Three Cities

On arriving, leaving, and learning to look.

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On Monday morning, we walk to the Presidio. The sprawling SF park begins just a few blocks from our house in Pacific Heights and cascades down the side of the city to the ocean and the base of the Golden Gate below. The Presidio is lush and wild; marked by tall, gangly eucalyptus and deep green cypress trees, mushroom-speckled mud spots, and felled branches with tender, peeling bark. We spot a banana slug suckling at a neon orange mushroom, a rolly polly hanging from the underside of a clover. Everything is damp. It smells of earth.

Our footsteps sink slowly in soil. As we walk, I think about the park I was in just a few days before— Rome’s Villa Borghese. The wide, well-manicured green space that sits above the center of Rome. The park overlooks the city’s broad skyline; a spread of pale brick and marble punctuated by the spires of obelisks, tops of cathedrals, and hidden corners of innumerable world-famous landmarks. The park is ripe with fountains spouting water from pipes built in 2000 BC, and ancient sculptures akin to those New Yorkers could only hope to witness within the confines of The Met. The first time I walked Villa Borghese, I thought it was the most incredible place I’d ever been.

After that first visit, though, I’d remarked on the park’s beauty to one of my partner, Giulio’s cousins and was shocked to find her taken aback. “Yes, but Central Park!” She replied, (I was still in NYC at the time), “Central Park is incredible. The baseball fields, the boats, the green spaces and flowers… and then you look up and are surrounded by skyscrapers!”

The interaction reiterated an all-too-familiar trope: the grass is always greener. In this case, the literal grass of these two parks, but also-- by extension-- the cities surrounding them.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot lately. Since moving from NYC to SF, I’ve received endless inquiries about the change. “Why did you move?” “Do you miss New York?” “Which city is better?” “Will you ever go back?”…

There’s nothing wrong with these questions. They reflect a natural human urge to compare, to define, to categorize places and experiences into neat boxes: “better”, “worse”, “then”, “now”, “closer”, “farther”, “temporary”, “forever”.

But for me, and I think for Giulio too, that’s not the point. We moved for a host of reasons, but among them was a general desire for change. Newness. Variety. Diversity of experience.

I’ve been reading the book Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doer, which my mom got me for Christmas. In it, he writes about the danger of familiarity:

“Over time, we stop perceiving familiar things as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched or familiar, the fainter our experience of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience— buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello— become new all over again.”

Yes.

Ideally, of course, one can also learn to see anew within the confines of one’s typical day-to-day life (for me, being with children often has this effect), but still, real perspective-altering, gratitude-renewing change sometimes requires a greater shift.

This has certainly been true for me even after just a few weeks in SF. In fact, even before that, it was the decision to leave NYC that allowed me to finally love it. Only then did I really see New York City—feel it; experience the pure magic of a sunset bike ride over the Brooklyn Bridge, the charm of neighborhood coffee shop regulars, the grind and grit and energy of lower Manhattan on Monday morning.

And it’s in contrast to New York that San Francisco has come into focus. Not in a “better” or “worse” way, but in differences. Second glances. Noticing the availability of sky, the nearness of the ocean, the awe of the Golden Gate peering out of the fog on a cold morning.

I don’t know how long we’ll stay here, or if either city will ever feel more like home than the other. For now, it’s enough to just be here. To walk through the unfamiliar and notice what appears.