Linked Autobiography

-A "linked-autobiography" I invented so people could understand my life better by going to the links within the text. For the most part these are all links to websites, but some are links to other parts of my site or certain pictures. Enjoy! Maybe it's the start of a new Internet writing trend. :o)

I was born on October 20th, 1968, in Oakland, California at Merritt Hospital. I was early, and actually an accident, or a blessing-depending on your point of view.

My parents were in their late thirties. They already had their two children, a girl and a boy. My brother is seven years older than me, and my sister is nine years my senior. As a child my sister spoiled me with kindness, while my brother remained somewhat aloof, and hit my shoulder when I made grammar mistakes.

I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in the lower Oakland hills. We lived on Coolidge Avenue, which topped out just below the Mormon Temple, which was a palatial white monument. I could never get lost and was always able to point out where our house was.

I attended Sequoia Elementary School, where my brother and sister had gone before me. Some of my teachers even mistook me for my brother, which always surprised me.

My father, an American Baptist (liberal Baptist!SEE his statement about what Am. Baptist's are) minister and seminary professor/administrator, always took us to church every Sunday. I enjoyed it, but didn’t really appreciate it until later in life.

In elementary school I went through scouts and loved competing once in a pinewood derby. I won a medal, which I may still have somewhere.

As a kid I was a voracious reader. I would often bring home the limit of books I could check out from the library. My sister taught me how to read while I was still in kindergarten. I remember always having a paperback in the back pocket of my jeans. My favorite series then was “Encyclopedia Brown”.

In the summers my family always went on camping trips, mostly in the Sierras. In my teens I fell in love with the writings of John Muir, “John M.”. His blend of being a spiritualist and a naturalist opened me up to seeing God in nature. His “cathedral of trees” showed me that the perfection of nature had something to do with God.

For junior high I was lucky to not be forced to go to public school. Since my dad had found a good position, Mom was working full-time at a retirement home, and most importantly my brother and sister were grown and out of the house, there was enough money for me to go to a private school. I was dead set against public school as Oakland was not known for its safe schools. I didn’t think a fight happening every day at school was important for my education.

So we tried Carden Redwood, which was a rich kids’ school in the Oakland Hills where the students usually attended since first grade. They taught French beginning in the lower grades and I couldn’t wear jeans, and had to wear a collared shirt and a uniform during P.E.. Well... it was simply not me( and alien to my family as well). After one year we found a more liberal school and I started my addiction to alternative education.

Around this time my brother softened and we sometimes got in the car after dinner and threw around a Frisbee, or football up at a campus field in the hills. Those twilight hours in the spring and summer that year bought us a little closer together.

Archway School was then a very young junior high and wanted to find out what “we” wanted to study. I didn’t want to leave so they arranged for me and a few other students to stay for ninth grade.

Coming into John Woolman School as a sophomore was great. Woolman was a school founded by 60’s liberal Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee style. I fondly remember the wood stove heated cabins, the warmth and openness of the community( it was a boarding school), the small classes( never bigger than twelve, some as small as three), the obligatory hug & handshake after not seeing a fellow student or teacher for a while, the 300 acres of which only twenty-five were used, and my first spring when we had a barbecue at the swimming hole where teachers and students skinny-dipped. It was a little bit of hippie heaven in the materialist 80’s. I received a better education there than I may have before or since.

During the summers I worked back home or at Baptist summer camps. My first job was at Baskin-Robbins where I somehow managed to keep to the employee limit of two scoops a day( and a bite here or there).

Immediately after high school, at my family’s insistence, I enrolled at Linfield College, a small school that I mistook for an open-minded community. Though I hardly knew or saw my teachers, I found some good ones, got quite good at pool, and greatly appreciated the presence of foreign students in the international dorm I lived in.

Dismayed with education, and not wishing to bring my average below 2.0, I fled to the "real world" of work. After a short stint as a ranchhand in Montana I returned home( to my parent's home in Seattle). My sister was a boomerang child for a while, too. I soon found work as a sandwich builder at Subway Sandwiches in Seattle.

To continue the adventure click SEATTLE

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