CHAPTER III
GROWING UP STRAIGHT

There was a popular phrase in California, a few years ago (for that matter, when hasn't there been a soon-to-be-popular phrase circulating in that state?).  When you got up in the rooming, you checked carefully to see if you "had your head on straight".  You got your act together, before departing to move with the flow.  At least, some people did.  For some unknown reason, life never quite happened that way for me.  I was usually out of bed and running to work before I had time to think about meditating.  
I don't know why it happened this way, but I never seemed to become a permanent resident of the phenomenon that some authors now call the Age of Confusion, despite growing up near its epicenter.  Probably through no fault of my own, the hippie phenomenon was merely a landscape through which I passed.  Though I shed my quota of tears and shattered illusions between my 20th and 30th birthdays, I did not neatly conclude that my parents or the world had irrevocably "done to" me.  Nor did I seriously try to shed the body of beliefs or values I had learned as a child.  
Perhaps the process of my generation went awry as it swept through my neighborhood.  If there was anything radical in my early life, it was simply that I never become radicalized.  I have never participated in a student demonstration, a sit-in, or a love-in.  The closest I ever carne to being in a riot was ducking dinner rolls in a college cafeteria food fight.  The sum of my experience with the law before I entered the Air Force was two traffic tickets and writing a will.  I learned something about LSD and later about crack because I saw the results of such poisons in the lives of relatives and a few colleagues.  I don't smoke: anything.  I enjoy wine often enough to recognize a Rhine label.  But I rarely drink two glasses in an evening.  
I am political enough to vote in state and national elections, but apolitical enough to doubt that many folks really care to understand the "issues" in these popularity contests.  I don't particularly like preachers and I'm not particular about the denomination they're from.  Though church isn't among my interests, I've had enough spiritual experiences to appreciate the power of prayer.  I pay my bills.  I pay my taxes.  I'm appalled by the size of both outlays.  
In short, I grew up "straight." 
There seem to be shades of meaning in that term.  When I was growing up, a "straight" (using the word as a noun) was a person who wore white socks, loafers, short hair, and an aura of innocent ignorance that marked him or her as a hopeless victim of The Establishment.  More recently I've heard the term applied in a more admiring way.  A straight person (adjective) may now be considered "untwisted", uncluttered and sincere.  A person who thinks straight seems to be one who functions effectively in a sometimes complicated world.  
Maybe I was just lucky.  Somehow, I didn't get lost in the contradictions of California in the decade of the 1960s.  Neither, however, did I arrive at middle adulthood wrapped in gauze, unaware of the world around myself.  I bumped my nose at the end of a few blind alleys in life and fell down a few times.  But I eventually found a way of living and functioning that seems to work fairly well for me and for people who choose to be close to me.  I learned that I'm either a little too bright or a little too dumb to be one of the world's great manipulators.  I'm also too stubborn to become one of the world's manipulated victims.  Sometimes my life feels a little like a balancing act on the high wire.  The balance seems to work.  
I grew up around some rather strong personalities.  This is hardly to say that they were perfect people.  It is more to suggest that the people to whom I was closest were of the sort that it is almost impossible to ignore.  They were visible.  They were audible to the point of loudness.  They had an opinion or feeling about almost everything.  Though they had character flaws in some particulars, they were not retreaters or excusers.  They sweated and they groped.  There was a simple and unconscious strength in them that I have seen mirrored in each of my brothers and in others who have come into contact with our family.  To the extent that this strength may be said to have rubbed off on me, I count it as one of my best inheritances.  
Another influence from the early part of my life was to have a mixture of later -- and naturally, unpredictable -- effects on me and on people around me.  Though the family almost always had enough of the things that keep body and soul together, there was rarely more than "just enough".  For the extras in life, we worked extra.  For a vacation, we went into debt.  Though I did not notice it at the time, I unconsciously acquired from my early life, both a work ethic and an image of myself.  The ethic has served me well many times since.  The image has required revision as I have grown older, like many of the images to that we attach ourselves in childhood. 
Some of my earliest clear memories are of playing in a pile of sawdust and wood scraps that lay scattered at the base of a large table saw in my father's shop.  When the place wasn't filled with noise and flying wood chips, it was a cool and shaded playground that smelled the way I imagined a forest should.  The shop adjoined a large garage that Dad built in the early years of our stay in the roll-away house.  Lumber to build the shop had been salvaged from the demolition of a girls' school across town and from a scrap sale in the shipyards where Dad once worked.  The floor of the building was unpaved, ground by the passage of many automobile tires into a fine dark clay powder that provided excellent material for "atomic bomb" mushroom clouds created by the imagination of a youngster playing alone.  
Most of my time in the shop was spent alone.  Until I was eight or nine years old, there were few neighbor children near my own age.  The area abounded with numerous ranches, many with chickens and rabbits.  But these potential pets carne attached to owners of advanced years, who tended to view a child of my age as more an insurance liability than a helper.  I was unceremoniously shooed away whenever I climbed fences.
Some time after my seventh birthday, I discovered we were living in what was then regarded as a poor section of town.  This unwelcome insight came when we moved.  Mother had decided to start a small business, making artificial flower arrangements and teaching crafts.  To get the exposure she needed to a walk-in public, she rented a small shop near the center of a larger town.  We moved into an apartment behind the business, and I moved into a new school.  
The flower shop and the rental income from our distant house very soon became our only family support.  Dad made a serious mistake while working on the table saw.  A false motion very nearly cost him three fingers.  His livelihood hung in the balance over two years as skin grafts healed and muscles were stretched by regular therapy.  Medical bills were considerable, but he retained the fingers.  
I began third grade in unfamiliar surroundings.  I walked several blocks to a large, old building that housed one of the best elementary schools in the area.  The school had begun many years earlier as a facility for children of University faculty who lived nearby.  A certain level of academic tradition had been continued, even after the larger concerns and population of the growing town had surpassed those of the University. The building stood on a shaded avenue, most of whose homes were larger than the entire six-apartment building where I lived.  I was told that each of these palaces employed a person whose only job was to open the front door and drive the long, black cars that we saw parked under the trees.  
I discovered during the next three years that the knee patches regularly sewn onto my jeans were unusual in our new neighborhood.  A lot of other kids got new jeans.  I got longer legs, but rarely longer pants.  This became a source of embarrassment, as my legs grew longer quite rapidly.
I spent much of this period in a special kind of purgatory.  What I lacked in clothes and manners seemed to have been compensated for by higher than average intelligence.  Before I entered sixth grade, I was regularly reading books at high school or college level.  I became a school "brain", and for some of my teachers a behavior problem at about the same time.  The thrashing given me by one angry teacher over my sarcastic remarks and constant questions nearly cost him his job.  I developed a blind temper and an uncomprehending bewilderment concerning the teasing that my temper invited from my school mates.
 	Though I completed elementary school downtown, the family's apartment days were shorter-lived.  Mother's business prospered enough that she could move into a larger storefront in a different area of town.  Likewise, my half brother Daniel came to live with us for a few weeks.  The apartment quickly became too crowded for us.  We moved back into our house in the old neighborhood, as I entered the sixth grade.
I took with me, a lasting impression of the downtown area and a few scars.  Most of the latter were unintentionally inflicted by Daniel.  He had rejoined the family as a rangy 12 year old, fresh from an active and largely unregulated life on a farm in the central San Joaquin valley.  Understandably, our noise and the hazards of our play sometimes exceeded the level desired by our parents and required by the landlord.
On one occasion, Daniel tried to "blow up my fort" with a piece of angle iron -- and ended our make-believe by braining me with the iron, instead.  In another instance, I asked him to give me a lesson in bicycle riding.  He started me peddling shakily in the apartment driveway, on his decrepit three-speed lightweight.  We both forgot that the drive ended in a busy street.  I was fortunate to receive no more than a scraped elbow as I dodged cars and a swearing taxi driver.  What my parents had to say about this sink-or-swim lesson is not recorded.
Dodging automobiles proved to be good practice for the four miles I would soon be riding to school.  Commuting became a way of life.  Although we had returned to our house near the edge of San Francisco Bay, my parents were determined that I would continue to receive the better schooling available downtown.  To pay the double portion of school taxes required to support this privilege, my mother took in boarders.  Strangers lived in the room that Aaron had vacated when he entered the Navy.
I remember the boarders as a succession of small, somehow "brown" men, who smelled of tobacco smoke.  My first dress suit was cut down from a donation by one of the boarders.  The suit earned me the raised eyebrows of a surprised teacher who chaperoned our sixth-grade symphony outing.  The cloth reeked of moth balls, thinly masking the scent of "Borkum Riff".  Several cleanings failed to completely exorcise the odor. 
