Great Escape
My Life in the Looking Glass
Reflecting on my childhood fear of mirrors
I was seven and already on my way to becoming a neurotic, bookish kid. I had only recently learned how to read the words in the volumes piled helter-skelter on shelves, spilling out of cardboard boxes in closets, the collapsing columns of tomes on the floor. I could not have pronounced many of the words they contained, much less understood them, but I rolled them around in my brain, alongside the equally unpronounceable names of the authors. Thucydides. Freud. Millet. Yeats. Whitman.
The people who owned and lived with these books wanted to be poets. Other than that commonality, they were badly mismatched and struggling in different ways to find meaning and fulfillment in Johnson’s and, later, Nixon’s America. They and their kids had just moved, leaving Chicago, where one of them was almost a full professor, to drop out and live in the epicenter of the Summer of Love. San Francisco.
Sunny day. Sitting at a folding table outdoors, on the street, near our apartment. Was there a popsicle? What was I doing there? Who was with me? Was it at the bottom of the hill, where Haight met Ashbury? I suppose my younger brother and I had arrived down there, as we sometimes did, after starting at the very top of the great three-tiered hill…
