Growing Up

What was your mom like when you were a child? 

What a painful question! 

I was born in San Francisco in the Fall of 1938. My dad was a doctor and my mom was a nurse; both worked at UC San Francisco. I also had a sister who was one year older. 

Of course I remember little details of the early years. There is one memory that I still have, of the two of us in the kitchen early in the morning, making and sharing hot cocoa. 

Some time after that I was reminded to be gentle with her as she rested on the couch, and then she would go away for days or longer. I was not aware when she went away for good. I do remember trying to kill a classmate in first grade when he taunted me that she was dead. The teachers had to pull me off him. It was the worst possible way to find out. 

Then there was no mother for years, just a succession of aunts, caregivers, and finally for several years, a lovely older woman, Nanny Haley. She was my mother substitute for years, and taught many things, including a love of reading and of strong Irish tea. 

Six years later my dad remarried. My new step mom was an established career women who became a valued partner for him. She really didn’t know how to relate to orphaned little girls. A year later she had a baby girl and I loved that kid . Still do to this day!  

What places have you lived, and when? 

I’m a deeply rooted San Franciscan, but my life has also included many brief sojourns in other places, near and far. In October 1938 I was born in San Francisco less than a mile from the University of California Hospital, where my father was a Medical Resident and my mother was a Nurse. Soon after, they completed a new house in St Francis Wood, definitely a more upscale neighborhood of the city. We lived there until I was 9 years old, when we moved to a newly built house in Kentfield in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from SF. 

I loved Marin, living in the edge of undeveloped hills, because I got my first dog, and we could escape after school and on weekends. As I grew into a young teen, I was lucky enough to spend summers on a working homestead ranch in Trinity County in far Northern California. The Trinity Alps were rugged, wild, and beautiful, and my summers there were probably the happiest of my life. 

Thanks to close friends and mentors I found there, I went from high school to Antioch College, a prestigious small school in Yellow Springs Ohio. I loved the college but Ohio didn’t love me, so after my freshman year I returned to California and enrolled at UC Berkeley. Living in Berkeley among twenty thousand plus student was totally different from Tony Yellow Springs in many good ways, and reinforced my split personality of loving wild country but also diverse cities. 

I graduated from Berkeley and became a nomad single mother, bouncing around finding jobs where I could: San Francisco, Redwood City, Sacramento, Berkeley, Tucson Arizona, Berkeley again, Oakland. 

After a decade of this life I settled in Berkeley long enough to complete two graduate degrees, and my choice of Epidemiology meant that I signed on to a pattern of lots of travel and brief stays in many countries. Chasing down epidemics means going where they are and staying as long as needed, anywhere from a week to many months.most of my stays were in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Near East, and a very happy Sabbatical was spent at the World Health Organization’s Secretariat in Copenhagen. 

Then I was astonished to discover a pregnancy at age 43, so stopped traveling and returned home to Marin and Academic/Research life. Upon semiretirement I have returned to San Francisco where I fully intend to live my remaining years. 

What were your favorite subjects in high school? 

I attended a public high school in Marin County, California. It was a new facility; the area was experiencing rapid growth in the 1950s and new schools were being built. Sir Francis Drake High reflected the growing affluence of the county. It had extras like advanced level classes, a large library, and a competition size outdoor swimming pool. These extras provided me with opportunities that had been unavailable in the previous high school. Everyone had to choose a sport; I chose swimming, and enjoyed it a lot, except for sessions at 8am first period in the winter. I also chose Spanish as an elective, and found it easy to learn. Then I moved up to the advanced level class and found my true joy. The advanced class was taught by Mr. McColm, a retired college professor. He had high expectations of us, and assigned reading and translating of the classics in the original: Don Quixote, Garcia Lorca, etc. Further, discussion was in Spanish as well. I loved the challenges, and being treated like a young adult, with respect. In my senior yearbook, he wrote in Spanish, thanking me for my contributions to the class, and wising me continued success, and a husband who deserved me. 

Are you still friends with any of your classmates from grade school? 

So, I was an outsider from an early age, but that was ok with me. I was happier being me than trying to fit in. 

Who are your favorite artists? 

My favorite artists fall into two groups: Asian artists and strong women artists. None of them is alive. First, the Asian artists, Hiroshige and Hokusai. Both are from the Blue or Ukiyo-e period, when mass printing and a new blue ink color led to their work becoming wildly popular. I love the broader meaning and subtle colors of their work. Among Western artists, my favorites are two strong American women. Georgia O’Keefe is well known, although she has faded from favor recently. I love her strong simple lines painted after she moved to the Southwest. The other woman artist is the American plein air artist Jessie Arms Botke 

who was part of a small group of California artists who paired in the 1920s. I’m fortunate to have two of her oil paintings, thanks to my parents who bought them nearly one hundred years ago. 

Are you more like your father or your mother? In what ways? 

I’m definitely more like my father. That is, I love rising to meet a challenge, and to break new intellectual ground. Like him, I’m direct, and rarely show my feelings. However, this question is complicated, because my biological mother died when I was 3, before I had the time to really know her. My father remarried seven years later, so my comparison is to my stepmother. She was a woman with only a high school education who nonetheless had risen to the position of a fashion buyer for a local high end department store. She sewed her own elegant clothing, wore perfect makeup and jewelry, and was such a charming listener that my father’s professional colleagues never realized that she had a limited background. I wanted none of that. My clothes were usually jeans, I wore no makeup or jewelry, and my nails usually had dirt under them. My goal was to become a doctor like my dad but he vetoed that. Still, I completed graduate work in Public Health and became an Epidemiologist. Very late in his life he was able to tell me that he was proud of me. It meant a great deal to hear that, finally.

At what times in your life were you the happiest, and why? 

As a child, my life was not happy. My mother died when I was four years old and my father was rarely home during daylight hours. I was not at all social, so my initial happy times were when my family moved north from San Francisco to Marin County and I could get a dog and escape into the hills with him. Life expanded wonderfully when, at age 12, I went away in the summer to a working ranch in the Trinity Alps, run by a Quaker family who had created a model community that made me very happy. Daily life there was modeled on mutual help and support. Everyone of any age was encouraged to help as much as they could, to learn, and to grow. In an atmosphere of so much warmth and positive feedback, I just blossomed. Every summer until I left for college, I couldn’t wait to head north to that beautiful, welcoming, wilderness. 

Do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist? 

More importantly, despite being really limited in being able to do many things that I love, I still feel that my life is positive and that I’m looking forward to each day. Curiously, when I was younger and had a much busier life, I had stretches when it was much more difficult to stay positive. Getting old, with myriad health challenges and limited resources, is a real test of optimism, but I believe that it is better to laugh than to cry. 

Well, being one or the other is different than reacting to situations, fortunately. Many present situations have been pushing me towards pessimism, but years of experience have taught me that most pass before they can sink me.