We lived the next few years in many ways suspended between two worlds: between the well-to-do, quiet neighborhood of the downtown area, and an environment of decidedly more limited means and occasional violence.  The roll-away house was surrounded by a semi -rural mixture of tract houses and deteriorating ranches on "the wrong side of the highway".  I rode my old bicycle with the balloon tires and the six tired coats of paint, to and from a school on the other side of a concrete no-man's-land.  Mother and Dad also commuted.  She cleaned the houses of a number of families who lived in the foothills overlooking town.  Later, she went to work in a clothing store close to the University.  Dad developed a steady following of customers for housing alterations, repairs, and custom cabinets.  Each evening, the family returned to the roll-away house through a neighborhood that gradually became increasingly hostile.  The transformation of our area happened so slowly that we almost failed to notice it. 
The area where we lived was gradually turning into what might justifiably have been called a ghetto.  The inexpensive houses that had sprouted like weeds after the Second World War attracted a new wave of immigrants in the 1950s, from the American south.  In contrast to the first invasion of the 1940s, the new arrivals were almost entirely black people (then called "negroes").  As I entered junior high school, southern blacks began to make both a visible and cultural impact on the neighborhood. 
A small shopping area was located a few blocks from home.  It was at first owned and run by a group of white merchants.  Repeated efforts by better-off blacks to buy into the Center failed.  Then a real estate company purchased a store on consignment to an out of state company.  When the company proved to be black-owned, there was a furor in the community.  The real estate broker was cordially informed that the next time he set foot in the district; he had better be prepared to leave it with both legs in Plaster of Paris. 
The sales contract was upheld in court.  Similar blind purchases were engineered in the stubbornly white residential neighborhoods near the shopping center.  Block-busting became a way of life for a few marginal characters who passed quickly through the community.  Property values temporarily dropped.  Black faces multiplied, as white owners began an exodus.  
These changes did not have an immediate impact on the twelve year old Bob Lawrence.  All I knew concretely was that the three-speed bike that my parents had saved all year to buy for me at Christmas was stolen a few months later from the bike rack at our community center swimming pool.  Though I don't remember anyone actually saying so, it seemed to be assumed that one of the unwelcome newcomers was probably the thief.  I rode three miles to a downtown pool on a used replacement during the remaining summer months.  
As I made these trips, I knew (without knowing that I knew) that there was a well defined boundary wall around my neighborhood.  Life outside this wall was quite different from life inside.  Outside, I would rarely see a black face.  Inside, I would go to a school where I did not know almost a third of the student body because they were black people.  In seventh grade, my classes were divided into "A-line" fast Learners, and "B-line" dummies (though nobody called them that).  The proportion of blacks in my A-line classes was low.  
I learned before entering high school that my community required of its residents, a kind of continual quiet watchfulness.  Walking home from a junior high school dance, I was approached by four young toughs.  Bored and looking for something to do, they harassed me.  I was picked up bodily and slammed against a wall, my pockets turned out and my thin suit jacket tom.  Finding not even small change, they dropped me in a heap and jeered as I fled, shaking.  I did not pass through the area again on foot after dark.  It did not matter that my attackers had been white.  They were members of a growing sub-stratum of idle youths who terrorized anyone in the community who was not obviously stronger or more violent than themselves.  
In the late 1950s, I saw the vague fear that hung over the community, explode.  When the Los Angeles district of Watts ignited in flames, there were smaller, less publicized fires in other areas.  My neighborhood, 450 miles north, was one of these areas.  During the week Watts burned, two stores within a block of my home were gutted by gasoline bombs.  For several months thereafter, I departed for school each day through a doorway framed by the exclamation point of a loaded pump-action riot gun leaning against the wall.  I could fire these weapons accurately before I turned 15.
I began high school in newly constructed buildings, as part of a small class group.  Within four years, the school population grew from 450 to over 1100, and the proportion of non-white students from about 20% to over half.  During this entire period, I cannot remember once inviting or being invited by any of my black school mates, to visit at home.  For me, blacks were an invisible people. With a few exceptions, it was whites who were seen, whites who represented the school in the community (excepting sports), and whites who planned and attended most of the school's social events.  
I did not think it strange at the time, but on a deep, unarticulated level, I was frequently uneasy in those surroundings.  Except with black people I knew from my classes, I was always prepared to learn that a dark face might turn out to be a young thug.  Even to this day, when I walk in the crowds that flood the center of any large American city, I find myself consciously on the alert, on the lookout for trouble.  This is a habit that many people might consider racist.  But it is a survival habit that dies hard.  
Apart from having to cope with racial tensions, I suppose that I developed socially in about the same manner as other young people during those years.  The process was haphazard.  I was not socially popular.  The bad temper that had marked me for teasing in grammar school had evolved into a kind of intellectual snobbishness in my teens.  I made it difficult for classmates to get past my large words, to find the very uncertain and un-confident youth who wielded the words like weapons.  
In small ways, however, I gained a measure of acceptance.  I tried out for track, which I quit after my sophomore year, having come in dead last by a hundred yards in a quarter mile race.  Classmates secretly cheered me on when our Junior English teacher threatened to eject me if I corrected his pronunciation even one more time.  I won small roles in two school plays, and was reluctantly elected an officer of my Senior class (the other candidate being a cheerleader better known for her cute smile than her knowledge of Robert's Rules of Order).  
I discovered girls in my 16th summer, an occurrence that then and since precipitated major changes in my life.  I graduated fifth in my class, having survived four years of education in high-water pants.  
Between the ages of 12 and 18, when I wasn't in a school class, the chances were pretty good that I could be found working.  Though I was physically clumsy, my father insisted that I learn to use a hammer and climb construction scaffolds.  I was his carpenter's helper for weekends and summers.  I learned to use the table saw that had mangled his fingers, reinforcing whatever caution his example had not prompted, by bloodying the tips of two of my own.  When there was no construction underway, I picked up spare change mowing lawns.  With two working parents, it became a necessity that I learn house cleaning. 
During high school, I also sat on the sidelines of a family civil war.  I did not really understand what Mom and Dad were fighting about.  Looking back on the period, it seems possible that much of the time even they were not sure.  All I knew was that there was a scary amount of shouting going on, and I was often in the middle of the noise.  To a few acquaintances, I imitated an ironic attitude about the battles.  I theorized that the primary reason my parents remained married was that neither had much prospect of finding a sparring partner elsewhere who could provide half the contest they had at home.  Of course, reality wasn't quite that simple. 
Mom and Dad probably fought over about the same things that worry and frustrate other adults: money, personal failings, and (possibly) sex.  Money in our household was a constant problem.  Both parents worked, but there was never really enough to go around.  This shortfall was aggravated by the personalities of both adults.  For Dad, the problem seemed to be one of compromise, or an unwillingness to do so.  After his experience in the shipyards, he found himself poorly equipped to resume the role of an employee working under supervisors.  There were times when Dad's independence worked real hardships on his family.  Likewise, he was burdened by the unfinished commitments of previous marriages.  His inability to support his former families prompted frequent agitation and not a little guilt. 
Mom's outlook was also an element in the tensions of the house.  In an effort to balance the family budget, she took responsible jobs.  But this work repeatedly frustrated her. In at least three different positions, she was promoted to supervisor because she worked well with people, only to trip upon her own stubborn mental blocks to lasting success.  She felt acutely restricted by the shortness of her early education.  It took her almost six years to learn to do long division of large numbers.  During the first three of those years Dad tried to teach her arithmetic, to their mutual distress.  When she tried to use skills on the job that she was studying during evenings at home, her nervous tension climbed by several orders of magnitude.  This produced many crying sessions at home, and a few at work.  I can remember the high-pitched, throttled overtones in her voice as she forced out the words, "But I can't" in heated arguments with my father.  
An additional subtle tension surfaced in the arguments between these two that I doubt was ever explicitly named: sex.  When they married, Mom was a five foot six inch beauty, high cheek-boned and rail slim.  Dad tried for months without success, to fatten her up on California avocados.  However, when she became pregnant for the last time, something in her chemistry must have changed.  She gained thirty-five pounds during the third year of their marriage, retained most of that weight after the birth of her child, and then gradually gained more.  By my fifteenth year, Mom weighed over 180 pounds.  No diet she tried ever worked.  Pills only made her nervous and teary-eyed.  Exercise beyond vigorous walking left her so exhausted that she could not function.  
