It was a wonderful experience, and it was my mother's doing. (I don't think she had to push my father too hard, but I don't think he'd have done it without her pushing for it.) She was the adventurous parent with the aesthetic sensibilities.
Here's my first published story that's sort of about the year in Paris
It was a wonderful experience, and it was my mother's doing. (I don't think she had to push my father too hard, but I don't think he'd have done it without her pushing for it.) She was the adventurous parent with the aesthetic sensibilities.
Here's my first published story that's sort of about the year in Paris
Love the story David. I hung out with a group of friends in the late 60s and one of the guys had a Peugeot, not sure of the vintage but I think early 60s. We had some great and wild times traveling around the SF Bay Area in that car. It wasn’t Paris but full of good memories.
My family of origin lived in Stanford '70-'71. I had driven the '62 Falcon--my father's beater--across the country, having asked for it instead of a plane ticket as both had about the same value. (they probably would have given me the Peugeot (pictured in the story, across the street from our Paris apartment, photo by me) and I'd regret more not having asked for it if I thought I could have kept it going all these years.) I got a girlfriend across the street kitty-corner from us, and she and I would drive into SF and walk all over, or go to the ocean. At Gunn High School, I learned to tune the Falcon. But I didn't have the patience for major auto repair.
I bought a Honda CVCC "Civic" in 1975. After discovering that most American mechanics then had no clue what to do with those cars, I got a mechanically-adept friend to teach me basic tune ups and maintained the car myself. You could buy a manual for it that was about the size of a phone book, that had every single process for everything in it, with step-by-step instructions and illustrated with photos that had arrows pointing at the things you had to deal with. I did a ring and valve job on it, following that manual. Of course, that was all back when you could work on cars, something that's impossible now.
that was the car I would have gotten had I been into cars at that stage of my life. 1975 was the summer I bicycled across the country. The Japanese were so much more inventive with cars.
I did change my spark plugs on my Civic a couple of years ago.
Thank you KD. I feel like I'm usually the one giving corrections, which probably comes from being on the spectrum, and I've proofed several friends' books.
“Is this a good car or a bad car?” Whoa! An existentialist at four years old?! :-)
Your parents were marvelous!! True adventurers! Where did they teach, if you don't mind my asking? and what subjects? (Do you teach as well?) Your story is beautifully written. It literally flows. When you said that you were in France for a year, I thought it was probably for a sabbatical, and remembered that my brother, who teaches Genetics at UMich, and his wife took their children for a sabbatical in France when they were young. Wish my parents had done that!! I was blessed to be able to spend a month each summer living on a boat of the coast of Bretagne for a few years in the 80's.
The Chevy was a station wagon, and the wheel wells swelled up into the passenger compartment, and at first view, I didn't think I liked them, as I climbed around in the car on the showroom floor. And that is exactly what I asked myself in the car in the showroom. But I quickly got myself used to them.
My parents met as Harvard grad students in economics. My father's specialty was the USSR, and he'd been fortunate enough to spend 15 months there during WWII, learning the language. His first job was at the University of Washington, where my mother, who had switched to psych, was a grad student. But alas, UW had nepotism rules, and my mother did not want--and probably would not have been hired--at the Jesuit college in Seattle. They both taught in their respective fields for many years at Tufts.
While we were still in Seattle, when I was 2 or 3, unbeknownst to me until decades later, after both were gone, she'd diagnosed me with autism. (In '55 or '56.) I think one of the very early experts was in the psych dept at UW. When I was 11, she told a friend--that family was spending the summer on Squirrel Island off Maine, but were normally in Berkeley, where we never lived although i went to school there, and the friend told her daughter, who I still occasionally keep up with, and the daughter told me a couple of years ago, after she read the story below, telling me my quirks were classic, like her son's. I think my mother told THAT friend because she knew it wouldn't get out among any of her other friends, and that she probably felt she needed to tell SOMEONE. (I asked my mother's best friend--still alive and sharp--even drives long distances--in her mid to late 90s, and she'd never been told.)
My paternal grandparents were NYC school teachers, my grandfather having had a couple of future Nobel Laureates in the physics class he taught. My mother's mother was one of the first female Coloradans to get a PhD (1915), and her maternal uncle ran the Colorado Democratic Party for most of the first half of the last century. The Hornbeins were considered Jewish Royalty of Denver, as TC was aware without my telling him. Another Hornbein, from Missouri, who later was head of anaesthesiology at UW (we didn't overlap, alas), left that name close to Everest's summit--the Hornbein Couloir from the US expedition in 1963.
