Foggy Memory

When I was little, my parents and I lived in San Francisco—half a continent away from the rest of our family, and sometimes it felt half a world away. Over holiday visits I examined them like some kind of social experiment, trying to figure out what made them so different from my parents and me. Little had I known then how soon I’d also be living the Midwestern life. While I had been trying to figure them out, the thought of moving closer to them had begun to occupy my mom’s subconscious so thoroughly that it had become like the fog that settled over the bay on chilly mornings and spilled from her mouth in moments when idle dreaming and plans for the future had become indistinguishable. Those were the times she would ask what I thought of the potential. I didn’t like it.

We moved from San Francisco to the suburbs of Chicago when I was nine, and though I was so young when we left—or maybe because of it (being the lone born-and-raised Californian in the bunch)—that densely-populated seven-mile-square city has held sway over my imagination and occupied so much of my thoughts since. San Francisco is where the important things happened. It’s where I took to wheels on sidewalks and the emptied-out streets in Golden Gate Park as I learned to ride a bicycle. Where I fell in love a dozen times and named my pets after those first crushes—Jennifer Morgan the hamster (who like her namesake, liked to bite my fingers and particularly favored the right index), Jeanette the goldfish (who miraculously survived earthquakes).

Back then my weekdays had been occupied by the classrooms of Saint Vincent DePaul. On weekends I ditched the uniform of starched-collar shirts, wool cardigan, and corduroy trousers, and became some half-feral thing that prowled parks or the bushes of a neighbor’s yard in search of treasure, hidden paths, or any other secret I might be able to wrest from the city’s clutches. Perhaps that’s why even after all the years in exile, I haven’t been able to shake the city from my mind. Maybe some part of that wild child I had been still sleeps in some forgotten corner of my mind, biding his time until he’s given the chance to return and resume his work of discovery. And perhaps that’s why four years ago I leapt at the chance to go back there.

My friend David works in a call center for one of the big airlines. When your flight gets canceled, he’s probably the one you’re shouting at over the phone—it’s okay, he insists; he’s used to it by now. On a good day, he looks disheveled. His normal outfits consist of nerdy t-shirts and khaki cargo pants and never seem to fit him quite right. His long dishwater blonde hair, smudged glasses, and giddy smile with just a hint of buck teeth complete the look. When he travels, he adds a collared shirt to the mix to meet corporate dress code guidelines for employee travel and wrinkled fabric abounds. He looks like crumpled paper. 

One of the biggest perks of the job is free travel, and thanks to a recent layoff I happened to have the time to take him up on an invitation to join him on a trip to visit a friend of ours in Baltimore. It had been several weeks since our last trip, and because I had been feeling stir crazy (the ravages of the coronavirus and months spent slowly losing my mind while sheltering in place not even remotely conceivable to me yet), I was quick to take him up on the offer of adding another destination to the end of the visit with our friend. Over the next hour we made a list of potential destinations and narrowed it down to Seattle or San Francisco since they were destinations for a fancy new transcontinental flight he wanted me to try. Hindsight tells me I should have picked Seattle, but in the moment the siren’s call of finally visiting my hometown for the first time in nearly two decades was too strong of a pull. 

I became consumed with planning the San Francisco branch of the trip over the next few days. My computer strained to process all the browser tabs I had opened to maps and sites and photos of all the places I wanted to see as I strolled down a virtual memory lane. There was Golden Gate Park, where we’d go to the Academy of Sciences (which now sported a green roof covered with grass that could be walked on) and the old wooden carouse with the old German steam-powered organ that played songs from Mary Poppins. We’d walk there through my old neighborhood in the Richmond district, past the row house where my dad and I survived the earthquake in 1989 by bracing ourselves in a kitchen doorway, my dad holding me (screaming, small child) in one arm while pushing back an immense wicker and glass shelf loaded with pots and pans that threatened to topple on us. Our building had survived with little more than cracks in the plaster in the corners of each room and a gap in the bricks on the first floor that I could fit my tiny fingers into afterwards. Because of the way the buildings had been built side-to-side, our whole block had shifted an inch or so: the house at the end of the block had spilled its walls into the street, a Victorian painted lady who had shed her skirts at the end of the dance. Inches away from there on the map, but a half-hour car ride in the real world was Union Street, where my mom had moved not long after, as if the earthquake had shaken free the last threads of our family’s unity. And there was the park on the hill where I had seen a ghost one night, where one day I’d snuck off with a girl two years older than me to hide from the nuns on a field trip while she taught me what french kissing was. 

