Janet LaPierre

Irish proverb: The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.

Berkeley

Change, like "stuff," happens—sometimes, it seems, in a blink. Thrillers and tales of serial killers are leading the pack in the mystery genre, and poof! Fantasy slides in, and we're reading about murders and detection among vampires and shape shifters. Or the familiar cozy is suddenly sharing shelf-space with mystery chick-lit. Not overnight but almost.

Other changes are so minor, so slow, that they pass by unnoticed until someone, or something, calls their total to your attention. The best expression of this experience I know of is a line by poet Phyllis McGinley: Who is that gray-haired stranger in the mirror?

My husband and I have lived practically forever in Berkeley, California, an old, established city and home to the flagship of the University of California system. Its physical size is contained by San Francisco Bay to the west, other cities pressing close on the north and the south, and the hilly green ridge of a huge regional park to the east. The population hovers slightly above one hundred thousand, including students at the University of California; and in tightly in-built Berkeley there simply isn't room for many more people without tearing down and replacing small older buildings—not easy to do under the steely gaze of the committee bent on enforcing the Berkeley Landmark Preservation Ordinance.

We had various reasons for settling here. It was close to my husband's work. It's a visually attractive place, with tree-lined streets and year-round gardens and of course, big, beautiful San Francisco Bay practically in the front yard. From the tiny cottages and bungalows in the flatlands to ever larger houses as the land rises toward the eastern hills, most of the houses and neighborhoods were and are well maintained. The closest thing to a housing tract here is the occasional row of three or four houses in similar styles put up by one builder maybe 70 years ago. Given the afore-mentioned Preservation people, and the city's restrictive building permit restrictions and zoning codes, there are very few McMansions in Berkeley.

[photo] I was a walker, and temperate Berkeley was a good city for that; I spent many hours pushing a stroller along the sidewalks, meeting other mothers and toddlers in the various small city parks and tot-lots. The schools were good when my daughters were attending them, and are said to be even better now. The big downtown library is both a handsome historic landmark and an excellent library, and along with its four branches was and is heavily used; South Branch has a tool-lending library, an amenity my husband appreciates and uses frequently. There were those among us who quietly bemoaned the recent arrival of the library's computer check-out system, which reduces the library more to the level of an ATM than a place for chatting with librarians and/or other patrons. But so it goes.

But while we congratulated ourselves for living comfortably in such a pleasant place, change of course crept in. Some of it was minor: the small-town newspaper folded, the Co-Op markets were bought out. Traffic got heavier on neighborhood streets, particularly those that made a straight line to the freeway. But the real kicker was the inevitable result of a national phenomenon: the enormous boom in the housing market. Ten or fifteen years ago—who pays that much attention except real estate people?—some larger houses in mild middle-class neighborhoods began to hit the market for a million dollars or more. And they sold. Now this nice little college town has many million-dollar homes including at least one on my very own mostly three bedroom/two bath—3BR/2B—street.

Some of the changes since then have been quiet. The small parks and tot-lots are still full of children, but many of them are being supervised by nannies instead of mommies; those million-plus-dollars homes can require two wage-earners. Kids are ferried to organized sports instead of playing in front yards and on quiet streets.

The biggest change, however, happened gradually downtown, a situation I call the case of the disappearing department store. You can no longer buy underwear or ordinary shoes or children's clothes or furniture in downtown Berkeley. What you'll mostly find there now are restaurants and cafes of all cuisines and cultures, some with live music. Movie multiplexes. The renowned Berkeley Repertory Theater. Other small theater groups. All the nourishment, culture and entertainment you could wish for, right in town. Away from downtown are a few commercially flourishing streets (NOT malls, never malls!) with interesting specialty shops: pricy garden and yard statuary, futons, Restoration Hardware, French lingerie, baby clothes and toys priced for grandmas. And then, across the bay, is The City, with all the above squared plus three major museums, the San Francisco Opera, The San Francisco Symphony. Takes a lot of energy and money, all this.

