Aïda of Richmond

She didn't say there was an umlaut above the i in Aïda... it's just the way she pronounced her name, A-ee-da, accented on the first syllable, and so that's how I'm writing it here now. I'd gone to the California DMV on Baker Street between Fell and Oak, right at the eastern (starting) end of the Panhandle, to apply for a state ID. And it turns out I was still in the system, as Aïda found me there, some 28 years younger, with identification card last renewed in 1998, when I was still living in Berkeley. The address? 3639 Tolman Hall. ::chuckle:: I asked her: do you know that Tolman Hall is no longer there? She didn't know that, and I mentioned that the building had been among the least earthquake-safe on campus, finally razed to the ground in 2019. I said that I missed the old Brutalist structure, and Aïda said she missed Berkeley too. When they were kids growing up in Richmond in the 1980s, she and her cousins would hop on BART and go to Berkeley to watch movies. All those indie…