Martha’s Vineyard is predominantly a resort community, particularly in the summer. We go to the beach, exercise in some form, ride bikes, hike the beautiful trails, socialize with friends. So when it rains, everyone comes into town, looking to shop, go to the movies or find something else to do.

We happen to live right in town, a block from the shopping district, so we just stroll around the busy area. Years ago there was a marvelous bookstore, Bickerton and Ripley, right around the corner from us. They had a great selection of books (this was before Amazon became the behemoth it is today) and a wonderful children’s nook, full of delightful titles for readers of all ages with a little cushioned bench, inviting children to pull out a book and linger. My children visited often.

The store was owned by two women who lived on my street. In fact, Marilyn gave David his first job there the summer he turned 14. He stocked books for them. She interviewed my shy son over Memorial Day Weekend, told him he had to stand straight and make eye contact with her. He learned to work hard for her. It was a summer that one of the Harry Potter books came out and the owners opened late that night, dressed as sorcerers to sell the books to the line of eager children. David had spent the day unboxing those precious books and scarfed one up for his grateful younger sibling.

But years earlier, the owners had offered me a great idea. My kids were always bugging me to buy books, but I was not always with them when they came into the store. Marilyn suggested I set up a house account for them with my credit card. “But how will I limit their purchases?”, I inquired. I knew they had no bounds when it came to Calvin and Hobbs, books about outerspace and the like. “Not to worry”, she responded. “There will be a $20 spending limit per child”. That was satisfactory and I gave her my credit card to set up the account.

The movie “Chicken Run” had come out earlier in the year. My kids loved everything from the Aardman Studios and just adored this movie. One rainy night, I was home alone with them. This was in the year 2000. Dan still worked and was not home. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I searched the entire house. Finally, I noticed the door to Jeffrey’s room was closed. I knocked lightly and went in. They were huddled together on his twin bed, pouring over the “Chicken Run” book, purchased earlier that day. The door was closed to keep the cat in the room. I looked at the price of the book – $38! How did they manage to buy that (it was a beautiful coffee table book on the making of the movie, as seen in the Featured photo). My clever children had pooled their resources – each used their $20 quota – to purchase this wonderful book, which now rests on my coffee table in Newton! It occupied their entire rainy evening.

 

Though not an art history major, I’ve loved looking at and learning about art since I was a small child. I tend to be very sensitive to all forms of external stimuli, which makes me open and vulnerable to various forms of creative arts and I enjoy most.

For example, I have always loved the story of Romeo and Juliet. (I first saw it performed as a 10 year old, while visiting my brother at the National Music Camp – he was a Capulet servant, but the girl who played Juliet went on to a professional career, playing opposite Jack Lemon in his Academy Award winning role in “Save the Tiger”.) I desperately wanted to perform the lead role at some point in my life. The closest I came was doing one of her monologues in Speech Class in college. But my mother took me to see the Stuttgart Ballet perform their version (set to Prokofiev’s dramatic music) when John Cranko, their genius leader, was still alive and I was still in my teens. Marcia Haydée, one of the leading ballerinas of her day, danced the role of Juliet. Much as I love ballet, it does not easily move me, yet in this version in the death chamber scene,  Romeo dragged Juliet’s lifeless body around and had me weeping. I could feel Romeo’s anguish for his lost beloved and it moved me to despair too.

I have sung my entire life and am frequently moved by the music, as I wrote about some time ago: Gotta Sing .

I did take some art history courses in college, with a speciality in Renaissance art. My son took a painting  course in Italy in the summer of 2002, but of course, looked at the masterworks too. I told him to “see the art with my eyes”. He brought me a book on Giotto, the father of 3-point perspective.

We finally got to Italy in 2011, touring Venice, Tuscany, Florence and Rome. It was everything we’d hoped for, with wonderful guides in Florence and Rome. When Lorella, the Florence guide, took us into L’Accademia it was a quiet morning. We quickly walked through the entry galleries into the grand salon that holds Michaelangelo’s masterwork: The David. It truly took my breath away. Of course I’d studied it, seen a zillion photographs of it, but being in its presence, being close to it, was something else entirely and I welled up, just by the magnificence of it. Lorella looked on with approval. She could tell that I felt it in my bones, that I was moved beyond words. A mere mortal had sculpted this from sheer rock. I stood in the presence of genius and was humbled by it. (And the teacher in Florida who thinks this is pornographic and the teaching of it should be banned should sit in a corner with a dunce cap on; her thinking is from a different century. She should not be allowed near impressionable children.)

I’ve been active at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for over 33 years and on its Board of Advisors for something like 25 years. The Rose was selected to host the U.S. Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the granddaddy of art shows. Mark Bradford did all the artwork in our pavilion, as well as working with prisoners at a local prison to teach them how to make handbags that were sold locally. They kept some of the proceeds, some benefitted indigent people in Venice. That made an impact.

I spent five glorious days at the vernissage before the official opening of the show. With our interim director and several Brandeis art history professors and curators, we had insider access to all the exhibits with great people to explain all. We could wander off anytime we chose and our group, along with another museum (where our former director had now become the director) hosted an incredible gala at Cipriani, overlooking the Grand Canal. Extraordinary!

 

One artist really grabbed my attention. On May 11, 2017, Kristin Parker, our interim director took us on a tour through the Arsenale, a huge space full of invited artists. We stopped to see Lee Ming Wei. He is a performance artist. He collects old clothing from people and he and his assistant stitch up the holes in the clothing, thereby healing, or making the owner “whole”. The thread from the patch is then unspooled and attached to the wall near their workspace, making a web of thread – its own form of art that grows and changes.

