In the last half (or so) of the 1980s, I held a job as a program instructor for adults  with developmental disabilities at a long-established residential and day program in Marin County, on the border of the towns of San Anselmo and the now very toney Ross. “Program instructor” was a fancy way of saying “low paid special education teaching without a credential.” I had a classroom with students, submitted lesson loans and kept track of student progress in basic functional academic skills such as reading street signs and survival words, writing and reciting their names and addresses and phone numbers, personal orientation, work activity and readiness, community living skills including basic cooking, hygiene, shopping for needed items and attending events in the nearby communities, or just enjoying a walk, choosing leisure activities, the basics of social interaction. I was supposed to call them “clients” since I was not officially their “teacher.” But for other than bureaucratic definitions, invented and used for bureaucratic purposes,  I was as their instructor, which is essentially… a teacher, 
The organization had been around, and in that spot,  since 1919, when it was something of a country manor and much of Marin County, just north of San Francisco over the waters of the San Francisco Bay, was indeed The Country.  There would be no Golden Bridge connecting Sausalito and the Marin Headlands to San Francisco for another 18 years. The roads around what was then The Cedars Development School for Retarded Children, were unpaved well into the 1940s and there were few houses around or near it. 

There was a combination lounge and less-formal classroom on the Cedars campus when I came there to work in 1986, at the corner of Oak Avenue and Upper Road, sometimes called The Carriage House. It had indeed served as a barn for a carriage  and horses to pull the Cedars carriage, in an earlier day still recalled by some of the Cedars residents who had come there as young children in the 1920s and  1930s. The fact that there were such elders still living there in the 1980s  stood as a testimony to the relatively good care they received. One pleasant older woman named Sarah who was alert and engaged in her life (she had a regular volunteer shift caring for animals at the Marin Humane Society and especially loved cats)  and with her friends there, recounted riding with her friends from the Carriage House  the horse-drawn carriages from Oak Avenue along Upper Road toward Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Ross to attend church on Sundays. She remembered not only the horses and buggy that brought them to Sunday services, but also that “we wore hats and gloves and Mary Jane shoes with nice stockings.”  

Most of my students in my classroom, and that of my friend Mary who had a group in the next classroom to me,  were younger than Sarah by an entire generation – around my age within 10 to 15 years though we had one older man, Joe, with Down Syndrome, in his 50s who had also lived there since early childhood,  They were less independent than Sarah and needed close supervision on and off campus. In the afternoon, we usually walked through pleasant nearby residential neighborhoods in San Anselmo.

Mary and I sometimes brought our classes on afternoon walks and outings together.  Our all students each, and all, needed to be watched closely as we assisted  them in gaining better pedestrian travel skills. We had students who would  attempt to pet any dog they saw, on leash or in a car or walking down the street,  and others who would try to run away from the sight of a dog.  I had two female students who would hug total strangers and announce “Get married! Wife!” There was a  male student  around my age who talked to himself, or to unseen people or entities, in  a loud voice while walking along the suburban sidewalks, sometimes babbling about the residential staff or the other residents (“And then Arnette said ‘You need to make your bed, and don’t be like Lizzie – Arnette is mad because Lizzie wet her pants three times!”  George would sometimes walk along, waving his hands in the air and announcing to the neighbors,  “Oh yeah, and I had diarrhea ALL NIGHT LONG!’”  I marveled at George’s thick articulation that suddenly became perfect when he called out long words such as “diarrhea” while a resident of the house near us was watering her lawn and garden.

On a pleasant, sunny afternoon, we were all walking along San Anselmo Avenue,  in a residential section that was mostly single family homes.  I was near the curb,  herding students back from wandering into the street. One of my favorite young women in my class, Terri, had a confused sense of direction, like dyslexia that was not confined to words on paper. She needed close supervision and sometimes a guiding, friendly hand or elbow,  though I had been admonished by my supervisor at The Cedars  that we should not “infantilize” our young adults by holding hands with them as if they were children or by giving them large print books to read.
While retrieving Terri from one more meader off the sidewalk, I saw a well-maintained mid-1960s-era Corvette parked on the street near where we were walking.  A man somewhere in middle age with brown hair was getting out of it and I greeted him – part of our travel training was intended to teach our students how to have an appropriate casual conversation with passersby.

