Saturday Night with the Alameda Progressives

Read it on the Wood Street Journal blog.

Life is Sweet

Read it on The Wood Street Journal blog.

𝓓𝓲𝓪𝓻𝔂 𝓸𝓯 𝓪 𝓟𝓸𝓭𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓽 𝓙𝓾𝓷𝓴𝓲𝓮 — Fresh Air dissects Trumpcare, ⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️☆

Read it on my new blog, The Wood Street Journal.
- µ

Report from the 2017 Brain Tumor Walk

Cindy, volunteer at Honor and Celebrate, posing in front of the message canvas

  
  People have rapt, confiding expressions on their faces when they stand in front of a canvas, Sharpie in hand, and write messages to certain someones who will never read them, because they've died.  Seen from my perch in the Honor and Celebrate tent, they stand quietly, letting the busy world fade, then their lips begin to move, then their hands.

• I love you mamma
• For my husband Patrick — Happy Anniversary
• If all you can do is crawl, start crawling  —from a fellow human
• JEAN LEWIS
• Memories of Maria, a thoughtful and decent person

    Many returned their Sharpies without meeting my eyes and walked away quickly.

Student volunteers from UC Davis
who set up the message canvas

    The message canvas would have been unusable without help from two young UC Davis students.  After my first attempt to set it up, it was too low and sagged badly in the middle.  They raised and pulled it taut with twine looped around the top bar of the tent.  Then one of them wrote: Remember Monica, Our Angel.

    Cindy was the other volunteer at Honor and Celebrate.  She had successful brain surgery for a benign tumor in the '90s, and has been intending to come to the Walk every year since.  But something always came up.  We were lucky she made it this time, because she had a deft touch in setting out the Sharpies, and fluffing the paper roses we used for the Remembrance Ceremony.

    Around forty of us gathered by the tent at 9.  We passed out kleenex, and paper roses, then Rev. Will Hocker from UCSF led us in a reading of Epitaph by Merrit Malloy:

    When I die
    Give what left of me away
    To children
    And old men that wait to die.

    And if you need to cry,
    Cry for your brother
    Walking the street beside you.
    And when you need me
    Put your arms
    Around anyone
    And give them
    What you need to give to me.

    I want to leave you something.
    Something better
    Than words
    Or Sounds.

    Look for me
    In the people I've known
    Or loved.
    And if you cannot give me away
    At least let me live on in your eyes
    And not in your mind.

    You can love me most
    By letting
    Hands touch hands
    By letting bodies touch bodies,
    And by letting go
    Of children
    That need to be free.

    Love doesn't die.
    People do.
    So, when all that's left of me
    Is love,
    Give me away.

    Painfully beautiful, like the setting — spectacular clear vistas, but chilly, and breezy enough for we hearing impaireds to lose some of the Reverend's words, and to not be able to fully appreciate the acoustic guitar accompaniment.  

   After the ceremony, a survivor told an inspiring story from the main stage, about how she married and had a child after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Then the walkers started off in the direction of the Golden Gate, encouraged by a troupe of taiko drummers.

    Unlike on previous years,  when the walkers returned, they did not hear a speaker from the research community telling of

Suzy on left

promising new treatments in the pipeline.  But we did have a good band, who played a hot version of "Got my Mojo Working" by Muddy Waters. One couple even braved the cold and got up and danced. 

 

  The wife of the harp player told me she'd always been active raising money for medical charities, but never imagined needing help herself.  That changed when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  She said this with a bright, friendly smile, the way many people tell you their truths at these events.

    My old friend Oded Angel, he of the fateful New Years Day bike ride, came at noon to help us pack .  He was a welcome sight.  For me and many other volunteers, the day had started at 6:30 am with a couple of hours of hard and inglorious physical labor, carrying heavy boxes from a U-Haul, unfolding tables and chairs. 

By mid-day I'd started to fade.  Oded helped until we were packed up, then biked off to visit his sister in San Francisco.  Before he left, he said he was glad to come to honor my wife.  Simple words, meant a lot. Like the simple words Sharpied on the canvas.

