Hitchhiking to meet Jeremy and Elsie

 

In the spring of 1977, I was 20 years old, pushing 21. When it came to being, or trying to be, a real, if somewhat bohemian and shaggy, adult, it seems I was always “pushing” it upward, not always successfully.  I lived in Berkeley and worked as a mental health counselor at a holistic treatment center. It was early spring of 1977.  My first cousin, Jeremy, had been living in Los Gatos, California with his partner Laura and their toddler, Elsbeth, and Raymond, their unofficial foster, an African American guy who as a teen still completing high school had traveled back from (his native) Saint Louis to this still-agricultural but increasingly suburban California town south of San Jose, where my grandmother (who was also Jeremy’s grandmother) remarked “I hope Raymond will be okay. That town [Los Gatos] is SO white and he is so Black!”

 

I had been invited, by my aunt (Jeremy’s mother), to join in a family Thanksgiving at Jeremy and Laura’s house in Los Gatos- my aunt was going to bring my grandmother from San Francisco -   a year and some months before that. In November of 1975. I was a student at UC Berkeley, and I had just moved into my first solo apartment in north-ish Oakland. I had known Jeremy since I was a toddler and he was a teen, but I met this branch of the family as an entourage a couple of months earlier; for my grandmother’s 80th birthday party (hosted by my father) at the SIr Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. Elsbeth was not quite two years old and was spinning a metal top at the party; Jeremy’s brother Joel, who had lifelong intellectual and emotional disabilities, was there and kept calling his young niece “Ellsberg ”as Dan Ellsberg had been in the recent news for his brave actions releasing the Pentagon Papers  and the espionage of his psychotherapy records by the Watergate burglars. Joel could not read nor write except to write his full name  but he followed the news as best he could on radio and television;  he had a fascination with disasters of all types, natural and political. Like people at horror movies, Joel enjoyed scaring himself with plane crashes and crime stories and governmental intrigue as well as he could follow it - it gave him something to feel that was not about facing his own frustrations. 

 

In any case, I had to telephone my regrets for not making this multi-generational Thanksgiving in Los Gatos; a few days before  the event, I came down with influenza, or a very flu-like cold, and spent Thanksgiving alone in my bed back in Oakland. My elderly neighbors in a back cottage were kind enough to bring me a generous plate of Thanksgiving food. I had my small one bedroom flat to myself. 

 

In any case, I was interested in reuniting with my cousin and his family and I got a phone number for Jeremy in the Los Gatos/ Morgan Hill area either from our grandmother or from Jeremy’s mother, my aunt  Elizabeth.

 

I called Jeremy sometime in the early spring of 1977 from Berkeley, saying I would like to visit if it were convenient,  and that I had a day or two off of my work as a live-in counselor coming up soon and would be happy to meet him and his family if it worked for us to get together.  

 

Jeremy seemed a bit startled to hear from me and said he was not clear on how old I was, where I was, or what I was doing. I told him that I was working as a counselor at a holistic treatment center for “disturbed” adolescents in Berkeley, that I was 20 years old, and that I would like to see him and had Monday and Tuesday as my days off.

 

There was a light and fairly warm rain, more of a drizzle, when my coworker Kirsten and I left Berkeley to hitchhike southward. She had friends she wanted to visit who were also also in the area on the south side of San Jose and we figured we would travel together, looking forward to the mild  adventure. We worked for almost no money over the community’s provision of room and board, and even a short trip out of town was a treat. 

 

I remember standing in the light rain with Kirsten at the corner of Adeline St and Ashby Avenue and Ashby, taking turns extending our thumbs at passing cars heading west on Ashby toward the I80 freeway going south. We were laughing and singing and getting to know one another better. We were outside that set of contiguous antique shops on the northwest corner of those streets near the Ashby BART station, looking at the beautiful antique furniture in the shops and the displays by LACIS, the Museum of Lace and Textile Arts and a family business (featuring breathtakingly beautiful  antique and contemporary  garments and ornamentation and classes in making and working with lace. At that time, Laxis had been open for over a decade at that time.

