Back to Palo Alto

The movers left the small, dirty house full of boxes. It was a warm summer afternoon, September 8, 1982. I felt like magic happiness, one of the best days of my life, like I did as a kid on Christmas morning, like I did the first day of living in Innsbruck, like I did when we moved out of Mexico City to California. Everything was good.

We were back in Palo Alto, living at 1599 Mariposa. We wouldn’t have to drive back to Suisse Drive in San Jose ever again. [Ed note: 25 years later, we never did, never have.] As the movers drove off I stood on the front porch and looked up the street to where I could see a patch of Stanford Campus across El Camino. Palo Alto Highschool was just 200 years to my right. We were finally back.

it had been about 15 months since we left Escondido Village, on campus at Stanford, for Mexico City. At last we were back again, just half a mile from the townhouse at 100C in Escondido Village, but this time with a permanent job, and buying (although with one of the most aggressive equity sharing deals you’ll ever hear about) a house. Although there was a lot of work to do (moving, cleaning) we could also just walk out of our front door and take a walk through Palo Alto and Stanford.

The kids felt it too, as much as Vange and I did. We’d made it back. They had the same sense of relief, the end to exile. Cristin of course was still just a baby, six months old, Laura had just turned 10, Sabrina was about to turn 9 and Paul was about to turn 7. The older three were about to enter Walter Hayes Elementary School, which would be their fourth school in 15 months. They were all looking forward to it, I think, or maybe I was just projecting my feelings.

We were all looking forward to just living here, taking walks, normal life, with the feeling that we’d get back to that feeling of Escondido Village, when things were all good.

The move to Mariposa was one of my finer moments. We’d given up living in Palo Alto before buying the house in San Jose — big mistake, that — but we kept driving back for shopping, visiting my parents, whatever excuse. Drives back to Palo Alto were like drives back to paradise from exile. But it took us almost an hour to go each way in the ancient yellow VW bus we called our car. And we always had to go back. I felt like a hero because by late Spring I decided we were going to live in Palo Alto, not San Jose, and I would just plain find a way. And I did. We had seen the Mariposa house on one of our brief breaks from exile. It looked like it had to be cheap, it was older, aged wooden sideboard, and it was smaller — only 1250 square feet, 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, and it was right up against the commuter train tracks in the back. It was listed by Tony Domenico.

Tony said he could get us into that house. He never wavered. We had no equity and significant debt, and no down payment. But I had a good salary and with my Stanford MBA degree and all, I was marketable for one of Tony’s equity share deals. And that’s what we did: we bought the house for $190K including a $50K down payment and an amazingly expensive mortgage (1982 was a year of historic high interest rates, so our mortgage was a fixed rate 18%. The equity share deal meant that a couple of Stanford professors named Dutton put in all but $8K of the down payment, we paid the mortgage, and after four years we had to either buy them out for a profit or sell the house to pay them off. The whole assumed equity appreciation, and it worked out for us and them. We were able to move back to Palo Alto.

So the next few days took a lot of work, but the world had changed. The worst of the work was when we discovered that the built-in breakfast nook had mouse grand central station built into it as well, but we moved in.