I was seventeen years old at the time. I was set to attend UC Berkeley in the fall, so I got invited to fly up on a weekend to attend some sort of orientation they were having for incoming students. I honestly have no memory of the orientation itself, but what I remember is the city of San Francisco.
I forget who it was, but just before my trip, someone had mentioned that San Francisco was supposed to be the 3rd most romantic city in the world. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but by the end of that weekend, and over the course of the next four years, I discovered what a truly amazing place San Francisco was in those days.
It’s been 30 years now, so the details are fuzzy, but I remember taking the hour long flight out of LAX into Oakland airport one Saturday afternoon just before the start of summer. It must have been the first time I’d ever flown on my own, and on the flight I happened to notice a girl I’d gone to church with when I was in junior high school. I saw she was alone, and I wondered if she was flying up north for the same reason I was.