Suzette

I first met Suzette at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  I was in the new class of counselors hired on July 1^st, 2001.  Suzette was in the class before me and had started working there six months earlier.  Early on I had a client who as I talked to him told me what he had told the previous counselor to do.  As I listened to this guy, I realized he was only manipulating the system to cheat his creditors and I was supposed to roll over and help him.  He was what in banking we called a flake.  I reverted to being the bank vice president I had been two years earlier and told the SOB we weren’t there to help him cheat his creditors.   

I went looking for the previous counselor to tell her I had taken care of this guy for her.  I expected to find a young recent college grad who could be easily pushed around.  Instead I found Suzette.  She was wearing a long gray sleeveless slinky dress that was businesslike and sexy.  She was gorgeous and had a smile that lit up the room.  She had not taken the client seriously and the problem had been she didn’t follow his directions either. 

She had a laugh to match her smile.  She was a most attractive young woman.  Of course, I found her attractive, I would have had to be blind and deaf not to have been attracted.  She had a beautiful laugh.  She was young, in her mid or late twenties, though I thought she was younger.  She was a recent graduate of Cal, the University of California in Berkeley.  She was an English major and probably the smartest of all the counselors.  She was a favorite of Susan the supervisor and did special projects for her.  Her name was Suzette Anderson, she appeared to be a dark skinned African American.  She wore her hair pulled back to a French braid, looking very Spanish, that and something she said, I asked her if she was a Latina.  And she was, Panamanian, born in New York, with immigrant parents, she grew up in Inglewood.  Like many Central Americans she is fiercely patriotic about being Panamanian. 

This was the period at the end of my obsession to learn Spanish, an obsession that got me to fluency and I immediately spoke Spanish which she understood but responded in English.  It turned out she could barely get a word of Spanish out.  She reminded me of my cousin’s children who would only respond to their mother’s Tagalog in English.  For years I used her as an example of someone who at five decides to only use English.  My own granddaughters stopped speaking Spanish in kindergarten.  I think it was their reaction to the way the Spanish speaking immigrants were treated in their classroom.  If they didn’t have to speak Spanish they didn’t want to.  Suzette to my surprise could barely get gracias out of her mouth.  She choked on it the way the most anglicized gringa would speak. 

She had been an English major at Cal and immediately began plying me with books.  She particularly liked Toni Morrison and at her urging I read “Song of Solomon.”  In our chats I quickly realized her appreciation of literature and literary criticism was way beyond my understanding.  She had learned something at Cal that had passed me by or honestly I probably didn’t have the aptitude for at UCLA. 

From my point of view it was a wonderful office flirtation.  She was a beautiful young woman and we were friends.  I tried to go to lunch with her whenever we were free together and it wasn’t often enough, but every week once or twice.  She was a bit of tease.  I wasn’t sure how she felt but it was fun for me.  She had a six year old son and lived with his father, but they weren’t married.  She didn’t talk about John and I didn’t talk about Susan.  If I had thought about it I would have realized the flirtation was mutual, but the age difference between us was huge.  Suzette was younger than two of my sons.  I just enjoyed the friendship with a beautiful and exciting young woman.  Anything more would have been too complicated and it never occurred to me. 

When I left CCC to go to Juvenile Hall, Suzette invited me to dinner with her and her friend Jody.  There was an electric charge between us, but if we hugged, it was stiffly.  I went back to have lunch with Suzette a few times after I went to Juvy, and it was always fun.  We didn’t really stay in touch but she was a friend and I wasn’t really surprised when two years later I got an email from her and she suggested lunch. 

By this time I was living in Oakland and Susan was living in LA.  Suzette and I had a wonderful lunch.  We ate somewhere in my neighborhood on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland and then we went for a walk, all the way around Lake Merritt, a good three miles.  We sat in a café and drank coffee and talked and talked and talked.  She was going to graduate school for an MFA and was very excited about that.  I was unabashedly attracted to her and would have loved to have touched her.  We sat close but there seemed to be an invisible curtain just barely keeping us apart. 

At that time Susan and I got together for a week in LA each month, which was OK, but I had long since given up on the marriage between Susan and me and would have welcomed an affair.  Suzette didn’t talk about John and my natural Puritanism and reticence and we were just good friends.  She was as a friend described it later, an inappropriate female friend, but not a relationship that I felt would ever get beyond flirtation.  I didn’t really know how Suzette felt and I didn’t ask.  I was enjoying her company. 

We got together a few more times and then I went to the Ranger Academy in Pacific Grove, a good distance from the Bay Area.  After the Academy, I invited her to my graduation.  She didn’t come but invited me to a celebratory lunch in the City at the Slanted Door, a highly rated San Francisco restaurant. 

We saw each other after that and then I received an email, our only form of distance communication, that invited me to lunch.  Susan was supposed to be in Oakland that week and I emailed Suzette that Susan being in Oakland made scheduling lunch difficult.  I knew the mere mention of Susan violated our unspoken rule of not talking about partners and it acknowledged in a subtle way that our lunches were not the totally innocent meetings of friends that we pretended they were. 

I got no response from Suzette.  As the time passed I realized she had been scared off.   I was surprised to think, maybe there was more to this than I had admitted and I found that very exciting.  Maybe I would hear from her again.  But I didn’t for nearly two years.

Then in March, 2007 I got an email from Suzette wishing me a happy St. Patrick’s Day and maybe we could get together for lunch.  By this time Susan had moved back up to the Bay Area and was living with me in Park housing at Mt. Diablo.  It was not a comfortable situation and I welcomed a chance to see Suzette again. 

Only this time I was going to say something directly about it.  I sent her an email and told her how much I enjoyed hearing from her and I would love to go to lunch, but I was married and this was a little complicated.  We needed to talk about what we were doing. 

In response I got an erotic love poem that took my breath away.  Suzette is a very talented poet and this was a very good poem.  I had no idea Suzette felt toward me as the poem showed.  I really had thought, the flirtation was just her style and we really were just friends. 

I was eager to see her and we arranged to get together shortly after Easter.  This time we touched.  I held her arm and enjoyed the closeness of her next to me.  She was shy, but the air between us was charged and it was wonderful. 

About that time I picked up Helen Fisher’s book, “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.”  Suzette and I were in love, all the chemistry and emotion that Fisher talks about.  It was a wonderful roller coaster ride.  I was old enough and experienced enough to know what was happening and our infatuation with each other was like a storm we couldn’t resist, a storm that would inevitably pass.  I was going to enjoy it while it was there.        

I tried to see Suzette every time I could.  We emailed each other and I would go to work and sit down at the computer first thing to see what she had sent.  It was a delicious obsession.  I knew if it came out, I was risking my marriage but by this time, I really didn’t much care. 

