In 1980, I spent a whirlwind year living with a wild girlfriend who was out of my league, and after it had run its highly developmental course, I was again facing that dilemma – out of work, out of money and with no real place to live, trying to find the path forward in my Los Angeles adventure (and amazingly enough finally eventually finding one). I could have freaked and baled for the Midwest, it could have even destroyed me, but I hung in there and kept breathing, and made it through in one piece, wiser and stronger and ready for the next chapter in my “Left Coast” odyssey.

Though I had thankfully lost my virginity before I came to Los Angeles (so any issues with breaking through that ice would not add to all my other challenges), this girlfriend, that I met as a co-worker at Lone Star Pictures, gave me a heady run in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Though she eventually dumped me, I do owe her a debt of giving me a wild ride (to get that fantasy out of my system), maybe seeing more in me at the time than I saw in myself, buffing up my self-esteem, and thickening my skin for travails to follow. (more…)

In 1979, I returned to Los Angeles after five months of purgatory with mononucleosis at my parents’ house in Dayton. I had only been in LA for one eventful month the previous fall, before symptoms of that nasty virus exhibited, my illness was diagnosed, and I bid a hasty retreat (determined to return) back to the Midwest to convalesce. Fortune presented me with an opportunity that is one of those moments in ones life that everything that follows depends on. So much so that my two kids today will sometimes note that they owe their existence to their dad winning $4400 on the game show “Password”.

It felt like purgatory because, for my own sense of self-respect and not feeling like a quitter, I knew I had to go back to Los Angeles even though I was very uncomfortable there, hated the place in fact, if I would have been willing to admit that. It seems like most everyone I had encountered there was either scheming or scamming or otherwise had a precarious grip on their life in the city of angels. I had not encountered the solid thoughtful people there, like my “Feminist Aunts” back in Ann Arbor, who were anchored and could help me anchor myself. Of course I had only been there a month or so before I baled with my mono. (more…)

In 1978 I arrived at LAX on a plane from Denver, the last leg of my journey that began with leaving behind my hometown of Ann Arbor and seemingly all the values and community that encompassed my youth and went with that special college town. I had had a number of compelling adventures in my life so far, most notably eleven weeks of backpacking on my own through Europe, but none more profound than this half-baked plunge as a very little fish into the very huge pond of Los Angeles.

I had been warned! I had seen Andy Warhol’s movie “Heat” laying out in every grotesque detail the worst case scenario of being a nobody wannabe with delusions of grandeur in the City of the Angels. I had heard my fellow Michigander, Bob Seeger’s song “Hollywood Nights” and the Door’s “LA Woman”, and knew that there might be no there there in “tinsel town”. (more…)

After completing college in 1978, I decided to leave Ann Arbor for Los Angeles in a half-baked scheme to fling myself off the deep end and into adulthood in a big strange city, leaving behind my home town with its close and dear friends, plus ghosts and memories in every neighborhood, park, store and other venue from the 23 years of my young life there. Lacking a really well thought out plan, this one at least made me feel like I was moving forward with my life somehow.

I was readying myself to depart from my comfortable little university town, seemingly every inch of it so familiar to me with memories of one or another experience, good and bad, from my youth. All those tree-lined streets I had walked, barefoot and shirtless on warm summer nights, bundled in down jacket, wool beanie and scarf wrapped round my nose and mouth on pristinely frigid winter days, or in the spring rain, with or without an umbrella. All those parks I had frequented, for little league practice and games as a kid, later late night in their hidden tree groves to surreptitiously share a joint, bottle of wine, or a six-pack of beer with friends. The university buildings I had had classes in or the Graduate Library where I skulked the sub-basements looking for dusty tomes written by dead radicals. The many toy, hobby and other stores I had patronized to buy Avalon Hill board games, slot cars, plastic army men, Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel record albums. The movie theaters I had spent hundreds of hours in watching movies and those iconic blue-lit clocks up high to the side of the big screen assuring me that this particular movie adventure had a ways to go yet. (more…)

To leave your starting point with only your feet (and possibly good walking shoes) below you and arrive at your destination the same way is a profound political commitment to sustained human evolution and balanced life on earth. (Of course there is also that marvelous feat of technology, that human-powered vehicle the bicycle, but that’s a subject for another post!)

