Before the Wind Comes Up

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Spring comes early to the North Coast, and with it comes the wind. There are very few days in the Spring when the air is still, and many more when the house is buffeted all day by wave after wave of cold, thundering marine air.

Some nights the wind picks up around 4 am, loud enough to wake me up. I can feel it testing the give of the glass panes on my window, like a crazed tympanist tuning a drum. Even though I am well-protected and warm, I reach for a pillow to protect my head from the blasts.

This is a wind that works on all levels—the exterior and the deeply interior. Some days I have only to look at the wind blowing outside to feel it at work in my own mind, tearing loose what is hastily nailed down and forcing the trees to anchor their roots even deeper.

This morning I looked out through windows glazed with a season’s worth of salt spray and saw the treetops motionless against the sky. Throwing on a light sweater, I took the dog outside for an early walk in the sweet light of May Day. It was a morning when everything seems possible.

Even when still, the wind is a palpable presence here. It danced in a slow-moving swirl around me, full of energy but relaxed, letting the dew hang on the tips of the tall grass until it ended up on Vince’s fur, or slowly steamed away in the sun.

On other walks I have felt halfway around the folly of my clothes choice. I prefer to think of dressing as giving instructions to the elements on how to behave, the result being that I am frequently mad at myself for not dressing warmer. But today, even with just a t-shirt and thin sweater on, I was never cold.

That in itself seemed like a hopeful sign that something new was possible, was in fact presenting itself right there in that moment. And it felt like if I just walked one more circuit in that perfect balance of cold and warm, I would fall into synch with it too. The door that had formed from Winter’s blasts and then blew itself open in the Spring would be there, and I would have the eyes to see it and step through.

Usually my reverie gets punctured in some way before I return to my house and get to work. But today nothing has interrupted the flow of that golden energy. In fact, as the day matures toward afternoon the treetops still hover in disbelief, waving quietly to themselves and letting the sun penetrate their innermost branches.

In this morning of grace I felt inspired to write. Miraculously, the day has cooperated, and this blog of my heart that I have left unattended for too long finally has a new entry. I feel whole again.

It is still a time of stripping away in this country. Too many people are struggling too hard, far too much of the time. But something new and wonderful is most surely rising up, with all the force of Spring and a gale wind behind it. If you step outside, maybe you can feel it too.

When the Past Comes Back to Save Us

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Memory is an odd thing: slippery as a fish, shapeshifting and disappearing with the flick of its tail. We call our memories ours as though we had some dominion over them. But nobody knows why memories surface when they do, after decades of absence.

In his final years, my grandfather was tormented by a rhyme from his schooldays that he could only remember part of. It was a verse listing the presidents, and each time we visited he would recite what he knew: “Washington, Adams and Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe. Adams again, then…”

He begged my father to look it up for him, ask a librarian, do something to ease his mind by recalling the rest of the verse. Each time my father promised he would, though I could tell by the look on his face that he would not. He never did.

The past can haunt us, but it can also come back to save us.

It was the Spring of 2008 when out of the blue I remembered my first piano recital, in 1967. I was five years old, the youngest student and therefore first on the program. Our recital was held at the Chapel of the Chimes in downtown Oakland, with its beautiful Julia Morgan architecture.

The room seemed cavernous to me, and my family sat on a pew several rows back. I remember feeling confident about my piece, and calm about playing it in front of everybody. When my name was called, without hesitation I walked up to the front and sat down, played my piece, took a bow, and returned to my seat. That was that.

What I remembered most in the Spring of 2008 was how matter-of-fact that performance had felt. There was no moment of hesitation, none of the agony and nerves of later recitals and performances. I had no idea why the memory had surfaced, but used it as an opportunity to reflect on my current life of public speaking and teaching. Did I ever feel so calm and confident about performing now? Would I ever find my way back to that simplicity?

When a memory from the distant past revisits us, we turn it over in our minds for a few hours or days and then it recedes again. This memory did not. For weeks it kept returning, as I planned workshops, traveled and taught. Then, that Summer Solstice, my father died.

His death was quite sudden, and took us all by surprise. I was about to fly to Portland and teach, so needed to coordinate with my family to make sure his service was scheduled for right after I returned. That’s when I learned that his funeral would be held at the Chapel of the Chimes.

