The Truth

Life in general is puzzling all the freaking time.
We just learn a poker face.

- Shobi-wan

Defined By How We Treat Others

Here is an exchange of emails between me and my former high school homeroom teacher, who also taught PE. I wound up sending the email by snail mail via the Wallenberg Community Foundation.

This post is also in honor of any teachers who read this. You never know what your students are learning from you.

Hi Mr. N,

About two months ago I met another Wallenberg grad. I don't know when she graduated and she could be anywhere from 15 to 5 years younger than I (but probably around ten, though really, it's hard to tell). I don't remember her name, either, at this point.

I was telling this story about you that I sometimes tell, in which I mentioned "you by your nickname At the end of the story she asked if I'd gone to Wallenberg, and it turned out that she figured that out because I had used your nickname. My impression is that she had had you for class (as opposed to homeroom). So I've been thinking about that story and I thought perhaps I should ask you about this.

When I was in 10th grade, during the "family life" unit in PE, you brought in a panel of people from an LGB organization. I think there were three or four people, there to talk about being gay or bisexual. I think they answered questions. I don't exactly remember.

In retrospect, I think this was a pretty bold thing for you to have done. Were there even "opt out" forms in those days? Was there a lot of blowback from parents? Did you ever bring in a panel like that again?

What kills me though is to think that you had gone to all of this effort to bring these people in, and they had gone to all of the effort to come in and speak to a bunch of teenagers who may or may not have been interested, and I didn't "get it." Five years later I figured out that I wasn't straight, and it shocks me to this day that I didn't start thinking about it that afternoon. Of course, it was a different time, I may have been particularly clueless, and blah blah blah.

Though I wasn't ready or able to hear their message (other than that of tolerance, which was an easy sell for me), I wanted to thank you for bringing in that panel all those years ago.

Thanks.

Samatakah

Here is his reply, which he signed with his first name. I was not in the class he describes below; I had PE during first period that year.

Thanks so very much for the very touching note you sent.  How nice to be remembered.  You have no idea how much notes like yours are appreciated.  You don't get much feedback in teaching and it's nice to know that someone remembers you from time to time. 

I DO remember that class very vividly.  It was part of the Family Life curriculum and the group I brought in was from a district approved speakers bureau.  We HAD sent out permission slips and everyone, or their parents had the option to "opt out."  No one did. 

What I do remember was that of all the topics we covered in that six-week unit, it was the only one in which parents opted to come to.  I don't know if you were in the class that exploded, but, as I recall, it happened during the last class of the day.  

Once the speakers were finished, there was a question and answer period (you have a good memory!).  I'll never forget, G__ C__ asked the million-dollar question: How do gays "do it"?  The answer that was given was a "no holds barred" type of answer, and from then on, no question was off limits. 

Finally, at the end of the class, one of the parents (who shall remain nameless) asked me and [another teacher] why these people were here and what was the purpose of all this explicit discussion.  I meekly tried to explain that the speakers were part of an approved group of presenters and that everyone, including the principal, the parents, and the students knew for weeks exactly who these speakers were and why they were there.  Then, much to my sheer relief, S__ A__ jumped up and started screaming at the parents that we, the students, had every right to hear what these folks were saying.  That it was parents like them that were trying to hide things from us.  With that, the place exploded in support of S__, led, I think, by L__ P__.  There was chaos for what seemed like forever, but the bell finally rang and everyone left. 

Well, I was called into the [principal's] office and he said the district office had called.  He asked me what had taken place.  I told him everything from start to finish.  All he asked me was if I had provided permission slips.  When I told him I had, he said he's take care of everything - and he did.  But I'll tell you, for several weeks I was very cautious about answering the phone and opening my mail  I thought for sure I was going to be called downtown for some sort of reprimand (or worse).  But the more I thought about it, I was more and more convinced I had done the right thing. 

The whole purpose was to try to get across to kids that there were/are alternative life-styles out there and that no one should be ashamed of who they are or what sexual preferences they may have.  I wanted them to know that there are many others out there just like them and that they are not "odd."  It makes me so happy to know that for someone like you, this class may have helped you discover yourself and who you are.  We are not defined by our sexual preference, our work, or who we happened to be with.  I believe we are defined by how we treat others. 

So, thanks for the kind words.  

Freshman Falling Out

In the fall of my freshman year at college, I was assigned a roommate by the university's Residential Life Office. The books I'd read that took place at boarding schools or colleges had always shown that roommates were friends, and of course I was hopeful (actually, anxious) that my roomie and I would be friends as well. On paper, we matched pretty well. I had chosen a college far away from home which no one else I knew had heard of, let alone attended.


Things did not start out very well. I n retrospect, I think I bore a lot of responsibility for this. Because I was anxious I was more arrogant than usual. I remember specifically showing off that I was from a big city, saying that Tacoma was a small town (which it wasn't). This could not have impressed my roommate, who was from a bona fide small town in eastern Washington.


Our room was split in half, closet-bureau-desk-bed in a row on each side. Other people in our dorm freed up space by bunking their beds, but we didn't even consider it. Over her bed, she had a very current Wang Chung poster; over mine, there was a tattered American flag with 48 stars, with a chain hanging across it.