However, there are still alternatives for the quieter soul. For one thing, this is still a walking city, and I'm still a walker. Out in the hillier neighborhoods, streets curve with apparent aimlessness; on long stretches without a cross street, the walker will come upon a path or walkway or long flight of steps, with a name post, leading down—or up—the the next street. Chances here to peer into back yards, or even windows. In spite of having wandered these streets for years, I can still discover an interesting-looking house I'd somehow never noticed. Tudors, two- or three-story brown-shingle numbers, Mediterranean-flavored stuccos with red tile roofs. There's plenty of evidence here that over the first three-quarters or so of the 20th century, California domestic architecture was highly eclectic.

In the large houses in the hills, most of them with nice big yards, there seem to be fewer families with children. What one finds, instead, are people with dogs. People get puppies, and take them to puppy classes and make play dates for them with other puppy owners. They walk them around their neighborhoods. Some take them (leashed, of course) to places like the spiffy shopping area on Fourth Street and even, some of the teeniest like toy dachshunds or French bulldogs, into the shops there. An alternative is one of the small off-leash dog parks; or the landfill park down at the marina, where dog owners, organized in a group called Bark!, managed to grab a sizeable spot for themselves and their unleashed friends. Play space for dogs.

For a dog-person like me, the real enjoyment of this trend is even closer to home. On a given day, walking for an hour around the hills east of my house, I may meet half a dozen dogs—with their owners, of course. If I change the time of my daily walk by an hour or so, I'll encounter a whole different group. One morning, as I passed an open garage door, a man working on his motorcycle there saw my dog, came out and said to me, "Everybody walks dogs on this street. I think in a given week I might see a hundred dogs. I guess nobody in this town works."

Many don't, I guess. And many, like me, are self-employed, or perhaps connected with the university. Whatever the circumstance, my sweet-tempered yellow labrador, Dulcie, and I regularly meet Pepper, a friendly black-and-white Tibetan terrier. We meet and avoid an insane but tightly-leashed bichon frise whose name I've never asked. We meet Milhouse, an affable English bulldog; Rags, a small cute rescue dog, mostly terrier; Charlie, a nice-enough female pit-bull mix whom Dulcie regards with apprehension. Penny is a gray Irish wolfhound, tall and narrowly built and a bit timid. Rupe for Rupert is an Aussie, an Australian sheepdog who nods as he trots past with his fast-walker person, who also nods.

Emma is a golden retriever we met first when she was about eight weeks old; even at that tender age, Emma had perfect puppy-to-dog manners, rolling over with a submissive grin to espose her belly. Now she's nearing six months of age, has tripled her height and length, and will probably weigh in eventually at 80 pounds or more. One day a while back we met a woman holding a bright-eyed, adorable tiny puppy; she told me it was her first dog, a Border terrier. Oh my, thought I. Three months later I met the dog again, now the epitome of the small up-for-action terrier, on a leash held by a tense-looking teen-aged boy. "Oh, you're going to have fun with her," I said, but he didn't seem convinced.

Then there's Lola, a retriever cross, and Zelda, a rather assertive—at least to Dulcie—chocolate lab. Mocha, a very gentle chocolate lab. Luther is a black-and-white Akita cross with one large pointed ear erect, the other not; sturdy and self-possessed, he's above foolishness. I've forgotten the name of a yellow lab male twice Dulcie's size, but Dulcie deigns to run and rough-house with him; it seems that breeds recognize their own kind. And a favorite of mine, an enthusiastic young basset hound named Buddy. His owner is an elderly man who looks weary, and said to me one day,with a shake of his head, "I used to think I was good with dogs."

I'm sure I've forgotten some of our canine neighbors. Pure-bred or otherwise, they are handsome and well-kept and generally well-socialized; this is a fairly stable, upper-middle-class neighborhood (a status some of us have achieved by having bought a house here long ago) and these owners take good care of their dogs.

When my daughters, Jacqueline and Adrienne, were small, they attended a cooperative nursery school. As a participating parent, I knew Jennifer, and Alison, and Eric, and I knew the people with them as Jennifer's mom, and Alison's mom, and Eric's mom. When I walk the neighborhood now, I can call nearly all these dogs by name, but I don't know, or don't remember, the names of most of their owners. It's like nursery school all over again: Penny and Penny's—not mom, but person. Penny's person. Some things change only slightly.

—Janet LaPierre

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