Gene and I started taking walks around the neighborhood this week, a trend I hope will continue throughout the summer. Up until now, I have always considered the height of romance to be when your boyfriend wins you a stuffed animal at a carnival and then tilts your head up to kiss you, an image imprinted on my nine year old brain by The Sleepover Friends and enforced by The Babysitter’s Club. But now I know the height of romance is walking with your new husband through your new neighborhood on a warm spring evening when all the flowers are still open and the sun is lighting up all the little parks and mansions and small girls on scooters are yelling “Orange juice, fifty cents!” because I guess it is too early in the year for a lemonade stand.
I loved San Francisco, as you all know, but Alameda has grown on me like a beautiful, jewel-green fungus. We passed by friends’ houses on our walk last night, and we had dinner at a really good Vietnamese place, and we ran into a minor celebrity who Gene sort of knows (what-up, Will the Thrill) and we stopped at one of our island’s two (two! so ridiculous) tiki bars to say hi at Jon and Rob. Had we been in the Castro we would have been defeated by our first windy hill, and if we weren’t defeated there would still have been no friends’ houses in a twenty block radius, and no really good Vietnamese places (in the Castro at least) and the celebrity would have been Bevan Dufty, and we wouldn’t know anyone at the bar. And the little girls selling orange juice would have been homeless men.
I still love San Francisco, but it’s good here. It’s definitely good.