Return Without Echo

By Cliff Potts
Bay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 23, 2026

This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts.

A Visit at Twenty-Five

I returned to San Rafael once, on my twenty-fifth birthday. At the time, I was working in San Francisco in the production department of Jews for Jesus. A couple of friends drove me across the bridge so I could see the house where I had been born.

I did not knock on the door.

The Structure

I stood outside and looked at it. There was no emotional recognition. It was a house — four walls and a roof. The fact of my birth had occurred there, but nothing in the structure carried memory for me.

The visit required no ceremony.

California’s Mark

By 1968, my parents’ California chapter was effectively closed. What California left behind was not nostalgia but pattern: movement, machinery, practicality, adaptation.

San Rafael did not leave fingerprints. It established direction — forward.