The "Spicy" Greenbergs

The Unconventional Life

Our large family is much diversified, varied, intermarried, and rooted in the trend of typical middle class American family life in the Bay area of northern California – in and around San Francisco.  We are the 5^th and 6^th generations living in this tranquil area.

We are people of al walks of life.  We have mechanics, PhD’s, merchants, teachers, artists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, mavens in insurance law, writers, radio announcers, actors, woodworkers and school advisors.

We are people in all faiths, mostly Jewish, Buddhists, Christians of different denominations and agnostics.  Some attend houses of worship; some never entered such an institution.  We are tolerant; never impose or teach our views. We all get along in a very tolerant atmosphere.  We are registered Republicans and Democrats, and vote for our parties.  Respectful, involved, quiet, and perhaps dull.

But not all of us are of this fine fabric.  We have my grandson, Stephen, who, since childhood, was different – not a conventional, typical baby, child, nor adult.  Contrary to the life of the family, he is the one who adds controversy, the salt and pepper, to well organized life of the "Good, middle class family."

He started it even before he could talk.  He was able to sing.  He started to run before he could walk.  He began reading before he knew the meaning of simple words.

Somehow he learned to read the newspapers.  He was tested many times.  After all, he was only about 3 years old.

One day, I took him for a walk in his neighborhood.  As we passed a construction site I pointed out the printed instructions on a cement sack. "Read this," I said.  He did without hesitation – read words I am sure he never even heard before.

He was interested in everything that was going on around him.  One day a lady came to visit his mother.  This lady couldn’t stop talking.  Steve listened and turned to his mother and said, "This lady talks a lot but says nothing."

As he was growing up he spent a lot of time in our home.  He partook in a lot of our activities including painting and gardening.  He asked endless questions.  Later, when he was grown up and living in his own apartment in the Marina district, he came here to eat and to study.  On a sunny day he took a card table and chair out to sit down in the middle of the large "Marina Green".  He took off his shirt and started to do his studies.  He was the only person on the expanse of the Green except the tourists who rushed down to photograph this spectacle.

He was an exceptional student, but when it was time to choose a college or university, he decided on the newest  U.C. campus that had opened in Santa Cruz a few years earlier. He spent three or four years supporting himself by working in pizza parlors, a cannery, and a law office.  After 4 years he became the valedictorian, giving a funny speech that people remembered for years.

When he was asked what he had accomplished, what he had learned, what he would do now, he had no rational answer.  He had majored in psychology and had seen many movies.  But now he had to learn a trade or a profession. He chose to be a lawyer, and promptly signed up to attend the New College, an unaccredited institution that had recently opened.

He learned well enough to pass the bar on his first attempt.  He wanted to do some good with his knowledge so he went to work for the sheriff, Mr. Hennesy, as a legal aid lawyer for prisoners in the jail.  He took on the protests of the helpless, the homeless, and the ones that fell through the net of the steady, organized citizens.

He was well liked, but the pay was very little.  He, himself, was not ordinary.  He had a long beard, long hair, with a diamond in one ear lobe – a gift from his grandmother.

He also fell in love with Marianna, an unconventional woman.  Time to move on.  The young woman, a student, raised by her grandmother in Germany, had come to the Bay area to live and to study.

Her views for justice and social reforms were close to Steve’s.  At Marianna’s invitation, he jumped at the opportunity to travel to Europe.  Once there, he was hired by the University of Maryland to teach civil law and the rights of the citizens to students at American military bases.  The couple lived in Italy, Germany, and Greece. Their first child, a daughter, Liana, was born in Italy.

I went to visit them there.  They lived in a beautifully restored, centuries-old Tuscan farmhouse, overlooking the Mediterranean --- the three of them alone in all this space with a lonely goose for company.

Two years later, a son, Toby, was born in Germany.  The following year, Marianna and Stephen  married and came back to the Bay Area.  Steve again worked as a lawyer for the poor, taking appeals in criminal and juvenile cases, and working alone from his home.  The cases were sad, and often hopeless.  Cases of the poor and the oppressed.  He saw all the injustice of the downtrodden.  He helped all he could.

When the children were 5 and 3, the family made a lifestyle change.  They moved to Nevada City, a hamlet in the Sierra Nevada foothills.  They became vegetarians, not eating anything that came from animals - no meat, no fish ( a pain when they came for a visit; how do you feed them?) and started to homeschool their children.  To the despair of all of us normal citizens, the children never went to school.  Yet the parents did a good job, sometimes joining other parents in the homeschooling movement.  We could see that the children were bright, even without formal schooling.

The family shook up the little community.  They took on the Mayor and the city laws restricting free movement for the young people.  They produced radio programs with a variety of discussions trying to improve what they saw as justice and freedom.

Along with other lawyers, Steve took on the challenge of the new state law "three strikes and you are out." If one is convicted of a third offense, even if it is only stealing a pair of shoes or cigarettes, or hitting someone, the punishment is LIFE in prison.  This blanket law is being fought now in the highest courts.

I am surprised that some people did not "tar and feather" the Greenbergs and send them away packing.

Last week, Toby came for a visit.  He is 15 years old, 6 feet tall and he showed off his weird hairdo.  It is called "The Mohawk," with "Spikes."  The skull is shaved, except the very top where the hair is standing straight up.  He has a pierced ear and eyebrow, too.  The placid family is scandalized, and yesterday the beautiful Liana, age 16+ came in and I didn’t recognize her.  She looked like a boy.  Cut-off pants, clothes that did not match and of course that dreadful Mohawk hair cut.

I almost cried, but trying to keep the children close, I assured them that this is a passing stage and they are just experimenting.

The whole family, specially the grandparents are upset and can’t even talk about these good wonderful people who don’t want to be ordinary citizens.  They protest and march to express their need for improving justice and to change the world.

They are the Spice of Life in our well-organized placid society.

What would life be without spice?