Kathe Tanner covers the North Coast for the Tribune, my old (if brief) paper from many years ago, and she is excellent. This story made me a little sad. I’m hoping Leffingwell’s closing is a mere demographic blip, soon to be restored by a few more students who deserve a school like this.

I did. My career at AGHS was never particularly distinguished, but my GPA nosedived in 1969. There was chaos at home, including Mom’s death, and I had some excellent teachers, but I could’ve used a place like Leffingwell where there was a better chance for teachers to grow into mentors, when they weren’t surrounded by 35 teenagers in an American Government class. “Continuation School,” in the late 1960s, was pejorative, a place for knuckleheads and girls who got pregnant. (Like my friend Bonnie, who Elizabeth and I found waiting tables at Bob’s Seafood in Morro Bay many years later. I adored Bonnie in 1969; I admired her—it was the weekend just before her daughter graduated from Cal Poly—even more when Elizabeth and I met her over fish and chips.)

I later found out that Bonnie, years later, took her own life, just as my mother had in 1969.

Despite my dismal high school career, I went on to teach Advanced Placement U.S. History and Advanced Placement American Government at Mission Prep in San Luis Obispo. Someone in administration must’ve lost their mind, a suspicion confirmed eleven years later when I was suspended from my teaching position for insubordination. The same kind of catastrophic lapse in judgment came fifteen years later, when they decided I should be Lucia Mar’s Teacher of the Year.

Bosh.

In Lucia Mar, at AGHS, I taught Advanced Placement European teacher, and there was at least one colleague who couldn’t resist needling me for teaching “easy” kids. (I only got the job because the previous AP teacher, a little soft on Hitler for my taste, resigned to take a higher-paying job in another high school.)

I understood my colleague, even though the little barbs she threw drew blood. I was not particularly good at teaching the “regular” kids—there isn’t a good word to describe the vast, and important, in-betweens—10th Grade World History. It took my passion for the subject and a year’s maturity (mine and theirs) to make me love teaching 11th Grade U.S. History.

But I found out something else in the interregnum. Between leaving Mission and beginning at my Alma Mater, AGHS, I taught for a year in Atascadero Unified. It was Night School. I was assigned every student who’d failed World History or U.S. History—or both—and they had to get through me to graduate high school. They were the “retreads.”

Napoleon could not begin to imagine the immensity of my power.

I also taught GED for adults (thank God for the student who helped me to teach math) and, in one of the richest experiences of my teaching life, I taught an adult how to read.

I didn’t have that much fun until, at AGHS, Mr. Goossen tapped me to teach a study hall for at-risk kids. When my class filed in the first day, I felt a quiver of fear: one of them, Jack Raymond, had a lacquered Mohawk. In technicolor. I was doomed. There was no way I could teach to a Mohawk.

The one thing I had going for me was that they were expected to begin each class by journaling. I collected them periodically, read them and commented on them. In the process, I found out f that many of my study hall charges were very bright—-some of them brighter than I–and some of them lived in directionless homes, slept on dirty sheets at night, had lost someone whom they loved, frequently a role model, and they loved the constancy of their closest friends, always music and almost as often a cat or dog.

I thought Jack was smiling at me insolently sometimes. It turned out later that he liked my sense of humor.

The honor in teaching AP students was in their drive, their curiosity, their willingness to learn the craft of writing. In teaching “retreads,” I discovered in my students the immensity of their compassion and the incredible courage it took for them just to come to school, to come to my class, every day. I certainly didn’t have that kind of courage in high school. I missed a lot of classes.

We were assigned Melville’s Moby-Dick as 11th-graders and I conveniently came down with strep. That meant that I could cover myself with blankets, stretch out on the sofa with our West Highland White Terrier, Winnie, asleep on my feet, and begin to learn more about whales than I ever wanted to know.

But I was safe. I didn’t have to go to school.

That’s when and where I learned to be a Retread.

I was all a-melt over a Newfoundland Mom and her puppies (eleven!) I saw on Animal Planet yesterday. When she got stressed out, she went swimming.

