the foreign land of home

yesterday, to the immense delight of all three girls, Juniper's preschool teacher invited us on a grocery shopping expedition in the eastern Mission.  the ostensible excuse was Juniper's delight in cooking at school;  apparently she's the last at the table during baking and tamale making.  walking down 24th Street between York and Florida, we stopped at La Mexicana for pan dulce, La Palma for corn husks, fresh tortillas, and masa, and Casa Lucas for pupusas and other groceries.  Kim, the teacher, spoke to the shopkeepers in Spanish and helped me order;  she taught me how to use tongs and a cafeteria tray to select my pan dulce, and she generally introduced me to what I should look for and how to ask for what I might need. it was a wonderful afternoon, for me made both more wonderful and also weirder by the fact that my first few years in San Francisco were spent in three different apartments right near that corridor.  in spite of that, I had never once been in any of the stores we visited until yesterday.  it was like an afternoon in another country, except the other country was a neighborhood I was intimately familiar with, by which I guess I mean it was somewhat disorienting.

one of the things that I love about living in a city--indeed one of the reasons to live in one--is the layering of lives and experience onto the same space.  on 24th St. I thought of my old housemates and friends, but also of the small moments that made the Eastern Mission such a vibrant and compelling place to live in my twenties.  I thought of the apartment door on Potrero Avenue that someone had painted with a heart and a quotation about "el corazon" in Spanish that I can no longer recall--a fact that makes me sad.  I thought of xenodrome, a wacky circus/performance space that moved in next door and for a time made it hip to live in our complex.  and I thought of Greg, the insane sexy alcoholic goth boy I dated briefly during that period who would get so wasted he'd steal liquor from my roommates in the middle of the night and pee in my bed.

and yes, there is nostalgia, even for that.