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Los Baños, California: Fields and Free Time
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 6, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. The Apartment Years At the apartment complex, I became what my mother called a “garbage picker.” Not for food, but for objects. Discarded toys, broken gadgets, bits of hardware—anything that could be repurposed into something imagined. Children are natural…
Los Baños, California: School and Adjustment
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 30, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. St. Mary’s I began school at St. Mary’s Catholic School that fall. The nuns recognized that something about my reading was different, but they misidentified the problem. My comprehension was not weak; my mind moved faster than my speech. Oral reading was…
Los Baños, California: Arrival — The Dam People
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 23, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. Looking for a Place Every town has its own beginning. Los Baños began with us driving slowly through it, looking for a place to rent. It was not a city, just a Central Valley agricultural town—sugar beets, truck farms, irrigation lines, and dust. My father was…
The Man Who Raised Me: The Inheritance
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 16, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. Advice He offered very little direct advice. One warning was never to join a peacetime army. He described it as “a bunch of Boy Scouts.” The other was shorter and more pointed: “Whatever you do, stay out of Texas.” He never explained the statement. He did…
The Man Who Raised Me: What Was Not Said
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 9, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. The Facts of Life He never gave me the talk. I learned what I needed to know from school and from friends. Once, I overheard him say that girls needed instruction about sex, but boys did not. When I asked him what VD was, he said, “It’s a disease you shouldn’t…
The Man Who Raised Me: Silence and Provision
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — July 2, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. Silence My father did not tell stories. Once, at the dinner table, I asked him what he could tell me about the Great Depression. He became serious and said, “You never want to go through one of those ever.” That was the entire answer. No detail. No memory…
The first mistake is to imagine the archive as a courtroom. A courtroom wants evidence neatly clipped, sworn in, labeled, dated, signed, and
The Man Who Raised Me: The Boy Before the Father
By Cliff PottsBay Bay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 25, 2026 This is a serialized installment from the autobiography of Cliff Potts. Eleven Years Old My father lost his father at eleven. That is where his story begins. An eleven-year-old boy in the middle of the Great Depression watches his father die. His mother did not work outside the home. That was conviction, identity, and doctrine…