Susan knew something was going on.  One time at a restaurant I arrived very late, something I never do.  She teased me about a girlfriend and I stumbled through a denial, but it was true I had been with Suzette and lost track of the time. 

After that Susan went on vacation to the Caribbean.  I had already said I did not want to go and work gave me the excuse.  I saw Suzette on the weekends and we spent more time together.  Suzette was still living with John, but that obviously wasn’t a good relationship either.  John and Suzette had a son born in 1995.  Suzette didn’t tell me much, but early on the relationship was on again off again and then John moved up to the Bay Area when Susan went to Cal and she wanted a father for her son. 

With Susan in the Caribbean we had a date and went to the Legion of Honor.  I think it was closed but we spent the day in the City and on the Muni I reached for her hand and for the first time we solidly held hands, not linked arms, not nearly close this time, but tightly held hands.  It seemed naively adolescent but Suzette and I were very reticent with each other and it made the romance all that more exciting. 

In all of this I really knew it was the infatuation that was running us and we wouldn’t know what we really had until the infatuation had run its course.  Being married and trying to indulge an infatuation wasn’t going to work and I realized I needed to end it with Susan.  I was really grateful that this infatuation gave me the energy to end something I had really wanted to end years before. 

By the 2004 I couldn’t stand living with Susan.  Our living in separate cities postponed the inevitable, but when Susan said she was moving back up to the Bay Area I thought I should tell her we were finished.  But I took the easy way out and decided to give it another try.   She moved up in December and by spring I had had it with Susan. 

I was having a hard time at the Park.  My supervisor was a twit.  I was the lowest man on the totem pole, a probby, on probation.  Living in State housing and in the Park is never a simple thing and Susan was making it very difficult for me with her demands on our “landlord,” and her dissatisfaction with everything in the Park and her own situation.  Her vacation to the Caribbean was a welcome respite but when she got back I had to do something about it.  I was grateful that Suzette had come back and I felt lucky that it gave me the energy to finally end it with Susan.    

When Susan got back on July 1^st, the next day I invited her to go for a walk with me.  “We had to talk.”  I struggled through telling her I wanted to separate.  I didn’t want to be with her.

She interrupted me and asked, “Is there another woman?”

I said, “No.”  I wasn’t separating from Susan because of Suzette.  I just wanted out. 

She said, “You’re lying,” and told me she had been reading my emails.  It didn’t go well after that but the result was right.  We were done. 

Susan and I continued in the house for a short time together.  We tried to avoid each other and didn’t talk again.  In September she moved out and I was free.

 In August I went up to Oregon to see my son and his family there.  When I got back Suzette and I went for a picnic at Paradise Park.  I leaned over to kiss her, for the first time.  I anticipated a light chaste kiss but it was returned passionately and our relationship took another step along.

In October Suzette finally informed John and that started a round of insanity for her.  I think it was shortly after that John turned up when I was meeting Suzette at a BART station.  I was surprised he was a little man and jumping up and down and yelling biblical insults at me, adulterer and all of that.  I thought considering that he had never married Suzette in 12 years or more he didn’t really have that much of a claim on her. 

John began drinking and was pretty distraught.  I learned he was a graduate student at Cal State East Bay, still a graduate student, even though I guess he was in his late 40s or even 50s and he worked as a community aide for the UC police, walking coeds to their cars after night classes.  I didn’t take him very seriously. 

I stayed close to Suzette throughout the craziness.  John had gotten himself totally worked up, he was drinking and one time he grabbed Suzette and ended up biting her on the lip, enough to bring the cops for a domestic violence call and earn a temporary restraining order.  So John was gone in November.  He continued to be as troublesome as he could be, but it was over.  He convinced the court he was the better parent for Arom, now 12, and he got custody of him. 

Suzette and I settled into making out as if we were virgins back in Catholic high school.  Yes, Suzette had put in her time at St. Mary’s Academy before she finished at Rialto High School. 

I went to Angel Island in mid-December which made the break with Susan more complete.  By that time we had started divorce proceedings, Susan was very businesslike and in charge.  We did a mediated divorce and had no problems until Susan decided I had cheated her on taxes.  She decided I owed her $150,000.  I explained how community property laws actually worked and what claims we might both have.  She didn’t pursue it.  I think in the end if I was cheating on her, even financially, it gave her closure and justification.  I certainly had enough blame and she was rightly angry and I was relieved. 

I was glad to be at Angel Island.  The people there had never met Susan and as far as they were concerned Suzette was simply my girlfriend.  Our scandalous beginning was irrelevant. 

Suzette began coming over to the island but she always needed to get off sooner than I would have liked.  She’d come only if she could leave at 9 at night or 3 in the morning or way too early and cutting her visits short.  After awhile it seemed like we were still having an affair, but it wasn’t John we were cheating on, it was Arom.  After the initial protests Arom was living with Suzette most of the time.  She told me she had not told him about us

We dated for a year, but it wasn’t a very satisfying relationship.  Even after John left it didn’t seem Suzette was free.  Sometimes I could reach her.  Sometimes I couldn’t.  Suzette is an extraordinarily private person and it was hard to tell what was going on with her.  Sometimes she was available and sometimes she wasn’t.  Sometimes she would come to the island and we would enjoy each other’s company and sometimes she couldn’t wait to get off the island. 

By January of 2009 I had decided that Suzette and I weren’t going anywhere.  I gave up on trying to establish a relationship with Suzette and waited for her to withdraw, only the next time I wouldn’t try to bring her back.  The infatuation was over.  We went on like that until March.

Then one day Suzette called me and asked me if I was sitting down.  I laughed and sat down and waited to hear what she was going to tell me.  She told me she was pregnant.  We had been using birth control but apparently it wasn’t effective.  When we got together a few days later Suzette had decided that she wanted this baby.  So with great trepidation I celebrated this coming event with her.  We would have the child.  She would move on to the island and we would get married. 

Then in April we learned that Suzette had tested positive for Trisomy 21 markers.  She had an ultrasound.  Fetuses with Down Syndrome often clench their fist.  The fetus didn’t have clenched fists.  We learned we had a girl.  They withdrew amniotic fluid and we waited for the test results which take about three weeks.  It was a very hard three weeks on both of us.  Suzette was mostly withdrawn.  I had concluded if our child did have Down’s Syndrome that I would want the fetus aborted. 

With great relief we learned that Paloma, by that time we knew her name, had no chromosomal problems.  It was like the second acceptance of this event.  Times had been difficult

Both times, learning about the pregnancy in March and then the test in May were like a roller coaster ride where this was this excruciating slow climb up a hill and then the decision to go ahead and the plunge down.  The first time the climb was a few days until we got together and I found out Suzette wanted to keep the baby and the second hill, much longer and higher, was four weeks and then we plunged down into the speed and inevitability of Paloma’s coming. 

