Pocket Watch

Pocket Watch

There was a time when I really wanted to own a pocket watch. I’d worn a wristwatch most of my adult life. I’d considered using a pendant watch or a watch that pinned to my clothing, and rejected them. Somehow I’d been enraptured by the image of a powerful, wealthy, handsome man who wore a pocket watch on the end of a gold chain, who fished it out of his pocket and clicked the button on top to flip the case open.

I eventually bought myself a pocket watch. The case is embossed with the Statue of Liberty and sailing ships in the harbor on one side, and an eagle flying in front of a mountain on the other side. I also bought a snazzy chain to connect the watch to a clip that hooks through a button hole or over my waistband.

I wore the pocket watch for a while, especially on state occasions. I felt pretty cool clicking open the case to read the time. But that gratification was outweighed by the hassle of fishing the watch out of my pocket, getting it right side up, and clicking it open to tell the time, as compared to the ease of simply turning my arm to see my wristwatch.

Nowadays, I find it even easier to press the button on the ipod touch that lives in my shirt pocket to check the time, in part because the large digital read-out is easier to read than the analog face of my smallish wristwatch.

So, since ease of use is such a strong value to me, why did I want to use a pocket watch? Somehow it acquired for me an air of sophistication, wealth, and, of course, male privilege. If I couldn’t have that privilege, at least I could have the proper accessory.

A Very Uncomfortable Time

A Very Uncomfortable Time

When I was 15 years old, I was living in Berkeley with my father and brother in a house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. My father and I each had a bedroom on the main floor, and Eric had one downstairs, next to the laundry room.

I was woken up one school morning by my father’s alarm clock. I went into his bedroom and shut it off, noticing that his bed had not been slept in.

I found him on the living room sofa, collapsed onto the newspaper, utterly silent. I poked him in the shoulder, and found it cold and hard.

It was clear to me that he was dead, but I had no idea what to do about it. After a few moments, I hear Eric’s shower go on. I called him on the intercom, “Get up here. I need you.” And up he came.

He thought there might be some hope, and called for an ambulance. The EMTs made a show of working on Dad, and Eric went with them to the hospital.

I stood in the driveway and wondered what to do. The mother of the family across the street had heard the ambulance and came out. After I told her what had happened, she brought me into her house to await word from the hospital.

When the call came, she spoke with the hospital. I told her she didn’t need to say the words; it had been obvious. I carried in my purse an address book, and we called Dad’s brother and his ex-wife, our mother, with the news.

He had died from a drug overdose, probably accidental. A closeted gay man and a doctor, Dad had self-prescribed all manner of psychoactive drugs. Mother had told us of his drug use, without explaining why it was up to us to deal with it. We had noticed that he sometimes passed out at the dinner table or was very hard to awaken in the mornings, and that his emotions were volatile. Once he stopped talking to us for several days. But we figured that was more or less normal.

I was in the throes of a crush on one of my women teachers at the time, and I had imagined her having to tell me that my father had died, and she would take care of me.  I felt guilty when part of my fantasy came true.

Mother borrowed a truck and came to take us to live with her in Santa Monica. She was ruthless in cutting down our possessions to what would fit in the truck. I would be separated from my home, school, friends, and much of my stuff. But at least I’d spent many vacations in Santa Monica, so there was something familiar about our destination.

I remember that our first day at Santa Monica High School was April 1. I was a straight-A student, so I settled in pretty quickly. I wrote the following poem around that time. It was published in a mimeographed literary journal called The Voltaire:

Fog, all around me,

Sheltering me

From my world that was

Torn apart.

When will the sun

shine again?

I can’t see

Through the fog,

Nor do I want to see

My world that was.

I look forward

To sunshine.

Upon what

Will the sun shine?

What will I see

When it rises again?

What?

What new road

Lies ahead,

Shrouded now by fog,

which will soon be revealed?

How I Wound up in Law School

Dana Goes to Law School

I chose to major in music at U.C.L.A. because I enjoyed singing and playing guitar. My high school guidance counselor apparently assumed that my future husband would support me. During my college years, though, I discovered that I was a lesbian, I wasn’t going to have a husband, and I would need a good career of my own. I also realized that I did not want to teach music and was not likely to earn a living as a performer.

So I needed to find myself a career. I took a series of career guidance tests, which showed that I would be able to do about anything I set my mind to, and that my interests were in “verbal, persuasive activities.” This made sense, since my love of reading had endowed me with a large vocabulary, but it didn’t narrow the field very much. My brother had been a year ahead of me in school, and I had usually followed and enjoyed his choices of electives. So I followed his grad school choice, too, and applied to several law schools in the U.C. system.

My first choice was Boalt Hall, which would return me to Berkeley, where I’d enjoyed living in the mid-60s. But Boalt was everybody’s first choice, and my music degree, albeit summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, got me only as far as their waiting list. I was accepted outright at U.C. Davis, which did not appeal, and at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, which was at least close to Berkeley. Its school year started a month before the other schools, and I had to pay a non-refundable acceptance deposit immediately, so I couldn’t wait for Boalt to decide. I prepared to move to San Francisco, where I knew nobody, so my excitement was tempered with a hefty dose of trepidation.

A friend drove me and my stuff to my new home, a tiny studio apartment in a building full of law students a few blocks from Hastings.

