Last reviewed 08/2013

                                                                John Kelleher

                                                       09/11/42 —

Introduction:

This most personal story is the hardest for me to tell.  I am tempted to sub-title it “My Fractal Life.”  My times have certainly been non-linear; pockmarked with false starts, mistakes, and some regrets.  Still, I look on them as good times after all.  I have included my curriculum vitae to provide the hard information about my education, bar admissions, and employment.  What I want to do here is give my children the flavor of my life and offer some explanation of the more erratic moves I’ve made.  In a sense, this outline is an apologia pro vita mea, what the old criminal lawyer in me would call an “argument in mitigation.”  There are some obvious questions you may want answered. I will try to give these answers with the inevitable warning that there are two sides to every story and insanus omnis furere credit ceteros (every crazy person thinks it’s everyone else who’s crazy).

As I write, I am 59 years old.  I work as a Family Court Hearing Examiner, a kind of minor judge.  I live in Homer, New York,   with my fourth wife, Kris, and our daughter, Megan.  Megan is 7.  I love to spend time with my family, read, write, cook, and daydream.  Children, bicycles, sailboats, trains, and things that fly have been my lifetime passions.   I don’t watch television, play golf, bowl, hunt anything, or attend any church.  I have a lifelong interest in Jesus, but the knowledge gained is why I do not attend any Christian church.  I am a theist, a Buddhist, perhaps a mystical pantheist.  I see deity in all creation.   I drink red wine and occasionally whiskey in moderation, when I feel like it.  I listen to music,   in which my tastes are eclectic, but play only a penny whistle.       I putter in my basement shop making wooden toys and exercise about an hour a day.   I planted my first roses recently.   I enjoy good health.

Early Childhood:

I was born during World War II.   Although I was obviously too young to recall it today, “The War” was very much a reality during my childhood.  The adults talked about it knowledgeably and emotionally.  Japanese submarines lurking just outside Los Angeles harbor, Nazi Stukas screaming down from the clouds, and sailors kissing girls at the docks all crowd my memories.    My first vehicular toy, received on my 4^th birthday,   was a red and yellow decommissioned aerial bomb to which wheels, a seat, and little wooden handlebars had been added.  I wish I had it now.   My godfather,   Eddie Slingloff, was a sailor killed by a kamikaze.   I have no memory of him, but recall his mother, Jenny Slingloff,   as one of my first friends.   She had a box of Eddie’s toys which she let me play with when Mom and I visited her.  Eddie’s picture in his sailor’s uniform was on the mantle over her fireplace.  When, after boot camp, my own son, Peter, sent me his picture in sailor blues, I got a lump in my throat thinking about Eddie and all the other kids who died in that far away war.

My mother tells a story that during this time I did something naughty, was punished, and cried bitterly in a corner.   Finally, brightening a little, I toddled over to Mom arms open wide and said, “Jackie loves his Lala.”   Mom softened and bent down to pick me up.  At this point, I bit her hard and laughed until I cried.”   She didn’t have the heart to spank me again.

My parents noticed very early on that I had a tendency to weave interesting, but not strictly factual stories.  I acquired a large and useful vocabulary before starting kindergarten and enjoyed using it.   They read me the Dr. Seuss story, To Think That it Happened on Mulberry Street, the story of a boy whose vivid imagination got the better of him.  After that, they would ask me, “Jackie, did this happen on Mulberry Street?”  when they thought I was embellishing.  I recall resenting the question, but answering it as truthfully as I was able.    The root problem, then and now, is that I do not have a bright line between dream and reality, whatever those words mean.  Things I dream and imagine are real to me.   I can’t express this any more succinctly.  What my mind sees is.

I also suspected my parents, all adults really, of being a little imaginative too.  They took me to mass at St. Andrews Roman Catholic Church. They sent me to parochial schools through second grade in Pasadena, California.  I knew that some of the things I was being told in church and school weren’t about events the physical world.  Jesus rising from the dead, turning water into wine, Mary ascending into heaven, and the “spanking machine” in the basement of Saint Andrew’s School all sounded like Mulberry Street to me.   Then, there was a “little bird” my mother told me about.  This little bird had told mother that I was dawdling on my way home from school, a walk of about twenty city blocks.   For the next few weeks I didn’t dawdle, but threw rocks at every bird which seemed to be paying me the slightest heed.  The funny thing was that none of those birds birded me out to Mom.   Maybe the whole little bird business was Mulberry Street too.  I didn’t ask Mom.  Why let her know I knew?

Backtracking a little, I also remember my disappointment when, on my 4^th birthday, I was told that I still had another year before I could go to school.   In retrospect, I think I would have been an ideal kid for home schooling.  Mom is intelligent and structured.   I enjoyed being with her.  It was about this time when, walking together to the grocery market and butcher store next door, we passed the Harley Davidson motorcycle shop.   I pointed to a shiny red Harley with a side car and promised Mom most solemnly that, when I “was a big boy” I’d buy one and she could always ride with me in the side car.   (The past and future tense then, as now, also seem elusive to me.)  Although Mom is now 84, I know if I had a Harley with a side car she’d crawl in and, by God, we’d have a pretty good time driving up and down Myrtle Avenue waiving at her friends.

School Days – The 1950s:

I looked forward to Kindergarten and recall being disappointed when, on my fourth birthday; I was told I’d have to wait another year.   This interest, however, only lasted one day.   When I came home after the very first day of school I told Mom that all they did was play; I had important work to do at home.

As a school boy, I told adults that when I grew up I wanted to be a priest.  Later, when I suspected the questioner to be of the Protestant persuasion, I would substitute “teacher” for priest.  I never quite had the courage to say “rabbi,” but considered this rejoinder from time to time as I came to appreciate what we now call the “diversity” of my audience. The truth is I wanted to be a dog.   Dogs frolicked outside my schoolroom window.  Dogs slept in the sun, drank from puddles, barked at elderly matrons, and pissed wherever they pleased.   Dogs humped indiscriminately.   Dogs were truly God’s own children.   Granted the clarity of my aspiration, it should come as no surprise that, when the time was fulfilled, I became a lawyer.  

The fondest memories of my school days are our family camping trips, a tradition started with a war surplus tent, canvas cots, and a week at Yosemite when I was five.  During the school year, marbles,   yo-yo season,   and mumblety-peg with scout knifes were very high on my list.   Best of all, however, were Little Oscar and his   amazing Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.   (I can yet recall the advertising ditty “Little Oscar is coming your way…”, and would embed it here if I had the ability.)  Oscar Meyer still produces wieners and recently re-introduced the Wienermobile, at least on television.   The old Wienermobile was a much modified Buick which had a behemoth aluminum frankfurter astride and beyond the ends of its chassis.  “Little Oscar,” a  midget employed by Oscar Meyer Meat Packing Company,  always came out of the side of the Wienermobile dressed up as a chef, complete with spotless chef hat,  and would shout  “Hiya kids!” at the top of his piping Mickey Mouse voice.   Then, if we gave him a sufficiently enthusiastic welcome, and if he wasn’t too cruelly hung over, Little Oscar would descend and mingle, handing out little plastic wiener whistles.  Of course, the symbolism of the enormous frankfurter did not escape our nine year old male perception.  Indeed, the reason we so enjoyed Little Oscar’s visits was that it gave occasion for much ribald banter and double entendre.  When Little Oscar joined with the crowd of children, some budding wag would always ask him if the inch long wiener whistle were the size of his “wiener.”   Sadly, Little Oscar, although our size, did not share our mentality.   Perhaps too many years of the same question from a succession of nine year old comedians had exhausted his equanimity.  In any event, the last time I spoke to Little Oscar he said, “Fuck you, kid!”  sotto voce, smiled broadly,  and continued working the crowd in the parking lot behind  Mr. Kentner’s Market.    I wasn’t surprised or offended by Little Oscar’s response.  I was honored by the brief human contact with the small celebrity.  After this conversation, I always imagined Little Oscar off duty – in his singlet and skivvies in some sleazy motel, little legs dangling from a too large armchair in front of a black and white console television.  He’d be nursing a long necked bottle of Eastside Beer in his tiny fist and rooting for the L.A. Rams – a regular guy.  I’m sure that the current denizen of the Wienermobile, a well-scrubbed Martha Stewart clone in chef costume with a pleated skirt, doesn’t drink beer or root for the Rams.

My life before college is a kind of dream from which I didn’t fully awaken while living at home.  I attended school, but my real life was exploring.   I liked to ride my bicycle, snorkel in the ocean shallows, sail boats, snap shoot my B-B gun at (mostly) inanimate “enemies,” and build things in Dad’s shop.   Ronnie “Scotty” Scott (now West), was my best buddy.   We took bike trips from Monrovia to as far away as Oceanside, camping overnight in our pup tent and snooping on courting couples in the sand dunes.  Here’s a sampler:

One summer, when I was ten or eleven,   Scotty and I left Monrovia at 3:30 in the morning to begin a long ride to Doheny State Park. When we left home it was pitch black outside except for the stars and our puny bike lights.   Dogs barked as we passed.  We shared the city streets with milkmen, paperboys, and night janitors getting off work.     Outside town,   the road was empty; a river of darkness.   Scotty had his bedroll tied between ape hanger handle bars.  Mine was lashed to a bike rack which weighed almost as much as a modern bicycle.   We pedaled across the San Gabriel Valley, over the Coast Mountains at La Habra Heights, and rolled down old Route 39 to what was then called “Tin Can Beach,” an unregulated strip of the coast now sanitized as Huntington Beach State Park.  In my imagination, a rogue Japanese submarine lurked just beyond the breakers.

