Life goes on

The events of the last four months have been so extraordinary that at times I have felt paralyzed, unable to even keep up email correspondence much less write words for more public consumption. However, last year I wrote an essay called A Geriatric Perspective, that appears in the Summer issue of The Threepenny Review. Here is a link to the article. The Threepenny Review

For years, when I was practicing medicine, my sisters and I were caring for my mother, who lived to be one hundred. Now it is a sister who requires the family attention. She lives across the country from the rest of us (four sisters) and has no children. My mother never expected to live so long and my sister never expected to be disabled. With all my book learning and caregiving experience, I can’t predict what’s ahead for me either. All I can say is that I’m familiar with most of the possibilities.

At the other end of the age spectrum, my third grandchild was born in April. ( The only good news I can remember, apart from Pope Leo XIV.) For her, time seems to move swiftly. Already a month old, she has lost that “newborn” look and settled into baby. For the rest of us, I saw a greeting card that said, “I can’t believe it is still 2025.” As I write, the National Guard is in Los Angeles.

I remind myself that I have lived through this before, when the National Guard was called out in Washington, D.C. to restore order after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The public bus I took to high school traveled a different route the Monday after the weekend rioting, to avoid the burned out areas. No one protested when the driver turned away from the usual streets. We sat in stunned silence, trying to figure out where to get off.

New Zealand

In November of last year, my husband and I toured New Zealand with a group of Bay Area gardeners. We arrived in Auckland on the North Island, then traveled by bus down to Wellington, the capital, where we took a ferry to the South Island. In addition to public gardens, we visited many private gardens under the auspices of the New Zealand Garden Trust.

In the 21st century, the Kiwis have made an effort to incorporate their First People, the Maori, into the social fabric. We were impressed that they teach the Maori language in schools, and signs are bilingual, although the Maori are 18% of the population. Currently, they are struggling with the backlash to these progressive steps. The video of a Maori legislator tearing up proposed conservative legislation went viral while we were there.

We admired the “can-do” spirit of this mostly rural island nation. We saw geothermal energy plants and a kiwi hatchery and biochar, a kind of charcoal produce under low oxygen conditions to sequester carbon. We heard quite a bit about the efforts of their Department of Conservation to cope with non-native predators and climate change. For two weeks, every day was Earth Day, in a lush green land.

Water, water, everywhere.

HOLD ON

Yours truly won first prize for fiction in the. CRAFT 2024 literary contest.. It has been a secret for months but now I can finally send the link to my short story. CRAFT LINK. I am happy that this story found such a wonderful home and I want to thank the author Deesha Philyaw, who judged the contest, and the editors at Craft who held my hand preparing the story and the essay which accompanies it for publication.

The Fall Garden

Here in Berkeley, where we may not receive any rain from May to October, the garden typically limps through
September, dusty and susceptible to black spot and mildew. I deep water at least one plant each time I’m working out there, letting the hose drip for an hour or so, but it’s rain the garden needs—water everywhere. This year our neighbor also cut down a couple of dead trees in their front yard and the sawdust coated most of my plants. My California fuchsia which normally blooms orange in September was damaged when the fence was cleaned and re-stained. There is enough foliage that it will come back, but not this year. When we returned from a week in Los Angeles with the grandchildren, I cut back the pink and white naked lady lilies, which had dried up, and deadheaded the aster in front, hoping for a few more blooms. The one spectacular bright spot is that the orchid cactus hanging on the front porch has finally bloomed, after 2 years.

I hope this is epiphyllum oxypetalum …

Fact checking

In 2016, two books Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance and Strangers in their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild were said to “explain” the election results. Many pundits have revisited Vance’s book since his nomination as the Republican candidate for Vice President, looking for clues to his current views. The website Mayday has just published a piece I wrote about the Afterward Hochschild attached to the paperback edition of her book, which clarifies that the deep story of her white interview subjects in Louisiana was not supported by facts. Unfortunately, this clarification came a year after the 2016 election, and it seems possible that many people were misled by Hochschild’s sympathetic portrayal of the emotions of her subjects. They feel that they have fallen behind blacks, but by every measure—wealth, education, health, income— whites in Louisiana are more fortunate than blacks. Mayday

Catching up

Since my last post, the plumeria bloomed and my granddaughter was born. We made it through the entire fire season last year without a significant blaze, which made me realize how much the fear of fire has come to dominate our travel plans. In early April, we visited the Portuguese island of Madeira and my husband is one month post-op neck surgery today, doing well.

