Repeatedly moving to a city is like seeing a nephew every six months, and being astonished by the changes, only you are the nephew. Gentrification changes the city some, but being on a two year cycle of leaving and returning to San Diego since I was twelve leaves marker posts around the city-- memories about myself and loved ones, memories of joys and others I'd prefer not to recall. And if I drive the city long enough for one stretch the echoes and the flashes overwhelm me. Like a plate of Proust's madeleines. Like a symphony, a crescendo of feelings, memories, experiences flooding you, melancholy and exuberation mixing together.

Less than a mile away from where my grandmother lived on El Cajon Blvd. during her bomber factory time, I have a quiet apartment in North Park. She and her older sister moved here from Arkansas to "do their part" during WWII. Picnics in Balboa and sweet freedom at last from the South. When I first asked my grandmother about Balboa park she perked up, almost glowed, quite different than the stoic, somber woman I knew. But as she was dying, she changed, as people do, and would volunteer "I love you." in place of the Arkansas drawled, "Well, I better get dinner done. I can't keep Roy waiting." (When my grandfather, Roy, died two weeks before my oldest sister's wedding, there was no coaxing my granite stone grandmother off her ranch in the mountains outside Albuquerque. Before that point, I didn't know she actually could cry.)
She became more honest with her memories in the last few years of her life. She revealed how her sister died. One night in their house on El Cajon,my grandmother and my great aunt stayed up late talking. My aunt had married young to a soldier now on the front, and now wanted a divorce, but could not proceed with it. She told my grandmother she loved her, went to her bedroom, and took enough pills so she never woke up again. My grandmother never told the story till she was dying herself, finally able to say, 'I love you. I'm proud of you.' And you could see the frail, yet still strong woman, in that frame, rattled and weakened by chemo. A week before she died, my mother bathed her, as grandmother had forgotten how, and she said, "Ouch!" And my mother saw one of the tumors bulging from her lower torso.

And so as I drive on El Cajon past the house where my aunt told my grandmother she loved her, and then did the deed of the pills, I think of my grandmother shaken and crying, a young woman away from home. And five days a week I pass a real estate sign in Liberty Station that shows two woman from the 1940s laughing with their pearly whites flashing. One of the woman is near identical to photos of my grandmother at the time. I go to work with the thought of her laughing in the fierce indepence of her new found freedom, the mix of fondness and sadness that memories of San Diego brought her.

When my wife and I leave after a visit to my brother-in-law in Golden Hills, and we move onto the 5 South on-ramp, we pass the house of one of my best friends from college. The old house sits on a corner, and as I pass I imagine her the first day after her 26th birthday pulling out the revolver she stole from her father, taking hold of the trigger, and passing on. It is with a mixture of sadness and joy that I pass by.

My dad still has on his desk the picture of him with me and my youngest sister in front of the In-N-Out in Point Loma, the day he decided, "I had to choose between you guys, and I chose her." I see myself much younger standing in the parking lot, torn by the situation, yet thankful for the bond my sister and I formed over the years of such imperfect situations.

The inextricable mix. These days of lottery. The up and down pulse of my mind drug cocktails. The ebb and flow of memories stretched across a city.