In 1980, I moved from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Northern California to become a professional circus performer.
Or at least that was the reason I gave myself.
It sounds improbable now, but at the time it didn’t seem particularly far-fetched. I had recently returned from Europe, where I had enjoyed some modest success as a street performer, riding a unicycle while simultaneously picking a five-string banjo. That particular combination had a way of attracting attention. There probably weren’t many banjo-playing unicyclists roaming the streets of Europe, and for a while I allowed myself to believe that perhaps I had stumbled onto an unconventional but perfectly legitimate career.
San Francisco seemed like the logical place to pursue it.
The classroom, as I imagined it, would be Golden Gate Park, on the meadows not far from Haight and Ashbury—the hallowed birthplace of the counterculture. If there was anywhere in America where a young man could reinvent himself as a unicycling banjo player and consider it a serious vocational aspiration, San Francisco was probably the place.
I have often repeated a phrase to myself over the years:
Geography is destiny.
Where we happen to land on this planet determines an astonishing amount about what happens to us. The people we meet. The opportunities that appear. The relationships that begin. The accidents that change everything. A few miles in one direction or another, one decision to move or remain where we are, and an entirely different life unfolds.
I had grown up in the suburban oasis of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Now I was trading it for an urban oasis on the other side of the continent.
San Francisco.
Not a bad trade.
I had no idea where my life was headed. I only knew I wanted something different from what I had known. I was leaving behind one world and stepping into another.
Getting there involved something called a drive-away.
There was an industry then that matched people who needed automobiles transported across the country with drivers who needed inexpensive transportation. I was given someone’s car, a $200 gasoline allowance, and seven days to deliver it from Kalamazoo to Berkeley, California.
That was my ticket west.
I don’t remember every mile of the journey, but I remember what it represented. Somewhere along those highways the geography of my life was being rewritten. Michigan receded in the rearview mirror, and California grew closer with every tank of gas.
I arrived first in Berkeley and checked into a youth hostel while I searched for something more permanent in San Francisco. My friend Donna Mueller drove up from Monterey and took possession of the belongings I had brought with me so I wouldn’t have to drag them around while finding my footing.
Donna was one of those old friends whose importance in your life may not be fully apparent until much later.
In her case, much later would turn out to mean not very long at all.
Before long, I found an arrangement that could hardly have provided a better introduction to San Francisco.
I moved into a senior retirement residence at Sutter and Larkin.
There were perhaps a hundred elderly residents and a staff composed largely of young people who worked fifteen or twenty hours a week in exchange for room and board. We served meals, washed dishes, cleaned rooms, answered telephones, staffed the front desk and did whatever else was necessary to keep the place operating.
Two staff members shared each room.
It was an extraordinary collection of humanity.
There were young people from Germany, the Netherlands, South America, Canada, Africa and other corners of the world. We were travelers, wanderers, students, seekers and people simply figuring out what came next. We worked together, ate together, socialized together and occasionally became entangled in one another’s dramas.
At times the place resembled an international soap opera.
I loved it.
For someone fresh from Michigan, it was an education that could not have been found in a classroom. Every hallway seemed to contain a different accent and another story. I learned about places I had never visited and lives radically different from the one I had known.
Even the residents had remarkable histories. One elderly resident was said to have survived the sinking of the Titanic. There was also an extraordinary and tragic incident involving a resident and a German housekeeper that became part of the lore of the place. I remember hearing that the young woman had defended herself during an alleged assault and that the resident died in the encounter. Whatever the precise legal disposition, it was a shocking reminder that this seemingly placid retirement residence contained its share of human drama.
Nothing about San Francisco seemed ordinary.
I stayed there for several months, saving enough money to move into the kind of shared rental arrangement that seemed to be a way of life for much of the city.
And then I found my dream address.
106 Presidio Avenue.
It was a large four-bedroom flat at Presidio and Jackson in Pacific Heights, surrounded by mansions and overlooking the Presidio. From our windows we could see the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay beyond it.