∏-Rats of Crissy Fields
Team Jolly Roger, a tradition at the Walk

    Jenifer let me take that canvas home, and I unrolled it on my living room floor and wondered what the writers would want me do with their messages, so private and so public.  Can't keep them forever, my clutter problem is already unmanageable.  So maybe sharing a few more is best.
   
• Miss you daddy! Every day since May 11, 2011 -- your little baby girl
• Our dearest love, Suzi -- Team Shine a light by the Bay
• The Jolly Rogers, YO HO" (Team members names in interlocking hearts)
• Friends of mine touched by Brain Tumors — Dennis, Kathryn, Sirus, Wasina

P.S.,

    If too much upbeat cancer talk brings you down, or you find yourself wishing that the '!' would suddenly disappear from the world's keyboards, you might appreciate this poem.  If this were a radio show, it would be dedicated to all the cancer patients who didn't make it.

Picture This


by Carol Teltschick

On your TV 
After the evening news
The name of every person 
who died from cancer today

A photo of each face


How they looked before, and after,
The list of treatments that did not save them

We could observe a moment of silence 
for each of these people
after our dinner

We could give them that
If only it wouldn’t take 
the whole damn night


(Cancer kills more than 1500 people a day in the U.S. alone)

WTF means What's to fear?! There's a place for poetry in the 24 × 7 news cycle?! — short podcast review

𝓓𝓲𝓪𝓻𝔂 𝓸𝓯 𝓪 𝓟𝓸𝓭𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓽 𝓙𝓾𝓷𝓴𝓲𝓮

NPR/To the Best of our Knowledge celebrates National Poetry Month ⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️☆

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.

Also a poem by William Carlos William, MD,

including these famous  lines:

It is difficult / to get the news from poetry / 

yet men die miserably every day / for lack /

of what is found there.

Dr. Williams was a general practicioner, with much

experience in the miserable deaths department. 

   Quon Barry woke up on Nov. 9 to "a world I never imagined," and she didn't like the changes.  Could acclaimed poets, such as Quon, do anything to help? Say by writing poems that responded to current disasters?  And so she launched Asphodel.info, taking the name from the William Carlos William poem with the famous lines about the difficult necessity of getting news from poetry.

    Asphodel.info publishes one poem a week, by an acclaimed poet, on a topic in the news — news defined broadly to include stuff like the first robin in spring.  She's optimistic about finding an audience because she says we live in an age of "the democratization of poetry" — poetry defined broadly as "compressed, charged" language, encompassing advertising and Twitter.  And she succeeded in getting NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast (TTBOOK) to air the first 5 poems in April to celebrate National Poetry Month.

    The 1st April poem called Inaugural, by Quon, focuses on one particular change to her strange new post-Nov 9. world: she now calls herself a refugee. She actually looks to the future with hope:

    …Once, I got on a plane,

    I left, it was done, I became me, I did not suffer in the way

    of such suffering, but I am a refugee from a war

    this country conducted. May this be the dawn

    of an era in which we do not have to live a particular life

    in order to respect it. …

   The 2nd poem is Brush with Cymbals (WARNING: may contain symbols, and play with words) by Fady Joudah, MD.  Like Barry Quon, Dr. Joudah is a refugee, a Palestinian exiled from Israel in 1948.  The poem is a one way conversation with his adopted country, and to me has strong echoes of Allen Ginsberg's America.  Brush with Cymbals begins with:

   

    America, I’m downloading your heart,

    your giga, and my CPU 

    is slow…I will have your corazòn

    when I’m in the dirt

And of course America beings with the immortal lines:

    America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

    America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

    The NPR podcast includes an 18 minute interview with Dr. Joudah, interesting enough to merit a replay or two.  He tells us that being a doctor is like being poet, he manages uncertainty in both roles; that being ill is like being a refugee, because you're exiled from your body; that in classical Arabic poetry, the last letter in the rhyme word is the first letter of the next line; that the key to being a translator, as in his translation of the famed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, is to place himself in delusional state where he can convey what cannot be measured.  His thoughts on how the Palestinians are seen in America?  He uses a medical metaphor, triage: there is a hierarchy of suffering, and exile matters less than holocaust.

