I was just conversing with one of my co-workers, and we both discovered that we grew up in the same hometown! Hello to all the people from South San Francisco!

Where is home to you? Where did you grow up? Who was there?

The reason I love music is because of my home. I received the best gift of a happy childhood with a large family. I learned what music my grandparents liked, what music my cousins enjoyed, and what my aunts and uncles listened to.

There was a song called “Penny Lane”, you might be familiar with the Beatles song:

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes/There beneath the blue suburban skies/I sit, and meanwhile back

The song is about the nostalgia of earlier years, in the hometown of the songwriters. South San Francisco is in my ears and in my eyes. I went to All Souls Catholic School. Anything beyond the radius of ten miles of my home was considered a long distance drive. I made friends with my neighbors. I made one friend asking, “Do you want to play Mercy?” Mercy is a game where you interlock fingers, and the winner is able to bend back the fingers of their opponent. The winner gets the opponent to say, “Mercy!” My neighbors and I walked up and down the same street every summer, talking about nothing and everything at the same time. If I had 75 cents I would buy donut holes at the corner shop near my school. If I had a dollar, I would buy a taco at the taco truck in Orange Park. At the park, there were tennis courts and basketball courts where we could fiercely compete against each other.

If we were really bored, my siblings, cousins, and I would bring cardboard up to Sign Hill. The hill reads, “South San Francisco, The Industrial City”. We would slide down the large letters on the hill. My house was right under the hill. My grandparents’ house was directly under the other side of the hill. My aunt’s house was around the corner of my grandparents’ house. If we couldn’t go outside, we took a mattress and slid down the staircase.

Think back to your Penny Lane!