Highway 17

"Have you thrown your senses to the war, or did you lose them in the flood?" -- Springsteen

Originally a track used by natives and stage coach companies, the 26 mile route between San Jose and Santa Cruz rises to 1,800 feet at the summit of Patchen Pass before descending into the coastal fog. The first time I rode through the wicked twists and narrow lanes between the trees of the Santa Cruz mountains, I was a passenger in a carload of partying students heading from the state college over to the beach.

The road had several popular nicknames at the time: Suicide Alley, the Valley Surprise, Glenwood Slaughterhouse. Separated at first by the force of wind generated by logging trucks passing in opposite directions along the lanes shadowed by the trees, Highway 17 wore a thin median fence and the occasional concrete barrier by the time I had moved to Northern California. You usually knew you were close to the center line by the chips of glass or broken fenders lying in the way.

That never stopped us from tearing along, passing bottles of Mickey's Big Mouth or a waterpipe between our cars, ten or fifteen of us en-route from the smoggy Santa Clara valley to the cool and salty beaches. Mark the Wop usually tore along in his modified blue Ford, driving like the erstwhile race driver he insisted he had been, the rest of us letting him get a few cars ahead so we knew where he was.

Cresting the summit, we wended between sputtering VW vans and terrified senior citizens in their camper trucks, letting it fly down the western rim through Santa's Village and Scott's Valley, finally planing out near the Branciforte where you could see the steeple of the Holy Cross Church in the salt-spray air. Safely--strange as that could be--on the coastside, we turned north on Highway 1 toward the beaches of Davenport, stopping only for fresh beer and sandwiches.

I liked the Red, White and Blue beach, marked only by its tri-color mailbox, where you descended again through a twisting dirt road to the sandy parking strip, and stumbled down the rocks to the nude beach, toting your cooler, towels, and radios. So long as you were going to be cold, your body prickled from the wind, you might as well wear nothing. We'd wake from hours of beer-snoozing, painfully sunburned all over. I used to joke that even the insides of our mouths, open to snores in the late afternoon sun, had been burnt.

Once, Ron and I climbed into Roger Andrino's Volkswagen and the three of us drove over Highway 17 to the flat beach between Davenport and Wilder Ranch. The tide was out, so Roger putted along the hardpack so we could picnic close to the waves. Later, the sea came in and flooded the car where it stuck in the sand and we had to wait until the tide went out again. We had long days and nights of bota bags and reefer and anger at the war, grave relief at having scored our draft deferments. The sun was setting into the anvil of fog, but across the waves on the other side of the world, it was rising over the jungles and hamlets where our friends and family members were dying or going subtly insane.

* * *

In my state college days I hadn't the slightest notion that I would someday live on the coast side of Highway 17. But when I went back to school to study literature, Maki-san and I drove her overloaded green VW over the pass and took a little beach house by Twin Lakes. I so hated Highway 17 then, for it no longer represented a road to freedom from the heat and choked thoroughfares of the Santa Clara Valley to the languid beach-side roads, but instead was a highway of inevitability going the other direction, toward the San Francisco airport where Maki would depart homeward.

On what I thought would be the last drive, a year after Maki had departed from my life forever, I was in the green VW she'd left me, packed now for graduate school in Alabama, a place as far removed from the laid-back surfer lanes of Santa Cruz as Albania, or Antarctica. I would not be back in California to live for more than fifteen years.

In 1999, having taken a job with a dot-com startup in Silicon Valley, I drove out Highway 17 to the coast. I rented a tiny apartment near the San Jose airport and found myself in a stranglehold commute, taking 45 minutes to travel less than five miles to work each day. One Saturday morning, I rose early and sped westward on the section of Highway 17 that had been renamed Interstate 880, hitting the pass before most people had woken up for coffee, descending from the summit in darkness, speedling along the patch from Scott's Valley toward Santa Cruz, the rising sun glancing off the whited steeple in the pastel pinks and grays of daybreak.