Thus, over a period of years, Mom became a large, soft lump of a woman.  Though this is a natural human process for many people, it is nevertheless one that strains the central sexual relationship of many marriages.  It would be years before these two partners worked out an accommodation that allowed their considerable affection for each other to find non-sexual outlets.  In the mean time, there were a lot of storms. 
At least one of these storms nearly ended in divorce.  It built over a period of months, shortly after I left for college.  A relative of my mother's had moved into their area with his wife.  Shortly thereafter, he suddenly died, leaving the young woman with a small son to raise and a house in terrible disrepair.  Mom and Dad came to help.  They visited with Louise often.  After a time, however, Dad became the primary visitor.  He rebuilt Louise's garage.  He spent many evenings renewing a kitchen floor.  While this extra labor poured into a house several blocks away, Mom dealt with a home increasingly in need of the some repairs and increasingly neglected.  Frictions developed. 
Mom forced herself to join Dad in more of his evening visits.  Tension built up between the two women.  Finally one night, Mom voiced the opinion that Dad's time would be better spent attending to his own home.  Having had a few too many cocktails, Louise joined in the discussion.  It was obvious, she said, why Brad spent so much time with her.  He was just like every other man, always "sniffing around" for a little sex.  Brad was humiliated before the two women. He upended Louise over his knee and delivered a thorough spanking before storming home.  For months, Mom and Dad retreated into mutual silence.  They rebuilt their relationship only gradually. 
As conflicts sputtered between my elders, I (figuratively) ducked for cover, into my own life and hobbies.  I became interested in short wave radio.  I raised an “antenna farm” on the rooftops of our house and garage and spent long hours listening to voices across the world.  During the high school track season, I ran around the quarter mile oval until after six on most evenings.  Later, I studied alone in my room.  
During summers, I swam at a distant community center a few times each week -- when I was not picking up lumber scraps, hauling roofing materials up ladders, sweeping, painting, or otherwise trying to earn a few dollars working for Dad.  The dollars were very few.  Dad required that I deposit three-quarters of my earnings in a savings account.  I never knew what an allowance was.  If I recall accurately, the concept was never even discussed.  
To these financial restrictions was added a contradicting influence: girls.  Though I first began to have secret crushes in grade school, the issue became both figuratively and literally pressing, about the time I entered high school.  I experienced puberty and began to wonder what special hell a malevolent Creator had in mind for me.  I suppose most teen boys are sometimes afraid they will spend the remainder of their lives in a permanent state of unrequited rut.  At the time, however, I don't recall having much of a sense of humor about the situation.  
Neither did I have very much information about what I was experiencing.  In 1960, nobody in my neighborhood had even heard of sex education.  There was nobody to tell us in specific terms what an erection was, or how human chemistry sometimes predisposes us to socially unacceptable daydreams.  Of course, the subject was not discussed at home.  Considering the history of my parents, I can in later years understand their silence.  But at the time, I spent a lot of my days and nights wondering and being scared.  I was most afraid of being caught at "you-know-what", that was at the time considered a shameful sin.  What a relief it was years later, to learn that almost everyone was as perverted as me.  
As I awoke to girls, I learned to scramble, in order to make ends meet socially.  Dating was costly.  Earning less than two dollars per hour and banking three-fourths of that, the hours mounted up considerably before I was sufficiently flush to afford a show and gas -- much less, the greater luxury of a dinner out.  I suspect that if the truth were told, a sizable number of teen-agers in the 1960's spent a lot of their time necking because it was the only kind of fun they could afford.  
Most of the girls I dated were not students of my high school.  Possibly because I was still known as a class "brain", it was not until my senior year that I was able to attract a female in my own neighborhood.  Fortune, however, supplied dating interests from other directions.  I met a few girls during the summer work I did for my father.  I was introduced to other young ladies through the good offices of a youth group associated with my parents' downtown church.  I do not recall that it was in any way deliberate, but I doubt that any of the girls I dated in my teens, ever visited my home.  I was unconsciously aware that the neighborhood was a little too rough to bear their inspection at first hand.  This is, of course, hindsight.  
My church youth group had been established by the leaders of the denomination in the early 1900s, at a time when such activities were generally thought to contribute to the moral upbringing of the young.  By the time these groups were abolished during my college years, it is to be presumed that the church elders had learned better.  Through we gave lip service to the agendas carefully prepared by our chaperons, the most important aspects of our group meetings were never committed to paper.  
We exchanged shy glances, flirted, stumbled through sweaty-handed dances to the recordings of our teen idols, and furtively exchanged telephone numbers. Looking back on these carefully managed courting rituals, I am reminded of the cautious sniffing of a pack of high strung bloodhounds.  During the up-welling of our ever-so-carefully sublimated adolescent chemistry, the church did battle for our immortal souls and lost, hands-down.  
It was through the youth group that I got my first real job away from home.  I lived ten weeks at a church summer camp, serving as a very junior kind of junior counselor, called a "Camper in Leadership Training" (pronounced "Kilt", and sometimes translated "unpaid serf").  For bed and board plus one day off per week, five Kilts assumed an uncertain status between campers and counselors, to perform a portion of the simple grub work of the camp.  
I arrived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a few weeks before my 16th birthday, to be put to work digging a new drainage line for the camp cesspool.  Unfortunately, the new line crossed and broke open the old.  In ninety degree heat, the smell was more than a little over-powering.  
The campers arrived two weeks after the staff.  Kilts were assigned to guard the lesser demons in the customer crowd, when senior staff was otherwise occupied.  The junior staff washed dishes, taught swimming, brought up the trailing end of cross country hikes, and generally filled in wherever needed.  When not otherwise occupied, male Kilts flirted with female Kilts and with an occasional junior counselor.  Campers were considered off-limits territory in the crushes and summer romances that sprouted at our home away from home.
Healthy outdoor activity proved insufficient to occupy some of our more active staff.  The male senior counselors became, in the eyes of the junior peons, hated wage earners who monopolized every girl in the camp.  We would do anything not permanently fatal, to bring low the iron-hearted monarchs who regularly made our lives miserable. 
One summer evening, the Kilts staged a spectacularly successful raid on the cabins of our seniors.  This involved drenching several of the overlords in a carefully prepared mixture of ice-cold water, honey, and bacon fat.  Sometime during the outing, a bag of beetles was also deposited in the bed of our head female counselor, who was terrified of anything that walked on more than four legs.  She was henceforth known as "Bug Juice", whenever her back was turned. 
Our foray unfortunately produced such an unholy commotion that the entire camp was awakened at four in the morning.  An unofficial Captains' Mast was held at dawn -- no Kilts need attend.  Several of us were proposed for a hasty bus departure on the following weekend.  It was only by the intervention of a loyal sympathizer on the senior counselor staff, that we were spared this humiliation. Our savior was a somewhat eccentric female person named Irene. 
Irene was at the time a college freshman, majoring in archaeology with a minor in men.  Somewhat in contrast to the more obnoxiously religious on the staff, she had a practical attitude and a sense of humor.  She could appreciate our antics.  She had been sorely tempted on her own behalf, to puncture the inflated dignity of some of her counselor colleagues. 
There had been, she pointed out, a good amount of hazing by the seniors. The Ki1ts were not exact unprovoked. She also politely alluded to the biological researches of one of the more outspoken bible-thumpers who attended the meeting.  He wasn't exactly the best example for our junior staff, now was he? Having stood off the Indians at the pass, Irene wisely exited the meeting before they could regroup.  
In the days that followed, things at camp settled down.  Apologies were exchanged and an uneasy peace prevailed.  It was rumored that meeting notes had been taken by one of the non-attendees whose sins had been discussed.  Since the staff room was situated in a building with several uncontrolled attic windows, there was a certain credibility in the rumor.  Whether out of belated common sense or a sense of self preservation, the camp director relented and the Kilts were permitted to stay on.  
A bit later in the summer, Irene intervened for me once more, as a practical joke went awry.  As Irene watched, I quietly crept my way through the bushes, to the wall of the girls' dormitory.  I had intended to startle a certain pretty sixteen year old counselor who lay tumbled in her bunk bed, reading.  However, as my head rose over the edge of the window sill, I found myself confronted by a two-thirds bare-naked hellcat who was not at all inclined to listen to my stuttered explanation of a bad joke.  Irene was sorely tried in the stormy session she had with the Director in my behalf.  
Irene and I became good friends.  What drew us to each other probably had a lot to do with family: family each of us did not have.  She was an only child.  Since my half brothers had departed home, I shared the same status.  We decided that she needed a little brother, and I a big sister.  We were close enough in age to have experiences in common -- 19 versus 16 -- but far enough apart in age to discourage any romantic fantasies I might have had.  
