Prologue

A while back, I posted two memoir snippets about my journey to and arrival in California, 1966 – 1967, without plans to write further. (Links below.) Thinking I’ll do so now, I’ve backed up a bit, to begin where I need to begin.

I lug four boxes up from the grimy basement that is mostly crawl space. Three say “contrib copies” and the fourth, “journals.” My fingers are sooty by the time I get them wiped down. Slotted into cracks like insulation, all the boxes include handwritten letters of yesteryear.

One box contains about 40 poetry reading posters with all the variations on my name: Keuning and Urioste and Pat and Patricia and Dubrava. There’s even one Herrera. None say Pat-Louise. I wrinkle my nose in disgust, stuff those names into an envelope and send them to Carson Reed, who hosts the Denver Poetry scene page and features posters from back in the day.

I seize the opportunity to remind Carson that I’d be happy to replace his beat-up copy of my book with a brand-new never-been-read one. I do have a few left. He’ll decline. He loves that I wrote what he told me to write: “to the only poet I know who’s better than I am.” I never knew what to say for dedications, was happy to take dictation.

Source material: some of the journals

The 36 journals are in one box, letters rubber-banded among them. I know what the journals contain, from the early 60s when they begin through at least the early 80s: he loves me, he loves me not; I love him, I love him not. I am miserable, I am happy. That girl was pathetic in her repetitions, her self-absorption. I wrote in spiral bound, college ruled notebooks, 80 to 150 pages each. In the white heat of youth, I filled one of those a year. In a bad year, notably 1978, I filled three journals. Journaling as a lifeline to grasp when the tidal wave washed over me. By the mid-80s, it took four years to fill a notebook. And then computers. I keep a journal on my laptop but go months without an entry, am more likely now to describe the outer than the inner landscape.

I had an infuriating habit of not writing the year, have to page through half the journals figuring that out. Also, I’d like to remember what that apartment looked like and what I could see out the window, but instead, go on for pages about how I feel about this guy and whether I’m leaving him today or tomorrow or maybe marrying him.

Crisis: I find the journal that ends in September 1966 as I’m arriving in Sacramento and the one that begins in 1968 in Denver. WHAT? A note in the ’68 journal: “I just reread the 1966 -1967 journal and found it nauseating.” So what then? Did you toss it, you idiot? You expect me to build a memoir out of my head? Memory is not to be trusted. I need source material, primary documents, for crissake.

Without the journal, I resort to the letters, put 66-67 in one pile, start reading. This takes hours, but is useful, because, for example, I didn’t recall how fast things happened. Time elongates when you’re young, experiencing so much for the first time. We tend to remember firsts and memory expands to absorb them all. The following were all firsts:

I lived above that liquor store for a month or less and during that time sold encyclopedias for Maryann Carver for five days. I started as a social worker for the welfare department in October 1966. The letters reveal an address change in October as well, so I’d already met Tanya and moved to that sweet old apartment with her. The Levee, a home-grown literary magazine, published the first issue of its second year in October. I’m in the staff list, name misspelled, have a long poem there. The poem’s maudlin, with two typos, one of them hand-corrected before mimeographing. By October I’d become a regular at the communal house where the magazine was produced, the place Sherrie called “hippie heaven.” I’d met David, a fellow social worker, self-proclaimed Marxist Jew and former lieutenant of Mario Savio. All in October 1966.

What then seemed an immense expanse, dissolves now into a blur of days.

Solo Journey, 1966

Next up, Primary Sources: The Letters