She had a job as a lifeguard and was out in the afternoons and evenings when I was home studying. I was out in the evenings and late nights goofing around with Denver D, Phil, Mrs. P, Bink, Jujubi, Spudwhip, and Tripp when she was at home. I only remember one conversation between my roommate and me, when I asked her was a "suite" was. I had been listening to Suite Judy Blue Eyes and she was enrolled in a music theory class. She told me, and that was the end of that conversation.


The big showdown happened toward the end of the semester. Phil and I had been hanging out at the Ceramics Building, and as usual I returned to the dorm after midnight. A bad feature of the doors in my dorm was that if the doors were locked from the inside they could not be unlocked from the outside with a key. I knocked on the door, first quietly and with relatively long pauses between knocks, and then louder and more constant. There was no response from inside, and I knew my roommate was home because if she hadn't been, if the door had been locked from the outside, I would have been able to get in.


Ultimately I went back outside, to the phone by the front doors that people used to call residents. I dialed our phone number and the phone rang and rang. I was really angry that my roommate was treating me this way, at the same time that I was puzzled about why she hated me so much. It also seemed to me that by not immediately letting me in, she was choosing to be kept awake by listening to me pounding on the door and calling. Eventually she answered the phone and I asked her politely to unlock the door because I was unable to get in to our room.


I moved out at the semester break.

The First Movie I Was In

When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine was taking a filmmaking class at SF State. He asked me and another friend if we would be in the movie he had to make for a class project, and of course we said yes. He promised to show us the film when it was finished and graded by the instructor at the university.


It took us only one day to shoot the movie, on 16mm film. It was a silent film about a young woman, played by me, dreaming - or not dreaming - about being in the '60's. I pulled my mom's Marimekko blue and white dress out of the closet, and our other friend showed up in what he usually wore, blue jeans and a denim jacket. I imagine other people were in the movie too, but I had such a crush on the other guy in the movie with me that I don't remember.


The filmmaker set up lights in my bedroom while I put on some pajamas. We had reset my clock to show 10pm and put a 49ers calendar on the wall next to the clock. Then I got into bed and pretended to sleep while the filmmaker pointed the camera at me.


After that part of the film was shot, we went to the big room downstairs and this time I changed into the blue dress and tied a bandanna around my head while the lights were set up again. My other friend rolled oregano (really) into Zig-Zag papers and we put the Rolling Stones on the record player. Then we sat on the floor and "smoked" the oregano joints while the filmmaker filmed us talking - which was, for lack of any need for a script, about all the clues to Paul's death.


We went back up to my room, I put my pajamas back on and got back into bed. The filmmaker filmed me waking up and smacking the alarm clock, and then quickly checking the 49ers calendar to see if it reflected the present, 1985, which it did. I mimed relief by rubbing my eyes and jumped out of bed. The filmmaker shot a close-up of the bandanna on the pillow.


We never did see that movie.

One Reason People Dislike Mimes

In the spring of our freshman year, Spudwhip and I went through a little phase of being mimes. One afternoon after classes, we put on our mime get-up and wandered around campus, goofing with people. Then we decided to go out into the real world - read: off-campus - and goof with people out there. Our plan, actually, was to go to the bank in downtown Tacoma where our friend worked as a teller and mess with him. Denver D must have agreed to drive us, since he had a vehicle and we didn't.


Just before we walked into the bank, we ran into a staff person we knew from the university, who kindly put up with our antics (while Denver D took pictures. Inside the bank, we did not immediately see our friend. His bank had a fiberglass barrier between the tellers and the customers, which I had not seen before.


Needless to say we did not get to fool with him very much, and only partly because of the fiberglass barrier. Of course, since we couldn't speak, there wasn't much we could do in the bank anyway. Because everyone else we knew worked on campus, we didn't realize that he had a "real job" and had to "really work." We also underestimated how busy the bank would be - in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, we didn't think there would be any customers in the bank. We made our exit after only a few minutes.


Over dinner that evening, our friend told us that we had made everyone very nervous. Because we were in whiteface, some of the staff, including the security guard, thought our intention was to hold up the bank. He said he couldn't interact with us very much because he was working, but also because he wanted us to leave so his coworkers could relax. He didn't say so, but we probably also really embarrassed him.


The next time we put on whiteface, a few days later, we'd been asked to act as clowns at an auction to benefit the university's Alumni Fund. After dinner when the auction started and we were free to leave, Spudwhip swept up a bottle of wine from the table and we played at serving wine as we moved toward the back exit.


We drank the wine that night. With all of the things I have forgotten, I still remember that it was a Covey Run Chardonnay, my first Washington State wine.

Vegetable Curry

I didn't learn how to cook until after I got out of college. I had few kitchen skills, and still don't know how to chop an onion properly. I remember consulting my Joy of Cooking to learn how long to boil an egg to hardness. Upon graduation, the things I could make were Blackbottom Cupcakes, Aunt Syl's Enchilada Sauce, poached eggs, and potato-and-cauliflower curry, also called aloo gobi.

I never look at it, but this is what it looks like:



I learned how to make aloo gobi from Jindi when I was in tenth or eleventh grade. My mother had asked Jindi to teach her how to make an Indian dish. Jindi is a vegetarian and this vegetable curry is a pretty simple dish. Mom had invited me and a friend to come to the cooking lesson also, and since we really liked Indian food we went along.


