Nancy, our new office manager, was pushing hard on everyone in the clinic to sign up for a rafting trip.  She had gone with the same outfit before and assured us it would be wonderful.  We would all simply blast off in carpools after work on Friday for the 7- hour trip to the Klamath River, have a great 2 days on the river, and hightail it back to Oakland Sunday night.  We were all young then and this almost sounded reasonable.

Our workplace, La Clinica de la Raza, was still small then, nestled in the very urban Fruitvale section of town, the heart of the Spanish-speaking community.  The clinic had been founded by Chicano public health activists, inspired in part by the Farmworker movement.  Spanish-speaking people had problems getting medical care—it was expensive, not in a language they understood, not in the neighborhood, and it could be unsympathetic or dismissive.  Often, they did without.  The clinic was scattered over several clumsily converted houses and buildings, with a colorful mural on the dental services building, designed to be a welcoming place.  The staff was drawn largely from the local first and second generation Mexican or Central American immigrant community, though mostly the health professionals were not.  We all did speak at least passable Spanish, since all services were offered in both English and Spanish, and we were there because we were enthusiastic about the project (certainly not for the pay).  It was a wonderful group of co-workers.

In addition to work in the clinic itself, we cultivated sympathetic specialists and we provided important medical, language, and emotional support for those who were hospitalized, sometimes in the face of blatant attempts to exclude clinic patients.  I was present at in the obstetrics department meeting at Alta Bates hospital where they discussed ways to limit hospital privileges for our staff to get a better “patient mix”, one that would reimburse more and wouldn’t make the other patients feel they were in a welfare ward (read:  nonwhite and poor).   Later I would testify about this when the hospital sought to use Hill-Burton money (federal funds that require some community services) for expansion. Advocacy was integral to the work, and it still is.

 

Overall, I felt lucky to be immersed in the general culture of the Clinica familia.  Across the street were a Mexican grocery, burrito stand, flower store and funeral parlor.   A panaderia and a few restaurants were nearby, and mobile paletta or elote carts hawked treats.  You could buy balloons or pillows from other street vendors.  The bank on the corner had been closed but there was a tiny shop where you could wire money to family outside the US, and a post office around the corner that always had a long line of people trying to send packages home.  Two blocks down was East 14^th Street, later named International Blvd, running the length of Oakland from downtown to San Leandro, with storefronts and signs that told the history of the city in different languages, foods, businesses and empty spaces– sequentially more Asian, Latin, or African American as you moved towards the southeast.  Cars and buses crowded the streets; a few blocks away the BART screeched into the Fruitvale Station (yes, the same one that became the title of a movie years later).  You wouldn’t know it, but close by, Sausal Creek flowed from the hills to the bay in culverts.

In any case, there was quite a distance between the busy daily life in the Fruitvale with its culverted creek and a rafting trip on a wild river in the mountains.  It was outside the experience of most of the staff, but Nancy recruited about ten of us for the adventure, including the lab manager and several of her crew, medical assistants, physicians and midlevels.  And so, in August of 1984, we crammed into our vehicles and hit I-5 through the Sacramento Valley heading north, through the Siskiyous, past Mount Shasta and ever further north until we almost reached the Oregon border.

She was right—we all had a great time.  The Turtle River rafting company guides were competent and caring and really fun.  We had paddle rafts—the guide would steer and the rest of us would have to dig in with our paddles, high side into waves, and in all cases heed the guide’s direction to avoid the dreaded wrap on a rock or capsizing into a hole.  There was only one major rapid on the middle Klamath but we all pulled together and we all survived still happy.  In the quiet sections, we could paddle inflatable kayaks.  The guides made delicious food and we camped under the stars, watching streaks from the Perseid meteor shower fall through the dark sky.  Even though the trip was only a short weekend, it felt much longer.  We were miles away from Oakland, far from the stress of work and in one of those magic places where things seem to be as they were meant to be.

We piled back into our cars for the drive home, tired but in good spirits.  South of Redding we decided to stop for a restroom break and to get something to eat, so I pulled into a T and A truck stop off an exit.  Suddenly Catalina was in a mild panic.  Were we really going to stop there?  I said, sure, why not?  Catalina came from a family that had worked in the fields in the Central Valley, and said, “We would never stop at a place like that—we might get beat up.”  I was taken aback.  It had never occurred to me that could be an issue.  But I had not travelled the back roads of the Central Valley as she had, was not brown or a farmworker, and didn’t have to consider the prejudice as she did.  It took a bit of convincing to get her out of the car, with assurances that we would protect her, but she did have her first truck stop meal.  Soon, we piled back into the car together and headed south.  It was late and there was still a long way to go..

