MAJOR PLAYER

If I’m going to write about my life, I feel it’s only good manners to introduce the major players, starting with my best friend, Ella, whom I met on the Aurelia, a ship that was taking us to Spain years ago to study at the University of Madrid our junior year of college. She was from U.C. Santa Barbara; I was from U.C. Berkeley. (Throughout my blog, vignettes from A Patchwork Memoir—my historic voice—will appear in serif text.)

“We’re ‘housemates,’” I tell people because “roommates” sounds too collegial. And we do live in what was once a house, though eventually it was converted into several apartments, a few of which have stood empty over the years.

We live in an ideal spot—on a shady residential street a half a block from the U.C. Berkeley campus, an area we couldn’t afford in our dreams if it weren’t for rent control. Despite our proximity to downtown, we have deer foraging in our backyard, raccoons climbing the coast live oak overhanging our driveway, and the occasional nocturnal sighting of an opossum or skunk.

Only four or five blocks away is the apartment where I lived with my mom and brother after we moved to California from Minnesota, when I was thirteen—two years after she divorced my father. (Which reminds me of the proverb “Bloom where you’re planted,” but more about that another day.)

One afternoon in my senior year of high school, a friend from art class and I took sketchbooks and charcoal pencils on a leisurely exploration of the neighborhood. And, to our amazement, we happened upon a Normandy village that looked like something straight out of medieval France. A veteran of World War I built it as an homage when he came home from the war, I was told. Now I live just up the block and pass it on my daily walks. So does Ella on her way to work—as a curriculum coordinator at the university.

Serendipitously, it was she who informed me that Maurice Sendak had just agreed to give a series of guest lectures at Cal. She even wangled us an invitation to the reception so I could meet the man who’d inspired me to write and illustrate children’s books.