thirty years

It hadn’t occurred to me until I sat down to write last Friday’s Secular Music Friday entry, my final one from the San Francisco Bay Area, that I have been here for thirty years. Thirty years? Unbelievable yet true.

I left my beloved Claremont in 1977 to become the store manager and open the new B. Dalton Bookseller in Laredo, Texas. After a year there I moved to Oklahoma City to manage two other B. Dalton stores. I stayed in Central Oklahoma until 1985 when Ruth and I decided to move, for a variety of reasons, to the Bay Area. Our first apartment in Redwood City looked out over the lights of the peninsula and the bay. I remember well the sign lighted in blue on a building, “Bat Area Bank.” We moved to San Jose a year later. I lost Ruth in 1989.

I lived in Los Gatos and then Mountain View. Terry and I got (back) together in 1991. Terry moved up with me to Mountain View in 1993 and we got married in 1994. We lived in Mountain View until 1997 when we bought our house here in Gilroy.

So we’re just a couple of weeks short of eighteen years here in Gilroy, and for me it’s been thirty years in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

Tomorrow the movers arrive and Wednesday we get in the car with Tasha and head south. It is a move I would rather not have had to have made, but all will be well and new adventures await.