I left my heart in San Francisco . . . No, wait, in L.A. No, wait . . .

I caught myself pining the other day for a street in San Francisco, a potholed stretch memorable only for the summer during which I cursed it every day.

It was our first year as Northern Californians. We’d been uprooted from Los Angeles by corporate consolidation. To say we had mixed feelings was like saying that Cuban exiles can get a little emotional when you mention Castro. Each morning, while family and friends back home were padding barefoot down some big, warm, sunny driveway to pick up the paper--or feeding the dog on some big, warm, sunny back porch, or hearing the shhhk-shhhk-shhhk of the lawn sprinkler under some big, warm, sunny palm tree--we would awaken to a bone-chilling, maritime fog bank.

There it would sit, the antithesis of summer as we defined it. Forcing us into wool socks and fleece jackets, sending us out with cups of tea and hot chocolate clutched to our chests, scarves wound around our necks to keep the icy July fog from pouring down our sweatshirt collars. Off we’d rattle each day in our wet car through That Other California’s version of July and August, infamous since Mark Twain endured it. Through the whipping white clouds. Down the dripping hill by the bus stop. Over the Muni-tracked paving. Past the padlocked schools of Irish step-dancing and the bums in the restaurant doorways. The grime and drear and pitted asphalt never varied as we ferried the kids to a day camp in which they knew no one.

It was the summer of that “Hey Baby” song, sung by Orange County’s own Gwen Stefani, and she sounded to us like a little blond call from what we thought of as Our California. The car radio played her hit ditty over and over in those lonely months, and while she sang, I’d drive my children along the route to their new camp, along our new home’s cold, cloudy landscape, and under my breath I’d mutter the bitter lament of exiles the world over:

“We’ll never belong.”

Oh, we were a sad, sorry lot that summer. Who worries about belonging in a place as storied as San Francisco? When circumstance dictated that we move there, our landing sounded so enviable that we boasted, blatantly.

Clean air, good bread, good coffee, cable cars, a “real” city with “real” history, not some sprawling ganglia of half-baked suburbs--what was to question? But as the months passed we just couldn’t stop being homesick for the California we’d left on the other side of the Tehachapi Mountains. Nothing pleased us, it seemed.

The houses were too old. There wasn’t enough sunshine. The supermarkets were cramped and drab and didn’t have enough parking spots. The schools seemed to have gone to wrack and ruin. Pedestrians kept running around in the crosswalks, something they had the good sense not to do, we sniffed, back in Southern California. The drivers seemed as incompetent as they were honk-happy. All the true action and power and money suddenly seemed to be back in L.A., which, as cities went, was quite “real,” as it turned out.

“Everyone I know who has moved from L.A. to San Francisco either loves it or takes one look and runs for their lives, shrieking,” laughed a friend back in the big, warm, sunny south.

Heartache beset us. Shuffling around in our fleece-lined you-name-it, we’d take our summer clothes out of the closet and lovingly stroke them, like mourners running their fingers across the keepsakes of the dearly beloved. Our kids would wax on about the abundance of great fast food back home to Bay Area children who, thoroughly inculcated, asked if we were aware that “poisoned grease” was “pumped into those places” each night by evil “tanker trucks with gigantic hoses.”

We’d drive south to visit family and burst into tears when we hit the Grapevine, rolling down the windows to smell--yes, it had come to that, smell!--the freeway. We’d crank up the car stereo with odes to our beloved Southern California: Joni Mitchell. The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Beck. Our Lady of the O.C, Gwen Stefani.

“Hey-ba-by, hey-ba-by, hey!” we’d wail past the exit to Magic Mountain, sobbing at the beautiful, bruise-colored smog.

Then, one day, we were hit with another job-related upheaval. Suddenly, work required that we move back to Southern California. Bags were packed, boxes loaded, new schools found, real estate agents contacted. Fond farewells were bid to neighbors and friends.

Down the interstate we trekked, ready to pick up where we had left off. But four years had, incredibly, all but erased Southern California as we’d known it, and had left us more Northern Californian than we would have guessed.

Oh, we were glad to be back (and glad to be warm). But months passed and, once again, to our astonishment, we just couldn’t stop being homesick. Everything had changed. Nothing pleased us. Downtown L.A. had sprouted great clumps of new construction. Half of the push buttons on our car radio--up north I’d stubbornly refused to reset them--yielded deejays who were now hollering their ads for auto dealerships and dedicating their love songs in Spanish. The Dodgers and the Lakers had gone, in our absence, through whole cycles of sin and redemption. Neighborhoods that had been dumps when we left sported bungalows with million-dollar price tags.

