Coming Home: Chance Meetings and Coincidence

"a homely home and simple pleasures"    
 -Jerome Klapka Jerome,
              "The Passing of the Third Floor Back"

Chance meetings and coincidence often lead to opportunity. It was a chance meeting with our friend Joan that brought us to Alameda and coincidence that a copy of the Alameda Journal, buried in her recycling bin, contained the listing of our future apartment. We acted immediately to arrange a meeting with the building manager and before long were living in a place far different from our former one in San Francisco.

It was smaller and cleaner, though of the same vintage. It was more expensive, but by far more reasonable then the hyper-inflated rents in the City. And there were amenities like a dishwasher and self-cleaning oven that we had never known before. Last was a view of a mature scrub oak that filled nearly all the windows with massively sinuous branches on which were living a family of squirrels.
We dubbed it "Home" and soon began exploring the island around it.

When first I imagined these pages about Alameda is was as a real diary with dates marking particular experiences and events. By the time I finally got around to writing them my haphazard journal keeping had failed to record an orderly time line. Just as I was imagining the project as a series of unbound vignettes another chance meeting with my old friend Jason, who is coincidentally Joan's son, exposed me to a book that has altered the course of the project. The book is called "The Geography of Nowhere", written by James Howard Kunstler. In a nutshell it's a history of the development of the American civic landscape and how the automobile reduced it to a sterile asphalt void with no sense of place or purpose. It's happened almost everywhere, but there still remain places in America that have managed to retain enough of their civic character not to have been annihilated by this dubious form of 'progress'.

Alameda is such a place, with it's streets lined with victorian houses that actually look old rather then like grandiose displays that have been pickled in money, where trees have been allowed to grow to their full heights and girths creating pleasant shady byways and where some commercial streets are scaled for use by people with shoes. Whatever the factors were that saved this island city from the deleterious effects of 'progress', Alameda retained it's charming character rather than succumb to 'development' and become another noplace in the middle of nowhere.

After spending the previous twenty-plus years within the urban villages of San Francisco, and learning to love and appreciate the scale of village life, our arrival in Alameda has become a recapitulation of all those qualities left reluctantly behind. Beyond smug cosmopolitan expectations this little island city has become our adopted home. Home is something special. It is not something you can buy at a mall or rent for a weekend. It is a sense of place that fosters the proximity to places and people necessary for creation of a real community. Home is something rare and precious worth fighting for, but without a committed community of partisans it can vanish almost overnight into the maw of gluttony known as 'development'. The battle for preservation may often be fought out loud with strident words and deeds. For the most part though, if victory is to be assured, the best weapon we have to preserve community is patronage. Next: Park Street