Autumnal Equinox

When I last wrote, it was spring, and now it is fall. It was an eventful summer, starting with a trip to Italy in May which lasted an extra 10 days because my husband and I both caught Covid. Luckily, we were barely symptomatic but we tested positive before we were supposed to fly home, when a negative test was still required. They changed the law four days after we arrived home.

Our isolation was not onerous because we were in a small seaside resort town, Sperlonga, halfway between Rome and Naples. Our innkeepers encouraged us to walk out and swim in the ocean, away from people, and we continued to enjoy the seafood and pasta, showing up early and eating outside at a small restaurant whose owner knew our situation. The welcome we felt when we first arrived did not falter.

Before the trip, I immersed myself in the work of Aminatta Forna and wrote a book review for The Threepenny Review, which recently appeared in print. The Threepenny Review

The importance of lipstick

Recently, I started reading the book The Secret of Life, by Howard Markel. It’s the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, retold with respect for the facts. James Watson’s bestselling book, The Double Helix, in 1968, was a great read but not very accurate. The dismissive way he treated Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who did not win the Noble Prize, is well known. But I was struck by the back-to-back quotations about lipstick at the beginning of chapter 13. Watson wrote “There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair..” Franklin’s mother wrote, “…and she always wore lipstick.” I am certain her mother was correct. I remember a man who told me when I was a medical resident (in the seventies) that I never wore a skirt, that I always wore pants on the ward, “like a dyke”. In fact, I often wore the white skirt I had been issued as part of my resident uniform (no white pants for the girls) but not when I was on call for 36 hours. After that comment, I carefully alternated skirts and pants and kept track.

We were also taught “the lipstick sign” in our clinical training. When a patient in the hospital started putting on her lipstick, it meant that she was feeling better and ready to be discharged. The first time I heard this “sign”, I remember thinking that I would never be discharged because I didn’t wear lipstick. I wasn’t opposed to it, but it seemed difficult—something I would have to reapply constantly. Those were hippie years and I always felt that I had something better to do than learn about cosmetics. But as Watson’s comment indicates, some men see lipstick as a symbol of compliant femininity, so much so, that a woman who was assertive (as Franklin was) would be perceived as not wearing it, even if she was. So you can’t win. Markel writes, “Watson’s malice toward Rosalind Franklin, and his cartoonish portrayal of her as an overemotional , angry, incompetent woman was set into the literary equivalent of concrete by the time he composed his memoir’s final line.”

Jack and Charmian London

Last year my sisters gave me a two night stay in a hotel in Sonoma, CA for a birthday present. It’s been a cold dry winter and I put off making the trip until last week, when warm weather was forecast. Sure enough, the temperature reached the high eighties last Tuesday in Sonoma, low eighties in Berkeley. We visited Jack London State Park, where we toured the author’s house and took a short hike through the redwoods which led to a “lake” formed by a reservoir London constructed for swimming. Periwinkle, vetch and California poppies were blooming in the fields around the abandoned farm buildings. London died of hard living at age 40 and basically his dream of a sustainable farm never came to fruition, although his wife and stepsister carried on. There’s a picture of him consulting with an elderly Luther Burbank: two plant guys in Sonoma. London’s wife Charmian was also a writer—her office is pictured below. She served as his typist and editor while he lived and protected his literary reputation after he died by publishing work posthumously, selling screen rights and taking trips abroad to authorize translations and secure copyrights. There was a first wife with whom London had children but he left the bulk of his estate to Charmian, who lived for forty years after the death of her younger husband. You never know.

Happy Holidays

Although the pandemic is still with us, most of us have given up on “going back to normal”. Normal evolves and time marches on. We have to find a way to live our lives. A year ago we had just elected a new president and the insurrection of January 6 was yet to come. We hoped that vaccines could magically restore us to the carefree travelers who visited Thailand in 2019, but every trip still involves a complicated risk assessment. No one wants to throw caution to the winds but we’re tired of sitting inside, too.

Moving on from the last post, now I have read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Talents. With a neighbor and the help of the book Tolstoy Together, an outgrowth of Liyun Li’s online reading group, I have also tackled War and Peace again, which I failed to finish years ago. These are books that I suspect would have changed my life had I read them earlier. Butler’s prescience is breathtaking. So is Tolstoy’s breadth and charm. Even now, I feel my brain expanding.

My holiday offering is an essay called My Father’s Voice in the Winter 2022 Threepenny Review, based on the newspaper columns I talked about earlier this year. The Threepenny Review

Everyday Miracles

Ten days ago a great storm passed through. Almost 4 inches of rain in Oakland.  Such a relief, after all the waiting.   Another summer of drought and fires—further north this year so less smoke in the Bay Area—but always the threat of closer, here. I was reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which describes our world after a catastrophe.  Her characters were coping with years without rain. Even my teeth felt dry.

