I want to float on an air mattress on Lake Berryessa with my girlfriend and to feel all the elements, the sun, the water, the thunder and lightning, the tranquility and the rage.
Stephanie* would’ve dropped her swimmers for me. I think it was the summer of 1983, the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was at Lake Berryessa with some of my classmates from Pacific Union College Elementary School (where I went sixth through eighth grades). I dared Stephanie to drop her bathing suit and she said, “You first.”
I was too chicken.
I think more about high school than any other time of my life.
I was bonded with people at PUC because we shared the same religion, the same diet, the same school, the same lifestyle. Diversity shatters community.
Curiosity is a great motivator for creativity. All stories are about what we’re grappling with.
A big reason I have not gotten into more trouble with my life is my fears. Safety has always been a big value to me. No messing around with the same sex, no animals, no married women, no paying for it, nothing unethical.
Remember woodshop class in seventh grade? How we used to hear it is better to give gifts that you’ve made than gifts you bought? So for Mother’s Day you gave your mother a mini bookshelf you made in class? And how badly it went over. So that afternoon you went to the bookstore and bought her several books.
