Memories and Dreams

So, I've been writing this blog for exactly three months now. I've been enjoying myself thoroughly, though it certainly is an unusual way to put together an autobiography. I hope, in particular, that my daughter (and perhaps her children) will find it valuable in years to come, after I've become a doddering old fool. I've tried to mine small events in my life for their significance, find humor in my misfortunes and connect the dots in a meaningful way. But I've also discovered several odd things in the process.

The first is that I seem to have written all these entries before. I'm at a loss to explain this phenomenon, but as soon as I choose a topic and sit down at the computer, I have this annoying feeling that I've already written about it previously. Then I go over old my blog posts and rack my brain for where and when and why I might have done so, but always come up empty. It's as if the stories are pre-written in my head, even before they end up on paper.

Is that the way my brain works? Do I compose and edit that thoroughly before I write? I also create 5-7 minute skits for the contemporary church services at the Presbyterian Church of Novato and people sometimes ask me how long it takes. My answer is that they usually only take an hour or so, from start to finish.

Then I run into instances when I am writing about some event in my early years and I can't be sure whether the memory is genuinely mine, whether I was told about it by a family member, or whether it may have only occurred in my dreams. It makes me realize how little of our lives we remember vividly. Driving my daughter home from a rehearsal of Pirates of Penzance the other night, she admitted that she had no recollection of being directed by me in The Sound of Music when she was 9. How can that be?

It is disconcerting to look back on so many events and realize that I can't recall them in their entirety, only being able to retrieve random snippets that had somehow made a deeper-than-usual impression on my cerebral cortex. It would be fabulous to access the rest of those memories, which I don't doubt are there.

Fortunately, a lot of them have begun to reveal themselves as I write this blog. Covered with dust, I carry them down from the attic of my mind and try to put them in some kind of order. Sometimes a little Internet research helps out, or I will get a clue from an item in my boxes of accumulated memorabilia - a class picture, a theatre program, or slides from a trip. Slowly, slowly, they come into focus and I hasten to add them to this growing document.

Finally, I sometimes worry that I will run out of material. It seems like it takes a lot of details to maintain this pace. But as soon as I lift a long-forgotten memory from the pile, another takes its place, so there is hope in that.

Anyway, I thought I would just take a short break and talk a little about the process. So far, it is immensely satisfying and cathartic on many levels. I recommend it heartily. I also hope you are enjoying the posts as well. And if you are, please let other people know about this site. After all, what's the point of a life, if you can't share it?

Eyebrows and Pie

I have my grandmother’s eyebrows. No, not like those creepy saint’s relics in the Duomo’s Museo dell’Opera in Florence, where they have the preserved finger of John the Baptist on display in a small glass vial. I obtained my eyebrows the old-fashioned way – I inherited them. They are wild and somewhat devilish in appearance. My daughter sometimes notices when I have missed trimming a stray hair and cringes when I pluck it out on the spot. Truthfully, I wonder how long they would get if I didn’t trim them regularly? I have sometimes considered letting them grow out, should my hairline one day recede too far. They would make for a spectacular and unique comb-over. Once, when I was doing a small TV movie role in Hollywood, I asked the makeup artist if I should have them shaped. He was aghast and said that if I “made it,” they would become my trademark. Since then, I have been rather proud of my genetic gift.

I was very close to my Grandma Clark, whose maiden name was Lola Whittemore. I always thought that Lola was a wonderfully exotic name, which seemed at odds with her early career as a single school teacher in Fort Benton, Montana. Before I knew that, I imagined she had once been some kind of exotic dancer. She married Charles Clark, a lawyer, and moved to Fresno where they bought a house at 839 N. Thorne Avenue. That address is engraved in my memory because my Grandma and I were pen pals. We corresponded regularly, starting from when I was very young, despite only seeing each other at Christmas and maybe one or two other times during the year. We shared a passion for coins and would exchange lists of what years and mint marks were missing from our collections, along with family news. I was pleased to learn that she kept all my letters and I inherited them when she passed on in 1977.

She may have lived far from her children and grandchildren, who settled in the distant San Francisco Bay Area and La Jolla, but she was far from lonely. She regularly took in boarders who attended Fresno State University. These were usually students from China who lent a hand around the house and provided extra income. They also took her along to numerous graduations and weddings, which were often held in traditional costume. It was always fun to see her smiling face, saucy eyebrows and wispy mop of silvery grey hair in the photos.

While Grandma was comfortable among Asians, she was definitely old-school when it came to African Americans, persisting in calling them Negroes, or worse. That made for an awkward situation one time when she accepted a new student over the phone, without meeting him first. She contained her shock when he showed up, all six feet of him with an enormous afro, as was popular at the time. But she was also old-school when it came to honoring her word. Of course it turned out that he was an ideal boarder and provided a much-needed update to Grandma’s race relations.

As she got older, she turned from coin collecting, which required only occasional activity, to word games, which kept her very busy. She subscribed to several puzzle magazines and dutiful mailed in her submissions for anagrams, word-finders, jingles, and the like. She even occasionally won small cash prizes, which made the hunt that much more exciting.

When she reached her eighties, she turned to the Bible. That struck us as an odd transition, since religion had never played a large part in her life. One day, on our way back to Fresno after a visit, my father asked her about it. I remember her response distinctly. She replied without a moment’s hesitation, “Well, don’t you think it’s about time?”

In her final years, I never missed an opportunity to accompany my parents down to Fresno, pushing aside any initial reluctance to making the long, usually sweltering trip (for some inexplicable reason, we never had air conditioning in our family cars). It was always comforting to get reacquainted with the old house and see Grandma again, though she shrank visibly with each passing year. Typically, we would go out for lunch at her favorite café, where she would simply order dessert. She seemed to subsist solely on banana crème pie. Then we would all sit around her living room and catch up, with Grandma ensconced in her favorite blue-green recliner. This chair was an oddity. In my imaginings it was the creation of some inventor from another century. You sat in it, pulled the lever and the thing stretched out like a medieval torture rack. Getting out of it was a Herculean struggle. You pulled and pulled until, suddenly, the chair vaulted into its upright position, nearly giving you whiplash. The only benefit was that you really could lie out flat on its farthest setting, which made it good for afternoon grandma naps.

I saw less of her after I went away to college and it was at the end of my senior year that she took ill for the last time. My mother called me with the news that Grandma had advanced intestinal cancer, which probably explained her nutritional peculiarities. I immediately called her at the hospital and we had a good long chat. Not many minutes after we hung up, the phone rang again. It was my mother calling to say that she had just got off the phone with Grandma, who was eager to share the remarkable report that Mark had called her “all by himself.”

