Summer of Love, etc.

You know the Robin Williams line—even if he didn't say it: if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. But we were really there. What my classmate Robin should have said: Remembering the '60s is tricky, at best.

I grew up between worlds and times in the San Geronimo Valley, a rural enclave in West Marin which was rapidly becoming an alternative lifestyle destination. A lot of interesting folks who shunned the cities and suburbs wound up in The Valley, as it was called. It was an uneasy marriage of radically different worlds.

I attended Lagunitas School District—LSD (I know, 'splains a lot). I was straddling the old redneck ranchers' world (living with my Irish Victorian grannie), and the Flower Children dancing in the dawn of a New Age—and me, trying to toe the mutable line. Not an easy task.

During the late 60s, I attended Sir Francis Drake High School—the only high school (emphasis on the word high) in the nation to shut down a local draft board.  We were a pretty radicalized group of kids.

Our student body president was Jared Rossman from Fairfax. That last name should ring a bell—as his older brother, Michael Rossman, was a key figure in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. On the eve of The Summer of Love, we marched to town and shut down the San Rafael Draft Board. Our school made the cover of Time Magazine and the 6 O'Clock News. And we gave the FBI a new client list.

When the school district took away our buses, I was the roadside kid hitching home from school. This is how I met most of the rock musicians of that era, Ken Kesey and his cast of Merry Pranksters, and boarded Further, etc.

During the Summer of Love, I was pretty straight, I was also very young. I was 14—a mere 'tweenie. Between worlds. What I remember most from that era was the original 1967 "A Gathering of the Tribes Human Be In" in Golden Gate Park. It was a protest gathering to counter a new California law to make LSD illegal. Timothy Leary famously said from the stage, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and then came tripping out through the audience to give my mom a hug.

A Beatnik and a Project Artaud painter, my mom was one of the first artists to embrace the hippie movement. She was at the epicenter of The Summer of Love. Mom dragged me through the Haight early and often. Sometimes our worlds intersected. I was a wide-eyed kid trying to take it all in. A vicarious bystander. Sure, there was fallout, growing up like that in unchartered territory. But I survived the social revolution more or less intact.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was meeting future mentors of our generation: Richard Alpert ("Ram Dass"), Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Most of the bands who played in the parks were our near neighbors in West Marin: Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

For some reason, though we lived in the epicenter of this sociological turmoil, it's hard to write about it so, from time to time, I whittle away at it, in search of the through line. Memory's always a work in progress.

I told former Sonoma County poet, Colorado Arts Commissioner Art Goodtimes, a mushroom aficionado, that I had a wild mother who claimed I was an amanita child. As if that explained things. We laughed and blamed the drugs.

I was living out in rural West Marin and commuting into the suburbs to go to school, holding onto a dual life between worlds while most of my friends were defecting, tuning in and dropping out, and running off with bands or the circus. It was some crazy times. Somehow we grew up between the Be-in, The Summer of Love, and the Kent State Massacre. This was our legacy.

Yes, we were really there. And we do remember. Robert Frost wrote: The best way out is always through. We survived the 'tween years—we could see no other way out but through. What a long, strange trip it's been.

At Lagunitas School

In this room was where the big kids sat, and across the hall was the principal's office: Mr. Fry. The office was where my skinned knees were bandaged, where I was sent down for being in trouble, and the WPA mural in the hall of the rich farmlands was the only thing that saved me.

I stared and stared at all that depth on the flat wall intrigued by the magic of paint and the outbuildings seemed so real. That wing is now a preschool. Where I did my first year of labor, my first grade class was in the old library building, a portable shed.

I dropped out of kindergarten, bored by at all and the painful years I spent in the other wing: third, fifth, and seventh grades seem to stand out the most. How we hid under our desks practicing for nuclear war and the brilliant flash in the eastern sky towards the Nevada test sites.

I'm not the first writer who suffered in these halls. It's not their fault, sheer numbers. I was not a socialized animal. They say the wounds make an artist. Did classmate Linda Gregg suffer that? Or was she a golden child?