I had been sober for more than a decade and sought out other ways to smooth out the edges of life, but the sea had turned an inconsiderate shoulder, the Santa Cruz morning streets were walked by strangers or, worse, shadows and echos, and the buildings themselves wore new names.

Allusions

In the fall of that year Maki Yamada and I took a small house on Lakeview Drive, less than a minute's walk from the beach. At night the fog rolled in and you could smell the sea and the eucalyptus trees through the window. It was a tiny converted garage with a smelly carpet and leftover flea population from the previous tenant, but we cleaned it with love and made it a safe place to live at a time when Ronald Reagan was President and Mark David Chapman had shot John Lennon.

In the morning, I walked past the sprawling gardens where our dirt road turned to asphault, where chickens ran free across the path and an old mare grazed silently at the fencepost. We had no money, but the university included a bus pass and there was a stop at 26th Avenue for the 56 line that ran right up to Porter College and my morning class. The return bus dropped me off in front of Kong's Market, where I bought our egg rolls for dinner. It was the happiest time of my life.

I was a good decade older than the students in Paul Skenazy's modern novel course, and I had no idea how to read critically or talk about writing. I'd listen for an hour while students bantered about the structure of Gravity's Rainbow or Absalom, Absalom!--difficult novels for a first-year student who was just stepping into the river. And so I'd weep on the bus ride home for fear of failure and my inability to wrap my mind around the muscular narratives.

Maki had a car, a VW that seemed to blow out a part every month, sending me scrambling for the idiot book and the box of metric wrenches. I had never even changed the oil before in my various Buicks, Dodges, or Datsuns and now had to crawl under the back hood and see what I could do to keep the bug from separating into disparate parts under its labored idle.

We had no money.

But Maki waitressed at night at a Japanese restaurant on the west side, and she'd come home with a plastic bag of sashimi and California rolls, and we ate like high members of the shogunate. On weekends we splurged and went over to Chef Tongs for a chicken stir-fry of charred peppers, vegetables, and peanuts. While she was away, I sat in the chair by the window and read novels, marking up the margins with arrows and multiple question marks that underscored my utter failure in understanding the arc of the plot, let alone the subtle literary allusions and call outs to Shakespeare. In the late afternoons, when the wind picked up, I'd pull on a hoodie and jog along the beach.

If we had a little extra cash, I'd ride my bike up Portola to the fruit and vegetable stand and buy dried apricots and dates, or eggplants and onions for our own stir-fries. Some nights, when Maki wasn't working, we took our books and rode down to Capitola Beach and had coffee at Mr. Toots, overlooking the harbor where pelicans curved down from the cliffs in tight formation, screeching down where the anchovies rolled in on the tide as easy prey.

I loved looking at our shadows fall before us when Maki and I walked in the sun. I was over six feet tall and she barely reached five, and we looked like a parent and child. Years later it occurred to me that she had relied upon me to teach her English, the odd customs of the Santa Cruz hippie lifestyle, and even how to drive the VW. And once the parent/student relationship had outgrown its utility, what would come to take its place?

Some nights the stray cats used the fat planters of rubber trees at Toots for a litter box and you had to run out of there squeezing your nose. Teen-aged tourists and gee-gawkers from the crowded peninsula drove out at dusk in their souped-up cars and drove the Capitola loop in search of sex or a proximate encounter in conversation.

But we'd end the evening together, cuddled under the comforter in our little house, listening to the waves out the window and feeling very happy.

Skenazy saved my life in mid-semester after flunking me over a poor paper. I had no idea how to write a paper; I'd been trained as a journalist, and while my powers of observation were sharp, you didn't pen a critical essay in the inverted pyramid format of a news story. I was nearly washed out. I sat ashen in his office at Cowell College as he explained that I had to learn the literary form and aeriodite lingo of the trade.

The door to his office was open and you could hear the great American classicist Norman O. Brown chewing out an undergrad: "You don't have the courage to drop out of school!"

Well, neither had I. Nor did I have a source of income save my scant student loans and scholarship. But I was willing to follow Skenazy's directions and spent long hours in the undergraduate library trying to make sense of my suffering. One afternoon I was nearly laughed out of the seminar room by my utterance of a wicked malapropism: "architypical".