I looked at the dashboard and smiled at the photos that adorned it. There was a small, framed photo of HIndu teacher Neem Karoli Baba, reclining and smiling close to the driver’s wheel – and  a portrait of Elvis Presley on the opposite side of the dashboard, closer to the glove compartment and the passenger seat, and a string of dried baby marigolds and other warm colored flowers around and between them,

I smiled and said to the driver, “I have to say, I really like your car altar there … Elvis and Neem Karoli Baba eh?”

The man walking up toward the duplex near where he had parked grinned back at me, as I took Terri’s hand (away from the  scornful eyes of my supervisor, who usually liked me and thought I had worked hard to build good rapport with some of our more difficult students)

“That’s right,” he said, “I guess you could call it an ‘altered altar.’ ”

I nodded and chuckled. “Altered altar: I like that,” I told the driver.   I looked back at my friend and co-teacher, Mary, thinking she would pick up the humor right away, but Mary looked blank. Perhaps she was less acquainted with the spiritual side of the counterculture than I had imagined. Then I heard laughter from the balcony window of the upper unit in the duplex building up the hill from where the car was parked, as the driver locked the car doors and walked up towards the lawn.

I looked up and saw that the man who was laughing there, merrily, had a face as familiar as the photo of the guru, and inextricably linked with it in my mind. I waved to him, while keeping an eye on the students who tended to wander into the street and those who tended to put their hands in car windows to pet dogs or to flirt with the passengers.

The face looking down was Ram Dass, newly moved into the apartment, clearly enjoying that I had placed him as the man most associated with the Altered Altar in the car, I remembered that he also had a taste for classic  cars, especially sports cars, and had once, famously, dealt relatively and kindly with a police officer who had stopped him on the road by talking motorhead lingo with him.

“Oh of course!” I said to both the men, still looking up at Ram Dass in the window.  Ram Dass seemed pleased that I had recognized his teacher and that I had recognized the gentle irony of his car altar… and that I had recognized him as I was walking these “special needs students” along the street.

“Huh?” said Mary, my co-instructor. “There’s something here I don’t quite get.” Mary was a talented artist with an MFA, who had long struggled with dyslexia. She had a delightfully droll wit that bordered on cynicism, much like my own in tone but which almost always seemed well laced with kindness and warmth. She was interested in many aspects of hippie culture, but was not especially familiar with the spiritual side of the literature with which I had come of age. I remembered that Mary was working on an intricate, wordless children’s book about dragons; she was a highly intelligent person who dealt with pictures far more facilely than with words, and was unlikely to have read most of the books that had influenced me so as a countercultural teen and young adult.

“You know Ram Dass, of ‘Be Here Now’ and all those books and such? Used to work with Tim Leary as a professor at Harvard before they both got kicked out and launched the psychedelic renaissance? That’s Ram Dass moving into that apartment. And he liked that I recognized his “altared altar” in the car with Elvis Presley next to his guru from India.”

“You’re the best, Julie!” George announced, loudly of course; this man used one of two volumes at any time or none at all, and loud. According to staff who had worked at the Cedars with George since his arrival there as a small child, he used no speech until the age of 9 years – and had made up for lost time by never quieting down after that.

Though George usually seemed to live totally in his own world, he had clearly been listening to the conversation and he definitely knew who Elvis Presley was, even if he had no idea or reason to care about Hindu teachers. George loved to sing along with his old LP albums of Elvis and other crooners. Just the mention of Elvis Presley made him happy. He never could pronounce my given name correctly, or he wouldn’t – a longtime staff member named Jeanette was always ”Joanne” to George and I had learned that it was futile to have George repeat anyone’s name after me to get him to say it properly. She was Joanne and I was Julie,  and so it went with George.

Ram Dass stood and watched us from the second floor, clearly enjoying the scene on the street including our students as George continued to half-shout, “Oh yeah, we got it straight, we got it straight…” I waved to Ram Dass and his friend one more time as we turned the corner.

It felt like an excellent omen all around.  “Elvis and Majaraji,” I thought.  “And Ram Dass as our new neighbor. Well, well.”

It felt like a very good afternoon and I hugged Mary in appreciation of a fine walk in the neighborhood. 

Judith Gips

March 31, 2021