Truth be told, I don't remember too much about the lesson itself. I remember cutting up the onions and the potatoes, and that my mom and my friend would both ask "How much was that?" when Jindi would put the seasonings into the pot. Jindi said, "You don't have to write it down" when we asked for the recipe, and I didn't, for about five years. When I did write it down, it was really for other people, or in case I forgot how to make aloo gobi.


Because I never make it exactly the same way each time, any way I make it is fine. Jindi was right: Aloo gobi is home food. You don't have to write those recipes down.

Quizzical Fitness

Arnold Schwarzenegger came on the scene about the same time that I started 7th grade. With his support,The President's Council on Physical Fitness mandated a new program in schools, which had the requisite Physical Fitness Test. It was something that you could fail, but would never result in your being flunked out of PE.


Every day we dressed down for PE, wearing our uniform shorts and shirts and changing into sneakers from our saddle shoes and Oxfords. From what I remember, the Test was a battery of events we had to complete, and it consisted of what seemed like days of different events: The 50-yard dash, the 1000-yard (or some distance) run/walk, the long jump, and timed push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups. There was a chart showing how many of what you should be able to complete for your age and size, which made it very clear to all who was failing and who wasn't.


I knew that I would fail the test. I didn't have what it took to meet any of the benchmarks, and I told myself that I didn't care to. I liked the long jump, which we did on the sidewalk outside the art building, because I was more successful at that than I was at any of the other events. I don't remember even trying to run the run/walk, which at my school was six revolutions around the lower playground. I knew I would never come close to the speeds of any of the bullies, so with a "screw you" attitude, I started out walking and kept walking. I had the slowest time of anyone in the class, of course.

At the time, I hated the PE teacher. This may have been simply because she was the PE teacher, and in retrospect I'm sure she was frustrated by my attitude. But she allowed team captains to pick their teams, allowed girls to say nasty things to other girls at bat or when serving, and allowed the playing of Dodgeball. These are all things that the Famous Irishman, an elementary school PE teacher, has told me he doesn't allow in his classes, and that these days are generally frowned upon among PE teachers he knows.


Years later when I signed up at the gym after the car wreck, I felt pretty intimidated by all the people there. I knew it was something I wanted to do, in fact, felt like I needed to do, if I was going to have the strength to dance at the level I wanted to dance. For the first four years at the gym I never spoke to anyone who wasn't staff, other than to ask if someone was done with a particular piece of equipment. I kept my eyes to myself, never looking directly at anyone else working out. I figured if I didn't watch anyone, no one would watch me - which is to say no one would judge me, my shape, or the weights I was lifting or pushing.


The Famous Irishman has said that bad memories of PE classes can turn people off to physical activity for the rest of their lives. I approached each workout, particularly those I did on my own and not with the trainer, with that ostrich attitude because I had body memory of those awful middle school PE classes. On the other hand, though I am still slow and would still fail the Phsyical Fitness Test as it was administered in middle school, sometimes I smile at how far I've come.

Learning How To Use Minimal Literalism

**Saipan Writer asks if I have quit blogging. The last two months have gotten away from me, and I think I had decided to stop paying attention to the blog. But she asked, so I'm going to see if I can take this to the end of this year.**

When I was in fifth grade, my class moved into a huge classroom in the basement of the building. This was the first year that my grade, which had been in two classrooms, was combined into one for homeroom and then split into two for classes. This wasn't such a big deal to me; not only was it only my second year at CSH, I was already so alienated from my classmates that where I was in the class made no difference to me.


My desk was halfway back, next to a support column. I found the wall next to me rather comforting, and sometimes leaned against it instead of the back of my chair. The desks were the kinds with lids, in which you stored your stuff. At that time I had just started keeping a journal, and I would slyly pull it out of my desk and lie it inside the workbook or other notebook in which we were supposed to be working. Or I would just write in it while the teacher lectured.


One day one of my teachers busted me for not paying attention in class. She came to my desk and asked for the journal. I gave it to her, because I had to, and she explained she would give it back to me the next day. Then she sent me to the Principal's office on the second floor.


Because the school was in a former mansion, the first floor was marble, with a wide curving stairway with a wide balustrade. It was almost like those you see in old movies, only bigger. This floor was guarded by a elderly nun whose job was to sit at a desk and yell at girls who ran or shouted in the main hall. I had come up from the basement and had just started up the main stairs to the second floor when I ran into the Principal.


I don't remember where I told her I was going during class time. I sure didn't tell her that I'd been sent to see her because I was writing in my journal instead of paying attention in class. We chatted and then I continued up the stairs and she continued down them.

After I walked to the third floor I went back to my classroom in the basement. The teacher asked if I had seen the principal. I said yes. The teacher sent me back to my desk.


The next day, the teacher returned my journal to me. I wondered if she'd read it and, if so, if she would say anything to me about it. There was a lot of "I hate this school" and "I hate So-n-So and So-n-So is such a b----" in it. She did not say anything to me about the journal, but she said that she'd spoken to the Principal and while it was very clever of me to say "yes" when she'd asked if I had seen the Principal, the teacher and I both knew that wasn't what she meant.