 

I laughed gently at the two of us, Kirsten and I, singing  Amazing Grace together while hoping to get a ride headed south, “like some kind of hippie cliche.”

 

I don’t remember much about the rides we got to get us to our destinations, nor the paper that I clutched in my hand. Jeremy was there to meet me, with his 3 and a half year old, when I arrived at his door, not too much the worse for wear. 

 

On my arrival, Jeremy  said, rather affectionately, and certainly not without a touch of amusement and irony , “Oh, you are something of a hippie, I see!” I remember how I was dressed; I was wearing deep brown drawstring pants, and a cream-colored India-style tunic with three top buttons  known as a kurti, with a brown print of someone dancing. It had been given to me by our Saint George Homes counselor-turned-cook, Phil Brougham.

 

Another Saint George counselor, Ryan, who was Kirsten’s boyfriend at the time  had remarked in his facetious-bordering-on-sardonic way that I was “showing all those  curves through a flimsy burnoose” paraphrasing a line from the FIresign Theatre’s comedy recording about “Nick Danger, Third Eye.” Ryan was a  New York transplant given to a radical sort of honesty that was not always what the other party wanted to hear most.  I had responded that I didn't have all that many curves to show off. In  a fashion I had come to think of as typical of him, Ryan agreed,  “No, you don’t. But that never seems to keep you from putting what you have out there for the world to see.” 

 

Well, here I was, newly arrived in Los Gatos, “flimsy burnoose and all.” Jeremy  explained that Laura and Raymond were out of town at a conference (about  radio…what else!) and that he was invited to visit some friends in the Santa Cruz mountains near Felton tonight  and that I was welcome to tag along. 

 

Jeremy told me he was interested in “the stories about the old times, the way Grandma tells them” but that he did not listen much to more contemporary gossip about who in the family as doing what. We  barely alluded to the troubles that had arisen when he was a teen and lived with us briefly nor to the animosity between his mother and my mother, who were sisters-in-law but hardly sisters in love.  

ANd Jeremy remarked that “all the time my mother had to put up with a flaky, funny Jeremy when I was young. Now I am the one who has to live with a flaky, funny mother.”

 

I nodded, I already knew that every family has its nuttiness and disarticulation, and that ours was no exception, and that our clan was a colorful one, and that Jeremy and I might be deemed “flaky and funny”  and that we were more introverted than either of our mothers, and that we were trying to find our “I Gotta Be Me!” ways of moving through the world, with or against the grain of it. 

 

I remember a playful Jeremy, wrassling around with his toddler daughter Elsbeth, who he called Elbow, and calling her a “manic oppressive” who “cheats when she wrestles.” I jotted some haiku verses about it/ them  in a spiral bound notebook I carried as a journal.  And I was reminded of my first memories of Jeremy, when I was a year younger than Elsbeth was now,  shrieking a delighted “Faster, Jeremy, faster!” as a 16 year old Jeremy spun me around in a canvas swing-chair that hung  by four ropes attached to an iron ring covered by canvas. 

 

We ate some simple supper from what was there. I let Jeremy know I was vegetarian, and he made some mildly testy remark about how “As long as it’s not about how you feel sorry for all the poor little animals. Because I will probably ask about how you feel about taking the lives of all those poor little plants.”  I make a decision then not to go too deep into what does and what does not have a central nervous system. This was supposed to be a pleasant  family meetup. But I did make a mental note of Jeremy’s attitude toward vegetarianism for whatever “next time” might entail. “Don’t come off as a moralist around this guy.” 

 

I can’t recall Elsie coming along with us to Felton; there must have been a babysitter who came to the house, but those details are lost down that rabbit hole of memory

 

I don't recall the names of the people we visited, either. I remember that they were kind and a bit playful, and I introduced myself as “Judith, Jeremy’s first cousin.”  They seated us on a couch in a small living room, and offered a taste, with some pride of their recently-bottled  homemade coffee liqueur. I was not much of a drinker and never much of a coffee fan, but I sampled it and  agreed that it was “pretty close to Kahlua.” 

