I got a new computer to replace the Pentium II I bought in 1998, which was slowly cannibalizing itself. I also bought a peripheral or two. I now have a working CD burner, a working floppy disk drive, and a working scanner. Also, Photoshop doesn't take three years to load--it only takes about six months. I'm still in the process of reinstalling programs and importing data; I'm hoping to finish up that process tonight or tomorrow. I owe some of you emails, and you should get them soon. If you don't, either 1) I've screwed something up; or 2) there's Bombay Sapphire in the freezer, Noilly Pratt in the liquor cabinet, and olives in the fridge. There's also lemon if you'd prefer yours with a twist.

In the meantime, here are some old photos for you, digitized with the help of my spiffy new scanner.

1986-ish. I'm the one in the middle. The one with the Billy Joel t-shirt. Which I bought at a Billy Joel concert.

My bad hair and I are here pictured hanging out on my friend Judy's waterbed. You know that sweater is sweet.

It took like a year for that damned perm to grow out.

Senior year. I am indeed holding myself up on that sign, because standing on the ground behind it would have cut everything but my forehead out of the picture. Note mangled bangs. They were a result of my decision to "fix" them with a pair of school scissors between second and third period.

Here, we are about to head to the Space Needle for dinner before prom. I think I must have thought I'd get there more quickly if I just closed my eyes.

I'm skipping a whole slew of years, here, but I'm not feeling a need for continuity at the moment. Besides, it isn't even a photo. It is a portrait of me, skillfully rendered by a friend after we had spent six or seven straight days writing seminar papers, smoking, and pretending that 45-minute naps were just as good as seven or eight hours of sleep.

My mom bought a baby book for me when I was little. Its chapters were broken down by developmental stages and included numerous questions about things a child might be doing in each stage: Does she eat solid foods? Does she have an imaginary friend? What are her favorite games? That sort of thing. Mom was always quite diligent about pasting photos onto the book's pages, but as time passed, the questions fell by the wayside.

I loved looking through that book, and I did so regularly. Perhaps that's why one day, when I was 7, I decided something really needed to be done about all that blank space where mom's answers to questions about me would have gone. I therefore took out a pen and responded to all the questions in the "Age 7-8" chapter. However, I had this vague idea that the person answering the questions was supposed to be an objective source, and I was clearly not an objective source. My solution to this problem was to write everything in the third person. Apparently, it did not occur to me that my 7 year-old scrawl might give me away.

Does your child have a best friend or friends?
Yes. She likes Sally.

Does she watch television? What are her favorite shows?
The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, ect.

What are her least favorite shows?
Gunsmoke ect.

I liberally peppered my responses with "ect," quite enamored of the fact that it was such a convenient rhetorical device. I thought it stood for something, but I didn't know what—hence the transposition of 'c' and 't.' What I did know was that it was a really short way of saying, "Yeah, there's more, but I'm too lazy to write it out just now." I think I should take a lesson from my childhood self by turning in a dissertation with 40 pages of content and 200 pages that say "ect."

My favorite question-and-answer pairing was the following:

Your daughter has probably shown an interest in the telephone. Does she enjoy talking on the phone? Can she dial the numbers by herself?
Yes, she can. She does it good, too!

Ah, little Shasta liked cutting right to the chase. Screw the first part; what could she do? Unfortunately, she did not yet like differentiating between adjectives and adverbs. I don't know what they were teaching her down in Texas.

I worked at a YMCA camp for many years. When parents signed their kid up for camp, they received an informational packet and some forms. The informational packet included some tips on how to make sure children came home with as much clothing as you had packed for them. One of those tips was to label shirts, pants, shorts, and towels with the child's name. Some of the parents who hadn't decided a priori that such labeling would be depressingly futile ordered personalized, iron-on labels through a coupon provided by the YMCA. Others squeezed their kid's name or initials in permanent ink onto the tags already present on the clothes.

Dustin Chipchase's mom didn't believe in such subtle approaches. Indeed, she found the prospect of loss so alarming that she took a laundry marker and emblazoned her son's name in letters at least an inch high across the front of everything he was to wear. Nor did she believe in things like "spacing out the letters" or "centering." On some garments, she wrote the name right under the neckline (see figure 1). On others, she found herself short on horizontal space. When she reached the right margin of a shirt, she simply turned it over and finished up, which meant that "Chipchase" ended up looking rather like a hiccup (see figure 2). Clearly, such results disappointed her, but it seemed that making the letters smaller was out of the question. Instead, when she ran out of room, she continued on a second line, with the text flushed right. It was important that she never do something as straightforward as hyphenating after "chip" (see figure 3).

We had a game, a bunch of us camp-staff-types, that we used to play on days off or when the season had just ended. We would sit in a circle with glasses full of something cheap and alcoholic, and we'd toast to campers. The idea was to come up with the name of a kid who was either famous or infamous in camp circles, and creativity was a good thing: It was better to toast to the kid who had talked the exchange counselor from Russia into letting their cabin group roast "marshmallows" made of cotton balls soaked in rubbing alcohol—and then top off the evening off with a panty raid—than to toast to the kid who couldn't seem to keep her cornmeal mush out of her hair. Dustin Chipchase's name often seemed to come up towards the end of those games. He was a trump card, a laundry-marker legend, a signal that it was time to move on to a game that didn't require all the players to drink on every single participant's turn.

I was wondering today what had become of him; he must be in his early twenties by now. So I Googled him.

My search - "Dustin Chipchase" - did not match any documents.

My hair is getting out of control. It's way too long for this cut, largely because it's short and layered, but I haven't been to see Grace in nearly eight weeks. The last time it got this way, a friend told me, "Hey! You have J. Crew hair!"