Then she sent me back to the Principal's office, telling me that I had to come back with a note saying she had seen me and talked with me about my behavior.

The Anchor of My Collection

As graduation from college approached, my housemates and I started going through our stuff, throwing things out, packing clothes, rolling up posters, deciding whether this paper or that was worthy of storing in our parents' homes as we started to live our lives away from the cocoon of undergrad. Our House was a mess as we pulled things from cupboards and drawers and threw them into boxes between studying for finals and attending end-of-year events.


One of those events was the Senior Art Show. Phil had majored in Art and he had three pieces in the show: A silkscreen of three cattle skulls; a painting of a general store somewhere in Colorado; and a ceramic curving sculpture with a face at the top. I had watched Phil experiment with the curve, seeing how sharp he could make a curve in flat clay without its breaking while being fired. We had spent late nights in the Ceramics Building, talking, while he threw pots and built sculptures and I reveled in the scent of clean mud. As a result, I felt a friendly possession toward this piece, and at the show jokingly asked Phil if I could have it. He said I could have it for $1500, and showed me the sticker on the description tag.


The deadline for moving out of Our House got closer and closer and each of us had to decide what we were going to keep and what we weren't. I saved most of my papers - I'd majored in writing, so the largest output of my undergraduate education was on typewritten and dot-matrixed sheets. Phil, however, had focused on ceramics and had a large number of fragile pieces that he did not wish to ship. He belatedly realized that he should have been taking pieces home with him at the end of each academic year. His cousin agreed to allow him to pack her station wagon with his art and take it back with her to Colorado. Phil shipped all of his clothes and some of the drawings and paintings, and planned the packing of his car with geometric precision. After several tries, Phil couldn't figure out how to fit the large and oddly-shaped black and silver sculpture into the car.


I wasn't moving back to San Francisco, so I offered to hold this piece for him. He didn't know if he would be staying in Colorado or moving to Seattle after his post-graduation European trip, but we both knew that if he decided on the former we could still get this piece to Colorado when we weren't so pressed for time. I took the sculpture to the place I would be staying until Shobi-wan and I got an apartment, and Phil continued to pack his car.


I have since carefully wrapped this sculpture in a quilt and moved it nine times, across a couple of state lines. About a year after Phil died and while his brother was in graduate school in New York, I realized that I had indeed taken possession of the sculpture without paying Phil a cent. A few years after that I sent a photo of the sculpture to Marko with a letter saying that I consider this piece a long-term loan from him, and as soon as he wants it, it will go back to him. Marko called me when he got the letter, exclaiming that he had wondered what had happened to this piece.


I have it, and every time I look at it, I think of those nights watching Phil build it, the smell of clean mud, and the $1500 I never paid him for the anchor of my art collection.

Why Spock Is My Hero

No and I watched Star Trek just about every night, looking for the rarely-shown episodes and our favorite episodes. My favorite character was Spock: He was the smartest person on the ship, observed everything and carefully drew correct conclusions, and loyal to friends (and to the Federation). Most interesting to me, he didn't have feelings. As I got older I saw that Spock did have feelings, but successfully repressed them except when drunk or in the midst of hormone-related upset, or, much later, in a movie.


When I was a kid I wanted to be like Spock. I also was (and am still) an observer, weighing risks and benefits before making decisions. I imagined myself to be a pretty smart person. I think I'm pretty loyal - maybe not as loyal as No, but loyal. However, the thing I envied most in Spock was his ability to control his feelings: He was never sad, rarely angry, and never had hurt feelings. He was always secure in the decisions he made. He knew he was right.


I especially felt this when I was in grammar school. Many of the kids were cruel, so I thought that if I could be the smartest one in the class, I would know I was better than they were, regardless of what the mean kids thought of me. If they knew what a good friend I could be, the kids who were neither my bullies nor my friends would be my friends and I wouldn't be alone in the class. If I could control my feelings, nothing anyone said or did to me would upset me, make me cry, or write "F---HEADS!!!" repeatedly in my binder in big, blocky, letters.


When I was in twelfth grade I had to take a speech class. One of the assignments was that each of us had to make a speech about someone who was our hero. I wrote and spoke about Spock: I admired his knowledge and logic, his ability to know what to do in every moment, and how he never allowed personal feelings to get in the way of making a decision or executing a decision. Spock was a good friend to Kirk, despite the difference in their characters, and to McCoy, despite the impression of disdain that McCoy constantly had for Spock, and I liked that about him too. I described how I'd taught myself to lift one eyebrow in that classic puzzled Spock look.


After I'd given my speech, Mr. S. told the class that we were supposed to talk about real people, because fictional people can't be heroes.

Final Shake-Up

At CSH, starting in sixth grade we had midterms and finals. In other schools midterms fell mid-term, but at CSH, "midterms" was what we called final exams for fall semester. They were held toward the end of January, four days of two exams each day. The teachers spent the week before exams going over everything they'd taught us the previous semester (which we'd forgotten, of course, over Christmas vacation), and on the following Monday we reported to homeroom to get split up into our first period and second period exams, which lasted 90 minutes. At noon we were let go, to return home to study for the next day's exams.


