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Construction debris – boards, nails and grey clods hardened by mortar – awaited them like land mines in unfamiliar territory. He liked the idea of a brand new house, so unlike all the old houses where they had lived before. He was proud to live in a house with modern appliances, with a chocolate brown refrigerator, and matching dishwasher, stove, and built-in oven. But he missed the tall trees, the thickets, and the wet grass around their old house in Utah.
His father was anxious to level the mound of topsoil that had been dumped in the front. Shoveling it into the wheelbarrow was something that he and his father could do together. They took turns carting the dirt around to the back yard. He liked flattening the dark soil with a garden rake and the patterns of neatness that it left. He thought about the stubborn cowlick to the right of his widows peak that refused to lie flat, even when he combed it wet.

When the monotony of the garden tasks bored him, he left to throw clods and stones, aiming for a bucket or a board on the slope behind the house. He was getting better and better at it. His father promised to buy him a new baseball mitt, and practice with him, just as soon as the yard had been landscaped.

Returning 'home'

He woud turn twelve that fall. Ever since he could remember he had learned to call San Francisco home, though he had never actually lived there. His father, who had grown up in San Francisco and left during the war, was pleased as punch to finally be returning ’home’. His mother, on the other hand, who had always been so proud of her pre-gold-rush San Francisco roots, was more reticent. Her career as a commanding officer’s wife was now over and she hadn’t even started looking for a new job. Since they were staying in a loft motel just off the bayshore freeway their first month back in California, there was no rush yet.

He and his older siblings were all happy to be there. The intimacy of family life in two small motel rooms with a kitchenette, the air conditioning, the swimming pool, coupled with the imminence of settling into a brand new house, and beginning a new school and made life seem secure, and exciting.

Nunzilla

Big boys don't cry

They hadn’t always lived on Harborview Drive 1295. The street hadn't even existed before the early sixties when roads were ploughed and asphalted in preparation for yet another new housing development. Within no time this new road would be lined with ranch style houses, one-story suburban classics, with used brick trim and pastel stucco. Here in the dry grasses along the crest of the San Francisco East Bay, the shiny new splitwood roofs were all that protected them from the blazing California sunshine. No trees had been planted yet, but there were some native, low-growing live oaks on the back slopes, and some plane trees just off the dirt road to the pauper burial grove in the valley below. That's where he went to play, in the shade of the trees that had been there for so many years.

...to be continued