"That sounds bad. Is it bad? What does it mean?" I wanted to know.

"No, it's good!" she explained. "It's that look, you know—like you put your hair in a ponytail, went to sleep, got up, took your hair out of the ponytail, rubbed your head on your pillow a few times, and then sprayed it."

"And that's not bad?" I asked, confused.

"No! It's very trendy!"

That wasn't much of a selling point for me. Voting for Ross Perot was "trendy" a while back. Anna Nicole Smith was "trendy" not long ago. The chunk-fest that is Bubble Tea is "trendy" to this very day. My hair is just too long for this cut.

My passport arrived today. I hate the picture. I had gotten pictures taken at Kinkos, and I actually liked those well enough. However, when I got to the passport agency, they informed me that the Kinkos pics weren't the proper size. "Your face is too small," the passport lady told me. I do believe it was the very first time anyone has ever told me that my face isn't sufficiently large. In fact, I've generally thought quite the opposite, since I have those round sorts of cheeks that, when I was younger, often got pinched by members of that pernicious class of elderly folk who use their age as an excuse to invade the personal space of people whose parents will yell at them if they complain.

My opinion on the matter of my facial dimensions was cemented during a particularly nasty argument with some distant cousins over the matter of whether or not I looked like Shirley Temple. I was around seven, and you have no idea how much I hated Shirley Temple. I objected to the very idea of Shirley Temple: she was a sailor-suit-wearing, sucker-licking, ringlet-tossing basketball of a child who was clearly a minion of Satan.

"Look! She's so cuuuuute!" one of my cousins squealed in my direction. "She looks just like Shirley Temple!" Then, the ten year-old harpies were all around me, brandishing their dirty harpy fingers like pincers as they moved closer and closer to my unfortunate little apple cheeks.

It was bad enough when pernicious elderly folk pulled such a stunt; I certainly wasn't going to let anyone a scant three years older than I act like an honorary member of the damned AARP. "BAD TOUCH! BAD TOUCH!" I shouted, trying to remember what I would look like if I had contracted rabies from one of those eight billion squirrels I was always hearing had rabies. As it turns out, foaming at the mouth intentionally is harder than you might think, but I tried, hissing—with distinct pauses between each word—"I DO NOT LOOK LIKE SHIRLEY TEMPLE."

The Weird Sisters recognized an opportunity when they saw one and launched a counterstrike: a diabolically spirited rendition of "On the Good Ship Lollipop." My fury reached monstrous proportions. I wondered how many of them I'd be able to take out before I got seriously injured. At least two, I figured; they were scrawny-legged types who were obviously no good at kickball. It's probably a lucky thing that an adult showed up and thwarted my rapidly-developing revenge fantasy, for physical violence was thereby averted. We all disbanded and went to our respective homes.

Okay, I didn't say "bad touch." Nobody used that phrase until the '80s, and we're still talking about the '70s, here. But I wish I had said it. I also suspect that I didn't look at all like a rabid squirrel. In fact, I'm rather convinced that I probably stamped my foot and tossed my golden locks as I insisted that Shirley Temple was my own personal antichrist, because that's how irony works, my friends. That's how irony works.

So, right. Anyway, I've never thought my face was too small, but "it's too small," said the passport lady. And then she made me pay to make it bigger.

Singapore in two weeks.

Some songs—like the one I'm listening to now, for example—make me want to tap dance. However, as I say that, I feel like I should acknowledge that I'm really more about the theory of tap dancing than the actual practice of a discipline. I learned this when I took tap, ballet, modern dance, and baton twirling lessons all at the same time when I was in fourth grade or so. Tap was all right, but I felt like the instructor really cramped my style. Ballet sucked. I had to hold my arms in one place for too long, and I felt like I should be able to skip all the foot position malarkey and go right to the leaps. Modern dance was just weird. Baton twirling? Loved it. The only person cooler than Joanie from "Happy Days" in Twirl was Olivia Newton John in Xanadu.

This probably says something fundamental about my character, but I prefer to think of it as an example of how priorities shift over time. Because now, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm so good at prioritizing.

So, when I say that certain songs make me want to tap dance, what I really mean is that they make me feel like putting on shoes that make a bunch of noise and then shuffling about aimlessly. Since I no longer own shoes that make that much noise, I'll have to soft-shoe it.

When I was in high school—and when I was home on breaks from college—I worked part-time as a clerk in a family-owned video store called Best Video. Only a few of us worked there, and we all knew the customer ID numbers of the regulars. You could reserve new releases there, and we would call you as soon as the movie was available. The cash register didn't always work properly, which meant we sometimes had to add and subtract totals, including tax, by hand. This was an awful thing when I found myself having to carry ones and twos in front of boys I had crushes on, because when I was seventeen, something about seeing boys I had crushes on in front of the counter completely obliterated my ability to do math. It was embarrassing. One night, I actually gave the piece of paper I was using to figure the sums to the boy. "You do it!" I said, and then I pretended to look for something under the counter. Looking back, the part that bothers me is not so much that I turned into a blithering fucking idiot, but that I did so in such a stereotypically gendered way. I mean, really. I've taught math, and there I was, making the guy do it for me. I should have asked him if he would also change my tire, take out my trash, and leave me out of a discussion about sports while he drank some beer and I had wine coolers.

The store later shut down after Blockbuster came into town and diverted all of Jim and Nadine's business, because that's the Way of the Man. But that isn't my point. My point is that I watched a whole lot of movies. And sometimes, I see one of them again on TV, and sometimes, they surprise me. When I first brought home "Joe Versus the Volcano," I remember being bored out of my skull during some of the raft scenes. At other times, I wondered idly if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were going to do it or what. When the movie ended, I gave it two and a half "hmphs" and forgot about it.

