First Steps

In responding to a comment on the blog the other day, it sparked a memory. From the time I was very young my parents told me this story. When I was nine months old they had taken my older brother, my twin brother and me to the beach. They said when I saw the ocean, I stood up and took my very first steps toward the waves. My twin followed crawling along behind me. It made me happy to remember how much I have always loved the ocean.

There are so many political things we could be writing about here, but you know how we feel about all of it. So instead,  here is a balance to all the madness swirling about. The very simple beauty of it all.

Words On A Wednesday: Harbor Seal

You probably remember the faraway photos I've posted here of Harbor Seals lounging along the mouth of the Mad River. We often stop at a vista point to see them when we are heading south from the short trip up the coast to hike Trinidad Head or Houda Cove. Well, we made a little trip north the other day to run some errands (nothing exciting at all) and thought it would be a good idea to stop at the vista point on the way home, walk down to the beach and try to get a better look. So we did. Except when we got down to where the trail is, we saw this.

Oh bummer. I seem to remember the gate was closed the last time we ventured down this way. Well, I still thought we should try to get down there. We weren't going to go to the sandy beach, which this gate was trying to prevent. We wanted to hike the trail along the hills there above the river and ocean. Luckily other people had the same desire and had long ago done this.

Yes, we were scofflaws. We saw a chance to get on to the trail, so we took it. We just wanted to see the Harbor Seals just a little bit closer.

One thing we hadn't thought about, though, was the tide. Why even consider checking the tide chart when you're just heading to the store? So, I didn't. Turns out that the tide was coming in in a very big way, heading up to a significant high tide of +7.4 right then. There wasn't very much sand left on the other side of the river for the seals to be lounging on at all. We weren't deterred though. We still wanted to walk the little trail above the river.

It was quite beautiful walking along there, looking up river. We loved the calming peace of it all (and the blue skies and the sunshine).

And then, because sometimes timing is everything, this little seal decided to pop up and say hello. I think it must have heard us talking as we were walking along. We waved and said hello back. And yes, we were so glad we had ventured down the trail to take a look.

PS-- The first two comments on the post made me realize I need to explain why the gate was closed. It's to protect Western Snowy Plover habitat. We knew we were not going to be walking on the beach at all, but on a narrow wooded footpath on the hill side of the river.  Plover season ends in September, but I think the gate is never opened anymore. Not sure why. Here is a link to some interesting info about Plovers on the north coast here and what has devastated their numbers.

Back To The Usual Stuff

I really enjoyed writing down my memories of the first 18 years of my life. It was good to look back and piece it together. I realized after all the posts that there are many things I left out. There are more stories to tell, and when I think about it, the 1970s was a truly wild decade for me. So maybe in the future I'll tell you those stories. It'll be fun, I promise!

In the meantime something amazing happened here. THE SUN CAME OUT. We have been living under the foggiest dome of a sky for several months. I'm not sure how we put up with it without losing our minds, although it's possible I did lose mine, it's pretty hard to tell anymore. But that beautiful sun and blue sky made an appearance for a few days, and we went out to enjoy every moment of it.

I had been a little worried that without seeing atmospheric optics that I had lost my love for the sky, that I had moved on to the grim task of just growing old and not being drawn to run out and take photos anymore. Well, then there was this sunset. It made me fall in love again with the sky. I kept running outside to take a look. Love had truly been awakened.

The next day we went for a walk at the marsh and saw even this hint of crepuscular rays. I was shooting photos out of the car window as we went zooming by, shouting for joy at the sight of it.

While we were out at the marsh we ran into two people, a woman with her very elderly father who were slowly walking along bird watching and enjoying the day. We stopped to say hello, and she asked us if we were bird watchers. We said, yes we are. She told us that there were some juvenile birds in the pond that she thought might be Mergansers and were definitely not Mallards. So, I took a few photos to ID later. (I do think they are juvenile Hooded Mergansers.)

We moved on around the big pond. The woman and her dad were walking around the pond in one direction, and we were walking in the other. So our paths crossed again a while later. There she was pointing out to her father the beautiful Long-billed Curlews that were finding food at the pond's edge. We talked a bit more, and she introduced herself and her dad whose name she said was Hy. He had just  come north from the central coast and had moved in with her. I asked him where he was from originally and he said "Brooklyn." Ah, I thought I had recognized that familiar east coast accent. I told him that I was from New Jersey. He said that he was born in New Jersey, in Newark to be precise. I shouted, I was born in Newark too! We kept shaking each other's hand and smiling at each other. Then we all agreed we hoped we'd meet again in the future walking around the marsh ponds. It was like running into family, it felt that good.

So, that's the story of life when the sun comes out.

