Return to the Haight

(Yes, he's grown again. Aidan is now taller than 5'6" and with his jumping ability he's that much closer to being able to dunk the ball.)

As I think back over my life, there has been no one part of town, here or in the other eight cities where I've lived at least three months, that can compete with the Haight. After all, I was there for a baker's dozen or so years.

I lived at three separate addresses in the Haight -- on Masonic, Haight, and Ashbury Streets. My first three kids were born during that period, I had my Rolling Stone years, my CIR* years, the majority of my world-trotting years.





(Photo by Dylan) Today, we returned to the Haight, and I passed my old addresses as the kids shopped for Christmas presents. The Haight's upgraded a bit in recent years; there still are used clothes stores and tons of pierced, tattooed kids along the street, but there also are seriously upscale boutiques. It feels more like the Village than in years past.





You know that when you walk streets you used to walk that you'll be flooded by memories, and I'm no different in this regard.

We passed a used bookstore where I once found two slender volumes about the English language written in the early years of the last century. Those two small books triggered a pent-up desire to learn the history of my birth language, and a dozen other books have followed in my quest to understand how old German, Anglo-Saxon, post 1066 Norman French, Latin, and many more recent foreign influences have layered this malleable language into one with so many nuances and so many shades of meaning that when I (somewhat compulsively) play an online word game, I invariably learn new three and four letter words every time.

We passed the shop where I purchased the album "Imagine" on the night John Lennon died. I was crying and couldn't hide it. I took the album home and played it all night long.

There were a lot of other ghosts and images, which I will not detail here. I'm going to have to go back again and let more of them in...


* = Center for Investigative Reporting

p.s. We had a surprise birthday party here tonight. The kids pulled it off expertly.