Several months ago, I watched it again, not without some misgivings. After all, it starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Also of "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail." And what I decided was that "Joe Versus the Volcano" is an excellent movie. It isn't a great film, but it is an excellent movie: a witty exploration of what happens when the quotidian finally grows too oppressive to bear. Melville might have written the screenplay if he were alive today and had somehow managed to get himself a sense of humor. Joe is a sort of cross between Sam Lowry and Lester Burnham, an antihero turned hero simply by doing something different. It's often quite beautifully shot. Plus, there are natives who drink orange cola, and Abe Vigoda is their chief.

I thought of this today as I reflected that after a week of persistent insomnia, I have a Brain Cloud just like the one Joe is diagnosed with, only not terminal. I hope. But it does help to think that on my island, the natives drink Jones Cream Soda.

I was born in Petaluma, California, in a hospital that I've been told is no longer a hospital. My doctor was Dr. West, and what I remember about him from when I was very little was that he was gentle and kind. What I remember about him from when I was a couple of years older was that he had a truly enormous, bulbous, Andy Capp nose. I couldn't understand how I had never noticed it before, but I was also angry at myself for no longer being able to see anything but his nose. My parents were still together then. My mother had very long, very straight hair that went from dark blonde to light brown while she was pregnant with me. She often wore dresses with puffy sleeves, and she had a tattoo of a hummingbird on her arm. My father had shaggy dark hair and a mustache and a tattoo with the Alembic logo on his arm. We had a cat named Clarissa and a cockatoo named Echo who used to whistle along to songs by Wings.

My older brother lived with his mother, but he used to visit often, and he, I, and my little brother would play with Tonka trucks in a large dirt pile on the side of the house. A number of peacocks lived nearby, and they used to wander around by our swingset; my mom gathered up the feathers and put them in an urn in our living room. Not long after my mother, little brother, and I moved out, the house was burned down. "How did it burn down?" I asked. "It was arson," they told me. I did not know that arson was the name of a crime, not a person, and upon meeting new people, I often told them that my name was Shasta, and I hated Arson. Later, when I learned what arson actually was, I also learned who one of the most likely candidates for starting the fire had been.

"Mom thinks you burned down the house," I told my new stepmother. And I'm still glad I said it.

We lived a few different places after that—we were in Millbrae for a while, and in Sonoma for a while, and I don't remember it all. I do remember that when I started kindergarten, I wore a red jumper and red and white striped tights for picture day, and once, when I fell on the playground and was crying because I scraped my knee, the assistant principal told me that he was going to whack my other knee and give me something to cry about. Some people really should not work with small children. In Millbrae, we had a ton of space to play, and whenever one of my mom's friends used to visit, he pulled quarters out from behind our ears. In Sonoma, there were dragonflies and corn and a big deck where we made forts.

And then, my mother got married again, and we moved to Texas. My first stepfather had curly hair, ate his meals quickly, liked my brother and me, and is someone I'd probably still look up if I ever went to Dallas, though I'm not sure whether or not he still lives there. We lived in a house on Goliad Street. Once, a tree fell through the roof after being weighed down in an ice storm, and once, we all got food poisoning, and once, I thought I saw my neighbor's ghost in his yard a few days after he died. He had been an old man.

My second stepfather also had curly hair. He got a blister on his thumb from playing that mine sweeper game on the Intellivision. He had a wallet with the word "bullshit" stamped onto it. He didn't like it when my brother and I played one of our favorite games, which involved propping ourselves up in the hall by putting one foot and one hand on each wall. When we were suspended, the idea was to kick each other until someone fell. If you fell, of course, that meant you lost. My stepfather didn't like the marks we left on the walls, but he didn't seem to mind the kicking. He also ate ice cream right out of the carton and, though he wasn't very fatherly, had a good sense of humor. After he and my mom divorced, he sent an envelope that contained an alimony check for my mother and five-dollar bills for my brother and me. I think he called it "kid-amony."

But I'm getting out of sequence, because it's too hard to tell you what it was like and stay in sequence, and because I honestly am not sure about the sequence of it all. There was a break when we were back in California for a while; we lived at my grandparents' house in San Francisco. And we were in Austin for a while, too. In Austin, my mom worked for a woman named Frances at Manor Downs, which was a race track where they also had concerts. Frances was my mom's friend, but I never thought she liked me much, because she always seemed to be glaring. Mom says that it wasn't just me; Frances didn't like lots of kids. There was a ten year-old boy who chewed tobacco, killed frogs, and once showed me his penis. There was a girl whose name I can't remember, but I do know that I split her lip after a nasty argument about whether we would be watching "The Incredible Hulk" or "Diff'rent Strokes" one evening. I like to think that I shouted, "Don't make me angry! You won't like me when I'm angry!" However, I'm quite sure I didn't say any such thing.

I didn't enjoy living in Texas. People there wanted me to be religious and normal, and I gave the religious part a go for a while, but the normal part didn't seem to be working out, so I just didn't say much most of the time. People sometimes tell me that I was lucky to live in Austin. "There's such a great music scene there!" they tell me. And yes, I know that, but living in a town with a vibrant bar scene does not do you much good when you are eight years old. Still, we did eventually leave Texas and head back to California once again; I would start sixth grade at Davidson Middle School in San Rafael. But this is getting long, so I will stop for now. I might continue later if I feel like it.