During the weeks of our camp summer, Irene and I did a lot of walking and talking in our spare time.  Irene loved rocks.  I liked walking.  I usually ended up walking with her collected rocks in my rucksack.  We climbed a dry waterfall that wiser nature freaks would have left alone.  We exchanged back rubs frequently -- carefully in public, since I was in enough trouble as it was.  The rubs were partial compensation for the eleven bloody noses that I inflicted on Irene due to her unnerving habit of creeping up from behind to playfully poke my ticklish ribs.  
We talked about boys and girls a lot.  She had been seeing a sailor for a year, over whom she alternately felt blind jealousy and love-sick longing.  I had met a generously endowed young lady in the youth group, who wrote letters from home that stood my hair on end.  As Irene explained, my girlfriend probably didn't intend for me to get any specific message, when she wrote that a gypsy woman had read her palm and suggested she would marry young.  Irene helped me to weather another minor crisis, when my parents drove up for a weekend on a lake near the camp, and without prior announcement brought the young lady with them.  The two days that she and I spent with my parents was full of subtle innuendoes -- most of which I am sure passed directly over my naive head.  Had I been a little less insensitive or the girl a little more forward, my guess is that I would have been initiated into the mysteries of sex during our family outing.  What actually occurred was a series of frustrating near misses and a lot of bundling through sleeping bags.  Irene had the good sense not to laugh.
At the end of the camping season, the staff departed.  Irene and I returned to the San Francisco Bay area and managed to stay in touch.  Now and then, she drove over to my neighborhood during a school vacation and picked me up.  We went for weekend walks in the California coastal mountains, bowled, or simply sat down and talked.  I met her family, and eventually they met mine.  
During this time, there emerged an odd convention in family names that was to confuse uninvolved bystanders for years thereafter.  To Irene (despite her parents' initial annoyance), I became simply "Little Brother".  Irene's mother was the first to become accustomed to this convention, since Irene's uncle had always been called ''Uncle Brother" when he came to visit.  Grudgingly, Irene's father allowed the designation to stick.  However, when her grandmother came to visit, there was a scramble to explain why it was that Irene, her mother, and her father each called me "Little Brother".  The explanations grew more complex in later years, after Irene married and bore two sons.  
Eventually, I met the sailor over whom Irene had spent so much time agonizing.  Ron was a tall, slim, blond fellow with an engaging smile.  He seemed to wonder why he was being subjected to Irene's Little Brother and a shopping trip to San Francisco, when what he actually had in mind was to get quickly to the serious and more private business of making mad, passionate Whoopee.  However, the three of us rambled for an afternoon about Union Square, accumulating packages.  On a bus through Chinatown, Irene sat between the sailor in his brown suit, and the skinny seventeen year old who was desperately trying to look twenty.  Two tittering Chinese school girls inquired of Irene whether both of these specimens were "taken, or do you rent them out?" 
Irene broke up with Ron after another year.  She was a full time student and he was a full time skirt chaser. Despite considerable effort, their schedules didn't match up.  When he arrived with the fleet at San Francisco or San Diego, he faced several hours of driving to reach the college where she lived.  Between classes, she spent too many hours writing pained love letters, seeking reassurance that she was his true love.  Ron cost Irene some very bad periods in her young life. 
The dynamics of Irene's love life added to a continuing family problem. Her father was an alcoholic.  He had run a mid-sized travel agency for several years, between his binges.  His charm had attracted a good repeat clientele, but his wife was the main force that kept the business running when he drank. Increasingly, Irene's mother was forced to take over the agency.  Life at home was stormy, sometimes to the point of physical violence.  Arguments over the older man's drinking were ear-splitting. 
The conflict affected anyone whom Irene brought home to introduce.  Her father uniformly disapproved of all her male friends, though he seemed to feel that "Little Brother" wasn't much of a threat.  Thus he did not waste time telling me to keep my hands off his little girl.  I was one of the few to whom he would speak with civility, when he was sober.  With such a background, it was perhaps no surprise that Irene took any opportunity to be away from home during her school vacations. 
During her last two years of college, Irene changed academic majors.  Old bones were interesting enough, but no way to earn a living.  Old rocks became her fascination (her minor subject remaining, men).  I lugged increasingly full packs of rocks through much of the Santa Cruz Mountains, during our outings of these years.  As we walked, she talked about the new people she was meeting, and the pressures she was encountering.  
Geology was then -- and largely remains -- a man's business: headed and run by very conservative, self-protective people.  Any woman with the temerity to attempt field work in geology during the 1960s quickly learned that the majority of male geologists were unrepentant in the belief that females hadn't the physical strength or intelligence to practice in the field.  Simply to survive, Irene had to out-perform many of her male colleagues.  For one who considered herself no academic genius (an observation generally confirmed by her grades) the college upper division curriculum was a challenge.  Learning to exceed the abilities of men to whom she had always looked for confirmation and approval, was an even harder task.  
Perhaps ironically, Irene later found herself in a position to assess and occasionally to judge the professional performance of younger male colleagues in the field of geology.  In her early 50's, she was appointed to serve on a board of licensure for geological engineers -- an environment in which the native conservatism of her field was compounded by political as well as ethical visibility for both Board members and appellants.  
Reviewing the 35 years of my friendship with Irene, I cannot say that we have always been the closest of companions.  There has usually been a lot of geography between us.  However, we have found that whenever we do come together, it is as if we are simply resuming a conversation momentarily interrupted.  Somehow, we are "for" each other.  I appreciate the many times she has heard me out when I have needed to sort through my head.  She appreciates similar times when I have stepped into the disorder of her suburban house to accomplish some repair or construction project of benefit to her family.  
There is an unspoken camaraderie between us that supports a continuing fabric of shared interest and support.  There is a caring that goes beyond circumstance, to connect us at some more fundamental level.  I think that without explicitly planning it this way, Irene and I have taught each other something essential about the nature of "family".  
If Irene and I taught each other unintentionally, there were others in my life during my teen years who were more deliberately my teachers.  I recall very little of what they had to say, at least as their words pertained to my classes.  I remember more about the sort of people they were.  
Mr. DeMaris was my high school Freshman English teacher.  A tall, graying man of exacting habits, he pushed a few of us to the edge of rebellion with spelling exercises and corrections of our commas and semicolons (with the possible result that I continue to over-use both characters in my writing to this day).  My freshman year was a period I was glad to put behind me.  It was two years later that I came to appreciate DeMaris' other talents.  
In my junior year, I had DeMaris as drama coach.  In this new role, he initiated a group of budding thespians into the mysteries of memorizing dialog, constructing stage sets and presenting a production of "Arsenic and Old Lace". After school hours, this sometimes dour man bloomed. His tough exterior housed a delightful sense of humor and a comic timing that kept his drama students in hysterics.  In drama, he truly lived as an instructor.  It was drama that motivated him to remain in teaching, despite the fact that he also drove a taxi cab during nights and weekends to support his family.  
I have since wondered if DeMaris may not have entered high school teaching only after having learned that he was not quite talented enough or sufficiently well-connected to write for Broadway, or to portray a Hamlet at Stratford-on-Avon.  Whatever his limitations, to his students he was a shining light.  He genuinely seemed to love kids and teaching.  
Mrs. Stevenson, on the other hand, probably didn't greatly like kids, though she liked teaching and seemed good at it.  Her own three children were a cross that I would hesitate to load onto the shoulders of a saint.  I have heard in later years that this is a condition not unusual in the families of teachers.  I first met the Lady S -- as she was known behind her back to both students and colleagues -- during my senior year.  She was advisor to a student association of which I was vice president.  When our officers met after school, she kept tabs on us.  If the truth were told, she was probably responsible for about 90% of the activities we believed we thought up.  She was a pusher and a doer.  
For a small group of students, she was also a counselor in a more personal way.  Senior class activities often started with meetings of a group who planned, printed advertisements, put up crepe paper (remember when such stuff was used to decorate every school dance?), and generally did the class legwork.  From time to time, such meetings were held in Mrs. Stevenson's house.  During my senior year, I became a frequent visitor in that rambling mansion. 
 Lady S inhabited a house owned by her mother, situated on one of the quiet avenues of the University section of town.  The elder woman occupied an upstairs bedroom, across the hall from Mrs. Stevenson's.  Also strewn about the house were the rooms of a fifteen year old boy-crazy eldest daughter, a shiftless thirteen year old maniac son, and a round-eyed nine year old nonentity named Marty, who would later become a hairdresser in a bad neighborhood of Chicago.  The only regularly present senior male in this menagerie was a Boston Bull Terrier named "Ike".  Lady S had divorced her husband as soon as her youngest daughter grew old enough to understand their heated arguments. 
