These have been some of the most humid, arid days I can remember. When I wake up, my window is fully open, and the tiniest of breezes roll in and out, barely keeping me cool. When it’s anything over 80 degrees in San Francisco, I don’t think of it as hot, instead, I think of a word my family utters over and over in thick, accented Russian: zharka. The word directly translates to hot, but there’s something about it that is endlessly more familiar, a thousand times more effective at expressing how the weather actually feels. The zh-sound, beginning with a letter that has no direct counterpart in English, perfectly encapsulates the stickiness, that feeling of pure humidity beating down on you. The rest of the word is pretty straightforward, with a heavy emphasis on the r-sound, ending with a gentle ka. I accidentally slip out a ‘tak zharka’ around friends sometimes, which has a direct translation but roughly comes out to ‘man it is freaking hot outside, can you believe this?’ They laugh sometimes, and other times, they just scratch their head.
These sweltering days lead to one of my favorite things in San Francisco- warm nights. When you can leave the house without dragging a light jacket past 7PM, there’s a certain magic in the air. For most of my life here, I zip up a fleece or button up a chore coat before hitting the town. The rare evenings where I don’t, I can pretend I live somewhere else, while still selfishly maintaining the snobbery around being born and raised in SF. (Some people are quite good at hiding this, I am not one of them.) As I leave my apartment in North Beach, a pair of uniformed Fish & Game policemen cuff a man who is yelling hysterically. He has been illegally selling an endangered species of salmon to the seafood restaurant on the corner,and once in their custody, one of the officers exclaims “all those weeks of careful stake-outs…finally worth it.” It’s a perfect encapsulation of this column, and in a broader sense, the surreal, beautiful experience of growing up in SF- there’s never a quiet moment.
And there really shouldn’t be. San Francisco is crammed to the gills, nearly spilling at the seams. For all the talk of competing with somewhere like LA or New York, one has to remember that the city, our city, is microscopic in comparison with those other glitzy, urban behemoths. It’s only seven by seven miles! Everybody knows everybody! You can and will run into an ex the moment you step into the farmers market! If you can’t put your finger on why you love this city, if you chalk it up to some sort of unexplainable magic, or an electricity in the air, well… you’re right. Partially. But for myself and so many others, the true alchemy that runs through this town is its size, which is tiny, but incredibly varied, in both culture and geography. When I’m out the door in North Beach on a warm night, I know my parents are squarely tucked into bed, immersed in fog over in the Richmond district. When I ride my bike to visit them, I traverse scenes that feel as if they range from the Mediterranean, sweating as I pedal by the exquisite Palace of the Fine Arts, to the Nordic, cutting through the Presidio Golf Course and watching the fog submerge the trees.
And truthfully, I have been biking over there a lot. San Francisco is a city often hailed as carrying the torch in terms of progress and innovation- yet, my entire family still treats this city, with few exceptions, as if it were a far flung colony of the Soviet Union. My mother has never used our dishwasher, and insists on air drying every piece of laundry we have. My dad doesn’t understand the point of delivery apps, and scoffs at ‘artisan goods.’ I believe the day I gave up trying to change them is the day I started loving them with my whole heart. Which is why it was so hard for them to hear that I was moving to New York next month- in the hearty, insular Slavic tradition, where kids often live with their parents until they’re married, this was like admitting I had totaled the car, or worse, forgot to turn the light off in the bathroom. Tears sprang up in my mother’s eyes, and my father’s face turned visibly solemn. They didn't understand….why? Why would I do this to them? (The Jewish guilt card, usually an ace in the hole for these two, was played almost immediately.) But then I looked up and asked them. Don’t they remember someone who moved across the world when they were in their late 20s, too?
