Late Summer's Nights Forever

The sky out back is soft, the color of peach fuzz. Way across the rooftops, a puff of whip-cream fog has crested Twin Peaks. It hangs there, suspended, unable to advance further across this slender peninsula until and unless a stronger breeze rising off the heated interior of California's rich agricultural valleys exerts a magnetic pull, drawing it inland.



For now, it is a warm night in the Mission District. I'm feeling an overwhelming tug of nostalgia tonight for so many things and people and times that are gone, never again to return.

Summer was always my favorite time as a child. Shooting my BB gun, pulling up immature carrots and radishes and eating them with the dirt still on, or roasting field corn, harvesting green apples or raspberries or blueberries, fishing on lazy afternoons, lying on my back in a field and witnessing the cumulus clouds as they shifted and twisted their way across Michigan's pure blue sky.

This is such a different place, and though I've long since acclimated, you most definitely can take the boy out of the Midwest, but never take the Midwest out of the boy.



Still, this is the right place for me. Back home, I never would have fit in. My thoughts and feelings are too restless for a region built on solid dependability. My time always feels too short to rest on the familiar, or the assumption of stability.

Here, sometimes, my body shakes, or my desk shakes, or my chair or the walls or the floors, or maybe it's all just my imagination. I've lived through so many earthquakes in a place the experts tell us inevitably will, sooner or later, be destroyed, that it is worth noting I've never felt like leaving, so I suppose this particular reality suits me.

Nothing lasts forever. Especially not us. A couple of buddies visiting me today at our delightful little startup (which at my age is the equivalent of working on top of a fault line) -- declared me happy and in the right place for the likes of me.

It may not be my inherited home -- the unstable West Coast -- but it's the home I chose.

-30-