“Cameron, aging painting instructor and chairman, was debonair and chatty, adept at drawing you unwittingly into his little conspiracies against whomever he happened to be annoyed with.

“Miriam, art historian, was diminutive, brittle, and emphatic. She went around with the air of controlled ill-temper of someone whose shoes pinch. She had a snug cap of fair hair and a hooked nose—and Seely found her intimidating, except during faculty meetings, when she had a lot of sandwich between her teeth. Seely supposed she’d resented having had to play second fiddle in the Art History Department for years, so now that the first fiddle was on sabbatical, she was stridently determined to be heard.

“Marcus, at 40, was the enfant terrible of the department—shy, foulmouthed, antic, volatile. He wore purple sneakers, played in a rock band, and was Cameron’s unruly protégé. He ducked his head and his eyes darted in all directions but yours in a conversation, and he was a terrific art snob now that his photographs were exhibited the best museums.

“George was the invisible sculptor. An indifferent artist and teacher, people said, he blinked naively behind lenses that doubled the size of his eyes, looking forever like some innocuous alien. No one seemed able to muster much feeling about him one way or the other, except occasional outrage that he had tenure.”

This Art Department provided my initiation into the world of office politics. The first time I realized what I was up against was when a distinguished Italian sculptor came to the college to give a series of lectures. Because he’d been invited by George, without the approval of the rest of the faculty, they treated this aging dignitary with studied coldness. (Before he left, he graciously gave me an original etching for my help.) I don’t know that I would have chosen to stay on if I hadn’t managed to convince myself that as a lowly secretary, I could fly beneath the radar, clear of faculty’s squabbles and intrigues. What I didn’t know until the end of my first semester there was that I’d been on an administration higher-up’s radar screen the whole time.

No less than the Vice President of the college had set out to get me fired. This was a political move, I eventually figured out. The clericals’ union had set down some guidelines—not requirements, though the VP pretended they were—for level-three secretaries, including that they be able to type 65 words a minute. Now that the shop steward had resigned, the Vice President hoped to create turmoil wherever he could, spuriously blaming the union, so they would be voted out. When I finally understood what was going on, I appealed to Local 29, which intervened on my behalf, sending a representative to meet with the Vice President. I don’t know what they said to him, but they saved my job—and a couple of years later I learned, to my secret satisfaction, that the Vice President himself was fired.

As much as I’d like to believe in karma as a mechanism for justice from one incarnation the next, I can’t quite firm up the conviction, but what I can believe—what I’ve witnessed time and time again—is karma at work in this life.

Barbara, a client of my mother’s, was leaving her position as secretary of the Art Department at Tiburon College and put in a good word for me when I applied for the job. I’d been living hand-to-mouth on minimum wage—doing everything from wok demonstrations (slinging fried rice) at Handyman and Sears to housekeeping gigs that involved chores like washing windows in the rain—so I had every digit crossed on the way to my interview. When I took the typing test, however, my hands shook so badly I couldn’t even keep them on the right row of keys. After the timer went off, I saw I’d invented a new alphabet with a large smattering of numerals, more impenetrable even than Russian. I collapsed on the lawn in front of the administration building and cried. But a week later I found out that Cameron had hired me anyway. “Actually, there isn’t all that much typing to do,” he told me later in person with an airy wave of his clawed hand.

He was an elderly man with long, protruding ears that looked rather spectacularly pink with the sun shining through them. A few strands of hair were combed across his barren head from far left to far right, and the pale bristly goatee that encircled his mouth reminded Seely of a vegetable brush. He also had, she noticed with some alarm, a huge black, witchy thumbnail that he was using as a letter opener.

“So! You’re interested in Barbara’s position?” he began in an aggrieved tone, as though she were responsible for Barbara’s leaving. She saw or guessed that he was irritated by the necessity of meeting with her—that he simply wanted the perfect secretary delivered to him and considered having to select her himself a bother and an imposition. After a fussy little gesture over the paisley scarf he wore around his neck, he leaned forward with a sigh of resignation and sank his chin in his hand, apparently waiting for Seely to conduct her own interview. She blinked and gulped, inadvertently grabbing her stomach, where her panic had landed. Then she began, in an admirably calm and measured voice, which only cracked twice, to do just that.

“You’re probably wondering about my qualifications…”

“Last night we celebrated Carolyn’s birthday—three ailing females, languishing on the mattress-sofa, swapping flu germs—while Steve, her boyfriend, served us dinner.

“’Well, you’ve got three choices,’ he announced. ‘B & M beans, boiled hot dogs, or canned spaghetti.’ Then he brought out a platter of chicken in a cream and wine sauce.

“‘You know, a camper horned in on our campsite late last night,’ said Carolyn.

“’Yeah, they woke us up playing reveille,’ said Steve.

“’They caroused and yelled, ‘Kill the commies’—and kept us awake all night long. Steve and I huddled in our tent plotting our revenge.’

“’You should have put tacks under their wheels,’ suggested Susan.

“’But that would have been tactless,’ shrugged Steve.

“’Why not peanut butter in their carburetor…or tomato juice in their fuel tank?’ I offered.

“’What?’ cried, Carolyn. ‘And waste all that food?’

