We live for our children most of the time. Okay, there are some parents who put their amusement and sense of well-being before that of their offspring but by and large we have been conditioned to give our kids what we ourselves did not have and try to get some vicarious kicks out of seeing them enjoy pastimes we were denied or just missed somehow.

Both Adam and Franny got guitars when they were preteens and lessons from the same place that I bought them: the Musicians’ General Store on Court Street. Franny never really took to it, propelled more by a fantasy born of School of Rock than a real desire to spend hours in her room practicing her fingering, while Adam at 22 is pretty accomplished. This is one of the only fringe benefits of a fairly friendless adolesence: mirror-star mastery.

So when I saw MGS closing its doors for the final time in the fall (the landlord had spiked the rent to make room for another gym, when what Cobble Hill really needs is another Starbucks — you can walk blocks before finding a Frappacino!) I went in and plunked some money down on a guitar for myself. Now all I had to do was learn how to play it.

I grew up around musicians. LIke most kids my age I wanted a guitar after seeing the Beatles (though I actually I think I had wanted one when I listened to the Clancy Brothers, who were bigger than the Beatles in my pre-ten-year-old imagination) but my parents couldn’t afford one and I was always quick to take no for an answer. By the time I was in high school I numbered a few fine guitarists among my friends but it never occurred to me to ask one of them to teach me even a few simple chords. Even though the ability to play, the very possession of guitar, increased their popularity and success with chicks exponentially, I clung to my loser status, playing air guitar in my room and imagining myself a star.

If it was fear that kept me from trying to learn then, I realized I would need a new excuse now. I had the time, the money and absolutley no expectation of being anything other than a kitchen plunker in my old age. “I don’t have any fantasies of playing on stage at my age,” I told my guitar teacher on our first meeting. “I just want to be able to strum a few Bob Dylan songs when I’m alone and blue.”

By the end of our first lesson he had taught me the chords to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” — which is not to say that I have learned them. In fact, after six lessons it’s safe to say I have not learned much of anything and have scarcely improved though he has demonstrated the patience of a saint as he watches me making chords with the agility of the frost bitten. If Adam has natural ability (which his teacher often said) I may have just the opposite. But as I try to make power chords that bear some resemblance to “All Along the Watchtower,” I can honestly say that my mind is engaged with no other task. I have no attention in those moments for any of life’s concerns. Including my children.

When first I moved to NY, 17 years ago this year, I was struck by the blase attitude most New Yorkers seemed to have when confronted with famous people. I was from San Francisco, where sighting any of the handful of immediately recognizable local celebrities — Robin Williams, Sam Shepard, any member of the Grateful Dead — was cause for comment for days. It took me a while to appreciate that one of the reasons celebs like NY was that people didn’t bother them on the street, no matter how much they might secretly crave the recognition.

Then again, the stars I spotted at first were of such low wattage that they hardly recognized themselves. I remember having lunch at Wolf’s Deli on 57th Street and sitting next to Steve Allen, who was speaking into a minicassette recorder. The only person I could think to tell who would care was my mother back in Petaluma (“That’s nice, dear.”) Wolf’s is gone now, as is Allen and my mother.

As time went on and my social circle grew I came to understand that the rules were not so simple. While New Yorkers feign a blase attitude, I have many friends (and friends’ wives) who never miss making an opportunity to tell me what famous actor/writer/bon vivant they have recently supped/weekended/gone shopping with. They will even underline the connection, giving me the celebs bonafides and intimate details (names of pets and children, make of automobile, visible tattoos) so I don’t miss the point. Whatever it is.

Plainly, this isn’t a regional conflict. The other night I had dinner with a few people from the midwest who I didn’t know. Within minutes it was made plain that the woman beside me was related by marriage to the most famous person in her city, one with more than its share, and what a burden it was for her and her family that everyone knew and made a point of belaboring the connection. (One I would not have been aware of were it not for her.) She told the table of a stranger who said to one of her children, “I just read a book by someone. Do you know who it is?”

The kid, for whom books still have pictures and end with a goodnight kiss, blanked. “Santa?” he said.

Just a reminder for all the egos in the room: there is fame and there is international superstardom. Any fool can write a book/host a show/star in a movie. Come see us when you’ve given away a few billion gifts.

Finding a family-friendly movie to watch at home is a challenge when your 13-year-old daughter favors slapstick and your wife wants romantic comedy but you’re in the mood for something more existential. I floated the possibility of the two-disc Beckett on Film that Netflix had just delivered but settled for something more meaningful and absurd. Groundhog Day.

Actually, I had introduced Franny to the film this summer when we were vacationing in Amagansset but the DVD we rented out there was damaged and we only got halfway through Bill Murray’s endless day. Santa had brought her a fresh copy for Christmas and though I’ve seen it about a dozen times now, I found it had only improved with time. The time that stands still, of course.

I usually skip the extra features on DVDs but Peggy and I ended up watching a short entitled “The Weight of Time” afterwards, featuring interviews with director Harold Ramis, screenwriter Danny Rubin, Andie MacDowell and ubiquitous character actor Stephen Tobolowsky who plays insurance salesman Ned Ryerson. (You know: Needlenose Ned. Ned the Head. Bing!) Rubin confessed that Ramis had changed the order of the script — originally the audience met Murray’s obnoxious weatherman Phil Connors when he was in demigod mode, boasting of knowing the story of every single person in town — and made MacDowell more of a love interest.

