By Fred Owens
Elite
schools, who needs them? I guess that's a little harsh, but I have
encountered the aura of academic prestige and did not care for the
experience. Oh, she went to Stanford. People have a way of saying that.
So that makes her a big deal? It does look good on a resume, and when
you consider the networking opportunities there can be a great advantage
to gaining admission to these schools. You might even cheat or bribe
your way in. At least some Hollywood actors are accused of that --
paying bribes to get their children admitted. Isn't this pathetic?
I
was at a reception at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University. This was many years ago. I struck up a conversation with a
promising young man who began to question me. He wanted to find out what
important thing I had done. I mean, he didn't want to be seen talking
with someone who wasn't important. I said I was a landscaper. He said a
landscape architect? No, just a landscaper. You know, yard work. Of
course I was playing my own game at the time, trying to uphold the
dignity of manual labor. But the conversation ended there, he was too
important to talk with me.
You find these
people at elite schools. Not everyone who goes there is stuck up, to be
sure. I count several friends, who attended Columbia, or Yale or
Harvard -- down to earth people and just folks, really smart folks, of
course, but still retaining a sense of humility. Okay, I met some
really, really smart folks when I lived in Cambridge. I was very often
not the smartest person in the room and I liked that. You just have to
sort out the snobs from the real people. It doesn't take long.
But
this admission scandal has been dominating the news for the past few
weeks. And it brings up the larger question. Why do we have such elite
schools? Why are an enormous amount of resources devoted to a small
number of students? What about me? What about my kids? There has been
so much talk of inequality. Maybe we need to start at the colleges and
do a bit of levelling. Let's deflate that aura of academic prestige and
bring those colleges down to earth.
Global Catastrophe. Another
alarming headline, but that is not quite what I mean. Which is that we
know so much more about disasters in the far reaches of our world. In
the past week there was a plane crash in Ethiopia and more than one
hundred people were killed. There was a mass shooting at a mosque in
Christchurch in New Zealand and fifty Moslems were murdered. Mozambique
suffered a terrible hurricane and flood. Thousands may have drowned. I
want to know this bad news and I want the details if possible. These are
human beings who suffered and died and they are so much like us with
homes and families. Modern communication is a blessing.
Part Three of Sage. In
Part Two I took up a romance with Susan Bird, the Go-Go Girl from the
Brass Rail. The setting was after college graduation in Toronto, wasting
away the summer of 1969, avoiding adult choices. In late August, Susan
and I hitchhiked to Berkeley, California. We entered the hippie world of
West Coast Dreams, and so Part Three begins.......
Her name was Susan Bird, but she liked it when I called
her San, San with coral pink toenail polish. We got to Berkeley, found work,
rented a room right off Telegraph Ave and began the month-long process of
breaking up. September, 1969.
We hung out at Cody’s
Books waiting for tear gas battles with the cops. We went to the Fillmore and
saw Santana and Grand Funk Railroad. Santana was the opening act if you can
believe that, fronting for Grand Funk Railroad which soon disappeared from all
knowledge while Santana still sings for the ages.
San worked part-time
at a department store at the perfume counter. I did landscaping work
sporadically. San was pretty and very nice to me. We never argued. I just
wanted more. I wanted the whole world to explode. I wanted to be totally insane
and suffer mental anguish. I wanted Fyodor Dostoyevsky to write my biography. I
wanted Mao Tse-Tung to salute me. Comrade! Join the struggle. It was 1969, the
hippie vision was breaking up into stupid little hippie clouds. I resisted but nobody cared. I called long distance
to my Mom and Dad back in suburban Chicago. They sent me money, they weren’t
worried. I could hear them talking – he’ll sort it out eventually. Their
confidence in me was annoying. I was 23 years old. I wanted to throw away my shoes and live in a
teepee. San just gave me a sad look about my dreams.
Why didn’t we have a
discussion? Something like this – “I want to go to Mexico in search of the
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, also to visit various Shamans in Durango. But I will
come back in six weeks, or two months tops…..so is that okay and will you wait
for me?”
“Fred, I don’t know.
It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Maybe we knew that
the conversation wouldn’t work. We got along well but we didn’t love each other
all that much. We shared this rented room, sublet from a grad student. I don’t
even remember who moved out first. It just happened and we didn’t try to stop
it. San was a quality babe. Why was I thinking she could easily be replaced? God, that’s an awful way to put it. Replaced?
An awful word. I missed her, but I was glad to be in Berkeley on Telegraph
Avenue looking for my future.
