Updated February 5, 2026

A few years ago my family and I moved to Seville, Spain for a two-year adventure living abroad. The time away gave me a chance to realize what I love most about the Bay Area, so I put together a guide to keep track. It’s part reminder to myself, part list of recommendations for friends and family visiting soon.

San Francisco has dozens of great neighborhoods, but I’m not going to cover them all. This is simpler: just the places I’ve lived and worked since moving here from New York thirteen years ago: The Mission, Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and Dogpatch.

What follows is a loose outline of a typical weekend with my family. The way we do it.

There’s one main reason we chose San Francisco, and you’ll probably catch on right away: we wanted to live in a city where it’s always a pleasure to be outside. We wanted nature close by. Hills and good light. Air that smells like sea salt and eucalyptus. Great food. Smart people. And somewhere we wouldn’t freeze.

Below, you’ll find the phases of a day and a few ways we like to enjoy them, mostly outdoors. :)

Morning

Run along the waterfront

You could bike or surf, too. The important thing is to just get outside and experience morning light someplace fresh. There are nearly 20 miles of continuous running paths and trails along the peninsula's coastline. Any section of it—or all of it—is a wonderful way to see the city and earn the rest of the day.

I recommend these routes.

Grab a coffee and a breakfast burrito

Sightglass Coffee on 20th Street is my all-around favorite spot for coffee and meeting a friend for a chat. They have some outdoor seating, and better yet, they open at 6:30am. If you're a coffee shop and not open by 7am, what are you even doing?

A new addition to the neighborhood is Side A, a combination bistro and vinyl listening room, but in the mornings, The Coffee Movement is behind the counter serving coffee and fresh donuts.

Also noteworthy is Marigold Café, just a few blocks south of Sightglass. It's tucked away in the back half of a pretty flower shop. They have a few tables, and their sidewalk landscaping is great, too.

Here's a list of more coffee in the Mission.

Afterward, use the ubiquitous bike-sharing—Bay Wheels—to cycle over to Breakfast Little and order an OG: bacon or sausage, two eggs, cheese, garlic aioli, eggs, and tater tots. I prefer the sausage with avocado and sriracha, too.

Try a concha with your coffee

Pan dulce literally means “sweet bread” in Spanish, but it refers to the variety of Mexican sweet breads found in panaderías. Our favorites in SF are the conchas baked and served warm at Florecita, found in a narrow alley in the Mission. You’ll find all sorts of unusual flavors like Hibiscus, Blue Corn, and Champurrado, which recalls the traditional Mexican hot chocolate drink, thickened with masa harina (corn dough).

Fill up on sourdough

Tartine Manufactory
If you prefer brunch over burritos, I recommend Tartine, the bakery famed for perfecting sourdough baking. There are two locations in SF, both in the Mission. We prefer the "Manufactory" because it's easier to get a table, and it's next to the Heath Ceramics factory and shop.

The dining room is dominated by large ovens so that you can smell the loaves as they're pulled out warm. There is a full coffee bar and pastries and a full breakfast menu (as well as a pizza menu at night if you want to come back later for seconds).

After brunch, we usually grab a loaf to go for the week's toast and sandwiches at home.

Shop a farmers' market

There are two excellent farmers' market options on Saturdays, the Alemany and the Ferry Plaza markets.

The Ferry Plaza is the classic strollable weekend market: good coffee, photogenic stacks of produce, and just enough here and there to put together lunch, plus stunning views of the sparkling waterfront and Bay Bridge. Be sure to look for the Hog Island tent where you can buy shucked oysters to eat on the spot.

More often we go to Alemany. It is massive, and the variety of fruit and veg and flowers is impressive. A lot of things you've never seen before. I often see chefs from some of my favorite restaurants shopping for ingredients for their kitchens. We always buy a couple dozen extra-small Miyagi oysters from Bodega Bay Oyster Company's stall for a picnic later.

Alemany is harder to reach. There is a bus, but it's 40-50 min from downtown. We usually take a car.

Lunch

Tacos in the Mission

The Mission is known for its burritos, but we like tacos better, and there are just as many good options.

You'll find Tacos El Patron off the beaten path on the southern edge of the neighborhood. We love everything there, though their specialty is birria tacos with consomé.

If you must check the burrito box, we love the pork burrito at Señor Sisig. When you’re done, you’ll be convinced you need more Filipino food in your life.

Here's a complete list of noteworthy tacos and burritos in the Mission.

Oysters in the Ferry Building

If you visit the Ferry Building farmers market, then you might just stick around to have lunch at one of the restaurants inside.

Hog Island
If you have time, we recommend signing up for a table at this Bay Area oyster institution. It's worth the wait in line to have a couple dozen raw sweetwaters, clam chowder, a pint of pilsner, and a view of the ferries coming and going.

Gott's Roadside
If you need food fast, I recommend this small chain of burger stands in Northern California, centered in Napa County. It's kind of the Bay Area's equivalent to Shake Shack, but the menu is more expansive (Dungeness crab sandwiches, etc.).

Picnic somewhere beautiful

We're picnic people and always on the lookout for a spot where a good spread would make it perfect. Some of our go-to's are below. Plus, I can recommend a couple of places to shop for groceries. We think Gus's is the archetype of a great neighborhood market (the wine selection is also excellent). There is also Bi-Rite, which is an SF institution, but the prices might be a little too exorbitant for a casual picnic.

Here are some good places to spread out:

Baker Beach and Crissy Field
Just around the corner from Ocean Beach is the Presidio, a historic and expansive fort that has since been decommissioned. The centuries-long military use has essentially preserved some of the most splendid real estate in the city. There are also a couple of other wonderful beaches there: Baker Beach and Crissy Field. Both have good views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands (the hills on the other side of the bridge). If you're with kids, be sure to visit Tunnel Tops Park inside the Presidio, too.

Dolores Park
One of the prettiest neighborhood parks in the city and a real slice of SF. Lots of people spread out on blankets, dogs, rollerbladers, and vendors selling ice cream and edibles. Superb playground for kids. And a deceptively tall hill on the back side that gives a view of the city skyline. Just a half-block from Bi-Rite, so super convenient to go run for more beer when you need it.

Dunes at Ocean Beach
When we're in Golden Gate Park, we'll usually walk over to Hook Fish for fish burritos (the red cabbage combined with the breaded black cod is a revelation). Grab some bottles of Pacifico, too, and walk over to the dunes overlooking Ocean Beach (pictured above). The lines at Hook Fish can get long, so you might want to use their website to order ahead for pickup.

