Ocean City 2 (1963)

Burned The beach reflected the afternoon sun back in my face as I walked barefoot across the parking lot half full of day-visitors’ cars. I picked up the pace to get through the soft hot tar and reach the cooler sand and my oasis of umbrellas ringing a pile of canvas surf mats. I waved …

Walking Home from BHS 1959

I sat ready, desktop cleared, shelf under my chair emptied, ring binder and books wrapped with a wide rubber strap. The three o’clock bell rang and I slung my books on my hip and headed out the door along with thirty-one other sophomores who had done their daily fill of grammar for Miss Archer. I …

Bel Air High School 1958-62

I arrived in Bel Air moving from Baltimore in ‘58. My mother had fought dad’s Parkville, Overlea hopes (suburbs just over the Baltimore city line, five miles from his mother) and pushed us farther north from the city into a town surrounded by green hills and the horse farms of the Harford County. She hated …

More Stanford 1985-9

Faculty Author Development at Stanford I kept working at Stanford after they graduated me. I kept working for FAD, the Faculty Author Development Program (We developed faculty authors.) I loved the job.  I had been in school for so long that they had trouble throwing something new at me. I knew enough when the tossed …

Stanford 1983-84

I walked from the train station toward the campus on the straight, mile-long, often-flooded, cracked and potholed road lined with palm trees every hundred feet, some dying and all missing their warm ancestral homes. My Stanford was not today’s rich, smart kid playground: no gourmet foods, no fancy restrooms, no executive suites, no dreams of …

Granola State – 1976

A steel platform supported the sixty-foot, red and white, vertical bacon-slice sculpture at Sonoma State. Behind it, ivy and flowering vines tried to climb the prisonesque concrete of the science building. Across a wide walkway, the library sank at a non-geological pace into the campus’s cut rate real estate, a primordial lakebed that grew spongy …

Basic Trainee – Fort Dix, 1967

I was sitting pretty. Sure, Johnson wanted more troops for Vietnam, but that spring he’d said no married men. I had been hitched for a year by then. I thought I was safe. My wife and I had bought into the lower levels of middle America. I found a used car and a little apartment, …

Electronics Tech, Hewlett Packard, Santa Rosa, 1975

Jim sat at a one end of a long workbench, testing microwave oscillators at HP. He stared at his oscilloscope, turning dials, checking the harmonics to see if they were within limits. I found out later that when you turned on one of the new oscillators, it usually worked or it smoked. If it smoked, …

Satellite Shiner – NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MD 1966

On my first day, I hitched to the NASA gate and walked in. Everyone else drove through. I found the building listed on the  instructions they sent me. It was a big building, twenty stories or so. But inside, it had only one floor with a ceiling a couple hundred feet above. They told me …

Busboy at Zim’s – San Francisco 1974

  I sat in front of a cheap desk talking to a young man in a cheap suit. We were in Zim's headquarters, a two story building on Lombard. I'd slicked back my hair and trimmed my beard. "I see you want to work full time at night. What do you do during the day?" …