Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sonoma State University was only fifteen minutes away from my front door, and in the
spring of 1988, I signed up for an elective course on dreams and images at SSU. The class
was taught by a remarkable professor, Gordon Tappan, whose ways of working with im-
agery became the foundation for my later studies of Renaissance art.
I was delighted to find a teacher like Gordon, and I think he was also quite happy to have
me as a student. Apparently he liked some of my comments and insights so much that he
would share them with his afternoon class. As it happens, Pam, my wife-to-be, was in that
afternoon class. She swears that Gordon would often introduce a topic by saying something
like: “Sam, who is in my morning class, made an interesting comment today.” She began
to wonder who this Sam guy was.
After the end of the semester, Gordon organized an informal study group for seven or eight
selected students. Pam was one of the invited students. The first time I saw her I kept trying
to figure out where I knew her from. The second time we met I asked her to tell me her
name again. She looked me in the eyes, smiled and said, “You can't forget my name.” That
was that. A year later we were married.
***
Not long after, we both completed our studies at Sonoma State, and I started thinking about
taking another crack at a Ph.D. It was a wonderful time in our lives when everything felt
like it was falling into place. Pam and I were joyfully happy. I was teaching a course every
semester at SSU called “The Psychology of the Imagination” while continuing to work at
Symantec as a quality assurance contractor.
Now, after all the meandering, it is finally time for Italy to re-enter the story. A friend
from Sonoma State, John, and his Italian-American wife, Francesca, got married about six
weeks before us. As a wedding gift, a friend of Francesca's family offered the newly-weds
a free stay in her apartment in a tiny village in the Valdambra region of Tuscany. John
and Francesca went and returned a few weeks later with ecstatic reviews: the place was
gorgeous, the food was amazing, the people were great, the art was incredible. They were
so smitten that they immediately started planning their return engagement. When they did
eventually make it back, they rented an apartment in the same village, and they invited us
to come join them.
The timing was fortuitous. After much searching I had finally identified a graduate school,
The Union Institute, that offered the flexibility I was looking for in a doctoral program in
psychology. I was one of the ten or twelve people in America with a passionate interest in
archetypal psychology, and the Italian Renaissance was one of its fountainheads. (There's
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