Hayward: our last sleepover on this whirlwind six-day California odyssey before we turn northward toward home.  It’s hard for me to believe that I lived and worked here for sixteen years.  After a forty-year absence, the streetscape is almost entirely unrecognizable.  The names are familiar but… there isn’t even a glimmer of déjà vu!

New freeways careen toward cloverleafs and off-ramps that have obliterated…what?  I can’t really remember.  Another of those out-of-sight-out-of-mind things. Unhappily, it’s the same scenario with many of the people of my formative work years – colleagues in the Hayward Unified School District and friends in my Castro Valley neighborhood.  The names are familiar but I can no longer conjure up the faces or the circumstances we shared.

We met an old friend for dinner – a friend we’ve seen now and then in the intervening years.  Dayton has lived here continuously, working for the California Teachers Association until he retired just a year or so ago.  We spent a leisurely two-plus-hours over a delicious Italian meal (in a restaurant new to me) catching up and reminiscing.  Although “reminiscing” might not be the operable word. Mostly, I asked and he reminded…

“Boy, that name is familiar!” I said about someone he mentioned.

“Don’t you remember?  You had to go to her house on some sort of Association business and she answered the door without a stitch on?”  You’d think that would have stuck in my mind… but, no.  “You and Kathy used to go into gales of laughter on that one.”  And I laughed again… although I have no memory of that experience at all.

And we talked a bit about Kathy, his wife and my good friend for all of my Hayward years.  She died a decade or so ago of cancer.  The headlines said, “Teacher, labor leader Kathleen Crummey dies.”   I miss her mightily.  Especially here in unfamiliar Hayward.