My City, My Beautiful City

Good Monday morning.

Yesterday, after church, I had a sneaky little vacation all by myself.

I didn't come straight home!  I went lookin'.

When we first lived in San Diego in the early sixties,  Mission Hills was practically all I knew.  We first lived in an apartment in Clairemont but every night after supper we'd go riding around in search of our future neighborhood.

The evening that we first drove up Juan Street Hill, I said to my husband, "This is it!!"  And before long we searched out a realtor, and before my second baby was born we were happily residing on Hickory Street.  After a time, with baby number three coming along, we found another, larger house on Lyndon Road, with a huge canyon in back, and we moved there.

We hadn't paid a lot of attention to the canyons before we went there, but the canyons of San Diego are worthy of much notice. They range in size from the small and sequestered to the huge and open. Our canyon, for example, was fully a mile across at the top (I'm guessing) from our street to the houses of Washington Place across the way, and there was a deep steep incline in between, filled with bushes, plantings, wildflowers (radish and mustard) in spring, and trees.  Still, it was wide and airy, and from this I began to call the canyon systems of my beautiful city, "air canals."

This canyon, as it rambled west, descended also, and came out not really very far from the Naval and Marine training bases at Point Loma.  In the mornings as we lay abed on Hickory, we could hear the mighty roars of hundreds of young male voices calling out as they greeted the raising of the flag.  Once in a while we'd find an abandoned uniform of day-wear down on the canyon where someone hoped, perhaps to return to his faraway home without detection.

There was lots of wild life in the canyon, foxes, raccoons, coyotes, who came out at night and ferretted around the houses for whatever they might find.  We loved having them and I remember in a hot summer spell, filling a metal tank with water halfway down the canyon so that the foxes might drink.

As my kids grew up, I became a night walker, taking to the complicated knots of streets to discover ever more little neighborhoods within neighborhoods.  There was a neverending display of differently designed residences and gardens. I 'd take my two chihuahuas on a leash and often I'd end up carrying them home as their little legs finally gave out on them.

To me, at that time, San Diego consisted of Mission Hills, Hillcrest, Point Loma, La Jolla and Clairemont.  But a big change came for me when I began teaching in about 1970.  Armed with the huge substitute teacher map provided by the San Diego City Schools for its subs, I went all over the area. Since I was concentrating on bi-lingual, the neighborhoods tended not to be the ones mentioned above, and I was out in the dawn looking for places I'd never even heard of.  I'd go in in the dark, practically, be handed a door key, go into a cold dank empty room smelling of sour sponges, old chalk, and kids....look for a lesson plan, and lots of times just improvise when that inevitable bell rang and a crowd of raucous, curious little kids charged in.

It's toward those unfamiliar neighborhoods that I go now to look around.  Places I'd never thought of before I saw them.  The canyons are there, the neighborhoods albeit shabbier in some cases, filled with an ill-sitting but vibrant group of immigrant families from all over the world now; inhabiting the tree-shadowed woodsy lots, planting in the canyons, pushing their children on the sidewalks.  And over all hangs the incredible San Diego weather: almost too still, almost too mild, almost too perfect.

It's amazing to me that I cannot even afford (outright is how I 'm thinking nowadays) to buy most of these derelicts.  The prices in San Diego proper are almost astronomical.  I wonder that these families can afford them. By renting them mostly, I am sure.  But there are hard workers there, and people who know how to save and put by.  If they don't own their house this year, just give them some time. It will be worth it.

So that's where I go driving, sometimes, after church of a Sunday.  I give myself the limit of an hour so I won't get home too late...but faced with the prospect of maybe or surely leaving it forever before too long, I cherish every moment and every strange new street and every beautiful new canyon hiding behind it. YAZZYBEL