    Next up, Ode To the Dead of Bowling Green by Nick Lantz. As in the Bowling Green Massacre, the fiction invented by Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway to justify the fiction that the travel ban her boss proposed did not target Muslims.  Poets and politician both play with words to pry them free them from their literal meanings. Nick's ode is a poet's meditation on the Trump team's playfulness:

    … When I say clock tower,

    I mean the problem of evil—to wit, a man in a suit

    who says immigrants but means slaves, a man in a suit

    who says choice but means your children will barely

    know how to read …

    …When I say hope, I’m asking

    how a poem can hope to shame a man pressing

    a torch into a pile of books in the town square.

    Nick Lantz teaches college in Texas, and the "clock tower" references a real massacre, at the University of Texas in 1966.

    A pedestrian almost gets killed by car, and walks away oblivious but unharmed.  This is news?  WTF!!  And indeed, the next poem WTF by Laura Kasischke, is about a young lady, wearing air buds and a t-shirt sporting those 3 fateful letters, stepping into traffic in traffic without looking even one way. Kasischke braked in time to reinvent the t-shirt's meaning:

    … I know what this stands for.  I've

    texted it to friends.  I've

    said it, outright, in public …

    what I read, instead, seeing

    her t-shirt's three

    letters through my windshield

    this afternoon is

    What's to Fear?    

    Larger significance, if any?  That the next generation, each and every one madly in love with their smart phones, is on a collision course with physical reality?  That America stepped into bad traffic Nov. 8, and our luck could run out at any moment?   Dear diary, you decide.

    The last April poem is November Eyes on Main Street by Richard Blanco.  He had a moment of fame on January 21, 2012, when he read his poem One Today at Obama's 2nd inauguration.  That poem talked of weaving diverse strands of the American experience, and ended with us looking up together at "hope — a new constellation."  He's in a different mood now. Of all these Asphodel poems, his is the one that says the divisions are stark, raw, and he offers no band-aids. Here he is, avoiding the eyes of the grocery checker on November 9:

    …Paper or plastic she asks me,

    but it doesn’t matter. What matters is this:

    she’s been to my barbque’s, I’ve donated

    to her son’s football league, we’ve shoveled

    each other’s driveways, we send each other

    Christmas cards. She knows I’m Latino and

    gay, yet suddenly I don’t know who she is

    as I read the button on her polyester vest:

    Trump/Pence: Make America Great Again.

    She doesn’t know me either. We manage

    smiles as she hands me my change, but

    our locked eyes say, nothing.…

    

   It is what it is.

Bay Area Brain Tumor Walk, May 13, 2017 at Crissy Field.

Team "Glio Warriors for Jean and Jonathan" at the
Bay Area  Brain Tumor Walk in 2013

Special Rosamundi issue with an
article by Jean about her
preservation garden for
endangered roses

    Team Rosamundi will remember Jean at the annual Bay Area Brain Tumor Walk, May 13, at Crissy Field in SF.  Rosamundi is also the name of the journal of the Heritage Rose Foundation, where Jean worked as a research editor, doing her bit for the cause of preserving old roses.  Jean understood that we're all in this together, the web of life, and that people change lives for the better all the time.  One needed change is improving treatments and support services for patients like Jean, with a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).  Please join our team and help make that happen.

    GBMs are the most common and the most lethal type of malignant brain tumor.  When Jean was diagnosed in 2011, the "gold standard" FDA approved chemotherapy for GBMs was temezolomide.  This drug helped about 1 in 5 patients by increasing their life expectancy by a 

Wild college days
Jean lived with a gentle intensity

couple of months — to about a year and a half.  At the walk, you'll have a chance to talk to long-term GBM survivors, and exchange news about promising treatments.
   If you've never been to a walk before, you might be surprised by the upbeat energy.  Most of the credit belongs to the survivors, happy to be alive after confronting a terrible diagnosis.  But some of it goes to those of us who come because someone we love did not survive, and appreciate having a place where we can share and acknowledge our grief.  Jean lives in the memories of a wide circle of people.  The Remembrance Ceremony at 9:10 will give us another chance to honor the bright spirit that passed from us in 2013.