At the time, I was not particularly aware of the twisted strands of the Stevenson family history.  I simply found that the clan was friendly at a time when my parents' house was a frequent battleground.  I ate several suppers at the ornate pecan dining room table that we had to clear of stacks of the Lady's soon-to-be-corrected school papers.  I helped decorate a Christmas tree, and was surprised to find a package beneath it in my name.  I put to use the things my Dad had taught me about painting and minor carpentry, in small projects around the property.  I picked out awkward tunes on an old upright piano in the basement.  Once or twice, I nearly got caught necking with the Lady's eldest daughter in their living room.  Such a denouement would have delighted the daughter, who thought Lady S to be unduly protective of her virginity and restrictive of her social life.  
During that year, I learned something about the way well-to-do people lived.  I was exposed to a few manners.  Lady S was insistent that I knock on any closed door before going through it, as a matter of polite reflex rather than embarrassment over what I might find.  The purposes of multiple glasses and forks in a dinner setting were explained. I also learned in passing, that the Stevenson’s were not a happy family. The household subsisted on the good graces of Mother.  Mr. Stevenson had been a promising young man who proved over time to be something of a neer-do-well. Then his grandiose business schemes came to be a danger to the finances of the family, and the funds he had obtained through Lady S were abruptly cut off. When her husband went bankrupt, Lady S was thrown back onto the resources of her University education -- teaching skills she had acquired because they were the mark of a civilized woman, not because she had expected to earn a living by them. When the Lady went back to work and her husband stayed at home in the large house loaned to them rent-free by Mother, the days of the Stevenson marriage were numbered. 
By the time I met the family, the breakup was already several years old. Mr. S occasionally came by the house for a half hour visit with the children, but there was a lot of conflict whenever this occurred. The kids did not particularly like him.  For her part, there was no new gentleman in the Lady's life.  In the years immediately following the divorce, she had been too busy struggling to make ends meet and earn her way out of the patronage of her mother. Later, she simply made work a way of life.  I suspect that at heart, she did not like men, other than as professional colleagues.  She communicated this dislike by omission and indifference, but communicated it none the less effectively. 
Lady S and her family added a thin coat of polish to my otherwise unsophisticated exterior.  She was also one of three teachers who wrote letters of recommendation for my college applications.  She helped me obtain one of the scholarships that made my first year at college possible.  For several years after high school graduation, I periodically dropped in at the Stevenson house. The inevitable nostalgia of my departure from home may have been a part of the bond.  Eventually, however, we drifted apart as my interests and priorities changed. 
As my last year of high school galloped past, plans were made for further education.  My parents seemed always to assume that I would go on to college. But as the reality approached, we learned how much it was going to cost.  I applied at several schools and was accepted.  Cal Tech politely suggested that perhaps I did not have the demonstrated record of interest in engineering subjects that they felt entering students needed.  The University of California at Berkeley was much closer, but when we read the expense figures, I might as well have tried to walk to the moon. 
Finally, without really knowing what I was getting myself into, we picked a smaller state college where a friend of Irene's had attended two years before.  I won a four-year scholarship that paid the small tuition, and two other cash awards helped cover expenses for the first year.  Mom changed jobs to increase her wages.  Dad started borrowing on his life insurance and working Sunday afternoons. 
It may have been accidental that I started and finished college in a single continuous academic major.  Two of my step brothers were in technical fields. The idea surfaced vaguely in my early teens that I should become an electrical engineer, and was never seriously challenged thereafter.  When I took a high school course in radio, I did not perform outstandingly, though I found the subject interesting.  The only guidance I got from a badly overworked high school career counselor was a list of engineering schools and a few college catalogs. My parents were willing for me to enter any program I wanted to attempt, so long as they could find a way to afford it.  It was left to me to figure out what "calculus" and "thermodynamics" were, and to decide whether I wished to study such strange subjects. 
I once defended my choice of engineering as the outcome of having observed that none of the alternatives seemed difficult enough to present a real challenge.  This explanation was self serving.  Though I wrote and spoke with reasonable ease, in mathematics I stuttered.  Had I entered a serious program in a hard science such as physics or chemistry, it is likely I would have failed miserably.  On the other hand, my observation of Mr.  DeMaris' financial struggles after ten years of teaching discouraged any interest I might have had in the liberal arts.  At the time, seven years of school in medicine or law would have been out of the question.  Business administration simply did not occur to me, possibly because nobody in the immediate family had much idea what a corporation was, or what people working in them did.  Left with an apparent choice between engineering and agriculture, I decided that my hay fever was reason enough to avoid the latter.  Thus, I would learn about electrons. 
The summer between high school and college passed slowly.  When no regular summer job was to be had, I picked up odd jobs wherever I could.  I painted rooms in a neighbor's house until he could no longer afford my wages.  I mowed lawns, sneezing violently.  Confirmation of college dormitory housing arrived at just about the time we had accumulated enough to pay for my first quarter at school. Information packets arrived, and I learned a little more about the college routine.  Finally, I hitched a ride to school with a prospective roommate, hauling two footlockers packed with nearly all of my belongings.  I was ready to step into the world of academia, or so I believed. 
I arrived in front door of my college dormitory in the midst of a herd of similarly downy-cheeked 18-year-olds, to learn that I was to be quartered in what amounted to plush luxury.  Two of us occupied a 12 by 15 foot room with two beds, two desks, two closets, and two book shelves -- the latter securely bolted to the cinder block walls.  About 350 young men lived in my building.  Students in some other parts of the campus were crowded three to a room, in smaller spaces. 
In our case, the crowding was of a different type.  My "roomie" turned out to be a music freak.  From our first day, the room was filled with flashing colored lights and the sounds of bongo drums, Herb Alpert, and Tchaikovsky at ear-shattering levels.  We tolerated one another for about two months before he found a similarly minded physics major to double up with, and I inherited a quiet Chinese from Hong Kong whom nobody else seemed to want.  Wong and I got on famously: he rarely spoke.  I still have, however, a beautifully carved ivory letter opener that he gave me. 
My initial impressions of college were formed in a gigantic food processor operation called "registration".  Going through this process only three days after arriving on campus was a shock.  Imagine if you will, a gymnasium of sufficient size to house two side-by-side college basketball courts and a full set of bleachers.  The floor is ringed with three rows of tables, behind that are chalkboards covered by columns of letters and numbers.  Behind the tables stands a tired crew of sophomores and juniors, shuffling back and forth to change or cross out the numbers on the boards.  The floor is covered by half an inch of IBM card punch fragments and torn-up class schedules.  The noise level resembles Niagara Falls in March. 
Outside of the building are several lines of aspiring students, entering the bull pen by appointment only, every half hour.  Each entrant has a floor map indicating where his or her courses may be found.  The objective of this process is to thread the maze with a filled out and approved curriculum planning card that has cost somebody several hundred dollars to pry away from the State Regents. As the afternoon grows later, you can feel the anxiety increase on the floor.  You learn that the English 102 course that you had to have in order to qualify for Speech 103 required next quarter and the business course in your major the quarter after that is (guess what) full.  That, my friends, is anguish -- thus, the torn-up schedules.  After a long day, the gymnasium begins to assume the character of the Chicago Commodity Exchange in the middle of a market panic, or perhaps the Chicago Stockyards during a cattle roundup.
 	The blood runs figuratively ankle deep at the cashiers' desk. Like almost everybody else, I got through my first registration with something resembling an intact study schedule: seventeen course hours of mathematics, physics, laboratory courses, and introductory engineering.  I then joined the ranks of new freshmen puzzling over just what these credits were actually supposed to accomplish.  The college catalog told us to expect one hour in class every week, for each credit taken. Two to three hours of work would be accomplished outside class.  If we had actually worked that diligently, most of us would have put in fifty to sixty hours every week.  Now that I think about it, a lot of us did spend that much time with our books.  In my case, a series of odd jobs and tutoring took up at least ten further hours.  It was no problem to keep busy.  
It says something about those times that the dormitory room from which I daily commuted, was in a building where only one area was open to females and that only between certain hours of the day.  There were girls' dormitories up the hill from mine.  Freshmen girls in their first academic quarter kept a ten P.M. curfew (midnight on weekends).  More experienced females were permitted outside the walls an hour later.  Though some of the girls chafed at this restriction, it was accepted for the most part gracefully.  