Then I found out my friend Erica Mueller had a Newfoundland named Fergus. What an outstanding name! When Fergus needed decompressing, they’d take him to river to swim, upcurrent, until he was finally tired out.

I bet it took Fergus a long time to tire out.

That led me to pondering Irish Setters. They love the water, too—note the difference between Mollie, our first Setter, and Wilson, our first Basset, at Laguna Lake, in the photo below.

Setters are also field dogs. I feel sorry for the grouse in that first photo, but when Elizabeth comes home, Brigid heads for the toy basket and emerges triumphant with a doggie toy in her mouth, just for Mom.

Fergus and Brigid behave the way they do because of their breeding, whatever that means, I guess it’s in their DNA.

But I wonder if part of them is beyond DNA.

Maybe it’s even Jungian, as in Carl Jung, the pioneering psychotherapist and theorist who believed in the “collective unconscious,” a kind of memory pool that all humans share. It goes back, Jung argued, to our ancestral human mother, the woman some physical anthropologists refer to as “Mitochondrial Eve.”

She was African. So, of course, were the women warriors in Black Panther. Damn. I hope I got some of that DNA.

I don’t know that this is true. But one of my heroes (because he looked and sounded like my Grandpa Kelly) is the mythologist Joseph Campbell, who pointed out that there is a version of the Cinderella story in virtually every culture.

I once watched the actor Wes Studi–Magua in Last of the Mohicans–and this man, who had played such a cruel character in this film, had little children at his feet rapt on the PBS show Reading Rainbow while he read them, so gently, a Native American version of “Cinderella.”

I was rapt, too. So here, Campbell and Studi, are two great storytellers:

One of my favorite poets, despite his verbosity, a sin I share, is the American Walt Whitman, who believed that all of us, living and dead, are bound together by a kind connection, a kind of spiritual film that presaged Jung, that makes us all brothers and sisters. Midway through his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” you suddenly get the intense feeling that the old fart, Whitman, is watching you, just over your shoulder, as you read the poem he wrote in 1856.

He’s got a little smile on his face, Whitman does.

Maybe it was Whitman’s poem that made me love this 1988 film opening, even with the Big Hair, so very much.

When the Twin Towers come into view, they hurt. I cannot see them now, but Nichols’ introduction reminds me that even the vanished Towers are are part of me, too.

Maybe even the sixteenth century is part of me.

I was watching parts of the two “Elizabeth” films with Cate Blanchett this morning–that’s her coronation portrait below.

My ninth great-grandmother, Lady Elizabeth Gelsthorpe Gregory, died in the great queen’s reign, three years before the Armada, and is buried beneath the concrete of this little London church.

My Elizabeth says that we Gregorys have very distinctive mannerisms, like the way we tilt our heads just before we have something meaningful to say.

And here comes Brigid with a toy chicken in her mouth.

You have to wonder: Did Lady Elizabeth tilt her head in the same way that my big sister does today?

Did my cousin Roy, killed by Waffen-SS troops on the doorstep of a French church in January 1945, do the same thing?

And if Roberta and Roy had that little tic, doesn’t that mean that, even with the intervention of so many years, that all of us are much, much closer to each other than we think we are? Don’t we, all of us, belong to each other? The poet John Donne certainly thought so.

But maybe now that’s the kind of thinking, in my case thanks to dogs, that will get you into trouble.

I don’t think there’s any recent event that’s had had such an emotional impact on me as the fires. They have reminded me, for one example, that I remember dinosaurs.

Remembering dinosaurs–in my case, the Shell Beach brontosauraus–for someone about to turn seventy-three, means that death doesn’t carry the freight it had when I was twenty-three, about when I saw the actor John Houseman in the film “Paper Chase.”

The fires reminded me that John Donne was right:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;…

This is an old man’s hand. That’s not the centerpiece of this blog post, which is about hope and remembrance.