That was in May and it was time for Suzette to move to the island.  She put it off, reasonably enough, until Arom graduated from Sierra Prospect 8^th grade.  She also put off telling Arom that they were moving and that she was pregnant.  She told Arom about me and her pregnancy as they were packing to move on the 4th of July.  Arom was 14 years old and furious.  I had never met him and Suzette didn’t tell him anything about me.  He was in a total snit, not talking, not helping, he was angry, rightly so I think.  It couldn’t have been handled much worse.

In return Arom did his best not to graduate from the 8^th grade but Suzette and his teachers pushed him through. 

Suzette got her father and brother to help her move.  The truck arrived at the docks in the late evening and it was a pile of furniture and boxes that had been thrown into the back of U-Haul truck willy nilly.  It took another few days to finish moving and I went over to help Suzette.  The apartment was a wreck.  We trashed what was left, packed a few boxes and I had Suzette hire a couple of casual workers to help her clean the apartment. 

We planned to get married in August.  Suzette got very crazy, as pregnant women sometimes are.  Disorganized she began concentrating on details of a very elaborate wedding.  For a wedding cake she went to a bakery in San Carlos, 40 miles away; the invitations she was hand making.  At this time Suzette had some idea I should be a father figure to Arom.  He was barely talking to me and rightly so I thought. 

In August Suzette and I went to get the marriage license and as was common by then Suzette wasn’t talking to me.  She like Arom radiated hostility and anger.  That was my excuse to pull the plug.  Getting married seemed a crazy idea.  The wedding was being put together with no communication or proper planning.  Suzette was focused on hand making invitations, and she was by this time very pregnant.  So I said, no, we would postpone the wedding.  She was angry that afternoon and then never said anything about it afterwards.  I knew it was a resentment that wouldn’t go away but it didn't make sense to me at that time to go ahead and marry someone who couldn't even talk to me when we were going to get the license.    

Suzette and I occasionally found a way to be friendly and comfortable together, but it wasn’t common.  We went to pregnancy classes at Kaiser Medical Center in San Rafael and most of those we passed ourselves off as the loving couple we should have been.  In social situations Suzette would relax and we did well, so sometimes that goodwill would last past the evening.  Paloma was born in October, more or less on schedule.  

Thankfully the day Paloma was born we were wonderfully together. 

On October 11^th about five or six a.m. Suzette woke me up and told me she was having regular labor contractions.  We were living on Angel Island.  Rich Ables, the maintenance worker on Angel Island, was a good guy with a very good heart who really liked Suzette and me and wanted to do anything he could to help us.  Instead of waiting for the 8:00 run to the mainland, which would have been easy enough, I called Rich knowing he would be very proud of being part of our day of birth for our new daughter.  So at 7 a.m. Rich took us to the mainland on the Ayala, the Park’s crew boat.

Everything was easy, there was no hurry or panic, we just wanted to be on the mainland as the situation developed.  When we got to Tiburon we walked the four blocks to the car and I asked Suzette if she wanted to go to breakfast and she did. 

We went to Denny’s.  Suzette ordered pancake rounds with syrup and butter, pancakes, orange juice, bacon, extra bacon, a vanilla milkshake and I think maybe eggs.  They kept bringing things and by the time she was finishing the table was full of empty plates.  The waitress there still reminds us of that day.  It was very funny and Suzette was having a good time. 

After Denny’s she wanted to go to ACE Hardware in El Cerrito for a board or something she needed; so we went there.  The salesman who helped us had been a medic in the Army.  He asked when the baby was due.  We told him the baby was on her way now.  That made him nervous.  Don’t worry you won’t have to do it, we told him.  From there we went to Target and Suzette shopped.  I don’t remember that we bought anything,

At Target she just wandered around looking at things.  We were moving pretty slowly.  Mid-afternoon we went to a Starbucks in Emeryville.  We sat there and talked and entertained each other through the afternoon.  Finally we decided we should think about going to the hospital.  The pains had never been terrible, but by this time Suzette would regularly stop and hold herself during a contraction.  They continued to be regular and they were getting stronger though not urgent.

I said I probably needed a burrito before we settled into the hospital and we went across the street to La Cucina Puebla, a place we liked.  Suzette decided to eat and we had a full meal, taking our time again. 

By this time, the pains were coming more regularly and at shorter intervals and we headed for Kaiser Oakland.  There is no maternity ward at Kaiser Marin so we had made all the arrangements to go to Kaiser Oakland.  Oakland Kaiser is a big medical complex at Piedmont Avenue and Broadway.  By the time we were walking from the parking lot to the hospital the pains had become intense and we would have to stop and wait until they passed.    

We went to the pre-birth triage and the nurse was very nice and the intern was a wonderful young man.  They agreed that it was going to be sometime that day but not soon.  They said if we lived on the mainland they would have sent us home but since we lived on an island we were admitted then.  We moved slowly, stopping when Suzette was having pains and were relocated to the obstetrics area and made comfortable in a delivery room. 

Even remembering it over three years later our experience at Kaiser was incredibly warm and human.  Everyone was wonderful.  They took care of us like we were family and very very special people.  They made us comfortable, they watched, they did what they needed.  From beginning to end, the triage nurse to the girl who helped us to our car two days later, people were just wonderful.  Thanks to whatever hormones, dopamine and whatever other things go on at a birth we were in a heightened state and we stayed that way, feeling close and deeply in love for the whole time we were there and loved by everyone around us. 

After 11:00 p.m. the labor contractions strengthened and started to become unbearable.  Suzette was in great pain and not her stoic self at all.  At one point, she started saying “No mas!  No mas!  No mas!”  The nurses all looked at me, they had no idea that Suzette was latina and pushed to her limit she reverted to her childhood language.  Coincidentally as she switched to Spanish the baby crowned and a few minutes after midnight Paloma was born.  Unfortunately the baby had picked up the drugs used to dampen Suzette’s pain and the first half hour a neo-natal intensive care unit, six very intense and efficient people concentrated on her to get her breathing and keep her breathing.  After a half hour they succeeded, cleared up and left the room, leaving the baby with us and the regular obstetrics staff. 

After the delivery we had a wonderful room to our selves on the 12th floor.  It was just us and the baby and we spent our time admiring her.  Outside it was storming, pounding rain and beautiful thick gray clouds.  The first storm of the season it was greeted by everyone in the Park and throughout California wild lands as the end of the fire season.  Paloma’s arrival brought a sigh of relief from all of us, the bad dry days of summer were over.  The rains had arrived.  We had a long relaxing day in the hospital.  The next morning I rushed around to do the paperwork, pay $800, the portion not covered by insurance and we left that afternoon and took a boat back to Angel Island through the storm with our new baby. 