The latter was an obvious move: without a girl to get it would be hard to care about Connor’s dilemma, continuously reliving the same day, but by following his transformation from arrogant asshole to selfless saint, catching kids falling from trees and fixing old ladies’ flats, Ramis did more than employ the character arc. He made Groundhog Day a story of enlightenment. He said he knew they were on to something when he started to get letters from Buddhists saying that he must be one of them, or Christians who said it was a parable of the Passion, and Hindus and Jews… I even saw it as a 12 step allegory: Connors, who lives only for himself, finds escape through service. It takes a while, of course. Rubin estimates Connors lives the same day in Punxsetawney for thousands of years.

“You are locked within your suffering and your pleasures are the seal,” Leonard Cohen sang. Ned Ryerson might add: “Watch out for that first step; it’s a doozy!”

Continued from below: Given its history — drunken, rowdy, half-cocked — it should not be surprising that there are more AA meetings in SF than there are in Brooklyn, and that’s saying something. Not only can you get yourself a dose of program, if you’re down with that kind of thing, at nearly any hour of the day up to midnight, you can find one that might specialize in people like you. Not just drunks, Jewish drunks (the 12 Schleppers), recovering Deadheads (Wharfrats) and the motorcycle punks who make up the infamous Tuesday night meeting in the Mission, Boys Night Out.

I knew that this meeting was going to be slightly unorthodox when the opening statements were read to backtalk and cavils from the regulars there; instead of “higher power” one dude kept calling his higher power “vagina” (works for me) and some of the standard AA texts, like the excerpt from the Big Book chapter entitled How It Works, had been freely and obscenely adapted as well. The meeting never actually came to order but just when I thought things there might be too out of control for the first timer I had brought with me, a funny thing happened.

In order to speak, meeting members had to wear a plastic Viking helmet, complete with horns, and when these guys donned the ceremonial helmet people shut up and most of what the speakers said was more familiar. Reocovering drunks and junkies talked about how much better life was now that they weren’t living just for themselves, but cared about other people, and when it came to recite the serenity prayer at the end, even God got his due.

Her due, I should say.

Having lived in NY now as long as I lived in SF (16 years) I find my loyalties rather divided. For a long time after I went east and decided I liked it, I derided what seemed to be the predominant mood in SF: tiresome self-contentment flecked with liberal guilt. People in NY are generally too miserable to feel either contentment or guilt for too long, and that keeps the cycle on agitate here, with just enough lack of total disappointment to keep things from flooding over. Think of Wally Shawn’s definition of a good day in My Dinner with Andre (no cockroach in coffee cup) and you’ll get what I mean.

But on this trip west I felt a shift in my prejudices. Most of my old friends there confess to finding the city’s love affair with itself boring but they are proud of their priorities. No matter how rich some people in the Bay Area are (and the richest are some of the wealthiest in the world) everyone has had the experience of finding a meeting cancelled because it’s just too beautiful out. How many times has this happened to you in NY? It’s not exactly “Surf’s up!” (though the waves near Devil’s Slide have become the stuff of legend) but the impulse is the same: what could you possibly be doing that is more important than getting out into this beautiful day? All of nature has conspired to make your human plans seem petty.

That will keep your load in balance.

I took advantage of the break between semesters to go back to SF for a week. Heading west in the winter used to be a way of beating the cold but global warming (or “climate change,” as Republican pollster Frank Luntz wouild prefer) has set our continent on a bizarro-world path. The east coast is enjoying spring-like temperatures, as much as we enjoy anything here (most people I know are freaked out by the weather) while the Bay Area was reeling in the wake of thirty degree lows.

San Francisco itself looked especially empty on this trip; I was reminded of a trip we took to Paris after the deadly August heat wave three years ago. “Daddy,” my daughter said as we trooped through the vacated Rive Gauche, “do people actually live here?” In SF the question is not so much do people live there, since I saw plenty of live bodies in cafes and restaurants, but how do they live? With the priciest real estate this side of Hong Kong (NY is a relative land of bargains) I marvel at the midday cappucino sippers, tapping on their three thousand dollar laptops while the money trickles in… from somewhere.

Michael Moore groused about the same thing in his first film, the slightly specious documentary Roger and Me. He had been given the heave after a brief and ineffectual stint at Mother Jones and the bitter taste left in his mouth reminded him of dark roasted beans and the seeming slackers who enjoy them at any given hour in SF. He was fired essentially for not doing anything, while MoJo’s last editor, my old pal Russ Rymer, was sacked for doing too much. Over breakfast at that old North Beach standby, the Cafe Puccini, he told me that he knew the end was nigh when an overlord told him, “There’s nothing in the magazine that couldn’t have appeared in The Atlantic.”

And he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

While the question of how people live in SF remains on the table, one need only look out the window to get the why. The most spectacular new view in the city can be found at the top of new De Young Museum in the middle of Golden Gate Park. On a clear day you can see the city entire, more glorious than most of the funky Northern California art on display. My brother Ethan and I circled the observation deck and reveled in the sunlight and crisp colors before heading off for lunch at a Burmese restaurant. My sound track as I drove was the new album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers which also seems to grapple with the meaning of California. Those guys are all in recovery now which reminds me of a meeting I attended…