Afternoon

Get out on the water

SF sits between the Pacific and the Bay, one of the largest natural harbors in the world. There are many ways to explore it, to visit its islands and coves, and to have views of the city's skyline as well as the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. And it's not uncommon to see seals, sea lions, dolphins, rays, and even whales, too.

Angel Island
Any time we have an out-of-town visitor, we make sure to take them to Angel Island. Several times a day you can catch a ferry from the Ferry Building over to this state park in the middle of the bay. There is a network of trails on the island that takes you through several different ecosystems and panoramic views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. We like the Sunset Loop going clockwise, which first takes you up to the peak for sweeping views before you descend downhill. Before you circle back to the docks to catch the ferry home, we like to split off to Perles Beach and have a picnic. Be careful of the ferry schedule; you want to make sure you're back at the docks well before the last ferry of the day.

Farallon Islands
About 30 miles off the Pacific coast is a group of rugged, remote islands that form part of the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge. Known for their rich biodiversity, the islands host one of the largest seabird colonies in the U.S. and are a hotspot for great white sharks, seals, and whales due to nutrient-rich waters. Access is highly restricted for conservation, but it's possible to take a boat out and see the islands as close as you can get without stepping ashore. We travel with the Oceanic Society. It's an all-day journey to go there and back, and if the water is choppy, it can be an uncomfortable ride. But it's a real treat to return to SF through the Golden Gate at dusk. Dress warmly :).

Sailing
You might also consider booking a crewed sailboat. Bring your own cooler with lunch and drinks and do a circuit around the bay. It's surreal to approach the Golden Gate Bridge from underneath. If you have a large enough group, you could even charter the whole boat. We had a great experience with San Francisco Sailing Company.

Explore Golden Gate Park

Some compare Golden Gate Park to Central Park. The scale is similar, but the concept is different. I see it as a transitional space between the dunes and the ocean at Pacific Beach and the urban core of the city to the east. It's also a theme park filled with attractions. There are several museums, fields, and parks within the park. Here are some of my favorites.

Botanical Garden
A living museum of plants from around the world. Spanning 55 acres, it features over 8,000 different plant species, with collections that thrive in San Francisco's unique climate. Everything from redwoods to rare cloud forest plants from Central and South America. There are several themed gardens, like the ancient plants garden and the fragrant magnolia collection. It's a great spot to picnic.

California Academy of Sciences aka Cal Academy
Excellent science museum that houses an aquarium, planetarium, rainforest dome, and natural history exhibits. Its living rooftop, covered with native plants, is a striking sight. One of our kids' favorites.

Car-free JFK and the Great Walkway
During the COVID pandemic, a grassroots movement led to the closure of JFK Drive and sections of the Great Highway to cars, creating a safe, pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly zone that winds through the park and then along Ocean Beach. Currently the Great Highway is only closed to cars on weekends.

Casting Ponds
I didn't know such things existed before I moved to SF: a dedicated space for fly fishing practice. Surrounded by eucalyptus trees, this is a serene spot to practice casting. It's open to the public and completely free. You do need to bring your own rod.

de Young Tower
The de Young Museum’s Observation Tower offers panoramic views of San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, and the Pacific Ocean. Just walk into the museum and follow signs for the tower. There is no need to buy museum admission to enter; tower access is free. Though the museum is worth visiting, too.

Japanese Tea Garden
The oldest public Japanese garden in the U.S., it has everything you would expect: beautifully manicured landscapes, koi ponds, rock gardens, and pagodas. You can enjoy cherry blossoms in spring and maple leaves in autumn. We like to linger at the teahouse and munch on sandwiches and cookies.

Hike to a good view

Crosstown Trail
The 17-mile urban hiking and biking route that spans San Francisco from the southeastern to the northwestern corners. Designed to be easily accessible, it strategically overlaps with public transportation routes, allowing hikers and cyclists to tackle sections of the trail without needing a car.

Weaving through city streets, parks, stairways, and nature areas, the trail offers a unique way to explore San Francisco’s diverse neighborhoods and green spaces, providing a mix of scenic views, challenging terrain, and hidden gems along the way. We've only done it once, tackling it in four sections with our kids over a few weekends, but we know friends who have completed it in one day without kids. It's really fun to drop in and out of different neighborhoods, sampling food in each, before climbing out to enter a different natural space.

Fort Funston
This has got to be the prettiest dog park in the world. On the southern end of San Francisco, you'll find dramatic dunes and cliffs that form the backdrop to a popular spot for dog owners, offering trails, wide beaches, and scenic coastal views where dogs can roam off-leash. The park’s steep cliffs covered with succulents make for a particularly unique space to explore.

Marin Headlands
A vast open space that offers a variety of outdoor activities with breathtaking coastal views. In any other state, this space would be a national park. We can't believe it is literally on the other side of the bridge.

It's popular with cyclists, but if you're on foot, start with a hike along the Coastal Trail, where you'll find vistas of the Pacific Ocean, rugged cliffs, and the bridge. We usually stop at Rodeo Beach, a good spot for beachcombing and picnicking. You can also poke your head into the Headland Center for the Arts to see what they're exhibiting.

Shop on Valencia

Baggu
One of the only four shops in the world for the beloved, cult-favorite bag maker.

Bernal Cutlery
Culinary shop known for its exceptional selection of hand-sharpened knives and expert knife-sharpening services.

Dog Eared Books
A cozy, beloved independent bookstore offering a wide range of new and used books, with a focus on local authors and diverse, offbeat titles.

Gravel & Gold
Boutique for unique clothing, accessories, and home goods, all designed with an emphasis on craftsmanship and personality. It's my first stop for Mother's Day gifts.

Open Editions
Art and design shop with an excellent selection of stationery and unique paper goods.

Paxton Gate
One-of-a-kind. Shop taxidermy, gems, macabre oddities, plants, and other natural science-inspired gifts.

Ritual Coffee
One of my favorite coffee shops and my go-to source for beans to grind and pour over at home.

Binge on art

There are several excellent art collections in the city. Below are some of our favorites.

Asian Art Museum
This museum in San Francisco houses one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world, spanning 6,000 years and a diverse range of cultures, from ancient to contemporary pieces.

