Yesterday, I deviated from my usual route on my daily walk. When that happens, I am almost always lured off into a longer ramble than I expected. It was the word “Dumplings” on a sign that diverted me. I am always interested in dumplings. I crossed the street to check out the little restaurant, and realized I was in a familiar place. Union Street. Cow Hollow. For several years, I walked down that street every morning, five days a week, to work as an “administrative assistant” at H&C, a high-end, family owned real estate firm on the corner of Webster and Union.

H&C as I knew it is no more. When I worked there more than twenty years ago it sold houses and condos to rich people. Now it is strictly property management with offices on Sansome. The rambling, obviously-once-a-private-home offices on Union and Webster are today occupied by a law firm that has covered the windows and put a “By appointment only” sign on the door.

The buildings on Union are the same, but most of the busineses have changed. Only the Bus Stop Sports Bar is recognizeable and, at the end of the block after Webster, the Union Street Coffee Roastery, which was closed yesterday for some reason. I paused to contemplate it and imagine my own ghost lining up inside for a caramel macchiato to carry back to the ghost of my desk at the ghost of H&C.

Most of the people sitting at tables in front of the renamed cafes and restaurants are no longer my age. I understand why older people get angry at change, but I also know it’s unreasonable. The world is constantly being reshaped by new hands. Accept it. Don’t become an old woman shaking her fist at a cloud.

Still, I miss the boutiques, gift-stores and bookshops that used to line Union Street, simple businesses selling things that were arranged on shelves, objects you could touch, smell, pick up and examine. I miss Solar Light Books, with its tarot cards and its two cats, the shops selling soap, shoes, tschochkes — I even miss the restaurant that gave me food poisoning. Most of the signage I see on Union Street now contains words like “wellness” and “beauty” and would require explanations if I went in to ask.

But there is also a place that sells dumplings. There’s that.

I retraced my steps in a pleasant fug of melancholy, and walked up Octavia towards Lafayette Park. As I passed the Spreckles mansion I looked up past its green hedges to see a face carved under one of its balconies, grinning down at me and rolling out its white tongue.