Tag: Stanford

This Stanford Life

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Three colleges have made their mark on me: Colby College (BA), Washington University in St. Louis (MA), and Stanford University (Coe Fellowship/Unofficial 4-year student). Early on, “Stanford” was almost a bad word. I taught at a large public high school (Terra Linda) where many of my highest achieving students went to Cal or UCLA, almost never to Stanford. Stanford was considered a snobby school for rich kids. My impression began to change during the summer of 2000 when I studied 20th century history at Stanford, while living in the French House on campus as part of my Coe Fellowship. Taking classes in the history corner (building), brought me into the Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, as the campus permeated my ethos. I moved to Palo Alto in 2004, thus beginning my informal education at the school. From 2004 to 2008, I attended events/classes on campus every single week. I went to lectures, films, business seminars, education roundtables, musical performances, athletic games, and completed a weeks-long writing workshop with the author Stephen Elliott. The school won me over with its never-ending generosity to the public. I recently visited Stanford with my son and now consider it my third alma mater.

Postscript: One of my former Terra Linda students is now an English Professor at Stanford. A former high school classmate (from my 1989 AP European History class) is the Provost.

Palo Alto Hermit

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I live two blocks from the Apple store, don’t own a cellphone or a TV, don’t have an internet connection. Some weekends I unplug my phone and I’m an ascetic, surrounded by my volumes of John Muir, Jane Kenyon, A Buddhist Bible, and my journals of poetic plodding. I watch them on their headsets, talking to the air, talking about technology into technology. They fill the Starbucks on University Avenue with their napkins, sketching schematas of the next IPO. I’m a walking anachronism, a luddite they call me, voluntary simplicity, I call me. Doing the mental math, I calculate whether I’m the only one in all of Palo Alto completely disconnected. Maybe a couple of Stanford religion majors without TV, but none would be internet free, no, that is just me, 1 out of 66,000. But there is Greg, that isn’t his real name, no one knows his real name, he drags his feet, toes sticking out of his shoes, his long, unkempt blondish brown hair jutting in all directions. Greg and the other homeless people by the creek are my kin, my kind, fiber-optically missing, invisible, off the grid. One night I meet Larry Page at a Stanford pub, we don’t talk about his company, Google. He tells me he likes Dance Dance Revolution, but only does it in private. The seven minute conversation sticks with me, like the mornings when I see Steve Jobs at the farmer’s market. Me, Steve, and Larry, we’re in this thing together, makes me feel like I’m a part of the team, the future. But all I teach about is the past, the Cherokee, the Californios, the buffalo, the removed, the replaced. I hike miles on Sundays, Butano Ridge Loop, Foothills Park, my fern-filled temple, my isolation, my solace. I try to make sense of it all, the movement of time, my standing still. After many days, maybe hours, I plug my phone back in, walk down Kipling Street, go to the library, check my email.