The most charming thing about the place, for This Walker of Neighborhoods, is that it is right in the neighborhood. Many of the houses along the street look as if thye have been here as long as the Burbank house. The yards show the bright flowers and loving care of long residence. Santa Rosa is a city of the elderly in much the same way San Francisco is a city of the young.

Returning from the Burbank house I encountered elderly people out for strolls, some pushing baby carriages and walking along with other evident grandchildren, others walking out to their automobiles. There are young families in this town, of course, and teen-agers, but the presence of elderly people here, their pace and tastes, is palpable.

As my friend Terry says, Santa Rosa remains more a place to retire than a place to live. I am quickly reminded of why I left this city, and that it would take the persuasion of a gun barrel to make me choose to live here again. I am too much the metrophile.

Still, as in San Francisco and the lake where Juan Bautista de Anza made his settlement, I am tied to history. A Tarot Card reader once told me that I carry history with me like a mantel. She said that I refuse to fully live in the '90s because my spirit harkens back to a more "courtly" age. That would be a comfort for my predicament if I believed in reincarnation, but I have become convinced that I do not.

I think, rather, that my fascination with history is a manifestation of my curiousity about the nature of what it means to be "human." It is no more or less than the fixation of a novelist(in spirit, if not in fact.)

I was shown today, again by Terry Terrian, that a very esteemed panel of judges(Christopher Cerf, Daniel Boorstin, A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, Edmund Morris, Arther Schlesinger Jr., John Richardson, Vartan Gregorian, Gore Vidal, and William Styron) had released their list of the Top 100 20th Century novels. This is certainly an announcement suitable for a note by a publication calling itself GENERATOR 21. The telling thing to both of us, Terry and This Writer, was that I had read 90% of the list. My complaint was that the list only included native English speakers, so that Umberto Ecco, Gabriel Maria Marquez, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, and scores of other writers who have stolen sleep from my nights were not given recognition.