The Places of My Life II

The first 22 years of my life (1952-74) were spent largely in Darien CT, Menlo Park/Atherton CA and Providence RI. From just a listing of the places, without anything more, you might infer that I lived a life of ease, affluence and easy comfort. Perhaps like George W. Bush, I was born on third base but felt that I had hit a triple to get there. I am sure that my parents wanted to do all they could so that I, and my three brothers, would have better lives than they, but I always lived a bit on the "edge" of the affluent towns in which I found myself.

My father was a product of the hardscrabble soil of upstate New York, about 30 minutes north of Utica. Dairy cows were plentiful, but crops were hard to come by. Thinking to make the soil more productive, my father's family (along with many others) blasted the unforgiving soil with pesticides long before there was any EPA or federal law to protect people in this area. The result was that his brother never made it out of his 30s, his four sisters all died of cancer, and he fell victim to a virulent leukemia exactly one year older than I am as I write this essay. He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he did on the GI bill after WWII. A BA from St. Lawrence University in frigid NY helped him land a job with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in NYC, though he knew not a thing about insurance or selling it. He would, however, be involved in helping the company gradually come into the "computer age." Talk of Univacs, Honeywells and IBMs was the staple at the dinner table when I was growing up.

Whereas my father's upbringing bordered on the impecunious, my mother lived in more comfortable circumstances. Though born in Stamford, CT (the same hospital where I was born in 1952), she grew up in the section of Darien nearest to Stamford, off lower Middlesex Road. Her great uncle was a local star, having been pastor of the Union Memorial Church (Congregational) for more than 50 years; her father ran a laundry in Stamford. She graduated from Darien HS, ventured into NY first to secretarial school and then, to St. Lawrence, where she met my father. After their marriage at the end of 1948, they set up in Jersey City, NJ (where my older brother was born). Perceiving, however, that change was coming to Jersey City, they hightailed it to the other side of the Big Apple, eventually settling less than a mile from her childhood home. When I tell friends familiar with the demographics of Fairfield County CT that we grew up in the "poorer" end of Darien, they roll their eyes.

My parents, however, wanted the best public education for us, and we probably got it, even though we left in 1967, when my two younger brothers had not really been "shaped" by New England realities. But I was. I think I adopted a sort of Puritanism in my character and outlook that not only was reticent in sexual matters (relations with girls were never very important to me in those days), but believed in the virtues of balanced and disciplined living (Church, sports, student government, scouts, paper route, mowing lawns in the summer, etc.). In many ways I was a perfect product of what the CT suburbs were supposed to be: repressed, dull, protected environments for the families and children of NY executives or wannabe-executives. Not only did African-Americans not enter my orbit (except when we played them in the church basketball league), but Jews were almost non-existent in my world. Darien, you see, had a history of being slightly anti-Semitic. The Jews, I was told, lived in New Canaan, three miles away.

California Dreaming

Though fueled by the ambitions and educated with the benefits of Darien, I really didn't stay around long enough to reap the rewards. My father's transfer to Met. Life San Francisco in late-summer 1967 resulted in our family's cross-country odyssey in our new station wagon, CT plate 603.909. When we arrived in the Bay Area about Sept. 1, 1967, I was greeted by a culture that was so different from CT that it led to such a severe, but unidentified and untreated, culture shock that I think I walked around in a sort of daze for a year or so. It wasn't as if the mid-Peninsula was bad; it was just so different for me. Shirsleeve shirts in January; no ties for guys in Church; something about "marijuana" in the air; echoes of a Summer of Love about 30 miles to the north. It was as if CT in 1967 was closer in values to CT of 1927 than it was to CA in 1967. After trying to fit in for the first year, I suffered a football injury in Sept. 1968 (junior year) that ended a budding athletic career. Perhaps with an inchoate yearning to connect with something deep in my CT past while I was still trying to come to grips with CA, I decided to become an Evangelical Christian early in 1969. Like people in antiquity, who wanted to bring soil from their ancient homes when they moved to a new place, I was bringing something of my "Puritan" soil to super-cool CA. Though I prided myself on my ability to talk easily to a cheerleader one moment, a member of student government the next, and pocket-protector-wearing nerd the next, in fact I knew that the CA culture had something that I wasn't "born" with.

Heading East

Perhaps aware of the fact that I wasn't fitting in as comfortably as I could in CA (for example, I actually attended a program for HS juniors in the summer of 1969 on the beach at University of California, Santa Barbara, but never made it to the beach all summer until the last day of classes), I headed back East for college. The ambition, drive and competitiveness which were so much a part of my Darien days were the staple of Ivy League schools, I thought, and so I went off to Brown. But, recall, I was an Evangelical before few if any were really identifying with that label at major Eastern schools, and this Evangelicalism kept me from "fitting" well at Brown. After all, Brown was 1/3 Jewish and most of the rest were left-leaning privileged kids from NY, NJ, CT or RI. While I always found it incredibly easy to meet new people and enjoy their presence, I found my Evangelicalism a sort of limiting factor. But since this commitment fueled much of my dogged intellectual practice (memorizing Scripture; learning Biblical languages), I couldn't quite figure out how to negotiate the maze of criticism of the Viet Nam War (everywhere present), the academic demands of a secular university, my own vocational uncertainty (I actually was a pure mathematics major until early in my junior year) and my religious commitment. Indeed, when I went back to Brown for my 25th year reunion in 1999, I knew no one. I was in a photo published in the Alumni magazine, but they misidentified me, and the magazine didn't publish my letter correcting the misidentification. I ended up picking up a Ph. D. from Brown, too, but for the entire time of my program I lived in Boston, and this provided the occasion for more sense of identity confusion as to "place" in life.

Suffice it to say that I left Brown at the end of 1973, having finished all my requirements except my honors thesis, which I wrote in CA, but didn't return to my 1974 graduation. It would be the first of three graduations I would miss; the only one I attended was at the school from which I felt the greatest sense of isolation--but that will be the story of the next essay.

3242