest but modern infrastructure and educational system, that it will receive investment from the U.S. and elsewhere and wind-up remarkably more integrated into the developed world. Already, in a just a few days, a Haitian-American culture that had been invisible—the luminaries in sport, entertainment, and the arts, as well as everyday reasonable people who speak about worries for their loved ones—has hit the scene. Inside the experiences of the green movement in Iran struggling with a repressive state, and inside the heart-breaking suffering in Haiti, there is only the painful Now. Outside, from the distance of my armchair, I see how these massive events will (likely) roll forth significant new arrangements in human history.

You can draw the perspective back even further. If you hold that 100,000 people (whatever the extraordinary figure may be) have been wiped away in a week, changing the course of history, and that that’s “just” a species event to go up alongside Pompeii or, say, the mass extermination and destruction of the life-worlds of native people around the planet . . . if you hold that expanse and then consider the locked-down view you may have about yourself or your loved ones, the precious me or the precious few . . . well, you might begin to consider the vast perspective of the flow of evolution, all the life, all the death, all the transformation, all the development, all the miraculous unfolding, and you might consider that awesomeness at the same time you love your loved ones, your safety, your chance to watch CNN.

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American Faith

By admin | January 11, 2010

James Fallows is a writer who had a California upbringing and a rocket rise. He was, for example, Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter in his mid-20’s. Fallows has a grand curiosity and a wonderful disciplined intellect that he’s applied to a variety of subjects over several decades. He’s got an article in the current edition of The Atlantic called “How America Can Rise Again.” Having just returned from three years residence in China, he’s got the privileged, fresh view of home that follows extended absence.

Fallows is a sober and dependable synthesizer, and in this article he wants to answer the question that he puts only partly jokingly: is America “finally going to hell?”

Today’s fears combine—what will happen when China has all the jobs? and all the money?—with the domestic concerns about a polarized society of haves and have-nots that has lost its connective core. They include concerns about the institutions that have made America strong: widespread education, a financially viable press, religion that can coexist with secularism, government that expresses the nation’s divisions while addressing the long-term interests and needs … [and] the broadly held alarm about the future of the natural environment…

I spoke with historians and politicians, soldiers and ministers, civil engineers and broadcast executives, and high-tech researchers. Overall, the news they gave me was heartening—and alarming, too. Most of the things that worry Americans aren’t really that serious … But there is a deeper problem almost too alarming to worry about, since it is so hard to see a solution.

Fallows and his experts take note of the centuries long American tradition of handwringing fear for the nation, sometimes dubbed “Jeremiad” (after Jeramiah, the prophet of doom). We’re in a period of intensified Jeremiad, and even though historically the despair has been part of a recurring cycle that leads to reform and rebirth, it’s hard to trust the ascent when your view is from the depths—and there’s no guarantee any time, anyway.

Still, Fallows and those he speaks with see reasons for resiliency. Socially, racial relations are as good as they’ve been, religious tolerance is the norm, anti-immigrant feelings are muted even in economic hard-times, and Barack Obama is President. Our national business traits bode well also.

Everything we know about future industries and technologies suggests that they will offer ever-greater rewards to flexibility, openness, reinvention, “crowdsourcing,” and all other manifestations of individuals and groups keenly attuned to their surroundings. Everything about American society should be hospitable toward those traits—and should foster them better and more richly than other societies can.

Fallows asserts that, for all our current problems, “the crucial point is that in principle, the United States has the power to correct what is wrong in each case.” But, he summarizes, maybe we won’t. That’s because of “the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke.” The government is “sclerotic” and suffers the “consequences of institutional aging.” It defies the “‘gospel of adapt or die’ [that] has spread from West Point to the corporate world.” Fallows lists functional failings and abuses of our 200-year-old governing institutions in painful detail. One interesting note: California with its two senators has 69 times the population of Wyoming, with its two. “Going to hell,” he says, “really means a failure to adapt: increasing difficulty in focusing on issues beyond the immediate news cycle, and an increasing gap between the real challenges and opportunities of the time and our attention, resources, and best efforts.”

