Biographical Notes In the spring of 1942, during World War II, I was born in a small town in the south. My father was a pilot, serving the U.S. Navy at the time as a flight instructor to England's Royal Air Force.
My father's Greek-Italian forebears had immigrated to the United States in 1850 (see ancestry for more). My mother's families had come primarily from England, with the surnames Stephens and Majors, though she had a German grandmother. But it was the Mediterraneans, all the solemn-faced wonderful aunts and my irreplaceable grandmother, who influenced me most in my early years.
I had two brothers, Randy and Rayfield, and many, many cousins. We followed our paternal Catholic background and devoutly attended parochial school, where we were taught -- along with the things that one knows are taught in Catholic schools -- to diagram sentences properly and have respect for all language.
The two people who meant the most to me in those years were my paternal grandmother, "Miss Mamie," and my cousin Idalee, who was my lifelong best friend. Sundays were the days I loved. After mass, I would spend the day with Miss Mamie (or "Mama") along with my cousins Jeanne and Yvonne. Miss Mamie was an enchantress who could make an unforgettable journey out of a game of bingo on the picnic table or a walk down to the local store for ice cream bars. Her love was unconditional.
In 1960 I graduated from high school and went off to school at the University of Mississippi, known at the time as a party school in celebration of its football team and Miss Americas (Mary Ann Mobley and Leigh Ann Meriweather). I followed the tradition as explained to me and learned to party quite well. Breaking free of a rigid background was my reason for receiving no academic accolades beyond being allowed to stay as long as I paid tuition. I majored in philosophy but was already a lifelong lover of words, the structure and molding of sentences and phrases. The nuns, under whom I had won my first poetry contest in fifth grade, had taught me an unquenchable zest for the written word. So while I didn't often go to classes during those four years, I read a lot, which cut into the party time but was not altogether useless.
In the second semester of my senior year, rheumatic fever intruded, and I was taken home, not to return to Oxford, Mississippi, until 34 years later. In the summer of 1964 I left home by train to visit friends David and Carol Ann Ready in San Francisco, arriving in the magical, wondrous, sea-filled air to the sounds of ships and Chinatown and Joan Baez, all with a dollar and seventy-four cents. 1964 in San Francisco; it probably tells you something. There on Upper Grant Avenue, one night in August, in jeans and bare feet, I was taken into a coffee house to hear a local folk singer. He dedicated a song to me before my friend and I were even seated, and five months later we were married. Born in fireworks and idealism, the affair died of boredom and banality eight and a half years later, not one person's fault any more than the other's.
I raised my two older children in Kirkland, Washington. After my divorce, I finally finished my B.A., then graduate school at the University of Washington. Wonderful years, those, followed by some rewarding work both in teaching and in journalism. Upon the death of my father in 1984, I and my children moved back home, where I and my two sons live, not quite home, not quite sure where to be. My daughter now lives in Los Angeles.
And next... I am sure of it: something will happen.