From There to Here

I grew up in the Midwest, and always wanted to “be a writer.” Summers were spent in a dank basement, plunking away on an old manual typewriter left over from my parents’ college days.  Or under a tree, deeply lost in a library book—finally ordered outdoors by my father. This was long before kids were begged and bribed to read and write—no sticker-covered reading log or journal, no prizes at the end of the school year for me. Mostly just my dad saying, “It’s nice out—why don’t you go outside and play?!”

Although actually the idea it was “nice out”—ever—was debatable: Sticky and humid and prone to tornadoes in the summer; below zero with windchill factors and feet and feet of snow all winter. So at 18, I moved west—where I settled in Northern California and found being outdoors was at least tolerable (though rainy in the winter and scorching 100-degree days in summer). I rented a little house and walked to work (the UC Davis psychiatry department), where I soon was promoted from my receptionist job to research and ghost-write for the chairman of the department: psychopharmacology, schizophrenia, suicide, ECT, frontal lobotomies, addiction, multiple personalities. I was also attending Sac State, where I got picked up as a research assistant by my adviser, who was writing a book on the Shah of Iran: the SAVAK (secret police), CIA alliances, assassination plots. All this thrilling subject matter, and I wasn’t even 20 years old. Jackpot!

Eventually I graduated with a degree in Government-Journalism—as well as a Psychology-major boyfriend who would one day be my husband. In for a penny, in for a pound (of student loans, that is), we both continued on to graduate school: a secondary teaching credential for me, a master’s followed by a license in marriage and family therapy for him.

We eloped to city hall on a hot July Monday, he opened a private practice—one he still successfully runs today—and I taught high school for awhile: English, social science and journalism. Loved the kids, loved managing and producing publications, but missed writing my own work. So when my daughter was born (followed three years later by my son), I decided to stay home with them and—in between park jaunts and gymnastics and soccer practice and room mom duties—write. Which I did.

In addition to freelance work, I’ve also written a book—Losing Papa—that chronicles the year after my father died and my attempts to grapple with his loss, as well as my life with two little children (and a comically fixer house). I’m currently working on a second book, Road Trips, that I began on a National Parks tour with my (by then) teenagers. Amusingly, it involved going outside and playing—and yes, Papa, it was very nice out.