Poet Bob Hass, in his book, 20th-century Pleasures, refers to this place as the Whitehill School where he played baseball. My uncles and aunts studied in these same rooms. I remember a class photo of them out front and my uncle played baseball too. But he was too old to have played with Bob Hass. Hass often gets confused in his geography and has Papermill Creek emptying uphill into Nicasio.

He said that Robert Frost spent time in Nicasio, and my family well remembers Kenneth Rexroth in Devil's Gulch. I remember stopping by Marie Rexroth's house under the redwoods studying the small signed nailed to the telephone pole.

I remember all my teachers names, well nearly all of them. Mrs. Burge, second grade who died of a heart attack, wanted me to collect the starfish maple leaves in fall to press them between tissue. I never did, it but I still keep trying to to fulfill that promise.

Miss Lenz, a popular redheaded third-grade teacher, had a pet skunk, whose cold claws and coarse fur was a surprise. The twins Adrian and Adair Daley were in that class, they were hellish. Adrian, the feminine one, packed a pistol, and a temper, and Adair, the tomboy, could swing punches with the best of them.

That was they year I failed to learn math but I learned to read.

Billy Joe Bianchi who got pneumonia in second grade, got put back a grade, so he was only one year ahead of me. We went into his room and a teacher demonstrated how to make carrot juice. We all had samples.

He drank his juice and said it was good. I drank mine, the bitter skin from the horse carrots was so overpowering, I felt betrayed. I have an aversion to carrot juice to this day though it's never tasted as bad as it did that first time.

I can't remember two teachers, one in kindergarten was an elderly woman who played the piano, and my fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Smith? I remember it was a fourth/fifth grade split class. Wasn't Billy Joe in that class too?

My fifth grade teacher was Mrs. Hards and she certainly was well named. I remember the magic that came from a ruler and construction paper, we made cable cars. First practical application of math, or was that in Mrs. Smith's class?

Mrs. Hards commented it was hard to find something grade level that I hadn't already read. The school used the SRT reading skills collection. I was never interested in completing the chapter tests and I did them halfheartedly. I only wanted to read, read, read.

I read my way through third and fourth grade SRT booklets with a voracious hunger. I remember learning about bats and dolphins, the good stories in the science SRT section had me mesmerized.

Sixth grade was even harder, my uneven learning skills forever separated me from the rest of the class. I loved Miss Kolanoski, her love of music had me singing in the chorus, but but my inability to do task work was a challenge.

My math skills were practically nonexistent and it took me 20 years and an accident to discover there was a reason for all of this, dyslexia. I'm still overcoming the horror of it all.

Mrs. Brice in seventh grade, was borderline cruel, but I did like the fact that she read to us in the afternoons. The Phantom Tollbooth had me impatient for each afternoon to come quickly. The story was like the minus stew, it made you hungrier for more. Mrs. Brice also introduced Spanish into my life.

Eighth-grade was even worse with the effeminate frustrated majordomo in a fussy canary yellow vest, and carefully combed hair over his bald pate. Mr. Sliney, who probably had no business being a teacher, with his military background, broke rulers over the boys' hands. As far as I was concerned, school was a full-scale war.

It was then, I realized my reading ability was unusual, during science, we timed ourselves how many words we could read per minute and most kids were turning into respectable double-digit scores. But mine was something like 500. No one believed me, so they retested me, asking me regurgitate what I read which I couldn't do of course. If I could have done that I could've done the class work too.

Reconstructing material in an orderly fashion was well beyond my means, in retrospect. Or so it seemed. About that time we switched over to multiple classes and teachers. What a relief to be out from under Mr. Sliney's thumb, who of all people, had to teach us sex education. I remember his livid face and bulging eyes as he discussed the distasteful subject.

Mr. Plant who was my geeky science teacher was a love. Then there was Miss Smith who could kill you with her sour looks, luckily she left me alone when it came to art. Something she admitted she knew nothing about and she was my art teacher. When we did pastel she handed me Kleenex to blend the colors.

Harry Roche, the coach, was another matter altogether. His method of teaching was to yell louder if you didn't get it the first time. For once, being assertive, I made the mistake of saying, I don't understand— it was probably fractions—and he came undone. As did I. My mind rolled up shop for the rest of the year. I was done with learning. Done with them.