One thing I hadn’t fully anticipated about attending my 50th high school reunion is the fact that I wasn’t only reconnecting with classmates from high school. There were quite a people there who were in my kindergarten class!
Granted, none of them have been particular friends through all the years and decades, but it still gave me pause.
I was pleasurably surprised to see that the reunion committee had organized a display of memorabilia which included binders of class photos from the four elementary schools that fed first into Thomas Russell Junior High and eventually to Milpitas High School.
Incidentally, it’s hard to see in the class photo, but this is definitely one of my all-time favorite pictures!
We spent the afternoon driving around Milpitas…revisiting old haunts and simply remembering.
The top photo is 1853 Conway Street, our family home starting from when I was five. Fifty years ago it was only one story, there was no brick fence, and the shade tree was much, much smaller.
Our driveway pointed straight up Greathouse Drive (photo below), so this was my view every time I walked out of the house. It was nice to see that it hadn’t changed hardly at all.
It was such an intense week (between recording and multiple trips to town to get the tires replaced) that I really needed to take it slow this morning. Which meant I didn’t leave for Milpitas until early in the afternoon.
It was fine though. There was hardly any traffic heading south and I arrived for the last hour of the “meet & greet” event.
And — oh my goodness — what a trip it was to see so many old friends!
Bobby & Naomi, Billy, Linda, Virginia, Carolyn, Ronnie, Bill, Lloyd, Cindy, Julie, Pam, Michael, Roy, Kathy, Jennifer, Sam, Walter, Marty, Richard, Leonard, Debbie, Roseanne, and the list goes on and on.
Major compliments to the reunion committee for all their hard work which has resulted in this great turnout.
Well, it’s finally here…the 50th high school reunion of the Milpitas High School Patriots!
The photo below shows half of the turnout from my 20–year reunion. My primary memory of that night was the difficulty I felt in trying to reconcile how not old I felt with the fact that so many years had already passed.
I was living in Switzerland in 2004, so there was no question of attending the 30-year reunion.
Which brings me to now…and the fact that tomorrow I drive down to Milpitas to connect and celebrate this interesting landmark with my former classmates.
We’re happy to say — in any language — that we are officially finished with all the actual recording required for the Christmas album — whoohoo!
The focus was on filling in the arrangements with instrumental accompaniments — violin, flute, keyboard, and harp.
It took literally all day, from 9:30am until 6:30pm (with a lunch break, of course). Prashad was with us for most of it, but had already left before we took the photo at the very end.
I’m quite certain that we’re going to sleep well tonight.
I always lived on the ocean side of San Francisco, in the Richmond, the Sunset, and Parkmerced. All had their beautiful aspects, but Parkmerced was my favorite location by far.
I felt like it was a close as one could get to living in a major city without feeling like you lived in the city.
By J. Ash Bowie
It was wonderful for walking and felt more like a community than the more typical city neighborhoods.
By J. Ash Bowie
I’m convinced that living in Parkmerced helped me maintain my equilibrium as a freelance musician coping with irregular hours while driving to gigs throughout the greater Bay Area.
I hear they’re making big changes there now. Oh well. I’m just grateful it was the calm and serene environment I needed all those years ago.
San Francisco has been on my mind so much these days that I figured I might as well wrap up the week by reflecting on one more thing I loved about living there.
Fog.
Yep. People complain and complain about the fog, but I loved it.
Well, I loved it 90% of the time. At least once every summer we would get a solid three weeks of fog and that really was a bit much.
But the rest of the time you simply never knew, from moment to moment, what you were going to get — you could look out the window at the most gorgeous day, decide to finish your half-hour project and then go enjoy the sunshine, only to look up after twenty minutes and it’s nothing but fog everywhere.
Of course the reverse was also true. You would bundle up and resign yourself to a chilly excursion in the park, only to find the sun burning through the fog twenty minutes later.
And the cool temperatures of foggy days were the best for long walks all over the City.
But some of my favorite fog experiences came when I would spend time in the hot summer temperatures of the South Bay (Milpitas, San Jose, Los Altos, etc.), then drive up Hwy 280 to return to the City.
At a certain point the air itself would dramatically change, getting cooler and smelling of moisture. Then you would look left (or west) and see the fog literally pouring over the coastal mountains. Absolute magic that I never tired of seeing.
And now, all this thinking about fog made me so homesick for the entire San Francisco experience that I had to go find a video of foghorns.
