…But I’ve been to San Francisco about seven or eight years ago and although I knew I liked it, I wasn’t prepared to fall in love. It was the same elating feeling I had a few months back when I went to Sedona and made sure to wear all the long dresses I hadn’t worn back home. You see, no one there knew they were a new trend in my wardrobe.

Last time I visited San Francisco I was with my ex-fiancé. We were in love and everything was magical. It was also the first time I traveled with a boyfriend and San Francisco was our playground. The cable cars and the endless winding roads, the sea lions sunbathing and pushing each other in the water, the dark halls of Alcatraz and the moment they locked us in a dark cell and told us to look out the small window and see the city lights through the eyes of long-gone inmates; the old church that reminded me of one down the street growing up in Santiago, and the Japanese Tea Garden with its perfectly trimmed, exotic bushes and its miniature cascades of clear water.



So I walked and walked up and down Market Street on Friday morning thinking of how different my life is now. Eventually I got on a cable car and made it to Fisherman’s Wharf where the smell of freshly baked sour dough bread and the fish market down the street weren’t helping my sentimentality. The Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory was another ephemeral, lost memory and as I sat there sipping my hot cocoa with extra marshmallows I thought, I wish someone was here with me to share this day.

I was happy and I was sad and I was thankful and I was confused. I wasn’t expecting the fresh bread to take me back over twenty years when I used to pedal my way to the corner store to buy eighty pesos worth of bread although my parents had given me a shiny hundred pesos coin to spend. I thought it was clever to buy twenty pesos worth of candy and eat it very quickly on my way home. How would they know? My parents always wondered why I was seldom hungry, but I digress. The fresh fish smell and the folks cooking right along the street inviting you wholeheartedly to try their latest concoctions was all I needed to fly away to Valparaiso twenty-five years ago where my father and uncles ate ceviche out of a giant shell of some sort while drinking wine and telling funny stories I was probably too young to hear.

So I walked and walked and thought of so many things I hadn’t thought of in so long. Some were awful memories I wish weren’t part of me but hope to one day know why they are. Most were wonderful times in my life that I hope I never take for granted and find a way to share with as many as possible. I am surprised I didn’t overload on hot cocoa because I just sipped and sipped on it all day and remembered my grandfather using a long, thin spoon to swirl the chocolate milk in my cup so I would drink from the water spout! He would cheer me on too… go go go go it’s almost gone – you have to finish it! And I would… I’d drink it all probably faster than any five-year-old ever should.

I met a nice girl sitting at the bar later that night. I ordered a glass of wine and quickly decided a fourteen-dollar pomegranate martini was much more suitable. She was a highly successful woman with an air of naughtiness all wrapped up in complete put-togetherness. She was going to meet guy friend who was late – annoyingly late. She was thirty-eight, had dated plenty, but never managed to meet him. I thought how I’ll only be a couple of years younger than her when I finish school. Will I be wondering the same thing? I took a big gulp of my martini, smiled, and reminded myself that whatever will be will be. They'll be just fantasies for a while longer...

Maybe it was the cooler weather, maybe it was the sights, maybe it was just the energy, maybe it was the smells, maybe it was the young man who gave me his seat on the cable car… All I know is that last week while flying away on a routine business trip I found myself once again fully enchanted by this city, and the morning of my flight back I walked around downtown wrapped in my bright red scarf thinking in a rather foggy daze that I had truly and quite inevitably… left my sappy heart in San Francisco.

Enchanted