Home Is Where the Heart Is

We are, for all intents and purposes, no longer Los Angeles residents. Contracts have been signed. Escrow has opened on the house we are selling and the house we are buying. We are moving Up North (as Angelenos call the San Francisco Bay Area) pursuant to my husband’s corporate transfer. But we are not so much leaving Los Angeles as returning to Oakland, to as much of a home as our gypsy marriage can claim.

Gene grew up in and around Oakland. We met there. Our friendship bloomed into courtship there. Our history includes stints in Washington, Baltimore and Los Angeles. While we have not hated living in any of these cities, we seem to have kept Oakland on our minds. Of all our holiday traveling since we have lived in Los Angeles, we seem to have returned most frequently to Oakland.

In addition to meeting the partner I deserved in Oakland, I found my best self there, aided and abetted by my girlfriends. Girlfriends can be distinguished from any other kind of relationship. We get each other through periods in our lives when one of us seems to be a magnet for unsatisfactory relationships. My girlfriends applauded, encouraged, goaded me to do something more personally satisfying than spend my life as a group health claims examiner. They asked me why a writer was going to law school and understood that I had to prepare to put my daughter through college. They all came to Washington when I graduated from Georgetown.

They are applauding again. And goading. Dorothy has suggested that my not getting tenure means that I have run out of excuses for not devoting more of my energy to my writing. To a woman they insist, with the righteousness of the loyal, that Loyola lost out, not me. I know that I can count on Jeannie to engage in a little retail therapy with me. In some form or fashion, I will have these friendships and others as welcome restoratives in the season of my disappointment. Dorothy was my first adult friend to whom I admitted out loud that I was (and am) a writer. Sherry, who specializes in adolescent psychology, was my pillar of faith through my daughter’s adolescence. She whispered horror stories of children who poisoned their grandparents so that I might realize what a small problem was Kelley’s closed bedroom door.

The people I’ve met since I left Oakland in 1983 see a more finished product: Lydia strong and articulate, Lydia challenging assumptions about former teenage mothers. But Kai, my Oakland girlfriend of longest standing, was a single mom like me when we met. From our adjoining flats on Ivy Drive, we struggled to believe that we could design our lives.

Yet there is an insistent tug from what I leave in Los Angeles. Chief among my losses is the first house I owned where no walls were shared with any other family. My husband reconstructed the back lawn and the garden almost single-handedly from a hilly plot of prickly St. Augustine grass. I watched him drag railroad ties across the slope to level the grade and worried about his back. The yard he devised is awash with color, fragrance and texture: deep red hibiscus, strong fuchsia bougainvillea attacking the fences, delicate purple false hibiscus at the bedroom windows. One summer, we really did have sunflowers taller than me.

There are other things I am starting to miss already. I didn’t get to the Jazz Bakery enough; I never got to the Thursday farmers’ market in Westwood at all. It could be said that I got to Eso Won Books too often, using all my discretionary funds to feed my passion. I will miss the girlfriends I have found in Los Angeles: the companionship and counsel of my law school friend Sean, Cheryl’s ribald humor and keen intelligence. But as my Oakland girlfriends and I discovered, valuable friendships can survive, even thrive, despite distance.

So at the end of July, when all the papers are signed and the documents and keys and very large checks have exchanged hands, I will be going back to the people I never really left. My girls.