Me with my friend M. before prom, spring 1989:

'80s hair still amazes me. I think it's because so many of us had parents and teachers who thought for a time that the best possible thing we could do was watch "Nova," and we came away from our viewings thinking all bangs should be big.

The theme for the prom was "Never Say Goodbye." As in "Never Say Goodbye," by Jon Bon Jovi, with lyrics like:

Remember when we lost the keys,
and you lost more than that in my backseat, baby.
I didn't lose anything in the back seat. It was impossible not to like my date—he was one of those people everyone seems to know and like—and he and I had periodically found ourselves together on a couch in someone's basement, but we weren't a real couple. It wouldn't have worked if we had tried; the only things we had in common were being short and liking to laugh. He had lots of energy. Lots and lots of energy. He needed about a third of the dance floor to do his thing properly, and I cracked up while he pointed at people in time to the lyrics of "Devil Inside." "Here comes the womannnnn," Michael Hutchence would sing, and my date would hold out his finger as he shimmied about ten feet to the left. By the time Michael got to "raised on leather," my date had managed to make it to the other side of the room.

We cut out after we'd made rounds, had pictures taken, and successfully dodged the ASB advisor. "Do you think they've been drinking?" she asked, pointing to some of our friends. "Oh, absolutely not!" I exclaimed, wondering how I could cut off the conversation, since my friends were quite trashed. The best excuse I could come up with was a gesture indicating that I really couldn't stand around and talk while they were playing Paula Abdul, so did she mind? It didn't matter if she did, because I left before she had a chance to respond.

About a dozen of us rented rooms at a hotel near downtown Seattle, and we sat around and drank margaritas out of a blender someone had brought. They were either too watery or too strong or too sweet, because we were 17 and 18, and most of us hadn't spent a great deal of time mixing drinks. We were lucky when we could get cheap beer. So, we happily sipped at the terrible margaritas that had made the countertop so sticky, and then we went to bed. My date stole the covers.

Tara heated the stones. She built an enormous fire on the beach, and she placed rocks around the coals. She added wood when the fire began to die down. We could not help her, because we were working, so she built the fire and warmed the rocks by herself. There were twenty-eight. While the fire burned, Tara dug a pit. When it was time, carefully, slowly, she transferred the stones to the pit. When they were all in place, she moved a dome into place over them. The dome was made of strips of wood, bent into shape and interwoven, then covered with a tarp. It was about ten feet across, with a flap on one side. Tara waited.

At midnight, we walked down to the beach. There was sand—not soft, ocean sand, but riverbank sand: coarse, thick, and full of round, smooth rocks left by the current. We had brought towels, and we sat on them while we talked softly, waiting for everyone to arrive. When it was time, we undressed, shivering slightly and leaving our clothes half-folded on the ground. Some of us, I think, only pretended that we were not self-conscious, that we were somehow immune from cultural neurosis. I certainly pretended. I refused to avert my eyes, but neither would I look at anyone directly; I refused to show whether I noticed if anyone chose to look at me, but neither could I help but be aware that my thighs must look frightfully white in the moonlight and also, my nipples felt like pebbles. I feel sure I wasn't the only pretender. As a group, our initial movements were casually calculated.

One by one, we crawled into the dome through the flap. There was an order. It would be hottest in the back, farthest from the entrance. I never sat there; I didn't need to be in the hottest place, despite a vague impression that my Finnish heritage should somehow make me especially fit for such a position—"we love our saunas," my grandfather likes to remind me—but I had never been to Finland, and anyway, there was my English ancestry to consider. No one has ever tried to convince me that saunas are a characteristically English indulgence. I was, therefore, one of the last people to enter.

The air was a wall. It hit me in the face and then wrapped around me. It turned into wet cotton and made its way into my lungs; I paused for a bit as I figured out how to breathe. It didn't take as long as you might think. A few of my companions in the back had already settled in, and I followed suit, arranging my towel beneath me and sitting, legs crossed, elbows resting on my knees. When we had all taken our spots, we began.

Nothing really signalled the fact that we had begun. We simply grew quiet, stopped shifting and murmuring, and the silence was formal. I closed my eyes and listened to myself breathe. Soon, I heard hissing as Tara scooped some water into a ladle and sprinkled it over the hot stones. There was the sound and then heat as the steam made its way towards us, condensing on our faces. After a time, someone spoke—perhaps of worries or hopes, or to tell a little of their heart. We let some things go and others in. When a speaker grew silent again, we acknowledged them, but we did not speak in return. If we did not have something to say, we did not speak.

I concentrated on the voices and on the silence, but after a time, concentration grew difficult. It was hot. I told myself to breathe, and that's what I did, but I could feel my own heartbeat. When I drew my knees up to my chest, I could feel it in my legs, too. I breathed and thumped and tried not to mentally chant "hot, hot, too hot." I thought perhaps I should leave, or at least stick my face out into the cool air just for a moment, but I didn't. I'd like to say that I didn't because mind had triumphed over matter, that I had achieved a yogic sort of state and was tra-laing my way meditatively down the road to enlightenment. But if I said that, it wouldn't be true. The truth was that I didn't leave for the same reason I never, ever was the first one to ask for a rest when I went hiking with the boys—the same reason I refused to complain about an overloaded pack or a blister on my heel. I would not let them decide that I had put a fatal chink in whatever communal commando fantasy they might be indulging, and I certainly would not let them think me weak.

So I stayed, and soon enough, I was calm again. The process took place in cycles. Occasionally, Tara poured more water on the stones. It was dark, but we glowed a little. Our skin was wet, and it was sometimes hard to tell whether the dampness had come from our bodies or from the steam. Our faces wore beads. My fingertips rested in the sand in front of me, half buried until I grabbed a handful of the wet floor and rubbed it on my arms, my legs, my cheeks. The sand was cooler than our skin, and it felt pleasantly rough.