I had always intended to speak at his funeral, to honor what an important figure he was in my life. Now I learned that neither my sisters nor my mother wanted to. I would be the only one of us to speak, and therefore first on the program.

How could I possibly rise from my seat and proclaim that my father was dead? Because if I spoke about him in the past tense he surely would be gone, and therefore his return would be impossible. In that extreme, surreal state of grief, writing his obituary and then his eulogy, flying and planning and teaching and returning to speak again, returning to the scene of my earliest memory of public performance, seated now in the front row of a room that seemed so very small, that memory saved me.

By some miracle the words had come that I wanted to say. I wrote them down. I felt calm, sitting next to my mother waiting for the service to start. When it was my turn I got up, went to the lectern, said my piece, thanked the crowd, and sat back down again. It was done.

That simplicity had returned in the moment I needed it most. Unmoored by grief, there was no part of me left to be nervous or insecure. There was just this piece, the delivery of it, making people laugh and cry, and then the long drive home, wondering all the way what had just happened, how I had been so lucky to have a memory come like a lifeboat and carry me through rapids that I hadn’t even known were going to be there.

What Would Sarah Winchester Do Now?

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Amid all the national clamor for sane gun safety laws, one forgotten figure keeps coming to my mind: Sarah Winchester. The heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, Sarah felt hounded by the spirits of those who had died by those rifles—Native Americans, Civil War soldiers, and many others. In 1884 she moved to California and bought a farmhouse in San Jose, where she ordered construction to proceed around the clock to trap and confound those restless, vengeful spirits.

I visited the Winchester Mystery House with my kids several years ago, during a trip to PantheaCon. What struck me then were the parallels between the Spiritualist circles that Sarah Winchester moved in 100 years ago, and the New Age community still so prevalent in the South Bay. They shared the belief that the spirit outlasts the body, and can be communicated with through channeling and other methods. Both provided a means for (primarily) women to cope with the loss of loved ones, and to experience a kind of spiritual transcendence not found in established religions.

Today what strikes me about Sarah Winchester is not her troubled personal story but the very fact that she felt responsible for how her fortune was made. To feel answerable to the victims of gun violence—is this even on the radar of the people now made wealthy by the Glock, the Bushmaster, and other weapons flooding our streets and killing innocent children?

Spiritualists in the 19th century were generally liberal—most abhorred slavery and were in favor of women’s suffrage—yet stayed focused on the spiritual realm. Women of that era did not have much political power, even those of great wealth such as Sarah Winchester. But today the social landscape has completely changed, and particularly around gun violence women are flexing real muscle.

If Sarah Winchester were alive today, maybe she would be an active member of the Women Donors Network, which just kicked off the Women United For campaign to take a leadership role on the issue of gun violence prevention. In an era where women’s activism is changing the game of national politics, she would certainly find more constructive avenues to channel her deep grief and guilt.

Perhaps her nearly 40 year project was simply the result of an addled mind, a harmless hobby for a wealthy eccentric. Maybe she was better off donating anonymously to local charities and living alone with her ghosts. But somehow I think Sarah Winchester might rest easier today knowing that the cause of her private torment is now being acted on by the entire nation.

We may never hear of a single wealthy gun magnate who is currently grappling with a guilty conscience. Perhaps they don’t exist, or maybe their are viewed as personally weak rather than principled.

Either way, the numbers of innocent dead have grown too large, their stories too anguished for us to ignore. And if we do finally enact universal background checks and outlaw assault weapons, I think the Winchester Mystery House should be part of the story of how America confronted its revolutionary roots and eventually, after too many generations, turned away from violence.

Magic is a Way of Living

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In September of last year, I posed a question on Facebook about magic:

How do you define magic? What is it? How does it work?
I’ve never liked Dion Fortune’s definition, that magic is “the art of changing consciousness at will.” I’m thinking of writing an article about why it’s so bad, but first I’d like to hear what others think. No pressure, mind you…

Little did I expect such an overwhelming response: 55 generous, thought-provoking comments by a range of brilliant people. Re-reading them now feels like being in the best graduate seminar ever. Needless to say, it has taken me a while to digest it all.

My impetus for asking the question was to continue the work I started in The Baby and the Bathwater, and examine the foundations of my spiritual training. I want to explore what I was taught versus what I now believe about aligning with the elements, working magic, creating community and using ritual for transformation.