Fallows concludes his article by suggesting that the only likely path forward is muddling, keeping the doddler government moving as well as possible, while acknowledging and imperfectly encouraging the strengths of our civil society. He gains faith, I think, by choosing to hold and advocate for a long view, 75 years, and offering up analysis and visions of possibility that can bring others into play with some form of vision similar to his; in other words his faith, such as it is, comes from a hope for a growth in consciousness.

Fallows is what I called a “living systems” thinker in another post, someone with a natural strategic view who sees systems in action and interaction—like China and the United States in moving relationship or like U.S. culture and governmental structure set into a flow. Fallows naturally takes a long view because he’s already seen and further anticipates complex momentum and possibility.

In that previous post, I also tried to describe something I called a “unity” way of seeing, where there’s not only the stuff of the world that we can look at and try to make sense of, but there’s also a unity, a continuity, between our “spiritual” essence and, for example, the “spiritual” essence of the United States. All One in God so to speak. I’m saying that there may be something like a Platonic ideal or an informational blue print—for me, you, or the United States—and this higher form exerts a subtle presence and pressure upon the unfolding of events (which is easy not to hear or to ignore). I think that when Fallows expresses his faith by introducing a 75-year perspective into American political dialog and collective consciousness, that (in his way) he aligns with the spiritual blueprint of America, the further unfolding of those qualities of openness and innovation and multiplicity that seem so much a part of the “genetics,” the information map for the country.

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Memory Play - House Across the Street

By admin | January 9, 2010

I can stretch my imagination to include endless (or at least lots and lots of) space in the universe. I like the idea that there’s space and that stuff forms, dissipates, and reforms within this space through the eons. Indeed, on a much smaller scale, this blog aspires to play with the same sort of phenomenon, namely how human societies come and go in the existent space of Santa Clara Valley. And on a still smaller, itsy-bitsy scale, I like how successive events transpire within some enduring human-size container, like, for example, the house across from where I grew up. That house is a miniature universe, and through it have tumbled all sorts of people and events, an infinitesimal fraction of which reside in my memory.

The house is still there, dating from the late teens or 20’s of the 20th century. It sits high, and a broad set of steps leads up to a roomy sitting porch. I delivered newspapers to people in that house and stood in the doorway collecting money for the service, gazing curiously in at the furniture and somebody’s life. I remember the interior as dark, the shades drawn again California’s light and heat.

I also had a fight in front of the house with a couple of brothers. I was about 10. We had been playing in the yard and tempers ignited. Still hard to admit, but I pretty much got whupped. Vern, a couple of years older, had me in an inescapable headlock, while Bobby, who was my age, pinned my arms to my side. They had wrestled me onto the concrete sidewalk that led to the house. My periodic bursts of furious squirming only got me more knee scraping and tighter squeezing from Vern. Finally, best as I could, I yelled for my Dad. He didn’t hear, but the brothers were wary enough of authority and the demonstrable wrath of their own Dad that they let up.

A few years after I fought Vern and Bobby, the house had changed ownership, the succession of renters had moved along and it had become a home for unwed mothers. I was 15, 16. I’d look across the street and see the pregnant girls my age, and couldn’t help but imagine how they’d got themselves into their predicament. It was an intriguing consideration.

The girls would look back at me, too. I can’t blame them, having been pulled from their families and circles of friends, and now hanging around for months in a marginal neighborhood, nothing to do, watched by minders, getting larger and more uncomfortable. They’d sit on the porch as I push-mowed our little lawn or, later in the year, raked off the leaves from our walnut trees and the neighbor’s sycamores. I looked at the girls furtively and could see their heads bend toward each other in conversation.

