Somehow it appears I am ending my stint in the Bay Area the same way I started it.  When we first lived here, this was the destination vacation for many friends.  Al and I played tour guide – hardly knowing where we were ourselves and seeing much of it for the first time as well.

Then came babies and the twenty plus years that child rearing causes to whoosh by.  No one came to visit anymore, and if they did, they were handed a map of the area and told where to go.  They were welcome to use our home as a base camp but our days of tour guiding were on hold.

Now in the past two weeks I have had the pleasure of resuming that role.  Mike and Chris came out from the more eastern realms of our great nation and I found myself (with our other college friend, Jeff) going up to Muir Woods, winding our way through the foggy north bay, ending up at the Golden Gate National Recreation area overlooking the city that was holding up its skirt of fog to show us its ankles.  I sat there as they took a short hike to a higher vantage point, and realized in 29 years I had never been to Angel Island out in the Bay.  Otherwise my mind and body were content just to soak in the reality that I had been here that long, and am now leaving.

We went to a SF Giants game, and I basked in the company of old friends from the baby days, enjoyed the temperate nighttime, looked out over the Bay from our third tier seats, watched the Giants lose (boo!) and once again, savored the moment.  I will probably not sit in that park again for many years.  However, just for the record, I will NEVER be a Dodgers fan (or Lakers fan for that matter.)

This week found one of my oldest friends, Andi, here with her now 20+year old daughter.  We went on a whirlwind overnight to Yosemite, then yesterday (Andi had to leave earlier to get her other daughter to college) Alex and I went to Chinatown.  I had not been in a long while and when I had, it was with children.  Going to Chinatown with children is about as close to hell on earth as I want to get.  The reason is that every emporium is pretty much the same – the same kitschy souvenirs, all irresistible to little hands.  The fact that the shelves are lined with the same junk does not stop the little humans from wanting to go into EVERY store and look at it all AGAIN.    Not Alex and I.  We shopped like grown up girls on a grown up girl shopping trip.  Jewelry, purses, silk robes, woolen jackets that felt like velvet and were out of our price range.  We went into one store that was wall to wall scarves of every fabric and hue, hanging from the walls in rows, forming one huge curtain of color.  Amazingly,  Alex was able to find one out of all those choices that she wanted to take home with her.

After that we headed back to Market and Powell where Al picked us up and we went on to the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.  It was completely renovated a few years back and is beyond description, but I’ll do it anyway.  The only thing I have to say about it (as she goes on for three more paragraphs) is that they kept enough things from the old Academy that I felt like it was still “mine.”  When we lived in the city Joe and I would go there frequently.  I had a yearly pass so we could go and play until his three year old legs and psyche collapsed.  It had the aquarium – now in new digs but the vast collection of fish I remember well (HUGE MONSTER BASS AS BIG AS YOUR ROTTWEILER, DUDE), like the Harlequin Shrimp that you used to have to really squint to see is now there in a beautiful aquarium showing off his colors.  The Phillipine coral reef (I’m going, that’s all there is to it) exhibit is the crown jewel as far as I’m concerned.

But that’s only the aquarium – they also kept the African room that includes their old collection of “stuffed” animals.  The room is huge and they rearranged the exhibit so that animals that actually live together are shown together, rather than the old panorama exhibit of everything together, no matter if from jungle or desert.   The lighting wasn’t any different though, and the benches were in the same place, and I remembered it fondly as the room where I could finally let go of Joe’s little hand and let him run unimpeded for a little while.  Indeed, that was still the plan of the day yesterday, when little ones were allowed to go off and explore and still be seen from across the room by exhausted parents resting on the smooth wooden benches.

There are more and newer exhibits – the rainforest, the living rooftop, the many educational hands on exhibits, and the planetarium show (boy have THOSE come along way, thanks to computers and the Hubble) but in the end, to my great satisfaction, it was like going home again to see an old friend in new clothes, and at the same time I was saying goodbye to it all – the sweet memories of Joe and me using the academy as a playground.  Renovation or no, it will always house the spirit of a young mother with her little boy, learning together at the Academy of Sciences.

And yes, I don’t often cry when I write my blogs, but I am this time.  Ta ta for now…