Saturday, January 30, 2010
Living in the garage
On late night TV, Sigourney Weaver talked about how she lived in a tree while she was a student at Stanford University in Stanford, just next to Palo Alto, California.
Her jokes about how 'everyone was doing that sort of thing' reminded ME of MY college years living in an ELABORATELY-refurbished garage (in the SF Bay Area) with large picture window with thick lined pleated draperies, fancy door and doorstep, nicely shrubbed, with a private bathroom and three walls lined with bookcases filled with my textbooks and other books.
My faithful Redstone House Noah, who waited in the mint patch for me to return from the university, slept at night at the foot of my bed. My best friend parked his camper van in the driveway in front and drew electricity from my garage apartment, and the two of us farmed backyard and made a lush organic garden on land that had once been a highly-productive farm on a mountaintop, with clear views of the San Francisco Bay and the Peninsula, and the roadlway down the steep mountainside curving into the neighboring mountain.
Labels: autobiography, Bay Area, biography, California, CalState, college, CSUH, memories, San Francisco, scenic, university
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Years ago, while I was a first-year graduate student at Harvard, a young vegetarian schoolteacher tried her darnedest to persuade a young Maynard S. Clark to go vegetarian in the tradition of Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet.
At a local church where I worked, we had a "Gather Inn" for professional adults. I was in charge, and we did international dinners prepared in the church kitchen by volunteers. Conversations ensued, and the international 'dining in' at cost (of food/materials) made a great social event in harvard Square.
Two 20-something vegetarian women (one lacto-vegetarian and one ovo-vegetarian) worked on me (one more than the other), and their meals together worked out to be dietary vegan meals.
August 14th is the birthdate of the one who worked most diligently on me.
She moved away from Boston, but her birthdate is recalled every year because 'way back then' I went vegetarian - then vegan.
So that's why August 14th is a VERY SPECIAL DAY for Maynard S. Clark.
Oh, yes: she worked on me in other ways, too, trying to change me.
"You're too formal!"
"Why do you always wear a sport coat and dress slacks?"
"I'm a nonjoiner. why do you have affiliation issues?"
etc.
So now I'm overly casual, seldom wear a sport coat or suit, and don't belong to any churches at all. I'm not sure that I changed for the better; except for my going vegetarian then vegan, I think I was a better person in those days, but that's yet another issue.
Maynard
At a local church where I worked, we had a "Gather Inn" for professional adults. I was in charge, and we did international dinners prepared in the church kitchen by volunteers. Conversations ensued, and the international 'dining in' at cost (of food/materials) made a great social event in harvard Square.
Two 20-something vegetarian women (one lacto-vegetarian and one ovo-vegetarian) worked on me (one more than the other), and their meals together worked out to be dietary vegan meals.
August 14th is the birthdate of the one who worked most diligently on me.
She moved away from Boston, but her birthdate is recalled every year because 'way back then' I went vegetarian - then vegan.
So that's why August 14th is a VERY SPECIAL DAY for Maynard S. Clark.
Oh, yes: she worked on me in other ways, too, trying to change me.
"You're too formal!"
"Why do you always wear a sport coat and dress slacks?"
"I'm a nonjoiner. why do you have affiliation issues?"
etc.
So now I'm overly casual, seldom wear a sport coat or suit, and don't belong to any churches at all. I'm not sure that I changed for the better; except for my going vegetarian then vegan, I think I was a better person in those days, but that's yet another issue.
Maynard
Labels: biography, church, Maynard, MaynardClark, MaynardSClark, memory, vegan, vegetarian
