Another Dawn at the Seal Rock Inn (part 3)
falling in love with San Francisco, again and again and again
This is part three of my series on writing in the Hunter S. Thompson Room in San Francisco’s Seal Rock Inn. If you’d like, you can start at the beginning.
11:35, Night Two, Seal Rock Inn, Point Lobos
Any place that is worth loving once can be fallen in love with again and again. For me, it is this way with San Francisco.
Tonight, my husband visited from down the Peninsula. As far as he knew I’d been holed up in room 305 of the Seal Rock Inn all day, writing, but in truth I’d gone for two walks—one through the neighborhood and down to La Playa, the other along the Land’s End trail and down to the secret beach.
Every step confirmed for me what I already knew: these few blocks where San Francisco meets the Pacific feel more like home to me than any other place on earth. I feel this place so deeply in my bones, it almost feels like a generational memory, rather than an individual one. But that can’t be true, because my people came from Ireland, Scotland, and England (immigrants every one of them, as most American families are or have been) and settled in Mississippi and the Carolinas.
My husband arrived at the Seal Rock Inn at eight o’clock in the evening with the jeans and sneakers I’d requested, as I had foolishly packed for summer, even though I know better. We had a hankering for burritos, so we walked uphill, past the Balboa Theater, to Chino’s, home of the Outer Richmond’s best burrito.
Back at the room, my husband read the pages I’d written today. He read with a pen in one hand, a cookie in the other, offering encouragement and ideas. We reconnoitered, of course. What good is a marriage of twenty-something years if you can’t have a hookup at a seaside motel with the man with whom it all began?