was a Santa Barbara rancher who suffered from bipolar disorder and had three nervous breakdowns before his marriage in 1929 to Alice Delano De Forest.  His doctors informed the bride's father, Wall Street financier Henry Wheeler De Forest, that the couple should under no circumstances have any children.  They eventually had eight, including their daughter Edie (1943-1971). [Source: IMDB bio, Edie Sedgwick]

    

You may find this hard to believe, but there was a time when all I wanted to do was relax.  Seriously.  Just take a deep breath and calm down.  I didn't know it then, of course, nor for a long time could I properly articulate this desire, but I suspect any sensible adult taking a good look at me would have said, "Jeez, that kid needs to relax."

Even some of my peers, I see now, recognized what I needed, that so to speak I was "waiting to exhale."  I recall one of them, Tammy Padovick, observing to her friends -- "Fast Girls" they were called in those days although to my mind there was never anything fast about them since in fact they moved with a slow languid grace and style that seemed anything but hurried or nervous, almost carelessly urging you to watch as they swayed on stilletto heels down the hall or across the parking lot to the place where they went to smoke and lounge about, taunting you in a desultory fashion to take a good long look as they crossed their legs or lingered over lunch which occasionally involved a banana or a SugarDaddy, but I digress... 

It was Tammy's opinion, expressed over Dip Cones at the Local Tastee Freez after school, (a popular hangout with the Fast Girls, which also drew a crowd including some of the school's more interesting male Varsity athletes) and in a particular sort of delivery intended for overhearing, that what I needed was to have the daylights "shaken" out of me, although I am here paraphrasing, of course, for "shaken" was not quite the word Tammy used, even as she added that she saw herself as the one fully capable of doing the shaking.  No, those of you familiar with Midwestern patois and dialect will realize I am conflating two expressions -- one for having the "daylights" removed from a person by various and sundry means, and the other referring to the "stuffing" being "shaken out" of an individual or thing, generally but not necessarily living (it could happen to dogs and cats, for instance).  Further, note that "daylights" is a word for which I am unable to determine a specific meaning but which I have reason to believe encompasses an individual's aura, being, awareness and consciousness, although I must add here that other metaphors were to come into play that afternoon at the Tastee Freez including impossible references to chrome and trailer hitches, finally forcing me to join in the discussion and raise at least one or two objections by pointing out to the gathering of classmates and contemporaries that, for instance, one "picked" a Cherry, and one "popped" a Balloon, and in neither case was "bust" a correct nor appropriate verb form.

How wrong was I. 

But that, if you care to infer, is another story altogether, coming as it does soon after the turning point in my life when I discovered alcohol, sex and drugs, more or less simultaneously and roughly in that order.  At which point, and for some time thereafter, as you can well imagine, I discovered I was no longer so nervous but was in fact remarkably calm, and I felt much more relaxed, and I breathed deeply as my shoulders fell away from my ears, and as long as you kept the drinks coming, I cared deeply about you and the world and everyone and everything in it, and I even felt profoundly, albeit temporarily, at peace.