I had paused in my digital cartography then, had sat back to run my hands over my face and through my hair as I tend to do when tired or overwhelmed by things, and looked at this map that reduced years of childhood experience to a grid of grey city blocks separated by white lines of streets. I began to realize that I was expecting something too personal from this trip, trying to relive some intangible past that I couldn’t expect anyone else to understand. I convinced myself that it was too late to change my mind, though, and told myself I was being irrational. 

*     *     *

It was late July when we visited our friend in Baltimore, and early August when we set out for San Francisco. I had already spent that summer in Pittsburgh with old friends, in Boston and Salem with family, and in North Carolina. I had spent so much time on planes that I was starting to recognize flight attendants. Our departure had been delayed a couple of days by storms and David had begun to worry that the delays would mean trouble getting to California—let alone back home—since we would be flying layover. When we at last left for the airport, I felt like the storms had moved into my stomach. I was finally on my way back to the city I called my hometown, and I had no idea if the reality of it would be able to live up to so many years of imagination. 

We were flying from Baltimore to San Francisco by way of New York; a circuitous route, but David had wanted to make sure that we had the chance to fly in a pair of eighteen hundred dollar first class seats—another bonus of traveling with an airline employee, provided the seats are available. I was pretty excited about the potential to be pampered and boozed up for a seven hour flight, so I was able to take it in stride when our flight from Baltimore to New York was canceled in the aftermath of the storms. But rather than see a bad omen, I only saw how easy it was to reroute our plans with an hour-long cab ride to Washington DC and a short flight from there to New York, and had David’s updates of how many open seats remained on that last, most-important leg of the trip. I’m going home became my mantra for the next several hours. 

We arrived at Reagan airport several hours early for our flight—David’s anxiety over getting where we needed to be on time is strangely compatible with my neurotic worry that I’m doomed to miss a flight if I’m not at the gate three hours early. We checked in, ate food, bought magazines, and I observed my tradition of buying new gum at the airport—never bring old gum on a new trip. David had begun to check seats for the flight departing from New York every ten minutes, no doubt expecting some new calamity to pop up. I was still too excited for the trip to worry, though his anxiety was starting to grate. I’m going home, I reassured myself. 

We flew from Reagan to JFK in a tiny jet where we sat face-to-face with a friendly flight attendant. Thanks to David, I had discovered the joy of Baileys in coffee at cruising altitude, and our new friend kept us supplied. 

On arrival in New York, we waited for the flight to San Francisco. David snarled in frustration, snapping me out of my reverie. 

“The flight’s booked solid.” He jammed his phone back into his pocket, and began to pace. The downside to his travel perks: Sometimes the flight books up and no choice is left but to wait for another flight, if another flight is available. 

“It wouldn’t hurt to check in at the desk, right? Maybe someone won’t show up.” Sometimes, I don’t even know how I’m able to be so optimistic. I’m going home. 

“I hope you’re right. The next flight isn’t for another three hours.”

I was having visions of sleeping on an airport bench. We waited by the gate for the flight to San Francisco and watched the passengers slowly board as David assured me (or perhaps himself) that the red-eye flight usually had more open seats. I was starting to look for the most affordable airport restaurant when we were called to the desk and told that four seats were free. 

Thanks to David, I’ve flown in first class half a dozen times in my life. The seat I settled into this time made all of those seem like torture devices in comparison. I felt a pang of guilt for sitting in a seat clearly meant for a passenger in a much different tax bracket. That passed quickly as I got used to the accommodations, and when a two-hour delay was announced (yet another effect of the storms that had passed through) I was hardly bothered. I’m going home—a mimosa and warm towel, please. 

The flight passed in a haze of movies, a meal with more courses than I knew existed, and the best nap I’ve ever had on a plane—or possibly ever—and then we were finally arriving in San Francisco. The engines grew louder as I pressed my face to the window like I had when I was a kid and watched the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge sail past in the distance. When we had lived here, having so much of our family in the Midwest had meant that we spent a lot of time flying back and forth. In those days, the bridge had been my sign that we were almost home. When I was six, I had learned how to sleep through the noise of drunken crowds and sirens in the tiny apartment on Union Street my mom and I shared. That’s where I learned to be a real city-dweller. Even now I can sleep through things that wake my roommates up. Back then, curled up in my little bed I could just see the tip of one of the bridge’s towers through my window—until a taller building had gone up next door a year before we moved, blocking the bay from view. The orange bridge had been as familiar to me as the back of my hands,Mandy there had been a time I separated people into those who had walked across its nearly two-mile span and those who hadn’t. Now it took me a few moments to recall its shape and size in the darkness. I’m almost home.