The various public conveyances that you may or may not employ along the way are also part of that sustainable paradigm; they represent some of the best trappings of civilization to expand the range of our walking ability. (more…)

My senior year in high school (1971-1972) I was a wannabe radical, enjoying the intoxicating stories of my high school history teacher (an avowed communist) about the group that plotted and killed the Czar in 1881, the Russian revolution of 1905 and its failure to seize power, and the Bolsheviks who thirteen years later successfully did so, leading to my own flirting with the ideas of anarchism, entombed in old dusty volumes housed in the sub-basement of the University of Michigan graduate library.

Throughout my childhood and youth, whatever compelling story I heard, read, saw in the movies or saw on television, I wanted to emulate, and became a source of play and fantasy. Now 16 and a senior in high school (I skipped kindergarten if you’re doing the math), I was enthralled by the story my “Modern Russian History” teacher was telling us. He was a larger than life figure, an “out” Trotskyite and a heck of storyteller, and I imagine only in a really liberal university town like Ann Arbor could he unabashedly do his thing and flaunt his card-carrying credentials. (more…)

In 1999, recently arrived in Los Angeles from her little town of Wolfeboro New Hampshire, my mom was diagnosed during the first visit with her new doctor with dementia. Where a diagnosis of cancer used to be feared by many as an automatic death sentence, today many people, including my partner Sally are “cancer survivors”. But today for many, the most fearful diagnosis is one of “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia”. To date I have not encountered anyone introducing themselves as an “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia survivor”. How can a person (or their loved ones) come to grips with “losing their mind”? What is more precious and irreplaceable to us than our memories and our personality?

A few years after my dad’s death in 1984, my mom was diagnosed with an atrial fibrillation, which was causing her heart to not pump blood properly. What had provoked this condition was never confirmed, but her doctor suspected that it had been some sort of virus that had attacked and damaged the muscles of, and maybe physically reflecting perhaps the metaphoric “breaking” of, her heart, after a lifetime struggle with self esteem, lacking the love of her own mother, and never finding the kind of loving relationship with a man that she continued to long for. (more…)

Life, at its best, is an adventure – not always successful, not always happy, but a compelling narrative worth living and sharing with others. Though he never said it in so many words, that was one of the most compelling lessons I learned from my dad, exemplified in how he lived his life, and how he inspired others to do the same. I try to frame my own life as an adventure (or maybe better, a series of them), exemplify that in how I live day to day, and inspire my kids to do the same.

Maybe the greatest adventure my dad ever inspired was in the late 1940s when he convinced my mom (at the time just a friend, they were not engaged or even a couple) to accompany him to Ann Arbor (some 600 miles west of where they both lived in Binghamton, New York), promising her that after a year of establishing residency, he could get her into the University of Michigan. They lived separately for several years and continued their relationship as friends while he got his bachelor’s degree in English and my mom hers in Sociology. Eventually they did become a couple, married and my brother and I were born. It was certainly a very unorthodox adventure, particularly for a single young woman during that period. (more…)

In 1973, at age 18, I journeyed to Europe with a female friend who got cold feet after our first few days in England, and after struggling with the decision to continue on my own (including a tearful international call to my mom from a pay phone), I pushed forward for nine weeks by myself. These events turned the trip from a fun adventure with a good friend into a much more intense existential odyssey, a stranger in a strange land of languages I could not speak or understand and other heavily developmental experiences. (more…)

Our son Eric always had trouble getting to sleep at night. And starting at age three when he had to get up early to go off to pre-school and later regular school, the issue of getting him to bed and from there to sleep was always a daily challenge. His mind would race and he would resist letting go of the day. His sister Emma, three years younger but with just as active a mind, was right there with him, and in need of some sort of serious transition to get to sleep at night. (more…)