This will eventually lead to a bigger work, probably a rewritten and expanded version of my dissertation on the priestess. These days I write books one blog post at a time, so for now I just need to dive in. Defining magic seems like a good place to start.

“Magic is the Art of Changing Consciousness at Will”

I first heard Dion Fortune’s definition of magic in the early 80s, and it has taken me this long to figure out why I don’t like it. It turns out that 30 years is not an unreasonable amount of time in which to fully change our consciousness around a single issue—especially if you apply a great deal of willpower to it.

And that’s the key to why I rejected Dion Fortune’s definition.

The big fallacy in the “focused will” model of magic is that consciousness is hierarchical. The mind sets its goal, you use breath and a bunch of other stuff to clear the channel between your head and all those lower chakras, create a circuit of energy flowing into your solar plexus, then beam out that laser-focused will to activate your desires.

Even if this method works for some people, for me it just highlighted the model’s deeper flaws. Because what happens to the minority report? Sure, our minds can overpower just about any conflicting signals coming in, but is that really what we want?

I reasoned that the proof of this philosophy of magic would lie in studying the lives of those who live by it. Were there any teachers or practitioners out there whose lives as a whole I admired? What were they successful at manifesting, and what were the obvious caveats to their success? Most importantly, did they have healthy relationships? Were their children happy and thriving, or disturbed and struggling?

In the end, out of a few hundred I found maybe a handful of people who I felt were grounded and sane as well as successful at this type of magical practice. So I abandoned that approach entirely and turned to dreams, particularly dream incubation, to see how well that worked.

As I wrote here, dreams are an excellent means for both listening to and integrating that minority report. If there is something I want to manifest, I ask for dreams about it. Without exception, this has helped me be wiser in what I ask for and better able to integrate the changes that come.

What About the Body?

If consciousness is not hierarchical, what other methods can we use to change it? In my experience, transformation starts in the body, as far away from the head as possible, then slowly makes its way into our minds. And because deep wisdom arises in the extremities, the more focused and overpowering our will is, the more difficult it is for this emerging wisdom to register in our awareness.

Dreamwork helps. Trusting dreams means trusting the wild reaches of consciousness, following them and learning their logic. It really helps to do this with a solid group of friends who can help you identify those emerging patterns and keep your bearings at the same time.

But dreamwork can also be very heady. We need a physical practice too, like aikido or chi gung.

Aikido helped me learn how it feels when my will and mind are aligned and in right proportion with the rest of my body. It taught me at a far deeper level than any other practice how to expand my awareness, how to be aligned with the flow of power, how to move strongly with a centered focus that comes from the body as well as the mind. I use it every day.

The Consciousness of Everything

At last, I had found a combination of practices that enabled me to trust both what I asked for, and what I received. It was a much more complicated and demanding process than the one I’d been taught, but in the end felt so much simpler.

There were a number of responses to my original post that took a Taoist view of magic: being in the flow makes things happen. This is true, but it’s kind of like saying that jazz improvisation is easy, when making it look easy is actually the end of a very long process of mastery.

More than anything, magic is a study in paradox. So it was probably no coincidence that the other day I came across a great quote about magic by Carl Jung, a master at understanding paradox:

Everything that works magically is incomprehensible, and the incomprehensible often works magically. The magical opens spaces that have no doors and leads one out into the open where there is no exit. We need magic to be able to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible. Magic is a way of living. If one has done one’s best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place. (The Red Book, 314)

For now, “Magic is a way of living” is a good enough definition for me. Because magic is what you see and experience when a whole bunch of other things are finely-tuned and working well. Maybe it sometimes looks like a mere act of will and mindful focus, but the reality is so much more interesting, and rewarding.

Abortion, Small Town Iowa, 1927

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My grandmother, Dorothy Mary Gibson Roberts, was so lucky. When her first husband became jealous, then violent, and then brought a gun into the house, she removed the bullets, hid the gun, then called her father to come pick her up in Sioux City. He drove down the very next day, nearly being run off the road when my grandmother’s husband saw them leaving.

With the clothes on her back, she went home to Whiting, Iowa, to stay with her parents while she got a divorce and figured out what to do next. Meanwhile, Will Gibson protected his daughter Dorothy from a raging, harassing ex-husband, filing divorce papers for her, and arranging for an abortion when she found out she was pregnant. My grandmother was 25 years old.