We landed with a bump and I waited impatiently for the door to open. When we got out, I didn’t recognize the airport at all. I had to remind myself that places can change a lot in so many years. David and I exited the terminal, and I searched for the few details I could recall but found precious few that jogged my memory. I wondered what David, who had spent almost all of his life in North Carolina, felt now. Maybe the smell of the Pacific Ocean reminded him of his home on the east coast he’d left behind more than a week ago. Maybe the smell was too different and set him on edge and made him feel some degree of the enormity of the storms that were brewing in me. Or maybe he was just ready to get downtown and find our hotel. I could sympathize—it was nearly midnight and we’d been traveling most of the day.

We got to the depot where we could catch the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), a train that would take us to the city. I was struck by the realization that this station hadn’t been built yet when my family moved. Worse, it had already had enough time to become dingy and worn-down. I had expected an immaculate station like the ones in my childhood, when the trains zipped smoothly from one city to the next with so little noise (though I was probably falling victim to selective memory). Instead, I found something that more closely resembled the dingy L stations of the Chicago Loop. At least, as the train slid into the station the same low, electric tone played over the loudspeakers, a gentle alert to the night’s commuters. I’m going home, I told myself one more time. 

Half an hour later we arrived in a city so alien that we may as well have just arrived in a different country. I checked the maps on my phone to confirm that we were in the right place. The street names matched up, but nothing matched my memory. I knew where we should be; not where we were. Nervous anticipation was slowly turning into a quiet panic that drove me through the streets of a downtown I couldn’t recognize. 

Of course I knew San Francisco had changed. I had heard it in the stories of people forced to move from homes owned for generations by rising costs, driven out to the distant suburbs by the buses that drove the employees of tech companies into the city. I had braced myself for it when I saw online that my old home, the one that had shifted sideways in the earthquake, had been painted a garish yellow-green and left to the devices of time and weather; and when I saw the apartment building on Union Street had been renovated, repainted, the little pharmacy on the ground floor replaced by a Sur la Table. I had expected it when I read an article about rising rents and saw that a studio in that same neighborhood on Union, which had once rented for $800 a month, now went for over $3,000 with little to no upgrades. I knew that part of the blame had to do with outdated building codes that kept buildings limited to no more than three stories tall in many neighborhoods. I knew what to expect, but I hadn’t expected how I would handle it in person, and here I was forced to reconcile those expectations with the realization that things actually had changed—and would only continue to do so. 

There! Just a block over on the map, a name I recognized. Market Street; the main thoroughfare of the business district, where my mom had commuted to her job every day until she was laid off in 1993, which had been the larger reason behind our move closer to the rest of the family. Once David and I got there, I would know for sure where we were and how to get where we needed to go. I breathed a sigh of relief when the Transamerica Pyramid Building loomed into view. I had called it The Pyramid when I lived there, though it sounded more like Peermin when I was young enough to confuse “three” with “free” and couldn’t figure out how to tie my shoes yet. This building became the reference point as I reoriented myself, looking down at the screen of a phone that I never would have imagined owning all those years ago. I hoped that David didn’t notice how shaken I was by this strange city. There was only one thought in my mind now, and it had replaced all others: Why are you here? 

In San Francisco, in the middle of the night, I realized how stupid I had been to think this trip would be a good idea. Any city is imposing in the middle of the night,  but they become something that borders on existential crisis when attached to the little memories that define a life but fail to connect to anything present in the real world. In that corner of my mind, the wild child was cowering at the sight of a foreign city that should have been familiar. 

At some point that night I had realized something that wouldn’t sink in until a few days later, but should have been obvious: When I had lived in this city I had been a child and, naturally, my experience of it had been administered, cautious, and curated. The occasions when I had set foot outside of a small list of pre-selected locations were rare, and it had been even rarer to be out after dark except with a parent and in the smallest parts of the city where everything was familiar. In my desire to reconnect with this city, I had discounted that this would be the first time doing so as an adult, unchaperoned. A decade of independence in Chicago had given me the sense that I could handle any place on my own, but here something called out to my nine-year-old self. And presented with a city that was unrecognizable, his fear became mine. Why did I come back? 

Despite the mounting discomfort, I clung to the hope that if I waited a little longer I would find a city transformed in the morning, that what I felt was just the strain of a day that had been too long, too tiring. David and I didn’t speak much during this time, only when navigating or when I pointed out something I still remembered. There was another rush of relief when I spotted the building that I had always thought looked like the tops of three parking meters pushed together, where my mom’s company had hosted extravagant Christmas parties every year until they discontinued the tradition to cut costs. 