One day, when I was in front of our house, a couple of girls were in their front yard, holding a hose and squirting water over the dry, spotty grass. One of the girls wandered away toward the nearby corner, out of direct view of the house. I think she was pulling me with her presence, and I didn’t resist. I went to the corner and then crossed the street, nervous but nonchalant, as if I just happened to be on my way through that very corner at that very instant.

Hey, where you going? The girl had brown hair and freckles and an air of daring.

Uh, the store.

Why are you always looking at us?

Uh, I’m not.

Yeah, you are. Don’t you want to know something?

What?

Why we’re here.

At that point, I didn’t know what to say. My shyness and sense of inappropriateness bore down, while at the same time the song of nature pressured from within. I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

I’m Sheryl. I’m from San Mateo. The Catholic Church keeps us here.

She was very real. I could feel that.

How much more time you got?

Two months.

We went on for a few minutes, a moment of intimacy that was inexplicable to me. Then it was over. I went where I was pretending to go and Sheryl went back to the house, our exchange having vanished into the enduring expanse.

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City Portrait: Tehran

By admin | June 25, 2009

I’ve been following the unfolding of events in Iran over the last couple of weeks. It’s hard not to be inspired by the collective impulse to freedom, nor to be deflated by the corresponding and (perhaps overwhelming) repressive response of a well-organized, militarized, ruthless state. I won’t comment specifically on events in Iran in this post, but I would like to comment on a piece of writing by a young Iranian-American who currently bears witness in Tehran. He describes his experience during the afternoon and evening of Saturday, June 20. This was the day after “Supreme Leader” Khamenei announced that he would not yield in his endorsement of the apparently stolen presidential election and that he would now summon all the powers of the state to enforce his resolve. Protesters were put on notice: there would be no restraint; Saturday would be a day of reckoning.

The writer, who calls himself Shane M., describes fully recognizable individuals from both sides who are strangely relaxed in the quiet before battle. He then goes on to chronicle the ensuing clash of engagement, the responses of bystanders caught up in the maelstrom, and the everyday events that go on despite the battle just beyond earshot. In the passage below, he describes a significant geographical feature of residential Tehran in the context of civil unrest. I’d recommend reading the rest of what he has to say.

The decision to prevent people from marching calmly and peacefully through the squares and main boulevards has thrown the action into the kuches and mahals of Tehran. It’s gone into the neighborhoods, the alleys and corners of where people permanently live, not the public squares and intersections that they occasionally pass through.

You have to understand the importance of the “kuche” or alley if you want to understand Tehran, especially now. Sar e kuche, too ye kuche, boro kuche…the beginning and end of everyday life happens in a kuche, the alley.

“Alley” as it is used here isn’t the same as what we might imagine in the U.S., the dark and dangerous spaces of New York, for instance, where bad things happen. Back in the day, neighborhoods consisted primarily of single-family homes, many with a hayat or yard with a central hoz, or fountain (the film “Children of Heaven” is a good depiction of what I’m talking about).

The buildings were close to each other and the kuche served as the shared ground between entrances. You had to walk down an alley to get home and the odds were that you would run into your neighbor along the way. Likewise, the alley provided a crude form of security. If someone had no business being there or was up to no good it would be immediately known…

Neighbors knew who belonged there. … Neighbors simultaneously spied on and looked after each other. A patriarchal code of honor, with all of its blessings and vices, held sway and woe onto the young man who wandered into the neighborhood. Hava ye ham digar ra dashtand. While this code has dimmed considerably because of shifts in demographic and housing patterns—more and more people live away from their families in apartment towers, the familiarity remains. As I noted in an earlier post, Tehran, despite its size, remains an intimate big city, the reason no doubt being that the base of social life outside of the family remains the kuche. Even if they don’t personally know their neighbor nor care to, residents of a block will come to each other’s aid when threatened from without. … The geography of Tehran’s urban life is going to play a big role in the coming days and months. Every time the police manage to squeeze down on protestors on the main road, the kids run sideways and backwards into the criss-crossing alleys.

