By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Columnist
I am one of those Greenwich parents whose offspring have chosen to live on the other side of the continent. It’s not exactly easy to watch your grandkids grow up when they live nearly 3,000 miles away, but it’s an improvement over traveling halfway across the world when they lived in Abu Dhabi before moving to San Francisco two years ago.
But then Abu Dhabi was flat desert and San Francisco is putting your treadmill incline up to its highest register when you need something from the grocery. My son lives on one of the city’s steepest hills, which I finally mastered by walking it diagonally.
Morning time there can often put that trill in your mind: “Hate California—it’s cold and its damp.” Abu Dhabi could get “too darn hot,” but it was never cold and damp. But after seeing day after day (count 365 days) melt into sunshine and cool evenings, I can see the love affair my family has with California weather.
And then there’s that “Ripley’s believe it or not” Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market set bayside on the Embarcadero where my cuisine-minded son shops on Saturdays. It definitely is the largest in the USA, with some 800 farmers bringing their produce. The variety of fruits and vegetables displayed is gobsmacking. This Saturday my son was in search of black mission figs from a half dozen fig varieties on view—for that special fig and cheese dessert he made us.
In San Francisco—and all the Bay area—it’s about superlatives: the best views, the best bridges, and now claiming the nation’s “best ≠new bakery” of the year, the Arsicault Bakery, as voted by Bon Appetit for its “preposterously flaky” croissants. The line was too long for us to sample.
Entreprenuering is everywhere. A quick lunch stop was at the Italian Homemade Company for a prosciutto, cheese and arugula panini specialty made by the Italian owner who gave up on his own country a year ago and is now drawing a crowd. In front of his shop, along the sidewalk, someone had recycled the dead stump of a palm tree into a chair.
The Greenwich competitive sport preening of youth is everywhere evident in San Francisco. Parents are empowering their kids across the soccer fields (my seven-year-old granddaughter kicks a mean ball), and urging them on in the breast stroke in swimming classes, and in gymnastics, with my son going the extra 30-miles to give his horse-smitten daughter riding lessons.
Curriculum night at my granddaughter’s school showed the extraordinary diversity this city draws with teachers from across the world and an African-American headmistress from Brooklyn. Maybe it’s the weather that brings them all. The Uber driver who picked me up at the airport was Albanian. He’d followed his wife’s family who moved there and yes the weather was a draw.
Another Greenwich parent who decided to take root next to his son and family invited me to see how he was living in San Jose. Jean-Francoise Bulyz left the healthy life he led in Old Greenwich two years ago to perch with his daughter near his Apple employed son. I traveled there by Caltrain’s Baby Bullet express, wishing I could see over the Diablo range to that grand agricultural valley that feeds so much of America.
Jean-Francoise was there to show me the “skyscrapers” of San Jose with its million-plus growing population. To see the Pacific, you have to climb over the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Magnificent in Jean-Francoise’s backyard is a giant Valencia orange tree, destined to provide my orange juice the next morning. Jean-Francoise is another culinary enthusiast, and for the pleasure of his table he has planted plums, persimmons, those black mission figs and avocados, not to mention herbs and tomatoes.
Under his Arabian sheik-sized tent he grilled me eggplant and Portobello mushrooms and orange-juice marinated chicken. His dessert was to die for but I’m keeping that secret.
Well, there is a rub in paradise. We’ve read that San Jose with all its silicon wealth has now the highest priced real estate in America. Jean-Francoise confesses he pays 25-percent more in real estate taxes for a slightly smaller house than he had in Old Greenwich, with no attic and no basement, and “situated in an earthquake zone and flood zone each requiring insurance coverage.”
But he’s close to his son and grandchildren and finds the climate “fantastic, hot and dry during the day and cool enough at night to require a duvet.” And he’s got that orange tree in his backyard.
So is it preferable to live in a people-friendly community of 60,000 rather than San Francisco’s worldly 800,000, where there’s the occasional tornado rather than a possible deadly earthquake? Would I trade the four seasons—the glorious fall, the white beauty of winter, the great burst of spring with its birdsong, and luxuriant green of summer—for the sunny-cool dayglow of California?
For my answer I consult Calvin Trillin, who when faced with an unanswerable question replies, “Too soon to tell.”