On the writing front, I reviewed Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water in the Winter 2024 Threepenny Riview. The review only appears in the print edition. Although I admire Verghese, I ended up with mixed feelings about this book. He wrote about his family, Christians, technically outside the caste system but with Brahmin privileges, in Kerala, and a woman married at twelve, as his grandmother was. So his treatment of those two problematic institutions, the caste system and child marriage, is rather gentler than I would have wished.

I also participated in a Symposium on Anger, in the Spring 2024 edition of The Threepenny Review. A few of those short essays are online. Anger essay

We are enjoying a chilly spring. The plumeria doesn’t tolerate temperatures below fifty, so I kept it inside until a few weeks ago.( This week’s forecast still includes night time lows of 49.) It looks like a stick again, entirely dormant, perhaps due to a mis-guided pruning attempt. I watch gardening videos for instructions and they make it sound so easy…

Plumeria in Berkeley

So far this summer we have been spared the fires and the heat that so much of the country has endured. The fire on Maui and the wildfires in Canada feel close, since we have visited and marveled at the beauty of both places. We used to visit Hawaii every few years when the children were young because it’s a direct flight from the Bay Area and all of us love the beach. Recently, I have spent more time in Los Angeles because my grandson is there. Walking the neighborhoods, pushing his stroller, I saw plumeria, one of the “lei” flowers, planted in pots and in the ground. Until he was born, I didn’t know that Los Angeles was warm enough to grow the fragrant blooms outside. We can’t do that in the Bay Area, but gardeners are stubborn folks and sure enough, online I found videos about growing plumeria in pots and bringing them inside for the winter. Last year, I mail-ordered a dormant plant, a stick, with no leaves or roots and planted it in a pot, which I kept inside until night time temperatures rose into the fifties in March. When I put it outside, there were still no leaves, but it resisted when I tugged gently, so I thought it had rooted. The leaves unfurled first, then a separate appendage grew and budded from the stalk. The plant is almost but not quite blooming in this our warmest month. My daughter is also expecting our second grandchild, due within weeks. Much anticipation in this household, with Maui, too, in our hearts.

On the Record

A few months ago, a reporter from the Philadelphia Enquirer emailed me about the column I wrote in 2011 for a medical journal called “The Color of Kidneys”. ( Scroll back to my post “Small Victory” 12/2/20 ) He was researching the use of race in estimating kidney function and told me that my column was one of the first to question the practice. Here is a link to the article he wrote about how kidney doctors are re-evaluating the way they list people for transplants. He worked hard to explain a complicated process to the lay reader and I am happy he included me.

Philadelphia Inquirer

A second chance

Until the Music Stops

Above is a link to a short piece I wrote about my visit to Cuba, originally published in 2003. The website Medium has a project called “Defunct Editors” to republish pieces published in defunct literary magazines, of which there are many. I am grateful that they resurrected this piece because it is close to my heart. My paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, emigrated from Cuba. I asked about trying to trace the family when I was there but I was told that it would be impossible, given how common the name Martin is and the state of their records.

Back to the Theatre

So far this season, I have seen more live theater than in 2020 and 2021 combined. My husband and I are trying to see all of the August Wilson Pittsburgh Cycle, and we added the Marin Theater production of Two Trains Running to our list. The only one we have not seen yet is King Hedley ii. Marin Theater deserves a shout out for mounting many of the local productions of Wilson’s works—maybe they will get to Hedley. A Wilson play is always a whole meal, not a snack—comedy, tragedy, and above all, wonderful language. He is the black Shakespeare.

We also saw Berkeley Repertory Theater’s production of Clyde, by Lynn Nottage, and Paradise Blue at Aurora Theater by Dominique Morisseau. Imagine, two plays by black women in the last few months! Paradise Blue, set in Detroit in in 1949, is part of a trilogy of Detroit plays and the homage to Wilson seemed clear. But there was more emphasis on women characters than in a Wilson play, a welcome change.

Unfortunately, the night we visited Aurora theatre they shut down the production after intermission because of technical issues with sound and lights—it was not a full-scale blackout. We were all disappointed and grumbling, but one audience member asked that the actors come back on stage so that we could applaud them . I was so impressed at her presence of mind, to think of others, when the rest of us were feeling sorry for ourselves. The actors came out and we gave them a standing ovation for the first half.

The actors seemed surprised and delighted at the unexpected curtain call. It changed the mood in the room, to acknowledge that we were all frustrated by the turn of events but we still appreciated each other. Thanks to the technology innovations of the pandemic we were able to stream the second act at home, so we learned what happened. But the experience only underlined how special the experience of live theater remains.