A few days later, following graduation, I left for a long vacation in France, where I received little news from home for several months. (Anyone who has tried to navigate the French phone system will understand why it was just not that easy to keep in touch.) But in August, toward the end of my stay, I got a letter saying that Grandma had died. Apparently, she had asked to leave the hospital for the afternoon to celebrate her 84th birthday at home and, once there, had refused to leave. A home nurse was hired and that is where my beloved Grandma spent her final days, passing away in her sleep in her favorite chair.

Unfortunately, the letter arrived on the same day I was leaving my French home and saying good-bye to my adopted French grand’mere, Madame Cailles. She saw the tears in my eyes and asked me what was wrong. I shared the news and added that it was hard to say good-bye to her, too. She gave me a farewell kiss on both cheeks and then held onto me for a second. Chiding me for my morbidity, she let me know in her shaky voice that she had no intention of dying anytime soon and how was I to know we wouldn’t meet again? That brought a much-needed smile to my face and to my heart.

As I got into the little Renault for the short ride to the train station, I waved good-bye to Grand’mere standing in the cobbled courtyard. Despite her words, it was still painful to leave, since she was 77 and I had no plans to return anytime soon. But, all during the long train ride to Paris, I thought about her and my Grandmother Lola and came to appreciate the wisdom of that final admonition, which seemed to apply to both of them in equal measure. Who can truly say that we will never meet again?

Sheep and the Farmer's Wife

My mother was not an animal lover. Growing up, her family never had pets. In fact, she had developed a fear of animals that, according to her, was only controlled by having them around. So that is why she reluctantly went along with the rest of the Clark family’s goal of turning 38 South Knoll Road into a suburban menagerie.

Naturally, we always had a resident dog, starting out with Missy, a Kerry Blue Terrier who developed such terrible skin allergies that she had to be shaved every summer and given regular cortisone shots. Missy was followed by a long succession of Keeshonds, who proceeded to fill the house with enormous balls of shed hair that might easily be mistaken for the dogs themselves. Our first experimental Dutch barge dog was L’il Dawg, who set the mark pretty high. Then my sister arranged for a couple of rescue Keeshonds to take up residence in succession: Candy, a hyper-active little thing who rode in the golf cart with my dad; then Fred (short for Fredrika), who was a rather rotund “traditionally-built” gal (for those of you who follow the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels). The only exception to the Keeshond dynasty was Jennifer, an extraordinarily shy Sheltie. She was definitely not a “people” dog, but communed happily with others of her species, even taking on dogs many times her size, if the situation warranted aggression. Her one quirk was that she simply could not do her “business” if anyone was within fifty yards of her, which made taking her for walks uniquely challenging.

Of course, there was an assortment of mostly anti-social cats, the occasional guinea pig dying too-soon of some mysterious ailment, an iguana and various short-lived hamsters and mice. We somehow avoided parakeets, since my brother was allergic to feathers (or so my mother, the pediatric allergist, would have had us believe). But, in her wildest animal-filled dreams (nightmares?) I don’t think she ever contemplated having to contend with livestock.

As was typical of many houses in Strawberry back then, we had a large undeveloped lot both behind our house and the house next door, which we also owned. Each year, a new crop of oat grass would spring up that, by summer, had to be mowed because of very real fire danger. For many years, my father would take on this onerous task, which involved tilting the front of the mower high in the air and slowly lowering it down onto each patch of grass (this was before line trimmers). This was a dicey maneuver and absolutely guaranteed to hurl any stray rocks far and wide. We kids knew to stay clear whenever dad was in the yard on mowing day. Eventually, my brother John got big enough to take over the mowing responsibilities. And when he went off to college, I inherited this dangerous task. The potential for serious injury was always present while mowing on the steep hillside (my dad had even taken to wearing old golf shoes for traction), which was doubled by the fact that our old machine was made before the era of automatic blade shut-offs.

Finally, the summer came when I prepared to enter college and both my sister (who lived in the house next door) and I decided that we didn’t want my dad to go back to mowing. Instead, we hatched the idea of letting sheep take care of the grass. How cool would that be? With remarkable speed and energy, we drove in durbins (steel fence posts) around the entire perimeter of both lots, stretched sheep wire, built an open-sided shed and installed an automatic water supply. Soon, Joe and Clem were on the job, probably the first two sheep our neighborhood had ever seen. They did a bang-up job at keeping the weeds at bay, as well as the lower branches of the fruit trees and anything else they could get their teeth on. They were also quite popular with the local children, who liked to pet them and feed them tidbits.

Joe was seldom any problem, but Clem definitely thought the grass was greener on the other side of the fence, literally. Lacking the cleverness to escape the yard, he made do by forcing his head through the fairly small holes in the wire fence to reach the more elusive bits. Unable to reverse the process, his insistent baa-ing would soon prompt a phone call from a concerned neighbor. Since the only person at home was usually my mom, she would grab a pair of wire cutters and venture out into the yard, making her way across and down the slippery hillside to the trapped sheep, sometimes in the rain. She would cut loose Clem as he struggled and pulled, occasionally being knocked down in the process. Then she would repair the fence and make her way back up the steep hill, no doubt cursing the animal kingdom and her own offspring. I will say this: She did what farmwork needed to be done and never shirked.

Once we had acquired sheep, it seemed natural to extend the farm theme to poultry. I built a coop below Kathy’s house and we purchased six reddish-brown “sex-link” hybrid hens, who began providing us with a generous supply of lovely brown eggs.

Fortunately, my mother liked the fresh eggs enough to put up with having to collect them. And, since she was already out in the yard, it was nothing for her to throw a little laying mash into their feeder at the same time. This required actually going into the coop, which was not an issue, since the chickens were usually out foraging in the yard or brooding quietly on their nests. What she hadn’t counted on were the sheep getting into the act.

Now, if the grass was truly greener on the other side of the fence, the alfalfa hay that filled the chickens nests was pure ambrosia to Clem and Joe. They could smell it every time they passed by, but they normally couldn’t get to it. Unfortunately, one day when my mother went into the coop, the sheep were nearby. As soon as she opened the door, they charged. Thinking quickly, she jumped inside and slammed the door shut, thus avoiding being trampled and saving the coop from destruction. But the sheep were persistent and continued pressing against the door in an effort to get at the hay. Now my mother probably only weighed 130 pounds and the sheep were easily 500 pounds each, so it was a definite mismatch. She was stuck, wondering whether my dad would know where to look for her and whether she would be forced to spend the night with the “girls.”

