Trying to remember the stuff of my childhood dreams always brings me up short. It usually starts with: how did I get here?
I remember lying in bed on the sun porch of our big Berkeley house. It was still light and I was seething with resentment because my mother sent me to bed. The party was still going full tilt in the backyard, strains of Janis Joplin reached me in my bedroom of windows. I wanted desperately to be out there with the drunken adults. My three uncles were up on the roof of our garage and the neighboring house. They were playing frisbee from their perches, lobbing the dented tin lids of our trash cans over the heads of the revelers in the back yard.
I must have been seven, since that's the summer we had a full house, two pregnant aunts, one uncle and my two year old cousin. That's why I slept on the porch. It was 1968. Berkeley was alive with riots and tear gas, brimming with the energy of youthful righteousness.
My parents, at 28, were the patriarchs of our family. They hosted the bridge games: big bottles of Hearty Burgundy passed around the table. There was cigarette smoke and swearing. I wanted all of that. Deep political discussions, wine, cigarettes, the houseful of people, demonstrations in the streets. I wanted to wear full length gloves like my mother wore to the Governor's ball with her off the shoulder gown.
It was the sixties, but it was also still the fifties in many ways. It was such a time of upheaval, everything was changing. What did the future look like for girls? College? Maybe, not for sure. Marriage? Maybe, no longer a requirement.
My biggest aspiration was to become a flower girl as soon as I was old enough.