Kristin knew this gentle man and spoke with him at length about his process and philosophy. Something about his story really struck me. He was a Chinese refugee who had lived in Paris most of his life, so he understood pain and displacement. The idea that by stitching up these torn garments, the owners could be healed really gripped me and I again welled up. Kristin noticed me – “Betsy’s having a moment”. She took me in her arms and comforted me.

Last autumn, the Rose hosted a one-man show for Peter Sacks, a brilliant poet and painter who emigrated from South Africa as a young man and now lives full-time on Martha’s Vineyard. The show was called “Resistance”. He painted collage-style portraits of historic figures from across the world, some still with us, most deceased, who have had the courage of their convictions to resist oppression or the status quo and promulgate change. The portraits depicted everyone from Harriet Tubman to Nelson Mandela to Alexei Navaly. They also included audio recordings of some of their remarks, read by famous people, projected into the gallery in a great wave of sound, though through an app on your phone, you could isolate each person’s personal narrative. As I write this, on August 4, 2023, Alexei Navalny, who has been imprisoned in Russia on trumped up charges since January, 2021, was sentenced to 19 additional years for “inciting extremism, rehabilitating Nazism”, and other ridiculous charges. He is trying to point out Putin’s corruption and is being silenced. His daughter, Daria, now a student at Stanford, was at the Rose opening last fall. She took in all the portraits solemnly and quietly said, “So few of them survived”.

Isn’t this what we all need these days? To have a moment, perhaps be comforted – “healed”; or open our eyes and learn something new? Great art should inform, teach, ask us to be vulnerable or even uncomfortable and challenge us. That should be what art can do, if we open ourselves to it.

 

 

People at San Francisco General Hospital emergency room had T shirts printed up that included the tag line: “as real as it gets”.  That pretty much summed up the big urban County Hospital experience where I was a medical student.   The ER was where lives in crisis ended up—there, or in prison, or sometimes both. People with gunshot wounds, overdoses, car accidents, fights, falls, intoxication and psychotic breaks would show up in the ER, often with a police officer or the EMTs–who knew all got to know the ER staff well.  Compassion, skill, and physical restraint of combative patients were all necessary.  There were almost always underlying psychosocial traumas the ER couldn’t begin to fix.

The intern I was assigned to was arrogant and over-confident.  I was shocked when he walked up to a person with an arm infection from drug use and, without warning, stuck a hemostat into the abscess to drain it, playing the medical cowboy.  It was a negative example I never forgot.

There were also standard medical emergencies such as heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, asthma, burst appendices, miscarriages, rapes, diabetic ketoacidosis, broken bones and dementia.  Not to mention headache, back pain, work injuries, and high fevers in children.  The list was long, including visits for problems that were not emergent, maybe not even urgent, but maybe the patient didn’t have another place to go due to travel, insurance, language, understanding, time of day, or some other reason that made sitting in the ER waiting room seem like the best option.  Staff and administrators complain bitterly about this “inappropriate” use of the ER.

Working in a busy urban ER can be grueling physically and mentally, but for those who thrive on adrenaline it is a good fit.  Each day is different, and when a life-threatening case comes in, the whole team has to mobilize—nurses, physicians, respiratory therapists, lab, X-ray, pharmacy and clerks working to stabilize, treat, communicate with families and specialists, and move the patient on to teams in the ICU, the surgical suite, or hospital wards (or the morgue) as appropriate.  Emotions can be strong—the satisfaction of saving a life together, or losing one, or just going through an intense period together.  When the shift is over, and you have signed out to the next crew, you can go home with some sense of closure and start again when you return.  You may never know what happened to the people you saw.

I am not an adrenaline junkie.  I don’t bungee jump and don’t even like action movies or gambling.  The high stakes, unpredictability and intensity of working in an emergency room never appealed.  My interest in medicine was always primary care, public health, education, health promotion, community building and relationships over time.  It is not as glamorous or dramatic as acute and tertiary care, but it actually saves more lives to have a strong primary care and public health system.  The longer I worked as a family physician and saw what happened to people sent to specialists and treated in the ER or hospital, the more I appreciated our work.  We kept many people out of the ER.  There is also satisfaction in having someone’s trust, being able to interpret medical reports and recommendations, averting unnecessary interventions and picking up the pieces after the acute care episode is over.  Of course, there was never a clean slate at the end of the day, and I would have the privilege and burden of having people come back over time, trying to manage problems that never went away.

Nonetheless, I did intersect with the ER when I was on call and had to go there to admit a patient.  Always a bit of an interloper, I could still appreciate the pace and ordered chaos of the place, the ready access to labs and Xrays and specialists.  I also worked many after-hours clinics in the office, when people would be seen as drop-ins for a host of problems.  It could be a nice counterpoint to a schedule full of known patients with chronic conditions.  While not as hectic as an ER, I appreciated the variety and I did more procedures such as suturing cuts, splinting injuries, giving injections, assessing pregnancy concerns, or pulling a hearing aid battery out of an ear canal.  With just myself and a medical assistant, lab was limited, but I could assess urine, pregnancy or strep tests on site.  Sometimes people with more serious issues–a possible pneumonia or broken bones–would be sent on to the emergency room.  Occasionally people would come in with a true life-threatening emergency such as a suspected heart attack, and then 911 was our friend.

I never regretted choosing the primary care path and providing continuity of care.  But I have to admit that sometimes it was just incredibly satisfying to solve an acute problem and be done with it, to pull out that splinter and send the person happily on their way.