Adair's Photo Album [1] [2] [3]

Click on any thumbnail to view its larger version.

Image Number 6

This is all of us at Mom's birthday party this year. Bottom left: Robin, Shannon. Middle row: me on the left, Adrian on the right. Above us is Mom, with Mickey and Sean standing behind her. Connie wouldn't get away from her job.

Image Number 9

Lagunitas House: This is the house I grew up in Lagunitas, in West Marin, at 140 Lagunitas Road. It looks exactly the same as it did when we left in 1963. It was one of the sagging summer rentals left over from the days when picnickers from San Francisco would take the train out to Marin for the weekend sun. Except we had sun only in the yard: the house was plunged in permanent gloom from the overhanging trees, spindly specimens that stretched high to reach the light. Ivy crawled up the trunks of the trees, and the warm air smelled thickly of dirt and trees. The yard that loomed in my memory as a vast bright space was barely a clearing between the house and the hill that separated it from the upper road. I could see the six of us kids playing tag in the clearing in the failing light, unwilling to go in until it finally became too dark to see.

Image Number 18

I arrived at the Queen Anne building where I live now, on the corner of Scott and Waller streets, back in 1973, a callow 21-year-old San Francisco State student with the soon-to-fade remains of a Marin County tan. I was moving in with my junior college English teacher. He had bought the three-story building for $43,000. It was a poorer neighborhood then, with the occasional fistfight in the intersection and not many pale faces. It was not then the hip Duboce Triangle, or the trendy lower Haight or elegant Buena Vista, or er, flat part of Hayes Valley, but the gritty Western Addition. I'm still here. He's still here. When a friend of mine from the Chronicle remodeled a church building between Haight and Page as a loftlike house, it was the first sign to me that the hood had started to change. The Church of Sir John Coltrane that rocked on Sundays on Diviz moved, and a pet store-as sure a sign of yuppification as gays on rooftops are of spring-- came in near where it had been. I have lived here 34 years now. I had my two children here, and they live three blocks away, in side by side apartments on Noe Street. My daughter had her own two girls here-seventh-generation San Franciscans, thank to a forebear of mine who came on the Mormon ship Brooklyn in 1846.