I'd never been interested in mountaineering--my big adventure was to ride my bicycle from Seattle to Boston--but the winter before last, I decided I should read his book, and do enough other reading so that I could understand his achievement. (I'd met him a few weeks before the bicycle trip.) I read his book, Everest, and then I read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Then I reread both. At that point, I thought I would be ready to talk to Tom Hornbein in a day or two. I googled impulsively. Up came an obit. He'd died a couple of days earlier, of leukemia. He was only 92. Another Hornbein had lived to 104. My brother, then in his mid 60s, and fit had visited Tom maybe 8 years earlier, and had had trouble keeping up with him hiking. Here's what I think is the most interesting of the many obits.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for this fascinating information!!! I will be able to spend more time rereading it a little later on today! As always, you write so beautifully. Interesting the connection between your (obviously very high-functioning) autism, and your thoughts about the Chevy. My older brother, also extremely intelligent, has autism and approached the world as a child in a similar way.
If you're within 50 miles of Boston, or on Cape Cod over the next week, I'd be very interested to have coffee with you. I'd love to hear more about your brother.
I'm working slowly on a story about how I learned about mortality at age six--it came in the form of a dream with a ditty in it, and then I asked about the birds and the bees (a pair of kids I knew, children of a friend of my father's, didn't have a mother, but a then future step mother appeared at our house for dinner with that family, looking like she didn't belong with them (they were casually dressed and she was well dressed). then, after we went back to Seattle, my parents asked my brother and me (10 and 7 respectively) how we'd feel about another sibling. I told them they were too old. They were nonplussed, although they didn't tell me that at the time, but I think they feared I thought they were worn out or something. No. I was concerned that it would be really hard on the sibling when they died. And I since recently had a conversation with the sibling--my sister. It certainly was hard on her--harder than on her older brothers.
My father went to UNC for undergraduate (I think he graduated class of 1940). One of his good friends--and mine, as I sometimes inherited parental friends--was Sidney Rittenberg, who may have had the most interesting life of anyone who graduated from UNC. He died a handful of years ago, a little short of 100, if I remember correctly. He's well worth googling.
My father also had a few friends at UM Ann Arbor.
it's interesting to hear about someone similarly on the spectrum. I'd love to hear more.
My sister and I bicycled Bretagne in May of '87, which was a very nice trip except for the headwinds. But I'd love to have had a month there for multiple years.
And, my mother was the adventurer. My father just went along with it. Although he did have quite the adventure being sent to USSR during WWII (what is now Ukraine). And staying after the GIs were told they could go home (he REALLY wanted to learn the language, and he loved being there. So maybe I'm not crediting him where credit is due.) We have a couple of hours on CDs of his being interviewed about being there by someone from the BBC (probably Martin Sixsmith). We're damn lucky for that!
Were your parents college profs? And if so, what fields? And you?
My father taught Sociology at U Mich and then at UNC. Gerhard Lenski. Since I've always been interested in genetics and psychiatry, I've done some delving into family history given my older brother's autism. I've come to realize (my Dad agreed with me), that he, his father (a minister with a PhD in History), and his father's father (a PhD in Divinity and a famous theologian) all had Asperger's -- now said to be on the Autism Spectrum. When I started looking at my patients, I realized a genetic pattern in most of my ASD patients, as well. My younger brother teaches Genetics at Mich. State. (Funny, because we moved to NC when my little brother was 6 -- but he ended up back in Michigan as an adult!) His son is a Physicist. Neither of them have are on the ASD. I am certain, however, that my older sister is on the ASD. I am a retired Psychiatrist. I was in private practice for over 30 years but chose not to teach. I loved all of my patients and every minute of my work. (Sorry I haven't answered your message above! And no time right now. Lots of stuff going on for these couple of days. I want to give it proper attention.)
I loved languages and studied French, Russian, and Chinese in college. I was a History major, and they were my "crip" courses. I ended up going back to school and had to do (all but one course) for a degree in Chemistry in order to get into med school. I went back to my hometown of Ann Arbor for an 8-week intensive foreign language class. That's fascinating about your Dad. Yes, he was definitely an adventurer in his own way! (And what a horrible place to have to serve during WW II. Thank God he made it out alive.
