everyone knows it's wendy

Wendy and her son Kyle, 1994.

                                                

I was born in Los Angeles and we lived in Whittier. My dad was a high school teacher and my mom was a preschool teacher. My dad was originally from Dallas and my mom grew up in New York. They met at UCLA in the 1940s and got married in 1948. They were members of the Communist Party. By the 1950s, my dad refused to sign the loyalty oath and he was black listed from teaching for a long time. He worked in a slaughterhouse for awhile and did other odd jobs.

We moved to South Massachusetts where my dad was a teaching at Mount Holyoke. He had an affair with a student. That was a big scandal in 1965 in that small town! After that my parents got divorced. One of the memories I have of my dad is going to a protest with him and singing We Shall Overcome. By then he had moved to New York and was teaching at Hunter College. He was always on the side of the students and fought the administration. He was very active in the professors' union at Hunter. Eventually he got his phD at USC. My dad wasn’t a good husband, but he was a good human being. 

Well, I can see a person's character beyond the worst thing they’ve ever done. 

In 1967 my mom remarried and we moved to Berkeley. She got a job running a child study center at UC Berkeley. I was in the first integrated class at Oxford Elementary in 1968. By the 4th grade, kids were being bussed from the hills to the flats, as a part of school integration. I went to Berkeley High, class of 1978. 

In high school I was into performing arts and played in a band. I hung out on the steps of the Community Theater. The weed was so lightweight in those days. I got good grades and did my homework, even though I was stoned most of the time. Back then, black kids and white kids didn’t hang out together. I was in a chamber wind ensemble and took private lessons. I was really into my music, which is kind of what saved me. I was overwhelmed by the size of the school and a lot of other things. I was afraid to use the bathroom because there were no doors on the stalls and graffiti everywhere. I would go use the bathroom at Hink's department store.

I was on the Model School A college prep track program. In 9th grade, i wrote a paper about Che Guevara. who else? Oh, i love Bell Hooks! I've read a lot of stuff and certain things that resonated with me. I like reading about the Harlem Renaissance. I love James Baldwin. I think he’s an American treasure. 

After high school I went to Mills. It was nice because there were no men trying to dominate the conversation. I first majored in music then I switched to European history. After graduation, i worked in retail management and I hated that. I went back to school and got my master’s in ECE. 

I loved Edy’s! my favorite thing there was the Dutch Girl. I used to score my weed from a dude outside Arinell’s pizza. I would laugh because it was cheap and full of stems. I know I must sound like such a geezer….well, back in my day….haha! 

Back then,  I was in a band called Bay Area Wind Symphony. We did a lot of shows around the bay. 

I got married in 1990 and I had a baby in 1992. I finished my master’s in 1993. Then we had another baby. We lived in Oregon for a few years, then we moved to a shitty suburb of Chicago. My husband got a job in Orange County, so we moved back to California. 

BY that time, I worked as a teacher at a Montessori school. WE separated in 1999 when the kids were…3 and 5 years old. HE was a very attractive, charming man. He became addicted to meth and got into dealing. THen he got sick with AIDS and died. He was only 49 at the time and the kids were in high school. One day he had gone to the emergency room with an eye infection. That's when he got tested and he had full blown AiDS. It all happened so fast and within two weeks he was gone. Yeah, I took care of him. His parents were doing this tough love thing and I couldn’t stand that. 

I tried to feed him, I shaved him. I sat on his bed, held his hand, and talked to him. No one told me he was dying, but i figured it out. Yes, he was prescribed dilaudid because he was in a lot of pain. I learned a lot about forgiveness through that experience, even though it was very hard. 

Well, I think holding on to resentment is like letting someone live rent free in your head. I’m pretty good at loving people unconditionally. When my dad died in 1999, he said the same thing -  that he had regrets. My mom didn’t like my ex, so she wasn’t very helpful as I was going through that.

It wasn’t easy. My daughter went to a progressive, small boarding school in Massachusetts. She came back for her dad’s memorial service and went to college in Vermont. She's a ceramicist now and she lives in Oakland. My son lives with me. He’s on the spectrum, but he’s high functioning. 

I think my appreciation of black people and culture was nurtured in me through my dad. I would visit my dad in New York and he’d take me to see all these jazz luminaries. He was also very political. Once he was back in California, he lived in Turlock for a short time. He took me on a farm worker’s march in Delano. I think my sense of social justice came from him. My father was a speech professor. He told me about the Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron. His specialty was expression in speech pathology. He designed and taught a Duke Ellington course at the Frahm Institute in San Francisco. He was incredibly well-versed in the language of jazz. 

America is complicated. I don’t want to give up hope, but at the same time why is this shit still happening? Why don’t white people listen and shut up? We don’t listen, we just want to take over the conversation. I don’t think this is anything new. I don’t know about wokeness. It can be misguided, yes. If people listen, that can be the most effective thing. I think white people feel guilty, feel blamed, and that’s not the point. 

I remember being aware of that. I was in a feminist collective at Mills for awhile. There was a lot of pettiness between the straight and queer women. No, there were no women of color in that group. Back then, Mills didn’t do much to make it accessible to other women. 

I feel a glimmer of hope even though I also expect to be disappointed. I definitely feel less gloomy now than i was 2 years ago. I just read today that Oklahoma banned abortion. What the fuck is going on?! 

What is wrong with an America where you have to be some kind of phenom if you’re not white to be taken seriously? Yes, I think standardized tests should be eliminated. They're totally biased. There's one question about being on a sailboat. What if you’ve never been on a sailboat? I once did a social science experiment in school where I was asked questions that only black people could answer. What is mojo? I wrote ‘black magic’.  What is greezin? I remember that because i didn’t know those words. I learned greezin means ‘eating’. 

I love kids and i love music. I love my rats. Chili is cuddling with me right now. She's my favorite, but don’t tell the others. I'm in a place in my life where I'm done with men. It took me a long to get there. I'm lonely, but it doesn’t scare me like it used to. There's a difference between loneliness and being lonely. 

As fucked over as i have been, I still believe in the redemptive power of love. I only knew how to relate to men by flirting. I started to deprogram myself of that around 40 and now, I don’t do it at all. Even if i think a dude is cute, I won’t do that anymore. My mom’s values were that it was important to her to be pretty and flirtatious. By the time she was 60 she said. ‘ I’m no longer the prettiest girl at the party.’ I had a hard time with that. Growing up, i felt like her love was conditional - I had to look a certain way and be accomplished a certain way. One thing I did differently was to see my children for who they are. Whoever you are is okay. I’m happy that my daughter is an artist. To me, that’s a good choice.