Highway 39 was mostly rural, truck farms and orange orchards punctuated by funky hamburger stands and beer joints.  Franchised fast food hadn’t been invented.  Knott’s Berry Farm still sold homemade jams from a roadside stand.  Next door, the Hollywood Alligator Farm hid behind a high, gaudily painted, but impenetrable, wooden fence.   I imagined veteran Hollywood alligators in Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses at pool side, sipping Bloody Marys and tanning in the morning sun.

The Korean War was history, but sailors and marines still haunted the ramshackle towns which peppered Highway 101, the north-south corridor along coastal California.   Scotty and I saw our first board surfers that day.  There weren’t many, only a hardy handful.  None wore wetsuits, these being things of the future.   Most of the surfers had fragile varnished balsa wood boards.  Some old timers still rode gigantic redwood boards.  I recall watching a big surfer astride one of these huge boards gliding down a wind crested comber.  It was like seeing a Rolls Royce on Main Street Monrovia.  This board, this surfer, was regal to me, royalty from a far different world and life.

We camped that night at Doheny State Beach, pitching our army surplus pup tent on the bluffs behind a thick hedge overlooking the ocean.   We dined haut cuisine, canned beans, cold franks, and Oreo Cookies.   Although we went to sleep at sundown, I woke later when a courting couple went laughing by our tent on the path to the sand dunes.  I smelled perfume and heard and the familiar clink of long neck beer bottles.   A girl’s baby powder voice cooed,   “Bobby, honey, you didn’t forget the blanket?”   After they passed, I crawled out and stood hugging myself in tee shirt and boxer shorts, a skinny kid shivering in the full moonlight.  I thought maybe I’d look where the couple went and,  if I were really lucky,  see a  girl naked. 

Looking down the bluff, I saw instead huge waves building about three hundred yards off shore.   As each breaker crested, phosphorescent plankton flashed in rippling surges of blue white light running down the wave’s spine for hundreds of yards in each direction.  The surf was alive with color and light.  I smelled jasmine, bougainvillea, and the salt green Pacific Ocean.   In that lost summer night, I knew what I really wanted in this life – an old pick-up truck, a surfboard, and a girl whose voice sounded like cotton candy. 

School was a chore.  These adventures were my real life, a kind of Tom Sawyer childhood.  When I was fifteen, my friend Dennis Fontany and I rode a tandem bicycle I’d built from two English three speeds from Monrovia to Monterey, California, up the old Camino Real, Route 1.   We camped behind filling stations,   beside creeks, and on the beach.   People waved at us.  We got our picture published in the Monrovia News-Post.   I’d like to take that ride again, with Megan.

Three years later, when I left home for college, Denny signed on as crew aboard a sailing yacht bound for Tahiti.   The last time I heard from his brother, Warley, Denny was still sailing in the South Pacific. It saddens me that adventures such as mine aren’t safe for children in this day and age.  They were some of my happiest times.

I went to Clifton Junior High School with a boy named Bobby Walling who died at the beginning of his freshman year at Arcadia High School.  Bobby stepped out of a car in which he’d been “making out” with a girl, slipped on something, and stumbled into the path of a speeding car.  He died on impact.  We’d been friends in junior high because Bobby was what, in those days, we called a “rat’s ass guy.”   This meant, Bobby said what he thought at the moment and didn’t give a rat’s ass who heard what he said.  This attitude got him many laughs, my admiration, and detention.   Bobby was briefly, very briefly, a member of my Sea Scout Ship, a branch of the Boy Scouts of America.   When asked by the scoutmaster, Skipper McCloud, to introduce himself and tell us what his dad did for a living, Bobby said, “Hi, my name’s Bobby Walling and my father’s a whoremaster.”  See what I mean about Bobby?  He was a rat’s ass guy.   I think about Bobby from time-to-time.  He was chubby and had sandy hair and freckles, like a kid in the Our Gang Comedies.  He always had a grin on his face.  Bobby was killed the same day as his first kiss.  He died with lipstick on his cheeks.

In the summer between junior high and high school (8th and 9th grade), I went to Wyoming to work on a ranch owned by Lloyd T. and Edna Allen, friends of my Uncle Lauren Moran.   This hard work ended abruptly a bout of para-delinquent behavior and my childhood.

In high school I was best in math and science, but did good work in all my studies save handwriting.   I was a runner up in the National Merit Scholarship competition and achieved SAT and other standardized test scores in the 99^th percentile.    I was a member of the Scholarship Society and graduated “gold seal,” but was not socially in sync with the other better students.    They all lived “north of Foothill,” the social boundary in the white community.  My humble origins meant I was not invited to join with this group off campus.  These children’s parents were store owners, real estate salespeople, and others whose income was derived wearing a necktie.   My dad worked in a brewery.  This made a difference then.  I suppose it still does.  I was never ashamed of where I lived or how my father earned our living.  On the contrary, I felt superior to the more middle class children because Dad really worked for and earned his money.   Managing a drug store or owning a Myrtle Avenue (Main Street, Monrovia) business seemed less honorable to me.

I received a California State Scholarship, then based purely on academic achievement,   but no local recognition for my high class ranking.   In fairness to the school, I must admit that one of the reasons I did not graduate with more recognition for my academic achievement was a misunderstanding involving chocolate chip cookies, baked with Exlax, a purgative, and an outbreak of diarrhea following a senior class social event.  Perhaps 25% of the senior class was affected.  Many students and several teachers missed school the following day.   I graduated from high school on disciplinary probation.  If that happened today, I’d have a rap sheet.  My punishment was I didn’t get the gold filled pen award from the local VFW.  I’ll bet more of my graduating class remember me than whoever it was got the gold pen that year.

I didn’t enjoy high school and bridled at its tedium.  The useful curriculum was watered down.  Much of what was given us was little more than propaganda.   I recall distinctly that Shakespeare was presented in expurgated edition, and then only “The Merchant of Venice.”   (No wonder so many Americans prefer television.  They were inoculated from reading serious literature in High School!)   I enjoyed competitive sports, but did not excel in a fashion anyone noticed.   I was a fast runner and durable; good enough to make the team, but not a letterman. 

I applied to and was accepted at California Institute of Technology,  but decided not to attend when told I would have to live at home my first year because of a campus housing shortage.  I was desperate to leave the nest.  I went to nearby Occidental College and chose to major in Comparative Literature instead of pre-Med, Chemistry, or Physics because Occidental only offered a Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature.  I figured if I was going to a school, I should go for their best program.   So it was that I became a literature major rather than an engineer, medical doctor, or scientist of some sort.   (This decision, by the way,   seems in retrospect to be the first in a series of decisions which would clearly justify my characterization of my life as “fractal.”)

As a kind of post script to this section, I want to add that at no time in my educational history did anyone ask me what I wanted to do; what I’d do if I didn’t have to earn a living.  Educators and guidance counselors tested me variously and told me what I should do.   They told me I should be a scientist, engineer,   or medical doctor.    Had I felt free to do as my heart wished, I think I would have gone to sea.   I am a sailor at heart.

Boy Scouts:

I joined the Cub Scouts when I was nine or ten.  From there, I became a Boy Scout and then a Sea Scout.  I have mixed feelings about scouting.  I honed valuable outdoor skills I’d learned in family camping and acquired more science than I’d received in school.  I also learned about citizenship and government, environmental preservation, and wildlife protection in greater depth than seems common today.  I certainly learned more about these important subjects in scouting than I learned in public schools.   Through scouting, I became a true believer in the ideals of truth, justice, and equality.  This has made it difficult for me to accept the hypocrisy of such divergent governmental impositions as racial segregation and affirmative action, both of which I witnessed firsthand.  Neither fits my program.  I can’t understand how and why we tolerate leaders who don’t respect our basic cultural values.                What was wrong with the scouts, however,   was that in some years our leaders were so lax or misguided that we boys degraded into delinquent behavior reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.  My first experiments with alcohol and organized cheating were in Sea Scouts.   Nevertheless, I still remember fondly my Boy Scout leader, Johnny Oshima.   Mr.  Oshima was a true American and taught me that honor and decency do not respect racial boundaries.  Johnny Oshima fought in Germany while his family was interned in California.  Still, he loved America.  My good memories of scouting prompted me to become Gillian’s Girl Scout leader later in my life.   Sometimes, I still ask myself what Johnny Oshima would do.  His sons, Ronnie and Kenny, were my friends,   but Johnny was my first real inspirational leader.             Scouting also introduced me to sailing.  Like many before me and since, my first sailboat was a Sabot, an 8′ sailing pram.   My Sea Scout troop owned two or three Sabots.  With my dad’s very active help, I built my first boat from a raw Sabot hull as a joint venture with my scouting friend, Richard Rudloff.   I still like prams and have plans for 16’ and 26′ prams, both of which may be in my future.