Memories Part 5- 1969-1970

The title of this post should be "It was just a dream some of us had..." We really wanted to change the world, make peace not war, become enlightened, get high, listen to good music, and most seriously make a difference. How does a 16 year old with so much passion about all of it learn to live in a time when Richard Nixon had just been sworn in as president? We took to the streets. We learned about draft counseling for our friends and neighbors who faced being drafted. My older brother was still in college and had a 2S deferment. He was safe, but there were others his age who were not in school. We met with a network of people who could make referrals, who understood the fear. How did we do this without the internet? I have no idea. I think there must have been flyers, ads in newspapers, word of mouth.

If you google anti-war protests 1969, you get an idea of how energized and non-stop it was. The first listing says "The whole year major campus protests take place across the country." Even those of us still in high school marched. We raised our fists. We chanted "No More War." We went to Newark or New York City for the biggest marches. I remember a cop on a motorcycle nudging us along on one street so we would stay within their marked boundaries. It was confrontational and not pleasant. Still, we we would not be deterred; we were utterly engaged and committed to ending the war.

Back on the home front my parents were planning their first big trip to California. It was the first time my mother was ever on an airplane. She and my dad flew with my aunt and uncle to San Francisco. They rented a car and drove the coast highway to Los Angeles. Oh what a time that was for them. It was July 1969. They had plans for selling our New Jersey home and moving west after my twin brother and I graduated from high school in 1970. I remember the dates they were gone because my grandmother came to spend the week with us while they were out of town. And, the reason I remember that is because my grandmother and I watched the amazing Apollo 11 moon landing together on July 20th. I sat with her, a woman born in 1892 in Galicia Poland, who came to this country in 1921, who lost her family in the Holocaust, who was as smart and strong as any woman I had ever known; we sat together and were blown away by what we were watching. Ah, it was a promise fulfilled, that walk on the moon. I remembered that the only other time I had sat with her and watched a compelling live broadcast was back in November 1963 when my sister, my cousin and I were in her apartment watching the funeral procession for President Kennedy. Oh we all cried our eyes out together that day. This was an uplifting bookend to the promise, "…before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." We watched.

That summer I had a job. Imagine this: A friend's father owned a small factory that made neckties in a nearby big town. He needed a payroll bookkeeper for the summer. I said I could do it, and so I did. It was not a typical payroll job. The 20 or so employees got paid by piece work. They did not speak English. They sat at their work station sewing machines sewing sewing sewing. Everyday they brought me the tickets, which I calculated to determine the number of products they had made. I kept a record of it all. They were paid weekly, and they were paid in cash. The day before payday I had to calculate how many $20s $10s $5s and $1s I needed, in addition to the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. It was interesting and tricky stuff. I would give the data to my friend's father and he would take it to the bank. On payday he would come into my office with the cash. I had to make up the little envelopes for each employee with the exact amount they had earned. When I look back on it now it makes me wonder if this was not entirely a legal thing to be doing. I'm really not sure. Quite the summer job for a 17 year old!

A photo of me in the 1969 high school literary journal

But as a17 year old with a free spirit (youthfully irresponsible) would do, I quit that job the second week in August and went to the Woodstock Music Festival with my siblings and a friend. We were as utterly unprepared for the event as suburban kids who had never camped, didn't own a sleeping bag or tent, and didn't even bring food could be. We joined the throngs of people on the street that Friday afternoon and walked and walked to the concert area. There we laid out our borrowed sleeping bags and heard the music begin: Ravi Shankar, Melanie, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez. We only stayed for one night and realized that our plan was not well thought out at all. We slept in that open field in front of the stage, and by Saturday morning knew that we'd have to head home. My brother Marc went to find us food for breakfast. He was gone a long time. He came back, and we ate whatever it was he had found in town. He said the whole town was overwhelmed.  We knew it was time to leave. We walked and walked back to the car, amazed that we could even find it. Marc started the 120 mile drive home. Midway we stopped. He took down the convertible top of his old Ford, and we all napped on the side of the road. We were tired and truly elated that we had made it there and experienced even that wee bit of Woodstock!

Then my senior year of high school began. It was the first year that the dress code for girls which required us to wear either dresses or skirts was finally dropped. I took the money I had made bookkeeping that summer and shopped for really cool clothes in Greenwich Village. I actually wore bell-bottoms on the first day of school. It was such a moment of freedom for us. I was taking all my college prep classes and planning on going to school in California. The backdrop of war and unrest was everywhere. The big plan for fall was two marches both called Moratoriums-- one on October 15th and one on November 15th. The first march drew 100,000 protestors, the second one in Washington DC drew a half million. The crowd chanted "All we are saying is give peace a chance..." That was our mantra back then. We sang the same lyrics on the streets where we marched in smaller gatherings. The anti-war marches went on all of my senior year. And then, on May 4, 1970 four students were killed at a protest at Kent State.