For someone who had arrived in California with a unicycle and a banjo, this was pretty heady stuff.
The building contained seven flats of roughly two thousand square feet each. To reach ours, you climbed two flights of broad stairs covered in red carpeting, with window seats on the landings. The building had the kind of faded grandeur that made you wonder about all the people who had passed through it before you.
There was even a story that Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had once lived in the flat directly above ours, Unit 107, with his mother.
Whether every detail of that story was precisely accurate hardly mattered to me at the time.
It added mystique.
This was San Francisco, after all.
My circus ambitions, meanwhile, were beginning to fade.
I discovered something important about performers: talent is not enough. A performer has to possess a powerful urge to perform—a need to get in front of people and command their attention.
I didn’t have it.
I could ride the unicycle. I could play the banjo. I could even do both simultaneously. But I lacked whatever internal engine makes someone want to stand before a crowd night after night and say, in effect, Look at me.
Occasionally I would take my banjo onto a San Francisco street corner, open the case for tips and play.
But I didn’t feel it in my bones.
So the circus career quietly evaporated.
Fortunately, accounting was waiting in the wings.
I found a job about five blocks from my apartment on Sacramento Street near Spruce, working as a staff accountant for an investment firm. The company occupied the first floor of one Victorian building and the second floor of another a couple of doors away.
I could walk to work in ten minutes.
This was particularly convenient for someone who regarded the snooze button as one of civilization’s more useful inventions.
My life appeared to be settling into something recognizable.
Apartment.
Job.
Friends.
San Francisco.
Yet beneath that outward appearance I was carrying a tremendous emotional wound.
Shortly before the events that would introduce me to Jennifer, I had emerged from one of the most devastating relationships of my life.
Her name was Grace.
She lived across the Golden Gate Bridge in Mill Valley and had a twelve-year-old daughter named Annie.
Annie was adorable, sweet, bright and lovable, and somewhere along the way I didn’t simply fall in love with Grace.
I fell in love with Annie too.
Grace and I had met in primal therapy. We were both there because, in one fashion or another, we were trying to heal ourselves. There was something about that environment that made emotional intimacy come quickly and intensely. People weren’t discussing the weather or what movie they had seen. We were reaching into our histories, our wounds and our deepest vulnerabilities.
Grace and I became the perfect antidote for each other’s suffering.
Or so it seemed.
We fell in love fast.
And because Annie was part of Grace’s life, she became part of mine.
For a time, the three of us felt like a little family.
There was, however, a fourth person in this arrangement.
Grace had a long-standing relationship with Cincinnati attorney Stan Chesley, a prominent mass-tort lawyer widely known in legal circles as the “Master of Disaster” because of his involvement in major catastrophe litigation. From my understanding, Stan had also helped Grace acquire her home in Mill Valley.
Whatever the precise contours of their arrangement, Grace remained loyal to him.
For several months I persuaded myself that I could tolerate sharing part of her life. One weekend a month belonged elsewhere. I tried to accept it.
Eventually I couldn’t.
Perhaps therapy had strengthened my self-esteem just enough for me to insist on something more.
I gave Grace an ultimatum.
She would have to choose.
Stan or me.
It was one of those decisions that seems courageous when you are making it and catastrophic moments later.
Grace was not prepared to end the other relationship.
I remember her warning me:
“If you walk out that door, you’re never coming back in.”
I walked out.
Almost immediately, I realized the magnitude of what I had done.
I had imagined that I was asserting myself.
Instead, I felt as though I had amputated part of my own life.
I panicked.
I pleaded.
I wrote letters.
I asked to come back even under the arrangement I had just declared intolerable.
The answer remained no.
One sentence from Grace lodged permanently in my memory:
“I am responsible for two people in this world—myself and Annie.”
The message could not have been clearer.
I was no longer inside the circle.
What devastated me was that I had not lost only Grace.
I had lost Annie.