It actually wasn't horrible at all. The only times he was in danger was when one of the planes returned from a bombing mission with no brakes, and was charging all over the airfield, unable to stop (my father served as a radar mechanic for most of his time there, and after that as an air traffic controller). And also I think the Germans conducted a bombing raid on the airfield, and the men had to dig trenches to spend the night in.
But basically, he had a very good time there. (We have a couple of hours of a BBC interview of him from around 1990 on CD, which I've listened to multiple times on car trips.) He had girlfriends, one of whom mysteriously disappeared, and we only found out in 2017 that someone among the Russian leaders had told her to leave him. He went to the theater, to concerts, he quite enjoyed learning the language--which I think he realized was going to be his ticket to becoming an expert on the USSR--and when the US authorities there told the men they could go home, after he'd been there for ten months, I think, he opted to stay.
There's now a book: Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance, by Serhii Plokhy, (a Ukrainian scholar at Harvard), in which my father figures. The Prologue is an incident where, on his first time back to USSR after the war, a couple of KGB agents are following him, and talking to him. He'd gone to Russia for what I remember as having been more than a month, during which time I tried fairly futily to understand where he was (across the sea). We lived in Cambridge at the time, just off Mass Ave., and slightly west of Porter Square. I knew the mail existed, but I didn't know how it worked. One day I drew something or other on a piece of construction paper. I walked to Mass Ave., something I don't think I'd ever done before, and I walked in the direction away from Porter Square, to a vacant lot with a lot of junk in it. I lofted my drawing, hoping that somehow it would fly over to whereever he was, and he would find it.
(It was driving through Porter Square, the previous winter, where I suddenly realized the steering wheels in cars were all on the same side.)
Reading the prologue, I felt a sense of relief, because I was reading about where he'd been and something that had happened to him. I don't know why I didn't get that from the CDs, or, possibly I did get some relief but just didn't feel it at the time the way I felt reading the prologue.
It was a wonderful experience, and it was my mother's doing. (I don't think she had to push my father too hard, but I don't think he'd have done it without her pushing for it.) She was the adventurous parent with the aesthetic sensibilities.
Here's my first published story that's sort of about the year in Paris
https://www.hagerty.com/media/driving/a-60s-summer-in-paris-leads-to-a-search-for-a-good-peugeot-404/
(Ignore the title—should have been In Search of Lost Time—With Apologies to Proust.)
Love the story David. I hung out with a group of friends in the late 60s and one of the guys had a Peugeot, not sure of the vintage but I think early 60s. We had some great and wild times traveling around the SF Bay Area in that car. It wasn’t Paris but full of good memories.
I think I would have really liked knowing you "back in the day," Karen.
Same here Tom!
My family of origin lived in Stanford '70-'71. I had driven the '62 Falcon--my father's beater--across the country, having asked for it instead of a plane ticket as both had about the same value. (they probably would have given me the Peugeot (pictured in the story, across the street from our Paris apartment, photo by me) and I'd regret more not having asked for it if I thought I could have kept it going all these years.) I got a girlfriend across the street kitty-corner from us, and she and I would drive into SF and walk all over, or go to the ocean. At Gunn High School, I learned to tune the Falcon. But I didn't have the patience for major auto repair.
I bought a Honda CVCC "Civic" in 1975. After discovering that most American mechanics then had no clue what to do with those cars, I got a mechanically-adept friend to teach me basic tune ups and maintained the car myself. You could buy a manual for it that was about the size of a phone book, that had every single process for everything in it, with step-by-step instructions and illustrated with photos that had arrows pointing at the things you had to deal with. I did a ring and valve job on it, following that manual. Of course, that was all back when you could work on cars, something that's impossible now.
that was the car I would have gotten had I been into cars at that stage of my life. 1975 was the summer I bicycled across the country. The Japanese were so much more inventive with cars.
I did change my spark plugs on my Civic a couple of years ago.
(kitty-corner)
Thank you KD. I feel like I'm usually the one giving corrections, which probably comes from being on the spectrum, and I've proofed several friends' books.
LOL!
