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like we brothas from another mother, kinda like mel gibson and danny glover

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I was gonna get up early today, go to yoga and be at work by two for an early night shift.

That’s not what happened.

No, I woke up at 12:45 with a start, looked at my phone and scrolled through my messages.

An email with no subject line jumped out at me, from an old, old friend who has been out of the country for over a year.

“At Market and Hyde, on the move. Call a brotha – XXX-XXX-XXXX.”

The time stamp was from an hour prior.

I smiled, and while I knew my words would come late today, and hence my shift, I immediately called the number he provided. A brotha gets back from over a year in third world Asia who says he’s in my hood, well – time to go catch up.

My words and work could wait.

He answered with that familiar voice of his and told me he was at Muddy Waters having a cup of coffee, watching the world go by. I told him to hang tight, threw on some shoes, brushed my teeth and hit the door, all my concerns for the day tossed out the window for a few hours.

When I finally rounded the corner onto Valencia a few minutes later, I immediately recognized the giant red dirtbag beard and cap and he shouted at me from down the street. He stood up and it felt good to give a hug to a dear friend who I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Turns out he’s back in the Bay for a while, living down the peninsula with his girlfriend, enjoying his last week off before he starts a new teaching job come next Monday. We sat around and drank coffee and talked politics and Vietnam and America and the city and all of the changes; the kind of open-ended macro-level discussion we’ve been having for years.

It was not only nice to see an old friend, it was nice to know another quality person was back in town to stay for a while. It was nice to have a conversation about big ideas with a former resident of the city, back for the first significant stretch of time since a lot of changes had happened. It was good to talk to someone who had a fresh pair of eyes for a city he knows in many ways as well as I do, and it was good to hear him speak.

“People act like this city was so cheap ten years ago. I mean, it’s gone up quite a lot from what I’ve seen on craigslist, for sure, but living here was never easy. Now it’s just harder, but how much have the basics really changed? You still got junkies down at 16th and Mission, you still got money running all over town – it’s not like anyone we knew could afford to buy a house ten years ago, so why it feels so different now to the same people I don’t know. It’s always been a land where you don’t grow up and while there’s more white people living in Oakland than ever, it’s not as different as everyone thinks that it is. Besides, everyone wants things to stay the same, and that ain’t the nature of a place like this.”

And on and on.

We talked about his new gig, about the cab industry, about medallions and the pink mustaches. We talked about human rights and his living in a place where people really didn’t have any, only to come back to a place full of freedoms a lot of people take for granted. We talked about women and the future and parents and all of the things you can talk about with an old friend.

The conversation didn’t end, just put on pause. I had to sit down to write and go to work and he had to shuffle on to his next destination, wherever that was. True friends don’t come along that often, and when they pop back into your life after a distance apart, you drop what you’re doing and go have coffee.

I’m looking towards much more in the future, now that he’s back for a year or two. Soon enough we will take one of our long epic walks from the bay to the ocean, eating sesame balls and street food the whole way, walking for no reason at all other than we enjoy each other’s company and because we can.

It’s nice to have him back, ridiculous facial hair and all.



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