My science exam was in our homeroom, in the SE corner of the top floor of the grammar school. Since the building was at the top of the Webster Street hill, the classroom in the opposite NE corner, had a fabulous view, seemingly miles above Vallejo Street below. Our classroom had a much less interesting view of Hamlin School for Girls down the street. Tables had been arranged separate from each other, rather than in the rows they usually were. Some of the tables were large enough for three, most for two, several for one. As a low-status student, I got a desk to myself by the door.


About halfway through our science midterm, the building started to shake. It shook for a few moments, and while I did not remember the teacher saying anything, to me it seemed that all at once, all of us two dozen people in the classroom simultaneously dropped under our desks. Once the shaking stopped, it seemed to me that the building was swaying, which to my mind made sense as we were inside the top corner of the building at the top of a steep, high hill. I reassured myself that this building had survived the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 (which I subsequently learned wasn't true). The room was silent except for the sound of the pipes in the restroom next door rattling.


After a few minutes, Ms. R. stood up from behind her desk and said, "Return to your seats, girls." We all did, picking up our pencils and getting back to the test. For the minutes I was under my desk, I was certain that the girls who had tablemates had quickly exchanged as many exam answers as they could.

Led Astray By The Nose

My best guy friend the first half of high school was a guy who lived down the street from me. We walked to school (uphill both ways!) together in the mornings, were in homeroom together, and since we attended a small high school were in a lot of classes together. We wrote each other notes instead of taking notes during class. He was the first boy I made out with, and the first boy I was jealous over. We laughed a lot together - he was very silly, translating "viejo" (which actually means "old") with the name of our Spanish teacher during a vocabulary test. In Biology we learned about a one-celled organism whose English name is "Nasty Nose." Since my friend and I spent a lot of time making up goofy names for each other, I dubbed him Didinium Nasutum.


At the school we attended, homeroom was a 17-minute period between first and second periods. This meant that absence calls from the office were made at 850. Didinium convinced me to cut class with him one spring day. He'd done it before; of course it had never occurred to me to not go to school. We planned that since his mom was home during the day, I would meet him on the corner like usual and then we would walk back to my house and hang out and watch TV, maybe go to the park.


The plan fell apart when I lost my nerve. I did meet him at the corner, and we did go back to my house in time to pick up the phone when the attendance office called. Didinium called himself in as sick, and when the phone rang I answered and told the lady yes, I was my mother, and that I was home with a 24 hour bug. I always had considered myself a good liar, but I knew that she didn't believe me. If nothing else, I didn't sound nearly as much like my mother as Didinium sounded like his dad.


I absolutely lost my nerve. Remember, I grew up in a neighborhood where education was such a high value that there was no question about whether each of us would attend college; the question was whether the college would be Berkeley. I knew the next call would be to my mom at the office, and I would be so busted I couldn't imagine what would happen. My bro No was the rebellious one (and even he attended school every single day). I told Didinium I couldn't go through with it, I had to go to school. I guess I decided that watching Hogan's Heroes and The Monkees wasn't worth getting grounded forever. I don't remember if I called the school back and said I was coming in after all, but I arrived at the beginning of the next class.


I didn't cut a class again until I was in my fourth semester of college when Phil and Jujubi talked me into going to the Antique Sandwich Shop for a late lunch, also on a spring day, instead of my Japanese history class.

Photos of Our House

Dancing in the living room with a philosophy professor

Jujubi, Denver D, and friends in the kitchen making pizzas

Each of us thought we were Santa - the trick was getting candy into the stockings before anyone else came into the living room

Mrs. P taking a break on the couch in the big window

Bink poses in the dining room


Graduation - Phil, Jujubi, and I about to move out of Our House!

Our House Is A Very, Very Fine House

The parenting blog on sfgate.com has a feature titled "Off Topic Tuesday," which allows the bloggers and commenters to talk about non-parenting topics. I think this is mostly because Peter Hartlaub, the lead blogger, likes to talk about growing up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. I can get behind that. Like him, I also grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. In fact I mostly read the blog because of "Top of the Hill, Daly City!" and the old Nut Tree.


This past Tuesday the discussion was "The Best Place You've Ever Lived." I noticed that the definition of the "the best place" had a lot to do with how close the house/apartment was or is to whatever the resident thought were good things to be near - the beach or ocean, restaurants, schools, etc. I was thinking about this, and the place I've lived the closest to all those kinds of things was the house in which I grew up: My elementary and high schools were within walking distance, as were the Junior Museum; the California Academy of Science; the Japanese Tea Garden; UCSF with its community pool and fun summer classes like Circus Skills; the Children's Playground, the Panhandle, and not too far from Sharon Meadow, Marx Meadow, and Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park; Rocky Road Mountain; and Haight Street with its roller skate rental shops and cafes (this last when I was in junior and high school, as I wasn't allowed on Haight until I was a teenager). We spent a lot of time at Baker Beach and at the Exploratorium. The corner grocery allowed us kids to sign for candy on our parents' accounts.


