Welcome

I’m Alberta.

It’s nice to meet you.

I grew up in a big family: two adults and five kids. Big families can be a pool of useful experiences. You learn to share—not Halloween candy, however—you learn to compromise, you learn to pull your weight, you learn how to jockey your birth order to your best advantage, and how to read people. Or not. Depending on whether you recognize how useful that skill is throughout life. I think the skills I learned growing up have stood me in good stead throughout my life—through ups and downs and many changes.

I have been a wife, a mother, a grandmother. A scholar, an educator, an administrator, a business owner, and a writer. And a friend, a partner, a confidant, a runner, a yoga practitioner, a traveler, a gardener, and a pretty fair cook. I can say that I have a very interesting life.

Writer

 I have always loved to write. After I closed Found Objects, I began to take serious writing classes. Attended Fishtrap, signed up for several classes at Hugo House, took additional writing course work and began to incubate what became Limina which was published in 2020. Limina morphed out of a 7,000-mile road trip I took in 1915 from Seattle across the upper states to a small town in Idaho where my paternal grandfather had lived and on to Iowa where my paternal grandmother’s family lived. Then south to Missouri to see cousins and people who knew my mother’s family. Then to Oklahoma, where my father grew up and further on to Mercedes, Texas, where he spent his childhood. It was an illuminating and exhilarating experience. Nothing but good came from it. I headed west along the Rio Grande, leaving Mercedes behind and made my way home via Colorado to see my brother and his family and finally to Ogden, Utah, where my youngest son, Nick, and his family live.

The day I drove through the Portal to the Northwest on I-90 was a very memorable moment. I can still feel the power of that trip.  How it shaped and changed me. The self-knowledge that came from mastering a solo drive in an old Passat wagon with no GPS! And nary a mishap—no flat tires, no “out of gas” screw-ups, not a single ticket. Just good people and good memories.

And from that came Limina. A memoir. A birth.  Limina was published in 2020. Sadly, right in the middle of COVID. Hard to peddle your book to closed bookstores, and few, if any, readings possible. Difficult times indeed. But I’m proud of the book. It encapsulates the first half of my life. Perhaps I’ll see what comes of the next half! 

Educator

My first job was teaching first grade at Goleta Union School. It was built in 1927. Its architecture celebrated Spanish architecture sitting in the heart of Old Town Goleta. It was the highlight of dusty little Goleta, which sat not too many miles up the road from fabled Santa Barbara, California. The school was closed after many years of service and has recently been retrofitted to pass earthquake standards. It now serves as a community gathering place.

On Monday mornings, the entire faculty and all students gathered on the front lawn as the flag was raised. We saluted the flag and recited the pledge of allegiance. I wonder if there is a school in this country today which participates in a similar exercise? About half of our student body was Hispanic. Many speaking little or no English. Most of those students’ parents spoke Spanish and often little or no English.

I had lived in Mexico as an exchange student and minored in Spanish in college. Though Anglo, I was the grade-level bilingual teacher my first year and again when I taught third grade. Those were some of the happiest years of my life. I loved my students and their families. Curriculums were shifting from rote and unimaginative to fluid and very imaginative—at least in my classrooms.

Administrator

Life circumstances changed: a divorce. My life and my sons’ lives went through a dramatic and difficult period, eventually resulting in my move to Seattle with a new partner. I was hired—not as a teacher—but as an administrative assistant to a high-profile medical doctor at the University of Washington. My sons had eventually made their way to Seattle, and we were reunited under one roof. My job was fascinating; I was responsible, among many things, for staffing the STD Clinic at Harborview Medical Center. The men and women who go into the field of sexually transmitted diseases are an interesting subset of medical doctors—they tended to be low-key and fun to work with. It was a very stimulating field—herpes was about to reach near epidemic rates, and then along came AIDS. I learned a lot about the perils of unprotected sex. And so did my sons—so much that they threatened to take monastic orders if I didn’t stop describing the effects of gonorrhea and syphilis on the male anatomy at the dinner table.

Business Owner

Perhaps the most creative and exciting job I ever had was owning a small business on First Avenue in Seattle. Found Objects opened in 1994. It was on the corner of First and Union between the Pike Market and the Seattle Art Museum. I had trained along the way as a decorative painter—faux marble, Venetian plaster effects, and so on which I loved doing. I painted Found Objects floors, decorating them with handmade stamps.  Then I hand-painted the walls to resemble old, distressed stucco with faux marble pillars. I did all this by myself—hands and knees on old cement for the floors. Very tall ladders and scaffolding to paint the pillars and 20’ walls. It was magnificent. I believe that it was the most beautiful store in Seattle at that time. And the merchandise was equally wonderful, ranging from jewelry to weird and wonderful “antiques” and art. Annual trips to Europe and New York were necessary, making for exciting times indeed. In 2004, we closed Found Objects. Things in downtown Seattle retail were tough. Torn-up streets, very little street parking, rising rents, financial hard times. I still reflect on that decade as a shop owner as one of great adventure and joy. I was very proud of Found Objects.