It’s a story of juvenile mischief and escapism, but also of memory and identity that’s deeply rooted in a place, and so it seemed fitting to post here as well.

…………………………………………………………………………………

Nostalgia, like politics and real estate, is local.

Which helps explain how a 40-something man returns to the California School for the Deaf and Blind (Clark Kerr Campus, as it’s known today) and becomes the 11-year-old boy of his childhood.

I spent the better part of two years at that school, daydreaming in its classrooms, kicking a football across its playing fields, climbing its rooftops when adventure or mischief (or both) swelled up in me, but mostly just wandering its hallways in idle search of who knows what.

I confess: I broke some things. Windows. Drywall. Light fixtures. Toilet paper dispensers.

No teachers ever told me to stop. How could they?

The place was abandoned.

We moved to Berkeley in the summer of 1980. My mom was an art student at Cal, and she and I lived in family housing adjacent to the Deaf and Blind school, which by then had relocated to its new campus in Fremont.

Legal and political battles ensued over what should become of the site, a contentious land-use tug of war among the city, the university and the community. But for the purposes of this story, all that really matters is that the 50-acre campus—all of its buildings and facilities—sat vacant for the next two years. And it was mine to explore.

My mom’s parenting was lax even by the latchkey standards of that time, and I was free to roam unsupervised until sunset—eventually drawn home not by her edict, but by darkness and hunger. For hours on end I would venture into this mysterious, irresistible ghost town, sometimes with a pack of friends, but more often in solitude. It was quieter on your own, eerier, more surreal. And, for an introvert like me, more gratifying.

The buildings, illuminated only by diffuse sunlight, were dim labyrinths to navigate and plunder. Windowless rooms—or even, if you had the balls for it, basements—were tests of resolve, daring you to enter, flushing your body with adrenaline, excitement and fear. I never thought to bring a flashlight with me—or to consider what kinds of sketchy people I might encounter there.

1981 delivered two of my generation’s cult films, “The Road Warrior” and “Escape From New York,” and I channeled them to imagine my own post-apocalyptic world of struggle and survival, of hunting and being hunted. Was it juvenile escapism? Of course. But with each step farther removed from my “real” life—a life of divorced parents, emotionally absent mom, physically absent dad; of preadolescent hormones and awkwardness and insecurity—I felt more and more like the young man I would become.

That place is a part of me, even well into adulthood, and I suspect it always will be. I smoked my first cigarette there—Kool menthol, hawked from my mom’s purse—enjoying the nicotine buzz before vomiting into the bushes. In a literal sense, too, I still bear its scars. On my thumb, gashed while climbing through a broken window. On my hip, from a nasty skateboarding abrasion. On my ankle, when I stepped through a glass skylight (and nearly fell ten feet onto the desks and chairs below).

It wasn’t a wholesome, Boy Scout, nature-and-woodworking sort of upbringing, and I cringe at the thought of my own children being (quite) so reckless and brazen. But it was formative, and it was—I only now realize—what I desperately needed: a real-life Dangerous Book for Boys experience that built my courage, curiosity and imagination in ways I never would have gotten at home.

I moved away in 1983, the same year that UC Berkeley began converting the campus into student housing. I started high school and became consumed by sports and the pursuit of girls. Then college. A job that grew into a career. Marriage. Mortgage. Kids.

Now, almost three decades later, I return to visit the old Deaf and Blind school (it will never be anything else to me). It’s winter break for Cal students, and, other than a few maintenance workers, the place is empty.

Squint your eyes a little, filter out the repairs and fresh paint, and nothing’s changed. I’m a child again, retracing familiar corridors, of the campus, of my memory.

I don’t break anything this time around, or even smoke a cigarette.

But it’s oddly tempting.

Photo credits: Jason Holmberg

Rafman’s full collection spans the comic and tragic, profound and prosaic, beautiful and bizarre. A handful of my favorites are below.

In a similar vein, from a different source, there’s also this charming and clever short video.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

^ Paved with good intentions.

^ Now that’s vernacular architecture.

^ Freeze this moment in time. They don’t get much better than this.

^ Not everyone appreciates the all-seeing eye.

^ Is anything photographed in Paris not romantic?

^ This one simultaneously lifts and breaks my heart. A makeshift, sidewalk residence decorated with a little girl’s dreams. Add walls and I could be looking at my daughter’s bedroom.

^ Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth.

I chose (c) and (d), which is how I discovered Charlatan, Pope Brock’s fascinating, brilliantly told, historical account of medical quackery in the early 1900s. Think The Devil in the White City meets The Road to Wellville.

It is, on one level, the story of John Brinkley, who got his start as a transient hawker of miracle tonics, obtained a medical license from a shady diploma mill, and eventually grew famous and wealthy as one of the pioneers of “rejuvenation”—that is, the transplantation of goat testicles into impotent men.

But underneath the bizarre, sleazy and frequently abhorrent practices of Brinkley and many others (medical hucksters fluorished in this more provincial, trusting era), you will find a story of human gullibility, suspension of reason, and willingness to be led, however implausibly, by the promise of a shortcut to happiness. The central characters, then and now, are you and I.

It’s easy to “tsk tsk” those simple, unenlightened souls of an earlier age. Who would pay the equivalent of $8,000 in current value for such a dubious experimental surgery, one aggressively condemned and repudiated by the AMA? (Brinkley would eventually be sued for more than a dozen wrongful death cases.)

But you could just as well ask, why do people today pay $29.99 for an “energy” bracelet whose benefits are acknowledged to be entirely bogus? Why is cosmetic surgery a $30 billion—and growing—global industry? Why did so many of Harold Camping’s followers sell their possessions and quit their jobs in anticipation of the Rapture?

Because we want to believe—in God, in Nature, in scientific discovery, in something beyond ourselves—never more so than when our health and vitality are involved. (We think we’re applying reason, but research shows we’re drawn to evidence that confirms what we already believe.)

“Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into the Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles,” Pope writes. “When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.”

If this sounds misanthropic, I don’t mean it to be. I’m not at all condemning belief. Objective reality has gaps in it, and each of us fills them in with something.

Just not goat testicles, please.

Photo credits: Shane Rounce, Nina Jean, Mike Fisher

(PCBC is the parent company of The Vine.)

It also, I believe, speaks to something deeper, which prompted me to sketch (crudely) the diagram that you see here.

There’s a magical alchemy in the blending of art, science and business, and I think the key lies in balancing—and honoring—all three. Diminish art and you lack the aesthetic value that drives emotion and desire. Diminish science and you lack rigorous, analytical, objective inquiry. Diminish business and you lack a means of creating tangible, economic value.

It’s not easy to nurture all three within an organization, but for those that succeed, the results are amazing. Apple. IKEA. Nike. Pixar. GE.

I don’t pretend to know how or when our country’s housing funk gets resolved. (Here’s a promising place to start.)

But I’m convinced the solutions reside within the intersection of these circles.

To locals, the change was sudden, clumsy and, frankly, inconvenient. Around here, “Arco” no longer signifies Big Oil, it’s simply the place where our Kings play(ed). It’s where, in our short-lived but glorious heyday of the early 2000s, “we” challenged—albeit briefly and unsuccessfully—the supremacy of the reviled Lakers, clanging cowbells so rabidly and obnoxiously that Phil Jackson and his coaching staff wore earplugs on the visitors’ bench. (Doing nothing to dispel Sacramento’s image as a hick town, I might add, but that’s a topic for another post on regional identity.)

So when the building signs were hastily replaced and the hardwood floors lacquered with new logos, we were resigned to the name change…and kept right on calling it Arco. (And yes, I’m well aware of the irony of rejecting one corporate namesake in favor of another. But, understand, the old name is attached to our memories now. It’s firmly established in our local lexicon.)

This is the reality of sports in the big money, corporate entertainment era, and we’re certainly not the first—or the last—fan base to wrestle with this. In San Francisco, the 49er faithful make their weekly pilgrimage to Candlestick (not 3Com, not Monster) Park. Boston built an entirely new facility and leased its name to TD Banknorth, but fans still watch their beloved Celtics and Bruins in “The Garden.”

Teams can supplement their revenue by selling the signage on the outside of the stadium. What they can’t do, not by decree alone anyway, is change our vernacular.

Who gets naming rights to our sporting complexes? We do.

Photo credit: Jocie SF

I’ve recently become an avid user of Postcrossing, a website that facilitates postcard exchanges across the globe. Over 250,000 members from 198 countries have collectively sent (as I write this; it increases by the minute) nearly nine million cards.