Paloma was transforming.  She was and is such a beautiful child, remarkably so from the very beginning.  Suzette and my genes from disparate places in the world produced an incredibly beautiful girl child. 

We both took time off and adjusted to the baby as she took over our lives.  Suzette went to work in March and during the winter I had a schedule where I only worked weekends.    

I had a lot of fear around being a father at 62 but over time the more I get to know Paloma as a person, the more fortunate I feel.  However she came into the world, whatever the timing, I am just a very fortunate person to have her.  The heart attack I had less than a year later made me feel very vulnerable but after six stints and three years later, I am alive and well and doing well today. 

As much as possible I don’t dwell on the future, I stay in the present and enjoy my beautiful daughter. 

Suzette and my relationship was difficult in the first year.  Arom didn’t help the situation.  The following September he left to join his father in Florida.  We got a new superintendent in the Park at that time who began to put the Rangers in their place and it became harder and harder to live on the island.  The superintendent changed the rules for using the boats to leave the island and Suzette could no longer get to work from the island.  In April, 2011, we moved to Oakland and living on the mainland was one less stress on us and our relationship. 

I retired in November of 2011 and I began enjoying that.  One day I went to Kaiser and they asked me if my spouse had insurance and I started giving the clerk all the information on Suzette and her job.  As I got to a part I didn’t know I said, I would have to call her, and then as I was dialing the phone I realized, she wasn’t my spouse; we weren’t married. 

I went home with the intention of telling the story to Suzette and asking her to marry me.  In our nearly three years together we had become a couple.  For some petty reason when Suzette came home that night, she was all upset and directed some of it at me and as she had been doing since we began living together, she withdrew and wasn’t talking to me.  I was struck by the irony of that, one more opportunity to get married missed because Suzette decided to be angry.  This time I waited a month and told her the story and asked her to marry me. 

We got married on April 3rd before a county commissioner and then a wedding with all of our friends at the Unitarian Church on Saturday April 8th.  Again the wedding was a difficult event but for me I did what needed to be done, a hall, a minister, a caterer and emails to my friends to come to the wedding and Suzette concentrated on the things that were important to her.  It worked.  We had a nice wedding.  Lots of people were there.  Suzette went to work Monday and we began living our life as a married couple instead of just a couple. 

In July, 2012, Arom returned from Florida to live with us.  Initially he was more cooperative but that wore thin.  Arom still makes life as difficult for himself as he can, but I’m less a part of it. 

Suzette and I live together better than we have before.  Two days after Arom moved in we moved, as previously planned, to a house in El Cerrito.  It suits my working class self image.  It’s a nice house, not luxurious, on a nice block in an acceptable neighborhood.  It’s very comfortable without being showy at all. 

My days are filled with writing.  Suzette still goes to work incredibly early and comes home late.  Lately she hasn’t had so many things going on that keep her away from the house.  For awhile it seemed she didn’t want to spend any time with me, but now we’re quite close.  That too will change.  Arom will join the Army this summer or be shipped back to Florida. 

And I enjoy Paloma.  We do ballet, that is Suzette and I take Paloma and watch her begin to dance in her pink tutu and tights and sometimes leg warmers.  We go bicycling, her in a green seat on front of my bike or lately on her own bike, a 12 inch pink princess bicycle with training wheels.  We go to the Farm, a small show farm in Tilden Park and to the snow.    

This winter we went up Highway 108 to the Sierras.  We had seen snow for the first time last winter in Arizona.  This time as soon as Paloma saw snow by the side of the road, patches under the trees and on the shady spots, from the back seat she shouted, “Stop the car!  Stop the car!  I want to play!”  We drove on a short distance and stopped in a parking lot with more snow where she could play and then went on to our hotel and the next morning had a wonderful time just being in the snow. 

We sing, we read stories, we dance and I am delighted to have a daughter.  I am also delighted to have a beautiful wife who lately most of the time is very warm and affectionate.  She is an incredibly interesting person who is sincere and seems to try very hard.  We are I think getting better together.  And while it’s not quite the normal middle class life that I’ve aspired to, it’s close enough and it has Paloma and Suzette in it and that’s an incredible good fortune.   

Moving to the Bay Area

I  enjoyed my time of being single.  I enjoyed dating.  I enjoyed relationships when they were good and I struggled through them when they weren’t.  A couple of times I thought I might get married, but it didn't work out.  By the time I was in my late 40’s I was really tired of being single and ready to settle down.  Judith and I had nearly married.  After Judith I was still looking to get married.     

A friend of mine in San Francisco set me up on a blind date, dinner at her home with a few other people, and I met Susan Robinson.  Susan was fascinating, African American, a Cal grad, she was very successful in her career, and doing well at Pacific Bell.  Her mother was Roberta Robinson, a very well known city councilmember in Los Angeles, and Susan was well connected politically.  She had worked for Willie Brown, knew Jerry Brown, Nancy Pelosi and just about everyone in California politics, north and south. 

A couple of months later we had our first date in Los Angeles and then a reciprocal date in the Bay Area.  Susan considered herself a libertine.  She certainly tried to be, at least at first, but for whatever reasons Susan and I couldn’t seem to find a rhythm between us.   We had a lot of other things in common and we both sincerely appreciated each other. 

I had reservations.  I don’t think my love for Susan was ever overwhelming or profound, but the situation was good.  She introduced me to a new world that was interesting and exciting and we had a stable middle class existence.  Our physical relationship was like the overall relationship, good sometimes and tolerable most of the time.  Susan proved to be unsatisfied with her own accomplishments and driven to work harder and harder.  She is a good person but sometimes she could be very difficult.  After seven years of marriage we were pretty estranged from each.  We found ways to keep it working.  We made it another four years.  After eleven years together Suzette came into the picture and the excitement and desire of pursuing Suzette pushed me into ending what had become a very uncomfortable relationship with Susan.    

But in 1995 I moved up to Mill Valley to live with Susan.  I had lived my whole life in LA except for the four years in the Air Force.  I used to tell people I had lived all over, North Hollywood, Atwater, Glassell Park, Highland Park and La Crescenta.  I told them, one time, I had even lived 11 miles away from where I was born.  Now I moved 400 miles north.     I loved LA but I wanted to see what life was like elsewhere. 

I moved in with Susan in Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  I continued to work for California Commerce Bank in Los Angeles.  The President of the bank kept me around as an insurance policy against the problems the bank had had before I came.  I supposedly worked in San Jose but that office closed.  After that I worked at home and went to LA when I needed to.  Two years after the first satisfactory examination, I got us a second satisfactory CRA exam.  I put real effort into the job.  It wasn't easy but it didn't require a lot of time.  Salvador, the President of the bank, was satisfied with that.  I worked half time and got paid full time.

