A few weeks later we decided to move back to the bay area. Upper Lake was unbearably hot in the summer and it was July. Our solitude there was fine for a while, but that gets boring too. And our near disaster with Allen made us want to get  away from any possibility of running into him again. Besides that, the house was marked by the police. Once again, Sanita went exploring while I watched Will. This time she found an excellent two bedroom house in Piedmont, a small township just a five minute drive to the campus in Berkeley. I can honestly say it was the most pleasant year of my life with her, free of any concerns and filled with friends visiting, reading and raising Willy, now two and fun to play with.

We spent a full year in our two bedroom house in Piedmont. It rented for one thousand a month, had a Spanish look to it, white stucco, with an arched front porch, a small front yard and a larger back yard. The interior was hardwood floors, a large living room as one entered, so large I set up my study at one end, with a big desk and a wall of bookshelves beside it, then a couch and chairs in the middle facing the opposite wall and a large television set. This part was open to the dining room with a table that could seat eight. Behind that was the kitchen, with its own breakfast table by a window looking out into the back yard. From there was the side entrance to two bedrooms and the bath. The back bedroom was an-add on to the original house and quite spacious. It came partially furnished, (curtains, couches, beds, appliances and tables) and our landlady was Spanish and loved us as tenants.

Soon after our move and my thirty-fourth birthday.

It took two trips to move all of our belongings from Upper Lake in the camper. But those furnishings completed our new house fully. I sold the camper shortly after for the price I paid for it, three thousand dollars. I had nowhere to park it in Piedmont, just one narrow driveway. I could have sold it for much more but Ross, (Norma’s boyfriend) thinking he was doing me a favor, drove it through a car wash while I was in Europe which smacked one of the plastic dome windows on top. Campers don’t fit in drive-through car washes. It just cracked the seal, so it wasn’t fixed. But water over the next two years seeped in and damaged the walls.

See how the tenor of this autobiography changes with my settling down to a bourgeois existence. My life is whittled down to petty details hardly worth mentioning, common to all who lead a middle-class American life.

“The short and simple annals of the poor.”

T. Gray.

I’m reminds of another autobiography ‘Goodbye to all that’, by Robert Graves, written when he was twenty nine. The beginning is boring, his education and school years mildly better, but when he enters the war, when the shelling and bullets fly and life in the trenches is described in its riveting, gruesome details, the corpses and stenches and rats and the crippling fears before assaults, where one in ten have a chance at survival, these are the gripping pages that make up the bulk of the book.

The years after the war, his marriage, his wife, their early poverty and business failures, then their children’s births, I can’t even picture, or her personality or the family life. All I know is that they argued more and more, (but not over what), and that they divorced ten years later, with no clear reason why. It’s all a blur, with a few odd details thrown in. Maybe he didn’t even know. But the contrast to the minute by minute, piercing clarity of the trench war experience, with the near certainty of imminent death, is amazing. The writing is crisp and gripping.

As Samuel Johnson once said, (to excuse himself from having written a letter begging pardon for a clergyman about to be hanged, when his friends all suspected his pen at work and said it was far above the clergyman’s powers):

“the near approach of death concentrates the mind wonderfully”.

My journals peter out into reading notes. The last in much the same tenor covers the months in Piedmont up to the move to Dallas in July of 1989. There it stops, the habit, until it resumes a bit in stray notes for my seven years in Puerto Rico and a few more for my fourteen years working hard in Canada, then in full force again in 2014, writing this account, short stories and one long novel.

Joy

This picture is one that Lassa graced me with. This one snapshot more than repaid me for my being his host for a week. I consider it a near perfect work of art. Only a great photographer can capture the moment so brilliantly. Notice the book in the kitchen cabinet behind us and the word ‘Joy’ prominently displayed.

In Piedmont I studied daily and have reams of sheets of words and definitions to prove it. Whenever I came across a word not perfectly understood, in Latin or Greek, I’d write it down and look it up in my big dictionaries and transcribe all the meanings and shades of meaning it had, along with quotes. This exercise, though it seems trivial, has one great benefit. It familiarizes one with many of the synonyms for each word. So in writing, I have tens of words to chose from for my meanings, ready in my mind. All I assert is that the reading of dictionaries, with its synonyms and etymologies, is the best path to acquiring a fluid and rich prose style, which can be florid or Spartan or common in turn, whatever best fits the matter and my mood.

