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[Editor's note: Leslie says: Probably if I was a more discreet person, I suppose that I wouldn't post my life story on the Internet, or I would at least pretty it up a bit, but as Popeye would say, "I yam whut I yam." It seems as if people could benefit from my journey, and perhaps avoid some of my pitfalls. Leslie's mother says: Leslie's life story makes me understand why my mother didn't want me to become a writer. I say Leslie's story is a gripping tale well worth reading, and it won't take you very long, even if you follow some of the links I put in there. OK, so maybe I went overboard on the links, but I think some of them provide useful background information. Leslie originally just had one, that to the Star Trek Prime Directive.]

I have lived the bulk of my life in and around Los Angeles. I was born in the San Fernando Valley in 1955, and subsequently raised in a newly built suburban tract house in Rancho Palos Verdes. My parents then were both working professionals, an aerospace engineer and a college English instructor in what I remember as a profoundly unhappy and stressful marriage that mercifully ended in divorce when I was in high school. I was raised, along with two brothers, by a Catholic African-Brazilian housekeeper named Ana Anita who, as my dad casually mentioned years later, "had a problem with diet pills." In the fourth grade, I apprehensively listened as each Girl Scout in a circle of Scouts confidently declared her family's religious affiliation. When my turn came, I said just as confidently that I was Lutheran...because that was what the girl who preceded me had said! It was only many years later that I would realize the origin of my religious belief system. Once a year, from before I could speak, I would be plopped in front of the TV to watch the movie "Wizard of Oz". From that, I learned that trusted friends would help me through my deepest troubles. I came to understand that if I had confidence in myself, and clicked the heels of my ruby slippers together three times, I could obtain all of my heart's desires.

My ancestors are German, English and Cherokee, but these influences are four generations or more removed from my Southern California environs. Grandma Craven had an old, black kettle in her backyard in Kansas City, where I lived for three summers during my childhood. When I asked at age 14, my grandpa said that the kettle had traveled with my grandma's grandma down the Trail of Tears. That was all the information Grandma gave him, and he doubted if I could get any more from her. I couldn't! Her name was Letha, which I discovered was derived from the name of the mythical river of forgetfulness between Hades and earth, but my mother doubted that my grandma's mother would have known this when she chose the name. Dad said that on the night he first met his future in-laws, Grandpa, an insurance company attorney, played "Isle of Capri" on a ukulele as he strolled between my mom and grandma who were screaming at one another in the living room. The Cravens were members of the Country Club Christian Church. The Burkhardts were staunch Methodists. Grandpa Burkhardt was a Mason, and Grandma was active in Eastern Star. Dad referred to his father, a small-town Iowa dentist, as "Mr. Sober-sides." He died of a heart attack when I was three years old. When I visited my grandma as a 20-year-old, a resident at her assisted living facility in Grinnell, Iowa commented that she had never heard any woman complain as much as my Grandma.

As a child, I must have seen every episode of Gilligan's Island at least five times. I awoke each morning to the Solid Gold Hits on my clock radio of Robert W. Morgan, KHJ Boss Radio DJ. I worshipped The Beatles from the third grade on, and gave them and Capitol Records a sizeable portion of my hard-earned babysitting earnings. I babysat for countless neighborhood nuclear families who were all desperate for childcare. After a shaky start, my newfound business flourished when I adopted the Star Trek Prime Directive as standard operating policy.

My initial upbringing left me with both a desire to explore other ways of existence, and a dangerous lack of knowledge of the hazards of such exploration. The summer after graduating from high school, I set out in search of a life that I could accept as my own. I first moved in with Maggie, a childhood friend. Her family had moved from their two-story home in Rancho Palos Verdes to rented quarters in Hermosa Beach after her 6-year-old brother died unfathomably slowly and painfully from a progressive brain tumor, and her mother, diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia, was committed to the long-since closed Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Her father had gone to Mexico that summer to marry a second cousin, so I was enlisted to keep Maggie company while he was away.

Maggie and I found a job as swing-shift factory workers at Metlox Potteries in Manhattan Beach. After three days of being hopelessly out-worked by the Central American workers, Maggie and I, along with everyone else working in the factory, were sent out on strike by the AFL-CIO in an attempt to unionize the company. We spend the next nine months picketing the factory under the strict supervision of Edmond, a former member of the French Resistance in WWII. During that time, Maggie and I befriended young man named Lars Lowenbrau, who lived next door to her and was bisexual. We visited him in prison after he was convicted of forging barbiturate prescriptions. His adoptive parents sadly and firmly declined our requests on his behalf for bail money. Further along in the strike, Maggie and I drove to Salinas to visit her Aunt Susie, the wife of a truck driver and mother of three children, who introduced us to her version of Strawberry Fields Forever -- marijuana and a room filled with Avon strawberry air freshener. It is still a vivid memory to this day. When we returned to Southern California to resume strike duty, I fell in with a group of revolutionary ex-convicts. I was quickly and quietly rescued by Maggie one week later, sans belongings, and with a sexually transmitted disease called trichomoniasis that I subsequently passed along to the burnt-out Viet Nam vet who lived upstairs from us.