Then it was over. Lazily, we forced our noodly limbs to crawl again, and since I was one of the last in, I was one of the first out. The air was a wall. It slapped at me—very aggressively, I thought—and jabbed its way into my throat. It didn't take long for it to feel good: clean and crisp and light. We shivered our way to the river, wading in up to our calves. There was nothing to do after that point but immerse ourselves all at once; easing yourself in simply does not work when moving under the water is warmer than being still above it. We swam, sometimes laughing, not too loud. The stars were intensely bright. They always were in that region, but it was hard not to notice them after emerging from the hut. We swam, and we listened to crickets, and we splashed gently until the invigoration began to wear off. We then padded our way up the beach and wrapped ourselves in fresh towels. There, we looked at the remnants of Tara's fire until our heads thickened, and we knew it was time for sleep.

In high school, I had a teacher named Mr. Vandeboe. He taught English and humanities, and he was about the coolest teacher any of us could imagine having. When we learned about ancient western culture, he showed slides of his trips to Greece. Whenever his wife appeared in one of the photos, he claimed she was "some lady who was following him around the whole time." He told us about taverns where he stopped by for a glass of "milk." He ran the film club and expounded on the virtues of "Easy Rider." He really did care about helping us to learn and become better writers.

Plus, he told great stories. One of these stories was about his biggest phobia as a teacher: that he would find himself in the middle of a lecture and realize that his zipper was undone. For years, he harbored this fear. For years, nothing happened, and he began to think himself a little silly for letting his imagination get the better of him.

But one day, a meeting went longer than it was supposed to, and the copier was on the fritz, and he was running late for his eleventh-grade English class. Still, he found it quite necessary to make a quick pit stop before dashing over to his classroom. He made it in the nick of time and began to present the lesson he had prepared for that day.

Sure enough, ten minutes into class, he figured out that his fear had been realized: his fly was most definitely undone. "They don't seem to have noticed," he thought, still talking about Thoreau and Emerson and transcendentalism. "But eventually, they'll see it. How do I zip it up without them seeing what I'm doing?" He mused for a while, reflecting on how much he would like to be doing some transcending. And then: "I've got it! I'll create a distraction!"

"And so Thoreau went to Wald—Oh my God! Everybody look over there!" he said excitedly, pointing to the row of windows at the side of the classroom. His students' heads turned, he zipped himself up quickly, and he was about to congratulate himself on a diversionary tactic well carried out when the students began to laugh uproariously. For a moment, he thought that he must not have been as sly as he thought he was being, but no, they didn't seem to be laughing at him—everyone's eyes were still turned towards the windows. He looked over, too.

On the lawn outside were two dogs, locked together in the throes of canine passion.

After that, the status of his zipper seemed like a relatively minor concern.

When I was in elementary school and still lived in Texas, there were two boys in my class named Scott and Mark. They were twins, and they were good-looking in a "we may be only 8, but we're cocky punks" kind of way. They were two of the stars of their soccer team, which was a Big Deal. Playing soccer seemed virtually compulsory for young Texans, in much the same way that everyone seems to learn how to swim where there's a great deal of sun and water. Being good at soccer brought up one's grammar-school social stock quite a bit.

Incidentally, I was never good at soccer. I began playing at that stage in my life when I really did need glasses but nobody knew that yet, and I couldn't see the ball unless it was right near me. I got terribly bored and made up dances to do on the field while I waited for something interesting to happen. I suspect that's how people who didn't already know detected that I was Not From Texas. Well, that and the fact that people used to remark that I "talked like a Yankee," though my Yankee family and friends claimed that I now "talked like a Texan."

I never was very big on team sports, anyway, though someone did manage to talk me into playing a bit of intramural volleyball in college. That was actually fun; my team laughed our way through most of our games, which greatly annoyed the teams we beat. Eventually, of course, we found ourselves playing against real volleyball players—who also happened to be friends of ours—and then, we laughed as we got creamed.

In any case, Scott and Mark were all the rage at Northlake Elementary School. If a girl had an unrequited crush, one or both of the twins was likely to be the object of that crush.

Every Valentine's Day, our teachers had us all decorate paper lunch bags to look like mailboxes and tape them up to the wall. Then, we exchanged cards. Many of the parents made sure that their children gave a card to every single student in the class. If I'm not mistaken, this is a more or less standard American grammar school activity.

Scott and Mark despised their mother's insistence on inclusiveness. One year, after writing out their mom-approved cards, they decided to get rebellious. A typical example read something like:

Dear Shasta,
Happy Valentine's Day. It's nice
to have you in class.
- Scott and Mark

However, on the inside of each envelope flap, in tiny little letters, they added a sentence to each Valentine that was going to a girl:

P.S. We hate you.

Even at the time, I thought it rather funny—especially when I observed the outrage this subterfuge provoked in the tightly-knit clique of Girl Scouts who wore curlers to bed every night and used to ask people how many Izod shirts they owned.

We used to go to Yosemite every summer when I was a kid. We always stayed in the campgrounds. At night, my little brother and I—and my older brother too, if he had come with us—would take out our flashlights and pretend they were light sabers. We made campfires at night and told ghost stories. There was one story about a kid named Elmer who got lost in the woods on one of his visits. Many of the other visitors also knew this story, and according to the legend, people were supposed to call out for Elmer to help him find his way back, so we did.

We looked at stars. I never could figure out how so many people seemed to be able to find constellations. The stars were bright and beautiful to me, but I found myself frustrated when I couldn't see what other people seemed to see with little difficulty. When we got tired, we climbed into our sleeping bags.

