July 2, 2024 by Born To Organize

And So it Goes

Earlier this year, a then-anonymous reader commented on a post written over ten years ago. She found the piece about my formative years in Millbrae by searching: “Millbrae behind the tracks 1970’s.” She added the name Cindy.

I didn’t remember Cindy by name at first. We had been friends for a year before heading to different high schools. Shortly after, our family moved to Santa Clara County. After she got in touch, we wrote back and forth by email before connecting on Facebook.

Cindy shared:

“You will not believe how I came across you! I was reading a biography of Mary Martin, and I recalled watching Peter Pan on TV when I spent the night with you and your sister at your apartment in Jr. High. The neighborhood struck me. I didn’t know the area “behind the tracks.” It’s not that I was living in the high end of Millbrae by any means, but I was surprised by what I saw. So, while reading the book and remembering that evening, I thought of you.”

“While reading your article, I got chills when you mentioned a shy, freckle-faced girl at the end. I knew it! I’m so happy to find you well and happy!”

We’ve been trading memories of our brief friendship, each of us remembering small details. I remembered that she had an old cat and a new puppy. I’ve always loved animals but we weren’t allowed to have pets in our rented apartment. Visiting them at her house would have been a treat.

We attended a party on New Year’s Eve at Cindy’s house, perhaps the first of its kind my protective mother let us attend. Cindy shared a memory of a sleepover at her place when we heard a noise and she called the police. It amounted to nothing, but those sorts of memories live on. My sister Sharon, who is just a year younger, can’t remember anything from this time. I wish I could remember more.

Cindy also shared parts of her early life that I never knew, including the trauma of unfit parents, time in an orphanage, and eventually, in foster care. She had a positive experience in the orphanage, including hot meals, warm pajamas, kids to play with, and toys, none of which she had with her birth parents. By the time we met, she was living in a warm and caring environment with her foster mother, though her foster dad died when she was a young girl. That may have been what brought us together all those years ago, though any chance of capturing that memory seems elusive.

I wish the plethora of pleasant memories could bury the old ones, but they don’t. We are the product of our experiences and how we use them to maneuver through a complex world. Publishing Train Tracks of My Youth rekindled a long-forgotten friendship with a friend who survived her own trauma, and thrived.

And so it goes.

You can read the full post Train Tracks of My Youth here.

December 30, 2013 by Born To Organize

Millbrae: Train Tracks of my Youth

I just read an uplifting post at Teddy and Tottie, a family enjoying themselves and the holidays.

Color me green with envy. It’s not that I had a bad holiday. To the contrary, I have two great sons, four adorable cats and a husband who is all you could ask for in a partner. I have extraordinary friends and a comfortable life. I want for nothing.

Depression, however, colors things grey. It tosses a blanket over the light and strips your energy. It paints things with a lackluster brush. We’re well acquainted, depression and me, but we’re not friends. Regardless, it shows up each year and settles in for a while.

The triggers are all too familiar, but since I can’t change the past, cancel the holidays or renegotiate the date on my mother’s death certificate, I simply work at remaining aware and try to be kind to myself.

We headed to The City for a family outing this week on a train that travels through Millbrae. When our train made the scheduled stop at the Millbrae station and without a hint of diplomacy, my old acquaintance took a seat in the invisible row of my past. Depression cozied up to my cerebral cortex and made himself comfortable.

And so it goes.

I wrote the following piece in long-hand while riding the same train several years ago. It flowed out of my pores and helps explain the sorrow.

If you suffer seasonal depression, my heart goes out to you. Let’s continue together to toss that blanket aside once and for all.

Train Tracks of my Youth

Standing on the Millbrae platform of a train bound for San Jose, memories dribbled out of me like a wound that won’t quite heal. The longer I stood, the sadder I felt, heavy, burdened, questioning as I stared down the train tracks of my youth.

Our family moved to Millbrae in 1968. My father succumbed to lung cancer a year later, victim to his habit of smoking hand-rolled, unfiltered Player cigarettes. He was 54. What should have been a temporary residence on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks became our home for 7 years.

After our father died, Mom found work in the City and rode those tracks north each day. We waited for her to come home at night, listening for the evening train. Having lost one parent, it suddenly seemed feasible that we could lose the other. The relief was palpable when she walked in the door. I remember the smell of her suede cape, her cool, soft cheek and the undeniable release of fear for another day.

We crossed those tracks daily to attend school, the not-so-subtle border between the slums of Millbrae and the mostly white, affluent hills of this small community. A boy named Dwight once caught up to me as I walked home alone on those tracks, charming and polite, he was tall, dark-skinned and interested in me, a potent combination at any age . But he was to appear a few weeks later at our bus stop, arms bleeding, flogged by his father for some unknown infraction. Confused and horrified, I felt very alone. Shortly thereafter his family moved.

