California, I love you so much, in spite of this

This is a picture from today — my son and I were visiting San Francisco.

We used to live in the Bay area; we’d get out to San Francisco often. The drive is about an hour. It’s nothing — but you get lazy and spoiled. When you live in Silicon Valley, San Francisco doesn’t always feel like your backyard. It’s an effort to visit the city.

But we did. We especially loved the Presidio Picnic on Sundays — going around food trucks and trying different things. I can guess the pandemic damaged this event; I hope it recovers.

Our first experience of California was in the now distant 2006. I was in the second year of my MBA program at Harvard. My wife Natasha and I had only one kid then (now four!). Max was a year and a half old. For Thanksgiving, we flew to San Francisco and then drove to San Diego. San Francisco looked and felt more eclectic than the more posh Boston, and we loved it. It didn’t feel European and it didn’t even feel American. It was San Francisco! The weather was not cold, but the clouds were like nothing we’d seen before: heavy, multi-layered, and multi-textured, trying to swallow the city’s landmarks and landscapes yet not quite overcoming their magnificence. I had never seen such an ominous sky as when we walked in the park near the Golden Gate Bridge. We somehow managed to get lost on that walk and…