It would be presumptuous to compare San Jose to Tehran, that is a generally quiet and only mildly troubled adolescent city searching for identity against a thousand-year-old city the size of New York that is at the core of one of the world’s oldest civilizations and currently in a world-shaking paroxysm. I’m not highlighting a city to city comparison, but rather Shane M’s voice of engagement, how he sees the city from above, across time, and at human ground level as the citizens of a great metropolis variously engage their moment. His is a terrific city portrait, and in its unsung presence, San Jose awaits the same.

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The Birth of the New

By admin | December 23, 2008

Sometimes, you get a strong feel for the birth of the new prior to its arrival. That’s how I’ve begun to think about San Jose’s entrance into its next stage. I’ve even begun to doubt my San Jose doubter’s mind (which may be nothing more than a protracted thought bubble keeping me from noticing that San Jose is indeed a genuine big city in its own peculiar,  hard-to-see way).

This breakthrough started at Backesto Park, site of my youthful, baseball playing summer days of joy. The last time I was in town I stopped at the park on a very hot Saturday evening just to see what was up. The park was crowded in a very interesting way. It was segmented by sport and ethnicity. At the North end of the park, there were maybe 100 Vietnamese men holding down the eight tennis courts, a few playing and a larger group sitting on benches and squatting near courts’ edge. They were shooting the breeze in their native language; it was an outdoor men’s club. Occasionally, when someone on court missed a shot, I’d hear an English-language expletive shouted out.

In the center of the park, two full, uniformed teams of Spanish-speakers were playing on the soccer field in a refereed game. Their families, mothers with mostly smaller children, relaxed on the grass near the field, visiting and casually observing the action. At the South end of the park, Mexican-American young men were playing basketball and handball on the courts there, and there were young families filling the nearby playground. Additionally, there were a few practiced drinkers sitting at the picnic tables in a small oak grove near the edge of the park.

Parks—like downtowns, boulevards, promenades, or subways—are places where the crowds of cities gather in the ordinary course of events. In the crowds, the city sees itself: here we are. There’s almost a law of volume and density. If there’s enough of both, you realize you’re in a city, a place of significance. It was this phenomenon that I responded to at Backesto Park. I realized in a visceral way that San Jose is what its promoters like to proclaim, big and diverse. There are a lot of people and there are multiple, strong cultures moving into and through the American experience in the San Jose city space. This is an update of the powerful myth/truth of early 20th century American big city history, the storied European ethnic groups living richly in their enclaves while transiting toward and eventually transforming the mainstream.

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Seeing Green

By admin | November 9, 2008

I attended the West Coast Green Conference in San Jose at the end of September. It’s an annual Bay Area event that’s in the major league of green conferences. This year the conference featured Al Gore and other green notables from around North America. There were a couple thousand attendees who sampled visionary keynote addresses, break out meetings covering green from many angles, and also a big green trade show.

I left reminded of the delicacy of our environmental situation and the cataclysmic threat it presents, but I was also inspired and energized by all the bright people sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm (whilst networking furiously). There was a positive mix of idealism and market savvy, do good and do well, Berkeley and Silicon Valley. It all seemed very 21st century, as if something new were emerging, where the energies of self-interest and the desire for a workable society were finding some happy way to join, being neither fearful nor cowed by the planetary challenge, but instead poised and even hopeful.

The point of West Coast Green is to build a committed, enthusiastic, informed, networked, expanding, and daring group of people who promote sustainability across economic and cultural sectors. At a minimum, to live sustainably is to live in sufficient harmony with the planet so that we don’t wreck the place that’s given rise to and nourishes our species, and thus we can avoid the way of the dinosaur. We do seem close to the moment of reckoning, and so it matters how people disperse and propagate the message following gatherings like West Coast Green.