We were somewhere in this protest in Washington DC May 1970

Just five days after that horrific shooting 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC. My brother Marc drove my siblings and me 200 miles to that march. It was a crazy chaotic time. My sister remembers seeing armed military on the roofs of buildings. We went to make our voices heard. While we were marching my sister got very sick. She suffers from migraine headaches, and she suddenly had one on the crazy streets of DC. I started walking with her to find someplace for her to quietly rest. A very lovely young man came to help us. He introduced himself, told us his name was Doug and that he lived in Washington. He said he was a student at Howard University and had gone there to know what it was like to be a white minority among a black student population. He knew of a place where Lynn could find quiet. He brought us to a small cafe where there was a couch. He brought her ice for her head. While Lynn rested Doug and I talked. Surprisingly it turned out he was from southern California, spending a year at Howard. I told him we were moving to California in early July. So we exchanged addresses. He gave me his parent's phone number, and we promised to meet that summer in California. Lynn eventually started to feel better, so we found our brothers and made the journey home.

Six weeks later a friend of my brother's named Chris, my sibs and I began the long drive across country to California. We had never been further west than Pennsylvania in our lives! We had planned our camping trip well with a Rand McNally guide that had campsite listings in every state along with descriptions of facilities and amenities. This was going to be a cross-country adventure for suburban kids who were going to camp out for the very first time. My mother told us years later that when we pulled away from the house to start the trip, my father threw himself on the bed and wept. He was so worried about us. Such a soft-hearted man he was.

It was a great journey. We learned how to put up the tent and cook on a Coleman stove. We did make one stop on our way west that was not at a campground. Chris knew some people who were living on a commune outside of Longmont, Colorado. So, we stopped there for a few nights. That is when I fell in love with our planet, when my dreams became bigger than the stories of countries and boundaries. We had driven across the Great Plains.  We saw the Rocky Mountains. We experienced an expanse of our earth that took my breath away. We sat at a table with loving, lovely people who were gardening their land. We talked of the future in a new way. We held hands around the table and chanted OM before dinner. My siblings and I decided to stop eating meat and chose to become vegetarian. I suddenly had a new dream. I wanted land and a garden. I wanted to build my own cabin. I wanted to protect our earth.

But first we had to get to California, which we did. Here is what I remember about my first days there. My eyes teared all the time from the smog (thank you Clean Air Act for somewhat fixing that). I had never experienced anything like it. You could see the dirty air, but not the valley and mountains that were right there in front of us. But we were finally in California.  I had a new dream and a lovely man who had rescued us in Washington to call. Doug was only there until winter before heading to Evanston, IL to seminary school to become a Methodist Minister. He was the kindest support to me when I was sexually assaulted by a stranger in September 1970. We kept in touch for a few years after he left for seminary, and yes, I broke his heart. He took this photo of me before he left. I will always remember him with great affection for how he helped us in Washington DC and in California to make the transition to our new life. (Years later he came to my parent's house and performed the wedding ceremony for my sister and her husband. When we called to ask if he would, he said "Yes, I marry and bury people all the time!")

And that, friends, is the condensed version of the first 18 years of my life. What a time to come of age. My love for the earth has stayed with me all these years. In 1970 the population of our planet was 3.7 billion. Now it is nearly 7.5 billion. I checked, earth hasn't gotten any larger to sustain that growth. And now we have a President who has created a time more horrible than the years that have come before. I am truly afraid, and I know I will march again.

Thank you for reading and letting me share these stories with you. I was inspired to write all this down by a comment someone left on the blog a while back. It reminded me that we sometimes make assumptions about people's lives without knowing really a single thing about them, except for what they write on their blogs and the pretty pictures they take. We have all lived long lives before these internet ones.

Memories Part 4- 1967-1968

When I think of my first love I often change the first line of WH Auden's "Musee Des Beaux Arts" to-- "About love they were never wrong, the old masters.." It wasn't what I had hoped it would be, but what kind of love can two15 years old experience? I can't tell if I was emotionally immature or mature? What would the difference be? I thought if John liked me it meant that he was like me. Nope. Not in the least. I thought if we were brave together to be dating as an inter-racial couple, we were together making a political statement about the times. Nope. I hid the relationship from my parents, but I know they suspected what was going on. John was a bass player in an R&B band. One of his band mates was a white guy named Kenny. He was my fake boyfriend when John and I went out. We did this for almost a year. When we did go out not everyone we crossed paths with accepted that I was dating a black guy. I got called "nigger-digger" on more than one occasion. Still, I learned much about young romance, trust, honesty, passion and disappointment. Turns out that attraction to someone is not the only measure of love. We were nothing alike. I asked him recently on Facebook what his music playlist was back then. He sent it to me. Not a single song have I ever listened to since those days. It had Archie Bell and The Drells "Tighten Up," Sam and Dave "And I Thank You..." Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally," etc. Yikes. I hardly remembered those songs. Not like the music I was immersed in at the same time. The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, etc. Still, I went to hear John's band play in local The Battle of The Bands and county Block Dances. John wrote that he remembered at one of the shows the last song they played that evening was "And I Thank You." He said a dear friend of ours was standing with me in the audience and he picked me up and put me on his shoulders so I could see them. The lyrics resonate with me now--

"You didn't have to love me like you did

But you did, but you did

And I thank you..."