 

 

 

 

Broken Ankle 

I’m the type who tends to play it safe.  In fact I can’t remember any really dangerous deeds done or risks taken.

Although I once jumped off an elevated deck thinking the drop down was shorter than it actually was.   It resulted in a compound ankle fracture keeping me wheelchair bound and in a cast for 3 or 4 months.   But that jump was probably more foolish and painful than dangerous.

However I once eloped,  jumping into marriage with a guy I knew only a few months.  That was a greater risk than that broken ankle jump,  but thankfully less painful!   (See New Leaf)

RetroFlash / 100 Words

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

Some lost souls just don’t want to be found.

For them, the span of their lives is judged not by the calendar nor the actuarial tables that insurance companies live and die by, nor by the average life spans computed by the American Heart Association. All of these objective measures of how long people may live just don’t mean squat to a person who feels inside his life is over and doesn’t wish to be reminded of his former life and the promise it once held.

My old friend

As if I needed a reminder of this – for there was a time I also found myself among the living lost – a phone call to the home of one guy we’ll call Oliver D. Jericho did the trick. Oliver – I never could get myself to call him Ollie for reasons that should be apparent later —  was my college roommate for a semester back in the mid-60s.

I had met and befriended him in my sophomore year of high school as I began hanging out with the drama, debate, and forensics students: the speech kids. Oliver was sharper than a carpet tack when it came to debate, and knowledge in general. For whatever reason, he and I hit it off and became close for a few years.

And then, we weren’t.

Nonverbal cues

When you asked him a weighty question, you could almost hear the gears clicking in his head as he scrolled for the correct, clear, and specific answer. He often would do this thing with his hands, closing them into fists and then extending his two opposing index fingers as they stared at each other a couple inches apart and began rotating in the air. While this little staccato ballet was in motion, his head would bob slightly, side to side, and his tongue would click softly off the roof of his mouth.

“Tch, tch, tch, tch, tch…”

Oliver D. Jericho was thinking. And you were dead-sure the answer that would emerge from all this personal stagecraft would be an illuminating one.

Okay, he was a nerd. Just not your typical nerd. He was a nerd with an edge. For one thing, he played a mean guitar and would often wear this little black French beret and horizontally striped t-shirt when he played. Sort of looked like a refugee from Mutiny on the Bounty or a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Most probably he was just trying to evoke the model of a beatnik. The late 1950s and early 1960s were, after all, their era. Complete with Maynard G. Krebs of Dobie Gillis fame.

The Prisoner, maybe?

In actual appearance, Oliver was interesting, standing about 5’9”, of average frame and body, sporting short-cropped curly brown hair, fighting and losing a bout with high school acne. But he always dressed cool. Cool by 1964 standards, that is.  Button-down collar, the right pants and right shoes, not bad really. If he were to pick a TV character he would like to be seen as, it would be Patrick McGoohan of the 1960s enigmatic show, The Prisoner.

If I were to pick one he looked more like it would be Woody Allen.

A keen wit

Oliver was also a wit, as per this scene:  Once, in the midst of doing a solo on his guitar, staring at the packed audience with this deadpan, “I’d rather be in Philadelphia” expression, one of the strings pops and it doesn’t pop quietly.   Undaunted and nonplussed, Oliver simply gets up, walks over and picks up a backup guitar, returns, sits down and announces into the mike, “For my next trick…” and the guitar riff continues like it had never stopped.

Intelligence and wit. That was Oliver. If The West Wing had been made back in the 60s, he could have played the Bradley Whitford role, although a nerdier Whitford. But he was a multitasker and his pragmatic nature would have acquitted him well in the Machiavellian worlds of politics, law, and business.

He seemed destined to be the high school nerd who would outshine all his duller, macho classmates. He’d be working on his third million while we’d be struggling to make $30,000 a year. The Bill Gates of our class. The whole school saw him that way, and he was voted as the male graduate most likely to succeed.

Except he didn’t. Or, if he did, success didn’t last long. Oliver had dropped out of sight, and no one I know had seen or heard from him in many years.  I managed to track him back to his and my hometown, and he was living alone in his late mother’s small home.

Now a recluse

So what was this older Oliver D. Jericho doing, sitting alone in a darkened suburban Oklahoma City house in the summer of 2004, avoiding friends who might have known him way back when, and passing time alone in life?  And why, when I finally found him via a Google search, did he spurn my phone call as if he weren’t even there?

That phone conversation was a brief one and left an eerie, sad feeling engulfing me.

Contact

The phone rang several times before being answered.

“Hello?” came the resonant, somewhat sleepy, tentative voice.

It sounded older than Oliver’ 58 years and it sounded odder, but still it could be him. I drafted the next verbal link.

“Hi. This is Jim Willis, and I’m trying to locate Oliver Jericho” I said.

