Sandy/Miriahm and son
The first draft i wrote of my life after high school almost put me to sleep, so I rewrote it. All true things just more fun.
Mr. Andre, my Senior year Latin teacher, gave me a warning admonition , which was,”Seattle has a lot of Beatniks, so be careful. “Hmmm”, said I and where do these Beatniks hang out? Even though it was right at the end of the beatnik thing, I did indeed find them, and a LOT of cheap -wine- drinking- parties and even eventually ended up working in one of the last, but not least of the Seattle beatnik bars, The Blue Moon.
But beatniks were on their way out, and were getting boring (THOSE HANGOVERS!!) so I switched my allegiance to what were first known, at least in Seattle,as “fringies” (as in “the fringes of society), but were soon known world wide as Hippies. And I have never recanted or regretted one moment. I danced to the Grateful Dead at more than one “Be-In”, free concert on the beach etc.,marched in a peace march led by Country Joe and the Fish;and that time in Honolulu at the Jimi Hendricks indoor concert where they announced that if we didn’t sit down immediately they would pull the plug—and almost everyone jumped up , ahhh.! we didn’t and they didn’t. Another way of saying this (the boring way) was first I attended U of Washington for a few years, and then moved to Hawaii with a group of friends to open a natural food/bookstore /restaurant and be part of a commune . It was in Hawaii that I joined, for a brief time an Indonesian spiritual trance group and thusly, changed my name, legally to Miriahm. (It was the 60s after all.)
I thought Japan sounded like a cool place, so when I read of a boat that was offering very cheap fares, as it was the cruise before they officially started service, I was on it, with no more than a suitcase, $300 and a return ticket, which I needed to pass through Japanese customs. I did have a possible job offer, and had taken a 2 mos. intensive Japanese Class.
What a time that was!, and I didn’t leave for 3 yrs.
Married a commune member, who was there studying Japanese massage techniques, as was I,and eventually we married and returned to Hawaii and lived there for the next 20 years.
My husband became a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, specializing in acupuncture, and I spent most of my time raising our 3 children.
Hawaii was good when the children were little, but there were difficulties as the kids got older, so we moved back to the mainland,to Colorado.
I got the idea to go to Nursing school–nurses always work– and have been a Hospice RN for the last 10 years. I love my job, and I’m good at it. The other thing I’m good at is traveling and I have been to a lot of really interesting places.
At one point ,in fact we bought a place in Mexico to retire to; it was such a quiet, but large enough city, with many cultural attractions; only it turned out to be the main area of a Mexican Cartel called La Familia, who decapitate, bomb and cause a lot of violent disruption. So we stayed in Colorado.
We have no grandchildren, and that’s just fine with all of us; we are a close family and one of the things I’m most grateful for, is that our kids like us, and spend time with us because they choose too, not because they should.
I think I can pretty much sum up my life from the chorus of an old Grateful Dead song.
“Sometimes the light’s all shining on me; other times I barely can see. Lately it’s occurred to me, what a long strange trip it’s been.” See you in September!