Where I'm from, and What It Means

I come from the Northern San Joaquin Valley—about 90 miles east of San Francisco. But I was born long before people moved there because they couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area. When it was still “Oklahoma with grapes.” It in fact reminded people of Oklahoma, and many of its denizens came from that part of the country, though we had no distinctive accent or regional identity. Rose Maddox and her brothers came from my hometown, Modesto, and had their first successes there. Wrestling was very popular. (My own forebears came from Iowa and Missouri; the Iowa people originally came from the Palatinate in what’s now Germany, the Missouri folks were from Ireland).


If you looked West, you saw the Coast Range Mountains. If you looked East, you saw the Sierra Nevada, but mostly in the Winter when they were snowcapped. If you looked North or South you saw nothing. It was, after all, the BIG Valley.

When you were lucky enough to go to college there, you usually went into accounting or education. If you had an inclination toward spiritual life, you usually got into Evangelicalism or Catholicism, which is all that was available. That I studied history and theology was weird. Even weirder was my practice of Eastern Orthodox Christianity (picked up in Alaska) and of Zen Buddhism (Boston).

My grandmother (the Missouri one) used to say we were black, based on the foods we liked. Even though we had no particular accent or regional identity.

As one of the rare guys from the Central Valley who went to college (thanks to that GREAT social program called the GI Bill) I observed the people who HAD to go to college because their social class required it, either through class destiny or aspiration, and even back then, I felt extraordinarily free sneaking in the back door like I did. But I recognized, even back then, that being a white male who spoke unaccented American English, helped my “passing.” My family didn’t come to either ceremony, when I got my BA or MA, but it remember going out to dinner with The Ones Who Mattered back then, and feeling extraordinarily free, even then.

And I think my unusual background is responsible for the fact that I snuck by a back door into the gentleman’s profession of publishing, when I, so obviously, lacked the requisite gentlemanly credentials. But I did have a penis, had the good fortune not to be born a woman or dark-skinned, and spoke without a Southern accent.

Here’s what I think: people always got enlightened, from the Stone Age on and even before, but the Buddha was just the first from the “right” class to get it. He was a king, after all. I imagine his coevals in the deer park rolling their eyes when he finally got it, or saying, “Now that the ‘right person’ has finally got it, at least we won’t have to teach any more!”