Adventures and Dreams:

When I was 12 or 13, my mother purchased my first suit, including a shirt with French cuffs and cuff links.   I never quite figured out what inspired Mom, but she dressed me up in this dark blue suit,  starched collar and necktie,  and took me to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium to see a talk by adventurer and lecturer,  John Goddard.  Goddard appeared in a fringed buckskin coat and gave a live narration of his film from a kayak trip down the Nile River.  Lord, how I envied Goddard’s buckskins that night.  I still do.  This evening was a turning point in my life.   I mark it as the beginning of my lifelong interest in adventure and exploration; a passion to know and see and experience the world firsthand.   If I ever sail off again, blame my mother and John Goddard.

At about the same time and certainly precipitated by the Goddard lecture, I became on fire to know more about ancient Egypt.   This intellectual passion, the first of countless such explosions of curiosity,   triggered my first self-directed study and, as a by-product, forced me to learn to read.  Until then, reading was painful, word-by-word process.  Since then, I haven’t been the same.   I can’t recall a time in my life when I wasn’t burning to know more about something, usually from history, but occasionally from nature or science.    Lately, it has been the history of flight and world navigation.   I very much enjoyed reading Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World.  Slocum was the first person to achieve this feat.   These intellectual adventures help me stay put long enough to earn a living and raise my children.   They are vicarious, but very real to me.  (I must add that my dreaming and intellectual passions exasperated my wife, Kris.  This part of my personality has its downside.)

All my adventuring has not been vicarious.   I have had many real adventures, bicycling alone or with my children to places few people see or, if they do, don’t pause to enjoy.  I have explored Mexico by VW van, Europe by Vespa motor scooter, and Ireland by bicycle.     I still hope to bicycle across the United States some day and dream of exploring the Finger Lakes, New York canal system, and Great Lakes in a sailboat.   There are great adventures just outside my front door.   They call to me constantly.

First Loves:

The plural is intentional.   In high school I was infatuated with Joyce Angela Creamer, but swept away by a more aggressive competitor, Claudia Coughlin.   With the typical confusion of an adolescent male,   I began going steady with Claudia, but loved Joyce.   Claudia jilted me after graduation for an “older man” who was produce manager at the Alpha Beta Market and drove a new Chevrolet.  I dated Joyce in college, but she never forgave me for Claudia.  Joyce ultimately married, and divorced, our classmate and my college roommate, Paul Boswell.  I wandered on, not much wiser for the affairs.  Joyce and I remained friends for several years, corresponding occasionally.   Joyce’s twin sister had a birth defective child and Joyce decided, wisely I think, not to marry or reproduce.   When I last heard from her, more than 25 years ago, she worked for Los Angeles State College and was known as “Angie” Creamer.   Claudia’s mother remained in Monrovia, lived to a ripe old age, and used to play bridge with my mother.   According to this source, Claudia married, begat a daughter, divorced, and now lives in Hawaii.  Claudia is now obese, a fit fate for jilting me.   Obla di, obla da.

My college girlfriend, Nancy Hawkins (now Bostick), and I went steady for two years, breaking up at the end of our junior year.   We were very serious, planned to be married and have a family.  This dream ended abruptly when Nancy’s mother, the socially ambitious wife of a Vice-President of Lockheed Aircraft, disapproved of me as working class, socially unsuitable.   Nancy, to my surprise, anger, and humiliation, accepted her mother’s interdiction.   The year after we graduated, Nancy was married briefly to a Latin American diplomat, had a son, and divorced.    Nancy’s college best friend and mine, Gale Lawrence,   continues to correspond with me.  Gale is a Family Court Commissioner (a job analogous to my own) in Northern California.  Although we come from widely different backgrounds and have led divergent lives,   I still feel an eerie connection with Gale. In fairness to Nancy’s mother, I was working class.  I supplemented my parents’ support, scholarships, and academic loans with part-time employment as an auto mechanic and occasionally as a roofer.   Nancy was probably attracted to me because I was different from the private school children with whom she’d been raised.  We had some fun together.  I know I grew some from knowing with her.   Nancy and Gale taught me to play the guitar.  Nancy’s sometime teacher and acquaintance was Jerry Garcia to whom Nancy   introduced me at Saint Michael’s Alley, a coffee house in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University.   He was a folk singer in the bluegrass vein a la Joan Baez at that time, but went on to found the legendary Grateful Dead rock and roll band.

Occidental College 1960- ‘64:

I enjoyed college much more than high school, made intense new friendships, and explored my newfound freedom.    I played the guitar, hung out at folk clubs such as The Ash Grove in Hollywood, read poetry, and drank too much beer.   After living my first year in campus housing, I moved off campus and roomed with Paul Boswell and, later,   Rodney Devon Dokken and Harold Todd “Hal” Thomas.   Dokken and Hal became my fast friends, although Dokken’s life ended tragically when he drowned in the early 1970s, an apparent victim of alcoholism.    Hal Thomas and Gale Lawrence were married in 1964 or ‘65, and had a son, Ian Thomas (1968 – ), with whom I am still in touch.   As I write (11/00) Hal has just been diagnosed as terminally ill.   

My college social life distracted me and I was not the excellent student of my high school days.   I enjoyed my studies, however, but felt too rushed by the pressures of a four year curriculum.  In those days, Occidental had a required liberal arts core curriculum and here I was in my element.  I loved History of Civilization and would happily have studied it formally for my entire academic diet.  As it turns out, this curriculum lit the fire which still burns.   I still love Medieval History.  My favorite professors,   P.K. Mok, Basil Busacca, and Kenneth Kurtz inspired me to love the literature and philosophy of China, Italy, and England.   I felt particularly connected to Professor Mok and much of my present world view and intellectual disposition derives from his teaching.   In his day,   Poon Kan Mok had been an Olympic soccer player, a spy in Japanese occupied China, and soldier in India.   He described himself as a Chinese peasant and Christian/Buddhist.  I idolized him and, I think, he had a special place in his heart for me. I have always referred to him as Mok Fu Tze, viz., Mok the Philosopher.  I am a Buddhist because of Mok Fu Tze.  Here’s a reminiscence which will give you the flavor of my college years:

In my junior year at Occidental, I was seeing a girl named Alice who lived on campus in the dorms.   Alice was dating a USC student name Ben, seriously as their later marriage demonstrated,   but frequently week ended at my home off campus.  So, this particular Friday, a warm spring night, I was waiting for Alice to come back from her movie date with Ben.  It was getting on towards 12:30 a.m.,   the curfew for women in the dorms, and couples were strolling by, kissing at the gate, and parting.  The night air was heavy with jasmine and seemed to swallow the yellow glow from dormitory’s solitary porch light.    Whispered voices drifted from out of the darkness.  I was sitting in the back seat of Alice’s light green Ford coupe, drinking beer and listening to soft jazz on her radio, not thinking much.  The plan was Alice would part from Ben at the door, sign in at the dorm, and clamber out a window to join me.

The problem was that Alice was late and the beer I’d been drinking was ready for redistribution.    There wasn’t any toilet I could conveniently   use nearby.   However, across the road from the parking lot there was a shrubby area which, without any particular botanical knowledge, I’ll call Chaparral.  This brush was about head high, impenetrable, and crisscrossed with paths leading downhill to the lower campus.   During the daytime, standing where I was on the ridge above it, you could see people coming through this maze, but they could not see each other. 

So, I stepped into a shadow above the Chaparral and, as any young man would, took the opportunity to urinate in a high arch into the brush on the hillside below me.  I had procrastinated a considerable time and must have had about a quart of used beer to jettison. 

In the event, no sooner had I achieved my desired optimal 45 degree trajectory than I began to hear some shuffling and scuffling in the Chaparral below me.   Then, after a moment of puzzled silence, a female voice wailed, “Oh, God damn it, Georgie.  It’s pee!!”   This exclamation was followed almost immediately by a bellow of animal rage and one of the larger linemen from the Varsity Football Team emerged momentarily from the brush and lunged blindly in my general direction. 

Now, you will no doubt appreciate from your own experience that there are certain bodily functions which cannot be interrupted readily once commenced.   So it was that for a moment or two I was a horrified, albeit convulsively laughing,   prisoner of my own situation.   Fortunately for me, poor George proved hobbled by his jockey shorts and trousers.  His first instinctive charge was his undoing.  He fell face first into the dirt, cursing and groveling, and came up somewhat muddy, naked from the waist down.   I took the occasion to bring my business to a hasty but satisfactory conclusion, and ran away yodeling into the night. A 300lb half-naked football player with an erection is nobody with whom to mince words concerning natural necessity, intention, and accident.  And, I knew full well that my uncontrollable mirth would hamper my powers of apology and mollification.

Alice later chastised me for my ignorance that the Chaparral was a courting ground for dormitory students, identified the couple by name, and related that the young woman had returned to her quarters in considerable disarray and high dudgeon.  