That little family—Grace, Annie and me—had vanished almost overnight.
There had been other romantic breakups in my life, but this one felt cataclysmic. Perhaps it was because of the emotional intensity of primal therapy. Perhaps because I had bonded so deeply with both mother and daughter. Perhaps because the relationship had somehow reached into some unmet need in me that I did not yet fully understand.
Whatever the reason, I came apart.
I became suicidal.
I bought a shotgun and ammunition.
That is difficult to write even more than forty years later.
At the time, my pain had narrowed my vision until I could imagine only one way to stop it. I had gone from heartbreak to desperation to contemplating the end of my own life.
And then an ordinary obligation intervened.
Donna Mueller—the same friend who had helped me when I first arrived in California—had gone back to Michigan for a visit. I had been looking after her car. On the day when I had convinced myself that I might actually end my life, Donna was returning to California.
I had promised to pick her up at the airport.
That promise suddenly mattered enormously.
I could not leave my old friend stranded at an airport wondering where I was.
More than that, I could not leave her to discover the terrible aftermath of what I was contemplating.
As panic overtook me, another deeply buried part of my past surfaced.
My Catholic upbringing.
I began rapidly praying Hail Marys and Our Fathers.
I prayed as if the words themselves might keep me tethered to the earth.
Maybe they did.
But so did Donna.
I had somewhere I had to be.
Someone was expecting me.
And sometimes that is enough.
I went to the airport.
Donna came home.
And I remained in this world.
I got rid of the gun soon afterward. I don’t remember exactly how, but I remember wanting it out of my possession. The entire episode had frightened me profoundly.
Looking back from the vantage point of decades, I can see that day as one of the narrow passages of my life.
Donna Mueller saved my life without knowing she was doing it.
All she had done was arrange for me to pick her up at the airport.
But geography is destiny.
Timing may be destiny too.
Years later, suicide would strike my extended family with devastating consequences. Two nephews, Matthew and Mark, would each take his own life. Those later tragedies would inevitably cause me to revisit my own brush with that abyss and wonder about the mysterious combination of pain, temperament and circumstance that can bring a human being to such a place.
But in San Francisco, in those early 1980s, I survived.
And then I met Mary.
One afternoon I was walking up the broad concrete steps toward the black double doors of the Presidio Avenue building.
A woman was entering with an infant.
She was buzzing herself inside.
We introduced ourselves.
Her name was Mary.
She lived one floor below me in Unit 104.
The baby was her daughter.
Jennifer.
Jenny.
Jenn.
At the time she was barely more than a year old, a leap-year baby born on February 29, 1980.
Nothing dramatic happened during that first encounter.
No music played.
No thunderbolt descended from the sky.
I simply met a woman who lived downstairs and her little girl.
Then I ran into Mary again.
And again.
A comfortable familiarity developed, the sort that happens naturally among people sharing the same building.
One afternoon the San Francisco sky put on one of its shows.
The view toward the Golden Gate Bridge was spectacular—brilliant sky, bridge, water and light combining in that way San Francisco sometimes does to remind you why people tolerate every inconvenience necessary to live there.
Mary’s door was open.
Her flat didn’t have the same view that ours did upstairs.
I popped down.
“Mary, you have to see this beautiful sight over the bridge,” I told her.
Then I offered to stay with Jenny for a moment while Mary came upstairs to take a look.
It was an utterly insignificant gesture.
A neighbor watching a baby for a few minutes.
Except it wasn’t insignificant at all.
It was the beginning of a relationship that would last approximately thirty years.
I could not possibly have known that as I sat with Jenny.
I could not know that the little girl in front of me would become one of the central human beings of my life.
I could not know that I would watch her grow.
That I would celebrate her accomplishments.
That I would worry about her.
That I would delight in her.
That I would come to regard her not simply as Mary’s daughter but, emotionally, as my own.
And perhaps there was a reason I stepped so readily into that role.
I had just lost a little family.
Grace.
Me.
Annie.