I enjoyed kayaking, cycling, hiking and just leading a life of leisure.  Susan went from the Phone Company to Odwalla, the juice company. After 6 months she was fired.  They didn’t really want to run a decent company, they just wanted window dressing.  A few months after she left Odwalla had an outbreak of E. coli from their juice.  One child died, many were sickened and they were found guilty of criminal negligence.  After Odwalla Susan worked as a consultant and finally went to work for Citibank as their CRA manager for California.  After I left California Commerce, a subsidiary of Banamex, Citibank bought Banamex and my successor at California Commerce Bank worked for Susan. 

At first I felt very unrooted living in the Bay Area.  Professionally no one knew who I was and San Francisco is very different from LA.  It seemed in non-profits and economic development that people of color still naturally had the advantage but in San Francisco the gay community added an extra twist and being a straight white male was no advantage in non-profits.  In Los Angeles I had been well known and respected.  In San Francisco I felt discounted as a white middle aged male from the suburbs.    

I never became an ex-Angeleno, one of those people who denounces LA.  I described myself as an unrepentant Angeleno or an Angeleno in exile.  I did come to appreciate the Bay Area where it’s OK and even common to be literate and where their universities are better known for academics than for their football teams.  In LA, unfortunately it's true, people seem much more ready to discuss the movie than the book.  The neighborhoods in San Francisco and the East Bay are fabulous, unlike anything in LA.  And I’ve even become a foodie.  For the first few years I had a foot in both worlds, but when I quit banking and started working for the City of San Francisco I had to admit I had become a Bay Area person. 

We lived in Mill Valley for awhile, in a beautiful home Susan owned on the hillside above Boyle Park.  Then we moved to Half Moon Bay where she worked for Odwalla.  Half Moon Bay was interesting for being so close to San Francisco but so far away at the same time, isolated by roads that closed in winter storms and otherwise frequently jammed with traffic. We got married in April of 1996 when we lived in Half Moon Bay.  After Odwalla let Susan go we moved back to Mill Valley

In 1999 I quit California Commerce and stopped commuting.  Staying in the Bay Area helped me to begin to put down roots. 

Once when I was counseling at Consumer Credit Counselors I asked my usual question, “Are you a native San Franciscan.” 

The woman answered, “No, but I’ve lived here so long, I think of myself as a native.”

“How long have you lived here?” I asked. 

“Seven years,” she said.   

By then I had been in the Bay Area for almost seven years myself and I didn’t feel almost native at all, but it did make me think I should start accepting the Bay Area as home.  Seven years is a long time.   

In 2001 I went to work for the City of San Francisco in their Juvenile Hall.  Juvenile Hall and Parks would never have happened for me if I hadn’t moved up to the Bay Area.  For that alone I always counted myself lucky to have moved. 

Between Susan and me, the crisis in our marriage came when Susan lost her cleaning lady and I did laundry for both of us.  I drew the line at folding her clothes.  It was a small thing but it reminded me of the Paul Simon song, “she liked to sleep with the window open.  I liked to sleep with it closed.”  Susan wasn’t having it and we had to go to counseling.  Susan was a dominant personality and I am an independent person.  Our marriage survived when she got a job in LA and I stayed in Oakland.  We were good at a part time marriage.  Our marriage became untenable when she moved back to the Bay Area and we began living together again.

After ten years or so it was hard to deny that I wasn’t at home in the Bay Area.  Now with 18 years in the Bay Area, I don't even try.  I am a Bay Area person. 

I love the beauty of it, I love the culture, I love the diversity, and I love the Bay Area.  I also love LA but I have to admit every time I go down there I notice the traffic, the rushing everywhere, the prominence of the Hollywood culture, and the incredible distances in Los Angeles.  LA is like a city in a centrifuge; flying away from its own center.  And the air is bad. When I visit LA I try to keep my complaints to myself, but sometimes they slip out.

I miss the mountains, the wilderness, the desert, LA’s Mexican heart, the vitality of it all, LA’s lack of self consciousness and smugness and the way LA is always changing.  I miss the vibrant arts and the museums in LA.  I miss a town that has a nickname for itself.  I miss mild winter days in LA.        

Paloma and Suzette think the Bay Area is home.  I have friends here and a working of knowledge of the local history and geography.  I am a Bay Area person with strong LA ties.

Cathy

She calls herself Kate now.  When I first met her she was Cathy, Cathy Bruemmer.  I thought it was Brenner, an Irish girl, and quickly learned it was Bruemmer and she was German.  The e is an anglicized addition, an attempt to get Americans to pronounce Brümmer with an umlaut over the u.  Or maybe it was just how an Ellis Island Immigration official, probably Irish, spells an umlaut u when he first hears it. 

Her parents were Midwestern Germans, her father Catholic from Illinois and her mother a convert from Nebraska, solid hard working people, though her father had a subtle and delightful silly streak.  He didn’t work that hard when he was being paid but he liked his own projects.  He built an airplane once and flew it until he crashed it.  He enjoyed life in a German way.  Her mother, the stiffer spine in the family softened with a little Thunderbird wine in the evening, was a ranch raised girl who had come to the big city during World War II.  Wilbert was 4F and stayed home which gave him a great advantage with beautiful women, an advantage I don't think he usually had.  Minnie was not only strong willed and hard working; she was good looking too.   

Cathy Bruemmer was one of a kind.  Her parents lived in a cracker box house facing the quiet streets of El Segundo, but the back wall thinly divided their home from Imperial Highway and the runways of LAX.  Cathy was a free spirit.  When I first met her, she was wearing one of her long dresses that she made for herself, I think it was green with a garish print.  We had just come out of the 50’s, her father drove a Ford Falcon station wagon,but she was well into the 60’s, ahead of the rest of us.  She was attending Mount Saint Mary’s College on a scholarship and worked in the fabric department at Penny’s where her mother also worked. 

She did all the cooking for her family.  Her father didn’t like onions or spicy food of any kind as he defined it.  It was after we were married that she bought her first garlic.  But within the confines of her family, she cooked and baked wonderfully, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and German chocolate cakes.  After we were married and her imagination was free to concoct anything she wanted including onions, garlic and even occasionally olive oil, she was a great cook, though her food, Italian, Russian, Chinese or French always had a faintly Midwestern German subtext.   

She was excited about movies, literature, and art.  She was a free spirit.  She was in trouble with the administrators at Mount Saint Mary’s; they knew the long dresses were a sign of rebellion.  Essentially she was a good kid.  She had been 5’7” in the third grade and all of 80 pounds and it was only now in her freshman year of college that she was growing into her own height with hips and small sexy breasts.  She was really quite pretty but she didn’t know it.  I don’t think she’d ever really been kissed yet, never had a boyfriend, and didn’t do drugs. 

