Fast forward in the flow and I’m an elder, writing about friends and family.  Once I was just a girl living with ghosts, but not all the ghosts are dead.  I’m trying to make sense of things from the stories of my life.

Take Lindy.  We were Tiburon Peninsula kids, getting high and driving around in endless summers off the chart in California’s San Francisco Bay Area.  She was my best friend, and her story weaves with mine.  She lives in mental institutions.  I spent my life teaching in public schools.  I was three times a wife, and twice a mother.  I have lived with lunatics, and listened to chainsaws rip up trees.  The way I see it, you can only wreck a place once.

I did some thinking, and plenty of not thinking.   Like the time I snorted PCP in a stranger’s car.  But that story comes later.

So what’s it like to be born in Japan on the fourth of July?  Like a kaleidoscope, I turn, spin, and it’s all changed, yet remains the same.  Lighted prisms merge.  I grew up and my perspective shifted like a kaleidoscope.  Stuff happened and I changed.