Across town, Maki was making quick work of building a wide network of Japanese students who had enrolled at the nearby community college where she was taking undergraduate classes of her own. Unlike me, she had a social life, and I was insanely jealous. The platters of late night sushi went away. And so had she.

I'd come home to our empty house by the beach and mope. I'd try to chase her down by telephone, ringing up her friends to see if she were there, stammering in Japanese when I couldn't find her. I had enrolled in a Japanese language class, prospering wonderfully, learning the hiragana and katagana and speaking with uncanny mastery--like a woman! I had picked up Maki's inflections and feminine nuances with sufficient acumen that my professor bristled. "You talk like a girl," she said.

And in the spring semester, Maki was spending more and more time away from the beach-house while I brooded in the library over biblical references in Faulkner. We had two languages between us now and so little to say. And Maki had begun to drop references to a man in her pottery class.

One night I sat alone in the dark, listening to the waves, and phoned her at the number she had for the classmate in her address book. Yes, she admitted when he put her on the line, she was there. And she wasn't coming home.

In the morning I had my valise packed, waiting outside the door to the beach-house. I wanted to be anywhere but inside my own crawling flesh. But she had been unfaithful, so why was I to leave? We agreed to find separate homes and when I left the solitude of Lakeview Drive, I moved into a bustling, dysfunctional community on East Cliff Drive, a house and cabins on a giant lot where 14 people lived and ate together. (Today, Lakeview is paved and the little house has made way for a choked row of overpriced condos.)

In the summer of that year, Maki flew home to Japan and I sat in my basement room of the noisy coed house speaking to the twenty books of my oral exam list where they were stacked on my desk, reciting to each literary character what I knew about them, how their world was structured, from which biblical or literary work did their titles spring anew, and how the landscape suited the thematic considerations of the form.

And out the window the afternoon light faded and the gulls screeched as the fog swept in.

Flying Blind

Whenever I board an airliner through the jetway, I practice a well-grooved ritual that I believe keeps the plane in the air. I won't spell it all out for fear of compromising its spiritual integrity, suffice to say it involves touching the airliner with my hand, looking at the runway, talking to God, and stepping into the aircraft with faithful choreography.

My first flight in an airliner came in 1959 during our familiar transmigration of body and soul from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. We flew out of LaGuardia on a three-tailed, glamorous Lockheed Constellation, lit up by spotlights on the damp runway with its bright red "TWA" insignia behind a veil of showers. In those days, you had your own compartment and the stewardess handed you a blanket, pillow, and comfortable slippers.

You could see the fiery exhaust streaming from behind the propellers in the dark gloom and tendrils of lightning burst from the pillars of black clouds. I thought the engines had caught fire, and I slept fitfully. In the morning, the painted desert stretched out below in pink and amber light. Over Las Vegas they served eggs and bacon and toast, and after the Constellation dropped hundreds of feet in a sudden air pocket, I threw it all up in the tray.

The details may be apocryphal, but I haven't been comfortable in an airline since. Those falling oxygen masks during my flight to Athens were doozies.

Leaping Off
In an attempt to cure my fear of falling, crashing, & dying, I signed up for a full course of hang-gliding lessons in the 1970s. We drove out to Sand City near Monterey before sunrise and met on the tall dunes in the face of an offshore breeze. These were first-generation Regallo kites with delta shapes, heavy, ungainly, hard to steer, and we strapped ourselves into them, ran headlong down the dune, then lifted the leading edge into the breeze and were swept into the air. It felt as if a powerful hawk had seized your spine and dragged you into the sky. After flying forty or fifty yards, you lowered the edge and crashed into the sand.

I stayed with it much longer than I had intended, although I never gained the expertise or willingness to leap off of a cliff. And when my instructor failed to tie himself into the harness one day and fell a thousand feet from the kite during a steep dive off of the Santa Cruz mountains, I canceled the balance of my lessons.

