Can't Go Home Again

You won't find yourself there.

Golden Gate Park smells the same as it ever did. Salt breeze and eucalyptus. In most places it looks the same, too. I can layer two decades of memory over the sandy trails and they still match. For the most part.

When Filha and I visited San Francisco last week, we discovered the bramble-ridden hollow off Chain of Lakes Drive—the one that once housed coyote pups—has been scraped clean and filled with water. Ducks dive there now, tail feathers pointed to the sky as they scrabble beneath the surface for dinner. A new tourist-friendly path hugs the outer edges of the lake. We traversed it skeptically. It’s definitely picturesque but we find we prefer the brambles.

“Why did they name this Middle Lake?” Filha griped. “That’s the most boring name you could ever come up with.”

“I would have called it Coyote Pond,” I offered.

“Eucalyptus Lake. Polliwog Pond. Bramble Lake!” she added. “Anything is better than Middle Lake. It’s not even in the middle of anything.”

We traveled to our former home, just the two of us, so Filha could have “one last San Francisco Halloween.” The plan was a year or more in the making, an effort to recapture the trick-or-treat magic of Filha’s childhood before she and her SF-based friends are too cool for costume-centric shenanigans.

But we may have arrived too late.

Nothing is ever quite like you left it.

We are not the same, either.

Our last Halloween in San Francisco was October of 2020. Filha dressed up as a dragon. She walked forlornly up and down the Great Highway in the fading light with her best friend B (also a dragon). They carried their plastic jack-o-lanterns but there was no candy. No block parties. No swarms of shrieking children living out their best candy-fueled fantasies. Just face masks of the medical variety and the constant fear of infection.

Halloween has long been Filha’s favorite holiday—and mine. I wanted her to have one last glorious romp in the outer avenues. Bank one more memory of a magical night with her best pals on the streets where she learned to ride a bike. Pumpkins on the steps and spiders in the windows. Garage doors yawning with fangs. Rows of tombstones like rotting teeth. Witches and werewolves and wendigos galore.

I made a lot of miscalculations on this trip.

For one thing, I didn’t really consider how the gleeful gore of an American Halloween would hit wrong this time around. In the front yard next to B’s house, a body lay cold in a blood-spattered shroud. Up a block on 45th Avenue, a cadre of black cats stood guard over scattered skeletons. Here a gnawed femur, there a pinioned torso.

All of it was plastic, I know. Fake and forensically ridiculous. But it was entirely too reminiscent of the real-life scenes that have live-streamed from Gaza for more than a year. The bloodied shrouds, the blasted skeletons, the starving cats. What used to seem like harmless Halloween fun felt now like a ghoulish mockery. As if bombs aren’t falling, this very moment, on real human beings. As if America itself is untouchable. Unaccountable.

That was the first harsh realization.

The second came when Filha broke down in tears an hour into her long-awaited trick-or-treating expedition.

Filha & B in 2020

She had spent the afternoon fixing her Murder Hornet costume with her Auntie Kathy. Costume perfected, photos taken, we walked the two blocks from our Airbnb to her best friend’s house. It was a surreal echo of the walk we used to take from our own orange house on 46th Avenue, a house now inhabited by strangers who fail to weed the succulent garden my friend Alison and I so lovingly planted and tended in front of our homes for years. (Like, pull a weed already! It’s not that hard!)

There were two other teens already waiting at B’s house, friends from middle school whom Filha had met the day before when she tagged along to see what a San Francisco 8th-grader’s day is like. They were kind and funny and yet I could see Filha start to shrink as she perched on the edge of the couch, left knee jogging a nervous tempo.

When we all hit the sidewalk for trick-or-treating, the adults a considerate block or so behind the teens, I worried about the stiff set of Filha’s slim shoulders, the silence she carried like a bulwark.

She seemed reluctant to collect candy from the open doors and outflung hands of former neighbors. The others were laughing and shouting their good times to the darkening skies, making plans to catch a bus at Judah Street to try their luck in Cole Valley—a bigger party than the two-block stretch of raucous spookery in the Outer Sunset.

Filha declined to join their quest for bigger candy bars so I met them at the corner where they waited for the bus. After saying our goodbyes and stopping to admire a friend’s black-light encrusted diorama of be-horned skeletons, Filha begged me to take her back to the Airbnb.

“I thought I would have so much fun,” she told me through tears once we were safe behind a closed door. “I used to have so much fun on Halloween. Everyone else was having fun tonight but I just couldn’t. I feel so different than I used to.”

Part of the difference is puberty, we agreed as we talked it out. Trick-or-treating when you’re eight is very different than 14. A younger Filha used to run shrieking up the Sunset hills in her costume, not one shred of self-consciousness in sight.

But you can’t recreate what is already gone. This is where I made my biggest miscalculation.

Halloween + SF=Guaranteed Good Times is how the equation went in my head. I forgot to factor in all the ways we have changed in the last four years.

Filha, B, and friends in 2024

The trip wasn’t a bust, though. We made some excellent new memories, spent precious hours catching up with old and dear friends. We ate so much good Thai food, so many Cali burritos. We dug our toes in the sand at Ocean Beach where Filha learned to walk. We greeted the Golden Gate like a long-lost love. We revisited some of our favorite haunts, took pictures to keep them close. We will always love San Francisco. Always miss it in bits and pieces.

The city just isn’t ours anymore.

Filha said it best, after we’d exchanged costumes for pajamas and snuggled into the comfort of our borrowed duvet.

“Portugal feels like clothes that are too big for me,” she said, “but San Francisco feels like clothes that are too small.”

Where does that leave her? Somewhere in the middle. She hasn’t found a fit yet.

But she will someday, she will. It may not be here or there. Belonging is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it catches you out when you least expect it. You look up and around one day and think, “You know what? I think I’ve found my place.”

Maybe she would have felt these things—the bite of lost magic and the displacement of puberty—even had she not moved a 12-hour flight away from the city of her birth.

But loving a place and knowing you no longer belong is bittersweet.

One of the things I have most feared with this move was fucking up my kid’s life. We had it good in San Francisco. We had a home (and a succulent garden) we loved, friends up and down the block. Filha was thriving. Business was booming. There was a very long list of reasons to stay.

But there was an even longer list of reasons to go. I knew, had known for a long time, that we lived in the belly of a Beast that would eat us whole and not even pause to smack its lips. All that goodness, the lovely little life Marido and I built from scratch, it could evanesce in an instant. If an illness or accident drained our savings dry. If one day it was Filha’s turn to face down a boy with a gun at her school. If, if, if, there were so many ifs. Many of you are counting them even now as you reckon with yet another grim American reality on this day of election results.

I’m not going to lie: I feel so damn lucky that I got my girl out. Not a day since June 12, 2021 goes by that I don’t feel lucky.

Leaving isn’t for everyone. It’s not a choice afforded to all. I am keenly aware of this.

But I am glad we chose to seize our roots and yank. I am glad we decided we didn’t have to bloom where we were planted. Not all of us can thrive in the pots they put us in. Not all of us can survive.

We came home to Portugal this weekend and as we drove to school Monday morning, Filha was fairly fizzing with joy. She carried six small bags of Ocean Beach sand in her backpack—a little bit of California for her Portuguese friends at school.

“You know what, Mom?” she said as we drove up the hill below our very own medieval castle. “Going to school with B in San Francisco made me realize how comfortable I am at my school. How much I really like going to school here. How glad I am to be back.”

We can’t recapture what is gone, but we can go on. For today, that’s more than enough.

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Copyright © 2024 LaDonna Witmer