Dear classmates,

Hi! Unfortunately I can’t come but I’ve been enjoying reading your potted autobiographies so I decided to contribute one.

Where to begin. OK, so sometime around that interesting year of 1968, after finishing up at Michigan and moving to Boston, there are about a dozen years where something must have happened. It involved Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Ecuador, Berkeley, New Mexico, and some similar places. Then eventually in 1980 I went back to school and ended up a cultural anthropologist, teaching for the last 25+ years at UC Santa Cruz, from which I am officially retired but not quite. During that time I got married, had a kid, bought a house, wrote some stuff, taught a lot of variably engaged but quirky and smart students, and lived in several countries, especially Brazil and Japan, which somehow manage to coexist on the same planet.

Lynn is a not-quite-retired adult school GED/ESL/math teacher. Eli is 32, married, a definitely-not-retired architect, and lives in San Francisco. His spouse, Lindsey, works at AirBnb. It appears that stratospheric Mission District rents, driven up by the Google hipoisie, inhibit fertility, so no grandchildren yet.

Santa Cruz is an idyllic palmy beach town about an hour and a half south of SF, inhabited by psychopaths, intellectuals, wannabe artists, clowns, anarchists, drifters, serial killers, dreamers, hippies, dropouts, didgeridoo players, and vicious surfers, in no particular order. In other words, it’s the California of the movies.

I was last in Akron in November 2012, after a long absence. In a Jimmy Olson mode I was writing a series of superficial but (I hope) mildly amusing articles on the election for a local Central Coast newspaper. As a reporter I am a complete amateur, but I thought it would be fun to try to describe Ohio to these Californians. A lot of people around here have never met an admitted Republican and were (justifiably in my opinion, but never mind) stupefied by the idea that someone like Romney (for whom the term “stuffed shirt” was invented, but again I digress), might actually carry a WHOLE STATE, especially one that is not in the Bible Belt, the Gun Belt, and/or the Old Confederacy. We Buchtelites don’t think of Ohio as exotic, but it is.

Thanks to the Toms (Sawyer and Slocum) and to Joyce for making that fall visit so enjoyable. And to Swenson’s for still being there, albeit in a hideous building.

I will try to send along a photo with this, if the computer gods permit it. The photo, from 3 or 4 years back during a visit to Oaxaca, is as good as it gets (or will get). If not, well, I have been told I look like a cross between Walter White and Larry King. Lynn doesn’t look like anyone but herself, which is good.

Everything described here happened by accident, which I suspect we have all learned is the most important thing. I hope your accidents have been mostly fortunate ones.

All best,

Dan(ny)