My years in Anderson Valley, from the late 1950s through the late 1980s, included a fair share of medical issues for my parents, my siblings and myself. When my parents’ summer camp, El Rancho Navarro, was in session, medical issues multiplied — perfectly natural with an additional 120 children on hand, even with a nurse on staff. Stuff happened and when it did, we depended on local and — on serious stuff — regional resources, with the hope that they were up to the challenge.
Posts published in “Essays”
So it started out to be a field trip to Bear Valley on the Lake/Colusa County line north off Highway 20 to look at wildflowers. Load mom, daughter and grandson in the Subaru, pack a…
The Houston Rockets made the playoffs this year and I’m particularly interested in the Rockets because Jeremy Lin is on that team. I am fascinated by Lin’s career and what I think his experience reveals about professional basketball, cultural mediocrity, economic collapse and catastrophic climate change.
In November of 1969 three boats took members of twenty tribes from all over the country to occupy Alcatraz, reclaiming it as “Indian land and demanding fairness and respect for Indian Peoples.” The spokesman for the Indians was a Mohawk from New York named Richard Oakes, who offered the U.S. Government “$24 in glass beads and red cloth.” Oakes said, “We hold The Rock,” and that became the movement’s motto. Unfortunately, a few months later his 12-year-old daughter fell from a three-story structure in the prison and died. He left the Island shortly after, as did many others during the 18-month occupation.
There's an old teddy bear in this house. He takes the blame. A half jar of pickles shrinks to nothing but brine overnight: Teddy did it. The potato chip bag gets opened and diminished before…
I first came to Willits in late summer of 1971 because a fellow worker at the Tides Bookstore in Sausalito invited me up to see the property his girlfriend’s family bought north of Willits. Daniel,…
We’re well into the Golden Anniversary of the sixties and I’ve scheduled in the Free Speech Movement’s Reunion in September in Berkeley. I expect to be in Paris with other “soixantehuitards” in 2018 if my…
For my birthday last October my brother gave me the coolest warmest San Francisco Giants jacket, a stylish melding of orange and black fabric with a smallish team insignia on the chest directly over my heart, and a grandiose insignia on the back, centered under the word GIANTS writ in large white capital letters outlined in orange. Little did I suspect that this jacket would prove to be a magical loosener of the tongues of countless men and women who had previously looked upon me with suspicion or indifference.
The curse that shaped the life of my grandmother, the lives of my mother and her brother, the life of my brother, and my own life, has finally been lifted. My brother and his wife lifted the curse, and their daughter Olivia, my charming niece, is the prime beneficiary of their heroic reversal of our family pattern, though I feel gifted by that reversal, too.