Many years later she liked to drink white wine with ice cubes and to smoke pot before she had sex though she could do just as well on a couple of margaritas.  She was still outspoken and still a little naïve.  She was working as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Santa Fe Springs.  A co-worker had been disciplined unjustly and in the lunchroom one day Cathy said, loud enough to be heard, “That’s why we should have a union.”  She was fired the next day. 

I fell in love and in lust with her at first sight.  A week later when we got together we made out until our brains nearly fell out and groped each other virginally.  We were Catholic and had grown up that way.  We were well suited to each other.  We were excited about each other but we didn’t know what to do with it and in fact didn’t make love until our wedding night, which we did wonderfully, after two years of Catholic foreplay. 

I think I was the first man, very young man, to appreciate her and she was beautiful, beautiful long legs and a lithesome body.  She was always envious of women who were fuller in the chest, but I thought she was wonderfully shaped.  She looked like a girl to me.  She had an inept grace about her.  She reminded me of a young and clumsy gazelle, who could jump beautifully into the air and stumble a moment later on her long legs. 

We were inseparable from shortly after we met.  Her family welcomed me and we did our college friends together.  I had become part of the literary and artistic circle at Loyola and I think Cathy found my friends very exciting.  We did her large circle of family friends together.  She was exciting intellectually, a voracious reader like myself, and though her family were working class Republicans, she was becoming a liberal Democrat. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964.  It authorized President Johnson to execute the Vietnam War but it really didn’t become an overriding consideration for college students until 1966 when Cathy and I met.  I received a IA draft status.  IA, one 'A' as we said it, meant you go next.  A grammar school friend of mine was killed in the DMZ in May, 1967, and I decided for Cathy and me that I would join the Air Force and hope I could avoid the fate of a draftee in the jungles of Vietnam. 

In the summer of 1967 I went off to Basic Training and then technical training at Keesler AFB in Mississippi.  In April the following year at the end of training I received orders along with the rest of my class to go to England.  I had been an English major.  Cathy was a history major.  I went home and we got married.  I was home a couple of weeks before the wedding could be put together and finally we enjoyed on our wedding night what we had put off so long and a honeymoon drive to San Francisco. 

At Christmas time in Mississippi I had been invited to bed by a young woman named Charlene and being a virgin I didn’t know how to say no.  For a couple of weeks Charlene and I made the beast with two backs badly and then life went on.  Stupidly in a very drunken moment, I chose to tell Cathy about this liaison the night before I left for England. 

I know it was devastating, but she struggled through it and joined me in England a month later.  We didn’t talk about it and never worked through it.  I think it was always a smoldering resentment that Cathy had against me for the rest of our marriage.  We conceived Sean during our first summer.  We both loved England and we did OK together.  There were resentments and struggles but nothing terrible. 

We lived offbase in the town of Bedford.  After a couple of years, a gypsy came to the door one day and Cathy invited her in.  Cathy told me about it when I got home.  The Gypsy predicted my promotion to Staff Sergeant and something about us which Cathy wouldn’t reveal.  I always had the feeling that the Gypsy predicted we wouldn’t last as a couple and that Cathy believed her.  It seemed after the Gypsy that as hard as we might try our marriage was always doomed. 

We had a hard time while I went to UCLA and she stayed at home with our two sons.  We struggled in our rented house when I got a job at Bank of America.  I think I have a normal libido and like most men I would love to enjoy most of the attractive women I see.  I am also a bit of puritan and even today I don’t have the energy or flexible conscious enough to cheat, not that it doesn’t seem attractive sometimes, but just that it’s too much trouble.    

Having gotten married at 21 with very little experience prior to that, I did wonder what it was like on the other side of the fence and as Jimmy Carter would say, I wasn’t faithful in my thoughts, but for the most part I acted faithfully. 

Cathy had her faults.  She was a terrible spendthrift, she was always buying something that saved us hundred of dollars that we didn’t have the money to afford.  She could be obnoxious and abrasive.  And together we probably drank too much.  But overall we did as well as most couples do and potentially probably could have stayed married for a lifetime. 

Unfortunately our minds didn’t go that way.  By the 1980s we seemed to hate each other.  Whatever either one of us did seemed to be against the other.  We came from an old view of relationships, husband working, wife at home, and that didn’t work well post-feminism.  I thought Cathy took advantage of me and I was stuck on a treadmill and I’m sure she found me limiting and critical of the new life she was trying to lead, a new life she had always been trying to lead.  And what I thought of as the curse of the gypsy hung over us.  My marriage in tatters, frustrated I looked elsewhere and found one woman who would sleep with me once and others who might.  I was no longer even trying to be faithful. 

Cathy graduated from Cal State LA and I think she felt empowered and limited in the roles we set for each other.  Finally in 1983 we separated and in the following year divorced. 

I’ve never regretted divorcing Cathy, now Kate.  She’s a good person and tries hard but even today 30 years later we only accommodate each other as friends.  I find her naturally abrasive.  I love her and I care about her, she’s the mother of my three sons, and today she is like a sister that I’m not really that close to.  Without our history we might not be friends at all. 

It makes me feel bad.  She was so beautiful and so exciting when she was 18, I wonder what happened to the girl I loved and regret my part in making her at all bitter.  Alcohol played a large part in it.  I’m of the school that accounts the downward spiral of alcoholism almost inevitable until one is given the grace to leave it. 

It is a sad thing.  I wish I had been able to give my boys a stable home life until they were 18.  I wish that I myself had been able to have a stable middle class existence, enjoying the warmth of a home and roots, instead of the searching rootlessness that was my 40’s and even 50’s.  

But life goes on and I’m here and I’m not there, and I prefer it this way.  

After the Divorce

Cathy and I separated in November, 1983.  I went off to live with my parents and she stayed in the house we had bought three years earlier.  Shortly after I left home Loyola High School decided to expel Sean, our eldest son.  Sean had been caught with marijuana at a football game.  Loyola had zero tolerance for drugs supposedly.  It was a hard time for all of us.  As soon as they started the process we did everything we could to fight it.  I moved back into the house and spent all of my free time getting letters of recommendation together for Sean.  It didn’t make any difference.  Sean in his first three weeks of Loyola with a full scholarship was thrown out.  It was devastating for all of us. 

When it was over I returned to living with my parents in Burbank and Cathy got Sean enrolled at Providence High School in Burbank.  Cathy and I were angry at each other.  Sean took everything on himself and struggled at Providence.  He was exceptionally bright and he did his best to shock and dismay his teachers.  An English teacher gave a lecture on writing to get the attention of the reader.  Sean wrote a suicide note.  He said it got her attention.  Ted had started swimming the year before and his days consisted of going to school and then swimming practice for hours.  His weekends he spent at swim meets.  He spent more time with his team and his coach than he did anywhere else. 

