Sunday, December 9, 2018

2018 in eight photos


So many images appear in my photo feed from this year, virtually all happy and beautiful times, since I tend to avoid taking photos of sorrow. Of course the year had its share of disappointments and loss, and I remember them in this season for looking back. Today, however,  I'd like to share with you some of my happiest times this year. Perhaps they'll resonate with your memories as we all slide into 2019.

First up: January 20: The second women's march in downtown Denver drew tens of thousands of participants, including me, hoping for inspiration to survive and resist another year with T-rump in the White House. There were so many creative signs and so much energy. I was particularly charmed by this pink-hatted group of family and friends, proclaiming their support of inclusive human rights. Another march is planned for January 2019--and I'll be there. Perhaps there will be things to celebrate as a new Congress convenes.


April: Oh, what a joy spring is. This flowering tree is in City Park, where I walked nearly every day I was home--my apartment being across the street from this oasis of trees in Denver. This photo was taken on April 1. In just a few short months now, this yearly miracle will return.


July: A neighbor in my senior apartment building in Denver turned me on to Postcards To Voters, a project started by "Tony the Democrat", a Georgia man who organized postcard-writing campaigns for Democratic candidates running in special elections and the midterms. Focus was on flippable districts and the concept was simple: one handwritten postcard to one registered voter in a particular district. I got together with neighbors several times during the summer to write postcards for various campaigns. Our first was Danny O'Connor who was running for Congress in Ohio (special election and later the midterms). He lost, but came closer than any other Democrat to winning in his district. My neighbors and I enjoyed getting to know candidates around the country and in the process, getting to know each other better.


Early September: As often I could this summer, I spent time at my cabin on Linda Lane's land in Florissant, a rural area west of Colorado Springs. The cabin (pictured here next to a 3-sided carport which looks bigger than it is) is actually a park model RV which I bought 16 years ago when I was still in Japan. Still summer, though Linda's wearing a jacket, as mornings are chilly here at nearly 9000 feet above sea level. I love the big sky and having time to gaze at it. Although I have better photos of the summer sky--some amazing sunrises and sunsets, this photo is one of my favorites from the land this year.  On most mornings, I enjoyed taking a walk with Linda and Belle, her border collie.


Mid-September: Renate (at right) is a treasured friend who I met in Japan when we were teaching at the same school--she taught German classes while I taught English. She came to visit me for the first time in Denver this year as part of a cross-country trip across the US and Canada. Here we are at the Denver Botanic Gardens one sunny morning. I plan to meet her next spring in Hamburg, Germany, when she celebrates a special birthday.


Late September:  I've enjoyed many good meals during 2018, but one of the most special was during a visit to the Orozco clan, part of my extended family, at Laura and John's house in Crystal Lake, Illinois. They outdid themselves with a feast of shrimp cocktails and homemade tamales amid other tasty sides. Love this photo of them and so proud to be part of this family. I don't see nearly enough of them. A wonderful day it was.


And then I spent a very fine week in Chicago with my sister and brother-in-law, Joan and Jim, before heading to the Loyola University Campus for my 50th college reunion. Yes, it's been half a century since I graduated from Mundelein College, which became part of Loyola in 1991. It was avery special weekend and I'm still processing all of the feelings that arose from seeing my classmates, being feted with events and tours, remembering how we were and learning how we are now. I have a number of photos from that weekend but this might be my favorite--Friday night before it all started, when some of us gathered in the lobby of the Hampton Inn in Rogers Park, ate pizza, drank wine, and plunged into sharing our lives over the past 50 years. Those red beanies? Yep, we wore them freshman year LOL.


October: A day after returning from Chicago, I began another reunion--with two wonderful friends from Japan: Junko (who I consider my Japanese sister) and Reiko, who I first met more than 20 years ago. We enjoyed 3 weeks together--mostly traveling. First, to the Tetons and Yellowstone National Park, then Denver, then a week in New Mexico. On our last day visiting the Tetons, we took a hike to a beautiful lake, and this is the scene and spirit of that day. Loved every minute, and it was all new territory to me as well as to them. Here's Reiko (left) and Junko, on the path toward the lake and those amazing peaks.



