MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

Me & Juan Bautista DeAnza

by Rod Amis

Reprinted from November, 1997

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Two blocks from my flat, as the crows fly, there is a lake. Spanish explorer Juan Bautista DeAnza camped there on 27 March, 1776. Today, the 19th Avenue off-route from the Golden Gate Bridge is, most unfortunately, above it. As are tennis courts.

Thus, what would otherwise be a bucolic setting at which to write this week's note is instead marred by all the vestiges of the go-go civilization from which this park was meant to provide respite. Still, we urbanites, desperate for any contact with "Nature," flock here. The ducks, too, seem to have become inured to the noise level...

Automobiles are noisy, dangerous, messy, destructive monstrousities which should be eradicated from this earth!

I have always hated cars. Probably always will.

One of my first memories of life in these United States harkens back to when I was six years old. I had been in this country less than three months when a reckless driver careened around a corner, as I was crossing the street in front of my parents' house, and sent me flying through the air(with the greatest of ease!)

I was informed of this latter, as I was immediately rendered unconscious by the impact...

When I awakened, it was to discover that I could no longer walk. The sum total of my miseries was now complete.

I had been taken from Bermuda, and a dream life with my grandparents, to live with two loud strangers who I barely knew, but who claimed me as their own. I had broken out in hives upon setting foot in America. I had gotten lost on the way home from school --- unfamiliar as I was with my new "home" --- and when a helpful shopkeeper offered to assist me in finding out where I lived I COULD NOT SUPPLY MY PARENTS' NAMES. All I knew of what they were called was "Ma" and "Da." When the shopkeeper asked, wisely thinking he could ascertain the needed information using this tack, what my own name was, I grew hysterical. The name they had just assigned me at this school was nothing like the name I'd been called for all the days of my life! AND NOW, scant months later, this: I was helpless, an invalid. Why had I been brought to this country to be tortured? Why had they just not killed me outright, banged my child head against a concrete wall and been done with it?

I am sure your memories of childhood are equally wonderful...

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