In 1965, it did not occur to us to ask whether sex-segregated dormitories were discriminatory, or whether co-educational dormitories might be a better social environment for young people.  At the time, students didn't get a vote on the rules.  It was generally presumed by our elders that unless a careful watch was kept on our evening arrangements, the result would be a wave of pregnant teen-agers or worse disasters.  When youthful heroes of the later 1960’s and 1970’s later challenged this assumption, I do not recall that statistics were carefully kept on the outcomes.  
In the meantime, if you wanted to party after midnight, you had to convince Mom and Dad to spring for an off campus apartment.  With two or three roommates packed into a three bedroom apartment and a watchful landlord who objected to loud music after ten P.M., much of the freedom in these supposed hotbeds of sin was probably illusory.  I didn't positively confirm until my senior year that the wardens occasionally erred, and a little good, clean fun was actually had by all.  Even in this fun, I was a visitor.  I lived four years in 12 by 15 foot eagles' roosts, overlooking the campus from Dormitory Hill.  
As I began my freshman year, though I may not have realized it, I was about as visible as a highway flare.  Most freshmen are.  There is an aura of innocent, watch-everything newness around the first year student.  This aura doesn't wear off until he or she is first clobbered by being ill-prepared for an examination, or until near the end of the first academic term, whichever comes first.  There is an inevitable period during which new clothes are worn in, faded, and (especially for some female students) shrunk to fit.  Thereafter, you can't tell the players without a program.
Social life in the first college year can be disorienting.  You have entered the All American Success School as the cream of a crop of high school over-achievers, only to find yourself back at square one.  Freshman girls rapidly disappear from your coffee groups, as the wiles of older classmen are worked on the innocents.  Freshmen boys -- particularly those without cars – which in my dormitory would have been 80% of us -- watch a lot of television in their off hours.  In a college largely populated by engineers and agriculture students, this effect is aggravated by a general under-abundance of girls in the student body.  Most of us freshman males were pretty hard-up characters.  
During the years I studied for an engineering degree, I can honestly say that the most important parts of the experience were not courses from the college catalog.  Like all students, I was merely exposed to an education.  It was left to me to learn how to learn; to internalize the process as well as the content of the schooling.  I don't discount the technical training that occurred in my courses.  But I suspect that social skills learned by living away from hare in the small society of college life were at least as important in my personal development as English 210 and Electric Machines Lab.  It is for this reason that I would not recommend a military academy education for most students considering higher education.  Growing up can be delayed by the excessive structure imposed by a military education.
Living with roommates was one of the experiences that knocked a few of the rough edges off the fledgling Bob Lawrence.  I admit that I had a lot of rough edges.  As a consequence, I went through three roommates in my first year of school.  After a series of embarrassing personal encounters, a group of fellow dormitory inmates took me aside for a friendly talk: they let it be known that if I didn't shape up and start being a more enjoyable human being, they would beat the royal stuffing out of me.  This pointed advice was reinforced by a series of rough pranks.  
On one occasion, my roommate informed me that a small surprise had been left waiting for me to find.  After I spent hours looking for impending disaster, I opened the door of my clothes closet, to encounter the ripe odor of my own unwashed laundry and gym shorts.  Quick to take offense, I complained loudly to my watching neighbors that this was too much.  A squirt-gunning at two in the morning, I could take.  Short-sheeting, I could take.  But for half of the hallway to march into my room and surreptitiously fact into my clothes, was outright destructive.  That odor clung!  
After a pregnant pause, the assembled pranksters roared.  What I had found had been of my own making and was easily repaired by more frequent use of laundry soap.  The greater lesson which sank in was that these people had known me well enough to realize that if they didn't make real trouble for me, I was quite capable of manufacturing it on my own.  The demonstration was not wasted.  My current roommate, to my surprise, stuck with me for the remainder of the year.  As we departed for the summer vacation, he confessed that after he had gotten past my barrier of bullshit, he had actually gotten to like me.  
Despite a shortage of girls and my lack of transportation, I was able to date during my first year of college.  I crossed paths with a pleasant freshman girl, before the upper classmen staked out their claims in the first academic quarter.  This young lady attracted no end of attention to the two of us by driving into my dormitory parking lot to pick me up in her (borrowed) 1957 Ford Thunderbird coupe.  This act of charity temporarily made my reputation with my fellows.  The flirtation, however, lasted only as long as the transmission of the T-Bird.  When we lost second gear on a back road, my love life dropped decisively into low.  
The remainder of that year was socially a relatively lean time, with one important exception.  The only other bright spot on my social horizon was a young woman introduced by Irene, when three of us drove up the California coast for Christmas vacation.  Stacey, it turned out, lived only a few miles from Irene.  After a five-hour cuddle in the car on the way home, I was thoroughly smitten with her.  We exchanged telephone numbers and dated twice more during vacation.  On our return to school, the relationship begun by biochemistry was continued and rationalized by long letters. 
A phone call every two or three weeks became the highlight of my college routine.  Stacey's picture on my desk kept alive a long distance romance.  It was probably for the best that we were separated by 100 miles, given that I was then struggling with college physics and calculus and had neither time nor money for frequent womanizing.
It was not obvious at the time that distance was a good thing.  I was far gone in adolescent love sickness.  I wrote Stacey long love poems.  I threw a kiss to her picture each morning, as I turned off the lamp on my study desk.  For several months, I planned life around the occasional weekends we could spend together.  I know now that she was genuinely fond of me.  I know also, however, that in the sense that was most important, she did not love me.  I was one of a few young men whom she saw when her number-one man was unavailable. Learning this distinction cost some hurt feelings later in my freshman year. 
After weeks of looking forward to seeing Stacey, I made a weekend bus trip to her campus.  We spent a pleasant afternoon together.  By the end of the day, she could see that I had been making assumptions that needed correction.  As gently as she could, she broke the news that though she cared for me, I should understand that there was another very special man in her life, to whom she owed a greater loyalty.  He was her lover/and she hoped one day to marry him.
	At the distance from which I had been romancing Stacey, it had been easy to ignore the small signs of her primary allegiance and to mistake her fondness for a deeper affection.  It had been possible not to see that Stacey needed a first-hand reassurance of love on a day to day basis.  She was not the sort of person who could live alone for very long.  This early tendency toward dependence was later to have a high cost to her.  
	That weekend, I left Stacey somewhat earlier than planned, caught a bus and returned to my dormitory.  I sat down, cried a little, and mentally licked my wounds.  The next few days were a blue period, but school was a fortunate balm: I was soon too busy studying for mid-term examinations to spend time feeling sorry for myself.  Though Stacey and I continued to write, the urgency of our letters was less pronounced.  We remained in contact, but there was a greater emotional distance between us.  
	In later years, Stacey and I very briefly became lovers.  I would shed more than one tear over the lady.  At the end of her third year of college, she had still not chosen a subject in which to complete a degree.  Her lover broke off with her for the attentions of another girl.  She dropped out of school and took a job as an airline flight attendant.  
	For a time, traveling satisfied a need for her.  There were at various times, a number of men in her life, and the far places she visited were a stimulation she had long sought.  But there was a ruinous summer.  She drifted into a casual affair with a man whom she quickly found she did not particularly like, much less love.  He was simply available at a time when there was no one else intimately in her life.  She became pregnant.  
	I was one of the two or three people to whom she sent a telegram from Japan, three months later.  She had made a trip there, and then been forced to call on her father's help to obtain the local references she needed for an abortion.  It was a very bad time for her and for people who cared about her. 
	A little more than a year later, Stacey married a restless young man whom she met at a party thrown by stewardess roommates.  The young couple seemed to drift without purpose through most of the two years they remained married. Stacey’s parents wondered plaintively what she saw in him.  A child was born, but still the couple could not settle down.  They divorced when Stacey learned that her husband had begun to supplement his low wages by dealing in cocaine and other drugs. 
	Much later in Stacey's life, I would meet her again.  Remarried, quietly settled into a suburban life, raising two children and helping a husband through night school, she had found a measure of stability and substance.  She had also, however, added about forty pounds to her five-foot, two-inch frame.  The little-girl impishness, to which I had been so drawn, was muted.  It had given way to a kind of determined disorganization fostered by trying to manage too many activities and demands.  I learned then that although I still cared about this once-dear person, she and I had become distant in ways that could no longer be bridged.  It has been several years since we last talked. 
