My car passed a beat-up VW bus with a JEFFERSON AIRPLANE LOVES YOU bumper sticker and the hippie at the wheel flashed me a peace sign. How had he recognized me as a fellow member of the tribe? By my car’s ban-the-bomb decal, probably, or my tent of long frizzy hair....
I’ve traveled on four continents, lived in England and Japan, and gone to sea with the British Merchant Navy. But wherever I am, when I close my eyes against the sun on a hot summer’s day, I’m lying on a front lawn in San Fernando, California.
In the autumn of 1970, I dropped out of U.C. Berkeley, took a job with an ecology group, and moved into a hippie pad on the corner of Ridge Road and Leroy Street. I should have finished my M.A. in Journalism that spring, but in April, after heated demonstrations over...
“You know you’re a real San Franciscan if you don’t even react when you see a naked person walking on the street.” – from a post on the SFGate Blog Here's a true story about “the City,” as everyone in the Bay Area calls San Francisco. (“So what’s Oakland then,” asked...
I wasn't dreaming of a white Christmas in December 1987. In California we like to confine our snow to the ski slopes where it can make itself useful. What I wanted to do was host my family -- parents, sister, and Aunt Catherine -- in the Victorian cottage I’d bought...
It was nine o’clock and t-shirt warm and almost-full moon, and I was taking a night-time stroll through my small town. As I got near the high school’s football field, the announcer’s voice baritoned through the night: “And it’s a fumble! … Recovered by Healdsburg!”...