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l cities across the country. Some of those places are lovely, but there are a lot of them. There was only one San Francisco, and it was turning into all those other places. Walking down Valencia Street, not long ago the hippest street in the Mission, the hippest part of town, I came to feel like I could be in the reasonably hip part of pretty much any city in America with a population of half a million or more. I was living in Middle America, but paying San Francisco prices, which were going nuts. In 1995 I moved up in the world from a big, beautiful $575-a-month studio -- a studio so big my friends used to ask me to let them use it for their parties -- to a one-bedroom apartment for $750. That was a nice deal, but not spectacular. At the time, the average asking rent for a vacant one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was $889, according to Rent Tech, a local listings service. Two years later, when my girlfriend and I decided to move in together, we discovered that, even combining our incomes, we couldn't afford a decent place in the city. The average rent for a one-bedroom had gone up 37 percent, to $1,220. We squeezed into my one-bedroom, and eventually got a little more space by moving to Oakland and paying quite a bit more for a two-bedroom, but still only about half of what we would have paid for the same place in San Francisco. The average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city at the end of June was $1,802, Rent Tech says, down from a high of $1,895 last year. Inflation alone would have pushed that apartment that was $889 in '95 only up to about $995. I was at a party earlier this year and a group of us were talking about the soaring prices. "Remember when you could move?" one woman said wistfully. "Remember when you could just decide, 'I don't like my apartment anymore. I think I'll move'?" My girlfriend had since become my wife. She never really liked California. A Midwesterner, she hated the pace and the traffic and the pretentiousness and the lack of seasons. It had been a source of conflict in our marriage. But now I was starting to come around. Remember when you could move? What kind of place had this become? And here's a better question: What was I still doing here? We decided on St. Louis for a variety of reasons. It's big enough for me, manageable enough for the wife and we both have some family here. Plus, we liked the place. Its small physical area and distinct neighborhoods remind me a little of the city of my lost love. In St. Louis, if you can afford $1,800 a month, the cost of that average vacant one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, you can rent a big house in a tony suburb. It does not appear from the local classifieds that you could pay $1,800 rent in the city even if you wanted to. We bought a nice old house in a city neighborhood called Dogtown -- owning a house is something I honestly thought I would never do in my life -- for an amount of money that, as far as I know, cannot make you a homeowner in the Bay Area. Between the time we bought the house and the day we moved, it became a form of pornography for my San Francisco friends to ask me what we paid for the house. They'd hunker themselves up as though they were about to be punched, and say, "OK, tell me what you paid for it. No! Wait!" More hunkering. "OK, now. Go ahead." I'd tell them and they'd go, "OOOOHHHHHHohohoh." One friend shouted, "No!" as her knees actually buckled. She grabbed my shoulders for support. "Do you have any idea what I just paid for my house?" she asked. I did. Not quite five times as much as we paid for ours, for a house half the size (but nice!). When I called to set up phone service, the operator at Southwestern Bell said, "So you're leaving California for St. Louis weather? I would say that's a bad choice." I laughed and said, "Well, we're leaving the traffic." "We have traffic here," she said, and I said, "No, you don't," and I was right. Two St. Louis scenes: Scene 1: The wife and I are going to a street fair called "A Taste of the Central West End." The Central West End is the neighborhood most like the old hometown to me, the bourgeois bohemian, chichi part of town. There are gay people and interesting restaurants and high prices and a punk rock fashion store, and it's hard to park. But see if you can spot the things that wouldn't have happened in San Francisco in the following sequence. We'll review afterward. One long block from the central intersection of the street fair, I see a parking space. I make a quick U-turn to get to it, and as I approach it I notice a man getting into a car just behind the open space. I decide to sit and wait for him to pull out, and then just front my way into the two-space hole when he leaves. After a moment, just as he's starting to pull away, I realize that I'd been mistaken. There's a car between the open space and the leaving man, so, deciding to just grab the open space, I pull forward. As I begin to roll away the man quickly lowers his window and yells, "You can park here! You can park!" Here are the things that wouldn't have happened in San Francisco: 1) I see a parking space one block from where we're going. 2) I have time to make a U-turn without the parking space disappearing. 3) Someone is leaving, thus creating a second parking space. 4) The man takes only a moment before he's ready to leave the parking space. 5) The man thinks that I've concluded that he's not leaving, thus indicating that he's noticed another human being populating the world. 6) The man takes an interest in my situation, trying to tell me the parking space is indeed becoming available. Scene 2: The wife and I are meeting friends at a popular restaurant in the city's Italian district, the Hill. When we arrive, I walk in to see if our friends are already there. As soon as I walk in the door, the hostess says, "You're looking for Phil, right?" I point at her like the game show host I secretly am and say, "That is incorrect!" She laughs and says, "You're kidding, right?" I say, "No, really. I'm not looking for Phil. I'm looking for the Granicks." She says, "Oh, well, the guy said 'young guy with a goatee,' so I figured it was you." In St. Louis, you can actually say "young guy with a goatee" and people will accept that as a reasonable description of a person they might then recognize. In San Francisco, saying "young guy with a goatee" is like saying "biped." There are other differences I'm getting used to. People seem to drive in the middle of the street here. If a car's coming at you on a residential street and there are cars parked along both curbs, one of you is going to have to pull over, even if there is room for two cars, because the other driver is straddling the middle of the road. Something to do with St. Louis being on the Mississippi, the traditional, if not actual, midway point of the country? A healthy berth given to people potentially exiting parked vehicles? I don't know. Also, St. Louis has the longest red lights and the shortest green lights I've ever seen. I can't explain and will not listen to scientific evidence of its impossibility. And of course, there's the weather, hot and sticky now, soon enough to turn bitter cold, both new to me. So far I'm doing fine with the heat, much to my surprise after two decades of enjoying the weather in a city that once supposedly saw the headline "77 Again Today -- No Relief in Sight." I'm loving the hot Midwestern nights. I bought a barbecue the other day, though I betrayed myself as a Californian by grilling fish on its maiden voyage. The biggest difference between St. Louis and San Francisco, though, is attitude. In just the two weeks that I've been here, I've seen several examples of St. Louis fretting about how the world sees it. The week we arrived the big story in town was Weeweegate, the kind of local politics cause célèbre that most towns get to enjoy from time to time. Everyone talks about it for a little while, and then it blows over. In San Francisco, for example, in the mid-'90s, the mayor, running for reelection, managed to let a couple of morning radio guys photograph him in the shower. Weeweegate is the case of a female member of the Board of Aldermen who either did or did not urinate in a trash can during a board meeting. The alderman, Democrat Irene Smith, was filibustering against a redistricting measure that she opposed when she heard the call of nature. She asked the acting board president, James Shrewsbury, for a bathroom break. Shrewsbury, who had appointed the committee that drew up the map that Smith opposed, was not feeling charitable, bathroom break-wise. He said that if she left the room, she'd give up the floor and the measure would come to a vote. So, according to news reports, Smith's supporters surrounded her with bedsheets (where did they get bedsheets?) and maps as she squatted over a trash can. Nobody will confirm or deny whether she actually let loose, but in any event she was cited by the police for lewd and indecent conduct for the appearance of urinating in public. "We are the laughingstock of the country," said Mayor Francis Slay in the aftermath. But an informal poll of journalist colleagues and friends on both coa