While I was at Occidental, my kid sister Mary Jo was a frequent weekend visitor.  She and mother were at odds.   Jo and I developed a fondness which forms the basis of our adult relationship.  When I left Los Angeles for law school in New York,   leaving Jo was my only regret.  I missed her sorely in the ensuing years.  I still wish we lived closer to each other.

Marriage to Nancy:

I met and married Annie Thornton (“Nancy” by Naturalization Order) Palmer in my senior year at Occidental.  Nancy was the best friend of Jan Blandemer (later Glass), another English girl who was dating guys from Cal Tech.  (Ironically, my roommate and best friends in college were all Cal Tech men.)  I was attracted to Nancy because of her intelligence and grit.   Also, I must confess that Nancy’s working-class English background  was a plus — the Beatles were just then storming America; being working class and British was very, very hip.    Nancy was 27, and feeling “old” and I was 21 and feeling ready to settle down.   Nancy was not immediately persuaded to marry me.  She liked her single life and had plans to keep traveling.   When we met, I was trying to decide whether to pursue a Ph.D. in History at UCLA under the sponsorship of my Colonial American History teacher, Professor Stonehouse, or seek more exotic employment in the Foreign Service or CIA.  I was interviewed by the CIA on campus by a man with a pipe.  (In retrospect, I wonder if he was the legendary Alan Dulles.)   My CIA interviewer encouraged me in my idea of joining the Army to go to the Chinese Language School at Monterey, California.  What I liked in college was history and cultures.  I had an ear for languages, but was too undisciplined then to master advanced grammar.

Nancy told me she wouldn’t consider marrying into academic poverty and, over pizza and cheap red wine, I announced my intention to go to law school as soon as I got back from my planned motorcycle trip through Europe.  (I’d formed the plan to travel and go to law school sometime during my second glass of Chateau Rocktown.)   We were married soon after — about Easter, 1964 — in the Gretna Green Chapel in Winterhaven, California, on the California/Arizona border.  We married on the spur of the moment and, when asked for a ring, I paused in panic, but recalled Aunt Grace Fitzpatrick’s ring I wore on my left little finger.   After the ceremony,   I gave Nancy a rose stolen from the garden outside the chapel.  Gillian now has this ring.   Nancy threw the rose into the desert.                                    

When I graduated from Occidental, we worked the summer, saved a little over $2,000 and took our tour.  We flew to Glasgow via Icelandic Airlines, visited English relatives, bought a used Vespa motor scooter, and rode it from Northern England to Gibraltar.  We traveled through England, France, Spain, and Portugal and even took a day ferry boat to Tangier.   We returned to England by cruise ship from Gibraltar to London and arrived back in California by Greyhound bus, with exactly $100 in our treasury, an amount I owed Mom and meant to pay forthwith.  We’d been gone five or six months and had seen most of the cultural attractions of England, France, and Spain.  I thought I’d return soon for a closer look, but have never returned to continental Europe^[1].

Back in California, Nancy worked one job and I worked two trying to save enough money to fund my first year in law school.  No financial aid was available for first year, married law students. I worked days as a calendar clerk at O’Melveny & Myers, a Los Angeles law firm, and nights as a fireman on the Santa Fe and Disney Railroad at Disneyland.  Including driving time, I was working about 90 hours a week for the whole summer.  

At New York University Law School, I worked hard and earned above average grades. (I graduated without formal class position because of a snafu in my first year Torts exam.  I took Torts, a year-long course, de novo in my second year.  I believe I graduated in the first quintile of my class, but, officially, had no class standing.)   I worked as a Probation Officer in The Tombs, the lockup behind the Criminal Courts in Manhattan, full-time in the summer and twenty hours a week during the school year.  Nancy was a salary administrator with New York University, a job which she enjoyed and hated to leave when Gillian was born.  

Gillian’s Arrival – June 11, 1968:

Gillian’s (Gillian Sarah Kelleher, 06/11/68) arrival changed everything.  Before Gillian’s birth I was Mr. Ambition, determined to take New York by storm.  Being a daddy hit me between the eyes; changed me utterly and forever, but not overnight.   Nancy too changed, but not as happily.  Nancy did not enjoy staying at home and missed her former, single life.  I began to resent having to go to work.  Working seemed like “work” for the first time in my life.   It still does.  Given a free choice, I’d stay home with Megan.   I’m happy that I can make this gift to Kris, who stays home with Megan.

The immediate circumstances of Gillian’s birth are worth telling.   Nancy quit her job at NYU and I started mine at the Securities and Exchange Commission (“Trial Attorney-Finance”) about a week before Gillian was born.  I was going to bar review classes at night and waiting to sit for the New York bar exam at the end of the summer.  I missed the Corporations review lecture the night of Gillian’s birth and was paranoid I’d flunk Corporations questions on the bar exam.   My health insurance hadn’t vested because I hadn’t had my first pay check, so Gillian was a $2,000 credit card baby.  Nancy suffered severe post-partum depression, including visual hallucinations, from which I speculate she never recovered fully.   Mom and Dad came to New York to help.   I felt like Custer at the Little Bighorn.  Things got some better, but not much.

Our best purchase that year was a Gerry Carrier, a backpack baby seat.  Gillian and I went everywhere on foot and by subway.  I walked; Gillian tugged at my ear lobes and talked in her own little language.  However, Nancy and I began to fall apart.  When we were poor students and traveling bums we had a wonderful time.   Family responsibility, my career building, and not enough money took their toll.  We quarreled too often and disagreed about how to spend what money we had.   Nancy was jealous of my budding career and newfound status in the community.  Nancy bridled at being “Mrs.” anybody and felt ignored when we went out socially with my new friends from work.  When she worked at NYU, Nancy was somebody and I was just her bum student husband.  The overnight role reversal really bothered Nancy.   This problem was exacerbated when, in the summer of 1969, I was appointed an Assistant United States Attorney.   This was an enormous professional and career leap for me.  I became a major league player in the law world of New York City.  My career was in high gear, our marriage was a mess.  Many of my colleagues from that office have gone on to become Federal District and Appellate judges.   One, Rudolph Guiliani, a law school classmate and friend, became Mayor of New York.  Another, Bill Gray, was the United States Senator from Vermont until his untimely death from cancer.

Early Career – 1969-72:

At the U.S. Attorney’s Office I served under Robert M. Morgenthau and Whitney North Seymour, Jr., a Democrat and a Republican.   My appointment was non-political.  I started in the short trials unit of the Criminal Division, but soon was promoted into the Securities Fraud Unit.   I investigated white collar crimes, presented them to grand juries, tried the indictments before trial juries, and took criminal appeals to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.   I was then one of the office’s top trial attorneys and, had I stayed, was in line to become chief of my unit and, likely, head of the Criminal Division.   This was a time of enormous professional success for me.   I loved the work and the camaraderie of my colleagues. I idolized the Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney, Silvio J. Mollo, and my senior colleagues, Andrew J. Maloney, and Bill Tendy, both tough career prosecutors.   Sil Mollo was a true leader.  Andy Maloney and Bill Tendy, both narcotics prosecutors,   grudgingly acknowledged that a white collar guy like me could be a “real” federal prosecutor.    While there, my friend Tom Fitzpatrick and I made a pitch to Sil Mollo for another friend,   Patricia Hynes, to become the first woman Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division.   Patricia was in the Civil Division.  As things turned out, Patricia was the second woman.  Sheira Neiman, another colleague, became the first.  

My life with Nancy, however, was becoming desperate.   This was perhaps in part because, in the three years I worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office I averaged sixty hours a week at work.  The office kept time records.  When I wasn’t at work, I played with Gillian and bicycled around Brooklyn and Manhattan.  Gillian rode in a seat on the back of my bicycle.

Nancy left me twice in the years immediately after Gillian’s birth.  Once, she went to England, once to California.  We went to family counseling.   In the summer of 1971, we took a bicycle vacation from Boston to Halifax with Gillian, then three,   riding on a baby seat behind me.  On that vacation I began to feel that a change of career and scenery would help us.   I started to look for a law teaching position.  This, I felt, would return us to our “student days.”  Nancy could complete her bachelor’s degree; I’d be on the bottom rung of a teaching ladder.  I was offered a job teaching at the University of San Diego Law School and resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office, leaving forever a power law career.   My friend Bob Morvillo, then Chief of the Criminal Division, told me I was making a mistake; that my true career should be as a federal prosecutor.   It’s strange to think right now how different my life might have been had I taken Bob’s advice. (Here we go again about my life being fractal.)

The problem was I was an instant success as a teacher.  I loved teaching and my students instantly rated me among the best in the school.   Many of my students were my own age.  They had gone to Vietnam when I went to law school.  I made strong friendships with many of them.   When I passed the California Bar Exam with flying colors (the Bar Examiners asked permission to use my answers for samples), Nancy cried in jealous frustration and anger.  Nancy said she wished I was dead; wanted to be free of me forever.  Our marriage had reached a painful low and efforts to reconcile seemed to generate new, more hurtful exchanges.  We were ratcheting down.  Although Nancy was pregnant with Peter, I felt that she, Gillian, unborn Peter, and I would all be safer and happier if I left.  I kept paying the bills and providing for the family, but moved out.   Our divorce came soon after Peter’s birth in March, 1974.   Nancy got the house, alimony, and child support^[2].  I got the VW Van, my clothing, and our debts.   I lived for several weeks in the van, parked in one of my Vietnam student buddy’s garage.

