Back to the Bay After an adventurous freshman year in the Ames, Iowa writing program, away from my repressive family, I was happy to sneak back to Berkeley and stay with ‘the sisters', Ella and Grace, in their rambling shared house on upper Virginia Street. If I’d had to stay with my parents, even Ames would have been preferable. Maybe I‘d make a ‘surprise visit’ to them before returning to college? My months in Ames were...

“So, when I came in, you and Ben were spooning and dozing. I was so pumped full of endorphins myself, I saw no reason I shouldn’t snuggle in. You sleepily wrapped your arms around me and we hummed and dozed happily for a few minutes, and then you said ‘Gotta pee!’ and gently extricated yourself from our puppy pile. Hours (or was it minutes?) later when you came back – time that night was so fluid – you found Ben and me ti...

“I have waited for the rest of the story for a year now,” I complain. “What story?” you ask, but I suspect you know very well. It’s toward the end of a sunny windless June day, rare on the North Coast. We sit watching the sun sink below the horizon after a slow, sensuous day outside mostly naked behind our tall boxwood and rosemary hedge, getting muddy in the garden, weeding around the pond, washing each other on the pond...

I don’t think “Food porn” was a thing in 1969, but California’s food culture was awakening just as Ella, Alice, and I were. Ella’s Momma was a legendary home cook who also loomed large at home and in the kitchen at Berkeley’s schools, where she was already introducing fresh vegetables and from-scratch food to the cafeterias, and was frequently invited to give guest demonstrations in Home Ec. We asked her for advice on an...

“I sure want to get some of THAT!” I announced as Ella and I watched her naked big brother through his bedroom window as he worked his oily cock. “You’d take him to bed?” A little surprise in Ella’s voice, but no disapproval. “I’m sure that could be arranged,” she whispered. “He complains that women his age think he’s too young and too small to notice. He says he just ‘can’t get lucky.’ Oh, and another thing,” she confide...

Alice passed us a note in orchestra: Dear sisters, My heart is still racing from our Sensual Saturday Séance. I never thought I would find friends who could appreciate me as you two did…do?…or make me feel so much, so good. I know we all have busy lives, and the demands of our families, school, and graduation make the next weeks tight. You know I’ll be thinking of you. I want you two to know that even if we never have ano...

To say I idolized Ella would have been an overstatement, but not by much. She was better than me – she worked harder at almost everything. Playing solo cello, eyes closed, swaying with the bowing, she was angelic. The 1960s were a time when the cello came into prominence as a solo instrument, and whether I watched Ella playing hers or held mine between my legs and bowed it, the vibrations coursed through my whole body, fo...

Dad came home for an extended stay in mid-December, full of himself because his team was closing in on isolating a new element. As usual, he let Mom assemble the celebratory tray before dragging her into the bedroom for what he, half proudly, half apologetically, explained as “celebrating their collision.” Very particle physicist. That night I made love to myself over and over to the accompaniment of their celebration mus...

Halfway through our eighth decade, our productive years behind us, and still in lusty good health, sex is our favorite topic. Today, gratitude and excitement fill me as I remember my introduction to my first real-life cock. Looking back over the intervening decades, across the lumpy terrain of social change, my lifelong bestie Ella and I see ourselves as two glowing outliers, tall poppies in a field of low grasses. Almost...