Decade

Exactly ten years ago today, I boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston, bound for a relatively new destination on their roster: SFO.

I wasn’t exactly Mary-Ann Singleton, at least not anymore. For one thing, I was a good bit older. For another, I’d lived in San Francisco before, in the heat of the dot-com era. Back then, almost as quickly as I’d been granted admission to Baghdad-By-The-Bay in 1999, I was ejected in 2001. I was in the middle of a Green Card application that could only stay alive, in those post-9/11-economic times, care of a new job deep in the Midwest (more on that saga here).

But even without that, I’d soured on San Francisco. The intolerable cost of housing. The angry backlash it engendered. The can’t-seem-to-get-it-right public transit. And, for me, some personal stuff, too: a friend who fell prey to drug addiction. A messy breakup for one of my earliest relationships. I thought it all spelled the end of a lifelong dream to live in California.

So why come back?

Turns out some other bits of America were even less of a fit for me. Oh, sure, I found cities that seemed better run, that had friendlier people, and more affordable real estate. But something about SF called to me in those years, across the miles and time zones. For one thing, as a software developer and progressive-minded science nerd, I found Thomas Friedman’s thesis about the world being flat to be a bit of optimistic overreach. Heck, Tom, America isn’t even flat. And, for me, there was no better way to experience that than by working at a San Francisco startup one year… and then working in Middle America with ex-military software guys at an investment bank in the heart of the Dubya Bush years. You can guess how those lunchtime conversations went.

And so, after years of cobbling together contracting gigs in America’s Number Two tech center, I decided, for the first time in my life, that an earlier decision I’d made about a place I’d left wasn’t the right one, and that, yes, it was the right place, after all.

Oh, it was no small change of heart: it led to the end of a four-year relationship, the fortuitous sale of a Chicago condo right before the big housing crash, and the niggling suspicion that, for all its attraction, SF would still present many of the same issues in 2007 that it did in 2001.

I wasn’t wrong: MUNI still sucked, leading me to get a motorcycle license and a scooter (I still own one a decade hence). There was more melodrama with friends and more-than-friends as I found the city less welcoming, at least socially, than those Middle America spots I’d previously called home.

And I watched the tech industry transform. Ten years ago it had recovered from its dot-bomb hangover, and had reached a sort of equilibrium where work was widely available, the Bay Area was still an international software center…but enough of the old guard was around to make an offbeat fellow like me feel right at home. One of the senior guys I worked with at two of my first jobs was a gay hippie type who was as great to work with as he was brilliant.

But then, along came Facebook. And Twitter. And an ever-expanding Google. And the iPhone, released within days of my return here. On the one hand, it was reason for techies like me to cheer: more work opportunities and new technologies. But it felt a bit different this time, as I found myself contending with new challenges in the business (once they assailed me for being too young; now it’s the opposite); and an even greater conflict between the burgeoning business (now populated by more than a few of those types I thought I’d left behind in the Midwest) and a metro area that wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this major world industry exploding on its doorstep.

And yet, I somehow managed to make it all work, and can now count San Francisco as the second-longest place I’ve lived in after the city of my birth. I became a U.S. citizen here. I springboarded into a trip around the world from here, which led me to write a book about those experiences. It sucked me into the vortex of an ever-buoyant real-estate market, where I bought and sold one home and am now in the midst of fixing up another. With all its foibles, faults, and transformations, San Francisco’s still got an ineffable uniqueness, a heart-stopping beauty and force among the great metropolises of our age.

But the biggest thing San Francisco granted me was a long-delayed adulthood: I met the man I’d eventually marry here. I dealt with the loss of a parent here. I adopted two pets and am planning an even bigger adoption with my husband here in the years to come. For better or worse, this lifelong nomad can finally say he put down roots in this most rootless of cities.

Here’s to the next San Francisco decade.