We always put a bowl of ammonia out at night to keep bears away. My mother told me that someone she had known years ago once put cold cream on before she went to sleep, but she forgot the bowl of ammonia. She woke up to discover that a bear was licking the cold cream off her face. I wondered why anyone would sleep with cold cream on her face—wouldn't it get all over the pillow, I wanted to know?—but I was sufficiently scared by the anecdote, and I never forgot about the bowl.

We usually had hot chocolate and cereal in the morning. My brother, mimicking the old Cheerios commercials, once said, "Cheerioooos, up your nooose." My mom had to extract the Cheerio from his nose with tweezers. Most of the time, we didn't have anything at all in our noses. We explored and we hiked. There was a big, square rock that my brother and I liked to climb. We bought little rocks and souvenirs from the gift shops. We hiked up one of the waterfalls—I wish I could remember which one—and got excited when we got close enough for the spray to hit our faces.

People told us about John Muir; I thought it was amazing that anyone could walk so very far, and I wondered if he ever got scared at night. When I was old enough to venture out by myself, I sometimes got on a tourbus and went through two or three cycles of the driver's route. I liked having some time alone, and the views were awe-inspiring. I wanted to stick my hand out the window, but the guides constantly reminded us not to, and I didn't want to be kicked off the bus.

There was a swimming pool we used to visit. It had an official name, but I don't know it, because to us, it was "Blue Pool." We used to buy frozen Three Musketeers bars and eat them on the deck. We never, ever waited to go back in the pool after we had eaten. I stayed in the pool for hours at a time, floating and seeing how long I could stay under water. When it was time to go, I used to duck my head back under the surface and pretend I hadn't heard my mom say we had to leave.

I've been thinking that I want to go back. It's been a very long time. The last time I was there was not long after the huge fire that hit there—I suppose it was in the early '90s? It shocked me to see so many charred trees. And now, I want to drive up there, sleeping bag in my trunk. I want to make a fire and call for Elmer, and I want to feel spray on my face as I walk near the waterfall.

My family and I left Texas and came back to live in Northern California for a couple of years. I don't remember anything particularly spiritual about that period. What I remember about sixth grade is that I developed an excellent feel for the San Francisco bus system, participated in a bunch of spelling bees, and bought a bunch of doo-dads from the Sanrio shop down the street from my school. What I remember about seventh grade is that we moved to San Rafael, and in San Rafael, I repeatedly professed my hatred for Duran Duran simply because everyone else thought they were amazing, and I felt like being a contrarian. I gave in just as they all moved onto someone else—Depeche Mode or Tears for Fears, I believe.

Then it was eighth grade, and we were in Seattle. I participated in one of those bussing programs designed to integrate schools more fully, which means that I caught the bus at 6:51 am and had a long ride to school. I didn't know anyone, and the cute boy who liked Iron Maiden was too busy with his Burner-in-Training program to pay me much heed. ("Did you hear about that kid who put his mouth over the vacuum cleaner hose? His lungs collapsed," I told him one day. "Shit, I'll never do that again," he returned.) There were two other girls who rode the bus with me, and they caught my interest because they were funny in a slightly obnoxious way, which earned them the hatred of our bus driver, who either was edgy by nature or just pissed off about having to drive a bunch of junior high kids around all the time. Now that I think about it, it must have felt a touch purgatorial. Still, Wendy and Sara seemed like fun sorts to me, and it was obvious that they hung out in some sort of club outside of school. When I asked what it was, they invited me to join.

And that's how I became a member of the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls, Northlake Assembly #139.

If you haven't heard of Rainbow before, the basic lowdown is that it's a service organization for girls that's sponsored by the Freemasons—yup, those Masons—and that it claims not to be a Christian organization, but it really is. I think they say they aren't a religious organization because they don't want people to think they're trying to take the place of its members' churches, but they require initiates to profess an "abiding faith in God" and say an awful lot of prayers. When we set up the room in the lodge where our meetings were held, we had to place a huge bible on a stand in the middle of the room. There was a light in the ceiling that shone on the bible while we went about our business.

As you probably know, the Masons have a long, controversial, freaky history. For all I know, they're still controversial and freaky. To me, they seemed like a bunch of crusty old Elks Club types who liked hanging out with other crusty old Elks Club types and seeming mysterious to outsiders. All I can really say is that if their meetings were anything like ours, they were terribly boring, though boring in a specific way defined by the official Ritual Book. Everyone in the room had to be introduced according to a predefined procedure, and when there were more than twenty or so people present, the introductions could take an hour or longer. We learned secret signs that we made at designated times during the Ritual. We wore floor-length white dresses at initiation ceremonies. (I once wore a toga, which made all the Eastern Star women amusingly uncomfortable.) It seems strange, no doubt, and it was strange, but it really wasn't any weirder than Texan Methodism, and at least the Rainbow people took me water skiing.

Over the first couple years of high school, I had begun to develop an interest in some New Age teachings, which, of course, fit nowhere into the Masonic scheme of things. I can only explain it by saying that, since my faith had been phased out, I felt no compunction about professing a belief in God and meaning something quite other than what the Masons assumed I meant. I suppose my spirituality had grown considerably more diffuse by this point; it wasn't that I didn't believe in anything higher, but that I didn't believe in the Christian version of it. My mother had come across materials that interested me, as had my friend Selby—who, ironically, I had met through Rainbow. Selby had a car, and we used to go buy ourselves crystals and incense while we talked about reincarnation.

