Growing Up Some More

At age 17, I headed off to college at the University of California, Irvine, majoring in English (though I later changed to a double major in English and psychology). I lived in Misty Mountain, the "multi-cultural dorm," with various students from other countries and of various races. Outside of the campus, Irvine was an overwhelmingly white city (I would be willing to bet that it still is.), so my friends (fellow students) who were black, in particular, had a terrible time. Just walking down the street to the grocery store, they would get stopped by the police. I was appalled. I'd seen a fair amount of racism -- primarily aimed at Hispanics -- when I was growing up, but racism on the part of the authorities was a new one to me. In their 1989 election, Irvine also put a measure on the ballot to allow the Irvine Company (which still owned all the land in the city) to reject new residents based on sexual orientation. I was sure it wouldn't pass, because I couldn't imagine who would vote for such a thing, but it won easily. I became very cynical about Irvine.

(LEFT) Okay, so we've had my first kiss, my first love, and my first date ... now we have the first boyfriend. His name was (and still is) Tim Zakharov, and this photo was taken at some kind of formal dance our dorm was putting on. I'm wearing a dress I bought for the junior-year "winter formal" in high school. Tim actually owned a suit.

Tim was Russian. He wasn't born in Russia, but all 4 of his grandparents were born in Russia and escaped during the Revolution, fleeing to Persia. His parents were both born in Persia/Iran and grew up there before moving to the U.S. when they were teenagers. Going to his house to visit was always very strange, because his family mostly didn't speak English to each other. Instead, they spoke a mishmash of Russian, Farsi, and broken English. I mostly couldn't understand anything they said. When Tim's dad tried to speak English to me, Tim had to whisper a translation in my ear. I mostly spent my visits nodding and smiling and trying to be invisible.

Our relationship eventually ended very badly. We tried to be friends, but our history got in the way. Only recently, some 20 years afterward, we have gotten back in touch on Facebook. We're both married now, and he has a kid. He has changed a lot over the years ... I wonder if I have.

(RIGHT)Tim took this picture on one of our visits to Lodi to see my Grandpa. This is the grandpa who was the only family member I ever really felt close to, aside from my mom and brother. He's my dad's dad, and I was his first grandchild. He always treated me like I was the most precious thing in the world, like I was extraordinary and wonderful and perfect. He was the only person who ever cherished me. He loved to hear stories about how well I was doing in school, or activities I was interested in, or whatever. He thought it was all interesting, and it all made him proud. He was also sort of cantankerous (with people other than me), prone to making bad jokes, and just generally a funny old guy. I loved him very very very much.

He died several years ago. For rather complicated reasons, I wasn't able to go to the funeral. Thinking about him still sometimes makes me cry, because I wish I could have spent more time with him, especially before he became so ill and debilitated by strokes and heart attacks. The last couple times I saw him, he was mostly paralyzed and couldn't talk. He tried, but he couldn't get the words out and it made him really mad, so that he slammed things around in his hospital bed as much as he could, which wasn't much. He was in a hospital bed, but not in the hospital. I think that, at least, was probably a comfort to him. His wife was a R.N., so she nursed him at home. I'm not sure if that changed near the end, but at least he didn't spend YEARS in a hospital room. Instead, he spent years mostly paralyzed in a hospital bed in his living room, watching "Wheel of Fortune" and getting pissed off that his wife was telling him what to do and he couldn't argue back.

But I'm selfishly glad that I got to see him and talk to him and read to him a few times more than I would have if he'd died right off, like the doctors thought he would. And for the first couple years, he could still get around on his own, sneaking out back to smoke cigarettes when his wife wasn't watching, that sort of thing. It was only when progressively more and more strokes rendered him mostly paralyzed that things got bad.

I wish I'd lived nearer, so that I could have visited every day. (It was an all-day trip on Greyhound for me to visit.) I wish I'd been able to spend time with him frequently, telling him about my life, telling him jokes, reading to him, even just watching tv with him and holding his hand.

He was a great guy. I think I'll always miss him.

In my fourth year at UCI, I decided to spend a fifth year abroad at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Stirling is approximately mid-way between Edinburgh and Glasgow, right at a railway hub, so it was incredibly easy to travel throughout the country quickly and easily. I loved my courses at Stirling, still studying English and psychology, and particularly enjoyed the class on learning, in which we taught pigeons to do various things (peck at a light, for example) for food. It was far more hands-on than any of my classes had been at UCI, and the teachers gave us much more individualized attention.

(LEFT) My closest friend in Scotland was Sharon Machon, and English girl from near Manchester. We neither of us liked to drink -- which seems to be the national pastime in Scotland -- so we didn't hang out at pubs like most of the other students. We went to movies, saw a few plays, and traveled around to see parts of the country. In the photo at left, we are at Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness, accompanied by two other Stirling students whose names I don't recall. Sharon is the one in the white coat; I am the one with the long hair.

I traveled a lot that year, sometimes with Sharon, but oftentimes alone. My favorite excursions were to Dunkeld, Oban, and Loch Ness. I had a fabulous time and definitely consider the year abroad one of the best decisions I ever made.