So many other photos I could have chosen, but I'll stop here. Reiko's wave seems somewhat symbolic of waving at the past before heading into the future. I hope you enjoyed my moments of joy. May you have many of your own to create and remember in 2019.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

In memory of Gillian Shaw

This morning I woke up to what I thought would be an ordinary day, nascent cold notwithstanding, and opened my email. "Sad news", wrote a friend, telling me that Gillian Shaw, a friend and former colleague for many years in Japan, had died on December 4.  It was sudden, I later learned from her closest friend, the woman who had shared her home. When she complained of chest pains, an ambulance was called, but Gillian's heart stopped on the way to the hospital. She had turned 70 just a week earlier, celebrating her birthday with our mutual friend in a special restaurant we all liked. She was still living in Japan, her adopted home since leaving England many years ago. Below is a photo of Gillian, taken at Italiana Restaurant, on her birthday in 2009.


It's evening now, and I've been thinking of Gillian ever since I read the news. Besides the shock of any sudden death like this one, there's the secondary shock, like after an earthquake, often worse. I will never, ever see Gillian again, and any kind words unsaid or issues unresolved will remain that way. Fortunately, over time, she and I had gone a long way to resolving ours. We taught together at Tamagawa University for 15+ years until I retired nearly a decade ago. During those years we sometimes rubbed each other the wrong way, so it was not always an easy relationship.

Things changed as I was getting ready to leave Japan eight years ago. I found myself with more stuff than I knew what to do with, and Gillian was instrumental in helping me cart and carry. She liked to bake--her own creations, seldom from a recipe--and shared them with me, another boost to the packing process. To my relief, she took what she or neighbors could use from my pile of possessions,  practiced as she was in living on a shoestring and repurposing things. I felt humbled by her help, and promised to continue our connection after I returned to the US.

Gillian wrote me after I left Japan--long handwritten letters. She wrote in great detail about her garden, her childhood in England after her parents' first family (four siblings) died in a bombing raid during World War II. She wrote about her early days in Japan, the books she was reading, about the little girl next door, a child she befriended through her growing-up years. Years earlier Gillian and her long-time friend, Michiko-san, bought a house together near the university--not ideally constructed or situated--so there were always stories about household projects. She was a skilled carpenter, and for a number of summers she donated her time and skills to a non-profit working with deaf children in The Philippines. I always looked forward to her letters, always interesting, hopeful, showing interest in my new life as well. Over time I came to believe that writing had allowed a different relationship to emerge between us, one far more satisfying than the one we had before. Later we switched to email for convenience, but it's the letters, written on the backs of calendar pages and sent in slim envelopes with beautiful postage stamps, that I treasured most. I saved most if not all of them.

In many ways, life was not easy for Gillian, who did not marry and had no children. Her parents were long gone, she was estranged from her sister in the UK, and only occasionally in touch with a brother who had emigrated with his family to South Africa. She was a part-time teacher for all of her career in Japan, with all of the insecurity that brings. When I first met her, she was teaching at other schools as well as Tamagawa, but as Japan's demographics changed, classes dried up, and her class load was significantly reduced. Through it all, Gillian, a former missionary, was buoyed by her Christian faith and belief that God was looking out for her.

She retired two years after I did, but remained closely tied to the university. She was a frequent visitor in the Agriculture Department, and enjoyed visiting a professor in the English Department, one who shared her love of reading English novels. Health was also a challenge for her. She had mobility difficulties as well as heart and breathing troubles over the years, so the cause of her death was not a total surprise.

The last time I saw Gillian was on my trip to Japan in early 2016. We talked of ordinary things--the changes at the university, her continuing difficulty walking, a variety of hopes and worries, the closure of Italiana--our favorite restaurant in the neighborhood and scene of many birthday parties over the years, and of course, the plants she had in her garden.  We parted, expressing hopes to meet again on my next trip, travel no longer being an option for her. As is the case with most of the time when death comes suddenly, we did not guess this would be the last time.  Below: Gillian, me and RT outside The Harvest Restaurant in Shin-Yurigaoka during that visit.



Her last message, however, came just two days before she died. She talked about her wonderful birthday lunch at The Harvest with RT, and her promise to write soon. I had not answered yet. If I shared her belief in God and an afterlife, I'd send a loving response with a nod up to heaven, but I'll have to settle for keeping her memory alive and sharing something of her life with you. We will remember you, Gillian.


Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Shaking hands with John Kerry

Even though I'm living less than a 15-minute walk away from Tattered Cover, my favorite bookstore in Denver, I sometimes have to rouse myself out of my evening settled-in state at home. Besides offering thousands of books, excellent coffee and a warm atmosphere, TC also has author talks. Last Monday, the eve before the election, John Kerry was scheduled to speak. I almost skipped it, but at the last minute, threw on my coat and walked over. I'm glad I did.


