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Published on 11/10/1999 All articles from this issue

What goes on in our heads

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By Mary Cristy

Editor's note: Due to a production error, Mary Cristy's Oct. 6 column was reprinted last issue. We offer the correct column intended for last week.

My friend and neighbor Dan Alexander phoned to remind me that the Los Altos Hills Historical Society would meet at Town Hall on Sunday. We chatted briefly about guest speaker Oliver Dyla, a Gunn High School computer whiz with a company of his own, after which Dan added, "I've ordered your book." I thanked him for his interest in my newly-published memoir, and he responded, "I want to know what's going on in your head."

What went on in my head in that instant was "like Wow!" as my grandchildren might express it. For Dan had touched a chord, and kindled a response in me that was deeply comforting. For decades I have lived in my own head, viewed the world through my own peculiar, sometimes skewed, perspective.

Now here was Dan, a respected neighbor, telling me he wanted to know what goes on in my head! A wave of relief flooded over me. All my life I've wondered what goes on in other people's heads.

If she's Kathy Perga, she might ruminate on the next meeting of her string quartet and decide on the music they will play.

Marjorie Kellogg could be visualizing the beauty of her spring garden for which she has ordered l00 daffodil bulbs to add to the already impressive floral displays she's painstakingly created over the years.

Susi Johnson, en route to Boulanger's for a loaf of fresh Sourdough, might anticipate a visit with her three adorable granddaughters.

But these are superficial considerations at best. We could all be 90 degrees to the left when we try for insightful glimpses into other minds, and hazard guesses as to what lies fathoms deep within.

Civilized man has been carefully taught to live within himself, to be wary of strangers, to guard emotions or suppress them. Polite society permits no rocking the boat, and, above all, no tears.

On an Indian summer morning. with fall colors on the trees heralding the change of seasons, Azar and Ann, my friends at Oz Boutique, discussed the prevailing attitude toward grief as it had been observed by still another friend, a woman from Milan, schooled in the Italian way of mourning.

At a memorial service for a middle aged mother of three, Vera had been stunned to hear "Weren't the children wonderful? They didn't cry."

"Madonna!" she responded. "If my children came to my funeral and didn't cry, I'd turn over in my grave!"

I would like to stroll about in that woman's head, and compare her thoughts with someone's from another culture.

"What goes on in their heads?" An endlessly fascinating question, and one to which we should rarely presume to have answers.

Our inner lives, our secret thoughts and fears, must ever remain private, and we know of others only as much as they are willing to open to us. As writers, we harbor a compulsion to share, to observe and to comment. But all too often we find ourselves nonplussed, embarrassed by the mistakes we make in print.

Still, we are impelled to go on trying to touch, to amuse, to charm, or inform, those who are kind and caring enough to find out what goes on in our heads. With a little bit of luck, we may succeed from time to time, and fulfill the hope that what goes on in our heads will reward readers.

"Cristy's book "Chicken Tonight-Feathers Tomorrow" may be ordered toll free from l-888-7XLibris, or through Heintzleman's Los Altos bookstore.