Fram, as we called her, was reeling from the consequences of her choices:

“It was one of my minor disasters. I didn’t realize you had to be in love to get married. And I was not in love with Al. I liked him a lot, but I just had no affection—I didn’t love him. I knew immediately I had made a terrible mistake.”

When I interviewed Fram extensively for my senior thesis in 1983-84, I got the story of her abortion from her bit by bit, asking another question each time we met, until I had as much of the story as she was ever going to tell. According to Fram, both the town doctors performed abortions, and they did quite a lot of them.

“It was definitely illegal at that time. It wasn’t fun; it was supposed to be a disaster, but nowadays it’s no disgrace at all. I remember going up to their office. It was at night. But I don’t remember that it hurt or anything. I don’t remember anything about it. It apparently didn’t bother me mentally. I would have done anything not to have a child, because I knew that I’d made a horrible mistake.”

The doctor who performed my grandmother’s abortion was also the doctor who delivered her and her two brothers. My grandmother was so lucky: her family was white and middle-class, owned the car dealership in town, went to Church with the doctors and their families, and were part of a small-town fabric that valued independence and privacy. She was lucky because in Whiting, Iowa in 1927, the town doctors believed that women and their families should be able to make their own health care decisions, and that women were strong, resilient, and capable of reconciling having an abortion with their relationship to God.

Watching the national coverage of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I wonder where those doctors are now. Why is there just one abortion clinic for the entire state of North Dakota, only one in South Dakota, in Arkansas, and in Mississippi? Why don’t more Family Practice doctors and OB/GYNs offer abortion services to their patients in these states?

Really, I am the lucky one in this story. My grandmother was able to recover from her low point, work again as a pipe organist and then as a secretary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she met my grandfather. This time, she knew she was in love.

They married and had two daughters, one of whom is my mother. And my sisters, cousins and I got to have a feisty, independent, funny, straight-talking grandmother, who in spite of the pain of recalling that time did tell me this story, so I could tell others.

Abortion is part of women’s health care services. Access to safe and legal—and affordable—abortion is the best way to insure women’s health, and the health of their families. Abortion has always been performed in this country, and will always be, no matter what some backward state legislatures decree. But not everyone will be as lucky as my grandmother was.

Poetry, Inauguration, Land

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I’ve been sitting here watching President Obama’s second inauguration today, thinking about politics and ritual, about society and culture, and how even powerful, hard-won change can still seem, and maybe is, fragile.

Our country’s story in my lifetime has so often been written by violence. And every day that big story is not about tragedy but about the peaceful transfer of power, of a participatory democracy and civil society, I feel so moved I am riveted to the scene. So be it.

8th Annual Brigid Poetry Festival

This seems like a good time to start the ball rolling for the Brigid Poetry Festival, an outpouring of verse in honor of the Goddess Brigid, Patron Saint of Ireland. Already people are starting to post on the Poetry Festival’s Facebook Page that I have been curating for the past two years. I think this year’s silent poetry reading could be even larger and more inclusive than the last.

Here are two poems about the spirits of this land and the spirit of this country. The first is part of the ancient Navajo Mountain Chant, a nine-day ceremony of healing for individuals and blessing the whole tribe. It was witnessed and translated in 1884 by Irish immigrant Washington Matthews, who had served as a surgeon in the Civil War.

Twelfth Song of the Thunder

The voice that beautifies the land!
The voice above,
The voice of the thunder
Within the dark cloud
Again and again it sounds,
The voice that beautifies the land.

The voice that beautifies the land!
The voice below,
The voice of the grasshopper
Among the plants
Again and again it sounds,
The voice that beautifies the land.

Praise Song for the Day

The poet Elizabeth Alexander wrote this for Barack Obama’s first inaugural ceremony in January, 2009. I think it deserves to be read again today. All praise is due to love.

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Smoothing the Sands of Memory

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My sisters and I talk a lot about memory now. Perhaps this is inevitable as the four of us straddle the 50 divide—two already there, the other two taking quick gulps of 40-ish air before their inevitable plunge.

