California Gypsy Introduction

It’s great to be connected!  I’ll present myself as I am – Jennifer Horton Chadwick.  I currently live in Saratoga, California, but have been searching for homes with acreage to buy in Sebastopol, California, a small town approximately an hour north of San Francisco.  It’s a very artsy place to live, which fits in with who I am perfectly.  I have been living with my husband here for several years.  He’s a software engineer, so the Silicon Valley lifestyle suits his needs, but we think it’s time to live in a place that meets both of our needs.  He likes a wild, natural place with me preferring an artistic atmosphere,  Sebastopol matching both of our desires.  We are currently living with our two parakeets – Poppy and Wendy that fly around, buzzing our heads and chirping their little heads off, adding color to our lives.  As this blog progresses, you may hear from me in Sebastopol.

I have decided to write a blog to recount my life experiences, since my husband and I are not our titles with not living one dimensional lives.  Simon, my husband started his years in Rhodesia, as it was called then, a British colony, from which he benefited  greatly with his old English style education.  He passed his placement examinations, then went off to university in Capetown, South Africa.  It was a beautiful place to attend college where two oceans intersect – the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.  As we have here in the San Francisco Bay area, there is a lovely Mediterranean climate with warm dry summers and rainy, cool winters there.  He left university, ending up working on Fleet Street in London doing software work.  Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe with little room in his country for a white British derived guy, since it was vastly changing, excluding members of the society based on color differences.  Finally after living and working in the UK for awhile, he was transferred to New York, never returning as a resident to Europe.

As for me, I’m your true gypsy, but I’ll start simply in this introduction.  I went to college in Maryland like many girls of that age group, graduated and became a secondary school teacher.  I grew bored with that quickly, so took a sojourn to Europe for numerous months, then, returning to school in North Carolina, attained a master’s degree in counseling psychology.  I then took on the role of a guidance counselor in an inner city school in Balitimore, Maryland.  That’s where my real education began and will speak about that in more detail later.  I was laid off at the end of the year, due to budget difficulties in Baltimore City, deciding to hang out in Cape Cod, Massachusetts for the summer, working a service job, prior to going to Boston to search for work.  Once I made it to Boston, I landed a job teaching at a school for the visually impaired.  My cousin lived near by and I had a friend from my North Carolina school days living there also.  I spent some of my idle time with them.  It was a beautiful town with top flight cultural events, but me, being the restless and adventurous person that I am, was happy only to stay there through the school year.  I decided to return to graduate school in Colorado to become a school/educational psychologist via an initial ski slope job to obtain in-state Colorado tuition.  Well, I finished my goals, working as a school psychologist for some years.

This is only part of my story, each of these experiences being interlaced with extensive foreign travel to various European countries, North Africa and South and Central Americas.  I was younger than 30 when all of these episodes occurred, quickly becoming a very different woman, than most are living in our modern culture.

I had decided at a very young age than nothing was more important than personal freedom, creativity and beauty.  I would let nobody chain me down, whether it be a job laced as a career or a marriage to someone who didn’t have the same free spirit that I have.  I must live freely, even if it is at the expense of materialism, assets or legal tender.  I must experience life in my own unique way, however colored another person may find my perceptions.  They are my own views and my own way of observing the world.   God knows at this point in time, after traveling in sixty different countries and living in some also, obtaining a sizable amount of formal  and informal education in vastly different disciplines,  as well as exploring the immediate world around me, I have earned the right to think how I want to do so.

As for my love life,  well I want to talk about that too.  It was painful in the first years of adulthood.  I always seemed to meet those who were ill suited for me.  They were only ships passing in the night from whom I wanted more.  I always preferred initmacy with other human beings, causing me to suffer, since that’s what I might have wanted but the agendas of those I met never were the same as mine.  I preferred to share myself  and my spirit with those persons I had met that I liked.  Unfortunately, my naivete and innocence were obstacles to self protection, since there are those that only know how to take without reciprocating – selfish and ill mannered.  I feared that I would be alone on the planet with no one with whom to relate.  It caused me many a tear, always behind closed doors.  I wonder if those that caused hurt, ever thought about their behaviors or perhaps they didn’t care.  Maybe, if I had been given enough respect by such ships at least communicating clearly their own needs and agendas, then I would have not become a social battle victim, rather making choices based on the provided sincere information.  I would suggest to those reading this blog to always clearly communicate your intentions and thoughts, so those involved will never become emotionally injured.    Maybe another term for this description is well mannered and sensitive to others.

This stage passed with one day someone walking up to my home in Florida, asking if they could ride down to West Palm Beach for a drift dive with me.    He had called prior to coming to my home, speaking with an accent that wasn’t quite British.   Simon became my scuba diving partner,  later on my husband.  He was the opposite of so many people that I had met in the past, being very respectful of my background and thoughts, behaving like a gentleman and still is.  I had met enough educated people in my life but seldom were any of them refined, displaying proper social etiquette.  He was raised in a different culture than my own, perhaps making the difference.  Can Americans be so much more callous and selfish than others living on our globe?  Well, that’s all for now.  In the future, I will post experiences from the current time, but also want to weave the past into my story.