Chapter 6 – Metamorphosis (cont.) By Christmas I was back in Berkeley, sharing a house with a young woman met through someone I had known in my “double life” before I left the previous spring. I took an office job at the University, but by spring there was no holding me to a rational, responsible 8-5 life any longer. In April I packed my few belongings and hopped a bus to Pacific Grove and Emerson College. The friend I had met in Indiana was already gone but there were a dozen or so “pre-hippies” there doing various forms of intellectual and artistic endeavor. We all lived in a big old three-story house surrounded by a high hedge like the secret garden. For me it was an epiphany, a mini-renaissance. I wrote poetry fiendishly, read voraciously, made metal sculpture and drawings, learned to play the guitar and sang folk songs, and tried marijuana. During this time, we all heard Dylan’s first recording. I lived in an attic room and had lovers, finally meeting one who was romantic enough to take the next leap with me on my journey. That July when I turned 24, despite much begging and pulling out of hair by my parents, I left with him to hitchhike from Portland, Oregon across the middle of the country, down a bit south into Louisville, and then on up to New York City. It was hot, dangerous, exhilarating, and successful. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: Life is a constant battle between the heart and the brain. But guess who wins. The skeleton.
Today I am grateful for: Dictionaries
End of Day – 8:49 pm
+ = Get to go see The Manchurian Candidate tomorrow.
- = Trying to do anything mental while dripping sweat is a real bust.

Addendum to Moscow segment (upon request)

Letter Home September 1962 (click here)

Autumn (written same time)

they let me in to look this time
the prisoners with their golden mouths come out
(you will see bleeding says the guard)
we watch
the fingers of the riflemen are fevered
the condemned have taken hands
(it isn’t ever easy but they die such
sudden colors
says the guard)
NOW
and the lives already gone are thrown against the
wall
(it never lasts long says
the guard they’re brave
and he is crying

Chapter 6 – Metamorphosis (cont.) For the next three months we lived a truly surreal life. Housed in a dorm at Moscow University in a tiny apartment that consisted of two adjoining rooms, we watched the slavic trees turn color and then the snow begin by mid-October. We gave American jazz recordings to Russian students who were wildly hungry for music from the outside world where they could not yet travel. We felt the tension toward Americans as the Cuban crisis evolved. We went to the Bolshoi opera and saw Khrushchev and his wife in their special seats. We ate hearty Russian bread and borscht. And before a month was over, I knew I would leave. So in the first week of December I stepped onto the train again, this time alone, and headed out to Helsinki for the long trip home, leaving behind the boy I had grown up with and whom, it turned out, I would never see again. Terrified and empowered, I rode into the night. It was the first thing I had really ever done independently and I had to break some hearts to do it. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: If you make ships in a bottle, I bet the thing that really makes your heart sink is when you look in and there at the wheel is Captain Termite.
Today I am grateful for: Little cat doors so you don’t have to open the door for them every two minutes
BLOGGING FORWARD TO: bd47 who writes intelligently from the heartland (OK, Indiana) about politics, his family, trees, medicine and other fascinating subjects.
End of Day – 7:59 pm
+ = Watching such an original and moving video about the joys of reading called Stone Reader – will review at a later date.
- = Sick of how every damn TV news program is rightwing. Well, of course, except for Jon Stewart and, interestingly, John McEnroe’s new show (well OK it’s a talk show but it’s political too).

Chapter 6 – Metamorphosis (continued) In August 1962, we left Indiana, flying out of New York on Icelandic Airlines with a stopover in Reykyavik and another in Gothenberg, Sweden before landing in Copenhagen. After an overnight stay and a bit of sightseeing, we headed by train through Germany to Paris. We checked into a tiny hotel on the Left Bank and in the next two weeks, while my husband studied at the Bibliotheque Nationale, I wandered about the streets of Paris alone, blissfully soaking up all the sounds and smells of this poet’s dream of a city and even managing a tryst with a handsome young French actor I met quite by chance. My marriage was becoming increasingly tense as we traveled further into our fate. We left Paris, again by train, in the first week of September, and after another few days in Copenhagen took a Soviet steamer to Helsinki, stopping briefly in Stockholm, and there we boarded a train for the thousand-mile ride to Moscow for which the tickets cost $23 each. Once inside the Russian border, it was like stepping into the past. The train itself was fast and modern, created by Stalin to impress the world, but the passengers were dressed in poor peasant clothes and one even carried a small pig. Approximately 24 hours later we arrived in Moscow. (to be continued)

Deep Thought:  You know what makes good hair for a snowman? Real hair. Don’t ask me why, but it works.
Today I am grateful for:  The new plastic water bottles that hold 8 glasses.
End of Day – 8:48 pm
+ = Kerry did the best I’ve seen him do so far at not being wooden in his speech at the Convention tonight.
- = Had a nasty experience at work today, a real gut punch. Bottom line is it was about feeling disrespected. Reminded myself just in time that I can’t afford to do apoplexy at this stage in my life. Hoo boy I was mad there for a minute.