Suddenly life presented another possibility.
Mary.
Me.
Jenny.
No one held a meeting.
No one negotiated the terms.
There was no formal declaration that I would become the man in Jenny’s life who occupied the space normally reserved for a father.
It simply happened.
Mary and Jenny’s father were going their separate ways, although he remained part of Jenny’s life. I knew remarkably little about the legal details of their separation because, astonishingly in retrospect, I never thought to ask much about them.
I was more interested in what was happening immediately in front of me.
There was Mary.
There was this beautiful little girl.
And there was me.
I had no biological children of my own.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, I had the opportunity to experience something that felt very much like fatherhood.
I delighted in it.
Jenny became our little munchkin.
I assumed many of the everyday emotional roles of a father—not because anyone formally assigned them to me, but because they felt natural.
Perhaps I was replacing Annie.
That is uncomfortable to admit, but there is truth in it.
Human beings do these things.
We lose.
We reach.
We attach again.
A space opens in the heart and, consciously or unconsciously, we search for someone who might occupy it.
But Jenny did not remain a substitute for anyone.
Very quickly she became herself.
Jennifer.
Jenny.
Jenn.
A completely distinct human being whose life became woven into mine.
And so began three decades of family.
Not a conventional family.
Not one easily explained by filling in boxes on a government form.
But family nonetheless.
Families are often described through biology, marriage certificates and legal relationships.
Life taught me something different.
Family is also repetition.
It is breakfasts and birthdays.
Car rides.
Vacations.
Arguments.
Christmases.
Illnesses.
Telephone calls.
Inside jokes.
Waiting.
Worrying.
Showing up.
It is thousands of ordinary moments accumulating until one day you realize that another person’s life has become inseparable from the story of your own.
For nearly thirty years, Jennifer was part of mine.
And then she wasn’t.
In 2010, the relationship ended.
The circumstances were complicated, painful and, from my perspective, profoundly unfair.
At the time my financial world was collapsing around me. One of the properties in my family portfolio had been contaminated by toxic chemicals, setting off consequences that would eventually cost an enormous amount of money and contribute to conflicts throughout my family.
I was not the prosperous, confident man I might once have appeared to be.
I was struggling.
And somewhere in that turmoil, Jennifer disappeared from my life.
I have wondered ever since whether my financial collapse gave her a reason—or perhaps simply an opportunity—to push me away.
I cannot know precisely what was going through her mind.
I only know what it felt like from mine.
For almost thirty years, we had been family.
Then suddenly we weren’t.
In that sense, the story of Jennifer contains an eerie echo of the story that preceded her.
First there had been Grace and Annie.
A mother and a daughter I loved.
Then the door closed.
Later there was Mary and Jenny.
Another mother and another daughter I loved.
And eventually that door closed too.
But this time there were thirty years on the other side of it.
Thirty years cannot simply be erased.
They cannot be declared meaningless because the ending was bitter.
The photographs remain.
The memories remain.
The little girl remains in the mind of the man who once held her and thought, perhaps for the first time in his life, This is what being a father feels like.
Which brings me back to geography.
Had I remained in Kalamazoo, I would never have lived at 106 Presidio Avenue.
Had I not moved into that particular building, I would not have encountered Mary carrying her infant daughter through those black double doors.
Had my flat not possessed the better view, I would never have gone downstairs that afternoon to tell Mary that she had to see the sky over the Golden Gate Bridge.
And had I not offered to watch Jenny while Mary walked upstairs, perhaps something entirely different would have unfolded.
There are moments in life that announce themselves with trumpets.
Others barely make a sound.
A door opens.
A neighbor says hello.
A baby needs watching for a few minutes.
And thirty years begin.
I had come to California believing I was going to become a circus performer.
The circus never happened.
Something much more consequential did.
I found San Francisco.
I found a new life.
And in a Pacific Heights flat overlooking the Golden Gate, after nearly losing one little family and nearly losing myself, I found another.
I found a daughter.