I found Finn Cohen’s interview with Wendy Liu about Silicon Valley [“Down in the Valley,” April 2024] very interesting. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 after college with a degree in electronics technology. My first apartment in Palo Alto was $125 per month. Tech companies were abundant, and they made physical products: hard drives, semiconductors, lasers, medical instruments. In 1972 I started a small metrology company and leased 3,100 square feet in Sunnyvale, the center of the tech area, for $0.31 per square foot. A few years later, in 1980, I bought my first house in San Carlos for $175,000. I sold it in 1991 for $350,000. Zillow now estimates that same house to be worth $3.3 million.
I treasured my time in the Bay Area. I met people from all over the world, and the diversity made me a better person. But looking at the area now saddens me. Manufacturing has been offshored and eclipsed by “content” providers, and only rich people can afford to live there. I consider this part of America now as “paradise lost.”
Nancy Turner’s Readers Write about her “secondhand” children [“Yard Sales,” April 2024] reminded me of raising my own kids. After a divorce in the mid-1980s I, too, became a single mother. I had one biological child and three adopted children from various backgrounds. Those mac-and-cheese years were a struggle, for sure. What would we have done without thrift stores, yard sales, and coupon clipping?
All four of my children are grown now, and they credit those years with teaching them how to live frugally. Not only that, they have passed this wisdom on to my grandchildren.
Cheers to all the strong mamas like Nancy Turner who are meeting the needs of their sons and daughters however they can.
Mac Crane’s piece on being nonbinary and playing pickup basketball with men [“Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back,” March 2024] hit home for me. As a woman who’s worked in the male-dominated engineering and IT field for thirty years, I’ve alternated between thinking that I make my male coworkers feel threatened because I am good at my job and worrying that I don’t belong because I’m not good enough. This sentence from Crane’s essay summarizes most of my career: “All they can see is ‘woman,’ and I will, one way or another, be punished for it.”
While men from my generation seem easily threatened and tend to exclude women, I have noticed that the younger men in this sector show us more respect. I may yet experience the joy of my work before I retire.
I’ve never been an athlete, but I can relate to Mac Crane’s essay. As the daughter of a carpenter, I spent much of my childhood hanging around my father’s woodshop and helping him fix antique cars. He never told me that girls could do anything that boys can do; I just always assumed that was the case.
In my late teens and early twenties, an open farm field was my version of Crane’s basketball court, and in place of the ball, I had a tractor. I pined for the approval of the boys on my crew. I could mow the hay and toss the bales. I could excavate a perfect line with the backhoe or level a barn site with a bulldozer. I could wield a chain saw and a posthole digger. I even drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. I desperately wanted them to accept me as an equal.
Moving out of the tractor seat and into an office chair didn’t change much. Even nonprofit leadership is a man’s world. As Crane put it, navigating this space is “like solving a complex math equation.” With more than two decades in my field, I’m a highly skilled and deeply passionate professional, but the men at the top respond to my drive for excellence by treating me like a nagging wife.
Cameron Dezen Hammon’s essay “Kissing Strangers in the Street” [March 2024], about her experiences with BDSM, reminded me of something my acupuncturist said: People have an inner courtyard and an outer courtyard. You don’t let just anyone into your inner courtyard. If you do, you put yourself at risk. Not only did the author let perfect strangers into her bed, but in writing about her experiences, she’s opened the gate for the whole world. In short, it’s good to have boundaries.
Shortly after reading Mr. Papas’s letter, I was forced to resign from my job as a church music director because my boss felt my essay—which had been shared with him by someone he would not name—was incompatible with the church’s values. I wasn’t surprised by my former boss’s reaction. I’ve been a music director in Christian churches for nearly twenty years, and I am well-versed in how Christian women are supposed to behave. I did put myself at risk by writing about exploring physical intimacy with strangers. But the greater risk for me was to allow my sexuality to be governed by the church and by men. That felt like a risk I could not afford to take. To live, to thrive, I had to risk losing a job and losing credibility in the eyes of some. But the alternative would have been to contort myself into a mold that has never fit and is no longer acceptable to me. I do, in fact, have boundaries: I will not allow my sexuality, nor my writing, to be governed by the expectations of others. I hold my emotional, spiritual, and artistic health in too high esteem to risk it.
Brittany Ackerman’s essay about her brother [“Such Gifts,” February 2024] reminded me of my relationship with my brother Dave. I have always felt a strong bond with him. His wisdom and comforting presence helped me through high-school breakups, divorce, the death of our parents, and all the critical incidents in life that could have unmoored me.
When Dave started having health issues related to smoking, I tried everything to help him quit: encouragement, money for patches, prayers. I would wake up in the wee hours, crying and worrying, pleading with God to help him stop smoking so he could stay alive. I felt like his life depended on me.
One day I told a friend who is a spiritual adviser about my worry. She said, “Mary, Dave is a smoker. It’s not good or bad. That is his path. You cannot control it, so let it go. Let him lead his life.”
I did. I let it go. His smoking no longer worries or angers me. I am at peace with it.
M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist who wrote The Road Less Traveled, was a heavy smoker until the day he died. He said that many people with addictions are extraordinarily sensitive. Life causes them deep pain. They momentarily release their pain by having a smoke. But we all do this in our own way, don’t we? Whether it’s through shopping or social media or Wordle.
Dave is seventy-five and still going strong. Who knows. He may outlive me.
What a beautiful surprise to see Doug Sylver’s name in your January 2024 Correspondence. Mr. Sylver, as he’ll always be known to me, was my high-school language-arts teacher in Seattle, Washington, in the early 2000s. After I saw his name, I contacted him for the first time in many years. It turns out that not only do we share a love of The Sun, we both played in punk bands in our twenties and worked through difficult divorces in our thirties. And, like Mr. Sylver—really, because of him—I am a language-arts teacher at a public school.
James Davis May’s poem “The Patron Saint of Airport Sparrows” [December 2023] is poignant and moving. It is everything a poem should be.
I finished reading the September 2023 issue of The Sun on a day so perfect it seemed impossible, and I wrote the thoughts and feelings the magazine inspired in a little black journal. Out of curiosity I checked to see what I was doing exactly one month prior and found that I was reading the previous issue of The Sun. Every other entry in my journal is meticulously time-stamped, but not those two. Reading The Sun fills me with so much calm that I lose track of time.