As I write all this down, I realize how lucky I was to live in such a place. I haven't lived in a place so close to everything as I did then. While I was thinking about the post on the other blog, though, I was thinking about my favorite place I'd lived as being the house I shared with Jujubi, Phil, and 17 other people across the three years I was a sophomore, junior, and senior in college. One block from campus, it was university owned, and had one bedroom for a triple, one for a single, and one double. There was a fireplace, a kitchen with yellow tile counters and a breakfast nook, one and a half bathrooms (including a tub), a livingroom with a plate glass window, a separet dining room, a huge basement, a backyard. On clear days we had a view of Mount Rainier from the window on the stairs. This house was known as Our House, after the song, and the Dance In The Living Room House, or DILR House. More formally (well, hardly "formally"), it was called Eleven Twenty Three, after the address.


The university thought it was a six-person house. Most of the time, only five of us were officially living there: soph year, Jujubi, Phil, Mrs. P (before she was Mrs. P), Bink, and I lived there. Junior year, Mrs. P and Bink had moved out and a friend moved in, along with two freshmen, one of whom left college after a couple weeks and the other of whom moved into a dorm at the semester break. Senior year Jujubi, Phil, and I were joined by two others of our friends. In the meantime, though, we had one friend or another sleeping on the couch for a semester or boyfriends sharing sleeping space. Since all the keys had "Do Not Duplicate" printed on them we left the door unlocked.


At that time, Tacoma wasn't much of a place to hang out in. The only place to hang out close to the university was a bar, so if you were under 21, which I was most of my college days, and you wanted to go out you went to Denny's or Dunkin' Donuts on 6th Avenue or up to Seattle to the Last Exit. There was a grocery store and a 7-11 within walking distance, and a public library and park a long walk away. Bus service was marginal so without a car it was hard to go to the mall, a movie, or Point Defiance Park.


But I didn't want to go those places most of the time. I was really happy to be at home. Because we were on the main approach to the campus, everyone came to the house all the time. On snow days, I would get up in the morning to one or several friends drinking coffee on the couch - people whose classes started earlier than mine and learned classes had been cancelled once they got to campus. When we had cast parties, from down the street you could hear people singing with Steve Miller, "I've been to Phoenix, Arizona, all the way to TACOMA!" If it was a warm fall or spring day, Phil would grill chicken or hamburgers, sometimes on the front lawn, and people would stop by on their way home. On the colder evenings, they would come by for some of Jujubi's great bean soup and beer bread.


At the time I credited Jujubi with the power of making that house feel like home. Maybe it was because she had such a nurturing vibe and I felt like a kid most of the time (I was, but I didn't think so then). She and Phil were the love in that house, and I just kept the door open. Our friends brought in a lot of love of their own, and that's what made our house so very, very fine.

Presenting:

The Class of 2021!

Vaulting Terror

The first couple of years I attended CSH, three days of the week we had normal PE class (complete with dodgeball) and two days of the week we had gymnastics. Yes, gymnastics, with tumbling mats, a balance beam, uneven parallel bars, and a vaulting horse (which has since been replaced by a thing that looks like a big tongue).


I wonder if they can still afford the liability insurance for that equipment.


Watching the gymnastics meets at the Olympics, I was suddenly reminded of the terror the vaulting horse held for me in middle school. I'm not sure why this year I was reminded of it; certainly I've never forgotten that we had gymnastics class as I still know how to do a cartwheel, and I've seen pieces of gymnastics meets many times since 1980. One moment I was watching the event and the next I was remembering one of the girls in my class calling out "Go!" and each girl's name as they started running toward the horse. She was ahead of me in line so I didn't have to worry about whether she was going to call out my name or not (I didn't think she would have if my turn had been ahead of hers).


I was one of the least athletic girls in the class and I would always, always, have preferred to be reading a book. I disliked gymnastics less than I disliked PE, mostly because in gymnastics I wasn't picked second-to-last for a team that I would then let down during the game. Even so, I sucked at almost everything but stretching, and had to face mocking about how I couldn't even do this or that in gymnastics.


The thing I sucked at the most, however, was the vaulting horse. An excellent student would run down the path, hit the springboard, and jump over the horse with just her palms touching it, and land on the mats behind, hands in the air a' la Nadia Comaneci. The other successful students would run down the path, hit the springboard, and jump onto the horse in a crouch, then jump down onto the mat and "Y" their arms.


I would run down the path, hit the springboard, and just bounce enough to get my hands flat on the horse. I was never convinced that I was running fast enough to jump high enough to not crash directly into the horse. I never got high enough to raise my knees to even get on the horse. The teacher would give me several attempts, and I would fail at them all, out of fear.


Eventually the 1980's and aerobics came along. I think younger kids continued to take gymnastics, but in 7th and 8th grades we alternated aerobics with PE.

!Gratitud!

I studied Spanish for five years when I was in school.  When I started at CSH in fourth grade, everyone had to take French; it had been founded by an American French order, after all.  I hated French and often "got a stomach ache" during the 45 minutes that happened to coincide with French class.  When seventh grade started, a teacher who could teach both French and Spanish had been hired, and I figured that Spanish had to be easier than French, so I left the latter for the former.  Then the high school I attended required three years of a foreign language and again the choice was between French or Spanish, so I enrolled in Spanish 2 as a sophomore.

