In 1971, I was living in Berkeley, California. I attended classes on campus and also worked there as I put myself through school at UC Berkeley. I lived in a house with three roommates, a large tank of tropical fish, my two cats, and an Old English sheepdog. My boyfriend spent his freshman year away,… Read More

I first read the book when I was a teenager. It’s the only book I missed two meals to finish. I staggered out of my bedroom late in the afternoon after turning the last page. I’d been lost for what seemed like days in the lives of Scarlett, Ashley, Melanie and Rhett. My parents must… Read More

This is how it started.  I asked him to write down the lyrics to “Both Sides Now” for me.  We were both seniors in high school, hanging out in the same circle of hippie wannabe ne’er do-wells. The song was on the radio all the time and I wanted to learn the words. I knew… Read More

The last time I saw Kelly, he’d been dead for over a year. In yet another dream, he was sitting next to me on a bus.  “You have to let me go,” he said. When I met him, in 1966, Kelly was a junior in high school. He was outrageous, audacious, charismatic, and sexy as… Read More

Family legend has it that my dad fully expected me, his second daughter, to be a son.  I imagine him pacing in the waiting room in the maternity ward, punching his fist in a glove, thinking about the times he’d play catch in the backyard and discuss the finer points of the game with a… Read More

The year: 1957-1958. I was six and my sister was eight when our parents told these two San Francisco-born California girls that we were packing up and moving to New York City. My father had entered the doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and we’d be living in Morningside Heights for a year—giving up… Read More

Thanks to a program that no longer exists, I was able to attend the local college while still a senior in high school. After filling out the necessary paperwork and expressing my urgent need to study Italian—a class not offered at my school—I was approved to begin classes on campus in the fall of 1968.… Read More

When my husband and I bought our first house after years of being renters, we were excited but a little bit terrified. The night before we made our offer, neither one of us got any sleep. We had looked and looked, and then one day the mother of one of our daughter’s kindergarten classmates told… Read More

The Beatles break-up began in 1969, the year I graduated from high school. I wished it weren’t so, but it was inevitable that they would go their separate ways, just as it was inevitable that high school would end, and everything would change. Read More

Caitlin, my daughter, spent several months in the Intensive Care Nursery as an infant. She needed open heart surgery and ended up spending several months recovering, having setbacks, and recovering, before she was finally able to come home at around four months of age. The ICN was full of babies who were too small or… Read More