New Beginnings

Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Top Winter Destinations (#litres_trial_promo)

A Winter’s Tale (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the same author: (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PART ONE (#u9866556b-11e5-57b0-b948-87ac0228d8a1)

San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.

Rudyard Kipling

Chapter One (#u9866556b-11e5-57b0-b948-87ac0228d8a1)

March Randolph Cantrell was named for the time of year she came into the world, and had lived all of her life in a golden state. The Golden State exists deep in the bones and blood of those born there, and makes them different, natural to the land with all its mysteries and quirks. Native Californians are immanent beings who can recognize instinctively the color and stillness of earthquake weather, and are never divided by that invisible latitude/attitude that separates Northern from Southern; they understand the human geography of one whose first breath of air was in a land of gold rushes, gold hillsides and golden bridges.

A native can stand on the sandy spot where the biggest and deepest blue ocean in the world touches land and know there are more hungry sharks behind them than in front of them.

Birthright gives them ownership in the fables of California, those Disneyesque stories of El Dorado and Father Junipero Serra, who once sowed a magical trail of mustard seeds as he walked the length of the land, on leather sandals coated with brown soil in which almost anything could grow.

Come every spring, Father Serra’s yellow mustard seeds sprout up from the ground on rolling hillsides, around fresh asphalt—in spite of concrete and wood frames—as bright a gold in color as one could imagine, and there to remind those who care to notice of the way things once were.

The month of March is a time of lions and lambs, and, in California, the time of the four-leafed mustard blooms that some claim are luckier than clover, and certainly more resilient. No matter what the weather: freak snow and ice, brush fires, crackling drought or Pineapple-Express-rains that drive homes down crumbling hillsides, despite all that Mother Nature can cast down from the heavens, every year the mustard always grows back.

For March Randolph Cantrell, California native was just one of many things that defined her: woman, daughter, artist, wife, mother, friend, businesswoman, now grandmother, a title that sounded too decrepit for a baby boomer who still wore string-bikini underwear and listened to rock music.

Growing up on the West Coast in the 1950’s, March and her sister May were known as those Randolph girls with the strange springtime names. Back in Connecticut, where the Randolph family had deep roots, names like March and May were simple tradition, appropriate as Birch and Rebecca, and not uncommon to girls with a great aunt named Hester, who had pointed out during one family holiday, “California is a fine place to live if you happen to be an orange.”

One bright blue day when March was eight, someone called the Randolph girls California natives. So with the peacock feathers from her mother’s vase sticking out of her ponytail, March stood at the medicine cabinet mirror and war-painted her face with blue and white tempera paint left over from vacation Bible school.

For those few weeks during an incalescent and sullen August, she ran around with a rubber Cochise tomahawk tucked into the waist of her seersucker shorts, speaking to everyone in bad Indian dialogue from an old black and white western.

At night, in those deep, still, blue hours when girls might lie in bed with secret thoughts of silly crushes and dreams of some-day-grown-up lives, her dreams weren’t about the neighborhood boy who let her ride his new Schwinn bicycle with the baseball cards clothes-pinned to the spokes, who loaned her the rubber tomahawk and wore his hair in a flat top. She dreamed that she was inside the wild stories that came from their small-screen TV—topped with tall rabbit ear antenna (which sometimes worked better if you put a piece of aluminum foil on them).

While her sister May had a passion for movies and heart throbs like Tab Hunter and James Dean, March demanded more from her television heroes and dreamt about falling in love with someone like Cochise, a noble man with a big dream. That was 1958. Ten years later, she met him.

A year after the Summer of Love, 1968 was filled with youthful dreamers fast becoming disillusioned. The sweet legacy of Haight had suddenly become hate. San Francisco, like most of the country, reeled from shock and the frightening belief that the world was rotting from the inside out.

Every night the broadcast news about Vietnam was too bleak to watch and too important to miss. Death and destruction, the body counts, escalated daily. After a dark day in early April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gone, too young, and along with him a dream. Now it was June, only half the year gone, and ten days ago Bobby Kennedy’s future ended horrifically with another assassin’s bullet.