When the strike ended, Maggie moved to Salinas, and I moved back in with my mother and younger brother. In the midst of recovering from a then undiagnosed case of anorexia nervosa, I enlisted in the National Guard and spent three, very long and difficult weeks of basic training in snow and freezing rain far from home in Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. At the recommendation of a fellow enlistee whose family had a tradition of service in the armed forces, I sent my squad sergeant a note that stated that I would shoot myself with my M-16 if I were not released immediately from service. Filled with joyous amazement, I was on a plane home within two days. After the abject failure of a first note that meticulously listed the misrepresentations of the recruiting office's service contract, I will be forever grateful for advice from someone who understood the time-honored traditions of the armed services.

Of the many experiences I had following high school, some were harrowing and quite dangerous. They gave me a strong sense, though, not only of other cultures, but also of the cultures within cultures, and the varied ways that people live their lives. They provided me with concrete insight into the consequences of lifestyle choices, and also made me more aware of the tremendous hazards, as well as the potential for change and growth that occurs when a person's ties to a traditional culture are severed or weakened. The experiences very strongly shaped how I choose to live my life and interact with others now.

After my brief stint in the armed services, this much more cautious young woman returned once again to Southern California. After taking a career guidance course, I decided to become an optician, and enrolled at Los Angeles City College to earn an Associate in Arts degree in Optics. During my studies, I roomed in the Fairfax district, the center of Jewish culture in Los Angeles, with the sister of a family friend who worked as a bookkeeper for a prominent bookseller of Judaic literature. I took a part-time job as a gopher (called so because the job entails one to "go fer this" and "go fer that") at Gang, Tyre & Brown, an entertainment law firm in Hollywood. When my school hours increased, I began working at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic as the evening recording studio supervisor. After graduation from L.A.C.C. and working briefly in a stiflingly small optometrist's office as a front office assistant, I answered a want ad seeking a volunteer coordinator at Braille Institute. At Braille Institute, I coordinated their volunteer recording program for ten years, then transferred to their low vision rehabilitation program, and then moved for a time to their Educational Programs area to assist in coordinating their admissions area before returning to the low vision program. During this time, I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Human Services from Prescott College. The program I enrolled in was part of their Adult Degree Program of independent mentored studies. Most of my course mentors in the Los Angeles area were people I had known for many years. The majority were visually impaired and/or working in or retired from the fields of vision impairment education or rehabilitation. After earning my degree in 1997, I returned to the job that I had enjoyed most, that of a low vision rehabilitation specialist, demonstrating adaptive devices and techniques to people with partial vision. Two years ago, I enrolled in a part-time, graduate certificate outreach program in low vision rehabilitation offered by Pennsylvania College of Optometry. Taking a leave from work, I completed it this summer with a six-week fieldwork stint at a low vision clinic in Philadelphia.

Now, quite suddenly it seems, thirty years have passed since high school graduation, over twenty of those years working at Braille Institute. For the past seven years I have lived in a cozy, two-bedroom townhouse-style apartment built in 1949 in Silver Lake, a funky, old neighborhood just west of downtown Los Angeles. The courtyard view is of the Griffith Park Observatory and Hollywood sign perched atop the hills to the northwest. I have a 5-minute commute from work, still driving the 1981 Toyota Corona station wagon that I'm determined to keep until the speedometer rolls over to 200K miles.

I have shared this space and my life with a man who walks each morning to his 25-year job as a clerk in the Los Angeles Public Library system. He is a wonderful companion who will always be much more sensible than I. At 40, quite serenely if begrudgingly, I started wearing bilateral hearing aids to compensate for a familial hearing loss. This summer, I listened with resigned forbearance as an ophthalmologist warned of retinal detachments from progressive nearsightedness. Just this past month, almost as calmly, except for the sheer terror of submitting to any surgical procedure, I underwent a hysterectomy, as both my mother and aunt did before me when endometriosis and fibroid tumors compelled medical intervention.

During my six-week leave from work to recover from the surgery, I have come to revere the "dolce far niente" philosophy: It is sweet to do nothing. I have taken long walks amid the camellias under the towering oak trees at Descanso Gardens in the Verdugo Hills north of L.A., and through the unending galleries at the L.A. County Museum of Art. I have spent time with my mother and her new, 80-year-old live-in boyfriend who was out marching in demonstrations protesting the potential war in Iraq. I have followed a narrow path on a windy morning along the jagged cliff-top edge of the rocky ocean shore just below my mother's world of golf carts humming through neat rows of manufactured homes. I've revisited my childhood next-door neighbors in Rancho Palos Verdes with my sister-in-law, 7-year-old niece and 2-year-old nephew in tow. I've stalked a flock of pinyon jays through the desert foothills of Joshua Tree National Park, just south of where my father and stepmother live in the remote high-desert town of Landers. I've lounged in the courtyard of my Silver Lake home, under the trees, reading, writing and sipping green tea through the warmest and loveliest January on record.

This Sunday is brunch on the patio with white wine and linen tablecloths at the Twin Palms in Pasadena with three longtime friends, all of whom are blind or visually impaired. During my privileged acquaintance with these people, each has journeyed to become a powerfully expressive playwright, a mentor teacher of multiply and visually impaired children with the Los Angeles Unified School District, and a director of a rehabilitation program for blind adults.

Last night the ground beneath me shifted a few millimeters northward with a gentle thud and shake, reminding me of the immense forces of time, place and humanity that shape the course of our lives. Before returning once again to the myriad distractions of my work world, this morning I reflect on a life well over halfway lived, and cannot help but wonder at where I have been, and where I have yet to go.

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