“Is this a good car or a bad car?” Whoa! An existentialist at four years old?! :-)
Your parents were marvelous!! True adventurers! Where did they teach, if you don't mind my asking? and what subjects? (Do you teach as well?) Your story is beautifully written. It literally flows. When you said that you were in France for a year, I thought it was probably for a sabbatical, and remembered that my brother, who teaches Genetics at UMich, and his wife took their children for a sabbatical in France when they were young. Wish my parents had done that!! I was blessed to be able to spend a month each summer living on a boat of the coast of Bretagne for a few years in the 80's.
Thank you KD!
The Chevy was a station wagon, and the wheel wells swelled up into the passenger compartment, and at first view, I didn't think I liked them, as I climbed around in the car on the showroom floor. And that is exactly what I asked myself in the car in the showroom. But I quickly got myself used to them.
My parents met as Harvard grad students in economics. My father's specialty was the USSR, and he'd been fortunate enough to spend 15 months there during WWII, learning the language. His first job was at the University of Washington, where my mother, who had switched to psych, was a grad student. But alas, UW had nepotism rules, and my mother did not want--and probably would not have been hired--at the Jesuit college in Seattle. They both taught in their respective fields for many years at Tufts.
While we were still in Seattle, when I was 2 or 3, unbeknownst to me until decades later, after both were gone, she'd diagnosed me with autism. (In '55 or '56.) I think one of the very early experts was in the psych dept at UW. When I was 11, she told a friend--that family was spending the summer on Squirrel Island off Maine, but were normally in Berkeley, where we never lived although i went to school there, and the friend told her daughter, who I still occasionally keep up with, and the daughter told me a couple of years ago, after she read the story below, telling me my quirks were classic, like her son's. I think my mother told THAT friend because she knew it wouldn't get out among any of her other friends, and that she probably felt she needed to tell SOMEONE. (I asked my mother's best friend--still alive and sharp--even drives long distances--in her mid to late 90s, and she'd never been told.)
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-home-forum/2020/0805/heeding-her-invitation-six-decades-later
My paternal grandparents were NYC school teachers, my grandfather having had a couple of future Nobel Laureates in the physics class he taught. My mother's mother was one of the first female Coloradans to get a PhD (1915), and her maternal uncle ran the Colorado Democratic Party for most of the first half of the last century. The Hornbeins were considered Jewish Royalty of Denver, as TC was aware without my telling him. Another Hornbein, from Missouri, who later was head of anaesthesiology at UW (we didn't overlap, alas), left that name close to Everest's summit--the Hornbein Couloir from the US expedition in 1963.
I'd never been interested in mountaineering--my big adventure was to ride my bicycle from Seattle to Boston--but the winter before last, I decided I should read his book, and do enough other reading so that I could understand his achievement. (I'd met him a few weeks before the bicycle trip.) I read his book, Everest, and then I read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Then I reread both. At that point, I thought I would be ready to talk to Tom Hornbein in a day or two. I googled impulsively. Up came an obit. He'd died a couple of days earlier, of leukemia. He was only 92. Another Hornbein had lived to 104. My brother, then in his mid 60s, and fit had visited Tom maybe 8 years earlier, and had had trouble keeping up with him hiking. Here's what I think is the most interesting of the many obits.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/remembering-tom-hornbein-everest-pioneer/
THANK YOU SO MUCH for this fascinating information!!! I will be able to spend more time rereading it a little later on today! As always, you write so beautifully. Interesting the connection between your (obviously very high-functioning) autism, and your thoughts about the Chevy. My older brother, also extremely intelligent, has autism and approached the world as a child in a similar way.
Thank you much for the compliments.
If you're within 50 miles of Boston, or on Cape Cod over the next week, I'd be very interested to have coffee with you. I'd love to hear more about your brother.
I'm working slowly on a story about how I learned about mortality at age six--it came in the form of a dream with a ditty in it, and then I asked about the birds and the bees (a pair of kids I knew, children of a friend of my father's, didn't have a mother, but a then future step mother appeared at our house for dinner with that family, looking like she didn't belong with them (they were casually dressed and she was well dressed). then, after we went back to Seattle, my parents asked my brother and me (10 and 7 respectively) how we'd feel about another sibling. I told them they were too old. They were nonplussed, although they didn't tell me that at the time, but I think they feared I thought they were worn out or something. No. I was concerned that it would be really hard on the sibling when they died. And I since recently had a conversation with the sibling--my sister. It certainly was hard on her--harder than on her older brothers.
