The day I moved into the new house I built, September 18, I took the moving crew to lunch. The owner of the moving company, Kirk, was a long-time golf partner at San Geronimo back in Marin. I don’t think we ever intentionally made plans to tee off together at the first hole – we were just part of the afternoon crowd of self-employed men that did our work in the morning and early afternoon and by 3 pm we could be on the golf course. Sometimes Kirk, Vince, Don and I would start on the first hole, and sometimes we’d catch each other on the fourth green and fifth tee box, then play in together. Nothing was planned. Just show up and play. That was an easy time in my life. Marriage was good, daughter was in school and happy, I made a lot of money, seemingly easily, though I know I worked my ass off and over many hours, week in and week out. San Geronimo is closed now. County of Marin’s doing. They think we needed more parkland. We fought a good fight to keep it open as a golf course, but failed. Kirk moved me from San Anselmo to Santa Rosa October 26, 2019, so I called him to move me from the rental on Hemlock Street to the new house on Crestview.
Around noon Kirk said the boys were hungry and asked where a good lunch spot is. I told him there was a Panera and Pollo Loco down at the end of Hopper by the freeway and he said no, we only eat good, authentic Mexican food when we work. I said ok and started thinking about the two good Mexican places I have been to since moving here. One is off Mendocino Avenue to the east of College – I don’t know the name of the street but it is on the way to Draftech, where I got all my blueprints done for construction, and more recently, to make large images of my photography and mount them on foam-core board. My house is largely decorated by photos I have taken during our travels, to Spain, Italy, Canada, the Caribbean, and Australia. I even have a photo of New York City taken from the Brooklyn Bridge, and one from Upstate New York in the country. A common thread among the images is that they feature water, including the NYC shot with the East River near the southern tip of Manhattan. The idea is to replace them every few years with new photos from new places I have been.
The other place is between PBK (Premiere Bath & Kitchen) where I bought all my kitchen appliances and most of my lights, mirrors and bathroom fixtures, and ProSource, where I bought my cabinets and hardwood flooring material. It’s on Piner off of Cleveland but at the time the boys wanted lunch I couldn’t exactly explain how to get there so I drove there with them following. I wasn’t that hungry but thought it was a nice gesture to buy them lunch. We got there just before the lunch crowd, thankfully, because it would have taken a lot longer to get our food. You know it’s a good Mexican place when it fills up by locals – mostly Latinos, Latinas and construction workers. I had eaten there once some months earlier. As we got out of the vehicles I saw the sign and name of the restaurant, El Brinquito. Kirk speaks Spanish fluently, after all those years running a moving company with Hispanic labor, and I asked him what El Brinquito meant. He didn’t know so he asked his two co-workers. One was a stout man of enormous strength – probably my height around 5’8” but weighed close to 220 and didn’t look fat. He was from Michoacán, which is just west of Mexico City with a lovely coastline on the Pacific. The other fella was a large man, over 6 feet and probably 240. A little on the chunky side but he sure could lift heavy stuff, He was from Zacatecas, a mountainous state in the Northwest of Mexico where one of the guys was from when I worked in the bakery in Tustin when I was a teenager.
I’m not sure which one of them told Kirk that El Brinquito roughly translates into “the borderland,” but when Kirk told me the name of the restaurant I was immediately struck by its name – both charming and a little on the adventurous side, and also what it meant to me at this stage of my life, and the coincidence – or maybe it wasn’t, that we would go there for lunch on the day I moved into my new house. Santa Rosa is a bit of a borderland to me, well away from what I know in terms of Marin, San Francisco, the East Bay, and certainly Silicon Valley where I started my career and worked professionally more than any other submarket in the Bay Area since starting my consulting practice in 1998. Perhaps more significant than the physical place, and finding myself now in Santa Rosa, is how I felt about the phrase, the borderland. My life seems to be at the borderland – no longer young, now quite old, no longer married and a family man, but making new friends and completely charmed and in love with this lady I am seeing, no longer grinding away and working full-time as a writer, marketing and public relations consultant, and toying with the idea of a “second act” career wise, which I put into quotations because if I do something else professionally or semi-pro, like building custom homes or pouring wine to tourists at a local winery on weekends, this next “career move” would really be the 7th, 8th or maybe 9th way I have earned money since I was a teenager.
So I find myself at this new place and stage in life, perhaps typical for a man in his mid-60s, single or otherwise. Though maybe not, as I have not approached life in too traditional of a fashion or time sequence to date, so why start now? El Brinquito, my borderland, I embrace you.