In fairness to Nancy, I now recognize that I am a very difficult person.   Her problems were exacerbated by my personality.  All of my wives and several girlfriends have complained that I am patronizing, moody, critical, picky, self-centered, and hyper-competitive.  They feel that they can’t ever be good enough to please me.  No wonder Nancy wanted me out of her life!  I gave my marriage to Nancy my very best, but it wasn’t good enough.   My vestigial Catholicism held me longer than maybe I should have stayed.   My father commented when I finally left that it was “about time.”  He felt that I was kowtowing to Nancy.   Still, the bottom line of this marriage is Gillian and Peter.  I am glad I met Nancy.  There is still a place in my heart for Nancy.  I wish her well.

Politics of the 60s & 70s:

Since I lived through the craziness of the Vietnam War, political demonstrations, and the Nixon impeachment movement,   I feel that I should comment on my non-involvement.  I had friends, mostly young lawyers, who went to Woodstock, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.    Nancy and I were invited, but declined to join in the fun.   I have always been mildly agoraphobic and to some degree chary of grass roots involvement in anything political.  It makes me feel used.   Also, we did not want to leave baby Gillian or take her into that kind of environment.   In reality, I was ambivalent about all the anti-government activity.  The Vietnam War confused me.  I didn’t know why we were there, but sympathized with our uniformed soldiers.  I wanted to volunteer for Navy JAG after law school, but Nancy threatened to leave me if I joined any branch of the military.  Her anti-war views were clearer than mine.  I’ll bet they still are.

The truth is that I didn’t and don’t like government.  I am a kind of antique conservative who believes that governmental involvement in anything doesn’t mean improvement.  I think government involvement has degraded our schools, exacerbated racial tension, burned our forests, and driven worthwhile enterprises into the ground.   So, some of the revolutionary rhetoric of the 60s and 70s appealed to me.  Bumper stickers saying “Off the Pig” and “Vote in the Streets” still make me smile.  I just don’t want them on my bumper.  I dream of living a wholly ungoverned life.  Yet, I love America and think our Constitution is democracy’s finest hour.  The Bush/Gore near presidential election tie illustrates my problems with today, including today’s education.  Nobody seems to understand, let alone be willing to defend,   the idea behind the Electoral College.  So, I am still ambivalent, politically agnostic.

Teaching 1972 – 1986:

“Kelleher’s a good teacher, just not as good as he thinks he is.”

Anonymous Law Student

Circa 1980

This essay would not be complete without some discussion of how well teaching worked for me.  I loved teaching.  I taught Contracts, Securities Regulation, Secured Land Transactions, Sales & Secured Transactions Under the Uniform Commercial Code, History of the Legal Profession, and Comparative Legal Systems (U.S./Mexico and U.S./Ireland).  I would still be teaching if I could.  I loved teaching my history course best of all.

I wanted to teach History when I was in college and the yen to teach stayed with me through law school and my first two law jobs.  As it turned out, teaching was very good to me because it enabled me to structure my work to suit the needs of a single parent family.  The job paid well and my students loved me.  I reciprocated.   Although I had many women in my life, including two wives, during some of my teaching years, child rearing was always my part of the family deal.  My children were my first love and highest priority.  Neither Robin nor Cathy had any particular willingness to help me with Gillian and Peter.   So, I needed to work evenings in order to be home after school.   This I did and my life was forever enriched by these years.  I was a teacher and Girl Scout leader.   Few men enjoy such opportunity.

I still teach whenever I get the chance^[3].  Teaching is a fountain of youth.  I feel my students’ interest and am energized by them.    I guest lecture and organize.  I enjoy teaching and still receive sincere sounding compliments for my efforts.  Nothing, however, will match the wonderful feeling I achieved in my early years with the discovery that as a teacher, I was a “natural.” 

This is not to say, however, that teaching was without problems.  I quoted above one of my most painful student evaluations, painful, but accurate on some level.  I always viewed my professional life as a kind of combat.  Throughout my school years I was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks; somebody who crashed the party.   I felt others’ social disdain in high school, college, and law school.  The majority of my college classmates came from wealth and privilege.   Even at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, I was a kind of outsider.  Mr. Seymour really is a Whitney and a North.  I worked with Christopher C.B. Dupont Roosevelt, a friend, but the wealthy grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. 

So, I developed a pugilistic attitude toward my professional life — I fought, won, and stood in the ring, bloody and boastful.   This competitiveness cost me friends and occasionally respect. (It has cost me wives too, I guess.)   America likes modest heroes.  I was a bit like my sports idol, Muhammad Ali.   I was the greatest, but didn’t need to shout it from the house tops.   In my teaching years, I was contemptuous of most of my colleagues, considering them vain, dull-normal bullies who abused students with their tired old games.  (I still consider this accurate of many, but not all, of my law teaching colleagues.)   It was not something I should have let them know I knew.   Many of my teaching colleagues considered me aloof and arrogant.   They were right.   I could have had a richer experience and happier professional life had I just looked for the good in my colleagues rather than seeing them as opponents in the same arena.   Many a poor teacher could have been my bicycling pal or sailing partner if I’d let them.   As it was, I had only a few colleagues who were my friends.  What success I had in teaching, I took like a lion cub tearing from the carcass killed by his mother.

Marriage to Robin:

After my divorce from Nancy, I remarried quickly and foolishly to Robin Lee Riblet.  Nancy had given me physical custody of both Peter and Gillian in March, 1975, but we ended up in court litigating permanent legal custody.  Nancy had been miserably unhappy as a single parent.  The kids spent their days with sitters while Nancy went to college.   I used to ride my bicycle to Gillian’s school just to watch her at play during recesses.  I spent my afternoons at the sitter’s home playing with infant Peter.  I was terribly lonely for my children.   Peter’s day sitter, “Mama Gray,” pushed me to seek permanent legal custody.  I thought being married to Robin would help me prevail in the custody suit.  Robin was living with me and wanted her “Mrs. Degree”.  Maybe Robin’s Mrs. helped me get legal custody of the kids, but the marriage was a mistake and ended by mutual consent without issue in 1979.  I think our divorce was final in 1980.  I still experience some remorse for my cynical exploitation of Robin’s naive, but sincere, desire to marry the man with whom she lived.  This is, as my nephew Clifton so elegantly puts it, “another fin on my rocket ship to hell.”

Robin immediately remarried her law school sweetheart, Michael John Raymond, with whom she was having an extramarital affair during the last six months of our marriage.  Robin’s infidelity was intensely painful, but a learning experience.  (Payback is a bitch!)   I understand the insanity of marital chaos.  I am sympathetic for others.  And, I was forced to begin confronting my own faults.     At this writing, Robin and Michael John are still married.  Robin is unable to have children, so her brief tour as Gillian and Peter’s step-mother was her only moment in the sun.  Robin is a Bankruptcy Judge in Santa Barbara, California.   I remember her fondly, albeit with some remorse and anger.

Single Parenting 1979 – 85:

                                                Lord, make me chaste – but not yet.

St. Augustine

I did not remarry immediately.  I was burned out emotionally and cleaned out financially.  Although I loved being a daddy, being a single parent without child support left me little time and no money for a social life. (My poverty during this period also exacerbated my separation from my teaching colleagues.)   I made no request for child support from Nancy because my attorney said that putting money on the table terminated a father’s hopes for custody.  According to him, I was the first father to win a contested custody proceeding in San Diego County.   I paid alimony equal to one-third my net salary for five years, during four of which the kids were with me.  

So, Gillian and Peter and I lived in an empty house.  We had a small black and white television on an orange crate, two lawn chairs, and three mattresses.   I drove an ageing VW van.    It took a long time to get even colorably middle class in our home life.  I palled around with students, some of whom became friends, rode a bike to school, and taught my classes.  I still pack a bag lunch, a habit learned during those very lean years.

My strongest emotion during this time was fear.  I feared that some social worker would find out what a terrible parent I was and take the kids away.   (I had a court ordered home study during our custody battle and felt stripped under the social worker’s scrutiny.  “How much do you drink, Mr. Kelleher? ….  When will you and Robin be married?”)  I worried about the kids’ clothing, nutrition, and cleanliness.  I worried about my social life being too single, too promiscuous.  I worried about our lack of furniture.  I worried about the kids’ cheap sneakers.    I knew that I was a bad cook and inadequate father.   I drank too much beer.  I feared that “the system” would catch up with me and yank away Gillian and Peter.  This was my recurring nightmare.

Slowly, my optimism returned and I began, quite consciously, to look for a new wife.  I wanted a keeper, someone who would work with me to build a decent life;   help me integrate socially with the USD faculty and other people my own age.  I dated dozens of women, but found no one who would fit with me and with Gillian and Peter.

