Author Spotlight: Belinda’s Law

Here’s where I get uncooperative. I think it was in the sixth grade when I balked at having to do an autobiography. If I did the assignment it probably read, for instance… went to first and second grade at the Cass Street School in Milwaukee, etc. I’m sure I didn’t mention that the teachers there were the last good ones I had, I know I didn’t include asking the teacher why my drawings weren’t on the bulletin board as they usually were and she explaining that the other kids should have their chance. Not that I didn’t take that as only sensible and fair, but that was probably the last time I initiated with any teacher. They were, if not the enemy, something other and  one didn’t lobby for grades or attention.

It seems that this Jeff guy — for his literary ambition — has appropriated, quite selectively, much of my life. Eg, he takes my modest anti-Nam experience and has himself at the largest protest in Berkeley (and infamous for the one guy killed). Actually I ran into that traffic-stopping chaos and was royally pissed because I was driving a Post Office truck and was trying to deliver.”relays” of sorted mail to the storage “cans” for the carriers. Another drive had me carrying six million dollars worth of stamps to be incinerated (?). There was armed security driving behind me and ahead of me and when we got to Georgia-Pacific I was told to stay in the truck. But I mention this because I was parked a stone’s throw from the office where my creation — a wall hanging of their logo — might have been displayed and I was tempted to take a quick looksee. That side-career of constructing (through a decorator) to customer’s specs became very uninteresting.

I suppose I should write something about writing. Well, the thing is…I’m not a real writer. Ie, one who sits down every day and knocks out so many words.  Every once-in-a-while I write a story or an article which may or may not be submitted. I enter the New Yorker caption contest about half the time and about half of those I think (with maybe ten thousand others) that mine was funnier. A recent lead letter in Harper’scaused a reaction and, oddly, was rewritten more than it was edited. I do have a pretty good published rate in that very minor field. (I do standard punctuation for these;  I use, for example, that pointless period and superfluous dot, ie, e.g.,)

And, oh yes, I was born a good while back, went to various schools until that age of unreason (sixteen),  worked off-and-on, here-and-there and now live, quite reasonably, in San Francisco.