Never let it be said I was a good Spanish student.  Social studies/civics and English were my strongest subjects; Spanish and algebra/geometry/trigonometry were my weakest.  Many a report-card bawling out was due to the Cs I got in Spanish.   This was because I really didn't care about studying and found memorization boring, so my vocabulary was pretty poor though my grammar was all right.  In fact, the year my Spanish was the best was the year during which I was kind of dating a boy from Mexico - we, like a lot of teenagers, spoke Spanglish, a language of Spanish grammar and Spanish-ized vocabulary.

In tenth grade my teacher was Sra. Baumgartner and that year was full of conjugations in all tenses.  I actually got a B on the final because I made myself memorize all the tenses the night before the exam.  That was the highest grade ever I got on a Spanish test.   For eleventh and twelfth grade my Spanish teacher was Sr. Crossley, who was famous for being both the meanest teacher and the hardest grader in school.  He was a hard teacher, but a good one:  When I was in Spanish 4 as a junior he was also teaching Spanish 5 and 6 in the same classroom. There were a lot of students in the class who spoke Spanish at home, and while my assignment might be to write a paragraph about the reading (my introduction to Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges!) they had to write two pages.  He only spoke in Spanish during class and insisted everyone else did too.  I graduated with a C- in Spanish and haven't studied it since.

Now I speak Spanish at work at least once a week.  There aren't very many volunteers who are fluent in Spanish but we have a lot of clients who are fluent in Spanish and not in English.  Because my Spanish, poor as it is, is better than the Food Bank Director's, I usually volunteer to counsel new clients.   I wonder what my Spanish actually sounds like to a fluent speaker; I always start off with "I speak Spanish, but my Spanish isn't very good."  The other day I spent thirty minutes completing a client's intake and describing all of our programs to her.

I'm always proud of myself for being able to communicate with these clients, because of all those Cs I got in school.  But I'm more thankful to Sr. Crossley for being such a tough teacher when I had him in high school; I think it's because of him that I remember as much as I do.

North To The Future!

Our Alaska trip was fantastic. The cruise was fabulous and the land portion was great - especially Denali National Park, which was incredible and inspiring. I wish I could sit with you and tell you every little detail. I hope someday each of you reading this can get there.


In the morning we put on jeans and boots and had one or another fabulous adventure - in Juneau we went whale watching and a baby humpback whale came and played with the boat. While mama was below feeding, the baby rolled over and waved its pectoral fins at us. We could see the pleats on its throat, and it would roll over again and show us its flukes. This went on for like fifteen minutes. Amazing! Even the naturalist was almost speechless. I want to be a whale in my next life. A gang of Stellar sea lions came to investigate the boat, and one of the bald eagles we saw was flying with nest materials in its claws.


In Skagway, we went to a dog mushing camp which was soooo much fun being around hundreds of totally excited dogs. They jump in the traces and bark their heads off, they are so excited to run. As soon as they hear "Go!" they put their heads down and take off. Alaska huskies are really mutts, skinny, sprinting dogs that don't look much like the Siberians and malamutes you see in Disney films. We also saw puppies, and one was really active and chewed on my ear. We went to a glass blowing shop and made our own glass balls, shipped to Mom's so we haven't seen them since they cooled. Zirpu did blue with gold flakes, I did red and dark yellow in twists and I hope it looks like Saturn; the red is black until it cools down. The gal who was our tour guide was so enthusiastic about glass blowing that I sucked up some of her energy too.


Then, in the evening, we changed into nice clothes and ate marvelous food on a white tablecloth. Two nights were formal, and when Zirpu realized he'd forgotten his tuxedo parts at home, the DJ, a real sweetie, loaned his shirt studs and cuff links to him. We had good tablemates, a newlywed couple from Pensacola who were cute as buttons and a knowledgeable Canadian couple on their second cruise. After dinner, we went dancing in the Crow's Nest, the bar at the top of the ship. There were not a lot of dancers on the cruise, but we did get in one totally dance-geek conversation with a British couple about International vs. American styles.


In Fairbanks, we went to the Museum of the North and lo and behold, Mt. McKinley was clear as a bell from 160 miles away. Like Mt. Rainer, it is often hidden in clouds about 70% of the time. I'm used to looking at tall mountains because of Rainer and the Rockies, but McKinley is really really tall.

The museum is a must-see, with everything from fine art to natural history to Gold Rush history, all in one place. We could have spent five hours there. The museums in Alaska (we went to like five) are careful to include women in their exhibits, probably because there were so few of them their individual contributions were that much more significant.


I really learned a lot about Alaska and just when I was a little frustrated that there was so little Native history, we went to the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and learned so much. For example: I'd heard (as have many others) that "Eskimo" is seen as pejorative as it means "raw fish eater." We were told that Inupiaq, Yupik, Aleut, and Alitiiq, who are raw fish eaters, aren't offended by that word, though Athabascans, Tlingit, Eyak, Haida, and Tsimshian, who have always had access to wood, do. I didn't even know there were different groups of Native Alaskans, though in retrospect it seems obvious. The young people at the ANHC emphatically agreed that walrus is the best seafood of all.