Balmy Alley
Iconic block-long alley in the Mission featuring a constantly changing collection of murals by local artists. Afterwards, stroll down 24th Street, one of the most lively and colorful corridors in the city that reflects the city's deep Hispanic heritage.

de Young Museum
Inside Golden Gate Park, it showcases American art from the 17th through the 21st centuries, along with modern and contemporary art, textiles, and international pieces. Make sure to visit the top of the observation tower, plus the café is not a bad option to have lunch inside the park.

Exploratorium
An interactive museum that blends science, art, and human perception, offering hands-on exhibits to inspire curiosity and learning. A must-visit for kids, fun for adults, too.

Legion of Honor
A beautiful Beaux-Arts building housing a collection focused on European art, featuring paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, including a renowned collection of Rodin sculptures.

Minnesota Street Project
Not a museum, but a bunch of large warehouses full of smaller, private galleries to view works by emerging artists.

SFMOMA
Seven floors housing an expansive collection of modern and contemporary art, the temporary exhibitions are usually excellent, and the café and gift shop are particularly good.

Happy Hour

Beer

Fort Point
This pourhouse is a local craft brewery with a modern vibe you typically don't find in a beer joint. Pretty decent bar food, too.

Radhaus
Bavarian-inspired beer hall inside a former shipping warehouse inside Fort Mason. Stunning views of the bay and classic German snacks like pretzels and sausages.

Shotwell's
This is a classic San Francisco corner bar. Vast selection of local and imported craft beer and cider. There's also a jukebox and pool table, which makes it a fun place to crash with friends before or after dinner. I think it has one of the prettiest "parklets" in the city.

Cocktails

Cavaña
Rooftop bar on the top of the LUMA hotel. Beautiful indoor/outdoor space with views in every direction. The bar snacks are also excellent. It can get crowded at night, so you have the best chance of finding a place to sit at happy hour. Access via the elevator near the hotel's valet.

Cityscape Bar
San Francisco has only a few bars with great views from above; this is one of the better options. The decor and the menu are just OK, but it's situated up on the 46th floor of the Hilton Union Square, and the panoramic views of the city are spectacular. It's particularly dramatic at sunset.

Moongate Lounge
Elegant bar located above Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown. The room is unusually stylized: mid-century design with hints of traditional Chinese architecture like circular portals, red velvet booths, and brass lotus chandeliers.

The Royal Cuckoo
An excellent dive. Cozy, dim except for many red lights, church pews, and usually great music—often a DJ, sometimes an organist.

Trick Dog
This spot is on every list of America's best cocktail bars. Every few months they go to great lengths to remake the cocktail list and produce a beautiful printed menu that is a piece of art in and of itself. Plus, if you're a runner, you should check out their run club while you're in town. Lots of the staff participate, and everyone is super welcoming.

True Laurel
Contemporary space with poured concrete and cobalt accents. Almost always has a great vibe. We love the Bay Leaf martinis and the crispy Hen of the Woods mushrooms with sour cream.

Wine

Ruby Wine
Wine shop where you can buy bottles off the shelf and, for a small fee, uncork and enjoy them at a window seat. A bit of a scene.

Verjus
Wine bar and restaurant in one of San Francisco's most charming downtown neighborhoods, Jackson Square. There's a bar set inside of a wine shop with places to stand or sit while you drink wine by the glass or wait for a table in the dining room next door and enjoy a bottle with a menu of savory dishes. Intimate and classy space.

Dinner

Go-to's

Bon, Nene
A Japanese comfort food restaurant in a modest corner storefront, run by a kind woman named Miu. She's beloved by all of the neighbors, so much so the place can feel like a cafeteria where the locals loyally go for lunch daily. I like the mentaiko spaghetti (tossed with a cured cod roe mix, seaweed, shiso leaf, and a creamy buttery sauce), and my kids love the veggie curry. Be sure to try the frozen beer.

Buddy
Cozy and welcoming neighborhood bar and café known for its menu of natural wine by the glass and creative seasonal dishes. We love the chorizo and clams, strawberries with burrata, radish crudité, and trumpet mushrooms.

Heirloom Cafe
Our regular good meal. The ambiance and welcoming staff are something special and together make it a beloved spot in the neighborhood. The wine list is excellent. Tell Amy and Stephen we sent you.

Rintaro
A Japanese izakaya in the Mission that offers us a cozy setting with a menu focused on seasonal ingredients and traditional techniques. Its house-made noodles and selection of sake are excellent.

Date night

Bix
A classic ambiance reminiscent of a 1930s supper club with live jazz and piano music. The vibe is white tablecloths and too many martinis.

Cotogna
Located near Jackson Square, Cotogna specializes in rustic Italian fare, offering house-made pastas, wood-fired pizzas, and locally sourced meats and vegetables. Refined without feeling stuffy.

Foreign Cinema
California cuisine in a former theater converted into a bar and restaurant. There are both indoor and outdoor dining rooms. Outside, classic films are screened while you're dining. Inside is a fireplace that we always try to get a table next to if possible. There is also a small bar in the back where I sneak to when I'm alone just to play chess on my phone with a glass of wine.

Zuni Cafe
A San Francisco institution known for its California classics, particularly the legendary brick oven-roasted chicken served with a side of Caesar salad. Great bar, too, if you just want a drink before a show or dinner elsewhere.

Special occasions

SF is one of the world's capitals of paying too much for dinner. If you want a superlative meal, you'll find a long list in the Michelin Guide. We're not hounds about pursuing Michelin stars, but here are a few excellent places that aren't too uptight.

Angler
Located on the Embarcadero, Angler specializes in fresh seafood prepared using open-fire cooking techniques. There is a large dining room with views of the open kitchen or a cozier bar and dining room off the back. NYT did a write up, worth reading before dining.

House of Prime Rib
A beloved institution in San Francisco, House of Prime Rib serves up roast beef with all the trappings you'd expect: creamy mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, and Yorkshire pudding. It's an old-school atmosphere where old-school San Franciscans celebrate special occasions or just want a charming fireplace to be near when drinking martinis and old-fashioneds.

Quince
Located in Jackson Square, Quince is a three-Michelin-star restaurant focused on seasonal Californian cuisine. Everything is fresh and beautiful. This is a very elegant spot, but it always feels approachable. It's a great choice for celebrating a very special occasion without feeling overly formal.

