Comes After Orinda

The Glenn Park Station is still here.  Seventy school kids in yellow uniforms are bounding down the stairs as I make my way up to the station entrance.  I agreed to meet a friend here and save him the trip through downtown SF to meet me.  Up in the hills I remember walks with my daughter when she was just a child.  There are streets between buildings that were never turned into proper paved roads.  I suppose nothing has changed over at Glenn Canyon Park where we used to walk beneath the eucalyptus.

Certainly the buildings across the street from the entrance have been spared anything like gentrification.  The stores feel tired and undistinguished from a quick glance.  I’m early and a text tells me and my friend is early too.  He’s up the road flashing his lights.  Soon we’re speeding along 280 on the road to Santa Clara.  Along the way I’m checking where Danville is.   Someone would like me to meet there tonight and I’m not sure how I’d get out there.

Later, after departing Santa Clara or Sand Hill Road, and Sand Hill Road for University Avenue, I did my best to take a nap before heading out to the New Montgomery BART station.  “Go to Walnut Creek and catch an Uber from there.”   No surprise that the 5:45 train was stuffed to the gills and I did my best to stand unobtrusively and consider the natives of the Bay Area.  One young woman sitting on the seat kept flinching in pain with her eyes closed.  No one got off at any of the first three stops.  What comes after Orinda?  Is that Walnut Creek?  We’d looked at houses in Orinda nearly twenty years ago.  What a different life that would have been.

After a wonderful meeting with two of my clients whom I hadn’t met in person before, I secured another Uber to take me back into the city.  This young driver had lots of things to share about his day job, how he found it, what kind of money he made with Uber on the side, before sharing a considerable amount of information about why dating for his generation was particularly hollow, how he’d lost his last love, and how his preference was for “younger” girls.  He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.  If it had been in China I'd have paid attention to him as a sales guy.

Tuesday, 12/19/17