When we reached the hotel I was in a daze, still trying to remember my city. We had wandered into the sort of neighborhood that my parents would have steered me clear of, the kind of place that’s only ended up in by accident before a wrong turn is realized and corrected. This neighborhood was rough. 

“Where the hell are we?” I was startled by the sound of my own voice. 

“Why are you asking me? You lived here.” David had taken the lead at some point; he had the address of the hotel after all. He stepped up to a firmly locked glass door with a flimsy plastic buzzer. It looked like the front door of an animal hospital. This was not what I had expected when he told me he’d booked a hotel. 

“Not here. This is the place where they find the body at the start of the horror movie.” The building was, in a word, rough. It was tucked in the middle of an alley that looked like it should have been at the back of a building, every unreadable sign and man-made surface coated with a layer of grime. I sure didn’t remember ther being so many trash cans when I was a kid. . . Now I was certain we were in a part of the city I wouldn’t have recognized even when I was a kid. David, I told myself, if I wake up missing a kidney, you’re in big trouble. I waited as he pushed the buzzer. After several minutes with no answer, I began to weigh my options and recall parks that might have nicer benches. I became uncomfortably aware of how out of place I looked here, a foolish tourist awkwardly tugging his rolling suitcase. At least it was small enough to run with, if needed. At last, an older man made his way down the stairs just inside. He looked as disheveled as the building. He looked at the two of us through the door, and his confusion caught me off guard. What the hell am I doing here, I asked myself. 

The man’s confusion, as it turned out, was because he had only been expecting one of us. What David had thought was a hotel was—in fact—a hostel that only allowed single occupancy in each room. As there was only one room available, we had no choice but to look elsewhere. It was well past midnight now, and our options would be limited, especially in this part of the city (We would later learn that a conference was in town and almost every room was taken). We also later learned that we were about as far as we could have been from the majority of the city I would have remembered. As it turns out, a nine-year-old kid isn’t very good with directions. 

The ordeal with the hotel became something of a turning point, and I realized what a bad idea this trip had been, and at that point I was also cold and exhausted to a degree I had never thought possible. There’s definitely going to be fog in the morning, I thought with some anticipation of hearing the fog horn in the morning. I realized how much I had missed the sound when we moved to the Midwest, and remembered how uneasy I had felt for the first months there. 

We tried a few hotels closer to the actual business district once we had put some distance between ourselves and that dark, spooky alleyway. The answer was the same at each—no vacancy. As we walked, I thought about all the stories in the news about people being displaced by the tech companies moving into San Francisco. There had been times I had wondered if, had my family not moved, we might still have been forced out by that same wave of progress that was reshaping the Bay Area. Here, trying to find a hotel room in the middle of the night, I felt I had gotten my answer: No Vacancy. 

In a last attempt at finding accommodations, David and I enlisted the help of one of my friends back in Chicago, who called me with periodic suggestions of places he’d found. The odds were not good. 

A small and shabby hotel tucked away off the main streets.

No vacancy. 

A beautiful and hideously expensive hotel. 

No vacancies until after ten.

Another hostel with a heavily-armed police officer stationed in the lobby.

Pass.

When we got another lead on a hotel that might have a vacancy, we trudged back up Market Street, past homeless people curled up on dirty blankets, past late-night vendors hocking knock-off jewelry and handbags, past drunken businesspeople spilling outdoor bars and into cabs. We arrived at the hotel, which we agreed would be our last attempt. It was nearly one in the morning now, and the first flight to Chicago in four hours was looking better by the minute. 

“I hope this works.” I was exhausted, beyond ready to get off my feet.

“If it doesn’t, I give up.” David looked more crumpled than usual. 

It felt like years had passed in the space of a single day. I wanted to sleep for a month. Through the exhaustion, though, dread was surfacing. I knew that if it had the chance to sink in, I would shut down and this situation would be even worse. We were in the lobby of the hotel, a small, shabby room that looked like it hadn’t changed since the early 80s. This wasn’t as comforting as I would have expected, even as I forced a smile, nudged David in the side with an elbow and joked that I felt like I was finally home. Time passed with a painful slowness as we waited for the solitary clerk to free himself from another guest who had a problem with their room. I knew that I couldn’t wait any longer. I felt myself shutting down. I knew that there would be a room available here—probably for too high a price—and the part of me that has common sense told me that it would be stupid to have gone through all of the trouble to get here, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to handle waking up in the city and seeing how different it had become in the light of day. I needed to go. I looked at David, and we both knew it was time to leave. 