Evening

Sweat and plunge

Archimedes Banya
In New York, I was a regular at the Russian & Turkish Baths on 10th Street. Archimedes is my SF counterpart. It has two large Russian 'banyas', a sauna, a plunge pool, hot tubs, and a steam room. Some areas are clothing optional. There is also a cafeteria where you can play chess, watch sports, drink pilsner, and nibble on vaguely Eastern European snacks like pickles and sausages with cabbage and a side of mustard. There are also a couple of rooftop patios where you can cool off and glimpse the city skyline and the Bay Bridge, both of which twinkle spectacularly at night.

Catch a game

Oracle Park
Located along the waterfront, Oracle Park is the home of the San Francisco Giants and is renowned for its stunning views of the San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge. When we're bringing the kids, we don't bother to buy good seats; we sit up in sections 305-310, where there's the least wind and the best views of the bay. If you're lucky, our division rivals—the Dodgers or the Padres—will be in town. Garlic fries are a must-order.

If baseball isn't in season, try walking south down to the Chase Center. Our basketball team is usually pretty good, too. :)

Dance

Bar Part Time
There are not enough places to dance in San Francisco, but we do have one thing you probably haven't seen before: a dive bar meets natural wine meets a dance floor. A long bar, private booths, commercial fridges of wine bottles you can grab yourself, and usually a great DJ set.

Did I miss something obvious?

Leave me a comment. I would love to make this guide a really good one.

Prefer a simple list or map?
→ List of my recommendations for activities, food, drink, and shopping ... or a map

Need a hotel?
→ My recommendations for places to stay

One of my favorite books of the last decade was The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf.

It’s a biography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), a Prussian naturalist virtually unknown to Americans (a fascinating rabbit hole related to anti-German sentiment during the World Wars). Humboldt's big idea was that nature is not a collection of parts, but a web, a web of ecological, social, and political systems that could not be understood in isolation.

I’ve been thinking about the book again this weekend because of the events in Venezuela.

Humboldt traveled to South America between 1799 and 1804 with the aim of mapping the web. Largely self-funded, he moved through what is now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba, carrying an unprecedented array of scientific instruments to measure climate, altitude, magnetism, geology, and plant distribution. The continent offered an ideal laboratory: extreme variations in altitude and climate compressed into short distances allowed him to compare ecological systems vertically rather than across continents.

At the same time, Humboldt observed colonialism, slavery, and land use as forces acting directly upon natural systems. He was the first to link colonialism to environmental devastation and predicted human-induced climate change.

His years-long journey and related publications would impact North and South American history.

They provided the first rigorous statistical portrait of the Spanish Americas: population, agriculture, mining, trade, and taxation. Thomas Jefferson prized these measurements, as well as Humboldt’s maps, of the Americas as authoritative data for understanding the region that the United States sought to expand into and manage.

In contrast, a continent away, Simón Bolívar absorbed Humboldt’s work and was convinced that New Spain was economically viable and self-sustaining without a global power to administer it. Humboldt’s observations, he believed, were proof that geography did not limit political capacity.

Wulf describes the subsequent and extraordinary triangle of influence and correspondence between the three men and how their ideas converged, often uncomfortably, around this question.

In 1815, while in exile, Bolívar wrote directly to Jefferson, framing the South American independence movements as an extension of Enlightenment republicanism. He appealed to the United States not merely for recognition, but for moral solidarity. As the first successful post-colonial republic in the hemisphere, Bolívar believed the U.S. had an obligation to support democratic self-rule elsewhere in the Americas.

Jefferson’s response was cautious to the point of paralysis. While privately sympathetic to independence movements, he doubted that Spanish America was ready for democracy. This was astonishing revelation to me given the lengths he went to support the French Revolution.

His skepticism rested on arguments about geography, climate, and even Catholicism. These claims echoed the environmental determinism of the era.

Humboldt rejected those claims outright.

For Humboldt, nature was interconnected but not deterministic. Climate, altitude, flora, and geography shaped societies, but they did not dictate their political or moral outcomes. He disputed the idea that tropical environments produced despotism or inferiority, insisting that empirical observation showed no such hierarchy. This was a direct challenge to the pseudo-scientific logic that had long been used to justify empire and slavery.

What Wulf makes clear is that Humboldt did not specify a political project to Bolívar, but he gave him something more elemental: permission to imagine equality across climates and continents.

That distinction feels relevant again. The question is not whether geography, culture, or history influence political outcomes – they do – but whether we treat those influences as destiny. When power intervenes today under the guise of inevitability, or stability, it echoes an older argument: that some places are perpetually provisional, and some peoples are perpetually not yet fit to govern themselves.

Humboldt’s wager was that this was not a law of nature, but a failure of imagination.

It’s important to me that everything I work on is, in some way, an autobiography. My most satisfying work has always connected to what I care about most, but also to what I’ve lived through. Passion gives the work energy, and experience gives it perspective. Together they set me up to make something lasting.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to cameras as a way to notice things. My photos and videos became receipts that I noticed something new, or at least something differently.

This drove my work at Vimeo.

I’m twenty years older now and I find myself in a new golden age of noticing: raising kids. Every year contains a thousand firsts, each somehow both typical and marvelous. You watch a person come into being, meeting everything and everyone with superhuman generosity, and you can’t help but wonder about your own beginning. This is the double act of parenthood that makes it so profound: we watch simple childhoods branch into complexity while tracing ourselves back to our origins. Each act of noticing them becomes an attempt to know yourself.

When my mom died eight years ago, my habit of noticing had a different impulse. The few albums we have of her, though mostly ordinary, now carry the weight of everything that’s gone. I study them closely, searching for traces … the way her eyes glinted when she laughed, the smile that never faded when she was surrounded by her kids … each becoming a kind of evidence. A reminder that she was here, that we came from her, that the texture of her life still echoes through ours.

Now I notice her in others. And in myself.

Through her I’ve realized that collecting and organizing memories can be much more than an attempt to reconstruct a simpler past that never was. It can be a way of knowing someone in order to understand ourselves and each other. It’s one way I’ve learned who I am and how I stay mindful of where I come from.

I’ve come to believe there is real magic in helping others do the same. So I’ve decided to focus on this for a while and I’ve joined Legacybox as a Partner to do it.

Our company operates a 120,000-square-foot digitalization facility in Tennessee where we convert more than 11 million items a year—film reels, tapes, slides, and photos—and preserve them digitally. Much of this analog media is fragile and often the only existent record of a life lived.