Finally, after ten harrowing minutes, the sheep decided to graze elsewhere and my mother bolted. But, clearly, something had to change. The chickens were gradually left to their own devices, which mostly meant roosting in the apple tree at night instead of the cozy coop. This led to a natural reduction in the flock, courtesy of the local raccoons and skunks, and soon the chickens were no more. Clem was given away and replaced with Hamlet, a very personable goat, who got along fine with Joe and never got caught in the fence. He did, however, find ways to escape into the surrounding neighborhood, which presented its own hassles. But on these occasions, I was sent out with a rope to bring him home; my mother’s tenure as farmer having officially come to an end.

You know, I personally believe that wherever we go after this life, our animals’ spirits go, too. If that’s true, I hope my mother has her wire cutters.

Pebbles and Kisses

They say that 2nd lieutenants have the highest mortality rate in the army because they are charged with leading their platoons into combat. I’ve never been in the infantry, but I know how they must feel.

In elementary school, I was usually the teacher’s pet. I never really sought out the position, the way some other lamentable boot-lickers might, it just happened. Partly it was due to my being a bright student. But it also helped that I knew many of my teachers personally. That’s because my father was president of the School Board and my mother was president of the PTA. Not at the same times, but the end result was that I was always running into teachers at my house, and sometimes even at our swimming pool. Seeing your fourth grade teacher in a bikini definitely puts a whole different spin on the instructor-student dynamic.

Anyway, I did my best to keep church and state separate at Strawberry Point School. For the most part I was successful, but not always. In one particular instance, I was so focused on raising my visibility among my classmates that I didn’t realize I would be blind-sided by fate during morning recess.

Not being a part of the regular four-square and dodge-ball crowd, and definitely not willing to risk my budding masculinity by getting involved in a game of hop-scotch (which was too bad, because I was actually pretty good at it), I spent most of my recess periods either talking or wandering around picking up rocks. Now, that isn’t as pathetic as it sounds. My friend, Brett, and I were particularly fond of the tiny pea-sized polished pebbles of red and yellow jasper, green chert and white quartz that would work their way loose from the concrete along the edges of the playground. It passed the time and I’m sure we had great conversations. I don’t remember what they were, but I assume they were along the line of “Hey, I found one!” Or, in Brett’s case (since I had never met anyone so soft spoken), “hey, I found one.”

At the end of recess, we would line up to go back inside – boys in one, girls in the other – and wait for our teacher, Miss Edson. There were even guides painted on the playground, if anyone was unclear on the concept or procedure. Pushing and shoving was discouraged, but those who did usually got to be in the front. Now, I have no idea why it was so important to be first in line, it just was. Perhaps it conveyed an evolutionary advantage that would mark one as a superior source of reproductive material, but that is just speculation. Usually, I was somewhere in the middle, not being strong enough to be in the front, where I presume the mates were being handed out, and not being one of the nascent jocks who were always delayed by having to figure out how to put the dodge balls back into the big wire basket.

I wallowed in linear obscurity for much of my youth, all the way through kindergarten, first grade and most of second. But in the spring of that year I hatched my plan to launch myself into The Elite, The Chosen, The Few, The Proud, The First-in-Line.

I cleverly surmised that since everyone was already used to seeing me wander aimlessly around the playground, I wouldn’t set off any alarms if I just happened to be in the vicinity of the back-to-class line - just as the bell rang. It was a brilliant plan, in theory. The only problem was that it was difficult to get the timing down.

Merely hanging around the front of the line until the bell rang wouldn’t do. That was considered very poor etiquette, enough to get one shoved aside rudely and be relegated to the tail end of our little boy caterpillar. For a week I struggled to get it just right. Some days found me too far from the line when the bell rang. Others found me there too early, and forced to drift away, lest I tip my hand. But, I was confident it was only a matter of time.

Finally, one bright sunny day, almost by osmosis, I arrived at the front of the line at the exact moment the bell rang. I stuck out my little elbows and spread my legs wide to prevent interlopers and leaned back against the surging throng, but they were too late. For the first time in my elementary school career I was top dog. I stood there beaming in wonderment; I couldn’t have been prouder if they had just awarded me the Nobel Prize for Pebble Finding. The other boys shriveled in the presence of my machismo. The world was my oyster. Then Mrs. Werbner came waltzing by.

Mrs. Werbner taught sixth grade way down at the other end of the building, in the Multi-Purpose Room. I had seen her numerous times over at our house, so she definitely knew who I was, but we seldom crossed paths at school. I hoped she would simply notice me, raise her eyebrows ever so slightly in silent acknowledgement of my sterling accomplishment, and then pass on by. That was really the only scenario that I could envision, so I held my breath, wishing it to be so. Please, oh please…

Apparently, no one listens to the prayers of second grade boys.

Instead, Mrs. Werbner saw me, dangerously exposed at the front of the line, swerved from her path, picked me up easily by the shoulders and gushed, “Mark, you are sooo cute!” How she managed to refrain from giving me a big sloppy kiss on the cheek, I don’t know, but the damage was done. I was mortally wounded while leading my men into battle. She put me down and walked briskly on, as her voice echoed loudly in my ears.

I should probably tell you that the other boys beat me up after school and the girls shunned me till long after puberty. But, truthfully, I have no idea what happened after she left. The rest of the world receded from me rapidly as I was sucked into a black hole of embarrassment. Miss Edson led the class back in, everyone passing me by as I stood there rooted in first place, before tagging myself on to the very end. I can tell you that the front of the line held no further mystique for me for the duration of my school years.

It is a shame that I switched schools in the fifth grade, so I never got to have Mrs. Werbner as my teacher. I heard that she was a really good and I genuinely liked her.

I just hated that she ruined my life.

Bulls and Pelicans

Just as you finish crossing the Richmond Bridge into Marin County and take the exit north toward San Rafael, you drive past the Marin Sewage Treatment Plant. If the wind is just right, you catch the distinctive smell of, well, effluent, to be precisely polite. You wouldn’t expect that oddly sweet and pungent smell to be evocative of one’s past, but it is to me. It reminds me of learning to sail.

When I was 14, I took a summer boating course offered by the Mill Valley Parks and Rec Department. The classes were held on an inlet of Richardson Bay, near where Shoreline Park is now located. To get there, you had to drive past the Mill Valley Waste Treatment Plant just across from the middle school on Camino Alto. My mother would drop me off and my nostrils would immediately be assaulted by the odor of sewage mixed with the salt air and marsh smells. But that didn’t matter, I was soon out on the bay and the romance of the sea far outweighed any unpleasantness.

I took to it immediately and was soon learning all the parts of the rigging, how to handle our 6-foot El Toros (aka “Bull Boats”), and how to read both the tides and the wind. For once, I was a natural at something, and by the end of the summer I had some real skills. The instructor, Tim Taylor, even asked me if I would return the following year to help him out with the younger students. I accepted readily.

