Santa Cruz is the first small town in which I’ve lived. To forestall your obvious smart speaker query, it’s a small city of 64,000 in a county of 270,000. Not exactly Our Town, you say? That’s what my husband and I once thought. Santa Cruz is about the size of Brookline, Massachusetts, where we lived for over twenty years before moving here, so we thought it would be about the same.

The parochial nature of SC didn’t sneak up on us though; it started thumping down all around us from the first night in our condo. After a lot of work moving in we went out for a nosh around 8:30 pm, and pretty much everything was closed. The sidewalks would have been rolled up, if SC had sidewalks, which it mostly does not. We managed to find a taqueria to keep from starving that first night, and we do fealty toward it still.

The next thump was needing work done on the house. There are a certain number of contractors in SC, and they book up; contractors were offering their services months in the future. At that point we remembered that when we wanted a bathroom refinished or a roof installed in Brookline, we had turned to a contractor a town or a few over. But SC county is surrounded by farms and mountains, not a population one-million plus metropolitan area.

Then we went to the symphony. Its music director has Metropolitan cred, Yuja Wang is among the soloists in regular rotation, and the first program we saw was Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, with the lead female role played by a singer who would reprise it at the Met a few months later. It was energetic and funny and rousing, yet from the first measures of the overture, clearly a provincial effort. One does not appreciate the accomplishment of getting all the members of the orchestra to play the same notes at exactly the same time until one has experienced its lack. One knows one did not significantly appreciate the pre-program talk of exposition, development and recapitulation after one has sat through the pre-program talk of the composer’s love interests, family strife, and childhood anecdotes.

I really don’t want to criticize SCS, which makes a wonderful effort. And since we live an hour’s drive from San Francisco, we were able to hear SFS, as well as SFO, as often as we were willing to drive there, which was roughly monthly when musical performance was still a human activity. Traveling there reminded me, a former resident of both Houston and Boston, of traffic, true traffic, 40 minutes-to-move-0.8-miles-level traffic. It was almost nostalgic for me: Truly, we are in a city!

Santa Cruzans love to complain about traffic, which to them means a journey that took five minutes in 1960 now takes an unacceptable quarter-hour. More annoyingly, they underestimate traffic Every Single Day. This is my burden in my current job as a receptionist for a naturopath. Patients are Late, and they are late because of Traffic, even though they Left Early, allowing much more time than it has Ever Taken.

Santa Cruzans also bemoan crowds, the same crowds whose components fuel the city’s tourist-based economy. How dare those folks come “over the hill,” aka as “from Silicon Valley,” to visit our beaches? They should get their own beaches. And what about the homeless, sleeping on picnic tables we want to use? Yet those who own property do not disparage the outsiders who purchase vacation homes in our area, driving housing prices up and up.

Are these common human reactions? Yes. Do I have any such irrational reactions of my own? Often. Do I embrace the crazy quirkiness of human nature? Almost always. Do many people recognize their own inconsistencies? Many. Does Santa Cruz offer numerous compensating amenities? Very many.

Does city life seem to me like Glory Days? Only sometimes.