During this period, the kids and I went camping on weekends and I bought an old, nearly derelict sailboat for $50.00.   I fixed “Tia” up and we sailed on Mission Bay.   Peter, always convinced that I was plotting to drown him like an unwanted kitten, would lie prone on the bottom of the boat and cry himself to sleep.  Gillian and I talked, listened to baseball games on the radio, and picnicked while sailing off Mission Beach.   Ultimately,   Peter too accepted this nautical adventuring.  He, like Gillian,   loved to ride in a towed rubber raft or fly a kite from the boat.   After Tia sank at anchor in a storm, I bought and refurbished “Lola,” another 16’ Snipe approximation.  I had Lola when I married Cathy.  Cathy was always convinced that Lola was named in honor of some former exotic girlfriend.   Actually, Lola almost named herself.  She was banana yellow and looked like Carman Miranda.  “Lola” just seemed to fit this yar little lady.   Cathy never believed me and I stopped caring what she believed.

Arlene Abrass – A Near Marriage:

Gillian and Peter may recall that I had a significant affectionate relationship with Arlene Abrass.   Arlene and I met in Guadalajara, Mexico, the summer that Robin left me, 1979.   Although she was a law student, Arlene was my own age, intelligent, and cultured.  She was that summer involved in a brief romance with one of my teaching colleagues.   Arlene, whose maiden name is Schwartz, was divorced, a non-custodial mother of two, and struggling to pull her own life together.  She did not need nor want to mother my children.  Throughout the time we were seeing each other Arlene maintained her own residence and was, at most, an affectionate aunt to my children.   Arlene and I became very fond of each other, but were never able to make our lives fit.  My children, and desire to have more children, both made a future together problematical for us.  Arlene was not able to have more children, was burdened with guilt about losing her own, and had real difficulty fitting into the domestic life I was leading.    The most obvious problem,   Arlene is Jewish, was a non-problem.

Arlene was tormented by jealousy, sometimes justified^[4], of other women and, more difficult, of Gillian and Peter.   Still, Arlene was just the person I needed from a purely selfish perspective.   She was very tender with me.   She helped me survive the awful bruising of Robin’s infidelity.   In the end, I terminated our relationship, but with a very heavy heart.  Unlike my ex-wives,   Arlene took nothing from me and greatly enriched my life while we were together.   Arlene has since remarried, become widowed, and developed a wonderful relationship with her now adult children and their children.  We correspond occasionally and have a friendship at a distance.   Arlene practiced law in Los Angeles until she retired to Seattle to be nearer to her family.    Arlene goes on Harley-Davidson adventures with her significant other.    They recently took a motorcycle trip to South Dakota for the big annual Harley gathering.  Some grandmothers have all the luck!

Bicycling Adventures:

I have always bicycled and can’t imagine not having a bicycle.   As soon as Gillian and Peter could be coaxed onto bikes, we started riding.   As an infant, Peter, like Gillian before him, rode in a seat on the back of my bicycle.   Bicycles were both a practical and economical way to get around the Pacific Beach community and San Diego area.  When I began teaching summers in Ireland, Gillian, Peter, and I took our bikes with us.   We bicycled around Dublin to places such as Howth Castle, Phoenix Park, and Sandymont.  On weekends, we ventured to Glendaloch and the Wicklow Mountains.   When Gillian and Peter (on the back of my tandem) grew stronger, we traveled to Galway by train and explored the Gaeltach region of Connemara and neighboring seacoast villages.  The summer before Jessica was born we rode from Tralee over the Connor Pass to Dingle and back.   Another time, we took our bikes to the Aran Islands to explore un-chaperoned by local guides. 

The kids took all this bicycling for granted, the way children will, and we had wonderful times.   I wouldn’t trade the memory of those times for another ten years of life tacked on at the end.  We learned more about each other in one of those adventures than most families ever get to know.   I can still recall Gillian’s smile of triumph at the top of a particularly demanding hill — catching her breath and admiring the valley floor from which we’d come.   I have a photo of this somewhere and hope I can find it to include with this essay.  Peter loved playing soccer with new friends he met in each village and B & B.  We bicycled, talked, read books, and slept like angels.  The Irish thought we were mad, like all Americans.   They were right.   I never had a happier time.

Megan, Kris, and I ride our bicycles around Homer, New York, whenever the weather permits.  Like me, Megan loves cycling.  I think Kris started just to be a good sport.   Megan started on a seat I made for her on the back of my English one speed.   This bike “cheats” with a Zap electric motor.  This helps lugging Megan or groceries around the village.  I dream of riding around Ireland again someday, hopefully accompanied by family or friends.  I want to go to Achill Island^[5] or the Gap of Dunlow next time around.

Marriage to Cathy:

I first noticed Cathy Ann Lovejoy as she accompanied a severely handicapped student, Karl Terp, into the first meeting of an evening Contracts class.  Karl was paralyzed from a sports injury and could not even turn the pages of his text book.  I thought Cathy was his nurse or paid helper she was so attentive to Karl.   As it turns out, they had just met.  In any event, I was very impressed with Cathy’s kindness to Karl and determined to further her career in law school.   She became my law clerk, a paid work-study position.  Cathy was a good law student, but said she wanted to have a life as wife and mother; that law was something she wanted to have when family obligations permitted.  

Unlike Arlene, Cathy did not immediately express any difficulty with Peter and Gillian or family life in that context.  In fact, she professed a desire to become a true step-mother to Peter.   Cathy did not think that she was likely to become a mother biologically and, in its way, this made her look more viable as a “fit” within my existing family.  (Cathy’s nurturing of Karl Terp seems, in retrospect, to have been a watershed moment in our lives.)  Cathy had had an ectopic pregnancy in college and was not very fertile.   We were both surprised when, on our honeymoon, Cathy took a pregnancy test and Jessica Alene Kelleher (01/25/85) first came to our attention.  To tease Cathy, I pretended I didn’t see the “ring” on the pregnancy test which indicated a positive reading and persevered until my own mirth and joy overwhelmed me.

Jessica was born at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Diego with my friend Barry Quinn’s wife, Renee McAllister Quinn, as attending nurse.  Jessica was the first baby in whose birth I assisted.  Shortly after Jessica was born, I substituted apple juice for a urine sample Cathy had just provided and, announcing that I was dreadfully thirsty after all my hard work assisting in the birth, drank the “sample.”   Poor Cathy, I don’t think she ever shared my sense of humor.  This stunt nearly caused her apoplexy.

After Jessie’s birth, both Cathy and I became restless in San Diego.  My years as a single teacher had given me a rogue’s reputation.   Although I was a good and faithful husband, it was hard to make a transition to married, family man.   Also, both of us had become disenchanted with San Diego.  The town had grown too big, too fast.  Drug crimes, crowded beaches, air pollution, and automobile traffic were getting to me.  We lived in a lovely, just remodeled (by me) home at 1158 Missouri Street in Pacific Beach, but felt that the neighborhood was losing its family flavor.  I accepted a visiting professorship at Western New England College of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the hope that it would turn into a permanent position.  It didn’t.  We bought and sold a home in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, took a terrible financial beating, and began to feel under siege.  Cathy miscarried.  We both felt blue and lost.  I didn’t want to go back to San Diego. My then dermatologist warned that my skin cancer was such that further exposure to year round sun was likely to prove fatal.   

In this state of mind, I resigned my tenured professorship at USD and took the silly and ill-considered plunge into private practice in Ithaca, New York.  (My old teaching buddy, Michael Navin, advised me emphatically not to quit teaching.   Good advice ignored seems to be a pattern for me – fractal life!)   We chose Ithaca because Cathy had been born there and because I always wanted to live in rural upstate New York.  I was already admitted to practice law in New York.  The move had some (in retrospect not enough) practical appeal.  I thought I might work out some way to continue teaching law at Cornell.  I loved, and love teaching.   I taught at Cornell as an adjunct professor, but Cornell proved to be a tight little island without permanent room for me, particularly when I took a sexual harassment against the Veterinary School.

In Ithaca, I associated myself with Thaler & Thaler, where I worked from May, 1987, to September, 1988.   I was happy enough with practice at Thaler & Thaler, but disliked Nathaniel Knappen, one of the partners.   Knowing that I would not be able to work with this man, I left this office and formed my own partnership with Diane B. Withiam.   Ironically, Knappen was killed by Deborah, his estranged wife,   in a domestic dispute shortly after I left.  She was acquitted of murder charges on evidence of self-defense.  I testified for her in the trial at the cost of any shred of friendship with the Thaler firm.  This crime and trial were memorialized in a book entitled Blood Verdict, I think.  Deborah Knappen was an abused woman; came to the office with black eyes.

Dad died just after or about the time I left Thaler & Thaler.   His death affected me profoundly.   In the following year I lived day-to-day and much of that time is dreamlike in my memory.  My private practice was very demanding of my time and energies.  The practice of law in small town New York is hard work, long hours, and low pay.   