I had so many
choices. The Hog Farm and Wavy Gravy. The Red Mountain Tribe and their radical
newspaper. The Rainbow Nation and their Native
American pseudo-rituals. Love Israel, which is what they called themselves, a
little too woo-woo for me. Jesus freaks, God help us. The Christ family – apocalyptic
and the world would burst into flames. Hare Krishna and dance til you drop. The
Roach Family, going to Texas on a blue bus to gather and eat peyote cactus. The
STP Family, an evil spawn on the Avenue. They preyed on innocent suburban
wanderers with rape and harsh drugs and brutality – they were scary dudes…….
Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead scattering blessings on us
all.
I sat on the
sidewalk, watching and waiting. Who comes ambling down the street? Ron Firman,
in striped bellbottoms and a silver chain around his waist, smiling at
everybody, humming softly as if he had lived there all his life, when in fact I
knew him from Toronto.
Can I stop here for a
minute and explain that when you’re hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in
Berkeley, California, you don’t expect to run into someone you knew from Super
House back in Toronto? Well, it would not matter to anyone else but me, but
there was Ron ambling and there was I in a squat on the sidewalk with a
home-rolled cigarette.
Did he see me first,
or did I see him first? Ron was from Thunder Bay, a small town in northern
Ontario. He was a sometime companion to Allanah Furlong, who was a room-mate to
Cyndi Quick who had been a girl friend to Alan Archibald who was the founder of Super House.
So I knew Ron well
enough. His voice was like the sound of a treasured heirloom clarinet, a sweet
sound. “I don’t have much to say, but I say it well, “ being his attitude.
He became an
important figure in this story and in my life because he introduced me to Sage.
Ron lived with Sage and some other hippies in a group home in the Piedmont
enclave of Oakland.
“Come and join us for
a meal. You can crash on the couch if you want to. We have lots of room.”
That seemed like a
good idea. Piedmont was a spiffy uptown neighborhood so it was surprising to
see this hippie home with an I Ching flag
in yellow and red hanging over the front door, but it was clean and well-kept. Patrick
the builder lived in the garage. Neil Dodgson was formerly a research chemist
in graduate school but he dropped out to study astrology. Neil had one of the
upstairs bedrooms. Rosemarie Barbeau, who would have become my sister in law if
she had ever married my brother, had another room upstairs. John Haroldson was
from Iowa, recently returned from two years in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan.
John had his room.
Sage had the fourth
bedroom, mattress on the floor, batik curtains with beads, books and clothes
strewn here and there. She was just too cheerful to be tidy.
I slept on the couch
in the living room. I forgot the kids. Eric and Sean, 7 and 2, lived in a heap
of toys and floor mattresses in a small room off the dining room down stairs.
They were Sage’s kids. She had two kids.
I’m repeating that because I didn’t know anyone who had kids. Actual
children that you had to feed and clothe and wash and soothe and teach. Every
day you had to do that if you had kids. This was incredible. Five years of
college and I never dangled a baby, never held one, never saw one, had only the
most theoretical idea that I might have some of my own some day.
No one in the
Piedmont house thought about children, except they were there. We took care of
them well enough, just never thought about it. Kids just happened, they just
showed up.
But I had not yet met
Sage. I did not know her bedroom until a
few days later. First I met the gang downstairs and sat for the communal
supper of fish, brown rice and steamed vegetables. It was a pleasant meal. The kids were
running around. Someone was designated to watch them, but I could not tell who
the watcher was.
Sage was due anytime,
coming back from her classes at Berkeley where she studied anthropology.
Then she came home
and gave her smile and sat down to eat. Look, I’m not going to make this first
encounter with Sage to be an earthshaking dramatic event with flashing love
bolts. We met and thus it began.
Let’s just leave the
gang -- John, Patrick and Neal,
Rosemarie and Sage, and those two kids, Eric and Sean – let’s just leave them to
enjoy their dinner. They welcomed me, showed me the couch and I made myself
comfortable, for that evening……
Part
Three ends here. I don’t know whether to go on or
just give up. Maybe I should look for a publisher, show him or her the first
three parts and see if they want to make a deal. Like I finish writing the manuscript and they
agree to give me an advance. That would give me a lot more respect, like I am
not just wasting my time. Such a deal! How could I get such a deal? I don’t
know any publishers. My networking
skills are nonexistent. It is hopeless.
Except it is not
hopeless. I live in Santa Barbara with Laurie, near the beach. How lucky is
that!
Onward!
Fred
No comments:
Post a Comment