Guess who sent this card?

When we went to Santa Cruz last weekend, I kept thinking about one trip I made there almost 13 years ago. January 24, 1986 was Stupor Bowl Sunday, so I was happy to take Roni up on her offer to visit at UCSC and see some of the classes. I drove up on Sunday and spent the evening in her single room. (Porter College, probably all of them, had unisex bathrooms, long before Ally McBeal came out.) On Monday I sat in on a couple of her classes. She was a TA for Jasper Rose's core class on creativity.

Digression: UCSC was started in 1965 as a University on the English plan of Oxford or Cambridge. One actually goes to one of the colleges in the University, lives there, attends the classes in the college curriculum, and graduates from that college. Dr. Rose was one of the founding university members, from Oxford, and was keeping the university focussed on this plan despite chancellors who were more interested in number-crunching. Porter college, "College Five", was mostly an art school. Dr. Rose's core class had to do with the creative process. He believed in getting to know the students. His "term paper" was to decorate one's room to reflect one's personality, and he came around the dorm to his student's rooms to check them out. He qualifies as Roni's "eccentric professor," (everyone should have one!) Dr. Rose eventually went back to Oxford, for at least the second time since UCSC started.

During this class, an auditorium class, Rose suddenly whacked his pointer down on his podium. There was a student in the back room reading a newspaper. He didn't necessarily expect the students to stay awake during his slide show, but he wasn't going to put up with reading something big and distracting. If the kid were going to read news, he could do it somewhere else. I found the class fascinating. Roni introduced me to Dr. Rose before we left.

My next visit was to the astronomy class, which was about Halley's Comet. Rich and I took the kids out to the foothills to try to see this, in the spring, but it was just a nondescript blur. I was truly glad about Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp, recently, since they are the way I remembered comets, something bright and exciting. Halley was a disappointment. Anyway, the class was fun.

Then it was time to go home. When I got to the parking lot, however, the car wouldn't start. We pushed it over to the hill and I got it going with a gravity start. Then I pulled over to stop for a second, and when I pulled out, still going downhill, I nearly hit a bicyclist. This shook me up (as well as the poor guy on the bike) so I was nervous when I pulled into the gas station in Santa Cruz. Once I'd filled up, no, the car wouldn't start again. The station got me someone to jump start it. This is when I begin to get annoyed enough to chew nails. One would think the tow truck guy would, when he had the hood up to attach the leads to the battery, notice the trailing wire and say "oh, look! Your generator isn't attached!" but Noooo, all he did was charge up the battery and charge me $25. I took off, heading over the dread Highway 17. (I'd been in trouble (out of gas) on this road before. It's nasty enough when all is going well.)

Every time I tried to turn the radio on, the car backfired, and it wasn't driving well. I had hopes of just flooring it all the way home, but by the time I was on the summit and coming down, I began to know that wasn't going to happen. However, I kept driving it down 17 and turned onto 280, in San Jose, when it completely died. I pulled to a stop on the non-existent shoulder with 6 lanes of traffic booming by. No electricity, hence no emergency flashers. I was up against the rail on the right and there was no way there was a gap in traffic on the left so I could get out. I have never been as frightened in my life as I was that day. I kept hoping a CHP car would come by, but when, after about 20 minutes, one did, the patrolman didn't see me and just drove on.
The 6 lanes of rush hour traffic kept coming and coming and coming, and I knew one of them would hit my car and I would be killed. The biggest regret I had was that I hadn't ever written beyond my diary and letters. I was in tears, I was so scared. When the second CHP car passed, I finally decided to crawl over the gearshift and attempt to get out on the right. The door barely opened, but I squirmed out. Instantly, a tow truck pulled over.
I was lucky there, too, since I only gave a passing thought to the possibility that the driver could be the serial killer type. He offered to tow the car to a nearby garage, and I readily agreed. I climbed in the cab with him, hoping he wasn't a psychopath, and we headed off that hellish road at the next exit. The garage was this total dump in a less-than-maximal part of town, but the guys were helpful and the wire was hooked up again in under an hour. I called Monica to ask if I could stay over, since I was totally emotionally drained from the hour on the freeway, and didn't want to drive home at all.

Monica's dorm room was crowded, but pleasant, and her roommate nicely left so I could have some room. I called home and told Rich about my travails. Tuesday morning I didn't really want to wait till they all woke up, so I left about 5:30.
I stopped for coffee and breakfast at Cordelia Junction, a couple of hours down the road. Just as I left there, the news of the Challenger explosion came, so I came home listening to that, and weeping.

I was just beginning to call BBSs in those days, and this was the time they really became important to me. The local one I still belong to had a great discussion of the space shuttle. It was the following week I actually began to meet some of these people in real life (during the '86 floods.) Since then, of course, my social life takes place in cyberspace. As does my writing. I didn't forget the regrets, and have written more (though often in the journal.) The updates that I'm so far behind on keep me focussed, as well.

Rich said last Saturday that he'd meant to get gas at that station in Santa Cruz, and I muttered something about them not exactly being my favorite people. Yes, I should have seen the loose wire myself, but I was the customer, and they were the purported experts, and I nearly got killed. Grumble.