When will we ever learn? Oh, when will we ever learn?
Hello, friends out there. It’s been a long time.
Here I am again, tapping away at the keyboard, something bubbling inside me that wants to come out.
I promise you I’ve spent plenty of time tapping away at the keyboard in the last months, maybe longer. Yet I’ve always second guessed myself, put the thoughts on hold, and not pressed the button.
Not today. This one gets published.
If all goes as I hope I’ll soon be powering through a substantial writing project: a new book I’ll write in the first half of next year. I say “new” book. Yes, there’s one from a few years back. Yet in a way that wasn’t “my” book in the way this one will be. This new one will also be about the brain, yet in a much more directed way than the first. The call to take heed of what’s taking shape in the world around us gets stronger by the day. And our brains can betray us, focusing us things that distract from the larger realities even as those realities come to define our lives — and our future. Our brains can convince us that things are acceptable when they really shouldn’t be and lock us into patterns of seeing and doing things in ways that are misaligned with our own, and even (I believe) with human intention.
This new book, fueled by encouragement from an extraordinary editor, won’t be like the old one.
Why? Because these days things are coming up for me that make me feel I’ve been too complacent and too silent for too long. I’m 64 as I write this, an “elder” or whatever you want to call me, and the changes I’ve seen even in my lifetime twist my soul with concern about the changes that will face generations to come.
I grew up in Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. The memories of that early place blend with the experience of it becoming the place, and the influence, it is today. The Valley’s innovations and their consequences, many unanticipated, have shaped my life, and pretty much every life on the planet today. They shape some stories I’ve kept to myself for too long.
There’s one I’d like to share today. To do that I have to take you to a parking lot in Monterey, California, sometime in early 1967.
My father had just dialed our 1965 Ford Country Squire station wagon, one with those faux-wood panels bolted across the sides, into a parking lot at a McDonalds somewhere off the main road, a few blocks from the coast.
Five kids piled into the seats of that thing, and no seat belts. Seriously, I have no idea how my parents did what my parents did.
Gasoline was around $0.32 a gallon then. Packing up the car and heading out to sightsee was always an adventure, and a very different weekend activity than our usual Saturday housekeeping chores and weed-pulling duties. If the Petry kids learned anything from our Midwestern parents it was the importance of a good day’s work.
My mom was in the passenger’s seat, probably wondering something like what my dad was: how in the world had they ended up with 5 noisy kids squirming in the vinyl-covered seats behind them? Though David Byrne wouldn’t ask for another 15 years, maybe they were wondering how they had found themselves behind the wheel of a large automobile, and where would that highway lead to. Maybe. If I project I’d say they made small talk, told us to quiet down, and kept the radio on, news and music blaring, to silence the questions and chatter in their own heads.
Maybe. Maybe not. That’s a thought for another day.
Going to McDonalds was not the usual thing for the Petry family. For our weekend excursions, long drives to places like Point Lobos or Half Moon Bay or some other destination on the California coast my dad loved so much, my mom would wake up early and latch the clamp of a metal, hand-powered rotary food grinder on the formica table of our small kitchen.
She’d fetch whatever leftover meat waited in the fridge — usually ham, likely saved with the upcoming weekend picnic in mind — and crank it into a spreadable paste she’d mix with pickles and mayonnaise, scraping the bowl clean with a well-used spatula. She’d spread that mix on soft bread — probably the Hillbilly Bread she’d bought at markdown from the day-old shelf at what my brother called “the used bread store” a few blocks from our neighborhood — then slip each sandwich into small waxed paper sleeve before stacking them all into the plastic bag the Hillbilly Bread had arrived in. Then she’d seal the bag closed using its reclaimed twist-tie.
Hillbilly Bread still seems to be a thing, something to file in the category of “things I wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me they were true.” Go figure.
Petry family excursions generally happened on Saturdays (church on Sundays). And Saturday meant, obviously, the day after Friday, when like all good Catholic families we didn’t eat meat.
That meant we’d had tuna fish salad for dinner the night before. I hated tuna fish salad almost as much as I hated “deviled ham” on Hillbilly Bread. But I would have known better than not to eat what I was served, and hungry enough on Saturdays to actually look forward to whatever ended up in the red Igloo cooler she had packed up for our picnic that day.
Writing this I’m getting new insight into why I’m a vegetarian.
Anyway, McDonalds. For some reason there was no home-packed picnic that day and the novelty of a fast food restaurant felt thrilling. I can see the five Petry kids, three of us (including me) in brown-rimmed boy-style glasses, exploding like rockets out of the car as our father’s voice monotoned our names, admonishing us to slow down. He and my mother followed.
McDonalds was a rare treat, if I can call it a treat. I didn’t like hamburgers even then, though I really liked pickles and French fries. In fact, it may have been the first time any of us kids had been to McDonalds, or at least that I had. Later I’d go regularly with some kids I babysat for, making myself eat the obligatory hamburger so I didn’t only have French fries. But this early sojourn felt exciting, a sense of being out in the world in a way that felt special. Life was like that back then. It’s a lot different now.
My mom orchestrated our orders and my dad paid. We each took our bag from the counter and headed out to the parking lot to eat our burgers and slurp our sodas. Though it would have been a few years before the famed “Crying Indian” ad — the one that actually featured an Italian actor, but I digress — would have hit the airways, “pollution” was a word I had heard often by 1967, along with songs asking things like “when would we ever learn” when it came to our impact on the environment.
