Finding It All:
A Home in San Jose's Northside Neighborhood

After 13 years of living in rentals, I am happy to have finally found not only a house with lots of character but also an interesting corner of the city in which to live.

Hello San Jose. I'm one of your new neighbors.

In mid-January, 2002, I bought a 105 year old Victorian house with a white picket fence in San Jose's Northside neighborhood. One palm tree in the front yard and another in the back give the unmistakable imprint of California to what otherwise could pass as an old New England home.

And the house is pink! A pale dusty rose pink. As my dear departed North Dakotan mother-in-law would have said if she was still alive to see our new place, "It is sooo cute."

After 13 years of living in rentals, I am happy to have finally found not only a house with lots of character but also an interesting corner of the city in which to live.

As my son remarked yesterday, Northside San Jose is a neighborhood with people out and about. You can walk to corner stores, shops, parks, churches, and restaurants. Many of the restaurants have sidewalk seating.

Residents throw rummage sales in their front yards, visiting with the people who came by to browse and talk. Children ride big wheels up and down the sidewalks. Peddlars sell Mexican snacks and icees from push carts. A bus goes by my front door.

All that activity is invigorating.

I'm a Catholic, so I enjoy the fact that I can walk just 5 blocks to my nearby parish church, Holy Cross.

After Mass, I sometimes join other parishioners at the Rollo's doughnut shop across the street. Rollo's is packed in the early mornings with all kinds of people, from Mexican service workers riding bicycles on their way to work to Italian retirees. The reason for the shop's popularity is obvious, the doughnuts there are great!

Rollo's is owned by a Hmoung family. The appliance store down the block is owned by people of Vietnamese heritage. These are just a few of scores of examples of how the northside is dotted with small businesses whose variety reflects the neighborhood's ethnic makeup: Mexican, Italian, Hmoung, Vietnamese.

And of course, Northside San Jose is also home to many assimilated descendants of immigrants from other countries, such as myself. I'm half Irish and half Hungarian, descended from earlier immigrants who came to this country in the 1800s. My son and my daughter add German to their ethnic background, since my ex-husband was German. I noticed there's a solid percentage of other mutts around like us.

For another glimpse of the neighborhood demographics, consider the Mass schedule of Holy Cross Church: There are two English masses, two Spanish masses, and one Italian mass every weekend,

I'll close with one more impression. After the 8:30 English Mass on Palm Sunday, I bought a decoration made from hand-plaited palm fronds from a young Mexican man who was on the sidewalk in front of the Church. Families carrying these plaited palms, some with red roses braided in, were streaming into the Church for the Spanish mass that started the next hour.

In this part of San Jose, as is common in the rest of California, people from around the world work, worship, eat, buy, sell, and play elbow to elbow. The "melting pot" metaphor doesn't exactly work to describe what we do, because we don't all blend together.

Maybe a better metaphor would be a wok cooking a stir fry, because in a stir fry, each piece retains its identity while it contributes to the flavor of the whole.

With all the color and variety and liveliness in my new neighborhood, I think I'm going to continue to like it here. I love stir fries.