We spent the month of September in Los Angeles, where I hiked with my daughter past her due date, along Santa Monica beach, on city streets and in Ken Hanh park, encouraging her baby to emerge.  He slipped into our world mid-month at 11:59 pm, delivered by a team of black women: midwife, ob-gyn and nurses.  Slippery, slimy birth.  Moisture is life. In the delivery room, my daughter was beautiful, powerful and my grandson was alert, checking us out. I felt so lucky to be there, thanks to my persistent son-in-law, who argued for me in defiance of pandemic protocol. 

 In SoCal, I discovered Canary Island pine and plumeria growing outdoors, like in Hawaii.  We visited the Huntington Gardens again.  But I missed my garden. When we returned, I spent hours deadheading the Japanese anemones and roses which bloomed while we were away, hacking back the Siberian sage.  I planted the white Naked Lady (amaryllis belladonna) bulbs a neighbor saved for me but the soil at my sister’s house was so dry that I couldn’t divide her dormant peony.  Only after the rain did the ground yield. 

Chinese garden, Huntington Gardens

How we survived

Over the last year, I have spent time reading my father’s columns and my mother’s book reviews from the 1950’s, published in The Defender. They are archived at the New York Public Library. Although my father spent most of his life as a journalist, I was only ten when he started to work full time for the Democratic Party instead, so I never read his columns from earlier years.

I have also been obsessed recently by trying to imagine how middle class blacks survived Jim Crow. My maternal grandfather was a successful businessman in the colored community in Savannah and my paternal grandfather was a doctor in the same community. How did they manage to lead professional lives and even thrive within a society where any random white person had more power than they did? For one thing, they obeyed the rules of segregation: as a child, visiting Savannah, I don’t remember even seeing white people. But they were also smart, very smart. It has always struck me as ironic that some white scientists claim that Negroes are not as intelligent as whites, since natural selection would predict that people whose lives depended on their wits would be smarter than those who were cosseted by laws that gave them every advantage and power, no matter how stupid they were.

Here is one of my father’s columns, where he describes how a black businessman survived in rural Georgia.

An orchid outdoes itself

Many years ago, a Mexican-American neighbor gave me a piece of an orchid she had gathered in a forest on trip back to her home. Since it was already here, mounted on a piece of oak bark, I felt no need to share the California law which prohibits bringing plants into the state. I thought epiphytic (growing on other plants, not in soil) orchids were always tropical, but Rosa assured me that it could grow outside here. And so it has, for more than a dozen years. Because it blooms in late autumn, I always worry that the buds will get too cold, and not open. If we expect an early frost, I have been known to bring the plant inside until it blooms. Then I set it back out again, to enjoy the rest of our yearly 300 frost-free days. It grew slowly. At one point I transplanted it to a larger piece of bark.

For the first time this year, the plant sent up two flower stalks. The 4 buds on the primary stalk swelled and bloomed pretty much on schedule in November but the two buds on the second stalk lagged behind. When the first flowers crumpled, I cut off that stalk. The weather turned colder but I didn’t bring the plant inside—I didn’t really expect more blossoms. The bonus buds finally opened in the early days of December. It felt like a miracle, especially as it coincided with the early Hanukkah this year. The photo below was taken December 17.

Still at the piano

I have lost track of how many years I have taken piano lessons as an adult—about fifteen I think. I have written about them several times, too. Particularly in times of stress, I depend on losing myself in music to give me perspective and hope. “Pandemic Piano Lessons” in the current Threepenny Review is my latest reflection on my practice. http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/martin_w21.html

In Memoriam

Sitting here in electoral limbo, I want to take the opportunity to mark the passing of Philip Lee, MD. He was a giant of a doctor, most famous for implementing Medicare when he served as Assistant Secretary of Health under President Lyndon Johnson. He forced hospitals to integrate if they wanted to receive Federal money.

He also served as Chancellor of UCSF, my medical school alma mater, from 1969-1971, where he hired an affirmative action coordinator and worked to increase diversity in the health science schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry and pharmacy. Historically, UCSF medical school had admitted one black student to the school each year. As one older doctor explained to me, if you didn’t get the spot, you went off to Meharry or Howard, the black medical schools.

The UCSF Black Caucus , a coalition of black employees from janitors to professionals, also applied political pressure to encourage diversity. By the time my husband and I applied in 1973, a black biochemistry professor, the one and only on the medical school faculty, had been appointed head of admissions for the school. I have no doubt that all these people contributed to the admissions committee’s decision to take a chance on two out-of-state students like us. They arranged a regional interview for each of us in Boston with a recent alumnus who was training at Beth Israel Medical Center. In my interview, he said: “The trouble with you Harvard students is that you apply but you don’t come. I assured him, “If you admit us, we will come.” And we did, later getting to know Dr. Lee in his capacity as the director of the Health Policy Institute that bears his name. How lucky we were.