Soon after we moved to Marin County in 1965 I met Ellen, the sister I never had, my soul friend. We were not similar – we came from very different families – but we agreed about what was important: our shared goal was to figure out existence. We have each continued to explore the question through different relationships and in different areas and for nearly fifty years, and we are still in touch and in general agreement.

My other friend was Kit. Kit and I were not metaphysical. What we shared was creative energy, math aptitude, and similar families. I thought hers was more artistic (her Mom threw pots and wore denim and had tangled silver hair) and mine was more technical (my renaissance dad was an engineer, after all, and taught us that if man built it then man could fix it).

Our families socialized. Our dads liked one another and our younger sibs were friends. Pairs of us got into scuba diving, camping, majoring in landscape architecture. It was a satisfactory family friendship.

I think Kit is around here but I’m not in touch with her. I remember hearing she married and had a child; I can’t recall anything else. Funny how I lost her. We had some good times, creating our district-wide literary magazine, camping in Yosemite, even hanging around at UCSD, which is where she went to college and I visited her.

But mostly what I remember are her plump relaxed hands, her serene attitude, how surprising it was that she joined Rick and Nick and me in disrupting Trigonometry class. And I recall weekday afternoons when we’d hit Petrini’s on our way from school to Kit’s house. We bought raw mushrooms and Wampum corn chips. Wampum were made by Laura Scudders and appreciated for their thick crunchy structure.

When we got to Kit’s house we cleaned the mushrooms, trimmed their stem edges, and sliced them about a quarter inch thick. We sandwiched a mushroom slice between two corn chips and snacked. The earthiness mixed with the salt and the mealiness of the corn to create an exquisite mash of flavors. We felt satisfied and sophisticated.