Acting the Imbecile
In my senior year of college, The Boys took flying lessons. Dennis, Russ and Kevin signed up together. The year before they had all gotten motorcycles. I would visit them on my trips to Los Angeles from northern California during semester breaks to view the toy de jour. I was as excited about going up in a small airplane with them as one might yearn to be covered with hot tar. I hated small planes. They bounced around in the clutches of the wind. They had fixed windows that made the cramped quarters even more catastrophic when airborne. And they fell out of the sky all the time.

But fearing judgment, I crawled into the rear seat of a low-wing Grumman Tiger and Russ powered the plane down the runway as fast as the little propeller could spin. Just beyond the control tower, I expected the nose to rise gently, for Russ to throttle back and climb. Instead, he raced headlong toward the end of the tarmac where I could see the ratty weeds poking up as they grew near. At the last minute, Russ yanked back the yoke, dropped the flaps, and the plane lurched into the air with a wrenching g-force that felt like a fat man jumping on your heart.

Ten minutes later, over the Tehachapi Mountain Range, The Boys broke out the funny cigarettes, filling the cabin with smoke. I could protest, I suppose, but at that moment it felt necessary to join them.

Homeward bound, moments after Russ turned base to land the Tiger, he nearly crept up the tail of a twin-engined plane in the pattern ahead of us. "He's in the wrong place," Russ said as we shouted. I told The Boys my flying days were over, but sadly, I went again and again because I liked the pot. I was still terrified every take-off and landing, and Russ' barrel rolls, hammerheads, and other aerobatics did little to change things. My persistence in this case does not reflect upon me kindly.

New Equipment
Coming in from a delightful trip to the Yucatan, I found myself seated by my customary right-front window when the Mexicana Airlines 727 jerked up in a labored climb moments after it had descended to the runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Out the window as we rose, you could see the planes crowding the runway where we had meant to land.

Terrifying. But that experience pales next to the Milan-bound charter I boarded in Toronto in 1985. Shortly after takeoff, the jet slid into a steep turn, dropped into the clouds below, and made an emergency landing. We learned after we had bussed to the relative safely of the terminal that a window had blown out in the cockpit and charts were flying around the cabin.

Hours later we boarded--unknowingly--the same aircraft, which made our landing across the ocean at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport far more exhilarating than the champagne they poured so freely to placate us. The brakes had burned up earlier on landing in Toronto. After it screeched to a stop, we left the plane and waited a few hours for, as the airlines love to say, new equipment.

Moniker Business

My birth name is Gary, as only my family and friends from the past know. It was a common name among 1950s boys, just as Kyle or Evan are white-bread names today. There were always four or five Garys in my classes. There were lots of Garys moving into lookalike suburban homes of families escaping the cold, crowded boroughs of New York to warmer climes in Florida and Southern California.

In Jewish tradition, I was named to honor my maternal grandfather, Harry, a Russian man I never knew. My middle name, Marc, pays homage to my father's father, Max. I never knew Max, either. When the Rabbi gave me my Hebrew names--to reflect my place in the order of things--I was called Getzel Mendel ben Gedalya, the last name being that of my father's first Hebrew name. I am Getzel Mendel, son of Gedalya.

In Hebrew school, they called me Getzel the Pretzel (see french fry post below). In high school, some of the more witty fellahs called me Buster (as in Buster Hyman), or Gary Cherry. Is sarcasm the misshapen expression of love? (Rilke says, "The child bent becomes the bender, inflicts on others what he once went through.")

I came by the nickname Gabby after living the better part of a year in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz (a socialist labor colony) on the Sea of Galilee. At the time, you went to an office in Tel Aviv and selected the flavor of kibbutz where you hoped to volunteer. The offices organized the available colonies by religious and political orientation. You could choose an orthodox kibbutz with a right-wing, Zionist stance, a middle of the road kibbutz with a liberal stance--or any number of combinations. There was even a kibbutz comprised entirely of American emigres, but who wanted to go abroad only to live with the people you were trying to escape?

