Dedicated to North Park. And my cousin, who is having a baby tomorrow

I was in North Park the other day, a neighborhood that's become extremely trendy over the last several years. It's so cool, in fact, that someone once said people who work at my newspaper shouldn't even be hanging out there.

I'm not usually sensitive to comments like that, but this one stuck with me.

See, my mom's first, official job as a hairdresser was in the gray building between 30th and Ray Streets around the corner from Urban Solace, right in the heart of it all. I was probably 14 when she started working there and it was my first time experiencing a part of San Diego that wasn't a suburb or Balboa Park.

Sometimes I'd go to the salon with my mom and she'd ask me to deposit a check at the Union Bank and pick her up a Cafe au Lait at a place on University, which I'm sure is gone by now. The first time I did this, I was terrified. There were loud buses and stray dogs and very old ladies with metal shopping baskets all around. I didn't even know what a Cafe au Lait was. When I ordered it, I swear I thought I was ordering a Cafe Ole! and was disappointed when there was nothing Mexican about it.

I don't even think my mom knows this, but I also learned to drive in North Park.
(She probably thinks that creepy driving teacher, the one who took me out for so long she had to call the school to make sure I wasn't abducted, taught me what I know.)

But my real driving teacher was my cousin's driver, Magda.

Let's get it out of the way. Yes, my cousin had a driver because she lived in Tijuana and it was a perfectly normal thing, especially in the 80s. Thanks to the drivers, I was able to spend a big portion of my teenage years in Mexico. Most Friday afternoons, someone would swing by my house in Chula Vista on their way home to Tijuana for the weekend.

ANYWAY.

So Magdaa wasn't like the regular drivers usually employed by my aunt and uncle. For one, she was a woman. And second, she was young. Plus, she didn't really follow the rules, which for a teenager is *the best.*

More than once, Magda and my cousin would pick me up at the salon and the conversation would go something like this:

"Do you want to drive?"
"What?"
"Do you want to drive?"
"Are you kidding? But? I don't even? Really?"
"It's easy. Come on, let's do it."

I got behind the wheel of the car and learned very early on about the North Park dips, which are pretty intense. And the weird one way streets that come at you when you least expect it. I learned to watch for pedestrians. And buses. And bikes. (Yes, people rode bikes in North Park in the 80s.)

Don't get me wrong, I love the new North Park. I love the ladies at Bar Pink (who I met during another, very different time in my life). I love that one of the last meals I had before being a mom was at The Linkery.

I just really love the old North Park, too. And as I was (very confidently) driving through its streets on Saturday, I felt lucky to have been able to experience both.