Adolescence in California and Oregon -
LeConte Junior High, Hollywood High, and Reed College

My adolescence stretched from about 1973 to 1979, and from Hollywood, California, to Portland Oregon. These were years of conflict with my parents, some academic success at Hollywood High School, and a great deal of adolescent unhappiness. In Junior High and High School I had a few crushes on various girls, and two longer relationships with young women. These provided some of the only evidence I had that there might be something very alright about me. In retrospect I think adolescent women tended to select me, rather than I them, and this "successful passivity" on my part would poorly prepare me for the world of young adult relationships in college.

Mostly I disliked Los Angeles and was happy to leave it in 1977 for the rain and the woods of Oregon. Reed College attracted me as a place that would reinforce my emerging identity (or aspiration to identity) as a scholar and an intellectual, with the added value of being far far away from Los Angeles. In reality, it proved a poor choice because Reed was and is a place for young folks with a certain degree of independence, but I had not yet begun to acquire the emotional strength and confidence that it required. And, for all of my difficulties at home, I was for the first time, far from home.

Arriving in Portland in September 1977, I was almost in shock at the loss of my girlfriend who was now at Yale. There were long transcontinental phone calls from the dorm hallway phone booth. I just couldn't believe how wrong it seemed not to be with her. I had been awakened to my need for love and intimacy and sex, but was quite clueless about how one went about getting those things. At Reed no one dated, of course. People just hung out. At least I think they did, but I was always wandering around the campus wondering where the heck the other students were - by which I mostly meant "women." Anyway, none of the hanging out seemed to culminate in sleeping with lonely adolescent males with an underdeveloped sense of self worth.

The realization that I needed to be in a relationship with a woman hit me hard and early. If you had asked me toward the end of my time at Reed, I think I could have told you that I very much wanted to be married, although I had no one specific in mind. It took me about 18 more years (to age 35) to figure out how to accomplish that. I was probably unusual among my male peers and my female peers in that way, at that time, in that place. Compared to the emotional issues and inner turmoil of my life, academics seemed kind of trivial. Yet Reed was only about academics, as I experienced it.

However as my years of adolescence drew to a close I found a few friends and we rented a house together, and new relationships and experiences began to fall into place. I fell giddily in love with Linda for a time, and a few other relationships with other women followed that were notably un-fun in the end. (My apologies across the years - may the waves of time heal us all.) Later still, to meet my need for familiarity and community, and perhaps to realize the latent desire for intimacy with a Jewish woman that my high school girlfriend seemed to have instilled in me, I would seek refuge and friendship in the small Jewish community at Reed. This involvement would prove fateful.