I had landed in Tel Aviv and spent December with my distant cousin Ronit (changed from Robin) who had settled in Israel years before. She had married an Israeli--a tough, no nonsense kind of fellow--and was completing an internship as a nurse in the downtown Tel Aviv hospital. Her roommate was a Moroccan Jew with black skin and kinky hair. When they completed their training, she was sent to the town of Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border. The town is the site of many a rocket attack and a horrific massacre led by the PLO. It was considered a "sponge town" in that it was to absorb the hatred and violence that rained down from the Lebanese mountains above while maintaining an Israeli presence. It seemed like blatant racism to me that Morrocans were assigned there, while my cousin and other Ashkenazim (European Jews) enjoyed cosmopolitan life in central Israel.

I had seen Kiryat Shmona on a bus trip north of the Galilee. The apartment houses had "safe rooms"--cinder block vaults where the families could run and lock the doors behind them should terrorists invade their building.

I was awestruck by the Galilee, with its dry brown hills and plush, irrigated fields beside the sparkling blue sea. Minarets in Tiberias and Safed were whited gems along the shore. After I had returned to Tel Aviv, Ronit said it was time to go; she advised me to check out the kibbutz office on Frishman Street.

I found an opening at Ginosar, a large kibbutz north of Tiberias, set on the shore of the Galilee just steps from where Christ had lived. Busloads of Christians emptied out nearby and people were baptised. Ginosar had hundreds of families settled on it, had a diverse economy based on crops (cotton, bananas, grapefruit), fishing (harvesting tons of St. Peter's Fish from the Galilee), a dairy, an electronics assembly plant, and a tourist hotel. Its most famous resident, Yigal Allon, was a Zionist pioneer and former Prime Minister, settling there in the early 1940s. I loved the idea of being on the sea which stretched out from the safety of the shore to the looming Golan Heights. I paid the small fee for health insurance, signed a few forms, and went directly to the Eged station to catch a northbound bus for Tiberias. Soldiers stacked their rifles in the aisle as we passed through the coastal plains and the foothills east of Haifa.

The bus dropped me off on the highway, right at the kibbutz. The farm was surrounded by barbed wire and a guarded gate and, after seeing bombings in the city and taking cover in shelters during terrorist threats, I came to feel comfortable when I returned from traveling and that gate slammed down behind me.

When you first arrived at Ginosar, you were assigned to a hut on the shore of the sea, given a roommate, a work assignment, and ushered to the laundry room where you were issued work clothes, bedding, and towels. You could put your name on your clothes, if you liked the fit and wanted them returned after cleaning. But you had to write an your name on the laundry tag. The Sabra who worked the counter looked at my tag. "Gary?" she said, "What kind of name is that?" She was right. In Japan, my name, phonetically, meant "diarrhea". "Your name in Israel," the clerk said, "Will be Gabi." (She prouncounced it "gah-bee").

It was odd having friends (among Israelis and kibbutz volunteers) with names that suggested they had stepped from pages of the Old Testament. There was Solomon and Samson, and Ester and Ruth. You could pick a name that used your original initial, so I became Gabby. In this country, Gabby is a woman's name, and I constantly receive junk mail addressed to "Ms." Or, I am miscalled "Gabe", which is rankling.

In the third month of my stay on the kibbutz, I went to work after a sleepless night and buried a machete in my knee. I was in the field, chopping down banana trees. Once the fruit is harvested, you chop the tree down to a foot or less and it regrows, producing its precious fruit. The plant is like bamboo, largely a conduit for fresh water from the Galilee and, once chopped, it sends new shoots toward the sun. My knee, on the other hand, did no such thing.

The stoic kibbutz nurse tried to stem the bleeding and told me to put a bandage on it and get back to work. This is no nation for slackers and whiners. But I needed stitches, so she backtracked, handed me bus fare to an American hospital in Tiberias. That afternoon, I came home on crutches.

For several weeks I could barely walk at all. A friend returned from a day trip to Tel Aviv with an armload of classical literature. It seemed like the first time in my life that fiction made sense to me. I thrilled in Graham Green's novels and Doris Lessing's stories. I wept at Chekhov, of all things. The sentences in Hemingway's narratives of the two-hearted river wrapped themselves around me.