Some Jean thoughts of my own, four years after.

On our honeymoon,
Jerusalem, Marh 1998

    She was a vivacious, brilliant, fascinating woman, and one of the great things about being married to her was to able to have an intelligent conversation, any time I could manage one.  At parties, she was usually the person I wanted to talk to most.  She was also an extremely good person, and many have wondered how someone so nice could also be so interesting.  After she was diagnosed with the tumor, she was still a linchpin in the support networks for our moms and her brother, as they confronted their own serious medical problems.  And they were not burdens, she found ways to have fun in the process.

With friends at Café Samovar, San Francisco,
 December 2012, taking a break from the Zen Hospice.
We enjoyed our lives together to the very end

    She did much to help me too—much—and going to the Walks is one way to  stay connected.  The first time was in 2013, three months after, and a sanity saver in a very dark time.  The raw grief has passed, but 2017 is a dark time too, although not for me in particular.

    Jean carried the idealism of her college days forward into that busy world called adult life, and would be sad to see what is happening in this country.  One problem is that there's less funding for medical research as more money is funneled to the military and the police.  That's another reason why your support for the NBTS is especially important now.

The poem we will read at Remembrance Ceremony May 13

Israel pictures

Terrye saying goodbye at Ben Gurion International

Much thanks to my sister Terrye and my niece and nephew Rutie and Yehudah, for their bemused tolerance of this wandering workaholic.  Will be trying to find words for the experience, but for now will need to make do with a few pictures.

At the entrance to Yad Vashem,
the World Holocaust Remembrance Center

My grand-nephew Nachman, Yehudah's son

Yehudah and his GF Raz,
lounging on Terrye's couch.
They are a charming couple indeed.

Father, son, guitar

µ, Rutie, and Rutie's son Eitan.

Back from two weeks in Israel/Palestine

Software engineering class at Bethlehem University.  That's me toward
the back wearing a cap. There were 17 students in the class, 14 females and 3 males.

     Returned Sunday from twelve days in Israel, sight-seeing and renewing family ties; and two days in Palestine, checking out Bethlehem University (BU), a Catholic school established by the De La Salle Christian Brothers.  The whole complicated story will be on the Wood St. blog in a week.  For now, just

Caffeine station on Yussef Plaza,
the main social space

a note explaining why you may wish to donate to BU, even if you happen to be a recovering Catholic, or a skeptic like me, with no affinity for faith-based anything.

• Your money will be put to good use.  The nominal annual tuition at BU is $4,000, and your donations go directly into tuition subsidies ensuring that no student actually pays more than 2K.  The per-capita GDP in Palestine is approximately $3,000, and the unemployment rate hovers above 25%.

• BU is open to all.  The 3,290 students are 3/4 Muslim, 3/4 female, and in Yussef Plaza, the main social space, women with and without head coverings chat amicably.  You could imagine this means that the Muslims and Christians students get along fine.  If you're an inveterate dreamer, you could even imagine it portends a day when Jews and Arabs will be on friendly terms.

• The Computer Science students are familiar types, with important differences.  Fellow programmers, think back to our difficulties in learning our trade, when the greatest physical hardships we faced were all night coding sessions fueled on sugar and caffeine, sprawling over uncomfortable chairs. Our brothers and sisters at BU endure far worse.  They pursue their studies under martial laws that can turn a five mile commute to school into an odyssey.  And that's when the military checkpoints are open.  Just like for us, one of their motives for learning how to code is to escape to an exotic land of decent pay, respect and dignity.  But their starting point is further back, in a world of endemic humiliation — and those great humanitarians Trump and Netanyahu are not about to make their lives any easier.  Writing a check is one small thing that can help.

BU Guest Relations Officer Brother Michael Andrejko (center) posing
in front of the library.  The round hole on the upper right was
made by a tank shell.