Initially, Cathy planned to work with me in “our” law office, clerking her way into a license to practice law and keeping overhead down.   This romantic, “Mom and Pop” fantasy evaporated within weeks of my leaving Thaler & Thaler.   Cathy stopped coming to the office and began to talk very frankly about leaving me, compelling distribution of the $40,000 equity in our home, and striking out on her own.  This, of course, angered and frightened me.  I’d been down this trail twice already.    Cathy told me that as a single mother she could get financial aid and return to law school.  (This is, in fact, precisely what she later did.)

We quarreled, slept in separate bedrooms.    Cathy was restless and unhappy.  I was still in a depression over Dad’s death.    Lack of income and differences about how to spend what we had took its toll.   Also, Cathy and I differed dramatically in our child rearing views.  Cathy undermined me with Jessica and complained that I did not let her raise Jessica according to her own views.   She sniped at Peter.   We quarreled bitterly when I intervened on Peter’s side.  Sometimes I sensed that this was a set-up.   Cathy wanted to keep Jessica, force Peter and me out the door.  She knew I wouldn’t, couldn’t, leave Peter unprotected.  Set-up or not, I had to move between Cathy and Peter.

Cathy returned to school, ironically studying family counseling at Syracuse University.  She developed new friends to whom she refused to introduce me.   She frequently stayed away overnight through the week and every weekend with a friend, often taking Jessica.   I suspected Cathy of having a relationship with “Seren,” a classmate, but was too exhausted to care.  

Cathy began seeing a psychological counselor herself, and soon announced that she and Jessica wanted a place of their own.   In retrospect, I’ve never really understood why things went so wrong so fast.   The things I’ve listed are just my best guess.  And, I was in work, money, and emotional overload. 

Cathy left me in 1989, taking Jessica.  I filed for divorce on the ground of abandonment, to which Cathy consented.    Initially, Cathy stayed in the Ithaca area.   She purchased a house. Cathy’s dad, Merle L. “Pete” Lovejoy (Died 12/15/01) and I helped her move her things and fix up her house.   Jessica went to kindergarten at Bell Sherman School.  Jessica was with me every weekend and every Wednesday overnight.   Then Cathy met her next husband and moved to Buffalo.   We shared joint custody of Jessica, but after Cathy’s move to Buffalo, as a practical matter I became a non-custodial parent.   I remain embittered at Cathy for so effectively defeating my effort to have a meaningful, daily participation in Jessica’s life.  However, I am determined to stay with Jess for the long run.  

I haven’t seen Jessica since Peter and Christine’s wedding more than two years ago, but correspond regularly.    I live up to my financial obligations to Jessica and hope that, when she is grown, we will be able to have a more normal father/daughter relationship^[6].  Jessica is intelligent, curious, and loving.  She reads and appears to share my joy in this pursuit.  We have much in common and, I pray, have a long future together.  Cathy is now a lawyer.   She works full-time, and has remarried.  Her married name is Maloney.   Cathy didn’t learn.  She married (and divorced) another Irishman.

Marriage to Kris:

Kris Marie Meldrum (07/07/66) and I met when I was attorney for Tompkins County Department of Social Services and she was the Paralegal Assistant.   I found Kris instantly attractive, but I don’t think either of us considered the other as a viable romantic interest.   Kris was friendly, but not overly so.   I was still married to Cathy albeit miserably.  (I now know that other single women at DSS were interested in me.  I was, maybe am, emotionally deaf to this.)     I was very lonely, but my goal was not to lose access to Jessica; not to permit Peter to be further damaged by my marital instability.  

I was preoccupied in an attempt to manage Cathy’s departure in such a way to keep Jessica near to me.     Our house was for sale.  Cathy was never home and said she was leaving.  The last thing I wanted or needed was a romantic entanglement.   I knew that this would only complicate my unhappy circumstances.   Kris became my friend.  I didn’t and don’t have many.   We worked together and, occasionally, saw each other off working hours.  I enjoyed her company, she enjoyed mine.  Kris talked about wild flowers, growing up in Tompkins County, and her beloved twin sisters, Cassie & Carrie Stillman.  This balance was not to last.

Kris and I began courting just about the time Cathy moved out completely.  However, Kris did not want to be a player in my divorce or have any part of the inevitable family conflict.   She kept her own counsel and for a long time resisted my suggestion that we plan a marriage.   In this, Kris was wiser than me.   We hiked in Treeman Park,   at Taughannock Falls, and the Montezuma Wildlife Sanctuary.   We worried about our obvious differences in age, background, and experience.    We talked more than we kissed, but we kissed and held hands a lot.  I remember when and where we first kissed, but will spare my children this memory.  (Why is it that children prefer to think of their parents as asexual?   I wonder if this is why the Christian’s Jesus was born of a virgin.   They don’t like their god – like Zeus of old – getting too friendly with a comely maiden.) 

Although Kris and I came to love each other, we had a stormy beginning.  We still have our moments.   I was the veteran of three failed marriages and tend to be very quick to want to cut my losses.  I throw my arms in the air and say, “Oh fuck me!” or just “Oh fuck!”  (I confess here and now that the “f” word had been among my favorites since I was six and first learned its most basic meaning.)   I think darkly about getting on my bicycle or in my boat and kissing the whole shebang goodbye.   Then I think about Megan, and think again.  I think about Kris’s smile.    Kris has a mind of her own.  When we disagree we really disagree, but Kris is stubborn and smart.  She says she isn’t going to become another of my failures.   I attribute the durability of our marriage, my longest, in large part to Kris’ good sense and love.  Kris never says the “f” word.

We married on December 26, 1990 at the Tompkins County Courthouse, by my friend Judge William C. Barrett.    Our daughter, Megan Lauree Kelleher was born December 7, 1993.   When Megan was born, we lived in Freeville, New York, on Malloryville Road.  Megan’s birth and the profound love we share for Megan helped Kris and me move our marriage to a higher plateau.  We focused.   This experience has been absolutely unique for me.   Kris likes being Megan’s mother as much as I like being her father.   We liked being married to each other.

June 26, 2006:   Kris asked me for a separation agreement and moved out last April.   She is still stubborn and smart.  As she’s become better educated, she’s become more independent.   We were unhappy because she wished to go her own separate way most of the time. She had become unfaithful to our marriage and was having an affair with her boss, the husband of her friend.  Family time had become nonexistent.  Megan and I were on our own most weekends.  I was and am dumbfounded by Kris’ departure, but we are trying to work out a peaceful way of continuing to rear Megan together, but living apart.  

June 25, 2008:   I obtained a divorce from Kris last month on the ground of abandonment.  The process was ugly and painful.  I haven’t seen Megan since February 2007 and almost all communication has ceased.  I hope I’ll be able to write something more upbeat the next time I check in.

August 15, 2010:  Megan almost never responds to the letters and cards I send her and when she does I feel that it’s just “for the record” to avoid my termination of her mother’s child support.  I wrote to her yesterday telling of my move to Ireland and inviting her to visit for a vacation.  We’ll see what happens.

September 2013:  Megan continues to ignore my letters.  Everything I know of her life comes from Kris under implicit threat of termination of my child support obligation.  Still, I am proud of Megan’s school achievements as reported in her most recent annual letter.

Mom & Dad – Susan:

An autobiography is a journey into self-absorption.   Still, I want to say a few things about Mom and Dad.   Susan, as my whipping boy, was also more important in my childhood than this essay credits.

My sister Susan is four years older than me and was always a hard act to follow.   Susan looks like Dad and was beloved of him.   Susan was a good student and a good citizen.  Susan was good in Spanish and on Student Council.    Susan is funny, like Dad’s brother James.   Susan is musical, sings like a thrush.  Susan always had loads of friends.  Thank God, Susan is messy.   Susan never cleaned her room or put away her clothes.  Susan threw Kleenex on the floor.  She threw her knickers on the floor.   Susan always had to pee just when it was time to do dishes.  Or any other domestic chore.    Susan never said “no” to mother.  She always said, “I’ll do it in just a minute.”  And never did.  I think Mom spent a great deal of our shared childhood trying to get Sue to get her shit together.  I didn’t exactly enjoy this, but better Sue than me.   I feared Mom’s temper and displeasure.  Mom would spank you if you sassed or didn’t do as you were told.   I tried very hard to learn from Susan.  Thanks, Sue; you saved me many a licking.

Dad grew on me.  As a little boy, I worshiped him, but he worked his 40 hours in the brewery every week, usually on a rotating shift.  He came home tired, dirty, and frustrated by his foreman, Alfred Weiss, a man I never met, but knew was a 9.6 on the asshole scale.  Often,   Dad was asleep when I was at home, working graveyard, midnight to eight in the morning.   A steam engineer by trade, Dad could fix anything.  He could weld, build with wood, and plumb.  He rebuilt my childhood home on Walnut Street from hardwood flooring to kitchen cabinets.  