In the beginning of that second summer, I started by riding my bike over from Strawberry to Mill Valley. But then I got the impossibly cool idea that I could actually sail to work. That was because my good friend John Wuoltee owned a 16-foot sloop that we often sailed together with our other friends, Mark Linker and Pat Norton. I proposed the idea to him and he said it would be fine.

It took only a few minutes each morning to ride my bike to John’s house and rig the boat. I set out of Strawberry Harbor, tacking into the wind around Strawberry Point, then a beam reach under the Richardson Bridge, and ending up with a downwind run into Mill Valley. It only took about 45 minutes. I would handle the main sheet with one hand, the jib sheet with the other, and steer with my foot on the tiller. I loved commuting by boat and it gave me a sense of independence that I had never experienced before. Somehow, I managed to stay out of trouble and only once got stuck on a mud bar on the way home, marooned for an hour till the tide had risen enough to float me off.


A Pelican boat.

 Some days, after class, Tim and I would take the “big” boat out for a sail. This mighty vessel was our 12-foot “Pelican,” sort of an El Toro on steroids. It had a flat bow, hard-chined sides and gaff-rigging. That means that it was (a) not particularly fast, (b) very stable, and (c) really cool-looking. I especially liked the gaff-rigged main-sail, which gave it a 19th century feel. But Tim and were focused on (b).

That the Pelican was remarkably stable made it an ideal teaching boat. Students could do practically everything wrong and it would stay upright. That also meant that we simply had to see if we could actually make it flip over. Fortunately, we had the ideal place to conduct our experiments – Richardson Bay. In particular, there is one spot just west of the Richardson Bridge that has to be one of the windiest spots on San Francisco Bay. The wind funnels in from Tennessee Valley and literally screams across the short channel. There are many other places, such as Raccoon Straights, where the combination of strong winds and fast currents make for occasionally dicey sailing, but for sheer predictable velocity, we had it right at our doorstep. It’s probably a good thing that my mother never found out, because I have to report that we did our level best to achieve disaster. But I think that the mast would have broken before the Pelican would capsize. We did have a hell of a lot of fun, though.

Sadly, the Parks and Rec sailing program was shut down a couple of years later because of budget cuts and the unfortunate timing of raw sewage spills that made the harbor unsafe and unsavory. I kept at it though, crewing on a Columbia 29 on the Bay and teaching sailing to several members of my adopted family in France.

But those summers on Richardson Bay had opened up an exciting new world for me. Or, as Ratty tells Mole in The Wind in the Willows, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." I agree.

Romance and Periaktoi

Rehearsing Pirates of Penzance brings to mind the first time I ever got involved in theatre, back in 1972, at Tamalpais High School.

I was a junior and infatuated with a celestial beauty who went by the earthly name of Julie Stafford. She often walked by our little clique that hung around the big oak tree in front of Kaiser Hall, usually on her way from drama class to points unknown. She had long wavy dark hair, fair skin and was an actress, which made her a Practically Unobtainable Object of Desire. I suppose I could have simply asked her out, but that never occurred to my addled adolescent brain. From lack of confidence, or just having a romantic screw loose, I decided that the best way to get close to her was to get involved in theatre, too.

At the time, I was part of the on-campus TV production class (KTAM) along with Chuck Cutting, who also built sets for the drama department. That seemed like the best place to start. Thanks to my indulgent father, I knew my way around wood tools, so it was not a stretch for me to offer my help with whatever scenery he was building for the current show. He eagerly agreed and I found myself that afternoon after school in Ruby Scott Auditorium, nailing flats together and stretching muslin for a fall production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechuan.

I took to it like a fish to water and, after a couple of set-building sessions, Chuck asked if I would like to be part of the running crew. At the time, I assumed it was an honor. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood how hard it was to find backstage staff for plays. A few days later, the Set Manager dropped out and I suddenly found myself in charge of scene changes.

This was no small show. It featured two periaktoi (large revolving pieces of three-sided scenery) flanking six doors center-stage that each turned on centrally-located pins. Different flats representing different scenes could be then added to or taken off of each of eighteen surfaces. In addition to the scenery itself, there were synchronized slide projectors that showed images on three floating screens above the stage. It was non-stop action for the running crew as flats were added and subtracted. It was also hot backstage, so I took to wearing a purple mesh tank top and cut-off jeans. I’m sure I thought I was pretty cool, but I hope that no photographs exist of me in that questionable outfit. I might have to enter the Witness Protection Program.

During the final scene change, all the set pieces were flipped simultaneously, revealing a beautifully-drawn Chinese dragon that stretched the breadth of the stage, Above that final tableau, a single projection showed a Viet Cong woman aiming an AK-47 directly at the audience (this was, after all, during the Vietnam War). Even with everything I’ve seen in the theatre since then, I’m still blown away by the brilliance and complexity of that set, which was designed by Michael Gough.

Meanwhile, it finally dawned on me that not everyone in the drama department was in every play. Alas, Julie, the object of my teenage affections, was not in this one, so my romantic efforts were wasted. But I didn’t mind, I had a new love, and that was the theatre.

There was also one notable incident during the run of the show that probably sealed the deal. Backstage during performance one night, I finished a scene change and was about to take a breather when I caught sight of one of the actresses making a quick costume change out in the open. It was so unexpected that it took a moment for me to realize that she was al fresco from the waist up. I quickly went back to my set, but the image stuck. Not of a half-naked woman, but of someone so focused on the need to quickly get back on stage that nothing else mattered.

So here it is 38 years later and I’m still at it. Fortunately, the pursuit of art and entertainment has replaced my more prurient interests (mostly), but the draw is the same. I love theatre folk. I love their commitment. I love their lack of inhibitions. Most of all, I love that I’m one of them.

Rocks and Justice

The problem with being only eight is that your access to legal counsel is limited.

I was out in our back yard, playing out in the high weeds with my childhood friend, Steven Gallagher. The oat grass would grow to three or four feet high, and you could make a kind of fort by flattening a small circle. It was fairly private, sheltered from the wind and the ideal spot to just enjoy a sunny afternoon, talking about whatever eight year old boys talk about. Suddenly, I felt something hard hit my forehead. It didn’t hurt all that much, it just kind of surprised me. You know, the way you feel surprised when something unexpected hits you in the head.

I think I said something memorable, like, “Ow! What was that?” Steven didn’t reply, he just stared at me and pointed. I reached a hand up to my forehead and it came away covered in blood, which was now streaming down into my right eye.