Chapter 6 – Metamorphosis (cont.) But in the end, the truly last desperate decision was for both of us to go on the journey to Moscow. The U.S. had an exchange program then which sent 12 students to study in Russia for a year while a dozen Russian students came here. If a spouse had a fair command of the language they could come along and with three years of Russian behind me I passed the test. By June 1962, we were at Indiana University in Bloomington for a summer of preparation, along with all the other American students who were going. As always, my husband was buried in his work and I had much free time. I made a friend during this time who influenced the forking my path was taking. She was a few years younger than I, but very bright and talented, and an early renegade of the type I would soon become. At the end of summer, as we left the country flying East, she traveled West to the coast to a tiny utopian community near Monterey, California called Emerson College. From that moment on, it became a place in the world that I could set my course for when I broke for freedom. I was now 23. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: One time I don’t think you should listen to your body is when it says “I’m dead.”
Today I am grateful for: The Democratic Convention keynote speaker – Barack Obama
End of Day = 8:30 pm
+ = Forgot to mention read a dandy book of short stories during jury duty. World Famous Love Acts by Brian Leung. One of those sets of stories where the characters all have a connection to a certain town. Perfect for jury duty reading.
- = The net is slow as a slug tonight. Or maybe it’s my ancient Mac. Or maybe it’s just ancient me.

Chapter 6 (cont.) I began to think of ways to extricate myself from marriage, including spending time with other interesting men I met – a sculptor, a medical student, a poet. I decided I would go to Israel and live on a kibbutz. I wrote letters to one and was accepted to come, and I began to study Hebrew and attend Israeli folk dancing classes. My husband had decided to apply for a fellowship to study in Moscow during the 1962-63 school year, and I planned to spend this time in Israel rather than go with him if he received it. In the summer of 1961 as I turned 22, one of the last-ditch efforts to save the marriage was a hike with two of our student friends along the John Muir Trail taking seven days to cross five 12,000-foot passes. High on this brutal gifted mountain, the noise of its water like a hymn, the stars shining, pure like nuns, in their cathedral, I stand exhausted on the cold, gray rocks – at last a pilgrim. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: The other day I got out my can opener and was opening a can of worms when I thought, “What am I doing?!”
Today I am grateful for: Having a car with air conditioning even though it takes about 15 minutes to cold up.
End of Day – 8:50 pm
+ = Survived second day of jury duty, even started getting a kind of zen hang of it all, and was not called for a trial.
- = As I was sitting next to a woman who made random jabbing motions with her hands and talked to herself on the bus this morning (it seems 80% of bus riders are poverty-stricken and physically and/or mentally ill), I thought sadly of the dog sleeping on the sidewalk next to the young woman who asked me for money and looked like she should be in rehab as I passed during my lunch break from jury duty the day before.

Chapter 6 (cont.) In spite of having developed an intense phobia of confined places after this experience and being prescribed a heavy-duty anti-anxiety drug, I went back out at once and found another secretarial job with the Agricultural Publications Department at UC Berkeley, but this time the atmosphere was so much more mellow that over the next year-and-a-half I began slowly to unwind. At this time we moved to a little house high in the Oakland hills perched at the top of a long flight of stairs among towering eucalyptus trees. Except for a Christmas visit to the farm in Oregon, this would be our home until we left California in the spring of 1962. My husband spent most of his time in his study working hard toward his Master’s degree. It was now that I began to listen to classical music and read poetry on my own. I began to mention drinking California wines in the letters home (which were still frequent). One day I was in a record store and heard Joan Baez, the first memory I have of discovering folk music. I loved it. I began to write poetry of my own and in the spring of my 21st year sent my first poem home. That summer our marriage was struggling. I felt at loose ends, out of sync, fluttering around inside myself, the feelings starting to falter themselves out in poetry. I couldn’t have been more emotionally vulnerable, and one day through a family friend I met a young man who was also a poet and knew much more about writing than I. He paid attention to me for qualities that my husband did not seem to see, and from this point on it was just a matter of time before I would strike out on my own. Years later, in my 50′s I returned to college to major in French directly due to my introduction to French prose poetry at this time. It has remained the style of my own writing. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: I wish I could shrink down to the size of an ant. And maybe there would be thousands of other people shrunken down to ant-size, and we would get together and dig tunnels down into the ground, and live there. But don’t ever call us “ants,” because we hate that.
Today I am grateful for: Online bus schedules
End of Day – 8:55 pm
+ = Survived first day of jury duty.
- = Entertainment in the Jury Assembly Room consists of a big TV screen right at the front with no sound, torn and old magazines, snack machines full of sugar and salt, rows of cardboard people with headphones on, and the really cool four people who brought laptops and plugged them into the wall.

Skipping the usual Things That Refresh My Soul Sunday segment today to get on with Chapter 6 so I can get on with Chapter 7. (For other chapters, see here.)