“When Steve finally brought out the birthday cake—with chocolate frosting and candy sprinkles—Carolyn tried to blow out the candles with a hair dryer for Steve’s sake, so he wouldn’t get sick too, but accidentally yanked it out of the wall and missed the last two candles. So much for birthday wishes.”

                                                                              …

Living with two artists, as I’ve said, was a revelation to me. Until I met them, I hadn’t realized how stimulating creative people could be, which made me feel for the first time that maybe I had something to offer as well. Until then I’d imagined that, not being supremely intellectual—which was my father’s standard—I couldn’t expect to be interesting and engaging to anyone else.

About the time I joined the Sierra Club Singles, I began to write some of my autobiographical vignettes in the third person, imagining that I would eventually develop them into short stories or a novel. I named my protagonist Seely, short for Selena, meaning “moon.” (Originally, I was going to call her Celie, for Celine, until I discovered it meant “blind”—not so inappropo after all, as events would prove.)

It was a misty morning at Barnacle Beach. Seely felt ridiculously overdressed in her heavy down jacket and ponderous backpack, straggling behind hikers in jogging shorts, their only encumbrance the Nikes strung around their necks. She had come prepared for any weather, her pockets stuffed with mittens and earmuffs. At the moment, however, she wore a broad-brimmed, floppy straw hat which the kleptomaniac wind kept trying to swipe off her head; she had to pull it so far down over her eyebrows to secure it that she could only see a few feet in front of her, unless she craned her head back, which she did until she got a painful crick.

A roly-poly man named Jason, who had squarish teeth with great gaps between them—his smile reminded her of washcloths strung out on a clothesline—escorted her along the water line. He told her he was an insurance loss-prevention agent.

“I go to construction sites—” he began.

“And stand below and catch anyone who falls off?” Seely suggested.

“No, actually, I have a net,” he grinned.

After a short distance they came to a huge jag of rock that angled down into the water and blocked their path. It was steep and unscalable, so there was nothing to be done but dash around it during the ebb of a wave. Seely, who had rolled her jeans up to her thighs and tied her bulky jacket around her waist, made a concerted scramble, but emerged with soggy cuffs and jacket tails.

On the other side, the cliff was eroded to form enormous columns, like a vast set of organ pipes. The two of them clambered up the bank and squeezed themselves into the hollows between the pillars, which were perfectly round, covered with moss, and tunneled up fifty feet. Jason had some difficulty prying himself out again, but, thanks to Seely’s calm cliffside manner, didn’t get unduly alarmed about his predicament.

Everywhere across the sand, bits of scarlet seaweed were strewn like autumn leaves. Seely found a long, rubbery piece of seaweed that looked like a donkey’s tail. When she brandished it like a whip, Jason roared, “If you hit me with that, I’ll yell for kelp!” Just then, a particularly wily wave ambushed them from the side and sent them tumbling over each other to escape its foamy clutches.

“Last night, coming back from disco class with Susan, I yelled on the top landing that it was hopeless—I was never going to find a job I liked—and I dived halfway out the open window, flailing my arms and leg (the other foot planted firmly on the ground).

“’I’m going to end it all,’ I wailed.

“’You can’t do that yet!’ Susan cried, dragging me back by the coattails. ‘You haven’t paid your part of the phone bill!’

                                                                             …

“This evening, outside my window, I hear the sounds of the city showering—the first time since I moved to Berkeley. Nearer at hand, I fancy a bird inhabits the rain gutter, it chirps so musically with trickling water at the corner beyond my desk. I have an unimpeded view, across several back lots, of a neighbor watching TV with his feet propped up on something on the one…two…three…seventh floor. Mornings I see him doing push-ups, his head bobbing rhythmically above the projection of his balcony, like something in a carnival target-shoot booth. Singing gaily, I dress in front of him, hoping that, despite the distance, he can still distinguish my secondary sex characteristics. Who knows? Maybe if I sing loud and long enough, he’ll buy opera glasses.”

As I mention earlier in Callie’s Ragbag, I was in my twenties when I wandered into a shop, searching for books for my classroom, and happened upon Where the Wild Things Are. When I got to the last line, it went right through me—whomp!—hit bedrock. I had to stand there awhile, fighting back tears, trying to compose myself. That was the moment, I’ve always known, that my wish to write children’s books took root. Some time later—weeks?…months?… I sat down with a pencil, munched on the end of it a while—but couldn’t come up with a single idea. “Eventually,” as I wrote in my long bio, “I concluded that I couldn’t write fiction and turned to journaling instead, imagining that maybe I could become a diarist like Anais Nin—though without a famous paramour like Henry Miller, I had my doubts that anyone would ever read my work.”

Now as I cast around in my mind for more ways to earn a living, I came up with the idea of teaching a mini-course I’d call “The Journal as Art.” As an experiment, I advertised it in the Bay Guardian as free 4-week course—and attracted a handful of students, only to find that it wasn’t a comfortable fit for me because I was too insecure about my own opinions to edit and critique other people’s work. But Vitalee, a newly arrived New Yorker—who’d just broken up with the boyfriend she’d traveled across the country with—became a new (and now old) friend and a month later, along with my roommate Susan, we were taking disco dancing lessons together.