Listeners line up at Tattered Cover after John Kerry's talk Nov. 5

The last time I looked carefully at who John Kerry was and is was in 2004, when he ran for president.   Bush Jr. was up for reelection, a year after he defied international protests and warnings, and invaded Iraq, that costly conflict which is still continuing today. Surely the country was ready for a change, my friends and I reasoned.  I was living in Japan then, a participant in the Japan chapter of Democrats Abroad--a group for American ex-pats around the world who want to stay part of the political process. A year earlier many of us had been in the Tokyo anti-war march opposing any invasion of Iraq. Kerry was not the favorite with this group; the more left-of-center Howard Dean was. Kerry, after all, had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq two years earlier. Later, he later came to see the error of his vote on that, just as he came to change his views on Vietnam. He went from military hero to antiwar activist in the 60s--this man of honor who had the courage to reflect and change. Dean's campaign derailed, Kerry won the nomination, and Democrats Abroad continued with it's major task of helping overseas voters get their absentee ballots in.

As with so many past moments, my emotional memory of the 2004 election stands out above the circumstances and facts. As the votes were tallied, I was watching the returns online in my living room with two friends. As Kerry's loss appeared certain, my friend Louise phoned. "Oh, Louise!" "Oh, Kathy!" is my memory of that conversation before all the parsing of what went wrong. It was an election Kerry should have won.

Kerry's visit to Denver last week led me to revisit the factual details of the election. Chief among them was the GOP-led "swiftboating" attack. Kerry was a decorated war hero in Vietnam as a result of his service on a Swiftboat crew, running against an incumbent who had dodged military service. An ad appeared challenging his record--an ad that was later discredited, but not before major damage was done. (Read more about it here.) Other problems--voting irregularities in Ohio, the selection of the later-disgraced John Edwards as running mate--took their toll as well.

Kerry visited Denver as part of a book tour for his 600-page memoir, Every Day is Extra. A review of the book in the New York Times says one of Kerry's lingering regrets is that he didn't stop his campaign cold to address those unfair and damaging attacks. Yet his talk before a packed house at Tattered Cover did not dwell on regrets, but rather on the seriousness of problems facing us and what can be done about them. Talking on the eve of the election, he opened by asking us all if we had voted. Of course we had. And then he talked about climate change and the importance of the Paris Climate Accord which he helped negotiate as Secretary of State under President Obama. He talked about the importance of leadership and the problems created in its absence. He talked about his friendship with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and John McCain and the importance of having bipartisan relationships in Congress.

Listening to Kerry last week, I remembered how we once took a presidential candidate's ability to explain and inspire for granted. How sorely I miss it today--though I know it exists in the campaigns of so many of the Democratic victors in the midterm elections. I wanted to thank Kerry for his lifetime of work and his continuing service to democratic process, but book-buyers were lining up to have him sign their copies, so I left the room, pleased that I had attended. Being a confirmed library user, I did not buy the book; actually, at 600 pages, I decided I'd read this one in review. I wandered upstairs to browse new titles before walking home.

Some time later, standing near a shelf of new releases, I became aware of a familiar voice next to me. Kerry was talking with store staff, standing less than 2 feet away. He was asking if there was a restaurant nearby, and I felt slightly annoyed on his behalf. (Don't book talk arrangers think of attending to their guests' creature comforts anymore? Did they ever?) I trust someone took him out to dinner. For my part, I waited to catch his eye. I put out my hand and said "Thank you"--for everything". A firm handshake and smile ensued from this man, a man of courage and honor.


Sunday, November 4, 2018

Breaking up is hard to do

For quite some time now I've been thinking that it's time for us to call it quits, but I kept pushing the thought away. After all we've been together a long time--about 10 years now. And like so many long-term couples, I've grown accustomed to your features, you almost make the day begin.

I found you as I was getting ready to leave Japan and return to live in the US. You were like a lifeline to my past and bridge to my future. You helped me find others from my past--old friends and former colleagues and students--in this world of lost emails and phone numbers. When I made new friends, you were involved then too. Over time, you took on even more roles. You became my de facto social secretary. You gave me a nudge when friends were having a birthday, kept me current with births, marriages and deaths, the slow but sure growth of friends' children, reminded me of upcoming events I was interested in, helped me stay current with favorite groups and organizations, amused me when all I really needed that day was a funny cat or dog video. You made life not only more efficient and organized but interesting as well. I came to rely on you for news stories too, via links posted by friends. And you didn't charge me a cent! I thank you for that, I really do. I'm going to miss all of those things, truly.