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I have noticed, too, the kind of crepe-y skin that the actress Jane Seymour deplores is starting to appear on the undersides of my forearms, and on my borther Bruce’s. Shoot howdy, I rememer Seymour as Kate, the incredibly evil lover of Adam Trask in the miniseries East of Eden. She wone a Golden Globe, more power to her, becuase I despised her.

Her lover/husband, Adam Trask, was played by Timothy Bottoms. To show you how slyly the years have paaaed, Elizabeth and I enjoy immensely an AnimalPlanet show about Bottoms’s son, Buckeye, now a vet in Hawaii. He has all of the compassion that Kate lacked. And he adores his Pittie cross, who goes with him everywhere.

Buckeye’s Pop was the star in another generational film, The Paper Chase, about Harvard Law, whose pivot was the incredible actor/director John Houseman, imperiorus as Timothy Bottoms’s torts professor. (“Bottoms’s” is a peculiar construction, isn’t it?) And Bottoms ahd the great good luck to fall in lvoe with Lindsey Wagner, his torts professor’s daughter and later The Bionic Woman.

You would think, wouldn’t you? You would think that this blog will be filled with self–pity? You would be right, because I have a lot of that trait, in addition to the aging hands. I used to remember the names of the horses of virtually every general in the Civil War. Now I can’t rember the name of the actress in Alien. (It was Sigourney Weave.) I get my facts wrong far, far more tha I used to.(San Luis Obispo muscian Louie Ortega never played for Whale’s Knees, I was bluntly and correctly informed. I keep making my big siter a year olde than she really is. The declination of my night vision means that I get lost on Elm Street in Arroyo Grande, when I look anxiously for the big lights that illuminate the shopping center where I worked, at Kinney’s Shoes, fifty-five years ago.

And then there’s this.

This is part of my workout yesterday, and I’m proud of it, but it’s faint echo my twenties, I benched 200 lbs with reps–when I was a wee fellao— went shopping in SLO for polo shirts whose sleeves would stretch because my bicps strained them. I was a hunka hunk.

And I was a flaming asshole.

I will be seventy-three this month. Now it takes me a full minute to shift from my left to my right side in bed. (Someimes I have to shift Walter the Basset Hound first, which is roughly equivalnet to benching 200 lbs.) When I’m awake and more or less conscious, everything hurts. The distanc between me an dthe quarter I dropped on the kitchen floor seems just a bit farther than the distance between Oxnard and Arroyo Grande.

When I have to show my ID for groecery shopping, I like to joke that “I was around when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.” Which I was, if some of you remember the Shell Beach Brotosaurus.

No, just in case you were waiting for me to feel sorry for myself, here just a few things I rmember from my impossibly long time on this here Planet Earth. And the wrinkles on that old, old hand? They make me very happy. Even the cheesy ones, which remind me that the one thing—maybe the only thing— I’m not afraid of is dying. Not that I’m in a hurry, mind you.

I remeber the first video; I adore the second, and there’s nothing I loved teaching quite so much as the third.

So there. Death be not be proud. You don’t scare me. Not one damned bit.

A young Italian woman; a prosciutto and fig pizza. When Elizabeth and I took students on the first trip to Italy—48 of our closest friends—we had a soda at sunset in Venice. They were hard to drink because our mouths were flopped open, in wonderment, at the way Italians come out just before dusk, dressed to the nines, and beyond. They were stunning—even the Italians close to our middle-aged years. Lots of leather, of course, oversized dark glasses, long-legged parade walks. They looked good and they knew it. They were enchanting.

What brought them to mind was the humble ravioli I made for dinner. It’s is not at the summit of the culinary arts, but it struck me that Italians food is just as beautiful as those Italians at twilight. And Italy itself. Here’s the ravioli, salad and the berry crisp that Elizabeth made, which is sublime (sweet and tart; crispy and fluid).

All of this made me miss Italy, which I’ve described many times as “My Happy Place.” It is so beautiful, as is its food, as are its people. I miss you, Italy.

I guess it was this film and its opening that made me fall in love with Italy a long time before I traveled there.