Will reply soon!
My father went to UNC for undergraduate (I think he graduated class of 1940). One of his good friends--and mine, as I sometimes inherited parental friends--was Sidney Rittenberg, who may have had the most interesting life of anyone who graduated from UNC. He died a handful of years ago, a little short of 100, if I remember correctly. He's well worth googling.
My father also had a few friends at UM Ann Arbor.
it's interesting to hear about someone similarly on the spectrum. I'd love to hear more.
My sister and I bicycled Bretagne in May of '87, which was a very nice trip except for the headwinds. But I'd love to have had a month there for multiple years.
And, my mother was the adventurer. My father just went along with it. Although he did have quite the adventure being sent to USSR during WWII (what is now Ukraine). And staying after the GIs were told they could go home (he REALLY wanted to learn the language, and he loved being there. So maybe I'm not crediting him where credit is due.) We have a couple of hours on CDs of his being interviewed about being there by someone from the BBC (probably Martin Sixsmith). We're damn lucky for that!
Were your parents college profs? And if so, what fields? And you?
My father taught Sociology at U Mich and then at UNC. Gerhard Lenski. Since I've always been interested in genetics and psychiatry, I've done some delving into family history given my older brother's autism. I've come to realize (my Dad agreed with me), that he, his father (a minister with a PhD in History), and his father's father (a PhD in Divinity and a famous theologian) all had Asperger's -- now said to be on the Autism Spectrum. When I started looking at my patients, I realized a genetic pattern in most of my ASD patients, as well. My younger brother teaches Genetics at Mich. State. (Funny, because we moved to NC when my little brother was 6 -- but he ended up back in Michigan as an adult!) His son is a Physicist. Neither of them have are on the ASD. I am certain, however, that my older sister is on the ASD. I am a retired Psychiatrist. I was in private practice for over 30 years but chose not to teach. I loved all of my patients and every minute of my work. (Sorry I haven't answered your message above! And no time right now. Lots of stuff going on for these couple of days. I want to give it proper attention.)
I loved languages and studied French, Russian, and Chinese in college. I was a History major, and they were my "crip" courses. I ended up going back to school and had to do (all but one course) for a degree in Chemistry in order to get into med school. I went back to my hometown of Ann Arbor for an 8-week intensive foreign language class. That's fascinating about your Dad. Yes, he was definitely an adventurer in his own way! (And what a horrible place to have to serve during WW II. Thank God he made it out alive.
It actually wasn't horrible at all. The only times he was in danger was when one of the planes returned from a bombing mission with no brakes, and was charging all over the airfield, unable to stop (my father served as a radar mechanic for most of his time there, and after that as an air traffic controller). And also I think the Germans conducted a bombing raid on the airfield, and the men had to dig trenches to spend the night in.
But basically, he had a very good time there. (We have a couple of hours of a BBC interview of him from around 1990 on CD, which I've listened to multiple times on car trips.) He had girlfriends, one of whom mysteriously disappeared, and we only found out in 2017 that someone among the Russian leaders had told her to leave him. He went to the theater, to concerts, he quite enjoyed learning the language--which I think he realized was going to be his ticket to becoming an expert on the USSR--and when the US authorities there told the men they could go home, after he'd been there for ten months, I think, he opted to stay.
There's now a book: Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance, by Serhii Plokhy, (a Ukrainian scholar at Harvard), in which my father figures. The Prologue is an incident where, on his first time back to USSR after the war, a couple of KGB agents are following him, and talking to him. He'd gone to Russia for what I remember as having been more than a month, during which time I tried fairly futily to understand where he was (across the sea). We lived in Cambridge at the time, just off Mass Ave., and slightly west of Porter Square. I knew the mail existed, but I didn't know how it worked. One day I drew something or other on a piece of construction paper. I walked to Mass Ave., something I don't think I'd ever done before, and I walked in the direction away from Porter Square, to a vacant lot with a lot of junk in it. I lofted my drawing, hoping that somehow it would fly over to whereever he was, and he would find it.
(It was driving through Porter Square, the previous winter, where I suddenly realized the steering wheels in cars were all on the same side.)
Reading the prologue, I felt a sense of relief, because I was reading about where he'd been and something that had happened to him. I don't know why I didn't get that from the CDs, or, possibly I did get some relief but just didn't feel it at the time the way I felt reading the prologue.