The Scene Outside My Window

While I remain hopeful that I'll wake up one morning and the scene outside my living room window will reveal teenagers fleeing from a group of frighteningly intelligent great white sharks hankerin' for a hunka human flesh, that hasn't happened--yet.

Most mornings, at least in the last couple of weeks, I've woken up to low tide, which means that cool birds like pelicans and white egrets hang out on the sand bar (well, really, mud bar) in front of the houseboat. I didn't see this living in the city. It's like I've been transported to the idealistic world of an old lady english detective novel. You know, where the overly curious old lady lives in a beautiful, quiet seaside village where all the neighbors know each other and the odd mutilated body turns up now and then.

Speaking of neighbors, that's something I've had to adjust to. In the city, you can walk down the street and remain anonymous. In fact, I didn't know the neighbors on either side of me when I lived on Judah Street for eight straight years, other than the grown man next door calling for his live-in mother in a slight panic on occasion.

The houseboat community, on the other hand, is very close-knit. Outside of the actual children, I'm the youngest on the pier, by a good twenty or thirty years or so. Okay, that's not strictly true. The parents of the aforementioned children are only a bit older than myself. Oddly, the father grew up in my home town of West Hartford, Connecticut, and went to my brothers' high school. He married an English woman, who, when I told her I was an advertising copy writer, responded that her job was lecturing about the evils of advertising. We weren't off to a great start. Their oldest child is like Little Lord Fauntleroy, without the snottiness. He's got the perfect English gentleman accent. I expect him at any moment to say, "Father, may we go down to the Moors after our scones and clotted cream? May we, truly?" Instead, he says things to me like, "I love going to the JCC for camp!" They have no T.V., which is a little sad, and apparently he knows nothing of these things called video games. I'll see what I can do to corrupt him in my time there.

Since I live at the end of the long pier, it's like running the gauntlet of neighbors. Sometimes, when I come home from work, I really just want to be left alone. Instead, I must meet and greet all the way down the pier. Because of this, it may take me a half an hour to actually make it to the houseboat. Yes, I know, it's nice, it's charming, and I do like knowing my neighbors, but still, it sometimes makes me miss the pleasure of being anonymous.

In general, I'm suffering from city withdrawl. I miss being in a livelier neighborhood. There's not a hipster in site. I can't really easily walk to a bookstore, or clothing store, or whatever. Of course, having said that, walking to those places in the city usually involved five blocks and several enormous hills. But so far, in Marin, I don't feel like I belong. So far, I'm the only one with pink hair that I've seen. These are not my people. Although several of my people do strangely live very closeby, in Sausalito or Mill Valley. But I've got the hope that Marin holds a secret enclave of coolness, although why that should be so important, I don't know and I'm a little bit ashamed of it. I haven't had time to do any exploring at all, really. So I'm trying to trick myself into thinking that I live in an outpost of the city. I don't really live in Marin; I live on a houseboat that happens to be surrounded by Marin.

I think in a couple of months this--and the constant dreams I've been having of not being able to find my house (but hey! at least I'm sleeping!)--will abate. And if not, I can always move back in a year.

Until then, I'll keep looking and hoping for the killer sharks outside my living room window.