My next and most immediate destination was the house, which was fortunately nearby. I screamed for my mother and ran up the back porch steps toward the living room. She intercepted me just as I reached the landing and I remember her response vividly: “Stay right there! Don’t you dare come in the house!” That really wasn’t the reception I was expecting. No, “What happened?” No, “Oh, you poor dear.” No, “The ambulance will be here in seconds.” Just an emphatic, “Don't come in!”

I stood there on the porch, feeling faint and bleeding out, as she exited into the house, looking over her shoulder to make sure I was staying put. She returned quickly with a towel that she applied to my forehead, telling me to apply steady pressure to the wound. Steven was still there in the background, white as a sheet. Only then did she calmly explain herself to both of us. Head wounds, she said, usually bleed a lot and seem worse than they are, so I was probably okay. Then she apologized for her abrupt reception, but she didn’t want me to bleed all over the living room, when I could bleed just as well outside. That’s what I got for having a mother who was also a doctor.

Next we got down to what, exactly, happened. Steven gave a reasonable accounting. The only missing piece was, who had thrown whatever hit me? Surprisingly, my sister, Kathy, was able to answer that one. She had. Then she offered her brilliant disclaimer: She had only thrown the rock “…to see if I was there.”

“To see if I was there.” I remember that quote verbatim, since it made as much sense then as it does today. Naturally, I expected my mother to challenge my sister’s flimsy alibi, but she let it go without a word. Perhaps she thought that Kathy already felt bad enough for what she’d done, but that’s seldom the case with kids. We definitely feel a lot worse when we get punished.

I was bandaged up, Steven was taken home, and the rest of my day was spent lying down on the couch as I contemplated the vagaries of familial justice.

Now, I have to admit that I was routinely getting in trouble at home, mostly for leaving my father’s carpentry tools somewhere in our vast yard, where he would eventually track them down by following the destructive trail of my latest “project.” Then I would get to listen to yet another reprise of the immensely popular “I don’t care if you borrow my tools, just as long as you return them” lecture series.

Even worse was when a tool went missing and couldn’t be found. Then I would be sent to my room “till I remembered where I left it.” Of course I had no idea where that would be – if I had, then I might have remembered to put it away in the first place. I would mope and cry as I paced the floor of my eleven by twelve foot cell, bemoaning the injustice of it all. Eventually, the tool was either found or my dad would have to make the six-day journey down to Goodman’s hardware store where he would trade three goats for the missing item.

I’m not saying that I wasn’t usually the guilty party, because the odds were good that I was. But in the rare instance when it might have been my brother’s fault or (gasp) even my father’s, there was no recourse. No Miranda rights, no public defender looking for loopholes, no plea bargaining. I was left “swinging in the breeze” by the cruel hands of justice. So terribly unfair, says the repeat offender.

I would like to add that, as an adult, I have changed my ways – but I haven’t. I still sometimes leave tools in the garden. Usually I pick them up before they have gone all rusty, but I have had to replace a few as well. And when I do catch myself mistreating my valuable possessions so shamefully, I react just as my dad used to. I send myself to my room. And I take a nap.

Trucks and Hotrods

A close childhood friend, Lynn Montgomery, called last night with the sad news that her older brother, Gary, had passed away last Friday. Yet another member of the “South Knoll Road Gang” is gone, and this time it wasn’t one of the parents, which makes me particularly sad.

In my eyes, Gary was always the cool guy on the street. Tall, laconic and five years my senior, we never “played” together, but we shared some of the same interests, including model railroads. And, naturally, when I was at their house playing with Lynny, our paths crossed, especially on nights when Mission Impossible was on. That was his favorite and we would all sit around the T.V., munching on s’mores and popcorn.

Gary’s family came from a tiny town in the Sierra’s called Groveland. Our family passed through it each year on our way to vacationing in Yosemite and the joke was that if you blinked, you might miss it, it was that small. But Groveland is in the heart of logging country and logging was in Gary’s blood. Back in Mill Valley, Gary would modify his Tonka trucks to be accurate depictions of the Peterbilt logging rigs he got to ride in with his older relatives. To me, they were amazing.

He was very good with his hands, building model railroad cars and scale buildings from kits, assembling fighter plane and car models. He was particularly fond of the ones that featured ghoulish zombies driving improbably souped-up hotrods. He could also do anything mechanical. I got my first multi-speed bike from him, which combined a three speed internal hub with a three-speed derailleur. I’ve never seen another set up like it.

Naturally, he would graduate to working on cars, but he never became what we called a “greaser.” He was too smart for that and excelled in school. He did have a very nice hot rod, an Impala (or a Chevelle?), which he would tinker on for hours in his driveway two houses up the street from ours. I remember hanging around watching him work on the carburetor one day when I was 12 or 13, when he asked me if I wanted to go with him to see how his modifications had gone. He didn’t need to ask.

We drove up Highway 101 to Atherton Avenue in Novato, since that was suitably isolated from the prying eyes of the CHP. Then he waited until the road was clear and wound the car up to just over 110 mph. Man, what a rush, and scary, in a roller-coaster sort of way. The burst of speed was, thankfully, short-lived but as we headed home I was still flying. Looking back, I realize that was probably my one-and-only genuine American Graffiti moment.

In Gary’s senior year at Tamalpais High School, he started dating Jan Baroni, literally the girl next door (all right, across the street). A dark haired Italian beauty, they made a picture-book coming-of-age couple for our neighborhood. We all went over to the Baroni’s house, which was the hub of South Knoll Road, to admire their outfits and her corsage.

Gary took his smarts and mechanical ability to Cal Poly, where he got a degree in engineering. But he soon chucked his job working for Bechtel, a big corporation, to join a drag racing team, traveling the country and working on incredibly fast cars.

Eventually, he married and settled down in Jamestown, near Sonora, and returned to his first love, driving logging trucks. The stories he would tell of wild rides and narrow scrapes were still exciting to me whenever the neighborhood gathered for our regular anniversary, wedding and holiday parties.

I always admired Gary for following his passions and for his easy-going ways. It’s sad that something as simple as a kitchen fall can lead to an unfortunate chain of medical complications that would end such a vibrant life, but sometimes that’s just the way things play out.

This morning, as I finished sharing the sad news with my sister, Kathy, all we could conclude was to keep looking for those 110mph thrills that life sometimes tosses our way, and to tell the important people in our lives that we love them, as often as we can. It’s funny that we need tragedies to remind us of those simple facts. Wherever you are, Gary, thanks for the ride.

T-rex and Mr. Clean

If you’ve been following my blog, I apologize for being AWOL these past few days. I’ve been fighting a nasty cold. I don’t get them very often, but the harbinger is if I find myself smugly musing on just how long it’s been since I had my last one. That pretty much guarantees that I will be coming down with something inside of 24 hours. Actually, I’m thankful when it’s only a cold. Even though I feel miserable right now, it could always be worse.

