Part 3: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies- My Neighborhood

Part 3: Cradle Songs and Distant Melodies

 My Neighborhood

My young adulthood in our first house has a lot to do with the ‘where do you come from’ question I've written about in the first two parts of this series. That house sat in an unincorporated zone known locally as ‘The Avenues’. My nearest neighbors came from Samoa, Colombia, Iran and Minnesota. And those were just the people I was closely acquainted with. I’m not sure where the guy on the corner, we called the ‘Christian Biker’ came from. A heavily muscled, tattooed, ancient car-fixin’ veteran of the Vietnam War, he took in a variety of woebegone characters, fed them and got them back on their feet. He was also the fellow who explained to me that the gunfire we heard periodically in the neighborhood was ‘automated weapons fire, Honey’. Eleven years in the house on Twelth Avenue means I’m from The Avenues.

The people I worked with, shaped my ideas as well. There was Henry, an African-American man who’d just moved to San Carlos by way of Georgia. He scorned the custard pie in the cafeteria as not being fit for pig food.

And there was Stan, whose Latino ancestry was stamped plainly on his face. Stan had worked his way up the career ladder, from an assembly job in Detroit. He’d heard about an early programmer training opportunity in the sixties, and taken advantage of it. Stan walked like a toreador and he dressed like Saville Row. One of the supervisors once looked scornfully at Stan’s beautifully tailored three piece suit and told him, “You know you don’t need to dress like that”.

“I’m comfortable,” Stan replied proudly.

Stan, Henry and I were a little outside of the group of other programmers. We were non-standard. I, because I was the first female programmer hired in. Stan and Henry for the color of their skins, and their accents. The two older men could have shunned me and made fun of my general naivete. I was only twenty-three years old, there was an awful lot I didn’t know about people and work, and I was so young it didn’t occur to me to hide the fact. Instead Stan and Henry took me under their collective wings and taught me how to survive at work, how to stand up for myself and, most importantly, how to laugh up-my-sleeve at the local customs.

We had a supervisor named Joseph. Joe was only a few years older than me, somewhat pretentious and pedantic. He walked a bit like a pigeon with his chest stuck out a little farther than normal. Joseph would ask us questions like ‘Now do you think of your job as just a job, or as a career?’ “Gee,” Stan laughed after Joe walked away with his characteristic strutting walk, “I wonder what the right answer to that was supposed to be?”

Joseph liked to walk in unexpectedly, and sit us down for motivational talks. These included little chats about team work. Periodically he’d consult a magazine article in which he’d underlined items he clearly thought were winning phrases.

Henry thought I was responding a bit too much to Joseph’s pep talks. “Hey it’s Little Joe!” he said when I came back in from one of our supervisors supposedly impromptu and friendly, one-on-ones over coffee. I learned a lot about attitude and what team work really meant, from Henry.

In a small, but very decided way, I’ve come from the places that my neighbors and co-workers are from.

Next Time: Whiskey in the Jar

... And yet I've always preferred Wildflowers (April Calendar, with Passover and Easter dates printable)

Please click on the calendar illustration above to enjoy the details 

Or for printing

And yet I've always preferred wildflowers. 

I was terribly disappointed when I checked the pages of  Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensability to find that Marianne Dashwood never actually uttered those words. They were only spoken in one of my favorite movie versions.

Fellow Time Traveller: Crotalus cerastes

Please click on the illustration above to enjoy all the lovely details 

involved in Crotalus cerastes passing through her chosen time portal

The rains are over, the rabbits and gophers are out and soooo is sommmmebody else. Isn't she lovely? And she was ever so polite about letting me know she was there, about a foot up the side from the trail. I was irritated that I left my audio recorder in the car. Her conversation with me, would have been such great audio for my next podcast. 


I knew when I created this  background, that it was somebody's idea of the perfect time portal. I just hadn't realized, until I stopped by Edgewood Park* for a short hike on the way to a music lesson, that it was the preferred time portal for Crotalus cerastes (a.k.a. one beautiful California rattlesnake).


* Edgewood Park Preserve, San Carlos, San Mateo County, San Francisco Bay Area. Put your snake proof boots in the car, Take the Edgewood Exit off Highway 280, meander down the hill. Parking is just off Edgewood Road. Part of County Park System . No dogs (but just across the road is a Mid-Penninsula Open Space Region trail that permits dogs)

Part 2: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies- Information Technology Runs In the Family

To read Part 1, please click on the following link
Part 1: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies, "Where are you from?"