In an age of content slop, I’m fascinated to work with media that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and doesn’t require an algorithm to be appreciated.

Legacybox combines physical craft and digital innovation in a way that feels deeply right to me. It also fulfills my early hope for the Internet: to make experiences that bring people closer, not farther apart.

My goal here is to help families notice the traces and let those memories live on.

Fifteen years ago, I was looking for a contractor to help with some landscaping. A neighbor referred me to somebody named John. He was fascinating and really knew his stuff.

As we wrapped up our meeting, John handed me his business card. A word cloud of careers surrounded his name and contact information. At the top was the profession I was hiring for—landscape designer—but also in that column appeared microbiologist and healer.

I continued to scan the card.

Firewalking accountant? Hypnotherapist software engineer?

I had never seen anything like it. I chuckled to myself and pocketed the card.

Several years and life events later, I came across this Robert A. Heinlein passage in Time Enough for Love, and I thought about John:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I scoured my apartment, and I was relieved to find John’s card buried in a junk drawer. This time I saw the card differently; it was a reminder of an important personal realization:

The world is changing so fast that squatting on one expertise isn’t enough to guarantee a livelihood. Rather than cling to a single skill, I need to stay a lifelong learner and trust my curiosity to guide me.

Also, focusing on one expertise sometimes stifles the passion that led me to success in the first place! Letting go of a narrow identity gives me more freedom to be a beginner again and experience the refreshing joy of inspiration.

That’s the real lesson from John’s card: I have permission to be a prism, not just because there is professional upside, but also because it’s fun.

It was good timing for this realization because the more I grow up, the harder it is to encapsulate myself. I used to say Designer. At one point it was Entrepreneur. Then CEO felt attractively accomplished.

Of course, having a clear title helps us present ourselves effectively to the professional world. But the irony is that clinging to a tidy label for security can quietly block us from discovering pursuits that might be even more rewarding, both financially and personally. Embracing our many facets, without waiting for permission, frees us to practice and grow, and be open to opportunities a single title could never contain.

I’ve always loved writing, but I never called myself a writer. I thought I knew what a real writer was and what they had to do to deserve that title. But after encouragement from friends, I started claiming it, not because I’m an expert, but because I enjoy it.

That simple shift changed everything: I stopped worrying about being an amateur and started practicing more seriously. Now I wonder, where else do I gatekeep my growth by comparing myself to imagined standards? Maybe the first step is just to call myself what I want to become.

Titles are neat. People aren’t. I'm going to be more like John.

Church was an obligation, not a belief. I went to satisfy my parents and followed the script because that was what was expected. I assumed that once I was free to stop, I would, and that I might never say another prayer again. Then, when I was seventeen, just months before leaving for college, something happened that forever changed my family’s lives, but mostly one person’s in particular.

My brother fell off the back of a pickup truck that I was driving. He landed headfirst onto the pavement, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and immediately slipped away into a coma.

I called my dad. He and my mom were sitting on Adirondack chairs next to a bonfire at the edge of our pond. I was standing in an empty parking lot illuminated by a single floodlight and the strobes of an ambulance, and it seemed that we couldn’t have been any further apart.

His greeting was heartbreakingly happy. I choked back tears and told him what happened. I could picture him on the other end, his smile falling slack, my mom’s probing eyes, then her panic, the darkness they would have to run through toward the house, the scramble to find their shoes, and the desperate drive to the hospital.

Just like that, everything was different. Forever.

I have many visceral, painful memories of that night, but most often I remember how much I cried. I didn’t really know, but I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I cried for every normal day my brother would never have. I cried for the years that my parents would devote to his recovery. I cried for my baby sister, whose innocent childhood would become a harsh reality. I cried because I felt guilty for being involved.

The next few months are buried somewhere in the deepest recess of my mind. The mash of a bleak Midwestern winter, the Christmas and New Year’s Eve spent in the hospital’s cafeteria, the bandages and all the tubes, the glances I would make at him hoping that he had miraculously improved, the drowsy beep of the machine indicating otherwise, and the stacks of uneaten tins of lasagna in our fridge, dropped off by friends, while we practically lived in the ICU.

But, also, somewhere in there is my one and only memory of being affected by a prayer.

When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process—one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.

This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.

Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. And I never returned to church or prayed again, either—yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.

It came to my mind recently while I was staring at the famous Blue Marble photo taken by astronauts in 1972, giving all of us on Earth the first glimpse of ourselves: pure, fragile, and isolated together in the vast expanse of space.

It seemed to me that if I spent some time every morning with this image, my day might be different. I wondered, if I could always be mindful of the true scale of time and space and my relative insignificance, might my anxieties seem smaller, too? Perhaps beauty more precious? Love more urgent? Honesty easier? Jealousies silly? Dreams doable?

This is a prayer, I thought. Or this is what prayer should be.

You can imagine how it all went wrong in the first place. Prayers might have been originally written to be helpful, to be mnemonic devices for recalling practical wisdom. But over time, the language and structure became unintelligible to laypeople, and their function morphed into something more like ritualistic loyalty oaths recited during ceremonies.

This is unfortunate because we need all the help we can get to live with clarity.

We are living in an epoch of optimization, yet we are further than ever from Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, the discipline to habitually practice virtues—like courage, generosity, and temperance—until they become part of our characters.

We’re overwhelmed with FOMO, self-help advice, streams of contradicting data, superficial influencers, and algorithms designed to capture our attention. And all of that is compounded by an industrial consumer complex that intimidates us to conform or else risk being odd. So we cleave to the mainstream, which doesn’t usually have our best interests in mind.

Perhaps one antidote to this mania is prayer.

I mean this in the Blue Marble sense. What if we dusted off the practice of centering ourselves with helpful reminders? We might write our own verses filled with wisdom we cherish, descriptions of imagery that inspire our humility, and memories that return us to what is most important. And we could make a habit of recalling these prayers to ourselves, quietly, to regain our strength.

I occasionally listen to ’s On Being, and one interview that has stayed with me since is a conversation with Alain de Botton. He made a compelling observation that many elements we now associate with religion—rituals, moral teachings, community gatherings—once belonged to a common cultural treasury. Over time, these practices were absorbed and institutionalized by religions.