Meanwhile, we seemed to have contracted some rare strain of “grass-is-always-greener-itis.” Out of nowhere, our allegiances had fractured, scattering little pieces of our hearts all over the state.

Now, preposterously, we wept at Disneyland--I mean at “California Adventure”--not only when we saw the lights of L.A. on our favorite ride, “Soarin’ Over California,” but also when the Golden Gate Bridge rose up before us. Now our kids waxed on, not just about In-N-Out burgers, but also about the abundance of “hecka cool” Bay Area sights to Orange County adolescents. (Thoroughly inculcated, they replied, “So, like, you’re from San Francisco? Does that mean you’re, like, gay?”)

Now, even as we marveled at the neighbor’s bougainvillea, we pulled out our fleece and our Russian River pinots and wished wistfully for rain. Now we sat at the beach, slathered in sunscreen, and sighed nostalgically about the way the air smelled up north. And the way the bread tasted. And the way the Vespa-riding barrista at our local cafe made our morning coffee. And the way there had seemed so much history behind the nuns who, when the neighborhood public school proved too crowded to take us, had ended up beautifully educating our children, and who, even as we left, were still praying for their acceptance to a good Catholic high school someplace.

As Southern Californians of long standing, we knew the cliche: You’re supposed to roll your eyes when you mention the Bay Area, just as in San Francisco, you’re supposed to reply, “I’m sorry,” when someone says they’re from Los Angeles. NorCal people aren’t supposed to like SoCal people, and vice versa. But the truth is, it’s become almost impossible to belong to just one part of California. Almost no one dares claim just one part of the state anymore.

Parochialism requires estrangement and estrangement requires distance, and distances here have been shrinking since the Southern Pacific Railroad completed the first set of tracks between L.A. and San Francisco 130 years ago. So Southern California in the interim got its hands on some of Northern California’s water. So Northern California decided it’s all that and a bag of organic soy chips. So 57.3% of the state’s 37 million people live below the Tehachapi latitudes and only 42.7% live above them. They don’t even agree that the Tehachapis are the true divider, or that “northern” California is the proper name for everything north of them.

It has been a long time since, say, 1941, when the counties up around Shasta felt so cut off that they banded with part of Oregon and tried in vain to declare statehood. (First one of the lead secessionists died, then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, interrupting the movement with World War II). Or since 1959, when a Sunday supplement headlined “Los Angeles -- The Athens of the West” found its way into both the L.A. and the San Francisco Examiners, prompting San Francisco--when it was finished gagging--to retort that if that was the case, then San Francisco was Olympus, so there.

Now paparazzi chase Hollywood stars to Namibian hospitals, and when people talk about “rival” cities, they mean Vancouver or Bangalore or Shanghai. In an age of global teleconferencing and commuter flights, California, practically speaking, is about the size of the San Fernando Valley. Silicon Valley CEOs bid up the price of Malibu beach shacks. L.A. teenagers bid up ticket prices at Indio rock concerts. One town’s snowmelt is another town’s drinking water. Not a holiday passes that half the state doesn’t go north while the other half heads south.

So do you choose, say, the California where you went to high school or the California where you went to grad school? The one where you met your spouse or the one where you raised your children? The one where you keep your home office or the one where your product is manufactured? The one where you were born or the one where your parents live in a retirement condominium?

The governor commutes between Pacific Palisades and Sacramento. The new chancellor at UC Irvine is just in from San Francisco. The writers of “The OC” sent young Ryan Atwood from Chino to Newport Beach to UC Berkeley in the course of three seasons. Even the Angels now claim two California hometowns.

Cross-pollination has always been a kind of official state subtext, but until it happens to you, that realization tends to sink in only gradually. It can be an adjustment. When the world gets smaller, identities can blur, loyalties split, hearts scatter. But the part in which you belong--in which you aren’t an exile--can adjust too.

You can be driving home under a big, warm, sunny L.A. sky and a song can come on the radio and make you pine for a potholed, foggy street you didn’t know was home until you left it. You can know what it means now, and not just in California, to be a citizen of a bigger place.

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San Francisco

Average

Temperature: 57 degrees

Rainfall: 21 inches

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344 miles

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Los Angeles

Average

Temperature: 70 degrees

Rainfall: 15 inches