Their faces curdled, an expression that appeared whenever they knew I was right. (A very rare occurrence, which is why I recognize it so quickly.) It was true. My mother had followed my father here, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. She was younger than I was, but they took a chance and it paid off. It was never easy, indeed, at nearly every turn, it was the opposite. While my mother was pregnant with me, she would pray that my Dad had an easy shift as a delivery driver for Brothers Pizza, which still sits at Taraval and 46th in the Outer Sunset. With broken English and a faulty Toyota Previa, it wasn't until he secured a position at BART that things turned around, and they began to create a bountiful life here. I told them that it was time for me to go and find my bountiful life, too.
For me, that bountiful life is one where I can experience an illuminating sense of newness- a stark contrast from the constant stream of change that has defined SF the last decade or two. (While newness is immediate, change is the process of witnessing it.) Many of the businesses I frequented as a kid have disappeared: the old toy store on Taraval that was only open 3 days a week. The rug emporium on Clement where they let me jump on the carpets. The incredibly delicious yet curiously decorated candy shop on Balboa. Those three are now a cryotherapy parlor, ceramics studio, and wine bar, respectively. There was a time when anger would bubble up inside me so vehemently it felt like I was a human volcano ready to erupt. I have settled down quite a bit as time has gone on. The only constant in a city is change, and in one like San Francisco, that change can feel both glacially slow and incredibly quick- the former from our lethargic bureaucracy, and the latter from the ‘disruptive’ nature of the tech industry. But like everywhere else, the waves will ebb and they will flow. Tech will leave, and inevitably, it will come back. Once the newest grift is over (as of writing, that seems to be AI), they’ll disappear, and once something different is hot, they’ll come back (undoubtedly another industry that solves a problem they themselves created).
People much smarter than I have said “the past is another country.” As I look back before I leave, I cannot shake that. Life was felt differently, time seemed to bounce in its own flat circle, and it genuinely seemed as if we were speaking another language. There were days when we’d run through Duboce Tunnel in our tattered Vans, push through an Edward 40 Hands on top of Bernal Hill, and smoke the worst weed in the history of man at Golden Gate Park. But life bends and veers and thank god that it does because I don’t know if I can drink two entire bottles of malt liquor without having to clear out everything I have going on the next day.
Nowadays, I fall in love with strangers at Vesuvio, take my weekly plunge at Crissy Field, and run a pick-up basketball league at Joe DiMaggio playground. It’s that last one that has surprisingly struck me hardest as I leave for my next adventure. What started as a casual-but-structured excuse to regularly see old friends has morphed into a living, breathing weekly ritual that sees dozens of young men who are kinda okay at basketball step into the arena. We’ve made polarizing merch, hosted bizarre award ceremonies, and shared succulent Chinese meals in honor of our anniversary dinner. The league has strangely enough also taught me a lot, and unfortunately for my teammates, none of those lessons pertain to the actual game itself. Instead, I have learned that people come and people go. You will be sad to not have your favorite guy to run the floor with, but they’ll drop back in eventually and maybe you can even learn to pick and roll with a guy who is un-ironically wearing a ‘Kamala is Brat’ t-shirt.
I love the league. Not only is it an immovable facet of my weekly routine, it’s become a metaphor of commitment to something bigger than myself, a first for an overly-dotted on single child of two Jewish parents.
The league, my parents. My closest friends, and acquaintances hanging out on the edges. When I tell them I am leaving, they cannot help but frown just a tiny bit. But then, nearly immediately after a frown, comes a smile, a light shooting up in the eyes, and a slight quiver of the face. ‘We’re sad to see you leave. But we are so proud of you.’
When I tell them I am leaving, I still smile incredibly wide, because the memories are so abundant, so rich that I can still palpably feel them. When I leave, I am letting go of everything and I am letting go of nothing.
Last week, for the first time in my life, I hopped on a cable car. Finally experiencing in person the rings, bumps, and views that made San Francisco famous around the world. After a brief chat with the operator, he takes us past Broadway & Mason. Still in the midst of an October heatwave, and Our Lady of Guadelope Church is radiant as we roll by. He points to it and exclaims “You just gotta smile when you’re in San Francisco!” Grabbing the mechanism to turn the cable car, we begin steadily going uphill, uphill, uphill.
