station wagon, we were forty-five feet long. Fully loaded, we could do only forty miles an hour, slower through turns. This pace must have been tough for my father, who normally drove in the left lane, weaving right only to pass.
Cars had piled up behind us, so my father pulled into the gravel arc of a turnout to let them pass. A huge RV camper went by. I caught the eyes of a boy about my age, in the high side window. During the three months of our trip I had come to understand the hierarchy of recreational vehicles. I loved our trailer, but I couldn’t help envying those RV kids. I thought about how that boy could move around anywhere in back while they were on the road. I imagined him lying in his bed, watching cartoons, eating sugar cereal from the box.
This was not the first time my parents had traveled by trailer. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson ordered the first combat troops to Vietnam, my parents returned to Europe, not to flee the draft as they’d planned two years earlier, but nevertheless pushed by the war. My father says they went because it didn’t feel like a normal time, a time for business as usual. For my mother, no time felt like a time for business as usual. The turmoil of the mid-1960s allowed them to share this sense of crisis for a time. They bought a car and a small house trailer in Germany and traveled like gypsies across Europe for ten months. To me the photos of that trip—of Sara in a bonnet and matching wool coat below the Eiffel Tower, of my mother in black capris holding Sara’s hand on the Acropolis—spoke of a more golden, blessed time.
When my parents returned from this second stay in Europe, they moved to the Bay Area, first to Oakland, because they couldn’t afford the city, and then finally, triumphantly to San Francisco in 1966, just in time for my birth.
My mother convinced my father to pursue a Ph.D. in history. My father always says now that she was the one who should have pursued the degree; she was the real intellectual. For a couple of years he hacked away on his degree at San Francisco State, selling baby furniture and then real estate on the side to support the family. Around the time Amy was born, he dropped out and went into business full-time. It was obvious to him that selling was what he was really good at, but my mother had a visceral distaste for business. She felt it was beneath my father’s talent, and for her it must have echoed her father’s decision to leave the ministry to make money.
After her own brief foray in graduate school, my mother’s vision had turned entirely inward. She cut off ties with most of her old friends, refusing to see people, refusing even to leave the house much. She started reading Edgar Cayce, whose blend of Christianity, prophecy, and belief in reincarnation dovetailed neatly with her own background and preoccupations. Cayce was a Baptist preacher from a small town in the South, not unlike my mother’s father. He died in 1940, but he was in many ways the father of the New Age movement. The story of his life, of the 14,000 psychic readings he’d done, and of his complex cosmology was popularized in books written by his family and followers, published in the 1960s. My mother devoured them.
She’d long been attuned to her dreams. Now she looked to them for signs and portents: Should we move to a new house? Should my father buy a building? What schools should my sisters and I attend? Even her diet was dictated by dreams, and she kept eliminating things—no sugar, no meat, no eggs, no onions—until she was down to a few leafy green vegetables, which in the 1970s came in frozen blocks from deep down inside the grocer’s freezer.
She’d taken up meditation. And sometimes, she admitted to my father, when she meditated she heard voices. Despite this, she meditated every day, drawn forward into her own terror.
All my mother’s interests—the spiritual questing, meditation, macrobiotic diet, mistrust of processed foods—were
Cars had piled up behind us, so my father pulled into the gravel arc of a turnout to let them pass. A huge RV camper went by. I caught the eyes of a boy about my age, in the high side window. During the three months of our trip I had come to understand the hierarchy of recreational vehicles. I loved our trailer, but I couldn’t help envying those RV kids. I thought about how that boy could move around anywhere in back while they were on the road. I imagined him lying in his bed, watching cartoons, eating sugar cereal from the box.
This was not the first time my parents had traveled by trailer. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson ordered the first combat troops to Vietnam, my parents returned to Europe, not to flee the draft as they’d planned two years earlier, but nevertheless pushed by the war. My father says they went because it didn’t feel like a normal time, a time for business as usual. For my mother, no time felt like a time for business as usual. The turmoil of the mid-1960s allowed them to share this sense of crisis for a time. They bought a car and a small house trailer in Germany and traveled like gypsies across Europe for ten months. To me the photos of that trip—of Sara in a bonnet and matching wool coat below the Eiffel Tower, of my mother in black capris holding Sara’s hand on the Acropolis—spoke of a more golden, blessed time.
When my parents returned from this second stay in Europe, they moved to the Bay Area, first to Oakland, because they couldn’t afford the city, and then finally, triumphantly to San Francisco in 1966, just in time for my birth.
My mother convinced my father to pursue a Ph.D. in history. My father always says now that she was the one who should have pursued the degree; she was the real intellectual. For a couple of years he hacked away on his degree at San Francisco State, selling baby furniture and then real estate on the side to support the family. Around the time Amy was born, he dropped out and went into business full-time. It was obvious to him that selling was what he was really good at, but my mother had a visceral distaste for business. She felt it was beneath my father’s talent, and for her it must have echoed her father’s decision to leave the ministry to make money.
After her own brief foray in graduate school, my mother’s vision had turned entirely inward. She cut off ties with most of her old friends, refusing to see people, refusing even to leave the house much. She started reading Edgar Cayce, whose blend of Christianity, prophecy, and belief in reincarnation dovetailed neatly with her own background and preoccupations. Cayce was a Baptist preacher from a small town in the South, not unlike my mother’s father. He died in 1940, but he was in many ways the father of the New Age movement. The story of his life, of the 14,000 psychic readings he’d done, and of his complex cosmology was popularized in books written by his family and followers, published in the 1960s. My mother devoured them.
She’d long been attuned to her dreams. Now she looked to them for signs and portents: Should we move to a new house? Should my father buy a building? What schools should my sisters and I attend? Even her diet was dictated by dreams, and she kept eliminating things—no sugar, no meat, no eggs, no onions—until she was down to a few leafy green vegetables, which in the 1970s came in frozen blocks from deep down inside the grocer’s freezer.
She’d taken up meditation. And sometimes, she admitted to my father, when she meditated she heard voices. Despite this, she meditated every day, drawn forward into her own terror.
All my mother’s interests—the spiritual questing, meditation, macrobiotic diet, mistrust of processed foods—were
Similar Books
