Shelly was a student in one of my art classes and lived just a few doors down in the Pine Creek Way condo community. One day her mom, Jean, told me there was an opening for a part-time teacher’s aide at Seven Hills School, the private elementary and preschool where she taught. Initially, I was thrilled to get the job, though I would be earning only $2 an hour. (Kids were about the only people I wasn’t painfully anxious around, as I’ve said.) The school was located in some farmed hills in Walnut Creek, the main building a ranch-style house with a garden and pool and a number of bungalows clustered around it. We had a cat, chickens, and a peacock and peahen underfoot, and cows in our back yard.

First I worked under a preschool teacher I’ll call Betty in the Red Barn, an actual barn that had been converted into two classrooms. From early on, I sensed that, like me, Betty suffered from depression, her repertoire of activities so limited that they didn’t provide much stimulation for the kids. Remembering how much I loved making forts as a child, one day I arrived with a large cardboard box that I had cut a door and windows into, big enough to be a tiny “playhouse”—well, big enough for a couple of kids to sit in, at least. I also brought a bunch of old wallpaper sample books, which the kids tore the pages out of and pasted onto the exterior of the “house.” They were so enthusiastic—and unruly, Betty thought—that forever after that she rejected all my creative ideas. I don’t know how many months I spent as her aide, but when the opportunity presented itself to work with Jean, Lu (the principal) allowed me to switch. Jean, it turned out, was masterful with kids—warm and patient and relaxed—and appreciative of my creativity as well.

My second year as an aide, I worked with Karl, the one male teacher in the school, who had the most advanced class of the five preschools. We had a choice location—two cozy rooms in the main building, one with a little nook that I turned into an actual playhouse. There was already a small round yellow table and chairs, but I created the illusion of a window with a  poster of two children walking down a scenic road that I framed with gingham curtains and added a matching tablecloth and napkins; then I scoured the local thrift shop for kitchen utensils. In a Woodshop for Women class I took in the evenings, I built a faux fireplace for the playhouse that I covered with contact paper with a brick pattern and hung a picture over it.

As for the academic side of things, Karl was a wonderfully creative teacher and would introduce a different letter of the alphabet each week, centering the daily activities around that letter. If the letter was C, for example, he might bring a cricket in a jar, a geode with crystals, serve cantaloupe for a snack, read a story about a crocodile, etc. Soon I was making my own contributions and starting to design card and board games that provided practice with letters and numbers. I also made felt finger puppets, wondering if I could sell my designs. At Christmas I gave one to each student in the class.

“Dear Ella,

“I tried to call you last Saturday—riffled through last year’s letters trying to find mention of a phone number at your Venice apartment—no luck. LA information didn’t have one either.

“The Bomb finally gave out. I sold it to a disreputable-looking guy for a demolition derby (where’s the *#&% dollar sign on this damn typewriter?)—for $30. Lizzy from one of my art classes was crestfallen. ‘Now you won’t have any more neat adventures to tell us about,’ she complained.

“The last neat adventure was a blowout on the freeway. I rode on the rim to the nearest shoulder, found out I was on a lengthy overpass with no apparent way down to the residential area below, was offered a ride by a young man who was petulantly irritated by my refusal. I then went down a hill of brambles in my dress shoes, saw at the bottom that I was surrounded by a six-foot cyclone fence, and turned to see that greasy young man had followed me. “Trapped,” he said, menacingly. I started to climb the fence. He was smiling, “You know what you need, lady?” Some adventure. By the way, I made it over the fence, but my skirt caught as I jumped down and wound up around my ears.

“Mutton chops, a.k.a. Mutty, my cockatiel, died of pneumonia with complications—a mineral imbalance or some such thing. I was force-feeding him Kaopectate, medicine, and baby food at the end. He died in the veterinary hospital. I was nearly in tears each time I took him in for his shots. He was having convulsions every half-minute. The vet sent me a note of sympathy after it was over.

“Arlen finally married Harry a couple of weeks ago at the Unitarian Church on the hill. The five-minute ceremony was held in the back courtyard with a panoramic view of the Bay Area as a backdrop. The minister read a Shakespeare love sonnet that Harry had chosen. Only fifteen or so people were present. Arlen is working now—as a file clerk. She’s unhappy because she’s clearly not as efficient as another girl they’ve just hired. Reminds me of you and your anxieties working at the V.A.

“And what’s new with you? (As I’m writing this I’m wondering if you’re even with us anymore. Maybe after our last phone marathon, you died of shock when your March bill arrived.)”

Arlen had gone back to Cal to finish her B.A. and get an elementary school teaching credential because her ex-husband, who’d left her for another woman and was now Vice Chancellor of one of the branches of U.C., gave her no alimony, only child support. So when their kids Jeff and Karen left for college, Arlen would be on her on. In group therapy at Cowell Hospital, where I’d seen Dr. C and Dr. F, she met Harry, who was seventeen years her junior and working on a Ph.D. in German Philology. She did earn a teaching credential, but decided belatedly she wasn’t cut out for the job—and wound up doing secretarial work instead.

Just like my faces, I started out drawing realistic depictions that soon became more whimsical and abstract.

While I began by drawing realistic faces from my imagination, they quickly became more stylized and eventually looser and more minimalistic as I continued to explore possibilities.

One day, as I was considering subjects for my art classes to draw, it occurred to me that I now had the skill to depict the fairy tale figures I couldn’t as a child (to my own satisfaction, at least—except in profile). So with pen and India ink I began to draw fanciful female characters that became more abstract as I went along, some of them even a little risqué. I designed a card with an angel at Christmas and started doodling animals, as well. Then I tried to market packages of my work as cards in a local shop but didn’t have any success. I also created a nude calendar, but that I never worked up the nerve to try to sell. I went through a number of artistic phases in rapid succession, beginning with realistic images that quickly became stylized and eventually abstract—important stages for me to go through because, perfectionist that I was, I’d always been meticulous in my drawing and bound by the literal. I needed both to explore a looser style and to exercise my pictorial imagination.

I couldn’t resist an inclination to push the envelope towards whimsy—tilting the neck at an improbable angle and drawing a tortuous root on the end of the rose, which I eventually decided to lop off.