One of the topics that interested us in particular was the phenomenon of channelers. In particular, we listened to some of the tapes from Ramtha and Mafu. J.Z. Knight claimed to channel Ramtha, a 35,000 year-old Lemurian who lived in a port city of Atlantis as a boy. Mafu, supposedly a leper from first-century Pompeii, spoke through Penny Torres. When I look for information on them now, I find numerous articles referenced with keywords like, "cults," "manipulation," and "sects." It might sound a little frightening, but really, one might categorize any religious group under such headings, and we were hardly stockpiling arms and holing ourselves up in the compound, if there even were compounds. The hardcore devotees might have formed something that looked a little like a spiritually-themed Amway, but I will say that Ramtha and Mafu were much more pleasant than the Methodists and the Masons, and they didn't make me sing "Nearer My God to Thee." And anyway, I was dabbling.

I went to hear Penny/Mafu speak once in Seattle. I was only able to attend the second day of a two-day booking, and afterward, a young man came up and introduced himself to me. He said he had seen Mafu in Los Angeles, and he had asked where he could find his soulmate. He was told that his soulmate would attend the meeting in Seattle, so he got into his car with a friend and drove up. On the first day—the day I wasn't able to go—he stood up and asked Mafu where his soulmate was. "She will come tomorrow," was the response. As I was the only person who was there the second day but not the first, it seemed clear to him that Mafu must have been talking about me.

He was sixteen, and I was fourteen. This whole soulmate business caught me off guard; I toyed with the idea, but just couldn't bring myself to believe it was actually true. It certainly didn't feel true. I don't think he believed it either, but the stakes were higher for him—had had come all the way from LA, after all—and he wasn't ready to abandon an idea he had pursued so actively. He seemed nice enough, and I let him drive me home. We exchanged a letter or two in the following months, but he was one of the worst spellers I've ever come across, and I couldn't bear to read letters from someone who misspelled words like "street." I was fresh from spelling bee victories, after all, and I admit that I was snobbish about them at the time. His name was Jason.

It seems clear that Penny Torres had a list of people who would be attending the Seattle engagement, and that she picked my name off the list because I was one of the only attendees anywhere near Jason's age. It seemed clear to me then, too. What I thought of it, when I stepped back a little, was that no amount of talk about the deity within could detract from the fact that telling a sixteen year-old kid to follow you to Seattle to find a soulmate you've picked off a roster is a really fucking cold-hearted way to mess with someone's head. I wonder how long it took him to get over it.

Me, I walked away. I decided that religion doesn't become me, and I walked away. But still, sometimes, when the time and the place is right—I felt it when I was hiking in Zion National Park, and I felt it when I sat on the edge of cliffs in the Sierra Nevadas—there is a sense of connection. I catch a glimpse of mystery, a touch of what seems like something higher.

And I'm perfectly happy not giving it a name.

I don't remember losing my faith, and I wonder sometimes if that means I never had any. I've read the accounts of people like Mary McCarthy, who remembered exactly what it felt like. She smoothed out the gaps that time creates and embellished a few of the particulars, but it is obvious that everything she felt about losing her faith was still quite present for her, present in her story.

Losing my faith was more of a matter of phasing it out. Perhaps it's because I had to make a conscious decision to acquire faith in the first place. I had moved to Texas with my brother, my mother, and her new husband, and I was quite young. I had been living in Northern California, and Dallas seemed strange to me. It was hot, and people talked funny, and they seemed to care about things that my old friends hadn't cared about. My mom had a tattoo and had been divorced more than once; this was the stuff of scandal in our conservative neighborhood. My brother and I used phrases like "oh my God" periodically, and had no idea what such utterances would do to the expressions on the faces of people around us. "Shast-aaaa!," Mrs. Reeves would call when I visited her daughter Laura, "are you taking the name of the Lord in vain in my house?"

"No, ma'am," I answered, sometimes truthfully.

Well, there seemed to be two options. We could remain heathens, forsake the Lord and His teachings, and have scorn heaped upon us by our neighbors, teachers, and schoolmates. Alternatively, we could become believers, start attending church, and carve out a bona fide place for ourselves among our Texan neighbors.

When I put it in such terms, it seems as though our decision amounted to a simple sell-out, but that's really not the case. We didn't consciously decide to Get Religion in order to make our neighbors and peers accept us. There is a point, I think, where being a disbeliever can seem much less sensible than being one of the devout. When those around you obviously regard you with a mixture of pity and horror—our souls were in danger, after all—their zeal starts to seem normal, and you wonder if they aren't perhaps right.

We did, at least.

I remember attending a Lutheran church for a while, which I thought strange because my grandparents—in their more devout moments, anyway—identified as Catholic. They still do, though they are some of the most lukewarm "non-lapsed" Catholics I've ever met. Grandma used to watch television evangelists while lying around in bed on Sundays; she hung her rosary beads from one of her bed posts. Never mind that the evangelist wasn't Catholic; it was an activity she considered spiritual. It was half-assed, no doubt, but to her, it was something. Occasionally, I listened a bit, though I liked the choirs better than the preachers, who always seemed like Richard Dawson, complete with Vaseline but plus about seventy-five pounds. Grandma had an exercise bike in her bedroom, and I used to pedal as fast as I could, which kept me busy and had the side benefit of drowning out the evangelical exhortations.

But my grandparents didn't live in Texas; they lived in San Francisco, and Texas was a different kind of realm entirely. I remember spending a great deal of time around Baptists, though I don't think we ever attended a Baptist church. I don't remember why we abandoned the Lutheran church, though I do remember going to Sunday School at a Methodist church for several years. One of its members was actually excommunicated for getting a divorce. My mom, who was on her third marriage at the time, asked why she was exempt. She was told that she had not truly found God before attending this church, so her past sins were forgiven. The implied message, of course, was that she—and anyone else listening, for that matter—had better watch their step, because this church had the power to cut them off from salvation.

