Hang on to your Dreams, Large or Small

With any move there are dreams, large and small, that come with it.  Our biggest dreams with moving to San Francisco – success and fulfillment in our jobs, our family coming closer together, Mimi thriving in her new surroundings – will only be fully realized over time.  Some of our smaller dreams, like finding a home or places that feel like home in our new city, are already coming true.

We arrived at our new home in the Richmond district of San Francisco, which sits half a block north of Golden Gate Park, a little after 10:00pm on Thursday night.  We came home to an empty house, save for an airbed and a microwave, but already one of my dreams had been fulfilled: to enter our new home all we had to do was hit the garage door opener and glide both cars into our private garage.  Later that night I thought of making a run for milk just so that I could park in my own garage one more time.  City living with a two-car garage.  Bliss!  Why is it that when you’re in the city amenities taken for granted by 90% of America seem like personal gifts from God? 

On Friday we waited for UPS to arrive with our lifeline to the outside world: the new modem for our internet service.  The entire city of San Francisco was beckoning to us, but we would not be moved from our empty rooms, bare floors, paper plates, and scraps of leftover Chinese food.  Internet would soon be ours.  Thankfully, the UPS truck arrived around 10:30am with our golden modem.  We wouldn’t be able to set up service until 8pm that night, but we were now free to leave the house.  Mimi took a quick nap and then we set out for our first meal in SF as a family. 

On a recommendation from Grandpa Reber, we headed to a nearby restaurant called “Bill’s Place,” which is on Clement.  A staple of the neighborhood for forty years, Bill’s Place is neither diner nor restaurant: it’s a “burger joint.”  And it is fantastic. 

 The 1/3^rd pound burgers are perfectly cooked - juicy, and stacked with all the trimmings you need, including soft and sweet piles of grilled onions.  Each plate comes with fries, which are hand cut and served up fresh.  I went for the curly fry option, which, though an extra $1.50, was well worth the investment.  Mimi was particularly taken with these fries, as well as one of the cooks who was on his lunch break.  Here she is flirting with him from behind her milk.  I’m not really sure if it worked. 

When it came time to leave NYC, both Sumie and I were a little worried that the food in SF would not live up to the same standard.  Having been graced with a Shake Shack within walking distance for the past three years, I was very concerned about the burger situation.  With Bill’s Place, though, I’ve already fulfilled my dream of finding a Shake Shack replacement.  The taste is totally different, but, I have to say, equally good.  I even prefer it to J.G. Mellon’s.  Some, such as Bobby Flay, may think this blasphemous, but they’d be wrong. 

From Bill’s Place we tottered over to an antique store on the off chance that they might have something for the house.  There we found a 1950s/60s electric school clock.  I had been scouring NYC for a decently priced one for several years, but had never had any luck.  All the ones I had found required new wiring and cleaning or were three to four times beyond budget.  As such, I was shocked to find that this prime example, here in San Francisco, was no only in great shape, but also well within my price range!

But the good luck didn’t end there.  I asked the owner of the store, Phyllis, to plug it in to see if it would run.  It did, and perfectly.  She then shared that the piece was on consignment, brought in by a teacher who had saved the clock from being thrown out.  There was a caveat, though.  The teacher had warned Phyllis that the clock is rather cumbersome to set, as it would normally have been regulated automatically by the school’s internal system.  Phyllis, however, didn’t really remember what it was that made setting the clock so difficult.  The answer was quite simple, actually.  Because there was no mechanism for setting the time, one just had to plug in the clock at precisely the moment it had stopped.  Yes, it’s a pain, but at least you get two chances per day. 

Now, I have been raised to always get a deal.  Be it car, clock, pinball, or Star Wars figure, if it’s used and I can’t take a little off the price, I’ll most likely walk away.  As such I was ready to haggle, but, to my surprise and delight, it turned out that the haggling would be done for me!  When I explained to Phyllis how I’d have to set it, she immediately came back with, “Well, that’s really inconvenient.  I’ll definitely have to cut the price,” and then offered it to me for $25.00 ($20.00 off the sticker).  Not wanting to blow my good fortune, I readily accepted.  I know that the vast majority of antique dealers will be nowhere near as kind as this woman was, but, at the same time, I do think the experience exemplifies the “kinder and gentler” mentality of San Francisco.  I don’t care how kind the person is, such a transaction would never have happened in NYC. 

Later that day we stopped by Japan Town to pick up some essentials from the 100 Yen Shop (Japanese Dollar Store) and then picked up dinner (and Saturday’s lunch) from a Dim Sum place for all of $10.00.  Dream of cheap food: accomplished. 

Big dreams?  Well, none of them have come through yet, but I did happen to make a very auspicious purchase.  When combing through the Japanese Dollar Store I came across the following notebook. 

The car on the cover is an MGA.  I have been yearning for one for the past three years.  It got so bad that at lunch I would occasionally punch up Craigslist, both in NYC and San Francisco, to see if there were any available and what they were costing.  How odd that I’d see one of these beautiful but relatively unknown cars featured on Japanese stationery.  Intrigued, I flipped over the notebook to take a look at the back cover. 

I couldn’t agree more.  Here’s to this dream, and all the others Sumie and I have for our life in San Francisco, working out.    

-Steve