Leaving San Francisco

"Leaving San Francisco" is a chapter in a longer book I've been working on for far too long called "The Stones of Le Santucce," about how a trip by train from Orvieto to Milan in 1952 starts a cascade of events that transform a family, a town and a medieval convent.
In this episode, the author and his wife decide to sell their San Francisco house and move to Castiglion Fiorentino, home of the Convent of Le Santucce, now rebuilt into a magnificent guest residence. 

Transcript

We didn’t know for sure what their lives were like before they came to our town. We watched them from afar, from high buildings, from shadowy cafes across the street. We watched them in the rain as they lined up for their buses, with their backpacks and their sensible shoes, their skinniness, their soft hands, their way of walking which was arrogant in its sloppiness, as if they could barely contain their contempt for a world in which a person had to walk, as if it were only a matter of time before they would come up with a better way, like floating on invisible wings. They rode extravagantly efficient bicycles costing thousands of dollars and weighing less than a loaf of bread.
As citizens, they lobbied for the things that mattered to them: Bicycle lanes, safer streets. They gathered in online groups to scan their neighborhoods for suspicious behavior.
They opened a bakery on Noriega where the bread was inedible. Their friends flocked to the terrible bakery and ate heavy, half-baked dough.
They dismantled San Francisco and piece by piece replaced it with replicas that were easy and inexpensive to make and contained visual references to the San Francisco they had heard about.
They bought houses at Noriega and 46th Avenue because the commute on 280 was easy. They bought hot rods and guns and flew American flags not on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day but on other days too, as if to say, Hey San Francisco, this is how you do it now, you fly the flag, you buy a gun, don’t you know anything about America?
The truth was, no, we did not know anything about America. We had come to San Francisco to forget about America and over the years had mostly succeeded until these new people arrived to remind us.

If you weren’t rich, you were desperate and frightened. San Francisco had become an opulent gulag of traffic and money. Everyone was either unexpectedly rich or unexpectedly poor. Unable to imagine any other future, we said one thing at dinner parties: Yes, you could sell, but where would you go? We could not imagine an alternative life. We gazed out from behind steel bars of our own imagining. We dimly sensed our own cowardice, our own fear, our own lack of imagination.
But years before, when we had moved to SF we had acted on the opposite qualities: Courage, imagination, trusting our instincts! Our instincts would have to come to the fore once again. We would have to make another leap.
Finally in 2015 our desperation became too great. We were hitting bottom. We hatched a plan: We would flee. We would just go. We knew our days were numbered. It was just a matter of someone saying it out loud.

And so we fled. We fled like tenants in their pajamas fleeing a burning building.

You could say we left San Francisco because America had changed and that America’s change was a natural change and our decision to leave was a natural change.
You could say that we had come to San Francisco as young people because it is a city for the young and that we would leave when we were no longer young.
You could say that in leaving we were admitting defeat, that we had not been smart enough, had not seen the future coming, had not acquired more wealth while we had the chance, that we blew it, that we should have been more ambitious and nimble in our work lives, that while we pretended we were leaving out of choice we were in fact being weeded out in a Darwinian process of selection, that like aging lions on the savannah we had lost a step and were surpassed. You could say that for all our intelligence we didn’t see the future that was right in front of our eyes, and even if we dimly sensed it we did not respond to it with anything like the furor and resolve it required, that even though we knew America, even though we ourselves were deeply American and so we knew in our bones how it worked, even though we knew that in America you’re on your own and if you don’t see the future coming, it will steamroll over you, we still let it happen.
You could say that we were unrealistic. We wanted things to stay the same even though we knew they were changing and when they changed we refused to reinvent ourselves once again because reinventing ourselves in response to this change felt not liberating but stifling. We could have created new sustaining rituals for ourselves but we didn’t want to. We wanted the San Francisco we loved and it wasn’t there anymore.
You could say that in the search for affordable real estate we had unwisely moved out of the spiritual heart of Bohemian San Francisco, the Mission and the Haight, and had gone to the Sunset where it was safe, thinking that was a wise and practical thing to do, whereas in reality it was the beginning of the end.
You could say all these things and they would all be true.
Except we now owned a house we could sell and with the money we could move to Italy.