J.D.’s Columns

Being Rich       I grew up in a union household where being rich smelled of worker exploitation.  I am old now and my thousand bucks a month Social Security check ensures that I will never be accused of ill-gotten rewards. My daughter and I were recently discussing how diddled we, as members of the working class, were becoming because our leaders are greedy people when she reminded me of how we once felt rich, during the Wendy’s era.       We were living between Petaluma and Point Reyes, northern California, while I took care of an assortment of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, dogs, and poultry, including peacocks, on a couple hundred acres of prime Marin County pasture.       The property was bordered on the north by Red Hill Road that began in Petaluma then snaked up and down through San Francisco’s milk supply and ended up twenty miles west at Point Reyes National Seashore and the big blu...

                              The Executioner’s Fork         Five of us roomed in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the ro...