How to make your eggs behave

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Betty Crocker was a ubiquitous invented character who taught things like how to make your eggs behave. She taught them, but I didn’t learn. Housekeeping was not my forte. I pushed a broom once for a job at a ranch. Not for one month or one year. No, once. Then I peeled and sliced potatoes three times a day and was pretty good at that.

The foreman was named Red and his wife was Maxine. She woke me at 4 A.M. each day. Then we fed 65 seasonal guys from nearby Reservations. While they were called “Indians,” I was called “Yankee” and was 16. One day, I drove to the Post Office, well, just a little bit into the Post Office, breaking some U.S. Government glass. It was my first time driving a stick and my last day employed at the ranch.

That’s how I got to San Francisco. Hippies came to The Haight (the Haight-Ashbury) to inhale and indulge. Cops came to contain or arrest. Reporters came to write it up with speed, and I do mean with speed. Photographers came loaded with film, or just loaded. If you could have been there, you would have found 100,000 hippies plus sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and one former kitchen girl on the lam.

I became a staff writer at the bottom of Time Magazine, then a freelance writer, and then a ghost. Magazines mattered then and the internet was just being born. I never got into drugs. But I kept writing — under the influence of wit, grit, grief and love. I still am writing under their influence each day. I would fail at retirement.

Fyi, Mark Twain said writing is easy; you just have to cut out the wrong words.

Photo by Jasmin Egger on Unsplash