	I experienced the tragedies in Stacey's life as a caring bystander.  There was very little I could do to help, and I had my own business to transact.  For three years, this business was largely a matter of waiting while I worked at my studies.  It did not seem at the time that I was waiting -- only working.  My days were full of books, lectures, laboratories, and examinations.  Odd jobs added enough money to pay expenses from quarter to quarter.  During the school year, I graded papers for my professors, answered a dormitory switchboard, swept floors and briefly lectured a class as a teaching assistant.  Summers commonly found me outdoors.  I spent one summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains as a roust-about and camp carpenter.  Another season found me in stained jeans, lugging an air-hammer and pickax around a University campus.  Money earned during three months as an engineering aide paid dormitory fees during one term of my senior year.  
	Social life, such as it was, had to fit in between other more necessary activities.  This was not, of course, my sense of priorities at the time.  I dated any lass I could find who was willing to overlook my limited means.  It was not until my senior year that Dad stumbled across a $50 dollar station wagon that provided the mobility I had long pined for.  That poor car did without an oil change for the next twelve months, before Dad inherited it as his work car.  In the meantime, it was ironically named "the Honey Wagon".  
	Before I brought the Honey Wagon to school, I had to hustle in order to have girls in my life at all.  At times, the fates were kind.  In my sophomore year, social life was underwritten by the occasional loan of an old Rambler sedan, the owner of which was an acquaintance in my college religious youth association.  Linda was always very charitable about her car, despite having heard from friends that it had been seen in some rather out-of-the-way places, with no silhouettes visible through the rear window.  The Rambler had highly adjustable seats.  
	During much of my second year at college, I dated a lovely oriental girl.  I met Dianne on the college tennis courts and played (badly) a set with her.  It was months before I figured out that she had probably come to the courts with precisely the thought that she might meet one of the college males who sometimes played there.  Dianne was in her senior year at the local high school.  
	I fear that in my heavy-handed way, I badly mistreated Dianne.  Over a period of several months' dating, our times together gravitated toward a lot of late night petting.  It became apparent, however, that as smooth to my touch she might be, we probably weren't going to "go all the way" (as the initiation ritual for sex was then called).  I broke off our relationship unilaterally, and in about the worst way possible: I wrote her a long letter explaining that I didn't wish to pressure her unfairly about sex, but at the same time I couldn't accept a continual state of arousal and frustration.  I did not suggest that perhaps we might find some safe way to overcome her reservations.  Probably, that option simply did not occur to me at the time.  
	Several weeks later, I did something even more muddle-headed.  In a moment of guilt and social desperation, I called Dianne again.  In the intervening period, she had been forced to hunt up a date on two weeks notice for her high school Senior Prom.  She would have been justified in reading me the riot act, but she was eager to see me again.  We went to a movie and shared a few hours of the same good feelings we had felt before.  Then summer vacation arrived, and I drove 200 miles away to a summer job.  
	Dianne and I wrote several times, as I proceeded to do yet another dumb thing.  I found myself becoming romantically involved with Linda, the former supplier of my Rambler sin wagon.  However, during summer, Linda lived only ten minutes away from Dianne.  To visit Linda, as I hoped to do briefly at mid-summer, I had to take the chance that I might accidentally encounter Dianne in the neighborhood.  This would have been rather difficult to explain to either female.  
	After a few days of trying to juggle these two hot rocks, I called the whole circus to a halt, kissed Linda good-by on her front doorstep, and wrote Dianne another really long letter, explaining that I was basically not very good at long distance romance, and granting that she had every right to call me most of the names in any book of insults.  I never heard from her again.  I have always thought I behaved rather badly during much of the time I knew the girl.  
	Thus: Dianne, if you have stumbled across this tome and recognized yourself, I ask you please to accept my apology.  You encountered Bob Lawrence at a time when he wasn't old enough to appreciate you.  And Linda: long life and many blessings.  I hope that marriage in your 30's and British Columbia were good to you.  
	The year after my encounter with Dianne, a combination of factors temporarily eliminated any thoughts I might have had about dating.  Changes in course availability forced me to take over 18 credit hours per quarter throughout the year.  During one of these ten-week marathons, my classes on two days of each week were continuous between eight in the morning and six in the evening, with a Spartan hour off for lunch.  
	That junior year likewise exposed me to a torture chamber taught under the title "Engineering Thermodynamics".  I swear to this day that I passed those courses on the force of prayer alone.  As I sipped a cup of black coffee on my way to a welding shop or physics laboratory, I wistfully noted the clean good looks of the incoming freshman girls.  But I had no time to sit down and pay court to these lovelies.  Perhaps it was just as well that I found myself too busy.  As usual, I was broke.  
	In some odd way, my senior year was the experience for which I had waited during three previous years of college education.  This was the first year I had a car at school and sufficient status in the college caste system to be reasonably certain of having a date if I wanted one.  It was also the first period when I had enough free time between courses to schedule parts of my weekends for something other than books. This combination produced the delightful circumstance that I attracted a local and consistent girlfriend, and eventually got laid. Though I continued to be short of money, it was a much more interesting year after I got laid.  
	April was a tall, long-haired, blonde girl, majoring in Mathematics.  She was the roommate of a girl who dated one of my engineering classmates.  We met over coffee in the college cafeteria.  April and her roommate were sophomores.  Joe and I conferred a degree of status on the girls by our senior standing.  This, despite a well deserved reputation of engineering students for not being the best social company.  
	Our dating soon became more serious.  The girls had grown tired of the constant petty infighting and regulations in their college dormitory.  They got permission from their respective parents to move off campus into a two-bedroom apartment. Joe and I were soon frequent visitors. Joe and his girlfriend started spending long evenings in the privacy of one of the bedrooms of the apartment.  Evenings became overnights.  Not long after, I joined April in her room.  
	How can I describe the almost wordless way that many young people during the 1960s decided to sleep together? I do not recall that sex was ever discussed in so many words.  April and I simply spent more and more of our late evenings together.  We kissed a lot.  Evening dates involved a lot of necking in parked cars.  Groping beneath rumpled clothes, we kept a careful eye cocked for the appearance of a highway patrolman.  When car windows became too steamy to see through, you could count the minutes before a campus rent-a-cop would appear.  
	Thus, we retreated to April’s apartment and eventually to her bed.  Our petting sessions became longer and involved more skin.  Eventually I came up for air, and said "OK, girl.  Here we are.  There's only one place we are going from here, unless you would rather I went home." With a small sigh (relief?), she consented.  "If you want to.  Only, do you have anything to protect us?"  Having had intimate connections in mind for some time, I had come prepared.  
	Our couplings in the weeks that followed were not terribly frequent or passionate.  There was strong attraction and considerable liking between us.  But we knew very little about sex and much less about each other.  We did not communicate well enough to teach each other -- and perhaps more important, ourselves -- what we enjoyed or valued together.  
	Thus we fell into a pattern, and the pattern became a trap.  Long hours in college study accelerated the process, but Joe and I likewise lapsed all too willingly into a habit of simply being with the girls.  The number of movies, dances, and outside entertainments in our relationships dropped.  Understandably, the girls began to feel a little used -- and perhaps unintentionally, they were.  
Inattention eventually led to arguments with April, though we really did not understand what we were arguing about.  There were frustrations on both sides and tears on hers.  There was confusion over what we wanted of each other.  Somehow, our connection simply came unglued.  I don't think either of us wanted a breakup.  But we did not sufficiently want to stay together, to take the time and expend the effort needed to know each other well.  In later years, I regretted that April and I did not manage to love one another a bit more, even if we had made love less.  
We stopped seeing each other about two weeks before my final exams.  I spent those weeks in a kind of disoriented haze.  I was fortunate to pass with grades no lower than B in all but one course -- a minor academic miracle.  April wasn't so fortunate.  That academic term was a disaster for her.  
The four years of college passed by in a kind of expectant waiting: waiting to be grown up, to be ready to enter the world, to start living.  It was a period in which very few events made a noticeable mark on the kind of person I was.  Like most of the people around me, I was too busy completing the rituals; paying the necessary price of admission to adulthood and independence.  We were too mired in details to detect the broader patterns unfolding in ourselves or our surroundings.  Perhaps every generation suffers from this short sightedness.  That's hard to determine.  I know only that I did.  
There were a few events that highlighted our peculiar isolation from a larger reality.  I remember sharply, the puzzlement and surprise that I felt one Fall afternoon, when America lost a President and I lost a casual friend.  When news of John Kennedy's assassination was broadcast on television, the campus went into complete shock.  On my way to class, unaware of what had occurred, I came upon a female classmate.  With several other girls, she was sitting on the grass of the college commons, her eyes red from hard crying.  I stopped and knelt down to ask what the matter was.  She burst into tears again, telling me between sobs that Kennedy had been shot and killed.  
