The flowers are still in their hair

When I went back to San Francisco at Christmas, I was expecting a crush of techies jostling for cafe space or elbowing me out of the BART. I predicted one long gloomy trip as I struggled to relate to millennials or Gen Zers too focused on their smartphones to notice they were tripping over my Birkenstocks.

Hey, I don't really wear Birkenstocks (not that there's anything wrong with that), and it was too cold and rainy in the Bay Area to have worn them anyway; but apart from that, I sensed that the Old Guard was still very much in the power position in my city. Take, for example, my cabbie in Pacific Heights.

I'd just left a very classy hotel I'd reviewed, and after a bad experience on the trip

was sharing my concerns with him. We ended up talking about the changing face of the newspaper business in the city, sharing names we both knew, and then laughing our way into the Richmond. I didn't have a ton of money for a tip, but clearly, this Old Guard San Franciscan wasn't money-grubbing. "Ah, it's just my second job. Don't worry about it!"

Earlier in my trip I'd left my favorite dentist, my long-time go-to dental magician - whose name I won't share because he's already rated five stars on Yelp and I want to be able to get in and see him on my next trip, too! - when it started to rain again. I was waiting on the N Judah. For those of you unfamiliar with San Francisco, these are the little electric streetcars that travel up and down the city, not the cable cars.

Well, it was running very late. So I started discussing this with the man next to me, and somehow mentioned that I'd once worked for a company South of Market, at 3rd and Howard. "Oh my God, which company?" He stared at me stone faced. "Balzer Shopes." "You're kidding me!"

Well, Balzer was a lithography firm, and I was a receptionist-cum-admin assistant working my way through college. I was very young then and used to go to a dive bar called the M&M occasionally to try and listen to professional reporters share their stories over cocktails. See, it's just a couple blocks from the San Francisco Chronicle and where, at least, the old San Francisco Examiner (now a freebie) used to be.

This man on the street then told me he worked in ad sales (I think, it was raining hard at this point) and knew Balzer very well. I told him Mr. Babe Balzer, my boss, used to give us all turkeys at Christmas. I didn't mention that once, when I was going to have a blind date, Babe even took a call from the guy to give him the lo-down on me. That was an odd event, sure, but there was no such thing as an Internet search in 1983.

"Do you think San Francisco's changed?" I asked this man.

"Oh yeah, if you go down South of Market, down where Balzer used to be."

"Yeah, but not here." We were on Judah and 30th. "Everything looks exactly the same."

"Oh, I assure you it's not," the man said, I thought somewhat defensively.

"But it looks exactly the same. I know it's a lot more expensive to live here, but my dentist has been here for 20 years. Everything I remember on this block existed 20 years ago."

He didn't have an answer for that. He told me I needed to go down to Irving and take a look at all the new businesses springing up.

OK.

So I did that later. I found that Tart to Tart still existed. Now it had wireless, naturally, but it was still there, just across the street from a Starbucks. And the old drugstore I'd frequented was there as well, Reliable Rexall Drugs. When would I find that it was an all-new city?

During my trip, I took BART into Pleasanton, a town away from my hometown of Livermore. No one got up for me when I slipped onto the train, walking with a slight limp and holding my cane. It had been several months since my injury, but I still needed the cane to steady myself.

Before I could realize no one had gotten up for me, the conductor shot out of his little cubby and scolded the passengers: "Would someone get up for this LADY!"

I turned: "Why ... thank you, sir."

Then I was thinking outloud, I guess, because it wasn't like me to voice what came out of my mouth next: "If people weren't all staring at their phones, someone would have noticed ..."

An African-American woman holding a shopping bag as large as a small child berated me. "We have a right to look at our phones! You don't have to be so RUDE!"

What?

"I - I - didn't mean to be rude - It was just an observation."

She looked very angry. And when she went back to staring at her phone, I felt even worse than I'd felt before the conductor stood up, literally, for me.

I then told her to have a nice holiday, hoping a fake smile would look sincere.

When she got off at her stop, she turned and whispered to another woman, a white millennial also formerly glued to her phone. The white woman tried not to laugh, it looked like.

What was happening? ....

The preceding was the only sign of the New Guard. I had picked up the train at Embarcadero, where a string of young people on their phones was waiting on the trains. It was a chore to get one of them to unglue long enough to help me figure out which train to catch. I'd been living in the New York area, and trains were always clearly marked. Here there was some kind of odd electronic board that apparently wasn't mimicked on the train itself. How would I know what a Dublin train looked like if it didn't say Dublin?

So ok, I was noticing some changes.

But once I got back to Livermore, I visited with a couple of old high school classmates of mine. They looked great, and before I knew it, the three of us were giggling like 17-year-olds. I shared my story about BART.

"Oh, you're really lucky that BART person stood up for you!"

My classmate then shared a horror story from BART, which I don't believe I'm at liberty to share, and this got me thinking: perhaps the problem isn't so much with San Francisco as it is with the way we're working and living now. It's a problem about how we communicate with one another. It's a problem with our devices, not with our locations. There are really nice people everywhere, and the evergreens and eucalyptus are still as fragrant on Park Presidio and Clement as they were when I left in '95.

"Why do you live in Connecticut?" my friend asked.

I swallowed a bite of my cheese enchilada.

"I like it," I told her.

I then thought for a moment. I have lived on the East Coast for 15 years.

"But it's just ... so far," she said. ....

I got back to San Francisco that night and my mom gave me a hug. We were sharing a room at our Airbnb. I think I must have the coolest mom in the world because this seventysomething was keen to try it even more than I was. I had introduced her to the concept and now she was educating me that the name came from some guys who had once slept on air mattresses and then started this company. I was proud that my city touted this business, recently rated by some source as the best place to work in the U.S.

I looked out my window of the Victorian that night, reflecting on so many years earlier in the Richmond District, when a young woman who wanted to be an actress and later a writer and journalist would make so many mistakes, too many to count. But somewhere amidst the chaos and cigarettes, there were those memories - the time I interviewed a hooker for an SF State project and had to take her to a Chinese restaurant so I wouldn't disturb my roommate; the time I ate a fancy lunch at the Washington Square Bar and Grill with a successful man far too old for me, but from whom I learned much; seeing a young Ellen DeGeneres perform at the SF Comedy Competition and hearing my friend Len, a comedian, grumble that she wasn't really all that funny.

In early summer, 1995, I threw my going-away from San Francisco party at a famous Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. My mom cried because I was leaving for LA. But I knew it was high time for new horizons, even if that meant moving to the smoggiest place on the planet. I knew I'd love LA, much in the same way dogs like to lick their own butts. It's gross to look at, but it's what they do naturally.

I was born in Inglewood, California, and as a baby lived in a small apartment where the planes from LAX awakened my young parents. But for me, it was a balm.

I would move to New York and Connecticut shortly before 9-11, and have been on the East Coast ever since. In the past 15 years I've been to Vienna, Prague, Paris, London, Shannon, many parts of western Ireland, Colorado, and several times to New Orleans and South Texas.

I've been addicted to travel for decades, but thankfully, will always be able to find my way home. Wherever that is.