I came down with something similar on my ninth birthday. You might think that would have ruined the day for me, but you’d be wrong. It meant that I got to stay home from school and enjoy my birthday presents all the more. For some reason, I recall that I got a set of plastic dinosaurs on that particular birthday and distinctly remember playing with them on the living room rug, amongst the crumpled wrapping paper, even as my body was fighting off a legion of microbes.

I don’t know what the attraction is between small boys and dinosaurs. It may be that, just as we are discovering the inconvenient truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, we disillusioned children come across unexpected evidence that the most improbable creatures on Earth (i.e. gigantic lizards the size of school buses) were really real. Couple that with the mind-blowing variations in dinosaur anatomy and you have a Match Made in Heaven.

And I knew my “thunder-lizards.” I could tell you which ones had tiny brains in their tails, why stegosaurus had a row of fleshy plates down its back, and don’t ever confuse brachiosaurus with brontosaurus, thank you very much. In fact, I would wager that your average 9 or 10 year-old boy knows more about the Jurassic Period than most paleontology grad students. Recently, I was informed by one diminutive dino-expert that we may have been wrong all along about the perennial bad-boy, tyrannosaurus rex. Some scientists, he told me, think that his huge jaws were most likely used for crushing the bones of already dead animals. In other words, t-rex might have been a hyena-like scavenger and not the king of the pre-historic jungle. Go figure.

Anyway, I was happily playing with triceratops and his pre-historic pals, when I was suddenly whisked off to the pediatrician. Fortunately, it was familiar territory to me since my mother’s medical office was in the same building on Camino Alto in Mill Valley. After getting my temperature taken, I said “ahhhh,” and then Dr. Brown listened to my lungs with the stethoscope she kept in the freezer. Apparently, this was no ordinary cold, so I was given a shot of penicillin in my bum, being coached to whistle loudly to distract myself from the needle stick. At least, I would get to pick something out of the toy box to take home. Ah, sweet bribery.

Unfortunately, I was not going home right away. I had to wait for my father to come over from his orthopedic practice. Now that was unusual. What was he coming for? No clue. So, we waited.

By the time he arrived, I had evolved the idea that there was some mysterious birthday present he had forgotten to give me that morning at breakfast; that he wanted to deliver right away, lest I spend the rest of the day without a full complement of gifts. But that was not the case. Instead, he had brought a gi-normous syringe, into which he proceeded to draw an inordinate amount of blood out of my skinny arm. I think I was in shock, or I might have protested the removal of well over half my blood supply. He said I was very brave and gave me a kiss on the forehead before he left. He was going to have the blood analyzed up at the hospital.

The Magic 8-Ball mood had suddenly changed from Probably-Just-a-Cold to Definitely Concerned. Dr. Brown informed me gently that I might have something called pneumonia, which was very serious. Now I didn’t know anything about pneumonia. But I did know that Iris Edwards, our housekeeper, sometimes used ammonia to clean things and I really hated its smell and, by association, the gleaming bald head and gold earring of Mr. Clean, the ammonia henchman. If pneumonia was anything like that, it couldn’t be good.

My mother took me home, where the dinosaurs had been grazing and battling in blissful ignorance on the rug. I was tucked into bed and ministered to night and day. I still didn’t understand what all the fuss was about – I didn’t feel that terrible; certainly not as bad as when I had strep throat – but everyone was very nice to me, even my older brother and sister.

Apparently, I lived. For many years afterward, I would brag to anyone who would listen that I had once survived pneu-monia. But through some vagary of word-association, I would add boastfully that I had also had a-mmonia. Now I would like to claim that I was fully aware of the clever wordplay, but of course, I wasn’t. As for the raised eyebrows that greeted my announcement, I interpreted them to mean that the listeners were in awe of my germ-surviving ability.

It wasn’t until much later that I cringingly realized my mistake. Of course, if I said something ridiculous like that today, everyone would just naturally assume I was just pulling their leg, and not that I had a saurian brain the size of a walnut. Right? Right???

Bed Posts and Bogeymen

As Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say on Saturday Night Live, "It's always something..."

My daughter worries about Global Warming, as well she should. I guess every generation has its bogeyman. When I was younger than she, during the cold heart of the Cold War, I used to live in fear of Soviet nuclear missiles striking the Bay Area. I can remember poring over maps in the SF Chronicle that highlighted likely targets, surrounding them with overlapping circles to indicate the extent and levels of destruction expected from hypothetical nuclear warheads of various megatons. Needless to say, the outlook was bleak. As tensions ebbed and flowed between Moscow and Washington, my only solace was that I would be assured of instant obliteration and would never know a thing. Small consolation, to be sure.

Fortunately, I'm still here, and while the Cold War has been replaced by similar threats from North Korea and Iran, I'm less worried these days. So, this weekend I undertook to repair a leaky window sill in my bathroom. (That may sound like a non-sequitor, but read on.) Kind of a tricky project, but as I tore out and replaced rotting wood, reinstalled the aluminum trim and neatly caulked everything, I reflected on how much more efficient I am at this sort of thing than I used to be. Today, I am all about making things just strong enough to last for the foreseeable future. Or, in theatrical terms (since I also do a bit of set design and construction), until just after closing night. Light and elegant appeals to me now, in stark contrast to how I used to build things.

Back in my youth, I sought the kind of solidity that one typically finds in 18th century Spanish Colonial furniture. Perhaps it was a survivalist instinct born of the Cold War, but I tended toward the massive "can't-deforest-the-planet-soon-enough" kind of construction. I was in this mind-set when, at the age of 14, I decided that I absolutely had to have a genuine captain's bed. You know, the kind with drawers underneath. And rather than simply going out and purchasing one, I was going to build it from scratch. Sort of.

Fortunately, my father liked to encourage this sort of activity. I presume he thought it was character-building. It certainly wasn't economical if you considered the cost of time and materials, but at least the time was my own. Heck, based on materials alone, it still wasn't economical.

We went to the Goodwill store in San Rafael and purchased a small chest of drawers, around which I would build the bed, since I didn't feel up to that level of carpentry. I knew vaguely what I wanted: several drawers along one side and a capacious cubby running the whole length, which could contain larger items, such as my skis. I could even hide in it, should the occasion arise - a combination "safe room" (slash) family crypt (slash) make-shift bomb shelter (see above).

