KINSHIP

Meryl came from a bustling, affluent family, as I’ve said, the fourth of six kids. Her father and grandfather were prominent Bay Area architects; her mother had studied architecture too but given up a career to raise her children. I never knew whether Meryl wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps, but I did know she had a lot of frustrated creative energy. While her older brother was groomed as the heir apparent to the family firm, I didn’t see her gifts being taken seriously at all.

Her family owned a beautiful stretch of land, north along the coast, with a cove and redwood forest, as well as some acreage inland, along a river. On a few occasions I was invited along. We kids slept in a separate bunkhouse; the family ate dinners of fresh abalone we’d just collected and artichokes, which I’d never had before, and sang together around the stone fireplace. There were horses, a tennis court—I even helped build an outdoor bowling alley (which was when I developed a brief crush on Meryl’s younger brother). Now that we were older, Meryl and I sometimes drove up to the “ranch” ourselves and slept in the “Moon Viewing,“ her parents’ bedroom—a cozy, hexagonal cabin with skylights you could see the stars through before you fell asleep.

After high school, she’d floundered for a while, depressed and adrift—went to UC Davis, where she trained a pig for credit, dabbled in courses at California Arts and Crafts, and finally decided to go for a Master’s in Botany at Chico State.

During these same years I was floundering too. What drew us together, I’ve always believed, was a feeling of kinship, of sympathy and identification. In her struggles as an artist and her grapplings with existential issues, I saw my own.