Great Highway

Great Highway Promenade Photo credit: Klyde Java

Anybody who’s been through it is familiar with the roller coaster.  Deciding it’s time to take the plunge. Making a commitment to really search for that one special one. Finding a prospect, but telling yourself not to fall in love, because this one might not be the one.  Falling in love anyway.  Declaring your love. Taking your shot. Hoping you’ll get chosen. Then, getting the call: Keep looking, loser. Somebody outbid you.

I’m talking, of course, about house hunting.  My nephew Ryan and his husband Noah recently vanquished their trepidation about home ownership and jumped in with both feet.  In San Francisco, in 2026, it’s been a tough ride. What they could afford was dispiriting.  The competition was fierce. They lost out to bids that were up to $1 million over asking price.  Ryan sometimes questioned the whole concept of home ownership—that cherished prize for most of us Baby Boomers.  I know he is not the only Millennial to feel this way. 

San Francisco's Outer Sunset

But they conquered all that and today is moving day.  Their cozy, classic San Francisco house is a block off Ocean Beach and a block south of Golden Gate Park -- farther out than they wanted to be, and decidedly in the fog belt.  But they are thrilled. It is a crisp, sunny day and we have joined them and my brother Jim (Ryan’s dad) to help.  We bring with us our Boomer enthusiasms, our relatively large Subaru, our crazy Springer Spaniel Chloe, and Cal’s handyman skills.

I love watching young couples just getting started.  Weddings, for instance, mean more to me as I age.  I love watching the radiant pair exchange the bespoke vows that are now customary. I watch, and I think, I love your shining faces.  I love your beautiful words.  But I think it might be a few years before you know exactly what those words mean.     

For Ryan and Noah, today is a beginning, and it all feels shiny and new.  The location. The friendly neighbors. The runaway dog from next door that needs chasing down. The in-home laundry.  Beautiful things in the house that don’t work.  Less-than-beautiful things that do work. These light fixtures are gone immediately, says Ryan of the home’s startlingly disparate collection of chandeliers.  Ryan is an architect with impressive aesthetics and high standards.  I smile, remembering saying similar things.  The things I demonized are still in our house.  We’ve been here 35 years.

Credit: Ryan Hughes

I remember how grown up I felt, realizing we could actually, maybe, afford to buy a house.  Somehow, against all odds, we had joined the adult team. I remember crunching the numbers, looking for loans, talking soberly about interest rates. I remember how my hand shook, writing that first mortgage check.  I remember how quickly my hand stopped shaking as that check became normal.  Mostly, I remember that feeling that the whole future stretched out before us, bright and shining and unknowable.

Cal’s first handyman assignment is a furnace filter cover that will not come off.  He figures it out quickly: the cover is affixed with weird, square-shaped screws that defy all conventional screw drivers.  We need a hardware store, he declares.  He and Jim take off for the store, while Noah, Ryan and I drive the Sube across town for another load of stuff. We reconvene at the house a little while later, bursting with more enthusiasms.  The store is great— less than a mile away! The clerk was helpful! The screw bits only cost $4! 

By mid-afternoon, tired and hungry, we take a break and walk around the corner to Ruby’s, a café with outdoor seating, an eclectic menu and tons of dogs. We settle in with Chloe, chat with the other diners, enjoy the sun. We chatter like excited squirrels about our morning. This milestone may be as common as dandelions.  But on this day of sunshine and new beginnings, it feels like a miracle. We’re all getting a charge from the light.

I’m taking a continuing studies class at Stanford called The Science and Practice of Joyful Living.  I pushed myself to do this, because I’ve had a funny relationship with joy since my son Carson died.  At first, joy seemed impossible.  Then, it seemed possible, but only if I didn’t chase it.  Over time, I came to see joy as a byproduct; a thing that sometimes showed up if you set up your life for meaning and purpose.  

Our instructor, Kelly MGonigal, takes a slightly different view. Kelly is a lights-out health psychologist who teaches at the Stanford Business School. Her impressive body of research suggests that joy is a value; a capacity you can strengthen. One of our weekly assignments -- Meeting Joy with Joy -- works like this: when you see joy in other people, you go out of your way to amplify it—noticing it, naming it, talking about it, writing about it, remembering it, mentally cataloging it before you go to bed at night, so that the short-term memory of it gets consolidated and transferred into your long term memory.  In addition -- and this is important -- you thank the person whose you got to share.

I struggled with Kelly’s joy-as-value-to-strengthen model. As a bereaved mom, and a grief counselor, I am familiar with the essential sadness that is the permanent companion of every bereaved parent. If you’ve been through this, you know: it touches everything.  It’s always there.  The trick, I think, is figuring out how to make joy and sadness co-exist. One's going to be there anyway. Why not invite the other in?

I wrote to Kelly:

You present joy as something to cultivate.  The intentionality of it matters; you don’t just sit around and wait for it to happen. That doesn’t quite fit my joy-as-byproduct model. But here’s the thing. When I complete your exercises for cultivating joy, they do conjure up that bubbly, effervescent feeling.  And: they almost always happen when I am being of service to another person.  You have me thinking in new directions.

I expected a response from Kelly, because she is a caring, thoughtful teacher.   What I did not expect was the thorough exploration of my ideas she sent back, nor the way she amplified them, in relation to her own views, in her next Q & A session.  She called my comments rich with insight, and said they were helping her think more about how she relates to joy and encourages others to do the same.    

Wait.  I made Kelly McGonigal think? The exchange was fascinating and more than a little bit flattering.  It was, well, joyful. 

As we finish our lunch, the promenade calls, and we join the throngs of kids, couples, grandparents, baby stroller pushers, dog walkers, roller bladers, goths, hipsters—the flood of humanity that is drinking in this day.  We stop at a table to buy some baked goods from a girls’ soccer team that is fundraising for a trip to Europe. Good luck! we cry, gobbling red velvet cupcakes.  Have fun! Make us proud! 

I duck into a public restroom along the beach. It is dingy and a little run down, as public restrooms in San Francisco tend to be. But somebody has placed a vase of fresh flowers on every one of the five sinks.  Who does this, I wonder?  Who is picking flowers from their garden to splash a little color and beauty into lives of people they don’t know?  In a public restroom?

Ryan insists that we have one more stop to make.  We follow him to a giant boulder at the end of Lawton Street. Huge and heavy, it’s mounted on a pole that allows you to push it, turning the thing in slow, ponderous revolutions.  There’s no plaque or explanation of what this rock is doing here. Nobody is sure what its purpose is.  Ryan has decided that it is a “manifestation stone.” Each time you pass by here, you must conjure up your heart’s fondest desire, push the boulder in one complete revolution, and name your intention to the universe.    

Some of our party take a turn; some do not.  But thinking about joy, and how to amplify it, I step up, push, and whisper:

May the joy of this day find you again and again in the years ahead.  May your road stretch before you, a Great Highway, long and wide and shining, and filled with all the possibilities that are your life.