When I got home from Scotland, I didn't return to Irvine (where I'd gone to college) or Anaheim (where I'd lived with my mom and brother). Instead, I decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area, which I had come to know starting with a summer fellowship at Stanford University in 1990, continuing with visits to some high school friends who were students at UC Berkeley, and culminating in a relationship with a boyfriend who lived in Berkeley (Donald Kubasak). I'd gotten to know Berkeley, in particular, quite well, and felt sure I'd be happy there.

So I moved into an efficiency apartment on Russell Street, about a mile south of the UCB campus, and lived there about a year. I was working as a typesetter for Wilsted & Taylor, a small publishing services company in Oakland. I really enjoyed the work, which involved writing computer code in a language which was designed specifically for book publishing. I enjoyed the work, I enjoyed my co-workers, and I enjoyed the casual nature of the workplace. It was a great fit.

(RIGHT: Katherine and me at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1998) While working at Wilsted & Taylor, I also took some proofreading and copyediting classes, and that's how I met Katherine Falk, who would become one of my closest friends. When my lease at the efficiency apartment came up, I decided not to renew it, and instead Katherine and I moved in together in an apartment near Rockridge BART. I was very happy living there with Katherine, and we had a lot of fun together, though we did have a tendency to play "garbage chicken" and watch bad tv ("Melrose Place," which we called "Masterpiece Theatre"). Through Katherine I met another boyfriend, Jay Bryon, who has since become a very close friend and was an usher when I got married.

Katherine moved out to live with her boyfriend, and I found another apartment by myself, where I got myself two kittens, who I named Cobweb (the tabby pictured below right chasing my computer cursor) and Mustardseed (the tuxedo cat pictured left having a nap). "Mustardseed" didn't stick, though, and she became "Munchkin," because she was the tiny runt of her litter. Cobweb and Munchkin aren't actually sisters, though they've been together since before their eyes were open. Munchkin was a runt, as I said, and her mother kept attacking her at the animal shelter, driving her away, even though she was only a few days old. The animal shelter was sad, but felt they had no recourse but to let her die. Then Cobweb's mother's owner came to the shelter, working for Hopalong Rescue, and said, "I've got a cat who just had kittens. I'll see if my cat will foster her." So she took Munchkin home (where they named her "Tiny") and she and Cobweb (who they called "Pokey") became sisters.

The kitties are much older now (they were born in 1995), and more recently we got a third cat, named Lucifer, who is all black and therefore doesn't photograph well. We got her when she was a little kitten, and she has terrorized Cobweb and Munchkin for the past two years. Cobweb and Munchkin are sedate old ladies now, and Lucy is always chasing them, chewing on their ears, etc. But that's all been recently (Lucy was born in 2007). For a long time it was just Cobweb, Munchkin, and me.

(LEFT, at the Amboise chateau) In 1994, I found a catsitter and my mom and I went on another trip to Europe (we'd visited when I graduated high school in 1987), this time visiting Paris and the Loire Valley. It would be the second of our three trips to Paris, and I think this was my favorite one. We visited lots of sights, including a photo exhibition of Umbo's work, and we got along famously. I do remember that I missed my boyfriend, though.

I continued living on my own for a few years, still working at Wilsted & Taylor, and then Katherine and I moved in together again, this time with the two cats. This time, we were rather less conveniently located for folk who don't drive (e.g., me), out by Piedmont Avenue, but still a pleasant neighborhood.

While living there with Katherine, I met Shannon Appel for the second time. I had met him back in the summer of 1991, when I was dating his friend Donald, but we hadn't really spoken. I was sort of intruding upon their role-playing game, so I felt very much the outsider. I get the impression that Shannon was also less sociable at that point in his life.

Anyway, I met Shannon when I was working at UC Berkeley, managing a book project for the American Society of Plant Physiologists. We met because Donald thought we might like each other, so the three of us were going to the downtown YMCA together. Donald started flaking; Shannon and I decided to continue to go without him; and romance blossomed. We went on our first date (post-gym dinner and drinks) on March 12, 1999. Things started slow, but within a year we had decided to live together. On March 12, 2000, we decided to get married. Our wedding was on August 12, 2000, and our friend Nancy Evans -- leader of our writing group and a former co-worker of mine -- officiated. Around the same time, his parents helped us buy a house in south Berkeley, very convenient for shopping, walking, and public transportation.

(LEFT) In 2005, we found out that my dad had lung cancer, and it quickly metastasized, spreading into his brain and his spine. He had a series of surgeries and rounds of chemo, and I visited him a few times out in Nebraska, including one visit when he was in pretty good health and we were able to have a good time, driving out to visit his sisters Bobbi and Kim in Iowa. He died in 2007, and I was there when it happened. Everyone said he'd been waiting to see me, and within 2 days of my arrival, he had died. I miss him, and dream about him often, but we were never really close. I was raised by my mom, and he didn't play much of a role except to set off fire works every summer at his house in Wyoming and feed us vegetables my mom never would have served (like summer squash). I may write more about him on a page for my Family section of this website.

The last few years have been relatively uneventful. We got the new kitten, took a couple trips to Hawaii, and Shannon got a book published (iPhone in Action). Other than that, we play with our TiVo, I go to the gym, we go for bike rides on the weekends, etc. It's a pretty good life.

Go back to my childhood