We decided on St. Louis for a variety of reasons. It's big enough for me, manageable enough for the wife and we both have some family here. Plus, we liked the place. Its small physical area and distinct neighborhoods remind me a little of the city of my lost love.
In St. Louis, if you can afford $1,800 a month, the cost of that average vacant one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, you can rent a big house in a tony suburb. It does not appear from the local classifieds that you could pay $1,800 rent in the city even if you wanted to.
We bought a nice old house in a city neighborhood called Dogtown -- owning a house is something I honestly thought I would never do in my life -- for an amount of money that, as far as I know, cannot make you a homeowner in the Bay Area.
Between the time we bought the house and the day we moved, it became a form of pornography for my San Francisco friends to ask me what we paid for the house. They'd hunker themselves up as though they were about to be punched, and say, "OK, tell me what you paid for it. No! Wait!" More hunkering. "OK, now. Go ahead." I'd tell them and they'd go, "OOOOHHHHHHohohoh." One friend shouted, "No!" as her knees actually buckled. She grabbed my shoulders for support. "Do you have any idea what I just paid for my house?" she asked. I did. Not quite five times as much as we paid for ours, for a house half the size (but nice!).
When I called to set up phone service, the operator at Southwestern Bell said, "So you're leaving California for St. Louis weather? I would say that's a bad choice." I laughed and said, "Well, we're leaving the traffic."
"We have traffic here," she said, and I said, "No, you don't," and I was right.
Two St. Louis scenes:
Scene 1: The wife and I are going to a street fair called "A Taste of the Central West End." The Central West End is the neighborhood most like the old hometown to me, the bourgeois bohemian, chichi part of town. There are gay people and interesting restaurants and high prices and a punk rock fashion store, and it's hard to park. But see if you can spot the things that wouldn't have happened in San Francisco in the following sequence. We'll review afterward.
One long block from the central intersection of the street fair, I see a parking space. I make a quick U-turn to get to it, and as I approach it I notice a man getting into a car just behind the open space. I decide to sit and wait for him to pull out, and then just front my way into the two-space hole when he leaves. After a moment, just as he's starting to pull away, I realize that I'd been mistaken. There's a car between the open space and the leaving man, so, deciding to just grab the open space, I pull forward. As I begin to roll away the man quickly lowers his window and yells, "You can park here! You can park!"
Here are the things that wouldn't have happened in San Francisco: 1) I see a parking space one block from where we're going. 2) I have time to make a U-turn without the parking space disappearing. 3) Someone is leaving, thus creating a second parking space. 4) The man takes only a moment before he's ready to leave the parking space. 5) The man thinks that I've concluded that he's not leaving, thus indicating that he's noticed another human being populating the world. 6) The man takes an interest in my situation, trying to tell me the parking space is indeed becoming available.
Scene 2: The wife and I are meeting friends at a popular restaurant in the city's Italian district, the Hill. When we arrive, I walk in to see if our friends are already there. As soon as I walk in the door, the hostess says, "You're looking for Phil, right?" I point at her like the game show host I secretly am and say, "That is incorrect!" She laughs and says, "You're kidding, right?" I say, "No, really. I'm not looking for Phil. I'm looking for the Granicks." She says, "Oh, well, the guy said 'young guy with a goatee,' so I figured it was you."
In St. Louis, you can actually say "young guy with a goatee" and people will accept that as a reasonable description of a person they might then recognize. In San Francisco, saying "young guy with a goatee" is like saying "biped."
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