Then I got to work. I churned out drawing after drawing on ¼ inch graph paper, taking into account the vagaries of dimensional lumber, the need for a secure fastening system and a list of materials required. I was stalling, but this was to be the bed of my dreams. Again, I was thinking archival construction, so I opted for a rigid frame of mostly 2x3 inch Douglas fir, lap-jointed and held together with stout 3-1/2 inch galvanized wood screws counter-sunk to a precise depth of 1-1/2 inches. Lest the mattress platform fail to support my Herculean 120 or so pounds, I opted for a sheet of 3/8 inch plywood on top. At this point, the bed was definitely in the heavy-weight category, tipping the scales at just under three thousand pounds.

The finishing touch was to be the siding. I hemmed and hawed for nearly a year over the choice of wood and the difficulty of mitering the siding's corners. Meanwhile, the bed languished in our basement.

Finally, my father had had enough. Get the thing completed was his loud-and-clear message, mixed in with a healthy dose of "you never finish anything you start" character assassination. He took out a second mortgage and we bought sixty linear feet of beautiful 3/4 x 10 inch clear redwood shelving. Mitering the corners turned out to be much easier than I feared, and the captain's bed was done at last. I can't recall how we managed to get it from the basement up to my room, though I think it may have involved earthen ramps and catapults, similar to the construction of the pyramids at Giza. But I finally had my bed and it was indeed spectacular. Architectural Digest inquired about doing a photo spread, but I preferred my anonymity.

Twelve years later, when I moved to Berkeley to attend acting school, the "bed-hemoth" went with me, having at one time been expanded to accommodate a more girl-friendly double mattress. At least I had modified it to be transported in two still-gigantic but manageable pieces. Two years later, I moved to Hollywood and tearfully bequeathed "Bed-zilla" to my housemate, Steve Schleimer. That was in 1984.

I sometimes wonder where that captain's bed has gone to. Does it still even exist, or has it been taken apart and used to build low-income housing in Emeryville? Perhaps I will never know. Or perhaps the world will end in fire someday, as I feared. As the smoke clears from the wreckage of our doomed civilization, the indestructible bed will be the only remaining structure among the smoldering ruins. Not even the long-heralded cockroaches will have survived. But, wait. Slowly the cubby door swings open and a young couple emerges into the eerie post-apocalyptic haze, holding hands and gazing in wonderment upon the exact piece of sturdy furniture they will need to re-populate the human race.

Whoever you are, Adam and Eve from the future, you're welcome.

Mud Puddles and Road Rash

"Keep the rubber side down." That's the somewhat macabre admonition that some bicyclists say to each other in parting. In other words: Try not to crash. Fortunately, for most of us recreational cyclists, hitting the deck is rare (knock on wood). The last time I fell off, I was out mountain bike riding at Rush creek with my friend, Jim Phelps. I couldn't have been going more than five miles per hour when my front wheel got bogged down in a mud puddle. I squelched gently into the soft ooze and laughed. My first thought was that I should stop by Starbuck's for a mocha, now that I was wearing a muddy badge of honor.

But falling on unforgiving tarmac is a different story. As you watch bike racing on T.V., you notice that crashes are a regular thing for professionals. I lost count of how many times Lance Armstrong went down in this year's Tour de France. It also amazes me how often the riders are able to continue. Bloodied and bruised, they mount their machines and chase after the rapidly disappearing peloton (the main group of riders). Broken collarbones are very common, due to the angle of the fall onto the shoulder, but some riders are even able to continue despite that devastating injury.

My only experience crashing during a race was back when I was 16. At the suggestion of my riding buddy, Mark Linker, I joined the Marin Cyclists and began going to meets. Starting in the lowest rank, I managed to win my first race ever, a 30-mile loop from Nicasio, in Marin County, out to Olema and back. Actually, I thought I was riding in third or fourth place. I could see a couple of riders ahead of me, so I dug deep and passed them, only to find out they were in the next class up. That felt really good.

My second race also started in Nicasio. It was a very cold morning and, back then, I only had fingerless gloves. We rolled out into the brisk winter air and soon began climbing the nasty hill that rises away from Lake Nicasio and descends toward the Rouge et Noir Cheese Factory on the other side. I climbed with a small pack and stayed with them all the way to the top. Since I weighed only 120 pounds wringing wet back then, I lost contact on the descent, but caught up to the paceline on the flat. We were moving along nicely, though my fingers were by now numb from the cold. Just as we crested the short rise past the Cheese Factory, that changed.

Since my mind was also a bit frozen, I'm not sure what exactly took place, but I guess someone touched their brakes (a no-no in a paceline) and I overlapped the rear wheel of the rider in front of me. As our wheels came together, we both went down and the rider behind me went over the top of us.

When you're riding, you sometimes imagine what it might feel like to crash. Yet when it actually happened to me, it felt like... nothing. Things happened so fast I didn't have time to think. Suddenly, I was on the ground, sliding along the pavement, my shoes still strapped to their pedals. We came to a jumbled stop and I took inventory. For me, at least, all I had was a very healthy road rash on my legs, hip and shoulder. The rider behind me broke his wrist.

The following cars stopped to help clear the wreckage and my bike was put in the back of a pick-up. Even if I had wanted to re-mount, my frame was now bent. The more seriously-injured rider was transported to the hospital and I got in the back of someone else's station wagon. Since there was nothing much to do about my injuries, we followed the remainder of the race and I can remember watching the finish sprint vividly. As one, the peloton got out of their saddles and immediately there was a tremendous pile up with riders and bikes flying everywhere. I heard that one rider dislocated his hip, so I was kind of glad not to have been involved.

My parents picked me up and took me home, where I was more upset at my bent-up bike frame than my own scraped-up human frame. My dad said not to worry, and carted my bike off to the local bike shop, where they restored its bikeyness to like-new.

My injuries took a little longer to heal. The scabs limited practically any kind of movement - except cycling. As soon as my bike was fixed, I got on and was surprised how easy it was to turn the pedals. I guess all the wounds were in just the right places.

As I watch bike racing today, I think about that crash and what it must be like to repeat it several times a year, or even within a race. Cycling professionals are truly a tough lot. Bob Roll, a famous cyclist and commentator on the Versus network, says that if you're not crashing, you're not going fast enough.

I also think about how the fear of crashing was more painful than the reality. There are so many things in life that are like that. If we can only put those worries aside and keep pedaling, the rest will sort itself out. Yes, there will still be crashes, even bad ones, but there will always be someone to pick us up, give us a ride home, and hopefully fix what's broken.

Until then, just be sure to keep the rubber side down.

Pegged Pants and Baggies

As I dropped my daughter off at school today (her 16th birthday!!), I noticed a very tall girl with very skinny legs wearing very skinny jeans. It made me think: How does she manage to pull those on? I also wondered if she knows the history of her current fashion statement. My guess is, probably not.

