My sister (from Houston) visited my dad (in California) and decided to spend Thanksgiving with him. Since we haven’t all three been in the same place in years, I decided to fly out, too (from Chicago).

Bay Area Rapid Transit

I landed in SFO and rode BART to Walnut Creek to spend the weekend with my dad and sister.
I associate the Bay Area with fear and trauma, so I’m never glad to be back, but it felt familiar.

View from the BART train

Unfortunately, it felt familiar like returning to week-old unwashed dishes, like getting back into dirty bath water, like mounting your childhood bicycle and trying to ride up that hill you faced every day, only now all those muscles are gone.

Camino Verde, Walnut Creek, CA

But walking around my dad’s housing complex the next day felt different. I saw the beauty of the area for the first time. When I grew up in Walnut Creek, I took all this for granted. I didn’t even see how nice it was. As an adult, I resented all that nature because it came along with the horror of being my mother’s daughter. I stared at everything and appreciated the beauty of the Bay Area for the first time in 57 years.

Homeowners don’t pick all the fruit on their trees.

I realized this was the first time I’d visited without feeling afraid of either my living mother or, after her death, the memories. This visit felt different from every other time I’d ever been there.

Another observation was that the people were much unfriendlier in the Bay Area than I remembered. Or maybe when I’d been there before, I wasn’t as friendly as I am now. But even dog walkers wouldn’t acknowledge me as I passed. I thought dog owners were the friendliest people in the country. Not in the Bay Area. Consistently, during the four days I was there, the strangers who talked to me were from somewhere else (damn Californians).

Skywest Town Homes

The unfriendliness of the Bay Area is apparent in the architecture of my dad’s townhouse complex. The garages stand guard between the streets and the houses and you can’t even see any front doors.

There are no front porches or yards, so there’s no place to sit outside and visit with neighbors. In fact, there are no sidewalks. You’re expected to drive up to your garage, scuttle into your home from inside the garage, and never see or talk to anyone you live near. I was a true oddity walking around without even a dog to explain my being on foot.

My dad has kept all the photos and wall hangings the same since my mother died 10 years ago. They haven’t all held up well. Here it looks like one of these Jesuses got a happy ending to his crucifixion story.

I ran out of things to do. I love reading ebooks, but I got tired of staring at my iPhone. Watching TV isn’t easy because my dad only has cable TV and it doesn’t have the functionality to tell you what’s on. Anyway, I couldn’t relax enough to concentrate on anything.

My sister spent a week there and left on Friday. I arrived the day before Thanksgiving and was there til Sunday. We went to a nice dinner on the holiday.

My dad had scoped out the restaurant weeks before and was paying top dollar for us to have an excellent meal ($95 each). Unfortunately, The Park Bistro in Lafayette had some problem they never explained to us. We were seated at 2:00 p.m, but at 10 minutes to 4:00 p.m. we had to ask for our entrees! No fewer than two managers came and apologized for this terrible service, and they didn’t charge us for the meal (we still gave a tip).

My dad has never been one for conversation, so after Judy left, I was grateful I had brought a solo card game called Grove. It was for the flight, but I played it more in my dad’s home than I did on the plane.

By Saturday morning I was done pretending I could get through this trip without sugar. In the long tradition of family members trying to stay sober during a holiday weekend, I snuck off and didn’t say exactly where I was going. For me sanctuary wasn’t a bar — it was the bakery section of the nearest grocery store — but it was the same behavior. I got three cupcakes and a bunch of cookies. It was too much sugar too fast and I felt sick afterwards, but those baked goods got me through Saturday alone with my dad.

Bench on Main Street, Walnut Creek, CA

My dad and I went out for nice meal on Saturday afternoon and walked around downtown Walnut Creek afterwards. What a congested, overdeveloped place! It was as crowded as Clark Street in Lincoln Park (Chicago), but with higher property values and more expensive businesses. I was surprised by their public benches that don’t have the cruel bars across them that Chicago benches have (to keep people from lying down on them). For a moment I thought Walnut Creek was less hostile to its people who don’t have their own roofs over their heads. Then I realized there ARE no roofless people in downtown Walnut Creek. The police keep all such citizens…where? Locked up? I don’t actually know, but I’m certain they’re not all safely housed and taken care of.

The city I grew up in did not look good to me, even without the childhood fear.

On Sunday I took BART back to the San Francisco airport and returned home. Many people refer to the place they grew up as “home,” especially if their parents still live there. I stopped calling Walnut Creek “home” when I was 30.

Dad in background

This was a trip to that place I grew up, where I was always afraid. Even the last time I was here in 2021 — years after my mother died — visiting didn’t go well for me. I emotionally fell apart. But I’ve finally healed enough trauma and released enough old pain to spend time there without that old fear. This didn’t feel like a trip into a war zone or a haunted house. It felt like a trip to spend time with family I hadn’t seen in a while. Helping my dad with things like figuring out if his cell phone carrier provided a certain service got stressful (they kept disconnecting me and I spent way too much time on hold, waiting to be hung up on again), but it wasn’t old pain that got me down.

I call this solemn success.

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