Navigating the 1960s in Marin County

It seems that I hold onto some things forever, like anger, and perceived slights. They blossom and fester in my garden of injuries, but sometimes they dissipate like fog. I do my best to understand that because I suspect that deep down, I assumed that my parents didn’t love me. Therefore, I cannot love myself. There must be something wrong with me for them to have abandoned me so.

Sure, my mother told me she loved me, and surely she did in her own fashion. Sometimes, if she had a car, she would whisk me off to the city where the urban and rural worlds collided.

Though, I was born in San Francisco, I was raised by my grandmother in the country. So it was all alien to me. I am grateful that my mother attempted to shield me while expanding my horizons even if I didn’t want expanding.

I remember one party were a man washed my feet in rosewater, it was so sensuous. I was about 15 but when he tried to lead me off, my carefree mother, turned into a tiger, the guardian of the gate, telling him I was underage, and it wasn’t going to happen. He dropped me like a hot potato which wounded my feelings.

I don’t think he realized she was my mother, we looked so alike in age, but it made me realize that, despite her myriad shortcomings as a parent , she did love me and cared about what happened to me.

I’ve gone way off strip script, but that’s OK too. I think we were at a party in Larkspur, at least that’s what it felt like at the time, somewhere similar under the redwoods. Maybe Mill Valley, she knew a lot of alternative folks as she embraced the counterculture as much as it embraced her.

She was an artist, an actor, costume, designer, and later also a writer, and I was newly formed. I was a teenager, negotiating the distance between an insulated life in the country with my grandmother, and the societal upheaval that was rocking the known world all around us.

I lived with a foot in two worlds, that of the country bumpkin, where my horse was central to my being, to this other edgy world, where everybody was redefining themselves in a society that was unraveling at the end to edges, like a black chrysanthemum exploding from the center.

My mother did not open that world for me. I was already exploring it. This is how we cut school and wound up at People’s Park, and Sather Gate to see Abby Hoffman, not to mention the peace marches where we marched against the war in Vietnam and the atrocities of the war machine that encompassed our lives.