Dolores hairstyling for men

Dolores

   It's an enclave for high and pop culture, where guys can view oil paintings in the abstract expressionist mode, à la Jackson Pollock, and savor posters from old Humphrey Bogart movies. It's also a refuge for animal lovers. My haircut can by interrupted while she gives a biscuit to a dog who stopped by the salon to say hello. Then when Dolores finishes, and wheels me around to confront the mirror, my visage is framed by a wall covered with photos of her customers' pets. Felix and Zola are up there, snuggling with Jean.

    Dolores herself lives with Merlot, a fussy beast, whom she accommodates with the judicious use of cat treats. She's also an avid reader and likes jigsaw puzzles, and her books and partially completed puzzles add to the ambiance.

Still life with pet wall and mirror

Pet wall detail:
Beautiful woman with her two justly famous cats

    



    She can tell you the exact number of days since her husband passed of a heart attack in 2012. He had been ailing, but his death still came as a shock. She admits to getting angry at him for abandoning her, although she has girlfriends she goes out to lunch with regularly. Another romance someday? Possibly not.

What's a hair cutting salon
 without a little abstract
expressionism?

Bogart Tribute Wall

    But she was understanding last July when I told her a hike with a love interest had motivated me to come in. That, and it had also been five months since my last visit, and my unruly locks had started to look unprofessional, even by the lax standards for college lecturers. She assured me I'd soon cut a dashing figure on the trail, and set to work.  She trimmed the eyebrows and the ear hairs too, those flags of aging, and when she asked me to inspect her handiwork I cried "Magnifico!" and we laughed. There I was, the best looking me possible — mean anything? And there we were, both surviving spouses, both doing our best.

The view from across the lobby

     My coiffure once again looks quite unprofessional. No surprise, the season has changed twice since my last haircut. The Bay Area autumn was not as dramatic as Michigan's, but the leaves did turn color; I crunched through piles of them on the sidewalks. The brisk cold winter makes my bald spot tingle, makes me glad to have some place to go called home.

     That home is on a small island off the coast of Oakland. It has an attractive old art deco building at 1415 Broadway, only three blocks from Park and Central, the throbbing heart of Alameda café society. Going there is a different experience than going to a strip mall.  Salon Dolores, on the ground floor of the vaulted lobby, feels different than the Supercuts experience. One more dose of her care and acceptance, and I'll be truly ready to face 2017.

1415 Broadway in Alameda, salon on left of the entrance

These two old guys decide to celebrate New Years Day by riding up a mountain …

Oded and Matt, claiming their bragging rights

New Years Day, 2017

       So, Oded and Matt get decked out in cyclist regalia, helmets, sunglasses, the works, and the punch line is … Oded's helmet saved him from a serious head injury!  Seriously, if you a ride a bike but eschew helmets, please reconsider.

Oded's helmet, after the fall

        Misfortune struck on the descent. Oded's rear wheel suddenly went out of true, and threw him off his bike. He hit the pavement on his head and shoulder, smashing the right side of his helmet, and tearing his jersey. His clavicle ached, and the rear wheel would not turn freely. But a couple in a pickup truck saved the day when they stopped, and without hesitation offered  to drive Oded down to the Walnut Creek BART station — offer accepted, and thank you so much! Later, the ER found that his clavicle was intact, and that the helmet had performed its function well and protected the most vital organ of all from injury.

Oded, while Matt was still climbing

     Second punch line: I made it the summit too!  Very pleased with myself, although I arrived 21 minutes after Oded, five years my senior, and still employed at BofA after me and many other of his work buddies were pink slipped in 2014.  He would have got to the top sooner, except that up to the juncture (2,200 feet) he would stop and wait for me to catch up.

Rest stop at about 1K feet,  South Gate Road

At least it was an improvement over my performance on New Years Day 2015, when the juncture was as far as I got.  (As an aside, modest Oded credits his cycling superiority only to his continued employment at BofA's nearby Concord Tech Center,  allowing him to practice mountain climbing after work.  In my opinion, it's because he's a force of nature.)

Moosie with Alison, 2015

    Historical note.  Alison, who appeared in the 2015 Diablo ride blog entry, was at it again this year, still sporting pink panniers and a stuffed moose as a rear rack ornament. But we only had the chance to say "hey" as she zipped by quickly on her way down from the summit, as I was making my slow ascent.