But to begin at the beginning… In August 1959 we drove from Oregon to California, renting our first apartment in Oakland. In September, we began our classes at Berkeley, my husband his first year of graduate school and I, my senior year. The campus was enormous and the system different than it had been in Washington – quarters rather than semesters. I registered for 7 classes, and by the end of the first month I was so overwhelmed that I withdrew from school. I felt panic and guilt to be disappointing everyone’s high expectations, but I went immediately to the state employment office and took the first job for which I interviewed. Of all the odd places, it was in the research department of a small plant that manufactured a lightweight panel used in aircraft construction. However, it wasn’t the scientific side of this job that impacted me – it was the social aspect. One of only two women in a department of a dozen male researchers, I did secretarial work that was no particular challenge, but I was also expected to participate in lunch-hour bridge games in a tiny library with neon lights in the ceiling. Never having been a cardplayer and certainly not anything as complicated as bridge, I discovered that the learning curve was intense and the game was being played with surprising hostility. To make a long story short, I lasted an amazing 10 months at this job. One day, the pressure of the bridge-playing, hard-driving atmosphere and an impending job review caused me to simply walk out the door and not return. I had just turned 21. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: It’s funny, but when you look at an old man, then you look at a photo of him when he was a young man, then you look at the old man, then the photo, back and forth, pretty soon you’ll do whatever anybody tells you to.
Today I am grateful for: Bunzilla
End of Day – 8:40 pm
+ = Feel reasonably ready to get up early, take the bus down to scary downtown Portland and do jury duty tomorrow – and please don’t write and tell me how much you’d love to do jury duty.
- = Granddaughter fractured big toe – owwww! Not on my watch though thank god.

It’s been a milestone kind of year actually, 2004. Today I turn 65, an age associated with retirement (and did begin in March to retire to part-time from 20 years at the same job). By the end of the year, it will be 20 years of Recovery for me, god willing. And in a few days, a year of Xanga. I joined Xanga to push myself to complete my life story that I began to write 10 years ago. My plan has been to write a five-page chapter for each five-year period of my life by first scrapbooking all the detritus I could find – letters, photos, etc., then writing it, then adding it to a web site that will eventually hold the whole thing. The decision to do this was three-fold – to come full circle and ground myself in my life, to keep my creative chops in working order, and to leave something behind for future family history. So it seems fitting to begin to post Chapter 6 today:
(for previous chapters click here)
_________

Chapter Six – Metamorphosis In the next five years of my life, between ages 20 and 25, I dropped out of college; got my first job; began to write poetry; travelled to Russia with my husband by way of Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and a 20-hour train ride from Helsinki to Moscow; left my marriage after three months there; travelled alone out again by train to Helsinki; and flew back to New York via Iceland. Returning to California, I worked at UC Berkeley for a minute; spent three months near Monterey in a utopian community school; hitchhiked with a boyfriend from Oregon to New York City; worked at the United Nations; met my daughter’s father; traveled with him by freighter to Africa and into Spain, where we lived on the Balearic Islands for six months; and returned to New York by way of Paris, Brussels, and Iceland, once again traveling alone. Within another six months I would be back in California and never leave the west coast again. In those five years, the direction of my life was fractured like a tree limb in a high wind. My future would become a digging out from the wreckage that followed. (to be continued)

Deep Thought: Instead of a welcome mat, what about just a plain mat and a little loudspeaker that says “welcome” over and over again?
Today I am grateful for: The child in my heart
End of Day – 8:27 pm
+ = Nice birthday breakfast with friends.
- = Heat still up at 100, so pretty much kept my day to a crawl. Heard it’s dropping tomorrow.

Friday Five

1. What is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?
I don’t know if they thought of it this way as the nicest thing they could do, but I’m grateful that my parents got me here. I have no idea if there are other worlds – before, after, or parallel – but I would hate to have missed this one. I always thought the idea of reincarnation was kind of creative – getting to come back and back and back until you’ve reached a point where everything felt totally the best it could be and you did the best you could, and then poof…….Nirvana. Even better.
2. What’s the nicest thing you’ve done for someone else?
I feel pretty good about having spent virtually every Saturday with my grandchildren for the past 12 years. Because of my romance with chemicals, the lights were on and nobody was home a lot when my own kids were little. I did my best considering.
3. What one thing do you wish you had done?
I wish I had found a lifelong companion.
4. What is your biggest regret?
That I lost so many years of being right here in reality with all its feelings and ups and downs and all its opportunities because of #3.
5. What is your greatest accomplishment?
On December 5, 1984 I chose to seek Recovery and have stayed here ever since.
Deep Thought: One good thing about hell, at least, is you can probably pee wherever you want to.
Today I am grateful for: Wall thermometers that tell what the temperature is outside and inside at the same time
BLOGGING FORWARD TO: firespider who writes delicate, introspective, autobiographical poems (and the occasional short story) of discovery.
End of Day – 8:58 pm
+ = Finished Chapter 6 of my bio after weeks of preparation! Will start posting tomorrow. Thanks for birthday wishes (a little bird blabbed – I was going to stay under the radar).
- = It got to 102 today so much sweating and brain melt.