One sister is downloading apps that help her brain stretch in new ways. When another says she no longer likes playing the piano because reading music is too hard, the rest of us wonder. Is it about time she just said no to something she hated, or is this a convenient excuse to shut down the part of her brain that used to be quite good at reading music? We fear the slow constriction that shadows our choices, and the loss of supple youth each decision underlines.

Through the magic of Facebook, I am now in touch with more high school friends than I ever was after we graduated. The other day as my daughter told me about something that had really embarrassed her, I thought about the two most mortifying incidents in my youth.

One, a moment of bad judgment in the vicinity of my then-boyfriend’s parents, I remembered quite clearly. It was still embarrassing, but then I realized that both his parents were now dead. How was I supposed to feel about my hideous lapse of good sense now that it no longer mattered? Could I let it go—should I actually rake smooth the ground where that stone had forever tripped me? What, if anything, was the cost of forgetting?

The other incident happened in junior high school, as most embarrassing moments tend to do. I remember the two classmates who witnessed it, and how afterward I spent many nights tossing and turning in shame. And that’s all I now remember.

I could easily contact those two classmates now and ask them, but other than a vague recollection of us being outside the auditorium, I have no idea what actually happened. Was it something I said? Something someone said to me? The details of that heart-pounding moment have been completely erased, and all that remains is the shell that used to house the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me in junior high school.

I feel about this incident the same way I do when I misplace something: I am frustrated by my inability to remember what I did with a minor, semi-valuable possession. But perhaps this is more a blow to my pride than any cause for concern about my memory.

After my dad died, I looked forward to finally asking my mom the questions she would never have considered answering if he were within earshot. But just as she seemed to ease into that reflective, post-raw-grief phase, she stopped being able to remember. Not through any act of will, but by the forces of erosion my sisters and I now fear.

There is a difference, I think (I hope), between realizing we have forgotten something and not being aware of ever having known. I am grateful for the things my sisters remember about our childhood that I do not. I am pretty sure they feel the same way when I fill in the gaps for them. And we now know the importance of living lives that others have witnessed, and knowing that even when the details fade away, the etchings of our passage remain.

Office Supplies and the End of the World

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Last weekend my friend Claude told me a great story from the recent Bioneers Conference, where R. Carlos Nakai spoke about his recent trip to meet with Mayan elders.

Carlos Nakai asked these Mayan elders about the end of their calendar, and just what the heck it all meant. Was it really true that their ancient calendar was coming to an end next month?

They answered yes, that was true.

“Well,” he asked, “what happens then?”

To which the Mayan elders replied, “We make a new one.”

In that moment it all became clear to me. Maybe you see where I am going with this already. If not, just think of all the months and years we have had to endure the endless 2012 prophecies, the New Age screeds with terrible graphics, the Christian fundamentalist cults, the incessant Facebook posts about paradigm shifts, eclipses, stone tablets, and ominous political movements.

It has all been completely unbearable, but after hearing Claude’s story I felt instantly better. Because it turns out the solution to all this doom-mongering is not global social upheaval at all—far from it.

In the end, the only thing that can restore balance to our tattered world is something we really should have thought of sooner: office supplies.

When you think about it, office supplies have been at the root of so many world civilizations meeting their demise. Either they’re writing down things they shouldn’t, or hiding them somewhere then forgetting where they put them, or in some cases neglecting to record the most important things, and suddenly all is lost.

No one seriously considers paper clips, until it is too late. But now we are presented with a golden opportunity to reverse the trend and end this profound clerical error. All it will take is for each of us to go to our nearest office supply store, buy an adequate amount of paper (all sizes), pens (let’s get different widths and colors just in case), scissors and push pins, and send them to the Mayan elders, c/o Guatemala.

Then when everyone comes down from Mt. Shasta, or Macchu Picchu, or wherever else they’re going this Winter Solstice, they’ll fire up their mobile devices and there, like a modern-day Christmas miracle, will be a deluge of posts and re-tweets of pictures from the sacred council chambers of Central America, where the Mayan elders will have revealed their brand new calendar!

Then maybe our millennial fever will finally play itself out, and we can all get to work cleaning things up and solving tough problems, the stuff that post-its just won’t fix.

My Life as a Closet Techie

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Some of my friends were shocked a couple years ago when I told them I was going to open shop as a social media consultant. Maybe shocked is not the right word: they were outwardly calm and accepting, but inwardly they sidled away as though I might be contagious.