Of course, the immediate precursor would be the skin-tight "shrink-to-fit" jeans of the 1980s (still ten years before my daughter or the skinny-jeans girl were born). In particular, I recall the Jordache brand, mostly because of Gilda Radner's brilliant "Jewess Jeans" ad spoof on Saturday Night Live. To get their designer jeans to fit even tighter, some fashionistas would squeeze into them and then stew in a bathtub full of hot water until their pants "shrank-to-fit." Urban legend even tells of one girl (most likely, a friend of a friend of someone who heard about it from their cousin, who swears its true), who nearly asphyxiated herself in the process and had to be cut out of her jeans in the hospital emergency room.

But I want to take you back two decades further. Before skinny jeans. Before designer jeans. Back to the Lost Land of Pegged Pants.

The year was 1964, I was in the third grade, and the Beatles were just beginning to hit America. But in our household, the Beach Boys ruled. It was my sister, Kathy, who got the first portable stereo in the family, for her 12th birthday. Remember the kind where the turntable would fold down, you would stack up a bunch of LPs and they would come crashing down one-at-a-time as they were cued up? Yeah, one of those. And she introduced us to pop music. playing her Beach Boys albums around the clock. That fall, I learned everything there was to know about "wahinis," "hanging ten," "GTO's" and how to have "fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes her T-Bird away." It was also the year I was introduced to the exciting world of fashion.

Up to that point, I simply wore whatever my mother purchased at JC Penney. Clothing magically appeared in my closet and I put it on. But my sister had also received a sewing machine for her birthday and had started the mysterious process of "pegging" her pants. She wanted to know if I wanted to have my pants done, too? Sure, I replied, eagerly. I would do just about anything to reduce my nerd-quotient at Strawberry Point Elementary, which was rapidly approaching the school record. (Or rather, I would do anything unless it actually involved me being less of a nerd.)

I brought her my cotton-polyester school slacks and she had me put them on inside-out. Next she pinned the seams on both sides of each leg tight to the skin. I was leery of all those pins, but she was careful not to stick me. Getting the pants off after this process was a tricky, but easier with two persons. Finally she sewed up the seams on her new Singer and, voila, instant coolness.

That is, unless somebody unfortunately witnessed you trying to either put them on or take them off.

Getting into pegged pants wasn't too difficult, just odd. It involved putting plastic Baggies over both feet, so your legs could slide into them like a pair of pasty-white sausages being stuffed into their casings. Once on, the pegged pants did give off a distinct Beach Boys vibe, though sitting down in them was nearly impossible. I have been searching without much luck for a picture of me wearing them. Perhaps that's a good thing; seeing a photo of her dad looking impossibly cool might permanently scar my daughter.

Getting out of pegged pants was a whole different story. The Baggie trick just did not work in reverse. Instead, you started by peeling them off down to your feet. That's where the fun began. It's surprising how little leverage you can get while trying to tug your pants cuff off one foot, with the other still entrapped. No angle is effective. If my sister was nearby, she would lend a hand, but I was often helpless. The struggle could go on for many minutes, hours, or even days as I was held hostage in these larger versions of the old practical joke: the Chinese finger trap.

If you needed to take them off at the doctor's office or at school, you were basically out of luck. More often than not, I would end up tearing the pegged seams at the cuff, which resulted with my formerly cool pegged pants having a bizarre little bell-bottom flare at the bottom.

Thankfully, my infatuation with pegged pants faded quickly, and I went back to wearing the Magic Closet Clothes. It would be another three years before I would venture out again into the turbulent waters of contemporary fashion. That would be in 1967, during the Summer of Love. But that is another story, for another time.

Boats and Goats

I'm not afraid of speaking in public. I'm not even that afraid of dying. I am afraid of being alone.

There is an episode of The Twilight Zone (or maybe it was its much scarier twin, The Outer Limits) where a colony of space explorers that have been stranded for decades on a barely habitable distant planet are finally rescued. However, there is one leader who still believes in their initial mission and tries to get everyone to stay. They reason with him, but he retreats into their cave, sure of himself and convinced that others will follow his example. The final scene shows him emerging just as the rocket blasts off, with all the rest of the colonists aboard. Only then does he realize what a fool he's been to stay behind. I remember being very moved by that episode, and a little bit freaked out.

When I was pretty young, seven or eight, I was playing with my trucks in the coarse granite sand along the single lane road that leads to White Wolf Lodge in Yosemite, where we often went for summer vacation. I was in the meadow right across from the lodge itself, so somebody knew where I was and it was no big deal that I was by myself (very different times back then, for sure). Hearing the sound of tires, I looked up to see my parents driving away down the road in our blue-green Ford Falcon station wagon. The image is still vividly etched into my memory.

I dropped my toys and started sprinting up the road, yelling my head off. My dad heard me and stopped. I'm not sure what I was thinking; though it certainly wasn't that they would suddenly abandon their youngest child on the side of the road and move away to parts unknown. Their explanation was that they were just out for a short sight-seeing drive and didn't think I would want to come along. They were probably right, but there was no way I was not going at this point. I left my toys right where they were and hopped in. We ended up stopping at many scenic overlooks, which turned out to be pretty cool.

Another time, I was much older and in high school. A good friend, John Slater, was planning to sail solo to Hawaii. To help him on his journey and provide a place for him to dock once he got to his destination, our history teacher, Mr. Sherman, had voted him into the (I believe) Santa Venetia Yacht Club, whose membership had now ballooned to two. That part taken care of, John had acquired a small boat and was launching it from the dock at my other friend, John Wuoltee's, house in Strawberry. From there he was going to sail it over to Sausalito to be fitted out for his voyage. Pretty heady stuff for someone still in high school.

Though I had my license, my parents were still at work with their cars, so I had arranged for John Wuoltee to pick me up for the launching. Unfortunately, wires must have gotten crossed and I was left cooling my heels in our driveway, waiting for the ride that never came. I don't recall being angry, just terribly forgotten and alone.

As it turned out, I apparently missed quite an event. Mr. Slater's boat was launched and nearly sank during the short four or five mile passage to Sausalito. I never had a chance to witness his sailing skills, but the seaworthiness of his boat (or lack thereof) put a possibly fortuitous cap to that particular adventure, which had the distinct possibility of ending badly.

Anyway, the saying goes that we're born alone, and we die alone. But in between those two inscrutable events there is also a lot of aloneness, which nature abhors as much as it does a vacuum. Animals in a pasture will always bond, even if they are of different species. At our home in Mill Valley, our sheep hung out every day with our goat, just to have some companionship. I guess I am no different.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I am lying in bed next to my wife, Pat, I will contemplate her sleeping form and imagine my life without her. I am often overwhelmed with gratitude that she has chosen to spend her life with me.

If you're reading this, sweetheart, thank you for sharing the pasture.