A brief pause followed, and then an emphatic and very awake, “Not here.”

It was Oliver. No doubt now. It was his voice, and it was his style. Back in high school and college he often dropped the subject out of short responses as in…

“Looks like it.”… or …“Think not.”

“Not here,” fit his pattern and after 35 years it still sounded like him.

I suddenly had this acute feeling I was invading his privacy, and I wondered if it was a mistake trying to contact this friend I hadn’t seen in so long.

The future back then

The once-shining guy who had come back home to roost in his family’s nondescript home, the guy who had avoided 40 years of high school reunions like they were Oklahoma rattlesnakes, the guy who had disappeared from the face of the earth, was letting me know he did not want to be found.

“Not here.”

It rang in my ears and reverberated as if bouncing off the canyon walls back home in California’s San Gabriel Valley. But why didn’t he want to be found? Or was it just that he didn’t, for some reason, want to be found by me?

Possibilities

Could he be put off by having read of the success I’d enjoyed in my professional life?  The local paper had published a few stories about my induction into the high school hall of fame and about my books and my teaching and research in Europe. Could it be Oliver wasn’t up to swapping life stories with a guy who he knew had struggled just to make his grades, way back when, while Oliver was acing the toughest major the university had to offer: Russian Studies? And that to be followed a few years later by graduating magna cum laude from one of the country’s top MBA schools?

Now his former roomie was chairing an academic department at a  private university in California while Oliver had jettisoned his career and was back home in his mother’s house and making no contact with that outside world he once knew.

My own wrong choices in life have disqualified me from feeling better than anyone else, but he wouldn’t know that. If Oliver’s life had taken the disastrous turn it seemingly had, he was feeling bitterness and embarrassment, and he wanted to stay lost.

Invisibility

“Not here.”

Not, “He’s not in, but can I take your phone number and I’ll have him give you a call when he returns?”

Not, “He’s stepped out for a couple hours but will be back about 10.”

Not, “He will be sorry to have missed your call.”

Just, “Not here.”

Period. End of conversation. End of story. Or at least, that’s what he wanted. I couldn’t help but think, however, that “Not here” also spoke at a deeper level to that fact that the Oliver D. Jericho I had known was, in fact, not there. I couldn’t help but wonder why.

Letting it go

The empathy — or projections — rose again inside, and I decided instantly not to press the matter. Not to say into the receiver, “Come on Oliver, I know that’s you. What’s up, man?” Maybe if it had only been a year since we last spoke, but not 25 years. I just let it go in the interest of his privacy, at least for the moment.

“Okay, sorry for the interruption,” I said, as if I didn’t know whom I was talking to.

There were no goodbyes before he hung up.  Just the click of the receiver.

Finding answers

I continued my search for answers, though, and a couple years later found Oliver’s email address and made contact with him that way. I was happy to see his response but was saddened to hear how bitter he had become at life, to the point of adopting an alter-ego. He called himself Jason now, and the life he had described living sounded a lot like Jason Bourne.

As was the case with many who finished college in the 60s and found themselves in the military, Oliver’s experience was very traumatic and seemed to change him forever. He felt unable to get the help he needed from the VA and found himself looking back on a life that could have been.

Back when he was voted  as the class senior most likely to succeed.

The Gs

Louise and I were both living in the women’s graduate dorm at Columbia in the 1960s while I was in library school and she in the social work program,  and we soon became fast friends.

Within a few years after grad school we each married,  happily our new husbands hit it off,  and by good fortune we both settled in towns north of New York in Westchester County.   And in those early,  married-without-children years Louise and Steve G,  and I and Danny got together almost  every weekend.

Then one day the Gs told us they both had accrued some vacation time and were planning to take a month off and drive cross-country.

“Oh dear,  what will we do without you for a whole month!”,  we cried,  “But take lots of photos to show us when you’re back.”

We never saw those photos,  and inexplicably we never saw Louise and Steve again.   And altho that was over 50 years ago,  Danny and I still jokingly ask each other  “Do you think the Gs are back yet?”

– Dana Susan Lehrman

It is said that a predictor of happiness and longevity as we age is maintaining strong friendships.
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“You will always be friends” the counselor told us.  We were too entwined and besides, she had seen it repeatedly in the women’s community, a fluidity of friends and lovers staying connected despite everything.  I said nothing but promised myself, “Oh no, we won’t”.
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Karen, seeking a new life, had fled from her family and friends to Kyoto, Japan.  She fell into equally bad relationships in the expat community. I have tried to explain her process of separating from me.  She joined a potter’s commune on the island of Shikoku where she eventuality became a renowned potter.