Wait. This one, Only You, which came out about the same time, helped, too.

This film came out later, and Cher is Armenian, not Italian, but she gets it. And, good sweet Lord, she is beautiful.

And as you drive up Italy, from Rome to Florence, there are vast fields of sunflowers, estate houses, guarded by cypress, that likewise stand watch over wheatfields, marble quarries cut in great oblong slices—Michelangelo swore that there was marble dust in his mother’s milk—and, every ten miles or so, Medieval towns perched atop the hills. In Umbria, one such hilltop is crowned by St. Francis’s church. Italy is almost impossible, But it isn’t.

1. Jimmy Garoppolo is starting for the Rams. This is madness.* When he was a Niner, Elizabeth and I spent a weekend in North Beach—wonderfully Italian—and passed a restaurant, on our way the City Lights Bookstore, that read JIMMY GAROPPOLO EATS HERE FREE!

*The Rammies just lost. Damn.

2. The Dodgers have signed a gifted South Korean middle infielder. Don’t tell me that actress Jeon Jong-seo (okay, and her yoga pants) who threw out the first pitch in an exhibition game in March, didn’t have something to do with that.

3. Yes, Ken Burns’s Baseball, repeating on the MLB channel, is just as good as it was when it first aired. When I taught U.S. History, I showed excerpts about the Negro Leagues every year when we studied the Harlem Renaissance, My kids were enthralled by Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson (and by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, from Burns’s series on Jazz). And they loved my surrogate grandfather, Negro Leagues player/manager Buck O’Neil.

4. Although we, a 49ers family, love 49ers legend Jerry Rice, Tampa Bay wide receiver MIke Evans today equaled Rice’s record for 11 seasons in a row with 1,000 receiving yards. Evans is a good man, and a tough one. (We also have a soft spot for Tampa QB Baker Mayfield, once a Cleveland Brown, and the series of Progressive Life commercials he did with his wife when they both pretended to live in the stadium. They were charming.

5. In thinking about Asian baseball players, I leaned to move my eyes independently when Ichiro and Ken Griffey Jr. appeared together at Dodger Stadium. I am left-handed, so that eye never left Suzuki. He hit like Carew, loving the opposite field, but Ichiro hit with more power and, he played with the game, I think, with the same grace, if a bit edgier, that DiMaggio had.

But we saw a game at Camden Yards in Baltimore—such a beautiful ballpark– there are little bronze baseballs set into the wall to commemorate epic home runs. Griffey’s was about twenty feet above all the others.

6. Best of all, best of all, there’s this magazine cover. WOOT!

Trying to renew my Driver’s License/California Permanent ID.

To do so, I need a copy of my birth certificate. Sure, that’s around here somewhere. Should be easy to find, since it’s heavy, carved in Cuneiform on a big rock.

Nope. Can’t find it.

I can get a copy from Kern County, though. $45.

It will get here a week after my license expires.

But it won’t get here at all unless I pay an extra $25 to get my true identity verified. (Secretly, my true identity is Don Diego de la Vega, aka “Zorro”). That okay. You can do that online, through a convenient online notary.

By the way, here’s an older Don Diego, about my age, played wonderfully by Anthony Hopkins.

Online Notaries ask a lot of questions—maybe it adds a little excitement to their dreary Bob Cratchity lives? Once they’re done being nosy, you submit a photo of your Driver’s License—mine’s the one that’s about to expire—front and back.

Okay.

To the photo submission page:

Take photo. Submit.

Failure.

Take photo. Submit.

Failure.

Take new photo. Submit.

Failure.

(I do this all the time when I make an online bank deposit, by the way, so I’m no newbie.)

Take new new photo. Submit.

Failure.

I submit heated a note to Mr./Ms. online notary. No cuss words, but it does include the adjective “absurd.”

Now I know why folks hate The Guvmint. Come to think of it, Zorro had a beef with the colonial Mexican guvmint of California, too.

Singing to self: Out of the night/When the full Moon is bright/Comes the horseman known as ‘Zorro’…