Looking back on it now, I know there’s a momentum to life that no one warned me about. Teachers and TV shows and even my parents told me not to pressure myself, that there would be plenty of time to make up my mind about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to do it with. That wasn’t true.

It turned out there was a nesting urge that started to peak when we got out of Cal. Maybe it was aggravated by the post-college identity crisis – that pressure about going to (real) work that kept so many of our fellows enrolled in school as long as possible – but there was a tendency at 21 or 22 to settle into an acknowledged marital-type relationship. And there was a likelihood after that of babies. Or a baby got started and then a marriage took place. Either way a lot of us found ourselves married to someone we didn’t love as much as either of us wished, parenting people who taught us ambivalence. I married Carol. We birthed Jessica and Jeremy.

In the course of all this we had to earn a living, and we had less than useful college degrees. Carol decided she was an artist, but an art degree from Cal doesn’t get one anywhere toward making or selling objects. And since I didn’t want to teach, my BA in English was about as helpful as a shadow. I worked in a few bookstores before moving up to the relatively lucrative world of clerk typist in a succession of small San Francisco offices. I managed to make just enough to disqualify us for food stamps or other assistance, but we didn’t mind scraping along then. We agreed to let Carol pursue some crafts for awhile.

She tried silk-screening first. She sold but didn’t make a profit. She moved from that to batik, and her designs were okay, but she didn’t like working with cotton, because it was hard to gauge the color when applied and it was impossible to get all the wax out of the fabric, and she had trouble selling silk. At that point a rational person would have faced facts and moved to another material or maybe even a paying job, but Carol’s opinion was that she wasn’t aiming high enough. She decided to try to raise silkworms and weave her own cloth.

I knew it wouldn’t work. I should have spoken up. We wasted more time and money on that venture than on any other. The facts are that Carol didn’t have the requisite knowledge or patience, and northern California doesn’t have the right climate. The fiasco reminded me of the time she tried to graft hops onto a marijuana root, or would have if she’d managed to grow the hops plants. We’d read that the plants were botanical cousins except that hops was a vine, perennial rather than annual, and legal. If a hops scion is grafted onto marijuana rootstock, you’re supposed to get a long-living trellis vine with all the THC of the root plant. Just think of the beer you could brew; that’s what kept me in it. But the problem was that we couldn’t find any hops plants around. We bought seeds but they have to sit in cold winter ground before they will germinate. We had terra cotta pots of seed-laden soil in our refrigerator for three months, and nothing ever poked up above the dirt.

She was slightly more successful with the silkworms, in that she managed to keep about ten percent of them alive long enough to move into cocoons. But no way was there enough thread produced; all she got was the waste silkfloss that isn’t worth twisting.

Carol gave up trying to make money. It was then her opinion that she should spend her time on our kids and her psyche. Jessica was eight and Jeremy five when Carol began with the first encounter group. In the ensuing 20 years she has explored the Gurdjieffian approach, another scene known to us only as “Henry’s clan,” EST-spinoffs, a few direct-marketing schemes, and now this Portals thing. Each time she attempted to recruit or enroll me and the kids, but that only worked with me the first time, with Jess for one season of Henry, and never for Jer. Each time she attempted to clean and fine-tune our auras as well as her own. It hasn’t worked. Carol always gets something out of it, and that something lasts in some way for anything from a month to a few years. But the programs do nothing for the rest of the family except insert that little distance of incomprehension between her and us.