One day, after dinner with her troublesome lover, Karen returned to her apartment and made a decision while immersed in her ofuro, Japanese bath. She looked at her body under the water. Small bubbles on her legs desperately held on until the movement in the water broke them away, rising to the surface and disappearing into the humid air of the bathroom. The bubbles refracted and bent the light displacing her reality with an image slightly apart from herself. As she lowered herself in the tub her body felt terrible heat. Slowly she pushed herself against the scorching cushion of the water. A further attack of hot water occurred at her waist where the inlet for the hot circulating water occurred.

Eventually she had to turn it off. Sitting quietly, she could feel the different temperatures recede and extend over her body. She began to monitor these waves as one would apply glaze to a pot and proceed with an appropriate firing. She was not her body. That organism would grow, change, die without her. Her brain would never feel the heat or anchor a bubble. Each part of her had a significance of its own, its own law of nature.

Stretching her body out as far as it could go, she watched the bubbles rise to the top. More adjusted to the temperature she began to think of her life in Japan. She had come to escape. Yet again, she was drowning. Not by her parents, or her college boyfriends, but rather her own loneliness. Under the water, watching her bubbles launch off from her body and disappear into the steamy room gave her a sense of detachment and separateness. Once again, she decided to find a refuge from me and the other expats.

Antisemitism is on the rise throughout the world for many reasons. The Former Guy, who won the election in 2016, made it acceptable to say whatever dark things one might have only imagined in days gone by. People somehow thought it was great that he “said it like it is” – no filter; being rude and uncouth is now in vogue. He has opened Pandora’s Box and it will be difficult to put those hateful demons away again.

Since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, hate crimes against both Jews and Muslims have been on the rise in the US; against Jews, around the world. The situation darkens daily.

But antisemitism dates back thousands of years. Jews have always been viewed as “the other” and singled out throughout the millenia for persecution and exile. Queen Isabella of Spain, of Inquisition fame, banished the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492. Recently, in Dubrovnik, we saw the second oldest synagogue in Europe. The expelled Jewish population, who thought they would make their way to the Ottoman Empire, stopped in Dubrovnik, an important trading route along the way. There they were allowed to stay by the Catholic population, given their skill sets and knowledge base, and they built their house of worship. The population was eventually decimated by the Fascists during WWII, and today numbers only 30. A rabbi visits only once a year, but the structure remains and is used by the few locals, a reminder of the history and what has passed.

One isn’t born hating others. It is learned from family, community, those around you. As Oscar Hammerstein wrote for a song in “South Pacific” when an American GI falls in love with a native girl on a Pacific island, but is reminded by his colleagues that it won’t work out: “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Growing up in suburban Detroit, in the parish of Father Coughlin, the “Radio Priest” of the 30s, who preached antisemitism on the radio during the rise of Fascism, was not always a comfortable place to be. I had a few minor run-ins with ignorant boys in high school. One, sitting next to me in homeroom in 9th grade, noted that I missed school on the High Holidays. The day after Yom Kippur, he asked me where my nose was. I pointed to it: on my face. Later that year, backstage, during a play rehearsal, an 11th grader called me a “kike”. I’d never heard the term. I had to go home and ask my mother what it was before I could get angry at him. He said it without malice. I believe he echoed something he heard at his own home. We actually were friends. Thinking back, I believe he was trying to get a rise from me, an unfortunate way to do it. But that was an example of learning a word without understanding how offensive it was. He didn’t get the reaction he wanted because I didn’t know it. Poor judgement all around.

Many years later, I worked in an office in downtown Chicago in 1978. Famously, the American Nazi party wanted to stage a rally in the suburb of Skokie, which had a large Jewish population. The residents did NOT want that to happen, but the ACLU backed the Nazi’s freedom of speech and assembly, as guaranteed in the Constitution. The case went to the Supreme Court and their right to rally was established, though they never did march through Skokie. Instead, on July 9, they staged their rally in Marquette Park in Chicago. It was a lovely, sunny day. I had lived on the north side of town for about three months. I was working hard to establish myself at my new job and new career in sales. I often went to my office to do paperwork on the weekends, as I was in front of clients during the week and that is how I happened to be downtown on July 9, oblivious to what was going on. In those days, I didn’t read a local newspaper.

I spent a few hours in the office and came out into the sunlight. It was a beautiful day and I decided to walk the three miles back to my apartment. I was always in my head, not paying too much attention to the world around me. Suddenly, I was in the midst of a screaming bunch of angry men, wearing brown shirts and arm bands. I absolutely could not believe that in 1978 I was in the midst of a Nazi rally with these horrid people screaming antisemitic chants in my face as I scurried past them. I was shaken to the core. I took it personally.

I sobbed for the remainder of my walk home.

 

Is it daydreaming if it's dark out?
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