#nostalgia | Theresa Donahoe

For dinner tonight, I met up with my sister and a friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in years.

Heather!

I am not exaggerating when I say “she hasn’t changed a bit” – except maybe the haircut. 🙂 She lives in Arizona now but was back in the Bay Area for work. I would have loved to visit with her longer and reminisce about the 80s, but then I was off to see another friend perform in a one-woman show:

Pearl!

It was such a moving autobiographical performance. She did such a good job connecting with the audience and sharing stories about her mother and father. At the end of the show, she said all the people she talked about were no longer alive, but she wanted to honor their memory. Speaking of memory lane….

This morning on my walk I noticed this bit of nostalgia at two different houses:

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I love this faux gas lamp look. What it must have been like before electricity:

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I don’t mean to romanticize the past, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. In 1922, the Christmas before my Grandma Gerry’s 8th birthday, her family had officially moved into their house at 155 Monte Cresta Avenue in Oakland, as she wrote in one of her letters:

“The milkman made one delivery a day and the mailman came twice a day. The streets were lit by gas lights and each dusk the lamp lighter came by to light them. Other places had electrified streets at the time.”

The creditors took the house at 155 Monte Cresta Avenue when my grandma’s father became ill. It was eventually demolished and replaced with an apartment building in the 1960s. I have no pictures of the old house. I just have this receipt from City Planning. Apparently, there was a fire there in 1934. I requested all information for that address. J.E. Noble was my Great Grandfather and is listed as the owner.