After I was able to walk again, the kibbutz assigned me to a seat in the electronics factory, where I pressed two red buttons simultaneously to spot-weld switches. The machine buttons were separated so as to require two hands to initiate the weld. Apparently workers fried their free hands using the previous model. It was a far cry from the banana fields and fresh air and mud fights with my fellows. But, more than anything else--more than the evening dance parties at the field-house, the sunny days bobbing in the fishing boats on that brilliant sea, or the endless dininghall arguments over world politics with my fellow volunteers--I thought of digging out another book from the collection my benefactor had brought back from Tel Aviv.

In the spring, I left on a ship bound for the Isle of Rhodes. Less than a year after that, I enrolled in the creative writing program at Santa Cruz. I kept my floppy green kibbutz hat (click picture for detail), which I wore until it deteriorated, my memories, the scar on my left knee, and my kibbutz name. It's my writer's name. It's the name on the label of my birthday suit. It's the name that fits the shape that will remain after all the stars have died.

Aside from the folks at the department of motor vehicles, the IRS, and members of my family, no one gets to call me Gary.

Three Plagues

"These are unclean to you among all that creep: whosoever doth touch them, shall be unclean until the evening." -- Leviticus 11:31.

Plague by Air
We were living in a small house near the beach in La Selva, a quiet, lovely place set in a grove of pines, fringed with flowering bougainvillea and ivy. In the stillness of morning and the dark, foggy eves you could hear the waves breaking on the beach below. On days when the fog backed out, the sun baked down on the houses and you could hear the wooden beams swelling and moaning in the still air.

One Sunday we were having coffee on the deck when we noticed a few bees darting among the trees. Then we saw more coming, sifting in between the pine needles in the dappled light, growing slowly in number until there were quite many of them. Diana went back into the house. It wasn't long before I followed, as a single bee sting can send me to the emergency room.

Shadows appeared out the windows over the tops of the hedges. Then thousands of bees circled the house and we raced to shut the flue on the fireplace. You could see out the windows, but the day had turned into dark ribbons of yellow and brown. I phoned the police, who referred me to the firehouse, where I was given the phone number of a bee keeper from Aptos.

That night, in the cooling dark, the keeper came out and shook the solid mass that had roosted in the tree in the center of the yard, and all the bees fell into a box and were gone.

Plague by Land
I was traveling across America in a Greyhound bus, maximizing my journey between California and Florida through a special fare that allowed you to move about for several weeks without restrictions. When you ride the bus, you're treated to desert way-stations in tiny shacks under a brutal sun, to inner city slum-terminals where panhandlers lean into you, or gas stations lit by a single lamp in the icy mood of a mountain snowflurry.

This particular night, we had stopped in a small Texas store and post office outside San Angelo. It was hot and stifling, and we waited just long enough for two riders to depart and an elderly Black woman to climb aboard with a shopping bag filled with clothing and a lunchbox. She took the seat directly behind my own and after a while she was asleep.

The next stop seemed further out in dark spaces of prairie, at a gas station flooded by arc lights where the bus pulled up with a whoosh of brakes and the driver opened the door. "Ten minutes," he called out.

I was in my stocking feet, half asleep, and went out to find a restroom. My socks got wet. Only when I had reached the sidewalk that fronted the store did I notice that the surface swarmed with dark brown beetles. Not only was the walk a sea of pulsing bodies, the wall itself was stuccoed with living, hard-shelled varmints. Around the side of the building, an attendant used a push broom to carve a path between the beetles and the doors to the restrooms.

I decided to hold my water and tiptoed back to the bus. I found a clean pair of socks in my backpack and put them on. A short while later, we were heading down the dark highway when the woman behind me screamed. A stowaway had found a home in her hair.

Plague by Stealth
We had been driving all day, following days filled with drives, when we gave up on reaching Alabama and took a motel room in Coldwater, Mississippi. It was hot and muggy and crickets filled the air with their cadence. We chose the motel because it had a swimming pool. So said the sign out front.