 

I was addressed as First Cousin for most of the evening; I found it amusing and oddly welcoming.  And I began to think of them as the Felton Friends. It was raining lightly outside here too. 

 

I was also very tired, unaccustomed to socializing in the evenings AS a residential worker at a treatment center, I generally unwound at night after dinner with our teenaged residents in the evenings, did bedtime rituals, and then fell out in my own bed after we’d completed necessary cleanup and made notes in a house logbook.  It was growing late, and I found a spot on a loveseat-sized sofa  near the place where Jeremy still sat with his friends, took a folded blanket to spread over me, and went to sleep.

 

The Felton Friends were unfazed by this type of behavior; they said I must indeed be a close relative of Jeremy because “it was like something Jeremy would do.”  I was starting to see multiple similarities between Jeremy and me; not only was there enough family resemblance for us to be mistaken for brother and sister that would persist throughout our lives - we each had a similar type of introverted quirkiness, not just a willingness to buck social convention but an inability to conform to those expectations when they arose. I had done this in other settings since junior high school and into my early  months of college… if it got late and I was sleepy, whether at a gathering at people’s homes or a dorm or a coop, or a folk dance hall, I would find as comfortable a spot even within “the noise and the haste” as the Desiderata would put it, and get some sleep.

 

It was too late to go anywhere else after Jeremy brought me back to his house, and I slept on a living room couch there too. In the morning, the weather was clear for an easy trip back to Oakland and then Berkeley. Jeremy and I agreed that we would meet again “soon” without any specific plans. I thanked him for his hospitality, and he thanked me for making the effort to be there.

 

 The details of the rides that brought me home to the East Bay are lost to me now; that rabbit-warren of memory is spacious and swallows much! My journey back home was unmarked by anything consequential. 

Jeremy seemed to see nothing too extraordinary or worrisome about my hitchhiking by myself (he certainly knew better than to say anything to our grandmother about my method of travel.) 

My hitchhiking luck that day was just good enough to get me home while it was still light out, without incident; there was no rain on the return trip.l I had reunited with a family member  whose similarities to me might be genetic or might be due to the influence of some of the same important elders such as our grandmother who now lived in San Francisco. 

 

When I returned to work at Rainbow House the next day, as my shift began on Wednesday afternoon, the kids asked what I had done on my days off and I told them, “I went to see my cousin Jeremy!”    One of the teen residents, Don, groaned, “Another Jeremy?” There were two adult men named Jeremy working at Saint George Homes then… a skilled resident counselor and team leader at Rainbow House, Jeremy H,  who was from England and very musical, and a member of the senior staff who was a Unitarian minister and dream work specialist, Jeremy T.  I said, “Yes, another Jeremy, and his 3 and a half year old daughter.”  and I read them a senryu ( a haiku-like verse tending to be more about human nature than about the nonhuman natural world)  that said something about “Elbow who cheats when she wrestles,” and showed them her scribblings in my notebook.

 

That notebook is long gone from the world now, and much more recently, so is Jeremy. At the time of his death in late December, I found myself charged with the task of telling a fifty-one year old Elsbeth that her father had died.

 

 I would be dishonest to report that her response was a harmonious or conciliatory one. I think of that quote from Dostoevsky that Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker anarcho-pacifist movement, so often repeated: Love in reality is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in our dreams. We can’t really know all the reasons that family love goes sour. We do what we can to honor everyone’s experience and everyone’s disappointment. And it is on others to choose to speak their truth or hold what peace is to be held. 

 

I want to be honest and also to respect the privacy of those who have their own tales to tell and their own pain and loss and anger. There is much I can never know and it is really not my business to know it nor to share what little I do know. Not that long before he died, Jeremy remarked to me that he would help his daughter if he knew how. And that will have to suffice. 

 

And I also want to tip my invisible hat to the often indirect but appreciative bond that I established over the years with First Cousin. We were grateful for one another. And that counts for quite a bit. 

 

• Judith Gips, February 2025, reporting back once again from a solo apartment in north Oakland