Ms. Grabel writes of herself: “Now I am a poet, an illustrator, and I teach Language Arts to incarcerated teenage girls at Rosemont School & Rehabilitation Center. I also teach poetry and spoken word arts throughout the Portland and surrounding public school districts.”

Potato Chips on Haight
I was 15 in 1966 and 1967. It was a time of Definitive Social Flux. And even at my podunk high school in Stockton , only 90 miles from San Francisco , there was a buzz about the hippies, the Haight, the Be-ins, the Jefferson Airplane, the Summer of Love. Not even allowed to buy record albums because my father considered the new music to be “jungle music,” I knew any inclinations I had toward wearing jeans and beads, going braless, espousing freedom had to be covert.

Luckily, I went to a Jewish summer camp that year—in the Santa Cruz Mountains , a glorious landscape. The camp was notoriously progressive. There were all these hip city kids from San Francisco and L.A.

There was a boy from San Francisco named Cary Love who liked me. Cary Love.

“Is that your real name?” was the first thing I asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“No,” I said. “That's not really your real name, is it?”

“Yes it is,” he said.

Cary Love started telling us all about San Francisco . It was all true, he said. Everything everyone said about the hippies and be-ins and Jerry Garcia and the Jefferson Airplane and marijuana was true. It was all wild and all fabulous. I lapped up Cary Love's stories like puddles of chocolate sauce in the bottom of the bowl.

“Wow,” was all I could think or say.

In late September of my 15th year, my mother and my brother and my sister and I drove to San Francisco one day to look at hippies. We were walking down Haight Street when a group of shabby-looking long-haired girls with an astonishing number of necklaces offered my mom and me some potato chips from a bag they thrust in our faces. Before I could even refuse them, my mother grabbed my arm and whispered loudly in my ear, “Don't take any. They might be filled with drugs.”

That next summer, the summer I turned 16, I went to Seattle to visit my cousins for a month and French-kissed hard and hot for a sustained period of time for the first time in my life. I also gained 13 pounds eating big bowls of buttered egg noodles for midnight snacks with my cousins almost every night for that whole month, which seemed to cancel everything out.

And then I went home and got all A's so I could go to college and become something that required a big brain in math, which I thought I had, but it turned out I didn't—at least not at Stanford.

Most adults were disappointing to me then, I remember, except for the mother of my good friend Joan. Joan's mother was an artist. Well, she was a housewife, but she painted and sculpted and decorated so beautifully in her spare time that her house took my breath away. Her ability to create sumptuous, glittering, breathtaking beauty wowed me. It was as good as the time I saw Fabian or Ann-Margaret on my block. Or the time I saw Robin Williams at the coffee place and realized he was only about as tall as a kitchen chair.

When I walked into Joan's house, I felt like I was putting on a magic cloak. The colors, the loveliness made my skin feel different, my face feel different. Joan's mother made these light fixtures, for instance, that were hanging globes of clear maché, the bulbs glowing through glued-on jewels, the chains gold and sagely glimmering. Those light fixtures seemed to sustain intelligent life. I never wanted to leave that house. Ever.

I never told my friend Joan's mother how I felt about her. Now 40 years have passed and she's become very good friends with my mother. There have been tragedies in her life. In fact, the only time I've been to her house these later years has been for funerals.

The house was still magnificent.

I too became an artist. I dumped the math early.