Still, I think Dad’s major contribution that shows in me today is his solidity and predictability.  He went to work, he brought the money home.   Dad didn’t get drunk, run around, or hit any of us, including Mom.  I knew he had a temper and never crossed him, but Dad was our protector and provider, not a threat.  I can’t imagine not supporting my family.  Thanks, Dad.   Since his death Dad has visited me more or less regularly in my dreams.  Sometimes he’s funny, but just a wink and a smile kind of funny.  Usually, he helps me through something.  Sometimes he just stops by to talk.   Dad is younger than me now, just another 25 year old guy in a white shirt and pleated trousers, like in his old photos.  He’s always around.  Sometimes, usually, I forget he’s dead.   This, I suppose, reflects my opening observation.  I’ve never been too sure about “reality.”   Actually, I don’t believe he’s dead,   just not around when I’m awake.

I must also add that Dad was affectionate with his children, using endearments so constantly that we sometimes wondered if he knew our names.  He’d call me “Honey Boy” without even looking up.  Thanks, Dad.  I think this made me a better father.

Mom is a much more visible part of me, at least to me.   I have many of her flaws and can’t shake them.  Mom is hard.  Mom is critical.  Mom is judgmental.  That’s me.  Mom is also smart and survivable.  Mom doesn’t take shit,   never did.  (This too, I see in myself, as a sometimes dangerous fault.  You have to eat shit to work in any bureaucracy^[7].  I never developed a taste for it.  I get indigestion; just can’t get the right moan of pleasure while kissing arse.)  

When Mom decided that smoking was bad for her health, long before the government made that judgment for us, she quit.  Cold turkey!   When, as an adult, I nearly tore a finger off at the knuckle in a misunderstanding with a power drill,   Mom put her finger into the ice water to shame me into doing what we both knew I should.   (As I type this paragraph, my right ring finger knuckle aches a little, but Mom’s example shamed me into treating it quickly.) 

Mom is financially smart and never wasted a dime.  Sorry, Mom, here I’m more like Dad, I guess.  I admire Mom more than I’ve expressed – even while recognizing that what I have from her is not what makes me most likeable some of the time.  Mom is a tough, independent person.  If you pick a fight with her, be prepared to go until someone drops.  Somehow, I think these very admirable (to me) characteristics are anachronistic.  Most people today are soft; don’t/won’t stand and fight.    Anyway, thanks, Mom. I’d rather be like you than like the crowd.

Further Development:

Gillian married her childhood friend, Marcus Polk in October, 1998.   I’ve known Marcus since Junior High School and always liked him.  Peter married Christine Sullivan  in April, 1999.  What could be wrong with a girl born Sullivan?   Christine gave birth to my first grandchild, John J. Kelleher, IV (07/07/00) and is pregnant again as I write. (Kathleen became my second grandchild.)   I am very happy for my big kids’ happiness and know that their marriages mean my family is growing.  Still, I greet these events with a light blue nostalgia.  I miss the children Gillian and Peter were even while celebrating their emergence as young adults.  And, I wish them both less turbulent lives than mine.

Jessica will be 17 in January.  She is already a young woman.  I keep looking for angles to integrate her into my adventures.  Recently, I’ve tried to get her to bicycle the Erie Canal towpath with me.  As I write, she is very estranged from me.

I plan to build a boat with Megan^[8] in the near future and am looking forward to teaching her to sail.   Maybe we’ll have a bicycle adventure before my knees give out entirely.   Summer before last (2000) Megan began playing soccer.    Kris and Megan are both taking swimming lessons.  I hope we’ll all sail and swim and bicycle together.  I dream of returning to Ireland and again cycling her country roads. 

I hope to retire from my present job in about five or six years, well before Megan leaves home.  This way, she and I might enjoy some extra special time together.  We can grow roses, sail boats, bicycle and build things together.   I write short stories, am working on a novel, and play my penny whistle.   I also have very powerful yearnings to help people, particularly troubled young men and women.  The parade of family tragedies I daily judge wears me down.  I tire of judging others and wish I could just step down off the bench, put my arm over a troubled young person’s shoulder and say, “There are things you should learn before you get too much older ….”  Maybe my childhood fabulation about being a priest wasn’t all blarney.  I would like to lead a more spiritual life.

Having said “I plan,” I feel constrained to end this segment with the old thought that our plans for the future are God’s little joke on us.   Really, life just goes on and we all do the best we can.  (2002)

August 2010:  Significantly, I have married and quickly divorced Paula Feliz Slansky Peck.  I still can’t get marriage right.  Life rolls on. JJK

I retired in 2009 and Paula and I lived in Boulogne-Billancourt, just across the street from the 16^th Arrondisement, for a year, taking full advantage of the vast cultural resources of Paris and traveling in France. Sadly, our relationship deteriorated, becoming antagonistic.  Paula, haunted by totally unjustified jealousy, became abusive toward me.  Ultimately, I left for West Cork with two bags, a bicycle, and a plan to live in Ireland.  This next adventure is recorded in my blog, BrendansVoyages.blogspot.ie, the first entry of which is reproduced below.  At least I haven’t lived a linear life.  August 17, 2010.)

West Cork Notebook

Arrival – Friday, July 23, 2010:

            Cork Airport, July 23, 2010, I am on my own and anxious.  Would I find a life here?  Having burned my bridges in Paris, I knew that if not Ireland I’d have to keep rolling, but God knew where. Brittany?  Oregon?  I’ve never been so free. The Dylan lyric replays, “Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”  I know how an old lifer feels when pardoned out the prison door.  The world I stepped into at Cork Airport was brave and new, but daunting.

            Collecting my two checked bags and favorite bicycle in baggage claim, my known future was compassed by a reservation at Thrifty Rent-a-Car and booked accommodation at Castle Salem, a Bed & Breakfast just outside Rosscarbery, a name on a map.  I drove in that direction, west, I think, feeling tired and worried.

(Edited and updated August 2013)

JOHN J. KELLEHER

                                                           Professional History

Professional Licenses:

New York Bar             Admitted – January 14, 1969

California Bar   Admitted – December 18, 1973

United States Supreme Court (June 30, 1980)

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

(June 15, 1970)

United States District Court for the Southern District of New York    (February 18, 1971)

United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York       (March 15, 1971)

United States District Court for the Southern District of California  (December 18, 1973)

Education:

High School  Monrovia High School  (9/56 to 6/60)

Graduated with Honors

College                       Occidental College (9/60 to 6/64)  B.A. June 1964

1600 Campus Road                          Honors-at-Entrance

Los Angeles, CA  90041

Law School   NYU Law School (9/66 to 6/68)                J.D., June 1968

40 Washington Sq. South                Halpern Award in

New York, NY  10011                    Trial Practice

NYU Law School (9/78 to 6/79)    LL.M., June 1979

40 Washington Sq. South                (Corporate Law)

New York, NY  10011

Employment Experience:

Family Court Hearing Examiner/ Magistrate

Broome, Cortland, & Chenango County                                       (1/94 to 5/09)

Tompkins County Department of Social Services

301 Harris B. Dates Drive

Ithaca, NY  14850                            (1/89 to 12/93)         

Kelleher & Withiam                        (10/88 to 12/93)

Norstar Building, Suite 202

202 The Commons

Ithaca, NY  14850

Thaler & Thaler                                (6/87 to 9/88)

309 N. Tioga Street

Ithaca, NY  14850

Western New Englad College School of Law  (1986-87 Academic Year)

Visiting Professor of Law

University of San Diego School of Law  (1972 – ’86)

Professor of Law

On Site Director   (Summer 1983, ’84, ’85, ’88)

University of San Diego School of Law

Dublin Institute on International & Comparative Law

Trinity College Dublin

Assistant United States Attorney    (1969 – ’72)

Southern District of New York

United States Court House,  Foley Square

New York, NY  10007

United States Securities and Exchange Commission  (1969 – ’72)

New York Regional Office

26 Federal Plaza

New York, NY  10007

Other Previous Employment:

I have also been employed as a lecturer, consultant, and expert witness in matters involving lawyers’ professional responsibility.

---

[1]. Commencing in June 2009, I spent a year in Paris with my then wife, Paula, fulfilling a promise to someday return and give that great city its due.  I left Paula, thank God, and headed for West Cork.

[2]. A year after our divorce, Nancy gave me the kids.  She kept the house and alimony, but Gillian and Peter lived with me for the remainder of their childhood.

[3].  In 2013 I volunteered to teach computer skills to older people through Age Action Cork, an activity I continue and from which I derive satisfaction. 

[4]. This passage was much quoted in anger by my former wife Paula, who maintained that my affections wander.  It should be made clear that Arlene and I never lived together, nor committed to any mutual fidelity.  We each occasionally dated others.

[5].  In 2013 in the company of my friend Cathy Sharma, I rode the Great Western Greenway from Westport to Achill and return.  This trip ranks among the most scenic and pleasant of my adventures.

[6].  Jessica and I became Facebook Friends in 2012 and correspond through this medium.  She posts photos of her children, Emma and Zach.  Things have gotten better between us.  I’m am delighted to see my grandchildren.

[7] In Straight Man, author Richard Russo writes “achieving academic tenure is like being declared winner in a shit eating contest.”  Truer words were never written!

8.  We built a pirogue in the basement of our first house in Homer, NY.  There’s a photo of Megan sitting in it somewhere which I will include if I find it.