Friday, March 29, 2013

Time = Change

or, Going Home Again

Imagine getting up in the middle of the night to pee and there’s a closet where your bathroom is supposed to be. Then, when you finally do find the bathroom (in what used to be the kitchen) the toilet is in the wrong place and has been painted bright teal.

No, we’re not talking about nightmares. We’re talking about time, which means change.

Auntie was away for a few days to visit the former homestead, i.e. Sunny™ San Diego, California. There should be an exclamation point there, but irony only goes so far.

Please don’t rat me out to the chamber of commerce, but it really wasn’t sunny. The weather was pleasantly and comfortably gray, just like it should be this time of year.

So, weather, doughnut shops, and the place where we used to get breakfast were all exactly the same. That was reassuring and nice. Happy smiles!

Now shift the background music a little bit. Our old counter-culture coffeehouse was slightly cleaner but otherwise unchanged – until you look at the people. A legion of smug dyed-blonde Botoxed golfers (both genders) in their 60s and 70s camped out where smug young boho’s and rockers (both genders) used to reign supreme.

Little shops we used to like had moved, but never far, usually just down the same block. That was disorienting. All our old indie bookstores except one were gone. Don’t raise your eyebrows at me. Of course it was inevitable. It’s still sad to see smoothies where there should be books.

My favorite scruffy neighborhoods had been tarted up and gentrified. That’s not a complaint. I prefer the way it used to be, but fair’s fair.

Cue montage:

We ran into someone the day before we had arranged to see him.

We were recognized in places we didn’t expect to be remembered.

We ran into someone we’d lost touch with (and couldn’t find) while we still lived there.

For the record, the food court at UTC still smells like Square Pan even though there hasn’t been a Square Pan in years.

Speaking of smells, the bird shit in beautiful, elegant La Jolla Cove is twelve years thicker and sure smells like it. But I think the tourists on the walkway were the same ones from all those years ago. They looked and sounded exactly the same, except now we are tourists too.

Bookstores file time travel under science fiction, but we just spent two days in the 1980s and 90s so I know it’s a fact. The open boxes of dried salted cod at Filippi’s prove it.

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