Ray Madeo:
CLASS OF 1966
Santana High SchoolClass of 1966
Santee, CA
Ray's Story
October 16, 2021 update
Greetings from Northern California. Happy 55th! Enjoy your Italian food. Mamma Mia! Did you know that I am nonbinary? Sorry to hear about the UPS driver and "The Power of Love" doctor from India. Life goes on.
There's good magic in old trees old bridges and moonlit nights. Science is also good. Did you know that in a recent CNN interview, Neil deGrasse Tyson said that neuroscience might replace psychology? We are all classmates of both magic and science. Maybe I will return to Lakeside in 2026. Still working on my book about meaning acquisition in children and throughout lifespan development. Hello, Goodbye, Hello, Goodbye. And I shall sleep forever. Sweet dreams for all the children.
Original post from 2016
Between the forest and the library
I wander alone
Between the ages and the pages
is where I roam
Between the elves and the shelves
I found a home
Between the brooks and the books
is my telephone
Between the forest and the library
in my house of stone
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I wrote the above poem and published it in 1983 in a town on the California North Coast. I legally changed my name to M.C. in 1985 and again changed my name in 1997 to O.P. which is my current name. I am currently writing a book about C-PTSD and it's effects on child development and lifespan development, including effects pertaining to psychological dissociation, meaning acquisition, emotional acquisition, cultural acquisition as related to the studies of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and semantic anthropology. The meaning of the above poem as related to all of these topics will be discussed in my book. But I will say here that the word "ages" refers to both the ages of people (childhood through adulthood) and ages of human history. It is a poem that is also related to the recovery of severe mental and emotional dissociation that began in my childhood at the age of 3 and which I was unaware of all throughout elementary school and high school.
I decided to share this poem on classmates.com for the purpose of my continuing recovery from C-PTSD, but I am not ready for any furthermore communication with others from this part of my past (Santana, Lakeside, Eucalyptus Hills). But I am looking forward to coming back to Lakeside after my book is published. But that might not be until five years from now, or less.
I excelled in math and science at El Cap and Santana. My calculus teacher in college (Carolyn Crosser Volpe) said I was the most brilliant student she ever had, after I had taught myself the first year of calculus. But I had to drop out of college for reasons which I did not understand myself. Later I discovered that traumatic experiences in my early childhood caused brain damage to the part of my brain related to meaning acquisition, verbal acquisition and communication acquisition. And I remembered that I was born gifted in those areas just mentioned, but that my gift had been horribly damaged. Some people might remember that I was a stutterer. It took me years to realize that my stuttering problem was connected to the damage that had been done. I no longer stutter; I stopped stuttering around 2 years after I remembered the traumas in my childhood. And I will write about this in my book.
My privacy is very important. I don't wish to say anymore or communicate with others from this part of my past (El Cap, Santana) until my book is published. Actually, I have already published quite a lot under my new names in 150 or more letters published in North Coast newspapers between 1982 and the present. And I have also placed personal messages in classified ads, including the following in 1984.
Is it wrong to inherit a gift from the stars? Is it wrong to have friends in far, far away places. Hello, Goodbye. Hello, Goodbye. And I shall sleep forever, sweet dreams for all the children.
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Thank you for reading my profile. I wish all well. Someday I will return to Lakeside and Santee after my book is published. And I will be able to integrate the dissociated child in me with the dissociated teenager and the dissociated adult and the senior elder. Many people all over the world will benefit from the book I write because it will help everyone understand more about normal child development, normal lifespan development, meaning acquisition and social cognition. Cutting edge scientists are going to celebrate this book as a major breakthrough. And there will be a revolution in the social and psychological sciences regarding child development, lifespan development as related to meaning acquisition.
Read Thomas Kuhn "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Also, think about the movie "A Beautiful Mind" and think about how there may be psychological disorders like C-PTSD that are just as severe and just as difficult to understand and cope with as schizophrenia, and that no books and no movies have surfaced yet regarding people like myself who have had to live with severe challenges that others don't yet understand because the science involved is science of the future and not of the past.
The truth is that anyone who wanted to know about Ray Madeo, and all of the other Ray Madeos in the world, would have to win a Nobel Prize, because...Expand for more
it will take a Nobel Prize winning type effort to really understand the nature of C-PTSD. And perhaps someday I will return to Lakeside as a Nobel prize winner (that is, the leader of a Nobel prize winning team of researchers).