I responded without thinking.  "I'm sorry to hear that.  We've lost a President and a vital human being.  But why are you so personally upset? What have you lost? All things pass..." She looked at me in total incomprehension.  She may have felt for a moment that I had turned into a monster before her very eyes.  Maybe without knowing it, I had.  She had lost a symbol of hope and idealism, even if she could not articulate her loss in that instant.  I had been too insensitive to see the source of her anguish.  We were never again more than polite with one another.  
In my sophomore summer, I saw death in a personal way for the second time in my life.  For whatever reason, this experience also failed to touch me deeply.  I was called home from my summer job to learn that my uncle Timothy had committed suicide.  It was the first time in several years that we had heard from Tim's family, and I felt only slightly affected.  
Both of my parents were distraught.  As the family gathered for the funeral, Tim's widow collapsed in my father's arms and they both cried.  With my brother Daniel, who had never met Tim, and Aaron to whom Tim had been a distant acquaintance, I stood on the sidelines.  I could sense strong currents of emotion flowing around us, but these tides did not seem to reach me.  Tim had been a distant figure during my teen years, after a falling-out between his wife and my father.  When the family at last came together to grieve, their sorrow may have been as much for their own lack of will or compassion in earlier years, as for Tim's passing. 
Dad had missed his brother long before Timothy's death, and the permanent loss was inconsolable.  Though I could see Dad's loss, it was not my own.  I was touched only briefly during the notes of the bugle and the sharp crack of the rifle salute over his military veteran's grave.  For a few moments, there were hot, unexplainable tears behind my eyelids and a lump in my throat.  My uncle, whom I had hardly known as a person, was gone permanently -- denied to me even as a possibility. 
If physical death did not reach me, there were other less obvious deaths that did.  Sometimes illusions die harder than people. One of the more important deaths was the passing of the unexamined belief that I could continue to participate in youth organizations of my church, without seriously investing myself in the belief system proclaimed by church teachings. 
The religion in which I grew up could have been seen from some points of view, as “radical.”  Besides ministering to the salvation of our Christian souls, this church dealt in a commodity much more concrete: healing the sick.  The medium for this process was called ''metaphysics''.  In such a system of treatment, the perceptions of the five senses are not accepted as final "Truth" about the status of reality. People are affirmed as children of a divine Creator, evidence to the contrary not withstanding.  Health was believed to be established and enforced in the face of "suggestions" of disease, by changing the perceptions of the supposedly diseased individual. In a sense, metaphysics "recreated" the world, by changing one's perspective. 
If this dissertation seems a bit abstract in the telling, one can imagine that a rebellious youth might have his share of problems in the practice of such a religion.  I found it impossible to deny or to mentally replace the evidence of my own senses and perceptions.  I knew that I was an imperfect creation, and could not imagine how one could possibly affirm to the contrary as the “real” truth.  Yet such mental exercises lay at the core of church doctrine.  
Lacking a sense of conviction regarding the belief system of my church, I found myself unable to demonstrate even the smallest healings experienced by other students of the religion.  Others recovered from cancer or pneumonia without use of drugs.  When I was afflicted with hay fever, my only relief was antihistamine drugs.  
Lacking the tangible evidence of my faith or the courage to free myself from the comfortable associations of my church, I resorted to the only other tools I had for preserving appearances: words.  Quite simply, I faked it.  During the testimonial meetings of my college youth group, I proclaimed benefits that I claimed to have derived from metaphysical practice.  I knew the dogmas and the vocabulary well, and it seemed that few detected my deception.  However, beneath my upstanding exterior, cowered a youth badly tom by his own hypocrisy.  I wondered miserably if the whole mess of my life was ever going to make sense.  
My habit of "faking it" lapped over into other areas of my life. Several embarrassing incidents in which I “embroidered” upon a relatively slight knowledge of things I really hadn’t mastered, demonstrated in some manner that I was not content with the sort of person I happened to be at the time.  I wanted to be considered "special", to be esteemed, to be loved.  But I did not hold myself in high esteem or believe myself to be lovable.  This contradiction required several years to resolve during young adulthood.  
Though I left the formal institutions of church, I did not totally lay aside a preoccupation with a divine Creator as a wishful hope.  On late night walks about the college campus, I held long, whispered, one-way conversations with an invisible Presence that I imagined as a Creator. I spoke into a void, remaining uncertain of the nature of whatever it was that listened, or perhaps did not.  However unknown this Power might have been to me, I returned to my dormitory room from these walks with a feeling of relief.  There was a catharsis going on that I did not recognize as such at the time.  
Eventually, however, this mental house cleaning was transformed into a more personal experience of spirituality in my life.  The key event was my breakup with April.  In this separation, I suffered my first serious emotional pain and found myself insufficient to the experience.  When April and I parted, I plunged into a sea of confusions.  It was only a week before final examinations, and I was unprepared.  If I flunked any of my courses as I expected to, I would be forced to return for a further quarter of academic work -- a quarter for which I had no funds and could see no likely source of funds.  
Early in the morning hours in my last week of class, I gave up my disorganized studies, pulled on a jacket, and walked into a very windy and unpleasantly dark night.  My stroll about the college perimeter covered several miles, as I talked with a silent Creator.  However, as I wandered through the silences, I remained upset and restless.  
At last, I walked out into the middle of the football stadium at the base of Dormitory Hill.  Having exhausted my supply of ideas to relate to my God, I knelt and stared up at the stars.  I had but one further thought: "God, this one is too big for me.  I've got to cope and go on from here, and I don't think I know how, any more.  All I know right now is that I'm here and You might be, and that isn't enough! I need a sign.  I need to know, damn it!" 
Then, for maybe the first time in my many nocturnal wanderings, I stopped talking and listened.  
What occurred in the next few minutes I'm not sure can be fully explained, except perhaps to someone who has shared a similar experience.  Conceivably, what I saw and felt might have been nothing more than a coincidence.  Whatever it was, it marked a distinct turning point.  After about a minute on my knees listening, I found that the area immediately around me had become dead calm.  Though the wind moved leaves and dust outside of a ten foot circle around me, it was silent where I was.  There was a quiet space around me and within me.  A lump rose in my throat and tears in my eyes.  
In a few seconds, the wind again ruffled my jacket.  I remained on my knees.  With deep feeling, I asked, "God, is this to be my sign?" Again, instantly, the leaves nearest me dropped to the ground.  The second calming was a bit shorter than the first.  When I again felt cold air on my neck, I rose from the damp ground and walked back to my room.  I may not even have thought to say "thanks."  Something had spoken without words, and something within me had heard. I was free of the burden that I carried into the stadium.  I went to bed and got the first night of sound in a week. 
I took examinations a few days later.  In the interim, there was time for no more than a cursory review of my fragmentary course notes.  But I entered finals calmly and completed them in the same spirit.  Though my performance was not outstanding, it was sufficient to complete the term and graduate with one-hundredth of a grade point more than required for honors in my degree. 
The spiritual quieting that I experienced was profoundly reassuring.  It did not, however, prompt my return to the church in which I had grown up.  The event was too unlike anything I had ever heard about or been led to expect of religion.  It simply "sat there" in my life, perhaps waiting for me to gain maturity. The quieting seemed to be a sort of spiritual sign post, pointing down a road that I could not yet see, but that I felt with some assurance, would be there for further exploration when I was ready.  A similar experience in later years added a few more sign posts.  However events and my own attentions have not led me to deeply explore or even define the path suggested by the quieting.  I am not certain I shall ever be so led. 
In the meantime, life moved onward.  I continued to confront the business of growing up.  I continued to feel a lack of self confidence and personal stature.  Though I was one of four survivors in my graduating class who had managed to complete the electrical engineering course -- of sixty who started as freshmen four years earlier -- I continued to be troubled with a sense of inadequacy in my chosen field.  
I was uncertain of what I was supposed to be doing with my life.  But I was about to begin learning how to be an adult.  The squeaky-clean young electrical engineer still had a lot to learn about the mundane and non-mathematical arts of living with people, supporting a household and earning a living.  I carne into my twenties still burdened with many of the abrasive and distancing habits that had characterized the high school "brain" in high-water pants.  There were many lessons still to be I earned.  
I was ready to come out into the world.  I was "straight", in the sense that I did not smoke, drink, or get high.  Perhaps I was a bit "crooked" in the sense that it would be several years before I learned to be emotionally self-supporting or responsible.  I was in many ways, an innocent.  Though I had more academic education than many people with whom I had grown up, I had less practical understanding of what life was about.  This rough, unfinished product was about to be refined by hard experience.