Idle essays

Remembering Berkeley: wish I was still there. Or could go back.

Gree and Gertrude — my mother’s grandmother and aunt — lived into their late 90s…problem-free. Partly because they were tee-totaling Christian Scientists and so never were challenged by a doctor. But I suspect more likely because they lived on a rather steep hill in Berkeley. Gertrude had to walk up that hill five days a week to board the train for San Francisco, where she worked at Crocker-Anglo National Bank. Gree walked up there every day or two to visit the charming little neighborhood grocery store. She would also mount a steep concrete staircase and then climb a steep paved road to get to her grandson Berwick’s place.

Steady up- and downhill walking. Hardly any place they went was on the flat.

Hereabouts, there’s hardly any place you can go that isn’t on the flat. There are a couple of so-called “mountain parks” — we’d call those breathtaking heights “hills” — and a ritzy-titzy neighborhood built on gently rolling terrain below one of those alleged “mountains.” But most populated parts of the Valley are decidedly un-hilly.

Gree and Gertrude’s neighborhood was a hill. Hereabouts, for me to get to rolling terrain, I’d have to drive 20 minutes (one-way!) through homicidal traffic. There: it was right outside the front door.

So basically what was happening: to go about their ordinary daily routines, they had to indulge in some hefty gymnastics. Up a steep hill to reach the grocery store; then down a steep hill. Up a set of concrete steps to reach another hillside road. Up that road to get to their kids’ house. And o’course, on the other side of the Bay just about any place you chose to venture in the city was going to take up you up and down an incline.

It was such a pretty place, Berkeley. I really do miss it.

My father decided that nothing would do but what he had to retire to Sun City, Arizona. Not a bad move, exactly: real estate prices were cheap enough that he could quit his job early, and once we’d been in the state for a year, my tuition at the University of Arizona was next to nil. My mother, after a brain-banging hard upbringing and a challenging adulthood, could accommodate herself to just about anything. She thought the place was just too, too wonderful.

How you could imagine that about flat, monochromatic, mono-ethnic Sun City escapes me. But whatever rings your bell, I guess. How you could imagine the University of Arizona was any match, for your Phi Beta Kappa kid, to Cal Berkeley (or any of the California universities) escapes me. I was set to go to Berkeley, but ohhh mirabilis! Ended up in Tucson. My father, not even having graduated from high school, had no clue what this meant for me career-wise. Nor, I suppose, did he care.

Because, after all, what was a woman’s career? To marry, bear children, cook, and clean house. Yeah.

I very much doubt he understood what difference a college degree would make for me — to say nothing of a graduate degree or two. Because after all…what was I gonna do? Become a secretary somewhere: that was about the highest and best use of your National Honor Society girl child’s little brain.

So, that’s what I see, what I remember when I visit Sun City. As you can imagine, it’s about the last place on this planet where I wanna live.

In an instant, I’d go back to Berkeley, if I could afford it. But of course, I can’t. Not even my father could afford it, on his handsome Merchant Mariner’s salary.

So here we are in lovely Arizona: Southern California redux seasoned with too damn much heat and a handsome dose of public stupidity. What a place!