A seismic event can occur when tectonic plates shift and buckle. Or when a family breaks apart and new ones are formed. Or when popular culture erupts overnight to create a unique landscape. Along the great fault that runs down the San Francisco Peninsula, I experienced these dramatic shifts in my body, my family, and the world around me during the tumultuous and revolutionary decades of the 1960s and 1970s. A time when everything was shifting and a new world was being born.
It was a dynamic and continually changing era. I watched the world around me morph in just a few years from the world of my parents and grandparents into the world we recognize today. During the same stretch, I saw my family situation change and reshape itself multiple times. Add to that, all the obstacles I had to overcome dealing with a neurological disorder on top of the everyday challenges of adolescence, and I can sum it up with the adage, never a dull moment.
My mom and I were poor. We sold our house, moved into an apartment, and we were always one missed paycheck away from bad times. But I never felt poor because, during that time, a whole network of support sprung up all around us in the little courtyard of an apartment complex in San Mateo, and in the unlikely figure of an airline mechanic who would become a fixture in our lives. Together, this random collection of individuals would experience the dawn of a new age in one of the most exciting places on the planet and come together to form a community.
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Dennis Venturoni Author 