“What does this have to do with dreams?” they asked. “I didn’t know you knew about that stuff,” they said, while smiling. Talking about my work taught me just how many people still think the internet is a little too “newfangled,” and those who work with it somehow untrustworthy.

To be honest, at first I shared their sense of alarm. I felt the thrill of transgression as I started speaking about digital publishing. Why wasn’t I content to sit around and talk about dreams and feelings? What did I care about the latest technology anyway?

But then odd memories from childhood came floating to the surface, and before long I realized something about my life: I have always been a techie. So in the interest of helping others who may be carrying a similar, unspoken burden, here is the backstory on why you can sometimes find me talking to large rooms about Twitter.

The Filmstrips

Some of you may be too young to know the thrill I experienced in second grade, when our classrooms went from showing silent educational filmstrips to filmstrips with a companion LP! All our teacher had to do was put the record on, start the filmstrip, and advance the strip every time there was a “ding” in the narration.

It was a glorious new world, except for one thing: our teacher never seemed to advance the filmstrip at the right pace. Either she would get ahead of the narrator, or she’d miss a ding and we would be stuck in the past while the person on the record was talking about something else entirely!

This was my first lesson in the headaches of being an early adopter. I turned out to be one of the kids who reliably knew how many frames we were ahead or behind, so while trying to keep my voice low (can’t risk alienating the boys!) I’d tell my teacher, “go back two frames.” She learned to trust my comments, and I learned to never bring it up on the playground.

The AV Guys

Back then, the A/V Club was an exclusive cadre of boys who were the only ones in the school authorized to set up film projectors in our classrooms. I watched them mount the reel and thread the film through the machine, wind the tail end onto the second reel, and slap the little side door shut.

Sometimes they just left the machine there for the teacher to set up, and inevitably something wouldn’t work right. I was too intimidated to help with the machine, though I really wanted to. Instead, I focused on telling her when she got the focus right—a minor detail, perhaps, but so important to the end-user experience.

Heath Kits

Sometime before we were born, my dad had built a stereo receiver, turntable, and two speakers from a Heath Kit. I still remember the black turntable in its black hardwood box, with little bristles sticking out from one end of the tone arm. The needle towed a payload of fuzz behind it by the time it reached the end of the record, and if you weren’t careful it would make a terrible sound when  you plucked it off.

Whenever a new Heath Kit catalog arrived, I pored over it for hours. Along with all the radios and weather stations you could make an actual calculator, and even a very mysterious-sounding computer terminal. I had no idea what it did, but I wanted to build one so badly that I risked bugging my dad about it until he simply stopped responding. Perhaps he, too, was wary of being an early adopter. More likely, he preferred the privacy of his own thoughts when constructing something in the garage. I’ll bet he would’ve done it if I’d been a boy, though.

Control Data Institute

I still remember the commercials, which aired frequently during afternoon cartoon hours. A row of serious-looking men and women, all typing on terminals connected to giant mainframe computers. Control Data Institute was the place where you, too, could stop watching Dialing for Dollars and start a new career in data entry.

The place looked like Oz to me. I fantasized about dropping out of school to enroll. How difficult could that be? I could learn to do what they were doing. Maybe my grandparents would let me stay with them downtown while I took classes. The thought of having to finish junior high before I could do anything interesting was such a thorn in my side!

Digitizing Card Catalogs

While researching metadata and ebooks recently, I realized that my first on-campus job at Berkeley fits into this closet techie narrative, too. The summer before my freshman year, I was hired by a forward-thinking librarian at Doe Library to hand-enter card catalog information into their new computerized system. There we would sit for hours a day, at desks just large enough to hold a card catalog drawer, a computer terminal, and a keyboard. If I craned my neck I could see out the large upper story windows of the library onto the bustling campus below. I was in heaven.

It only lasted for the summer, but this was the perfect job for me, combining my love of books with my fascination for computers. The librarian took pride in the fact that she had hired young women as well as men, and I was thrilled that I hadn’t needed to go to Control Data Institute after all!

UNIX vs. DOS

Eventually I transferred to UC Santa Cruz, where every student had an account on the school’s UNIX system. You could go at all hours to any of the dimly-lit basement computer labs on campus, and either do weird programming things like the guys there were doing, or use the text editor to write your papers—and print them out on dot matrix printers!