We returned to the airport, defeated, this time in a car driven so fast and recklessly that my head hit the ceiling at the bottom of a hill. I felt guilty for giving up at the last second, and I couldn’t help but feel like everything going wrong was punishment for being foolish enough to think I would arrive at a city that was still recognizable. We arrived at the airport just a little before 2 A.M. We had been in the city for a little more than two hours. Two hours that had damaged me in ways that I still struggle to explain. I had brought the past with me like an extra piece of luggage, and it had weighed me down too heavily. 

I moved through the empty airport in a daze, so distracted by my thoughts that I had forgotten to remove the bottle of water from the earlier flight into the city I’d left in my carry-on bag. I sat on a bench waiting for my bag’s contents to be checked, trying to figure out the song playing over the speakers. Something else I knew but couldn’t remember. I know this one—it’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s what I say when I try to remember something I should know. I knew that people would ask about my trip to San Francisco—I had been so excited, after all, that I had told anyone who would listen. 

Now, I would have to explain why I had called it off, but I couldn’t quite place it. It’s on the tip of my tongue. We passed the plane we had flown in on as we walked through the terminal in search of chairs that we could catch a nap on. Three hours later, we boarded a flight back to Chicago which miraculously had two neighboring seats available. I slept almost the entire way and woke up as we were approaching the city. 

Arriving in Chicago by plane is similar to arriving in San Francisco. In both cases, there comes a point when I look out and see that we’re flying over open water that stretches out so far that the boundaries can’t be seen. It’s impossible to gauge altitude, and I always have a brief thrill of fear that I’ll be pulled from my seat, through the window, and dropped down into the churning green depths. If I look hard enough, I can always find the little white wake trails of boats passing beneath. In them, I find memories of summer days sailing with my dad. These, if anything, have done the most to connect the two cities for me. 

When I was little, around four years old, my mom, dad, and I got caught in a storm on the San Francisco Bay. Too little to help, I waited out the worst of the waves and wind in the cabin of The Shamrock trying in vain to help my mom with her seasickness as my dad fought the wind and waves alone. The waters were too rough for the outboard motor to work, leaving us at the mercy of the howling wind. On our safe arrival at a (temporary) dock across the bay from where we set out, I stuck my head out. My dad expected a terrified child. Instead, I enthusiastically shouted “Great sail, dad!” In 2009, after my dad bought a new boat to sail on Lake Michigan (which he grudgingly allowed my stepmom to name Owen Meanie), he and I were caught in a similar storm. This time I was old enough and big enough, and felt like I’d been given a chance to prove that I’d grown up in the years since. Instead, I put my rain gear on wrong and got drenched from the waist down. Just like in the aftermath of that earlier storm, when we arrived safely at the harbor, I hopped off the side of the boat, rain boots squishing with the water inside and helped tie the boat to the dock. “Great sail, dad!” I called, even if it was tinged with a healthy dose of sarcasm. My dad and I are both big on nostalgia. 

But the water is where the similarities between the two cities ends for me. When landing in San Francisco, the water rises closer and closer to the plane until it feels like it’s about to set down among the waves and just when they seem within reach the ground appears suddenly, saving the day. In Chicago, there’s always a moment of disappointment as the water is cut off too soon by the metropolitan sprawl. The green expanse is arrested by a thin strip of beach and the grey of the city (that’s beautiful in the summer—trust me). There’s a thrill of picking out the buildings I can recognize from above, and I always try to spot my apartment. It helps that I live along one of the approaches to O’Hare. 

The wind is strong in Chicago, and the plane usually drifts sideways as it moves forward—a friend who used to be a pilot told me this is called “crabbing.” I always think of a plane shuffling sideways or a crap flying gracelessly through the air, but there’s something in the strangeness of the image that always seems relevant to how I feel coming back to Chicago: In some ways, it feels like I’m just shuffling sideways rather than moving forward. At some point that night in San Francisco, my mantra had fallen apart and in the late morning as we returned to my little apartment a few blocks from the lake, it turned into a mantra of “I’m sorry,” muttered by David, who in some way felt responsible. I couldn’t remember the words to tell him that he wasn’t the one I blamed. Living beneath the flight path to O’Hare, I was reminded daily—several times hourly—of the failed homecoming. In the years since, I have decided that another attempt needs to be made. I just need to do a little more planning.