When I was 9 years old my parents decided to move from Las Angelos to the Bay Area and make a new start.
It was decided that my dad would take me up to live with family friends and then him and my sisters would come up later.
Gretchen and Joe were a married couple only in their mid twenties but they seemed as mature as all adults. I don’t know where we met them., but they accepted me and treated me as they would their own son. They lived in San Raphael, at that time San Raphael was a sleepy town and not that big.
But Joe used to teach me all kinds of neat stuff. In the seventies chess was big, the world champion was Bobby Fisher and he was like a rock star back then. Everybody knew who he was and every match he won, everything he did was in the newspaper. He had some classic matches with the Russian Boris Spatsky and it was front page news. Anyway the paper used to publish the games they played so you could play the exact games yourself at home. I was good at chess but Joe was excellent and we would play all the games together move by move.
But Joe taught me al kinds of other neat stuff. He taught me how to play poker; we gambled with chips. He took me to a near-by field and taught me the lost art of drop-kicking a football which is the method pro football players used to kick field goals and punted in the thirties. He took me down to Golden Gate Park and taught me how to “stick” a knife in the ground. I don’t know if kids still do this but it’s when you take a pocket knife and flip it once so it sticks in the ground blade first. I think this is a lost art too.
He taught me how to build a card house and he let me shoot his pellet pistol. He got me to read “The Hobbit” for the first time. Well, I didn’t know what Joe did for a living but he was gone all day and he left me alone with Grethchen who was a pretty redhead. I knew she was pretty but I just innocently liked her.
During the day we used to take long walks to the downtown area. I remember we would stroll through quiet tree lined streets to get there. I always used to kick rocks as we went along and I tried to avoid stepping on the sidewalk cracks. You know that old saying when you are a kid, “Step on a crack, break your mothers back”, lol. But we would go downtown and she would go window shopping or pick up a few things for their house. We would stop at the drugstore and I would read the comic books.
It was such an idyllic existence. I think I’ve had a racing mind my whole life but while I lived with them I had the only peaceful time in my life and my mind was calm and lazy. These are almost my favorite memories. I would give anything to feel now, what I felt back then.