After unpacking, we went into the cafe and ordered sandwiches. In this part of the world, maybe only in this part of Mississippi, they served barbecue pork on white bread with a scoop of cole slaw plopped directly on the meat.

I couldn't wait to get back to the room, change into my suit, and cool off in the pool. I should have noticed the smaller signs of trouble, but walked right past them. The pool area was fenced in, set up against a forest of kudzu vines that looked like green frosting on the trees. I tossed my towel to the chair and dove straight in.

The pool was thick with tiny green frogs. Hundreds of frogs. Thousands of frogs. Chock-to-jaw with frogs. I had jumped into a vat of frog-flavored pudding.

On my way back to the room and the shower, I paid closer attention to what I had seen all along: the hallways and narrow paths of the motel were filled with the little guys, scampering around in the dusk, doing their froggy things.

Persistence

"...after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence...." -- Marcel Proust

Neurobiologists say that we have more than 1,000 different sensors inside our nose, located at eye level, enabling us to identify more than 10,000 distinct odors. Since the cells in the nose are short-lived and frequently replaced, the researchers claim that olfactory codes must be mapped in the brain to enable us to associate the smells with phenomena. Then the brain attaches linguistic information so that we have words for them. The catalog can be extensive. Wine aficionados probably have a broader memory vocabulary than I have for crushed grapes. While the associations seem instantaneous, they have taken a lifetime to form, and we probably inherit genetic memory from ages ago when we had to sort out meat and berries for spoilage.

My favorite earliest memory is of honeysuckle hedges along the walkways of a motel in San Diego. I would set the date around 1963. Whenever I pass a row of honeysuckle today, I am instantly in front of the Mission Valley Inn, and then I wander the broad highway of associations with lobster, which we ate by the harborside, and an evening's walk in the crisp salt air. My first sweetheart wore a lily of the valley perfume and whenever I smell something in that broad palate of odors, I am transported instantly into her arms.

In the spring of 1979 I met Maki Yamada , a woman from Nagoya, Japan. She had arrived in California to study English -- and to learn how to drive a car. Driving school was prohibitively expensive in Japan. After several months we moved in together, taking a small cottage just a block from the beach in Santa Cruz. You could smell eucalyptus trees out the window and hear the morning waves. In those days, my attire of choice was a pair of overalls, a railroad engineer's cap, and bare feet. It was the beach, after all.

Maki adored the cap, which she would swipe from my head, hold to her nose, take a long sniff, and sigh.

"Ee-nyoi," she'd say.

It was as if the cap was a portal to her baby blanket, or some ancient connection to paradise. As often as she did it, I could never see it coming. She'd whip the cap off my head and bury her nose in it.

"Ee-nyoi."

I'd ask her what a smelly old hat had to do with anything and she would just sigh and lift it back to her nose. It had no particular odor I could discern. Perhaps it lay camouflaged in the blank spot of familiarity, just like the smells of our house that only visitors can sense.

Teaching Maki-san to drive was a challenge. We had to overcome linguistic barriers and the illogical machinations of clutch and stick. "Put the clutch in where!" she stammered as the VW lurched and died.

At the end of her stay in America, I took Maki-san to the San Francisco Airport, hoping I'd be invited to join her back in Nagoya when she settled. No such fortune. I was heartbroken and sent her tape recordings of the waves rushing against the sand at the beach. The cap had finally deteriorated and I put what was left of it in a mailbag and sent it, too.

She eventually married a German doctor and raised a family on the coast of Australia. In the photos, the children look hale and inquisitive.

Do you think that associations can morph over time? One of my fondest memories of my extended tour of Japan was the smell of rice fields when farmers burned the husks after harvest. It reminded me of the smell of wild dormitory parties at San Jose State in the early 70s.

Today, whenever I smell a burning campfire, it reminds me of the scent of smoldering paddies, and that, of course, makes me think instantly of Japan, and instantly of Maki Yamada... and then I see my hat as good as new.