I decided to give it a try, so went down and logged on. So far, so good. There were some printed instructions on mimeographed sheets, but try as I might I couldn’t quite grasp the concept of a “shell,” and half the time I got lost in the UNIX labyrinth trying to find the text editing program. The whole thing was a bit intimidating, and yet I never went to a tutorial session. I had lots of problems back then, but somehow I knew that learning UNIX would not solve any of them.

Fortunately, around that time my roommate came home with a DOS desktop computer. At last, a machine that did what I wanted it to do—and was fun to use! From then on, there was no turning back. I wrote everything I could on that DOS machine, where I could easily find my way into and out of the word processing program, and the lighting was so much better.

The Final Proof

During the time my kids were growing up, I was the family IT person. There was nothing I enjoyed more than leaving the kitchen to troubleshoot a connectivity problem, or solve an extension conflict in whatever Mac machine we were currently using.

But the moment I treasure most was during Jojo’s sophomore year in high school. She and a friend had to do a video project for one of their classes, and they were on the phone trying to figure out how to download footage from her friend’s video camera onto either of their computers. Finally, I overheard Jojo say to her friend, “We either need to ask a boy, or we need Anne.” And with that, she put down the phone and asked me for advice. I had arrived.

Growing Up in the 70s—A View from 1979

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My current book project begins with a big dream I had as a teenager. I remember the dream very clearly, but decided to go back and find how I wrote it down originally. So I spent a few hours the other night in an absolute time warp, re-reading journals from my freshman year in college.

Just a couple weeks after graduating high school in 1979, I moved out of my parent’s house in Oakland and into the student co-ops in Berkeley. My journals are full of the painful struggle between my parents and me, as well as the adventures and friendships that marked my eager entry into a larger world.

Most of what I wrote is not fit for public consumption, but I came across one piece from December 27, 1979 that I think is worth sharing. I was 17, home for winter break, and wrote every day to maintain my sanity. This particular day I was on a tear about the impending decade change, my relation to older Boomers, and what growing up in the 1970s had really been like. Enjoy:

So many people say that the only thing happening in the 1970s was 50s and 60s nostalgia. Or they say it was the Me Decade. Or that everyone went out and bought new improved consciousness, or found themselves, or bought designer jeans. What a bunch of hype.

I have too large a stake in the 1970s to see it dismissed, panned and put-down so much. I grew up in the 70s, I am a product of the American society of those years. My first political awakening occurred during Watergate; I watched Batman, Room 222, The Waltons, All in the Family; I saw Star Wars, The Graduate, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Annie Hall; I loved Big Macs and chocolate shakes, I liked Saturday Night Fever, I was into baseball, football, and chess, I went to public schools—what more do you want?

We were exposed to, opened to, and offered excesses of a whole lot of stuff, mostly sugared drinks, lots of TV, sex and violence. Also rock and roll when it became rated PG. There was a lot of talk about the apocalypse, and I sat two feet in front of Daniel Ellsberg at the Bear’s Lair and listened with gaping mouth as he talked about Eisenhower and Cambodia and Tonkin Gulf and all that I’d missed.

For a child of upper-middle-income WASP parents, the seventies were a fantasy land. Television said you could be anything you wanted to be, and we believed it without realizing it. Things were wonderful, and if you couldn’t be who you wanted to be in real life, at least you could give it your best shot at night when the lights were out.

Television showed us how very sophisticated scenes were handled, how the woman was silent and smiled knowingly and how the man couldn’t quite penetrate her depths. Unfortunately, being that woman later on, I couldn’t remember what it was I was supposed to know so secretly, the one thing that had been taken for granted, so implicit on the screen.

I don’t know, it seems to me that we were shown the surface of a universe of things. We were given so much on that level, that most of us didn’t bother with its foundation, with the root images or impulses that might spawn such symbols. So much you were supposed to have been born knowing. If you asked you were uncool, and definitely not hip to what was happening.

But, with such free rein to go out and explore life, we also found ourselves with the freedom to reject what we were shown, to search for new alternatives as any spoiled child will do. We did. Our parents had not seen that they had given us this right to snub our noses at their neo-conservative values, as had been true in previous generations also. So we were not dramatically unlike our older friends, except we consumed more drugs earlier and in greater quantities with less reason than they did, but they had better stories to tell. They still do.