We spent our summer on our side of the tracks playing kick the can and hanging out at an apartment pool reading discarded issues of Mad magazine. I was at home with our crowd on Garden Lane, the have-nots who didn’t need to explain. I played with a boy named Robert, our champion player, his friend Scott and my sister Sharon among others. There was a girl from Puerto Rico named Teresa who exuded sex appeal from every pore. She knew a lot more about boys then I did and got to kiss the one I had a crush on.

We survived those years dodging drugs and unwanted pregnancies and went on to graduate from college. But I would be lying if I said we made it through unscathed. For in that rough-and-tumble neighborhood on a street called Garden Lane I saw things that I still don’t really understand: the cries of a woman beaten by her boyfriend; the squawk of her parrot, also agitated and scared; the sight of a father beating his four-year old with a switch; and the cruelty of a boy exploding a frog with a firecracker before my devastated eyes.

Garden Lane was a place of loss and violence, pain and sorrow, first crushes and the dawning sexuality of a shy, freckle-faced girl. The train tracks remain but Garden Lane is gone, obliterated by tractors and wrecking balls to make way for a BART station in its place. Plowed under but not forgotten, it continues to parallel the train tracks of my youth.

August 2, 2013 by Born To Organize

Two Letters

Alys

Dear Reader,

We create a ‘contract’ of sorts when we publish a regular blog. My unwritten contract with you says that when you log on, you can expect to find a post about gardening, crafting, crafty gardening and cats, delivered with a mostly light heart. So, the following letter, written to my dad who died when I was 9 has a more somber tone and I wanted to let you know that upfront. If this is not your thing, please read no further. Stop by next week for the usual garden antics.

With love and gratitude for your readership and support.

Alys

Dear Daddy,

This is one of those letters you never actually send, though I would if I could. You left an unimaginable void in our hearts when you died on a day just like today. It was hot, strangely still and ultimately surreal. How could you have been here one minute, then gone the next? I walked in on mom the day you died and I knew. She was kneeling on the floor tearing up your letters though I never fully understood why. She had her reasons and in the end it doesn’t really matter.

You would be amazed what can happen to a letter these days. When I hit a button on an electronic box called a computer, this letter will travel through something called the internet. Once sent, you can’t tear it up, burn it, or control it in any way. Lovers and politicians learned this the hard way. It’s what they called a double-edged sword in your day.

I love you so much, and was really, really, really sad when you died. As you know, I was only 9 so I didn’t have the resources to understand what was going on. Mom did her best, but she struggled too. We all missed you terribly. I’m crying now as I write this, all these years later, as at times I remain stuck in the painful past.

Please know, that you would be proud of your legacy. Your girls grew up and got college degrees, something that was really important to you. It was your reason for moving the family to California in the first place. We all love and nurture animals as you did, and yours-truly is a gardener! Can you believe it?

I have special memories of our beautiful London garden. You hauled rocks in a wheelbarrow to build a small ‘creek’ down the middle of the yard. It gathered run-off from rain and melting snow and filled my imagination with happy moments. Your grew snapdragons near the back door, and tomatoes during the hot days of summer. Sometimes people would meet you at the nursery where you worked and ask to come by to see your garden. I was so proud of you.

When we left Canada for what you hoped would be a better life for your girls, the new homeowners weren’t interested in keeping up your garden. You were hugely disappointed. I certainly would be. Of course the plan was a new home and a new garden in sunny California. We arrived in November of 1966 to less than favorable circumstances. The man who hired you to run his nursery had since filed bankruptcy. You supported our family with your savings, then sold your beloved coin collection to make ends meet. It was a difficult time for all of us. I can’t imagine as a parent how hard that must have been for you.

By the end of 1967 things were finally turning around. Our family moved to Millbrae where you landed a job at a local garden nursery. We lived in a rental, but at last could put down roots. The following Christmas, what we thought was the flu turned out to be lung cancer. The holidays were never the same.

I turn 54 this October, the same age you were when a cruel and ravishing cancer stripped you of your life. Your physical suffering was finally at an end on that hot, August day, but my struggles had just begun. Life doesn’t come with guarantees.

I want to thank you for your gifts of life and affection. Each of your daughters carries you in her own way. I think you would be proud of us, as we are of you.

My wish today as I hit the ‘send button’ would be for you to know that we all grew up, lived productive lives and that we carry you in our hearts, always. When I reach toward the earth, to tumble a seed or pull out a weed, I think of you.

Your loving daughter,