Us He Devours

A few months ago I received an email from a former student who had been in my fiction writing class at the University of Illinois. It began, "You may not remember me, for I was an unremarkable writer." When kindness drops into your laptop after years have passed, it's a remarkable gift. I only taught for a few years and probably had no more than 1,2o0 students. Not many. And I left the profession feeling that I was not good enough, that I had not published much, and while I had been a good lecturer, I was something of a fraud. The email wiped the last notion clear, and I cried with gratitude.

At the beginning, up on the hill in Santa Cruz, I studied writing with James B. Hall. He preferred to be called JB. Born in Midland, Ohio, he served in the Africa campaign during WW2. A wry, inventive writer and brilliant scholar, Hall was one of the first to attend the legendary Iowa Writers Workshops in the late 40s, and spoke of his classmate Flannery O'Connor. He authored a half dozen novels, five books of short fiction, a book on craft, and several books of poetry before passing this year in his home in Portland.

He had started the writing programs in Oregon (where he mentored Ken Kesey), at Irvine, and Santa Cruz. He gave Ray Carver a faculty spot for a semester when Carver was struggling with alcohol and beginning to publish his tales of mean suburbia in The New Yorker. Hall liked me from the start, possibly because I was older than most students, returning to school for a second bachelor's in my 30s, or because I had a newspaperman's experience, which had served many fledgling authors. I was insecure among the youngsters, and more insecure trying to speak the rarefied language of literary studies. So, I hid out in JB's office, where he never minded when I showed up or how long I stayed.

Once, when a young freshman came to visit, he nodded for me to remain seated. The visitor told JB she wanted to study writing, that she loved writing. I could see the twinkle in his eye. He asked her about her favorite authors. She told him that she loved James Joyce most of all.

"Can you tell me the opening lines of Portrait of the Artist?" JB asked. She could not. He looked over at me.

I said, "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was..."

Hall smiled. Then waved his hand dismissively. Visit over.

He could be brutal. He uttered outrageously bizarre or unnecessary things. He called my Japanese lover "baby doll". We were riding in his Volvo wagon on a way to a reading once, an open bottle of wine on the seat, when he spun an illegal U-Turn. "Hall's Law," he said.

Once he was in your corner, he was there for keeps. I had never read literature with a discerning eye before and had two years to learn as much as the four-year students. Hall would look over my short stories, pen in hand, and announce: "I can make this bleed anywhere." Or, he might say, "It's good, except for the whole thing."

I found one of his novels in a college office and stole it. It was out of print. When I took it to him for signature, he asked where the hell I had found it. Stupidly I said I discovered it at a local garage sale. He had that look in his eye, but wrote in it: "For Gabby, who has drive, initiative, and that other thing going for him."

At the end, I was to sit for an oral exam with three professors who would grill me on the 20 books of prose, poetry, and drama on my list. The idea was that you'd answer most of the questions. As the hour ended, one of the professors asked me the origin of Faulkner's title for The Sound and the Fury, and I said, "Macbeth, Act Five, Scene Five." With that, it was done.

I was to wait out in the hall while they deliberated, but it wasn't long. When I came in, I saw tears in JB's eyes. He informed me that I had earned high honors.

In February of 1991, I was living in the woods in Washington State. I had been to rehab, was trudging through a rough patch of things, and from the blue came a letter from JB. He had moved to Oregon after retiring from Santa Cruz, for there was better healthcare in Portland to assist his ailing wife. I wrote back, explaining my departure from academe, my struggles, my hopes.

A week later an envelope arrived from JB with money inside.

We wrote occasionally over the ensuing years, but our letters eventually tailed off. My mistake. After receiving the email from my former student, I was searching for JB's address when I came upon his obituary.

I have found that kindness begets kindness--but I had to have my teachers. And I need frequent reminding, for I often default into selfishness. What I know for sure is that my unremarkable writing student grew to become a remarkable woman. And perhaps JB thought the same of me, the lost orphaned lamb redeemed.

Hence, this message out of the blue is for you, JB--even though it bleeds everywhere. I hope you get it.