The “environment.” What I knew as home, the natural world I grew up in, was my childhood delight. I loved wandering into the orchard behind my house and sitting under gnarled cherry trees, birds flitting in them and then away again. How many hours I spent face-down, lying on the ground so I could squint and really focus on tiny insects, veins in leaves, little star shaped fronds on soft mounds of moss. I saw a small toad once and crawled behind it, wondering where it had come from and where it would go. Another time I held my index finger patiently on a branch until an unsuspecting katydid tiptoed upon it, staying there for long enough for me to wonder why it had tiny filaments on its legs, to watch its compound eyes swivel in independent directions, and see how its oddly jointed knees bent and folded as it walked.
I sensed a certain logic in nature, maybe even a vocabulary and predictable structures I could build mental sentences with, something much more interesting than those tedious syntactic tree diagrams we were forced at school to map for hours on end (a task that fueled early expertise in “avoidance” and “procrastination”). Nature made sense. It gave me stories I fell in love with in ways I found all too seldom in my school classrooms or catechism lessons. Roger Tory Peterson Field Guides enriched my learning, as did National Geographic and the various nature compendiums my mother wisely matched to my fascination. An encyclopedia of insects, still bearing a $1.97 price sticker on the back, rivaled a blue Schwinn Hollywood two-wheeler as my favorite Christmas present of 1966.
I loved that encyclopedia so much I saved it until my sons were grown, always a bit chagrined that they hadn’t soaked in the lifelong dose of awe it had ignited in me. Different times. I get it.
But back to McDonalds. Again.
Sitting on the hinged flip-down rear door of that Country Squire, I wondered why each of us had been given an individual bag, a bag we’d only use for a moment and then throw away. It didn’t make sense. I swiped the last bits of salt from the French fry sleeve (they were made of thin paper then, not branded cardboard like I see in gutters or blowing through open spaces today) and wadded the various papers into a ball to walk to the trash receptacle and throw it away.
I took some family teasing for what happened next, though one of my sisters agrees that it was, in a way, a defining moment. As I walked back from tossing my trash I noticed another family, four kids I think, also gathered around a station wagon — pale green, if memory serves — eating. Yet as they finished their burgers and fries they dropped the wrappings on the ground, where the Monterey wind blew them to the corners of the parking lot — there was quite an accumulation of wrappers at the base of the chain link fence — or out through the parking lot entrance, into the street and into the world. Shrieking seagulls circled out there, diving as the litter blew their way, picking up the papers in their orange beaks and flying off, or snatching scraps that clung to the wrappers in their as they raucously fought with each other for food.
It felt wrong. I didn’t think about what happened next, or if I did I don’t remember thinking about it. I must not have thought. I often second-guessed myself as a child and traded what my heart and gut told me for what grown-ups told me, what they said I should do, what I should be like to be a good girl and all kind of other things I was supposed to be.
But this time I didn’t hesitate. I walked over and starting picking up the rustling papers from the ground, gathering them into a wad. I looked up at the family — I think at the kids, not at the parents; disagreeing with grown-ups was disrespectful, I’d been told — and said, loudly, “I think this is disgusting.”
I remember a flash of eye contact with one of the kids, a boy, short reddish-brown hair and a striped t-shirt with a solid color collar. About my age. I may be making it up but I think he may have also bent and started picking up trash, eyeing me as he did. I can’t really say. What I do remember was putting an armful of gathered litter into the trash bin and heading back to my parents’ car.
Our family was uncharacteristically silent as I arrived. My mom handed me one of those wash cloths she’d packed, wet with soap and water, so I could wipe my hands.
I recall a quiet drive back to San Jose, though maybe I was preoccupied with my thoughts. Using and discarding so much litter, being so casual about it, challenged and confused my 8-year old sensibility. It didn’t fit in with the order of the natural world I knew so far, a world that seemed to whisper predictable logic to a glasses-wearing, gap-toothed little girl who loved its every word.
Why am I writing this?
Two reasons. First, because I’ve long felt there was something to this story about our innate human intelligence, a knowing that gets conditioned out of us as we begin to “learn,” that seems worth surfacing. There will be a whole chapter in this new book about conditioning. Don’t even get me started. Though I’ve written about it before.
Then there’s that second guessing I mentioned. Too many times I’ve doubted myself when stuff that made sense to me deep inside felt unconfirmed or even refuted by the workings of the larger world. Too often I’ve pushed my inner knowing down and gone with the flow, followed what others were doing, de-risked my position to avoid drawing attention or making waves.
I’m over it. Trees in my region are starting to push springtime growth from the tips of their branches, following that logic of nature that tells them that weather like this is weather when they should bud.
But it’s December. It’s not time. When the snows come, and they will come, what will happen to those tender leaves and to the incipient little flowers, the ones meant to attract pollinators that in turn help feed birds and in turn help feed all of us, fueling the delicate, powerful natural systems that actually are the logic of the world?
There’s so much more to say and I’m done with not saying it. Will it matter? Will anyone listen? I have no idea. Will I get served a happy meal of hate from people who say I’m virtue signaling or flaunting my privilege or lecturing about stuff that doesn’t matter in a world where so much has gone wrong? Probably so. I’m sure nothing I say will matter enough and that I’ll get some worthy smack-downs; I hope I’ll learn from them yet I won’t shut myself down.
That fake Indian from the ad, like all of us, deserves better. Yes, he was an indigenous imposter. Yet even a bunch of Mad Men from the early ’70s had enough inner knowing to realize that the people whose cultures came before theirs had ways of living with and surviving on this land, on this planet, that their way—OUR way—was violating.
Is violating.
Tears then. Flash floods, decimated forests, climate refugees, shockingly confused trees, and rising sea levels now. We’ve gone far beyond disgusting. We’re approaching terrifying. In fact, we may already be there. And it’s all too apparent, we know inside, where this highway leads to.
It’s time, past time, to face the question: when will we ever learn?
