About the three children there's nothing I can tell you that you can't find out from any number of finely crafted, rarely bought novels of the mid- to late-20th century. The serpentine path that led to the writing may be of interest. In the pre-Internet, pre-satellite-TV days, what did a bright girl marooned on her parents' ranch in western Colorado do except read? Nothing unusual there. What is unusual was how the reading was mixed with talk, and what talk it was. Both parents were Ph.D.'s, mother in anthropology, father in biochemistry. They married late, coming together out of well-established tenured careers at an eastern university one level below the Ivies. Fed up with academic politics, they pooled savings and small inheritances and went west. Bought a medium-sized working ranch, kept and treasured the aging foreman and his crew as their teachers, settled in, learn their new craft, and had me. Apart from the expected childhood illnesses, my memories of growing up are remarkably trauma-free. The six-month winters, defined as the time between when the snow came and when it left, I spent mostly indoors. Weeks often passed when I was allowed to stay at home. (I never did understand how my parents arranged things with school officials.) We'd decide on a subject, select books from the large library they'd moved west, and set out reading and talking, reading and talking. During breaks in the weather, I'd get on the school bus, ace the make-up tests, and return home to more reading and talking. Summers were different only in that much of the reading and talking moved outdoors. As years passed, my parents were able more and more to actively participate in the operations of the ranch. Fine high-Rockies July days would find them in some flower-filled pasture doing something with the cattle, and over to one side on a rock or under a tree, there I'd be... reading, preparing for that night's talking. I can see now how they were arming me, they thought, giving me the focused intellectual preparation they'd both had to struggle for. And it all worked beautifully, until I went off to my choice of Ivy League schools. And met Tom. It was the first day of a math class, sophomore year. The professor had walked in and started, in medias res, talking about LaPlace Transforms as if they were our oldest and dearest friends. Five minutes into it, I was absorbed, delighted by the teacher's obvious passion. My own love affairs--and they had been passionate--up to that time had been like that of the teacher: I could and often did fall in love with the most abstruse, abstract ideas, from those of Mendeleyev to Fourier to Plato to Ruskin. Five minutes of LaPlace, and Tom entered, late. He hurried up a side aisle. I caught only a glimpse. It was either enough or way too much. Hormones kicked in. An entirely different set of hormones than had driven my abstract passions. In a reversal of the fairy tale, this Sleeping Beauty, upon encountering Prince C., went to sleep at that moment and didn't wake up for 30 years. Our intelligences matched. Our levels of hormonal naivity matched. My own hormones, with hardly a squeal of protest from me, decided immediately that his career mattered and mine didn't. And his hormones of course accepted this decision. The demands of two quickly arriving children bolstered my sacrificial position. Thirty years later (go read one of those marvelous but perhaps a tad too-serious novels if you want details), with the boy and the girl well into secure T.A.-ships, and Tom well on his way to mature contrition, I began to wake up. Though truly--and now rather deeply--loving Tom and the children, what could I do but laugh? Not bitterly, but heartily and with just a touch of pain. As I began reading and talking again, I found that words on paper or even on-screen, helped. I laughed at myself. And soon found that my words helped other people laugh at themselves. We had in the meantime divested ourselves of the ranch and "retired" to southern California. What better place to practice laughing? Correspondence eventually with Magellan's Log led to my present humbling task of "representing" Los Angeles to the world in this crazyquilt forum. |
I raised three children, a girl, a boy, and a husband, before I
started to write.