Benjamin the athlete spent more time at his baseball coach’s house than he did at home.  The baseball coach had a son about Ben’s age and Ben found a safe haven there.  Cathy and I seemed to be buried in our own pain and I don’t think either one of us was there for the kids at the beginning of our separation and then divorce. 

In December I stopped drinking and began attending AA meetings.  In January I began a writing class at UCLA Extension.  Separating from Cathy after having been married since I was 21, I began my long postponed bachelorhood.  I was desperate for companionship but not very good at it.  In the new year Cathy met someone and I took care of the kids.  Many weekends I just moved into the house and stayed with them.  Ben, Ted and I began to establish our relationship now that I wasn’t living with them.  Sean was out on his own, as wild as he could be with a wild set of friends.  I barely ever saw him.  Sean was obviously very angry at me.  The other boys seem to adjust to the new reality. 

Cathy and I did the lawyer thing.  I had my good friend Hu Sommers take care of me.  Hu made sure Cathy and I both got a fair deal.  He front end loaded my obligations and when I asked him why I had no money, he asked me what was I going to spend it on? 

I continued working at City National Bank and Cathy was teaching at Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood.

 It took me until May to establish a real relationship with someone.  Not to my surprise, but it was ironic, Cindy was much like Cathy.  She was president of the local parish mother’s club, a legal secretary at a small firm; she had an 11 year old son and lived in a home she rented in the neighborhood she had grown up in in West LA. 

I dated Cindy for about eight months and then went on to another girlfriend, which became my pattern for the next 10 years or more.  I wasn’t ready to get married to a woman very similar to my ex-wife within just a year of separating, but of all the women I dated Cindy was probably the one I should have married.      

In August of 1984 I moved out of my parents and into the back house of a friend a few blocks away from where the boys and Cathy lived.  I left City National Bank and began working for Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank.  

Cathy and I had worked out our bitterness using lawyers for awhile but that played out and we settled into a relationship where I paid child support, alimony and car payments.  I was broke but as Hu said, it didn’t do me any harm.  We never formalized visitation rights over the boys thank god.  I saw them when I wanted to, took them places, attended Ted’s swim meets and stayed with them when she was away.  After the initial accusations of being a poor husband and a poor father, Cathy didn’t stand in the way of my seeing my sons at all and until Benjamin graduated from high school I lived nearby and actively participated in their lives. 

It took me awhile to get started in AA.  At first I attended meetings once a week and I stayed pretty much on my own, but I was lucky to find a good sponsor and after the first three months got more involved in AA and even found a home meeting in South Pasadena.  A home meeting in AA is a meeting that one goes to regularly.  I showed up and I began participating, pouring coffee, cleaning up, getting to know people.  We met in the South Pasadena Women’s Club. 

I participated actively in that group and attended other meetings in the Pasadena area.  I got to know people and to be known.  I celebrated my first year of sobriety at the South Pasadena Women’s Club and many birthdays thereafter.  Eventually I became the secretary of the first meeting, the pre-meeting and then the second meeting.  The secretary isn’t really the person in charge.  They help to find the speakers and they lead the meeting.  The South Pasadena Women’s Club meeting had a small informal steering committee, all men, who met for breakfast on Thursday mornings at the Green Street Café.  I became a member of that group.  The AA group had an official name besides The Women’s Club, but most of us didn’t know what it was.  We just called it The Women’s Club.    

Making things equal the Crown City Meeting on Friday nights had an informal group of women who ran that meeting.  Somewhere along the way I became secretary of that meeting for a while too. 

At work I used to laugh to myself that these Japanese bankers, American businessmen and lawyers that I was often stuck in meetings with had no idea that I was the head drunk for San Marino/South Pasadena for awhile.  Of course, I knew leadership in AA wasn’t like other places, much more amorphous and all about service, not prestige, but it was fun to think about. 

At the bank in 1987 I was promoted to vice president.  In 1984 I started driving Ted to Loyola High School every morning and did until he graduated in 1989 when I started driving Ben to Loyola every morning. 

Sean was asked not to come back to Providence after his first year.  He started Eagle Rock High School.  At Eagle Rock he was more a truant than a student.  He’d bought a car on his own before he was 16 and hid it in the neighborhood which I found out about.  He was a punker and ran with a crowd that was as lost as he was.  At one point he moved in with me, but then he started stealing from me.  Since then Sean has proved himself to be scrupulously honest.  I suspect at the time he thought of it as borrowing from me.  If he did, he owes me $10.  I was probably too scrupulous and intolerant at the time and I dropped him off in Glendale to fend for himself, which he did. 

I began doing well at work.  I figured out how to be single and have a social life.  As Spalding Gray said, being a straight single man in my late 30s with a job, it wasn’t that hard.  I dated women in AA and women I met at work or in classes.

In 1986 I met Lisa Levine.  She was a beautiful woman and very smart.  She had two daughters, a girl 11 and another three years old.  It was a stormy relationship for the next three years.  Sara, the youngest daughter made my life impossible around Lisa.  Lisa herself had some strange traits, but we tried to make it work.  We broke up and then got back together.  In 1988 we bought a house together and I thought if I just settle down this will work.  After a year together I realized I didn’t want to marry someone with whom I was just going to be unhappy in the end and we broke up.  She moved out and I kept the house. 

A couple of years later I found myself deeply involved with Judith Barnes, a strikingly beautiful woman and again extraordinarily bright, but also very neurotic.  She was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and was recovering but life was not easy for her.  I was very attracted to her and loved her, but life with her wasn’t easy and it didn’t look like we would ever have a normal life together.  In 1992 in one of my rare manic episodes I broke up with her, which probably was for the best. 

During this period Benjamin started to Loyola High School.  He started as an athlete but didn’t like his baseball coach and dropped out.  Later he became an adequate swimmer on the water polo team, but his athleticism didn’t go very far in high school.    He was his own character.  I learned later he had been the LSD and marijuana dealer for his classmates in his final year or two.  His mother found marijuana in his drawer one time and I went through a charade of being shocked with her.  I did want him to know that being a pothead wasn’t a good way to go through life.  He was very active in Alateens. 

In this same period, Benjamin began to develop a reputation as being a very original character and someone with a lot of talent.  He won a full scholarship dedicated to a young man, an original, who had died in an auto accident.  In his last year in high school he took a photography class.  He made a short film that was remarkable for its tone and lighting.  These were the first signs of Benjamin’s talent as a first class photographer and an artist, a skill he has developed.   

It was ironic that Benjamin also became an alcoholic and addict.  Ted stopped drinking at 15.  Sean stopped at 28 or so and Benjamin kept going until he was 35. 