I used to love singing with others on Sundays and wondered why that kind of communal joy wasn’t more common outside of church. De Botton argues that practices like these still meet universal human needs and should be reclaimed to enrich secular public life.

I think it’s worth a shot.

I’ll tell you about an image in my mind that I try to think about every morning. I expect parents of young children might relate.

It’s not uncommon for me to lose my patience with my kids. I’ll become frustrated because I’m distracted and stressed about something, and I’ll snap at them just a little too quickly with too little tenderness. Then an hour later I’ll step into their room to turn off their reading light, and they’ll be crumpled up and asleep, clutching their stuffie, and I’ll just get zapped by the sight. How small and perfect they are. How big and new the world is for them. How boundless their excitement for it. How little they know. How much they need me to guide them. How I am their example.

At that moment, I feel connected to something profound. I suddenly have the deepest well of patience to be a parent.

We should be aware of when this happens, savor these moments, and somehow convert them to something we can recall so we can access those deep wells whenever we need them.

So that is why I am praying again. And singing, too.

P.S. It’s been 26 years since Noel’s fall. Before the accident, he was a passionate ice hockey player. He regained the ability to walk, but not to skate. That didn’t stop him. He learned to skate on a sled, and for more than a decade he has played goalie for the Fort Wayne Flyers.

For a long time my social media bio was “Working on the Internet now so I can live in the woods later.” Cringe, but sincere. I’ve always been reluctant to spend a life in front of a screen, and even when I was younger and my ambition was at full throttle, I never had any fantasies about moving to the Big City to live out a career-driven life. All I ever really wanted was to own all of my time and to use it to grow things and make delight.

I can trace it back to a core memory of being 10 years old in the backyard with my mom. She lived outside barefoot and wearing tattered gloves, always in a frenzy of digging and planting, weeding and composting. I was surprised one morning when she pointed out a section of her garden where I could plant something of my own. This was Mom’s special place. It was undulating with colors, teeming with life, and dominated by a gnarly old cherry tree.

She had made it all by herself. And it was one of the most beautiful things in the world, I believed.

A different core memory emphasized that impression. One Saturday after finishing my route delivering the Buffalo News in our starter-home neighborhood, I cycled past a kid from another school. I didn’t know him, but he followed me home hoping we might play. We let our bikes fall onto the driveway and walked around the garage to the back of the house. The sun was casting that lazy summer morning glow, and Mom’s garden dazzled in the dappled light like a kaleidoscopic projection. I realized I was viewing it through the eyes of this kid seeing it for the first time. I turned to see his face, and his mouth was gaping.

“You guys must be rich!” he blurted.

I knew we weren’t rich, but I let him think so. It wasn’t until decades later that I appreciated how keen his remark had been.

So when my mom suggested she could make room for me to have a garden of my own, I knew she was inviting me to something special. I vividly remember the first cucumber that emerged from a yolky-colored blossom on the vine she taught me to sow. I was truly astonished.

In some way, all I’ve ever done since is try to experience again the magic of that first cucumber.

But as you know, life happens, and you get sucked into things. I graduated college, moved to NYC to chase money, and began my long career staring at a screen and fantasizing about a life spent outside.

It was while I was feeling trapped in New York that I discovered Christopher Alexander. Few thinkers have practically influenced me as much as him. I was interested in his ideas about cities: that they’re valuable, but their continuous sprawl and the increasing disconnect between city-dwellers and the countryside are causing them to essentially become inhumane.

In his seminal book A Pattern Language, he suggested an ideal pattern of building cities he called City Country Fingers:

If we wish to re-establish and maintain the proper connection between city and country, and yet maintain the density of urban interactions, it will be necessary to stretch out the urbanized area into long sinuous fingers which extend into the farmland.

I believed this pattern to be impracticable at the scale he described—at least in the US, where we’ve ceased to seriously build cities—but the general idea of interlocking fingers of human ingenuity and natural splendor, of stimulation and retreat, of hard and soft, seemed like a pattern you could practice at any scale.

It was around then that I decided to move to San Francisco, a city that I consider one of the better American examples of an advanced economy interlaced with nature.

My newlywed wife and I picked the Mission District to search for a home. It ticked the most important box for any East Coaster moving to California: plenty of sunshine all year long. But what we liked most about it was its own interlocking fingers of Victorian townhouses and large warehouses converted to lofts, of light industry and cheerful elementary schools, of old railroad easements and coffee shops. Honestly, it mostly reminded us of home in Brooklyn.

We knew we had found the perfect TLC project when we saw the For Sale sign on an unusual corner building. We later learned it had served most of its 120-year lifespan as a rundown bar, but at some point it had been rezoned to residential. It was just sitting there, empty and long unsold, waiting for someone to do the work to bring it up to code (that’s a different story; when we started the process we had zero kids and by the time we moved in we had two.)

What struck me about the surrounding blocks was another example of interlocking fingers: mostly treeless and neglected sidewalks varied with stretches where the concrete had been ripped out and replaced with mounds of succulents, yucca, and agave.

These little sidewalk gardens wormholed me back to that childhood backyard; I realized there were other growers nearby.

It didn’t take long to find Jane Martin. She was the force of nature behind many of the sidewalk transformations that I had stumbled upon. In fact, she alone had tenaciously coaxed the city to introduce a low-cost permit to allow homeowners to convert a portion of their sidewalk into landscapes.

Serendipity. She lived three blocks from me, and I asked her to teach me everything.

I learned that these gardens eliminate excessive hardscape and increase permeable landscape that absorbs storm water. They counter the urban heat island effect and regulate their block’s ambient temperature. And they grow San Francisco’s tree canopy, at that point only covering approximately 15% of the city’s area, which is relatively small when compared to cities like New York City (24%) and Seattle (30%). Most important to me, they give city kids (and adults!) something green to touch every day.

They are City Country Fingers at the DIY scale. We got to work on our own.

Our process started in 2013 when we asked Friends of the Urban Forest to help us plant two olive trees. They organize block planting events and coordinate all of the necessary permits, trees, and supplies. The trees we planted that day would later become critical for our garden's success by blocking gusty afternoon winds and providing shade to help other plants get established.

By 2016 the street trees had already established themselves. We proceeded with the demolition of the existing sidewalk, which was nearly 12 feet wide. The city allows you to plant much of that as long as you maintain a six-foot width of unobstructed path.