Now, I've been lucky to see great, beautiful things like the Rockies, Death Valley, and the "bathtub rings" that mark the prehistoric shores of the Great Salt Lake; Denali took my breath away, repeatedly. We were also lucky in Denali National Park to go on a natural history tour with a guide whose passion for the park was palpable and inspiring. He's a former truck driver, not a ranger, and knew everything about everything. We went to Primrose Point, the usual Mt. McKinley viewing spot, where we talked to an Athabascan person about the subsistence life his people led and still lead. We could not see the mountain because it was snowing!


Animal sightings: Dall porpoises, sea otters, bald eagles, Stellar sea lions, little black and white birds with bright feet whose names I can't remember now, seals, orcas, humpback whales, moose, porcupines, caribou, snow shoe hares, ptarmigan, Dall sheep, mountain goats. We may have seen a bear in the suburbs of Anchorage, but it was pretty far away. We did not take pictures most of the time because our little Canon Powershot has a small lens, and it was more important to me to experience it than record it.


Alaska is gorgeous! It's like the best of the northwest, with the mountains coming right down to the water. It's a little disorienting, because mountains that look like they ought to be 10,000+ feet high are like 6,000 feet high, and they're right next to the water. The light is also disorienting... You look outside and it looks like mid-afternoon, only it's like 8:00 - or even 11:00 - at night. This photo of the foothills outside Anchorage was taken around 11:30 pm.


Travel is supposed to expand your horizons and make you curious about the world. This trip has really inspired me to, among other things, go the museums and aquariums here at home. There were so many great things about our trip, we are already talking about going back!

The Six Word Memoir

Have you heard about The Six Word Memoir? Mrs. P., the most voracious reader I know, mentioned it, probably because she's noticed how many memoirs have been turning up on my list of read books. She is a high school English and drama teacher, so she asked her students to write their six word memoirs. Then she asked her sixth grade son. And her parents. For all I know, she's asked the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to do it too.


Of course I made my own attempts. This exercise reminded me a lot of the assignments in fourth grade to write haikus, counting out syllables on my fingers. It reminded me so much of that, in fact, that I had to remind myself not to count a words like "accidents" or "doesn't" by their syllables.


What I found hard about it were things that were true about me and my experiences, but that I didn't want that to be the whole story I tell of my life. The first thing that came to mind was "I learned: Love doesn't conquer all." Well, that's true, but my life hasn't mainly been about disappointment in love (if I were 20, or 26, maybe). So what has it been about?

All my turning points were accidents.

To elaborate (in six-words):

College decision made in grocery line.

Fell in love with best friend.

Harry's Mother downstairs, Yellow Brick Road upstairs (I know that's seven, but I can't call it "YBR" here).

Too many men, joined bi group.

Zirpu was Craigslist Bachelor Number Eight.

Started financial aid when college desperate.

Took up dancing on a whim.

Car accident in Fresno literally accident.

Googled food bank, selected wrong one.

'80s Week

It seems like it's been '80s Week around here recently - "here" being the immediate area around myself. Last Sunday I ran across The Breakfast Club on TVLand and even though I've seen it a couple dozen times and even though it was the TV edit version (with the most ridiculous substitutions for the cusswords and the pot smoking scene edited out) I wound up watching it to the end. I followed a link to a blog post regarding Principal Vernon and the first two songs on Friday's 10@10 were from Risky Business and Back to the Future. I've been in contact with someone from the Class of '85 at my high school and she sent me some photos from 11th grade. Almost every time I turn on the radio it seems like I hear Jack and Diane (incidentally, John Mellencamp turned 16 in 1967. I turned 16 in 1984).


In 1980 my brother was elected Sergeant-at-Arms for his sixth grade class. Mom put up red, white, and blue bunting and had a little party for him. No's election coincided with Ronald Reagan's, and when a friend of Mom's dropped by that evening, she asked incredulously, "You're not celebrating, are you?"


I read 1984 during Christmas week of 1983. I did that sort of stuff, like reading A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve three years in a row. I had an elevated sense of my own literacy.


In 1984 while at summer camp, which was held on the Sonoma State University campus, I became friends with a guy who was a student there during the year and who was working that summer for campus security. Because I never did anything I wasn't supposed to do, I was never caught playing hacky-sack in the courtyard after lights out, night after night. I don't remember realizing that this guy probably had a crush on me until he came to the end-of-camp dance and held me close while we danced and he sang along with Lionel Richie.


In 1986 my homeroom teacher came in from the school office and announced that the Challenger had just blown up. We had a 17-minute homeroom period, during most of which we would hang out and talk and finish homework, like a very very short study hall. I was sitting on my desk, and said, "You're pulling our legs, Nordie!" I think of this as my generation's "where were you when..." moment.


In 1988 I finally started coursework in the School of Education, with Mrs. P. We started by observing at Jason Lee Middle School, where we were placed in a sixth grade class. On my teaching day I led the class in improvisational storytelling, when each person took turns making up a few sentences of the story. Being sixth graders, they had the hero throw up a lot. After four weeks Mrs. P and I were sent to Henry Foss High School. On our first day, while we waited outside our master teacher's classroom for the bell to ring so we could introduce ourselves, a passing staff member asked us for our hall passes. We wound up having to show her our college ID cards to prove that we weren't cutting class.