Prologue: A Night in Berkeley

My fourteen-year-old daughter, Lilah, and I had just had a great Mexican dinner at Comal in Berkeley and we were killing time before we would get in line for Open Mic night at the Freight and Salvage.  This was Lilah’s first open-mic experience, though you’d never know it by how beautifully she would perform her unbelievably moving original song, “As Time Goes.”

Comal is right next to Half-Price Books on Shattuck, and the Freight and Salvage is just around the corner from them both.  Though we had lived in the Bay Area for almost twenty years, we didn’t spend much time in Downtown Berkeley, so it felt like we were on an adventure.

We got there early because I was worried about parking and having enough time for dinner.  We ended up scarfing down the excellent food at Comal so fast (like father, like daughter) that we had a lot of time before we had to get in line.

Normally I’d be thrilled to hang out in a bookstore with Lilah, who loves books and is way beyond her years when it comes to the big questions in life, history, politics, etc.  I had spent much of the earlier part of the day hauling about 500 of my books to another Half-Price Books in Dublin, closer to us in Alamo.  This was an exceedingly difficult process–not because the books were heavy and there were a lot of them–and not because I had recently turned sixty and just gone on Zepbound and had lost over twenty pounds in about two months.  I looked a lot better, and felt a lot better, but I was getting rundown because I was eating a lot less and exercising a lot more.

“Selling” all my books to Half-Price meant they “bought” them for half a percentage of what they were worth.  This book selling process was hard because I had retired from my psychoanalytic practice a month before and part of the reason I was getting rid of books was because I didn’t think I’d use them much again–that is, I wouldn’t use these particular books again.

Actually, that’s not really accurate either.  It was more because I had too many books and the ones I got rid of were mostly really random and had been collected along the way through my dual-doctorate career as both an academic (Ph.D. in English) and a clinical psychoanalyst (Psy.D.).  I had a lot of really random books.

Though I really didn’t need these random books, the process of selling books I had bought while fully engaged in my dual career still unsettled me significantly.  I had to move all of my clinical books out of my office when I started my practice.  I had done this twice before within a year.  I had restarted my practice in early 2023 when I thought it was safe to return to in-person work.  I didn’t want to do online work during the pandemic because I had done it too much before and I never liked it–for me or for my patients.  I wasn’t able to help them online as much as I was in person.  

Once back in an office, I was able to get things going well enough … for a while.  I had chosen to reopen my practice in Oakland, where I had been for several years, from 2007-2012.  I had never had any trouble getting patients 

There was a lot going on then that was deeply unsettling.  

It was the fall of 2024–actually November 4th, the Monday night before Election Day. It was a few nights before I had the dream that inspired this book, but close enough to the election that we were already significantly destabilized emotionally by the polls showing that half the electorate preferred this deranged rapist, obvious fascist, Putin fanboy, endited criminal, and failed president to the sanity and security of Kamala Harris.

Trump’s second ascendency wasn’t the only thing destabilizing me.  My famous father, William Anders, died a few months before on the day Lilah gave her promotion commencement speech, June 7th.  He was ninety and flew his plane into the sound, as he had told me he would do several times.  

My beloved father-in-law, Douglas Olson, died six days before that.  Like my dad, Doug was an amazing pilot: Top Gun graduate, two tours in Vietnam flying an A-4 off of carriers, Blue Angels alternate, and a senior pilot for Northwest.  My dad was a test pilot, Apollo VIII astronaut, the guy who took the Earthrise photo.  My daughters–I often joked–probably had the best piloting genes ever.

My wife and I had lost our fathers.  My children–Finn (22), Evelyn “Evy” (17), and Lilah–had lost both of their grandfathers in less than a week.  Losing Doug was the most difficult loss for me.  Doug was 77, whereas my dad had a long life.  Dad went out doing something he loved and probably doing something he chose to do ...