* * *

Part 2: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies

Information Technology, Runs In the Family

To begin with, the ‘where do you come from’ question had a lot to do with my parent's life. In the sixties, seventies and eighties they followed a variety of programming jobs through the midwestern and western United States. So for a bit, as children, we came from Vandalia Ohio, Lansing Michigan, Seattle Washington, and Sierra Vista Arizona. Then later, for a time, we came from Claremont and Camarillo, and Ventura California.

Following in our father’s footsteps, my sister and I both applied our university degrees to writing software as well. It seemed rather quaint to think that we were second-generation programmers at a time when the field was so new. In point of fact we were following a familiar path. Family involvement in information technology was nothing new. My maternal grandfather, Charles Herman, his sister, my great-aunt Mabel, and their father, also Charles, were all telegraphers. Telegraphy, like software development, had been the latest, newest way to make a good salary and be caught up in the newest thing. It also meant that my mother’s family survived the Great Depression without missing a paycheck. Being a telegrapher in Chicago was a good way to remain employed.

So, information technology means we’ve been off the farm for a long time. Except that my father, his mother and little brother survived the thirties by going back to the farm. While my paternal grandfather went on the road as a traveling salesman, his family bunked around with whomever in the family would take them in. And those best equipped to do that, were farmers.

Farm life taught my father how to work hard, something he continues to do in his mid eighties. He developed a fount of really corny family jokes. He also learned to make a mean dish of hash browns on top of a griddle. So, I guess if you’d met him during the Depression, you would have said that my father came from a farming culture. Except of course he didn’t.

Back in Deerfield Illinois my mother was exposed to another culture, something that had nothing to do with her family. She had a card at the local free library and there she met the librarian who suggested that anybody who read as much as Peggy, ought to go to college.

Nobody in Mama’s family had ever gone to college, but it sounded like a good idea to her. Though she had enjoyed small-town suburban life as a child, she rebelled against it as a teenager. When Peggy Herman graduated from high school, she took a train into Chicago and got herself a job at the stationary company, H.R. Donnelley. Then, when World War II broke out, she got an even better paying job in the war plants. And a few years later, Mama had managed to put herself through college paying for it entirely, with the money she had earned herself. So if you asked Peggy Herman where she came from, she’d say, the University of Chicago.

Next Time: My Old Neighborhood

Listen to this entire story in the April Edition of "Unpolished Performances", a free podcast in the iTunes Store. Download it by clicking on this link.

Part 1: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies- Where are you From?

Part 1: Cradle Songs & Distant Melodies

“Where are you from?”

You can LISTEN to this entire story in the April Edition of "Unpolished Performances", a free podcast in the iTunes Store. Download episodes, by clicking on this link.

That question starts off so many conversations. I’ve never known how to answer it. It comes up about the time we get down to brass tacks, when it comes to really knowing something about each other.

I can see the wheels turning in the other woman’s head, just as they are spinning in mine. Did her parents come from some other shore? What was her school and home life like? Does she come from a rural, suburban or urban environment? Once I know those things, the answers will lead, rightly or wrongly, to some kind of judgement call when it comes to the opinions she is likely to have.

The best answer I can come up with is that I’m a Californian. Much of my education was here. I came of age, married and began my adult working life in the San Francisco Bay Area. So many of my opinions might be typecast as a California point of view. Yet, those opinions were influenced by the wide-ranging backgrounds of the people I lived with in college, neighbored with in my first house, and worked closely with in my profession. I’ve also been affected by all the other places I lived, even those we only passed through on our way to California. And, of course, I was affected by my parent’s experiences in the Midwest, during the Great Depression and World War II. The historical record before that is dim. No doubt I’ve been influenced by a wide-ranging web of ancestral experiences and memories, and not all of them come directly through my bloodline.

Surely there are a number of places I’ve come from. The real question is, where am I going?

Listen to this entire story in the April Edition of "Unpolished Performances", a free podcast in the iTunes Store. Download it by clicking on this link.

Sewing: Maui Star Flower Quilt

A GOOD mother would slowly and painstakingly craft this quilt stitch by stitch over a year sacrificing all to complete it, her only pleasure the knowledge that her darling child is warm at night. A BAD mother creates a digital version in less than an hour, and then gets on with her own homework.

Please click on the Maui Star Flower Quilt illustration above 

to enjoy all the wonderful starry details

Pele Dreams of Waking in Haleakala

Please click on this illustration above  

to enjoy all the glorious details

Someone near and dear to me has been visiting the island of Maui this week.

Don't be wakin' Pele up, Darlin'!