My daily studies lasted into early afternoon. Then I’d play with Will or do chores or idly read on the couch. By night I’d watch movies with Sanita. John and Bruno came by at least once a week, just to hang out. I’d only do speed about once a month when Ted came by. Sanita would sometimes participate and invite Marg. over for late night talks. Sanita and I no longer had them, at least the intimate talks as in the first year at Norma’s. Marg also came by to play with Willy, her great delight. The year passed and Sanita insisted we move to Dallas, which we did in July of 1989. Jim and his new girlfriend Lisa visited for a week and we toured the Sierras.

We had one more set of visitors in Piedmont staying for a week in our spare bedroom. This was Tina from Sweden, where she was happily married to Lassa, a famous photographer, earning a good living with his camera, his pictures published in many papers and magazines there. He took a picture of me holding up Willy at our kitchen table. Tina was happy with him and we had a great time, at home and seeing the sights.

One day I took Tina alone to visit Ted, now living in a shipping container in a back lot in downtown San Francisco. She hadn’t done a line in years, since leaving the U.S. and wanted to revisit old feelings. He was happy accommodate us, sitting at his desk, boots up. We enjoyed excellent talk for hours, many lines, then the two of us traipsed around S.F. till evening, a fine day.

This was the last place I passed a very pleasant time with all my old friends. It was an idyllic period in my life, daily study, total freedom from any cares, and most importantly, not the slightest hint of a crack in the relationship between Sanita and me, at least as far as I could see, as we still treated each other with daily and nightly charm and love.

My friend Steve S. at my birthday party.

I was proud of this year of self-improvement, especially in my studies. One day, on a lark, I strolled across campus to Dwinelle hall, my old Classics department, just to see who might still be there, thirteen years after I’d left. I saw the name of Mr. Murgia on one of the doors and knocked. He was sitting at his desk, apparently idle and called me in. He recognized me immediately and was delighted to see me. I told him how I quit Toronto after six months, almost in disgust, how very much lower it was to the caliber of Berkeley. Then I said that I’d become an electrician and liked the trade but that I also kept up my keen interest in reading Latin.

When I told him I’d recently finished reading all of Livy he was amazed. When I told him what edition I’d read, with the Freinsheim supplements, all fourteen volumes and all the footnotes, some eight thousand pages, his jaw dropped. He stood up and shook my hand, saying he never heard of one reading so much out of school. I told him it was my lifetime hobby and my goal was to read all the classics and much of Renaissance Latin. This cheered him to no end. I’m sure I made his day, a former student who valued what he taught me above everything else in life. This was my ‘goodbye’ to Berkeley.

When we lived in Piedmont my mother visited for a week. One night the two of them dressed up and went to the opera in San Francisco. I should have gone with them. She told my mother in confidence that night that she thought I didn’t love her. My mother told me this the next day so I might correct the situation. But it was too late.

One reason Sanita wanted to draw me away to Dallas was to finally sever me from all my friends still doing speed, even though we were indulging so infrequently. And in that matter I accepted to go because I was tired of it too and ready to quit for good. Too bad I had to lose such friends with the occasional habit.

Sanita had her mother fly out to help us pack up and also accompany her on the trip to Texas in our Volvo. They would take and manage Willy, leaving me to rent a U-Haul and bring the furniture a few days later, after they found a suitable rental house. It was late August.

Two nights before I started on this trip a strange encounter happened. Sanita had left the day before. After packing my last books up alone, I wanted a beer and the refrigerator was empty. So I walked to a small bar down the street which I’d passed many times but never entered. I step in and there I see Cora, Owen’s first wife, the mother of Breeze. She hugged me as we met. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years. This bar was her hangout now as she lived nearby. She was still slim and sexy, still the schoolteacher with tan skin and long dark hair, down to her waist.

We had a beer together and I told her of my life, (parts of it) and that I lived just down the street and was moving to Texas. She listened all excited and told me of how Breeze sometimes remembered me with fondness. Then she pulled his picture from her purse, now a teenager and hardly recognizable to me. I had the strongest desire to show her a picture of Willy and Sanita, my family, as a match to hers. She told me she was still single but looking for the right man. After another beer we were walking to my place. I brought her inside to a sea of boxes, packed by Sanita and unlabeled, covering the living room floor, and all taped up. I cut open one after another but couldn’t find any pictures.

I felt the strongest sense that she wanted to sleep with me, the way she stood so close and stayed on with intimate talk. But I resisted and finally sent her home with a sigh and a hug. What a wrench she would have thrown into our relationship if I’d stepped into that bar, so close, months earlier. She was a smoldering hot sex bomb, a heartbreaker and for sure a home breaker.