What is it like to retain faith but feel like you've lost access to your community of worshippers, and perhaps to your God? That's what I wondered as the Divorced Sinner was driven out of our church. It must be horrifying to believe but feel that your belief won't do you any good. I wonder if it would be something like having a pocketful of foreign currency and not being able to spend it on groceries that you absolutely need—though I imagine it would be worse. I found myself hoping he would decide that this particular church didn't have the final word on the matter, that he would find a place for himself and for his soul.

Our friend's excommunication provided a dilemma for me to ponder that was both practical and spiritual. Yet I also found much to confuse me in biblical teachings themselves, and this confusion seemed of even greater import to me. I constantly re-read the passage in Genesis where Noah's sons get cursed for seeing him naked in his drunkenness and covering him up. Even at the tender age of seven, it seemed obvious to me that no son should be cursed for having a lush as a dad. My feelings were, in part, quite rational. They also were indicative of one of my most basic personality characteristics: I have a passionate antipathy towards injustice, and when accused of misdeeds I haven't actually performed, I will defend myself as vehemently as any cat backed into a corner. It extends to others, as well, and I couldn't help but be awfully pissed off at Noah for giving his sons such a raw deal.

I noticed hypocrisy, and I noticed injustice, and I noticed that the pressure to be Christian wasn't necessarily good for Christianity. I don't think I ever lost my faith because for me, the pressure to be Christian always felt more social than spiritual. I always harbored a pip of doubt somewhere in my heart about the whole enterprise, and this seed made shedding my religious skin quite painless after my family moved away from a city in which belief was tantamount to an entrance requirement.

Yet, while I had shed the belief, I hadn't managed to get rid of the habit of belief. I moved into new areas entirely; I experimented a little. For a while, I thought what I found was quite exciting, as it didn't seem as stringent as our Texan doctrines had. What I found had its problems, too.

(to be continued and concluded in part the deux...)

I just found a Post-It note my grandfather wrote about his father: "Born Turku (Abo) Sept. 12, 1886, Finland. Left Hamburg, Germany Nov. arrived San Francisco March 23, 1910 on Finn. sailing ship Marie Cheau. Sailed around the Horn. Killed on the Florence Luckenbach on the SF waterfront April 27, 1925 in an industrial accident under unsafe conditions. I do not believe this. I believe the Finnish Reds got him. His brother was a captain in the Finnish White Army (Jager)."

I wonder if that's true.

My grandfather compiled a little genealogical packet and gave it to some of us at Christmas. It included some color copies of photos.

This is my great grandmother, Alma. She came to the United States from Finland in 1905, when she was recruited to serve as a servant in a household in Berkeley. She worked for them for 13 years and then married my great grandfather, Karl, who was also Finnish.

I never knew before that she actually had 4 children. I only knew about my Aunt Fran and my grandfather. She had 2 more, though. In 1919, she had a stillborn baby girl, and in 1921, her next baby girl, Florence, died in an accident.

This is Karl with Aunt Fran and Grandpa in 1925. He died 3 or 4 months after this picture was taken, but I don't know how he died.

I wish I still had a dress like that.

There's a kind of euphoria in staying up ridiculously late, I think. I even did it as a child over summer breaks. I remember being 10 or 11, snuggling in my bed to read books until dawn. If I never had to get up in the morning, I'd happily stick with such a schedule. However, it really fucks with my body when I get 3 hours of sleep one night and 12 the next—and when that becomes a pattern.

I wouldn't mind being a super early-morning person, but I don't think that will ever happen.

Anyway, I've been thinking about a kid who went to the YMCA camp where I used to work. He was quite brilliant and very creative, but he was rather difficult to manage. He was on Ritalin during the school year for severe ADHD, but since kids aren't supposed to be on Ritalin year-round, his parents took him off it for the summer and sent him to camp. It was a questionable parenting tactic, but we didn't send kids like that home unless they posed a danger to themselves or other kids. And I think I can see how parents might get to a place where they just need a break.

In any case, it quickly became evident that he needed multiple outlets for his physical and creative energy. We provided some for him, but he thought up others on his own. He used to hide under all the clothes in the lost and found box, completely burying himself underneath them. Then, whenever someone came by and tossed something in the box, he'd let out a sharp "OWW!" Watching it was hilarious—people always edged away a little nervously, then came back to peer in the box. He never made any sound after the initial "ouch," so lots of people wandered away a little confused.

He liked to do one-man shows at campfire. He put a bucket over his head and pretended he was a robot, moving around in what looked like a Styx-inspired domo arigato routine. Sometimes he picked up actual sticks and waved them around wildly. He narrated the whole thing, but we could never understand a word he said through the bucket on his head. It's too bad, because I would have been interested in hearing what he had to say.

One day, we discovered—quite by surprise—an activity that engrossed him entirely. We were practicing procedures for strapping people onto the backboard, and he expressed an interest in being the rescuee. We agreed, and as we practiced, he asked numerous questions about the process: Would I be awake if I had a spinal injury? Would I be able to talk? What would I look like? What would it feel like? We answered his questions, and when we were done, we started unstrapping him. "No!" he yelled, "Leave me in for a while."

So we did. We let him hang out on the backboard in an area where we could see and hear him, and as kids filed by to see what was going on, we listened to him educate them on his "condition." (He always let them know he was actually OK). After that, he periodically requested to play "that spinal injury management game," and we were happy to let him.

He must be 18 or 19 by now. I wonder what he's doing.