Most of our plants have one thing in common: drought resistance. Jane helped us with that. We also considered how nice they are to touch, as well as their ease of propagation (in case plants were stolen or failed to thrive on the first planting).

We waited for wet weather in January 2017 to plant. This pause allowed the plants to establish themselves in optimal conditions before weaning them off of watering. We also added stones to suppress weeds and trap moisture.

Today, ten years after being planted, the original street trees are nearly 25 feet tall, and in our small way we have disrupted the continuous urban sprawl.

The work never ends, and we continue to find ways to nourish it. We added lights connected to a photosensor to illuminate the path and help maintain a safe space at night. Last summer the kids and I used a kit to add a free book exchange.

The kids actually play a big part. They’re 8 and 10 now, and they’ve grown up in the garden. We spend nearly every weekend weeding and picking trash, making cuttings to fill in areas that have failed to thrive. My favorite part is when neighbors stop to comment on the garden and to thank us for the work. I’m pleased the kids are experiencing themselves as contributors to a wider community, where the barter can be as simple as doing what you love and receiving gratitude in exchange.

I hope this will be one of their core memories. Maybe their first cucumber.

All of this is in dedication to my mom, Kim Klein, the lifelong gardener who gave me many things, but nothing as important as her true passion. I’m also fortunate that I inherited her preference to be barefoot.

Mom passed away in 2017 at age 60. We miss her deeply and every day remember how she inspired us.

Get Involved

If you’re interested in a sidewalk garden of your own, I published a more technical document with tips, FAQs, and a complete plant list.

In the decade since, we discovered that this accident wasn’t uncommon. In fact, the city labeled our block as a High Injury Corridor, a term it created as part of its Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries by the year 2024.

Despite the city’s efforts to make streets safer for pedestrians, we continued to witness all kinds of collisions outside our front door, most involving a speeding driver. Hit-and-run victims and police would knock on our door to ask if we had any video footage of an earlier accident. We didn’t have a camera, but it became such a usual request that we decided to install one.

We’ve captured the routine fender bender, a fleeing felon bowling over a FedEx truck at high speed, and even a car dragging a person before eventually running over them and breaking their leg.

All of this was alarming and frustrating, but it reached a level of urgency when we had kids of our own, and we needed to start using the crosswalk to make our way to school.

I did some research and discovered the city’s Residential Traffic Calming Program. Basically, it allows an industrious neighbor like me to gather signatures and apply to have a calming measure—a speed bump or something else like it—installed on their block.

I completed all of the paperwork and submitted the application in April 2021. I assumed we were a shoo-in. Not only had our street already been singled out by the city’s own research, but our block also hosts an elementary school, a preschool, a community center, and a Boys & Girls Club. Yet 13 months went by, and I didn’t hear anything. So I started making a fuss on Twitter, and I wrote the SFMTA again, and I finally got a response:

In summary, they budgeted 24 months just to process applications. If the paperwork takes two years, who knows how much longer it would take them to install anything? To put this in context, this program was intended as a Quick Build solution to help meet the Vision Zero goal (and at that point they were only two years from the deadline, and traffic deaths had actually increased).

This was frustrating news. San Francisco is one of the world’s richest and most influential cities. Plus, its budget per capita is enormous: over $17,000 per resident—more than twice that of New York or Los Angeles. People talk about California’s GDP being fourth or fifth globally, and a big chunk of that is generated in the Bay Area. The Bay Area’s GDP is equivalent to Netherlands, just shy of Australia, South Korea, and Mexico. And we can’t rapidly build a speed bump? On a street we already know is dangerous? When we’ve made a commitment to end pedestrian fatalities in just two more years?

Surprising for a city that attracts so many builders and innovators.

So I did what every dad who lives on a dangerous crosswalk would do. I bought a speed bump on Amazon for $98. It was delivered the next day, and I installed it.

I wanted to make a point. So I laid this thing out on the road and sat there for an hour recording car after car taking notice and slowing down.

Look, this isn’t ideal. I don’t want neighbors to have to band together and install their own bumps and chance the liability. I prefer that the city sincerely pursue its own goal of zero pedestrian deaths by enforcing existing traffic laws and improving roadway engineering. At a minimum, permit neighbors to install bumps safely and legally at their own expense.

There must be a better solution, something in-between an Amazon Prime Bump and a Bureaucratic Bump. People are getting hurt while we’re waiting around for a solution.

Unfortunately that’s what this story is really about: waiting. Waiting for the obvious. Waiting for the already permitted and approved.

So I couldn’t keep my bump out there; it was just an experiment, and without proper signage and markings, it could lead to accidents. But I did get the SFMTA’s attention; they let me know a month later that my application was approved. That was 35 months ago, and we still don’t have an official bump.

Since then the Vision Zero deadline came and went, pedestrian fatalities and injuries have continued to rise. Fatalities were actually 40% higher in 2024 than in 2014, the year they set the goal.

It’s been four years since I submitted my application and three since it was accepted. Every year on the anniversary of my application’s approval, I write to ask for an update. Last year I received a generic response that the address I had been corresponding with had been deactivated.

Fingers crossed that this year will be the year. Otherwise I will have to proceed to Phase 2 and this is my moodboard:

A week after the 2024 presidential election, this Facebook post stopped me scrolling:

I am closed ... If you have a new repair, etc. I will no longer accept the job. There’s not enough joy left in my soul now to do this any longer. Thanks for your business since 1998.

It was similar to the many messages of despair being shared that week, but this one surprised me. This man, Aaron Morris, is one of those people – or so it seemed to me – who was fortunate to make a livelihood from a true passion, and not only that, be extraordinary at his craft. I know because he did a wonderful thing for my family and me a few years back...

In 2017 my aunt found a bundle of negatives wrapped in paper in the attic of her home in Buffalo, NY, which has been passed down generation to generation since our relatives built it more than 100 years ago. She sent me the package and I hired Photoworks in San Francisco to scan them.

The images were astonishing. For the first time we had pictures of family we had never seen. Before they were only anonymous names on family trees, names that were later given to newborns to remember them, but whose faces were unknown, whose worlds shared the same landmarks as ours but on another timeline. Now, we could meet our ancient grandparents – as young parents and children – and peer into the lives of Polish immigrants settling into early Buffalo, which then was emerging from fields and a simple lakefront into the country's 8th largest city.

What is now an inner city neighborhood in East Buffalo was then their little farmstead.