Ted finished high school and went on to UC Santa Cruz.  It seemed an odd choice for Ted who by the time he finished high school was an outstanding athlete in water polo, buttoned down, very conservative appearance, though gratefully not in his politics, and very sober.  He struggled for three years at Santa Cruz, loved it, dropped out after his third year and returned to school to graduate in 1994.  He taught high school and then went through a personal crisis and left for Japan to teach English.  After two years in Nagoya, he went to Saudi Arabia for a year and then returned home.  He paid off his student loans.    

He met a girl in Santa Cruz, married her and started graduate school.  Seven years later he earned his PhD in political science from the University of Oregon.  Somewhere between struggling with everything in his undergrad days at Santa Cruz and graduating from Oregon he became an academic.  He was always a scholar but it took him a long time to focus it and to learn to work it, but he is an outstanding scholar.

Ted and I never really got along very well.  That’s even been true sometimes until recently.  Ted and I, I think are too much alike.  We had terrible arguments when he was in high school and seemed to hurt each other’s feelings easily, something I was more responsible for than him but something it didn’t seem I could prevent.  He was an incredible youngster, very intense, very interesting.  We weren’t really very good friends when he went to college, but over the years, as with my other sons, we have built a very warm and enjoyable relationship. 

Sean was the wild child.  He was on his own from 15 on.  He lived on the street, then with a group of friends.  He was a character.  There was an article about him in my UCLA alumni magazine, a child of the 90s written by a sociology professor.  At that time Sean at 19 was the night manager of Del Monico’s pizza parlor in Hollywood, drove a 1959 Ford Fairlane and the night he spent with the young professor, the car only ran in reverse, and with that he gave the professor a tour of Hollywood after midnight.  Sean was involved in the punk scene and by extension in fashion, music, art, and clothes.  Sean has incredible charisma and he was always a remarkable participant in whatever he did. 

Shortly after he was 18 I went to see him.  We planned to have lunch.  I think he invited me.  We had not been able to talk at all through his teen years but something happened in that visit and we became friends, a friendship that has continued and developed for over twenty years now.  He started modeling in LA and then got on a plane and went to Paris.  He stayed there three years and did very well.  His drinking and whatever else he did didn’t help but he was a wild child within bounds. 

He came home and started working in the movie business, a gopher, then a grunt and eventually learning most of the trades.  Sean is a good carpenter, a good mechanic and can figure almost anything out.  My three sons have extraordinary minds.  Ben is an artist of the first rank coming very much into his own now.  Ted is an extraordinary scholar and thinker.

I am fortunate that all my sons are admirable in their own particular ways.

I went to visit Sean when he was in Paris.  Sean walked down the streets and people knew him, French, British and Americans.  He cut a unique figure even in Paris.  He did well as a model but burned out toward the end.  When I visited him he had been in France for a couple of years and spoke French easily.      

I had this great stay with Sean and his girlfriend Lindsay in a fifth floor walkup apartment in Le Marais, the third arrondisement in Paris, right in the heart of Paris.  I brought a bicycle from home and Sean let me ride his Yamaha 175.  I got around Paris and began my day with café au lait and croissant in La Pierre du Marais.  I read my International Herald Tribune and enjoyed the best coffee in the world. 

I met Sean’s friends, he had many, and we went to lunch and dinner in incredible places.  I learned about Paris.  I became very jealous of Sean’s ability to speak French which he did with ease.  Sean who was 24 at the time and full of advice and worldly wisdom, told me if I wanted to speak Spanish, I should go home and speak Spanish to everyone who could. 

After my two weeks, I went home and took Sean’s advice.  I bought tapes for my car and began speaking Spanish to everyone I thought might respond.  It was great.  I began learning to speak Spanish.  I started going to Tijuana once a month to practice and rented a hotel room west of downtown.  I quickly learned that Tijuana is a wonderful town with museums and coffee shops where the people are very friendly and it was at that time a very relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.  I got my tongue working.  I would sweat but I could communicate with people.  I learned how the jitneys worked.  I visited el museo de California.  I had a favorite coffee shop. 

In September I went to Cuernavaca Mexico for a two week immersion course.  The school I had signed up for was nearly out of business; Eduardo had broken his partnership with another school and had no facilities.  So I lived with Eduardo, his wife Lourdes, Maria Lourdes or Mary Lou and their small child.  They were wonderful people and during the day we studied Spanish at Eduardo’s mother’s house, a beautiful Mexican home that opened on to a garden.  I really began to learn Spanish.  A couple of weeks after I got home I got a call from an attorney who needed advice on my expertise, CRA, for his client a bank with a large CRA problem.  He didn’t say it, but I knew it was California Commerce Bank, a subsidiary of Banamex in Los Angeles.  I was tired of Dai-Ichi Kangyo and recommended myself as the CRA officer to help the other bank solve its problem. 

I went to work for California Commerce and they had a wonderful bilingual staff with loan officers from Mexico.  As soon as I let people know I wanted to learn Spanish I had plenty of people helping me.  It was a good bank and a wonderful environment to learn Spanish. 

Spanish became my obsession and within two or three years, my Spanish was very passable for a gringo who had never lived in a Spanish speaking country, not counting Los Angeles. 

It is one of the great accomplishments of my life.  Until then I had never met a person who learned a foreign language on their own, without living in the country, with the exception of my father.  When I began speaking Spanish, my father wouldn’t speak it with me, though he understood easily.  I began to realize my father never spoke Spanish or even French when there were people around who spoke the language.  For awhile Ted had a girlfriend who spoke French and Pop would never converse with her, he’d always put her off. 

I began to think about it.  My father barely spoke English to anyone or any other language.  He always claimed he spoke French and Spanish and while he studied French and Spanish all the time, he never spoke them to anyone.  It was all in his head.  He could get by in a foreign country but to be a tourist only requires rudimentary speaking skills.  He certainly wasn’t conversational in Spanish and I doubt that he retained enough French after World War II to be conversational in that language.  But he and Sean were my inspiration to learn Spanish. 

These were good times for me.  I was living a sober life and doing what I wanted to do.  I began working in a very foreign and interesting environment with the Japanese which wasn’t always very satisfying but it was challenging.  I was promoted to Vice President at the bank.  I was a leader in my AA community and I was becoming a leader in economic development in banking. 

Dating became easier, though falling in love, getting bored or tied down and ready to move on and then single and looking for another girlfriend wasn’t always comfortable, I dated interesting and beautiful women.  I dated a librarian, a professor, an agoraphobic Beverly Hills princess, a Jewish Chinese woman from England and many other people.  It was an adventure, not always comfortable but always interesting. 

I learned to speak Spanish, I travelled.  I went to Paris, to Toronto, to Mexico.  I bought a house in La Crescenta with a woman I thought I wanted to settle down with.  That didn’t work but I kept the house and lived there from 1988 to 1995. 

Then in 1994 I met a woman in San Francisco.  In 1995 I moved to the Bay Area to be with her.  A year later we were married.