A final message. Remember the Great Comet of 1965 during October through Jan/66. I share and celebrate all the beauty and wonder and mystery of Mother Nature with everyone.
Is it wrong to inherit a gift from the stars? Is it wrong to have friends in far, far away places. Hello. Goodbye. Hello. Goodbye. Sweet dreams for all the children.
CORRECTION (9/8/16) : the 7th line in my poem should read "between the brooks and the books" rather than "between the brooks and the book."
MORE COMMENTS (9/18/16)
Two quotes from Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey": "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
When he died he had the following words inscribed on his tombstone: "Here lies Arthur C. Clarke. He never grew up and never stopped growing."
MORE COMMENTS (9/20/16): I CAME TO LAKESIDE BY WAY OF THE SEATTLE WORLD'S FAIR
I spent almost all of my first 33 years of life in San Diego County. My former last name "Madeo" is Italian, but I have a vast multi-cultural heritage that includes Indian from India, Native American, Dutch and other European elements; and also African-American, which I did not discover until I was 53 years old when one of my sisters did some research. Unfortunately, my parents never really talked that much about being Indian from India, nor about being Native American. Interestingly, I spent my first five years in the Logan Heights area just blocks away from where the Star of India was docked. I also remember going to an Italian restaurant on India Street. We moved to Clairemont and I went to elementary school at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary on Pochanatas Street. And, of course, Eucalyptus Hills is right across from the Barona Indian Reservation.
The only time I was not living in San Diego County for my first 33 years was when my mother and step-father moved to Seattle because Convair-General Dynamics had a huge layoff at their aerospace plants around 1961. So we moved to Seattle in March/62 so they could work at Boeing. The World's Fair opened around April 21st. In the meantime, I somehow discovered the book "Brave New World" by Huxley and I really got into Huxley and his other works. My mother had only a 5th grade education, and I decided to switch parents and live with my father who had married an English teacher who had been teaching senior English and Literature at San Diego High School for 25 years; they had just purchased a beautiful ranch house on Valle Vista Road overlooking the Morena area and Barona.
When I think back to my adolescence and middle childhood I have to say that the most significant thing that happened to me was NOT HIGH SCHOOL, but rather the four months I lived in Seattle (Mercer Island) when I went to the world's fair. And when it came to science, there was a positive spirit about science (about the world's fair) that was NOT later reflected in some of my science teachers at El Capitan, especially Valov (9th grade) and LaBlonde (11th grade chemistry); I dropped out of both classes. They definitely were not like Carl Sagan or De Grasse Tyson. Nor did any of my family members reflect the positive spirit of science which I inevitable came to realize was innate inside me. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people (both academics and laypeople) back then who thought that science and the humanities were two different streams of thought. There are still a lot of ignorant people who think that way. And there are still a lot of ignorant people who separate science from the sacred.
JEDEDIAH SMITH REDWOODS STATE PARK: The most important event that happened to me in my life other than the world's fair was when I became the autumn/winter campground host in the redwoods just inland from Crescent City in 1986 (30 year anniversary). What happened to me there in six months was far greater than anything that could have ever happened to me at any university in the world! I walked on Walker Road and I hiked on Wellman Trail high up above the Hiouchi Bridge on moonlit nights. I reconnected with both the Native American spirit in me, and the soul from India. And I also reconnected with the spirits of ancient scientists and mathematicians such as Euclid, Pythagoras and especially Hypatia of ancient Alexandria.
After Jed Smith I moved just a couple miles to the shore of Lake Earl in a cabin. In 1989 the Hiouchi Bridge suffered some damage and had to be scrapped. They closed the road from Crescent City to the bridge and made a detour that went by Pelican Bay Prison. But the closed road was open to bicycles while the bridge was being torn down and a new bridge was being built. I bicycled up the closed road through old growth redwoods to the torn down metal bridge one day and grabbed myself a piece of the old bridge. It is about 8 inches by 8 inches, has three rivets, and weighs about 8 pounds. I will always keep it to remind me of the good magic of old trees, old bridges and moonlit nights.
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