Childhood: 1960’s Berkeley Baby
I have a handful of memories from the first two years of my life, visceral snippets of texture and color, fleeting images like stills from a short film.* The memories evoke sentiments of unalloyed happiness and contentment.
We lived in a tiny home on Keeler Avenue in the North Berkeley hills. My father was a medical resident at U.C.S.F. and we were on a very tight budget. He had emigrated from Israel in 1950 to attend U.C. Berkeley, the only school that did not reject him because of their Jewish quotas. My mother, a pre-med student, had transferred from U.C.L.A. to U.C. Berkeley and then dropped out to marry my father and start a family. She gave birth fourteen months apart first to my brother, David in 1959, and then to me in 1960.
From the moment my father arrived in Berkeley, he loved the place. There was a wonderful ferment of people from all over and already then, before the free speech movement, Berkeley was a wellspring of alternatives to the status quo. My parents had a collection of intellectual and artistic friends and would gather to sing along with Odetta and listen to Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry.
I was born at Herrick Hospital. The building still stands near the downtown, just below Shattuck Avenue, but looks positively quaint, hardly identifiable as a hospital by current standards. It is now a “campus”, subsumed first by one immense hospital and then another. I arrived in the world several weeks early, scrawny and colicky.** My mother had learned self-hypnosis, anathema at the time, and thus endured labor and delivery without any pharmacologic assistance.
A photo of me at a few days of age would have been beautiful only to my parents. When they brought me home from the hospital shortly after my birth, David age one, stroked my newborn black hair and called me “Ow.” Ow was our extravagantly long-haired black cat whom David had named. Ow would stretch out in the stripes of sunlight on our blonde wooden floors and David and I would happily grab a fistful of his fur.
Once I got over my colic, I made up quickly for lost time and happily ingested both edible and inedible objects. When David and I began eating solid food, we consumed large quantities of “lami and sauce” as David called it (salami and applesauce), two inexpensive staples. My mother frequented the old Berkeley Co-op, (now an Andronico’s on Shattuck and Cedar), where she could shop frugally. When I returned in 1978 as a junior at U.C. Berkeley, I too shopped at the Co-op, also on a very tight budget, gathering the free recipe cards, and looking at the second-floor bulletin board advertising jobs, services, and housing rentals.
I must have been two, following the curved path of small smooth pebbles in our garden, skirting bushes with immense puffy blue flower heads that towered over me. It smelled of damp and sunshine. I picked up a few pebbles and put them in my mouth. If I held them very carefully just behind my teeth, I could caress them with my tongue. They clunked against my teeth, as if knocking on a door, and I tried not to swallow them. My mother emerged from the house and, familiar with my antics, directed me to spit out the pebbles. I giggled and tried to keep my mouth closed at the same time, swallowing a few pebbles in the process. It made my mother smile and worry, and I teeter tottered between joy and naughtiness.
The house next door was a pale-yellow castle with a turret. David would lead the way over and knock on the back door of the castle. Friendy would answer. David named her. It seemed as if every time we knocked, Friendy was there. She would usher us into the kitchen where the sun slanted in in a dusky yellow haze. Friendy was old and her house smelled like linens that have been stored in a dark closet for decades or books left unopened over a lifetime. Friendy smiled and cooed at us, and gave us each a small cookie that fit perfectly in our hand and in our mouths. It was utterly delicious. We adored Friendy. She was pure goodness and cookies.
Our Berkeley birthdays, of which I had two and David had three, were celebrated with crocodile challah sculpted by the Éclair Bakery. A candle would be stuck somewhere near the alligator’s head. We could tear off and eat the rounded mounds of golden brown alligator bread to our heart’s content. Almost four decades later, I bought alligator breads from the Éclair Bakery and, after it closed, from our local bakery (The Bread Garden) for my boys’ birthdays.
My favorite blanket was the palest lemon color imprinted with tiny pink rosebuds, satin ribbon edging, and quilting. Along with my nearly fuzz-free Teddy Bear with a crooked nose, my blanket was a frequent companion. The bear, left unclaimed but heavily loved by another child, was given to me by a salesperson at Hink’s, the elegant old department store downtown. At naptime, with my bear by my side, I would pull my blanket over my head and look up at the light filtering through, basking in the all-embracing warmth that enveloped me.
Our contented existence in Berkeley was a short chapter in my life. My mother began pressuring my father to leave California. She was concerned, as many folks were at the time, that Russia would wage nuclear war against the United States, a war that would most assuredly target the San Francisco Bay area. My father had no intention of quitting the place he felt so deeply at home. In response to my mother’s frequent appeals, he retorted that there nowhere in the world would be safe in the event of a nuclear war, so why not stay where we were happy. My mother, however, was relentless. Thus, when I was just over two years old, we packed up and sailed to Switzerland. Spurred by the same fears, my parents’ best friends moved to Mexico with their young children. Gun emplacements still abound all around the Bay Area, ready for an attack that never materialized. We spent four years in Zürich, where a magical new chapter of my life was to unfold.
* I can’t be certain whether these memories are entirely recreated episodes based on stories and photos, but some are so experiential as to seem quite firmly rooted in my unassisted memory bank.
**Colic: upset stomach in newborns causing persistent discomfort and crying often over the course of weeks with no fully effective treatment.
