Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, my former wife Patricia and I packed everything we owned in a Ryder truck and left San Francisco for a new life in Minnesota. I’d tired of San Francisco, hard as that was for anyone to imagine. Patricia was more reluctant to give up the City, she’d come from the Midwest and had “earned” S. F. I’d only been born there. I had a wee fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis and we decided to give the Twins cities a shot. We had an exciting drive, detouring south through Nebraska to visit Willa Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud. I remember going past signs near Red Cloud that touted a tourist attraction called Pioneer Village: “In 1865, 145 covered wagons passed here. we noted that we were traveling the opposite way, thus becoming pioneers in reverse.Now, after twenty-five years in St. Paul, I’m reversing myself and returning to Northern California, where I’ll settle in Sonoma. My son is making the cross-country drive with me in my well-packed Saab. Yesterday, Anton and three of his friends helped me move fifty boxes (mostly books), some sticks of furniture, and other crates of minutia, into 10 leased linear feet of a massive semi. The truck, which barely fit onto my street, sheared overhanging tree branches where it passed. The driver, a seventy-five-year old gent named Dave, told me he was on the road almost all the time. What a fate, I thought, as large an albatross as a man could attach to himself.