I was a devout Christian at the time, and made a point to attend the nearest church on the first Sunday. It was a Lutheran Church, not much different from the Presbyterian church I had belonged to in Los Angeles. I was made welcome, and soon found myself singing in the choir and exploring The City with other church-goers.

Law school was far more challenging than nearly any class I’d ever taken. The only courses I’d ever had trouble with were the upper-division English class I’d taken as a high school senior and college calculus. I had always been at or near the top of my class in school, but then so had all the other members of my law school class. I had to learn better ways of note-taking, because I had to be able to read and understand the notes to study them for the final and eventually for the bar exam. I got to know a few women in my law school class, and we formed a study group. Nevertheless, my nerves frayed, and I started having anxiety attacks.

I went to student health, and the doctor prescribed Valium. This was 1974 or 5, and a prescription for “mother’s little helper” was a badge of dishonorable weakness. Looking at the vial of pills shocked me into remembering my Christian faith. I remembered that God had brought me this far and was always with me. I had a good cry, thanked God for the reminder, and got my feet under me.

I graduated from law school with honors, passed the Bar Exam, and had a nice little career in legal publishing, from which I am now happily retired.

QEWW Public Reading, September 2018

Here's the piece I read at the end of my first cycle in the Queer Elders Writing Workshop that is sponsored by Openhouse:

You Gotta Give them Hope

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person elected to political office in California. My path intersected his in the 1978 campaign against the Briggs Initiative. In a backlash against early ordinances banning discrimination against gay people, State Senator John Briggs had authored a proposition requiring school districts in California to fire gay teachers and any teachers who advocated for gay civil rights, in the classroom or elsewhere. When early opinion was strongly in favor of the initiative, gays and our supporters mobilized against it.

At the time, I was an officer in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a San Francisco coalition of gay rights activists within various religious communities – Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Jewish. We visited congregations and held services to counter the ignorance and invective that were being used by proponents of the initiative. Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart were debating Senator Briggs. The No on 6 Campaign, the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative, and similar groups all over the state joined the fray.

And we won. On November 7, 1978, Prop. 6 went down in flames, roughly 60% to 40%. And we celebrated. And there was backlash.

I was working for the California appellate court on November 27 that year. My desk was in a large room with windows overlooking the San Francisco City Hall. Somebody noticed a fleet of police cars converging on City Hall, and most of us watched for a while and wondered what was happening.

Eventually we learned that former Supervisor Dan White had brought a gun into City Hall and had killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Gay and straight, most of the city was in mourning. I joined a candlelight vigil outside City Hall that night, and lessened my grief by sharing it with friends.

Harvey had been a member of my synagogue, and I attended his memorial service. Eerily prescient, he had recorded a testament to be played in the event of his assassination. It included the line, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” A bullet did kill him, and nobody should lurk in a closet ever again.

My Tiger Misty

My tiny tiger Misty is a brown tabby cat. Her coat is desert camouflage embodied in warm, soft velvet.

Being a cat, she sometimes seeks my lap when I'm engrossed in something on my ipad. She wreathes herself around the device, trying to substitute herself for it. But I'm stubborn. She succeeds only in scenting it as hers.

Soon, though, I develop a free hand and the desire to stroke her fur with it. Like an old Greek fisherman with his worry beads, I soothe my fingers and mind with her luscious coat. She purrs her approval and writhes to present more itchy sites to my fingernails.

Tiger she is, and I her plaything. She's the boss and I her serf. She's the favored child and I her playground. My cat's companion and I, and she the queen of all she surveys.

Dana's Harp

Nancy and I met in music programs at our synagogue. We both sang, as service leaders, and for fun. We also both enjoyed reading, and we explored the Jewish novels of Chaim Potok.

His book Davita's Harp featured a female leading character, which appealed to both of us. The title harp was not a Celtic lap harp or a tall orchestral harp. Instead, it was a door harp, which is a musical instrument that plays itself. A wooden box with tuned metal strings stretched across a sound hole, a door harp has metal balls that hang next to the strings. The balls hit the strings when the door is opened and closed, making them sound. It's kinda like a wind chime for indoors.

Some months later, Nancy gave me a door harp for my birthday. Its sound hole was in the shape of a Star of David, the six-pointed star of Judaism. I greeted it with glad cries and mounted it on my front door as soon as I could. It hangs there, sounding its major triad when I open the door, to this very day.

Sealed with a Stamp

I left Berkeley towards the end of my tenth grade school year, because my father had suddenly died. Even though close friends had offered to keep my brother and me until the end of the school year, our mother decided that we needed to move down to live with her in Santa Monica immediately. So move we did, and started a new life in a city we only knew as a vacation spot.

At first, letters from my Berkeley friends were my lifeline. I drank in each letter over and over, for the bittersweet pleasure of the familiar past viewed from my barren new present.

I sent letters back sharing my new circumstances -- my new classes and teachers, the indignity of sharing an English class with my older brother, my lungs' painful adjustment to the smoggy air.

I decorated my letters with sealing wax in various colors. One seal featured my initial; another was a pattern of some sort, maybe a flower.

I put effort into my missives and appreciated every word I received. Gradually, though, the events of my friends' lives became increasingly distant, I dug into my own concerns, and we drifted apart.