Los Gatos Weekly-Times The attraction of Los Gatos? It's about heart By Daryl Glen I recently spent several days in San Francisco re-experiencing the haunts of my young adult years, from where Los Gatos seemed suddenly very remote. I was having such a good time I started asking myself if maybe I wasn't meant to stay among that energy and excitement, concrete jungle be damned. Then I remembered a passage from Carlos Castanada'sConversations with Don Juan. "If a path has a heart, then it is a good path." I remembered how one of my own teachers had once said she hoped I went with my heart and not my head more often. And so I hopped the express Greyhound bus and an hour and a half later I was back at the Black Watch and the Last Call, where everyone knows my name, and where minor transgressions are invariably forgiven by the next day. There was Les telling me he'd been worried about me, and Shirley telling me she'd missed me at her barbecue, and with each passing minute, the city began to seem more and more cold and unfriendly. "You gotta have heart, just a little bit of heart," the song goes. For years I searched for the "perfect place," although a sympathetic friend of mine once warned, "You're never going to find it. Every place is going to have flaws." At one point we decided Guerneville was "it." Another time it was Mill Valley, "an untidy Los Gatos" my friend called it. But Guerneville floods, and Mill Valley has its head in the trees. And they're both too far away from my little 21-month-old nephew. So here I am in Los Gatos--partially by choice, partially be default. Shortly after I moved here, I ran into the same friend on the street at Christmas time, and we ducked into Swensen's for a soda. "Are you still looking for the perfect place?" he asked at one point. I paused. "No, not really. Maybe I've found it. Or maybe I'm just a little older and a little less hell-bent on perfection," I said. My lovers no longer have to be airbrushed centerfolds; my writing doesn't have to be dialogue for a Broadway play. I'm more concerned with good friends and beautiful surroundings than I am with incessant excitement. Recently I've been helping several friends in Los Gatos get their houses in order, and I've thought it perhaps symbolic that to a one, they've all had cobwebs in their homes. "Time stands still here," Virginia Woolf wrote. Cobwebs? In Silicon Valley? When there isn't even a dairy in Monte Sereno anymore? And yet one of the things I like about this little town is that Los Gatos predates the computer revolution. There is still a sense of community and connectedness in Los Gatos. A friend and I like to talk about "old Los Gatos of craftsmen and little bungalows, the Los Gatos of "heart" that still beats if you listen for it. It's one of the things that brought me back this time and the time before that and will most assuredly bring me back in the future. You see it in the little things. The free coffee the Black Watch still offers to its customers; the food baskets and clothing they give to the needy at St. Luke's Episcopal Church every Tuesday; the stranger who offered me a ride home several weeks ago and then insisted I go to bed early because she knew I was watching my little nephew the next day--and who has since become a friend. Whenever I go up to the city I find myself stopping at my favorite piano bar requesting songs, sometimes from the musical Company, which I saw in London with my parents when I was 10 years old and which still evokes those memories of supreme well-being you can only have as a child when the world seems as infinitely wondrous as it does safe and manageable. Last time the pianist played "Another Hundred People": "Another hundred people just got off of the train. It's a city of strangers ... ." Next time I may request "You Gotta Have Heart." Then I'll go back to Los Gatos. Daryl Glen is a resident of Los Gatos. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, October 21, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.