Nice memory, and wow was that ever true. I didn't have to love like I did. Ah young stupid romance.

In piecing together this bit of personal history I was reminded of something that I had long ago forgotten. In my ardent love for John I went to the local shopping mall and decided to shoplift a Nehru Jacket for him. I thought he should have one. I had never shoplifted before, but love was a strong motivator. I found a nice one, surreptitiously folded it up and put it in a bag I had brought with me. I continued to shop and make my way around the store. Then, I left. I thought once I was out of that store I was free, I had made it. But.. no. That's not how it works. Once you leave the store with an item not paid for, you are stopped by a store detective in the parking lot. Uh-oh. He brought me back into the store and into his office. He told me what I had shoplifted, that he had been watching me for quite some time. He told me that he was going to call my parents. I was frantic. I was heartbroken. I was embarrassed. I was guilty. He knew that I hadn't gotten the jacket for myself. I told him it was for my boyfriend, that it was a surprise gift for him. We looked at each other. I looked at his wrist and arm and saw he had a tattoo. It said "Born To Raise Hell." I looked back at him and said, "That's a very interesting tattoo. You know who else had that tattoo? Richard Speck the murderer." He looked at me and smiled. He said, "I know. I know." He then told me he wouldn't call my parents, but that I should NEVER shoplift again. I told him I absolutely would not. He walked me to the door and said, "Keep fighting, tiger." I never forgot those words. I never shoplifted again.

My father was working a regular 8:00 - 5:00 job in those days. It was a big difference from his 3:00 am- 10:00 am self-employed schedule. He had been the one who was there when we got home from school. He had been the one who made dinner every night while my mom was commuting home from her job 20 miles away. Things changed in a big way. My parents planned all the dinners, but my sister Lynn and I were responsible for making it. So, we learned how to cook dinner for our family. My dad always wanted/needed dinner right at 5:30. We had it ready. If my mom was late he would get a bit frantic. Turns out he was diagnosed with diabetes a few years later, so it was probably his blood sugars dictating his desperation for food RIGHT NOW!

Our suburban house became a hangout for all of our friends. We had many gatherings in our basement, and yes by then we had started smoking pot. We sat together listening to music, getting high, and fantasizing about changing the world. Or maybe just planning which concerts we would go to in at the Fillmore East. We were teenagers on the cusp of a revolution we felt certain was coming.

I was a non-violent, peace-loving romantic (still am!). The end of 10th grade was approaching. It was spring of 1968. Just writing that year sends me reeling. 1968. The war in Vietnam was raging. Candidates from both political parties were crossing the country with their messages of peace and war, hoping to get enough votes to be on the top of their prospective tickets. Spring 1968, just a few weeks before my 16th birthday Martin Luther King on his "Poor People's Campaign" was assassinated. Shot. Murdered. The man who said "I have a dream..." who said "I've been to the mountaintop..." was dead. I was in high school in a relationship with a black man and this was the context of our lives. How does one make sense of such brutality? Of the violent contempt some people feel about others? How could we believe in "the better angels of our nature"... how could we after all this time? I felt crushed but also driven to the streets to rise up in protest.

And then... and then... two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. How was this even possible in our supposedly civilized country? It was devastating in every way. Beliefs in the dream that the war would come to an end if Kennedy was elected, that there would be social and economic justice, that we were in fact on a path to a greater good came crashing down. The heartbreak of these two assassinations has never been fully assuaged. I have always believed that there are some events that lead to a trajectory in a direction of which there is no turning back or undoing. We are this now because of that then.

And then came the 1968 Democratic Convention. The sad complexity of things, the collision of dreams, the protesters and the police, the whole world was watching. The candidate of my dreams had already gone to his grave. We were left with people I did not believe would represent me in their decisions for our country. I loved Humphrey's support of Civil Rights and the Peace Corp, but he ran on a platform that was in full support of the Vietnam War. That was simply unacceptable for me. I was too young to vote back then, but not too young to care deeply. There would be protests in our future. I was ready to march.

All of this ushered me into my junior year of high school. There I watched Richard Nixon get elected. I was both heartbroken and charged with passion to keep on fighting like the tiger I was.

To be continued...

PS-- The reason I'm writing this is because we sometimes make assumptions about people's lives without knowing really a single thing about them, except for what they write on their blogs and the pretty pictures they take. We have all lived long lives before these internet ones.