The places that made me Ken
November 9, 2022
Who a person is starts with where they are from. I am from four very different places. I started life in San Francisco and lived my early years in Marin County. I left when I was seven, but to this day whenever I return, I feel HOME. There is something about seeing places and landmarks you remember as a child that pull at you and make you feel like you belong even years later. One of my fond memories from that time is watching the fog roll down Mt. Tamalpais in the early morning while riding in my dad's brown and white '69 VW bus. My dad lived in Petaluma and my sister and I would spend every other weekend with him. It was always a treat for me to go with him early on a Saturday morning to work on his beloved 16 foot Danish sailboat he kept in Sausalito Bay. It was an even bigger treat when we'd go out for a sail on the bay. Those memories bond me with San Francisco and my dad.
When I was seven my mother decided Marin was "full of druggies" so we left California and moved to Portland, Oregon. Her parents had moved there a few years prior. Her decision was not surprising. Being a single mother, my mom needed to be in a place where she had a support system. That support was my grandparents. My mother worked two jobs and was going to school so most of my memories from that time are with them. My grandparents lived in an apartment near Lake Oswego that looked out on the Willamette River. I have memories of sitting on the balcony with my grandmother on an early morning watching the barges hauling huge logs on the river against an uninterrupted blanket of green. Until you leave Oregon you don't realize or appreciate just how beautiful and GREEN it is.
The summer after my 8th grade year my mother got a job as a teacher with the Department of Defense Dependent Schools (DoDDS). We left Oregon and moved to Mannheim, Germany. This move was life changing. The culture shock was immense but transformative. As my mother was a teacher we got to live "on the economy" which meant the army paid for a large apartment in a house in a suburb north of Mannheim called Käfertal (Beetle Valley). Käfertal's claim to fame in our military community was that the car accident that took General Patton's life was at an intersection two blocks from my house. My experience in Germany was particularly beneficial because it exposed me to two totally new and different worlds: Europe and the U.S. Military.
Living in Europe opened my eyes to a world outside the United States. My mother and I traveled extensively, and my memories of that time are countless. Whether it was walking the red-light district in Amsterdam at 15 years old or being tailed by an East German undercover Stasi agent while grabbing a Berliner Weisse from a stall in East Berlin at 16, I count my experiences there as irreplaceable and formulative. One of my favorite memories was how the fireworks and cheers in our neighborhood when Germany won the World Cup in 1990 dwarfed the noise made when the Berlin Wall fell.
I had some prior exposure to the military as my grandfather was a retired army officer. But the experience as an "Army Brat" was totally new if somewhat ostracizing. My mother was technically a DoD civilian, so I was a bit of an outsider among the life-long brats. I also learned that unlike my time in Oregon where money tended to determine your social standing, what mattered most was your parent's rank (NCO kids vs officer kids). It showed me that privilege and oppression in a society doesn't necessarily need to be through wealth or ethnicity. Instead, it is based on identities associated with a person either willingly or by force. Those with identities associated with power have privilege. Those with identities associated with little or no power are oppressed. In the military that division is between the officer class and the enlisted. It is very defined, accepted, and necessary given their mission. Understanding that privilege and oppression originate with power was a very important lesson.
When I graduated high school, I ended up in San Antonio, Texas for college. I joked at the time that I chose San Antonio because it was about as far as I could be from the two places my mother would potentially be (Germany and Oregon). This was only partly true as the main reason was that I followed a girl, which - no surprise here - ended badly. San Antonio is very different from everywhere else I’ve lived. It is dirtier. The roads are horrible. It gets very hot. It is poor. Public transport is almost unusable. But it has things I love - history, tradition, diversity, community, really good food, and it isn't Austin (just kidding - kind of). For all these reasons and countless more, this is the community I decided to spend the rest of my life in. By the time I was 18 I had lived in 3 different places. I've lived in San Antonio for over 30 years now. While the places before helped mold me into a young man, San Antonio has helped me find myself and grow to be, I hope, a good husband and father. For this I am very thankful. I am honored and proud to call myself a San Antonian.