There was a lot more than just their neighborhood. There were glimpses of an undeveloped Lake Erie shore, as well as Niagara Falls.

One image in particular caught my eye. I swore I had seen that violin before.

I remembered that when I was a kid, my great grandma passed away and we cleaned out her house. My parents moved boxes of stuff from her attic to ours. Sometimes I would rummage through our attic, looking for hidden Christmas presents, and I remember seeing an old coffin-style case with a violin inside.

On my next trip home to visit my family, I went up into the attic with my wife and we couldn't believe our luck, the case was still there.

A few quick Google image searches narrowed it down to a German factory-made violin, possibly in Markneukirchen, between 1900-1910, which checks out because I believe the original photograph was dated to 1912. The GSB-engraved clasp suggests the case was manufactured by George S. Bond in Charlestown, New Hampshire.

My college buddy's father, Aaron Morris, is a luthier in North Carolina. He encouraged me to send it his way to have a look.

He quickly dissected it and confirmed it was a Stradivarius replica with a "Germany" decal pasted inside.

Six months later, I received two pictures from his shop with the caption: It can play again.

Aaron, thank you to for restoring our family's treasure and bringing color and sound to a very old memory.

And I must say, I hope you find the joy again. We need more people like you.

PS. Since these photos were discovered, I have begun to experiment with AI tools to colorize black and white photos. Here is that original with a quick color pass, next to a photo of my daughter 115 years later with her great-great grandfather's violin.

We’re wrapping up our second year in Spain and getting ready to move back to California. Not an easy decision: the kids adapted, they have cute Andaluz accents, they have loads of locals as friends, and they’re thriving. Whenever that happens—the kids being happy—it’s hard to argue with the lizard-parent brain that commands you not to mess with a good thing.

But this was always meant to be temporary, and we’ve already extended it a year.

That doesn’t stop the kids from running their own campaign: they’re pleading to stay in Seville and insisting on good reasons for why we have to go back. They don’t understand anything about the ins and outs of the US-Spanish income tax treaty, so I just leave it at It’s Time.

One morning at the breakfast counter, we discussed the move home. My 8-year-old wondered aloud to no one in particular, “When we go back, do I tell people I’m Spanish-American? Or Europe-Californian?”

The simple innocence of his question struck me. He knows nothing about the documentation required for such a dual-citizen arrangement. He just wants to know how to describe his experiences and what makes him him.

When you consider that most kids don’t form permanent memories until they’re two and the haze of COVID that obscured the first half of my kid’s childhood, it’s reasonable that he would have a complicated sense of identity. Half of his lucid memories are in Spain, in Spanish.

Coincidentally, at that same breakfast counter, the 10-year-old was using Seterra to study for a geography test. A few hours later, she would have to prove that she memorized all of Spain’s 50 provinces and their capitals. She noticed me notice her high score and seized the opportunity to show off some more. She tapped over to the Europe quiz to demonstrate that she could also place every country in the EU.

Out of curiosity, I asked her to try the USA quiz.

32%.

I expected something a little better since we had driven through 48% of the states together over the span of one summer a few years back. Plus, I’ve always encouraged the joy of geography, supplying atlases and maps of all kinds, and playing up the moment whenever we cross a border. I love places, and ever since both of them were capable of conversation, I’ve tried to inspire their pride in their place and to be aware of the pride of others, too. I hoped my passion was infectious.

Still, while the mastery of Spanish provinces is drilled into her, her recall of states remains casual and limited to where her grandparents, aunts, and uncles live.

I think her sense of being American and all that it contains wasn’t as important in the Bay Area as it was in my childhood in a Rust Belt hockey town on the Canadian border. When the Sabres played the Leafs, it might as well have been a pitched battle, and I was a patriot. I had to know all our facts, our stat lines. And for some reason, for me, this extended to having to know our primary agricultural exports. It went that deep.

I suppose the politics of the last decade have had a chilling effect. It feels like there’s a back and forth between who gets to be American, and this has trickled down to the kids. It’s sad, but it can’t be denied that depending on who’s in power, an American flag on the front porch means something different. Was it always that way?

It’s possible I’m overthinking it. It could be that my kids’ awareness of America is stunted just because it’s usually too foggy in San Francisco to have a decent fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

The irony is that their self-identification as American—and their urgency to know more about their country—began when we moved to Spain. Their teachers often call on them to share trivia about the national parks and our version of football. And their classmates beg them to bring back Prime from our trips to the States, convincing them that they’re lucky to come from a land of milk and honey, or overhyped fad beverages and Crumbl Cookies, I guess?

Their status as Californians also adds a layer of prestige (“Have you met Steph Curry?”), though not without its burdens (“Why are there so many fires and homeless people?”). All of this while they’re rapidly adopting the customs of their host country (a three-hour dinner starting at 9pm is A-OK in their book).

Naturally it’s provoking a lot of searching for an answer to What Are We? Spaniards? Americans? Californians? Golden State Warriors?

The latest iteration of my explanation is something like this: We’re Americans. In America, there are 50 different experiments about what it means to be an American. Each state has its own special advantages and disadvantages to run those experiments. And we’re in Spain to gather ideas to bring back to the Californian experiment.

The 8-year-old stares at me blankly. “OK, so we can still watch F1 in California?”

“Of course.”

The answer to the bigger question my kids ask—Why Do We Have to Go Back?—is more complex and does have something to do with the tricky bureaucracy of a foreigner with foreign income, but it has a lot more to do with this: good and bad, I’m American. I need to be in a place where I can be both the place’s biggest fan and its legitimate critic. I need to know its history and stand a chance at being part of it. I need to speak its language really well and persuade, argue, and create with it. I need to be a local.

Our time in Spain has been splendid, life-giving, and life-changing. We’ve made great friends, and we’ve had an adventure that the four of us will always consider pivotal. But this is not my home. An exciting possibility, though, is that my kids might have a choice: to be locals in both. They know the languages, they have the friends, and most importantly, they know the agricultural exports; I just hope they have pride in their place.

P.S. On that cross-country camper van trip I mentioned above, we shoved off in August 2020 when California was relaxing its strictest lockdown policies. The second day, we pulled into a small town on the Nevada side of the Sierras—we must have looked like aliens when we slid open the door and descended to the street in our masks—and without skipping a beat, a passerby noticed our license plate and greeted us, “Welcome to America!”

Appendix

Some things my kids and I stared at together this week