The two men who stood for change and hope were senselessly stolen away from an upstart generation demanding the same change, and whose loud, chanting voices had been fueled by hope and a belief they could make a difference.

No, no, we won’t go.

Coffee-house talk and conversation in North Beach bookstores and the underground presses compared recent events to history’s anarchies. The city’s street-corner disciples (the ones who weren’t hiding in the nirvana of acid) railed at The Establishment, shaking their fists as they cried over the injustice of men killed here and overseas.

You can’t vote for the man who sends you to your death?

At home, where it was supposed to be free and safe, someone was assassinating the country’s heroes. In spite of all the shouting and ranting, most people carried a silent, dark dread down to their bones, and the youth of San Francisco sought anything available to pull away from a world so out of control they had to shout at it.

March’s father was only a single generation away, yet a continent stood between their ideas. He taught math and geography, was logical, conservative, a genius, a veteran. Her mother was a housewife who sewed from Butterick patterns, played bridge and the organ at church, and served dinner at six o’clock. March was raised to be standardized and conventional, the perfect round peg to fit in the perfectly round hole.

Her sister May fit precisely into the Randolph mold. She was stockings and white shoes. May was the one who went off to Smith some three thousand miles away and was picked as one of Glamour’s college girls, modeling in the magazine in her plaid skirt and cashmere sweater, her hair cut in precise angles and her smile as perfect as piano keys, even without braces.

March, however, was bare feet and Bernardo sandals.

She regularly forgot to wear her retainer and lost it often enough that she had to get mouth molds for new ones at least three times a year. Right after graduation, she was out of her parents’ house and living on her own near the Haight in a room cut out of the attic in an old Victorian. She worked a part-time shift in a coffee-house bookstore and attended the Art Institute, where thought was free, ungendered, and those East Coast kinds of traditions her sister May wrote home about were nowhere to be found.

San Francisco’s artists worked in loud, in-your-face-you-can’t-ignore-us colors that defined the place and time. At the Institute, among so many unique individuals, March didn’t have to be exactly like her family.

A close friend from a graphics class created psychedelic posters advertising local rock shows at the Fillmore, Winterland and Avalon ballrooms. Another designed velvet, lace and leather clothing, fringed sweaters and beaded tops for a trendy boutique frequented by local rock singers. Some poster work came to March via her graphics friend, and by connection she was soon part of the San Francisco music scene most weekends.

It was dark inside the Fillmore that night in mid-June, one of those down moments between music sets. The place was filled with three times more people than city hall permitted, because Joplin and Santana were on the bill. The cloying, sweet scent of hashish floated above the crowd in foggy clouds of contact highs, and crudely-rolled cigarettes were passed from hand to hand, glowing like red fireflies through small, compact circles of people.

As one of her friends dragged her through the crowd, she spotted a stranger a few feet away, standing alone, wearing a Nehru jacket, faded jeans and sandals. His hair was thick and dark and almost to his shoulders. His profile was noble. Even the lack of light and his close-clipped black beard couldn’t hide his dark, intense looks, the kind of guy girls noticed but only the bravest or silliest would ever approach. Within seconds, the music started again and she lost sight of him when he was engulfed by a flood of half-stoned people making for the stage.

By midnight the Fillmore’s lightshow rose up from behind the band in those vibrant, poster-colored hues, pulsing with the ragged voice of Janis singing a spiritual turned into hard rock by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Near the stage rim, March danced in a circle, barefooted, her sandals stashed in the deep pockets of her long velvet dress, her arms raised high in the air and five inches of mismatched bangle bracelets rattling down toward her elbows.

Freedom rang through the notes of the music and the words of songs: there was nothing left to lose, something that felt more true lately than ever. Her loose, uncut hair hung freely, and beneath the heavy velvet dress she wore nothing—free after being held captive and rubbed raw for too many high school years of elastic garter and Kotex belts.

Even the apples in a copper pot by the Fillmore stage were free for the taking, but probably laced with something to make your mood all too free.