After creating an account, the system will randomly generate a recipient and a unique code for you. Each time one of your postcards is received and registered, you’re then eligible to get a card from someone else—and that’s where the magic kicks in.

Every postcard that arrives in your mailbox—like the one pictured here, from Mimi in Malaysia—brings a spontaneous touch of culture, warmth and humanity into your day.

And, just as importantly, yours do the same for someone on the other end.

(1) Wrigley Is Wrigley, and Nothing Else Is

Native Chicagoan Dave Eggers captures the communal essence of Cubs baseball at Wrigley Field—an experience soaked in history, fraternity and beer. Every so often, fans also take in what’s happening on the field.

Known as the “Friendly Confines,” Wrigley is one of the oldest—and arguably the most neighborly—of all major league ballparks. (Bostonians will make their case for Fenway Park, which is two years older, but the fierce intensity of its crowd creates an entirely different atmosphere than laid-back Wrigley.) “I grew up with the Cubs,” Eggers writes, “and I don’t remember the possibility of winning ever being high among the reasons we went to Wrigley.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) the Cubs’ perennial futility and heartbreak, fans flock to Wrigley as “[a] place that celebrates not just a team but a city—and a city’s refusal to plow the past under. [It] is the ultimate neighborhood stadium, the ultimate urban stadium, the ultimate statement that some semblance of tradition is more important than the money you could make with a hundred new skyboxes in some spectacularly soulless new stadium.”

(2) Dr. Don

Don Colcord is a pharmacist in the small, rural town of Nucla, Colorado (population: “around 700 and falling”). As proprietor of Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe, he is, within a two-hour driving radius, the area’s de facto health care provider, dispensing medicine and medical advice in equal measures. He knows his customers’ names, and also their circumstances. When someone’s insurance has lapsed, or he or she simply can’t afford to pay, Don rings up the order anyway and sets aside the receipt for payment at a later date (if at all—each year he writes off ten to twenty thousand dollars in unpaid bills).

“At the Apothecary Shoppe, Don never wears a white coat,” the author tells us. “He takes people’s blood pressure, and he often gives injections; if it has to be done in the backside, he escorts the customer into the bathroom for privacy. Elderly folks refer to him as ‘Dr. Don,’ although he has no medical degree and discourages people from using this title. He doesn’t wear a nametag. ‘I wear old Levi’s,’ he says. ‘People want to talk to somebody who looks like them, talks like them, is part of the community. I know a lot of pharmacists wear a coat because it makes you look more professional. But it’s different here.’”

(3) Keep it up and we could solve our gang problem

(The above link opens a PDF.) The Vine’s own Chris Grant is the architect of an ambitious project in which star players from the Great Britain hockey team (field hockey to Americans) trained and mentored a group of youngsters from East London’s poorest neighborhoods.

“The scheme is quixotic, to say the least,” the writer comments. “Take 30 unsporty 11 to 14-year-olds from tough areas…, introduce them to a sport associated with toffs and private schools, organise a highly competitive fixture in three months’ time, and get star players with little or no background in coaching to teach them how to play.” Without giving away the ending, it’s a Disney-esque story of redemption for the kids and stars alike.

“Society is increasingly stratified,” Chris says. “But the hockey project showed that those barriers can be broken down very easily. People from different backgrounds need to be brought together. We need to revive the idea of the club as a focal point for communities.”

Photo credit: Seth Anderson

Libraries (and librarians) are perhaps our communities’ most underutilized public resource, which is a shame. Americans collectively hold (and pay crushing interest on) more than one billion credit and debit cards, compared to 90 million actively used library cards.

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” Ray Bradbury once said. “One of them is not reading them.”

One of my favorites is Pulse, an online magazine about the human side of medicine. Yours truly was recently published in the magazine (but don’t hold that against them). My article, Small Talk, is a reflection on the emotions that people experience—separately but together, side-by-side but isolated—while undergoing tests and treatment. Human empathy and comfort are irreplaceable, I conclude, especially when our environments and systems strip those things out.

I hope you find it edifying—and I don’t mean just my piece. Pulse is a powerful source of insights into human connection. Its organizers are helping to re-humanize a profession that, without meaning to, sometimes loses sight of the underlying needs it’s serving. (Kind of like ours does.)

Subscriptions are free, and enthusiastically recommended.