You Can Never Go Back

I lived in the bay area for 5 years in the 90s. I lived in a 500 square foot apartment on the Stanford campus and worked as a teacher, and eventually also got a master's degree part time on evenings and weekends. I enjoyed living there and made some wonderful friends, who I still cherish today.

So going back to the bay area is incredibly nostalgic. It is just so beautiful there. I'm more apt to feel this way in the deepest winter months, when it's frozen and snowy in my hometown. In California it's never frozen and snowy. Even though it was rainy during my brief visit, it was warm and green and I got to see the ocean and the trees and feel the breeze on my skin.

One of the things I did when I was in California was spend a night in Palo Alto, close to where I used to live. At one point I met a dear friend for coffee on the downtown strip, and marveled at how much everything has changed. Later we wandered through the Stanford shopping center, and everything has changed there too.

I think the big thing that changed was the dot com boom. Downtown Palo Alto was never shabby, but it wasn't particularly fancy either. Now it is ridiculously fancy. Like, I walked into a clothing store and saw jackets for $1500 and sweaters for $800. I went to the shopping center and saw a different place from what I knew from my time there. It is a place that caters to the ultra wealthy.

We've been priced out of the bay area permanently. A professor could never make the necessary salary to buy even a condo to house a 4-person family, never mind a house. This is probably just as well, because I've spent enough time in a smaller town now that I've lost my tolerance for extreme amounts of traffic, crowds, high prices, status cars and clothes, and no parking spots at the grocery store.

I met my father and stepmother for lunch while there. My dad was unable to make it through an hour's lunch without making denigrating remarks about academics (like me), government employees (like me), and making sneering, incorrect claims about teachers who make 150K while working "seasonal, part-time" jobs. (I looked it up. The average teacher's salary in the district he referenced is actually 57K. Meanwhile, the median home sales price is 1.6 million.)

Every single time I agree to see my dad, I end up regretting it. I really, really need to stop. I am 41 years old, and it's pathetic that I still allow such casual, cutting remarks to hurt me so deeply after so many years. But for whatever reason, they do.

The bay area, with its ostentatious displays of wealth and status, is a good place for people with values like my father's, but it wouldn't be a good place for me. I feel more at home in my hometown, a place where folks actually respect hard working people like teachers. When I lived in California, I didn't take full advantage of everything the bay area had to offer, probably because I spent so much of my twenties working until all hours of the night, grading, prepping lessons, making tests and quizzes, and developing new classroom activities. (You can't do that stuff during the work day, because during the day you're actually teaching.) Like everybody I knew, I worked summers to supplement my low income (which never even made it to 30K). You know what? I wish teachers made 150K. Sometimes I can forget how cushy my life is now, and how easy my job is compared to my time spent teaching. The fact that I actually get to sit for most of the day, the fact that I get to go to the bathroom whenever I please, the fact that I do not have to control the behavior of 30 teenagers at a time, some who would (and did) happily tell me to fuck off on a daily basis...my god, the ease of my job now compared to that degree of stress and physical exhaustion is ridiculous.

You know what I like about where I live now? People write op-eds in the paper thanking their children's teachers for the work they do. The winters suck, but the values of my community align a little better to my own.