"By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" by Joanne Greene is available for pre-order from your online favorite book sellers. Release date June 20,2023
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joanne-greene.comIn this Story...I Move to California
I learned to drive a stick shift after convincing my parents to buy me a used 1972 white VW bug with standard transmission for my twenty-first birthday. Five months later, it was stolen in broad daylight out of the parking lot behind Papillon, the wine and cheese café where I worked that summer. Poof. Gone. With the insurance money, we replace it, ironically with another 1972 white beetle, this time with automatic transmission. I parked in in Harvard Square one afternoon and, when I returned, the car was gone. What are the chances? Clearly, it was a sign that it was time to leave Boston and move to California.
My sister and brother-in-law had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area that year with their sixth month old son. My mid-year visit birthed a fantasy that I, too, might head west. Why not start my post-college life in the city I’d officially named my favorite on my cross-country teen tour in the summer of ’69? I could do without snow, annual car theft and entrenched provincial mindsets.
In short order, I packed my bags and was on a flight. San Francisco had it all – natural beauty, unbeatable counterculture, and great year-round weather. I was ready for adventure, to explore new terrain, to write at the Owl and Monkey café at Ninth and Irving, and to apply for jobs at alternative radio stations. It was definitely the right decision as my career took off, I met my husband of forty-something years, and birthed two California boys who, in their late 30’s, have no intentions of leaving the Golden State. Even my parents spent their final years here. Other than earthquakes, annual wildfires, the lack of water, and the cost of living, California is home.
