I'd wanted to live in Berkeley ever since the time during the early Sixties when I'd been living in San Francisco. I was living in the Bay Area at the time of the Free Speech Movement (1964) and had avidly followed that whole dispute on KPFA, Pacifica's listener-sponsored radio station. But because of my awkward living situation at that time -- living in San Francisco and working 30 miles south of there in Sunnyvale and Mountain View -- I'd been able to spend almost no time at all actually in Berkeley during that period.

The Free Speech Movement had eventually been followed by the ``Filthy Speech Movement,'' namely one individual (male) who walked around carrying a sign saying ``Fuck'' and was several times put in jail for this, to the great indignation of many of the activists on the Berkeley campus. I had thought that the then Governor of California (Pat Brown) had summed the situation up very well when he said that it was simply an issue of bad taste. Unfortunately, he didn't seem to understand what he himself had said. He didn't seem to see the absurdity of putting someone in jail for bad taste.

A few years later, while I was a graduate student in La Jolla, there had been the People's Park riots in Berkeley, which were much uglier. While teaching at Humboldt State afterwards, I later had the chance to talk to some people who had experienced the time of those riots, with people being tear-gassed on their way to the grocery school and tear gas blowing into elementary school classrooms. (One day they had actually sprayed much of the city with tear gas from a helicopter.)

It wasn't so much that I wanted to live in a place that had riots, but I saw Berkeley as a place where people were rebellious and wanted to be on the leading edge of everything. I also saw it as one of those magical mystical places like Greenwich Village, San Francisco's North Beach, the Left Bank of Paris, or Provincetown, Massachusetts, that were filled with a rich bohemian and artistic life. The difference was that for the most part the bohemians had long gone from Greenwich Village and North Beach and the Left Bank, I had the impression that the avant garde was still alive in Berkeley.

Now it was now 20 years later and in all the intervening time, I had still barely set foot in the city of Berkeley. (I had never even applied to Berkeley as a graduate student, because I had foolishly assumed that it was out of my league.) So when it became time to choose where to go for a sabbatical, my choice was obvious.

In 1983, I'd been promoted to full professor, but my salary was still less than $30,000 a year. Fortunately my daughter had just graduated from college the year before, which made the financial situation a little bit easier. My wife and I had a few thousand dollars in the bank and we decided to take a major risk by going to Berkeley for a full year with me on half-salary, making the assumption that my wife would somehow be able to get a job. (She did, working full-time for just about the first time in her life, and although the job paid minimum wage, that was enough for the groceries, plus a fair amount left over which she kept for herself. My half-salary paid the rent.)

The ostensible purpose for my sabbatical was for me to learn some numerical analysis, possibly including some computer science. I in fact sat in on two graduate-level numerical courses at Berkeley and about four undergraduate computer science courses.

I did learn a little computer science, but the most interesting thing about sitting in on these undergraduate courses at Berkeley was observing the tone of the classes and the level of the students. It certainly made it rather difficult the next year when I had to return to Hawaii and deal with the sort of students we have here. (The year I returned, I sat in on a graduate course in automata theory offered by one of my colleagues, and found that almost everything he taught had been covered in the undergraduate course in algorithms I had audited at Berkeley.)

My real goal for learning this stuff was that, given the rate at which my salary at UH was lagging behind inflation, it seemed clear that I would soon have to find a non-academic job, probably going back into the aerospace industry. I hoped that what I was learning would make me more marketable.

My other goal for the sabbatical was to do some serious writing, either writing a novel or at least a number of short stories.

My wife and I had a small apartment on Blake Street, just a few blocks from Telegraph Avenue (about four blocks from Moe's Bookstore) and within a short walk of the campus. It was definitely the right place to live.

I loved all the bookstores, and the UC Theatre (an enormous repertory cinema) and the Pacific Film Archive (the cinema in the University Art Museum). The coffee houses were also interesting for a while, especially the infamous Mediterraneum, although the Med had considerably cleaned up its act from the days when it used to be a center for drug dealing and prostitution.

But, for the most part, the city of Berkeley turned out to be, on the whole, a disappointment to me. I discovered that Berkeley was simply a sleepy little college town. In particular, there was very little night life.

There was still a lingering ghost of political activism in town, but the biggest enthusiasm in Berkeley seemed to be for fine dining at expensive restaurants (Chez Panisse on North Shattuck Avenue being the prime example).

Even on our own modest budget, my wife and I never ran out of interesting places to eat.

I realized that two months, or maybe even just one, would have been quite sufficient to satisfy my desire to live in Berkeley. I wished that I'd chosen to live in San Francisco instead.