On my own conference rounds, I pocketed a good number of practical nuggets, but I was also struck by differences in “ways of seeing” that I detected in keynoters and presenters. These individuals, at least in the measure of conference organizers, are leaders who speak for important pathways to a sustainable transition. Their way of seeing will be influential. By “ways of seeing” I don’t so much mean the content of what someone cares about, though that matters, but rather the depth and expanse of their naturally occurring vision. Do they see into the system that is the base of their normal activities, or do they see more? By way of example, here is a very brief take on three ways of seeing that were dominant at the conference, with illustrative cases.

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A Reminisce: Love, Disappointment, and the Formation of a San Jose State of Mind

By admin | August 24, 2008

We moved to San Jose from Pasadena in 1954 when I was four years old. My Dad worked in the canneries when we first arrived and, after that, he was a welder at San Jose Steel on East Julian Street near the Bayshore Freeway. My Mom was a brainy and efficient power secretary who worked downtown for Ned Richmond, a family scion heading up the Richmond Chase canneries. Later she worked for Mark Thomas, whose civil engineering firm was on San Pedro Street and (as googled) seems to have prospered over the decades.

In 1958, my parents bought a house near the intersection at 10th and Washington. Adjusted for the times, our ethnically mixed, working class neighborhood was not much different than it appears to be today. It was a rich, if sometimes challenging place to grow up. I liked to run on the streets and had minor flirtations with crime and vandalism. Some of my friends got into big trouble, but I always backed away and sometimes actively discouraged the more ambitious or violent plans that were being laid. Apparently, I had some inner line that I wouldn’t cross.

I played a lot of sports, too. When I was younger, I spent just about every weekday of every summer playing baseball at Backesto Park. Mr. Briscoe, Jim Briscoe I believe, was the recreation director. Thinking back, he seems to have been a very good guy. He took his job seriously and organized good programs that ran seamlessly. Those were my mythic Americana days, shouting boys of all kinds playing ball in the summer heat, the old Italians rolling bocce in the distance with their dark hats and mysterious ways, the big sprinklers fed by long, thick hoses clicking away as they watered different parts of the park in succession. I can remember Mr. Briscoe standing by the door of the equipment house witnessing the scene, his cap above his open face, his big dark-rimmed glasses over an earnest and responsible look, his tanned arms folded over the whistle on his chest.

I loved those boyhood things, running largely unfettered through the streets and in sports, but there was another strain that ran through my youthful experience. I was subject to the boosterism of the era, which as it’s turned out lingers with me more than the rest. We got the Mercury every morning. Often as not, there were articles about San Jose’s growth. I’ve always had a head for numbers and I kept track as San Jose lurched forward in population and square mileage. I was deeply pleased as we passed or grew close to established cities with big-league teams and national recognition such as Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. But all this city progress begged the question: why didn’t we look like a city? Where were the tall buildings, the dense neighborhoods and mass transit, the crowds, the grand boulevards and parks? What, besides the numbers, was there to be proud of and to liven your step?

Not much, I’m afraid. Nonetheless, I developed an active fantasy life, especially for downtown, which was near our house. I imagined skyscrapers rising in the dusty lots and, as we deepened into the 60’s and my sensibility changed along with the national culture, I came to cling to every tiny indication of urban arrival, a headshop or a restaurant with a sophisticated air. My fantasies ran way ahead of reality. I wanted so much to be urban and (with those numbers spinning repetitively) I almost believed.

In my later high school years, abandoned as I was to a city sense, I’d take the Greyhound to San Francisco on Saturdays and walk there until I had to return on the last bus leaving the 7th Street Station at 2 a.m. Riding down the Bayshore in the dark, the bus droning steadily, my real experiences of a great city would give way and my fantasies of San Jose would come to fill my mind: my hometown, its own great city. Then the bus pulled into the San Jose station. As I disembarked into the quiet darkness of early morning, the hard truth of a downtown that lay so sleepy and barren and non-descript would smash me like a wave and my mood would shrink and shudder as if thrown to the ground.

(Only to rise again.)

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