Mary

Susan went to the same high school we had, Lowell, and she had gone to college at SF State, which, like Lowell, is close to the ocean and probably only a five-minute drive away. I read this blog and it’s funny I thought about writing about the coast too, because I always felt like it was a big link to the Meltesens. Susan drove us up and down the coast, too, to Mendocino to go the cabin, to Monterey, to Heart’s Desire Beach in Tomales Bay, to USA Restaurant in North Beach for cioppino and calamari, to Pescadero to go to Duarte’s to get artichoke soup. 

When I think about it, San Francisco really is like the West, it is open and rangy in a way that the East Coast isn’t. Lowell and SF state are clustered around Lake Merced, a man-made lake wind whips around like crazy. In high school, I would wait sometimes two hours for MUNI to come along, as the winds whipped off of Lake Merced and I cursed the world.

Julia had Susan’s diary from high school, and she read it to us. It could have been ours, with its teenage frustration, complaints of walking down the same streets day after day, sick of the mind-numbing effects of high school.

Susan understood us, as teenagers who hated our school, because she was a public school teacher and a creative person and she had gone to Lowell too. You could tell she was a great teacher, the way she would talk about her students was both practical and kind. Unlike the teachers I was used to, she seemed to have chosen a profession she really valued. She was angry at the wealthy parents of San Francisco who insisted on sending their kids to private school, creating a class division which was certainly apparent at the school she taught at in Visitacion Valley (Viz Valley for those in the know.) She had even arranged a special trip for her students, on the “tall ships” where they could be sailors. Another link to the coast, and they were lucky to have her as a teacher.

Driving along the coast, Susan told stories of growing up in San Francisco, a smart, creative, angsty teen girl like us. Like us, her friends would cut school to run to the beach, passing the same Doggie Diner, the same zoo. The Great Highway, which is really just a little highway, runs along the coast, separating the beach. She told a story about being stoned on acid as a teenager, standing on one side of the Great Highway and being too unsure of when the light changed to go across.

I remember driving to Mendocino, we read the ElleGirl featuring Kelly Osbourne, who we were interested in because she was chubby and had dyed pink hair and looked like us. We were obsessed with her video, Papa Don’t Preach, they’d play on the local video channel, hosted by local DJ Chuey Gomez. Like my family, the Meltesens did not have cable. I would hang out there a lot, watching hours of CMC and then eating dinner at their house. They always had salad as a last course, the Italian way.

Susan drove us up and down the coast, on the twisting, tiny roads of 101. When we went to Monterey, Julia and her talked a lot about the chicken, a chicken that was supposed to play tic-tac-toe. Susan had seen the chicken in person, but when we went to the building where it was supposed to be, it was all boarded up.

I feel lucky I got to go on these trips, too, and see the coast the way Julia and Simone always had, the way Susan taught them to, because she’d grown up the same way. We saw an orange octopus scuttle away in the Mendocino tide pools, descending a narrow staircase that hugged the cliff to get there. San Francisco, the beach, the limpets in the tide pools, the Great Highway, Tomales Bay, artichoke soup; these are all memories I have, tied together in the northern California coastline.