Things have changed, though. The first time I really understood that there was a price to be paid for all of this service. You had sold my data to third parties without my knowledge. And even worse, it became apparent that your lax controls had allowed bad actors to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leading to an unexpected outcome, tragic for me and so many others. Earlier this year, your chief representative Mark Zuckerberg, apologized to Congress. He promised to do better. He said his team had been "slow" to see the threats and was now taking steps to remedy problems. I believed you, perhaps mostly because I wanted to. I rationalized it all by saying that there are no secrets that can't be found on the Internet, regardless of whether one was partnered with you or not.

Then last week--another jolt. I watched the two-part Frontline program, The Facebook Dilemma. It was then that I realized that "slow" was a euphemism for "refused to listen". People in the Middle East, The Philippines, The Ukraine, and Myanmar, had tried to tell you--repeatedly. Tried to tell you that fake accounts were flooding users' pages, exploiting fears, and the worst elements of tribalism. People died because of this. You could even say it led to genocide and the subversion of peoples' movements for justice.

Were any significant controls attempted during those years, Mark? That's unclear from the program, but what is clear is that the problems continue. Steps have been taken, I learned. More checkers around the globe, fluent in local languages, for example. Yet, chillingly, one of your current representatives said flatly that the problem cannot be solved, not at the scale your organization operates. It can only be contained.

In all fairness, I have to look at my own role in this relationship--my readiness to take shortcuts. I've been spending way too much time scrolling through stories--stories I usually soon forget because there are so many. Some say you designed it this way as an addictive process. But I'll let that go for now, as this paragraph is about me. The fact is I willingly let you take charge of things for me, and now I'm about to be on my own again. I'm looking forward to that, actually. To making better connections with friends--beyond "like" or "sad" or "angry". I plan to reactivate this blog, dormant since January, as a place for exploring ideas and sharing stories about my past, present and future. I hope any of you who wish to connect with me this way will subscribe or check in from time to time. You can use this encrypted link: https://kathyintransition.blogspot.com.

As for Facebook, I'll keep my account open for awhile. You, my friends, can send a personal message about the best way to stay in touch with you, if you wish. At some point, I plan to deactivate and then delete the account. Apparently the latter is not easy to do. (For a step-by-step guide, go to this link.)

I look forward to keeping in touch with you, my Facebook friends--and to doing something interesting with the 10+ hours I formerly spent every week scrolling through the Facebook screen.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

In search of Maggie Book Riley, my grandmother

I never met her, but I still remember the one photo I saw of her: a young woman, circa 1910, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, serious expression, eyes very much like John's--my father and her son. She was my grandmother, and she disappeared from family life so long before my birth that she may as well have been a remote ancestor. Her name was Margaret (Maggie) Riley, nee Book. Born in 1878, she was no more than 34 when she left her husband and kids, never to be heard from again. I no longer have the photo, but the hat I remember was something like one of these.


Maggie left her home in Kansas City in 1912, when my Dad was only nine. She had three other children, ages 7--13. As my father told the story during my childhood, she came to each of the children, asking them if they wished to leave with her and a male companion or stay with their father. They all elected to stay with their father.

She was only 16 when she married, shockingly young by the standards of my generation and by the same standards, still young when she left. My Dad never blamed her. "She could have drowned me, but she didn't," he used to say before launching into quasi-Dickensonian stories of his life with the uncle and aunt who subsequently took care of them while his father, a carpenter with the railroad, was at work.

I continued to wonder about Maggie from time to time and still do. The basic facts are still unknown: Where did she go? How did she make her life? How and when did she die? Then there are the deeper questions: Why didn't she try to communicate--or did she try and the kids weren't told? Was she happy? Did she make another family or create a different kind of life? What kind of independent life was even possible for her in early 20th century America?

Recently my interest in Maggie's life was rekindled when I got an email from Carol S., with the subject line, "We're cousins!" She had taken a DNA test via Ancestry. com, as did my sister Joan and I, and  our names came up as genetic matches. Carol's great-grandfather, Theodore Book, was Maggie's father. Carol traces her family line back to the family Theodore created with his second wife after Maggie's mom died.

With an intermittent interest in genealogy, my sister Joan and I had already found records from Maggie's early life in rural Missouri, near Odessa. Theodore married Ella Boucher, who died in 1890, at the age of 28 after giving birth to 6 children, including Maggie. Six months after Ella's death, Theodore remarried. Four years later, still just a teenager, Maggie married Hugh Riley. My sister Joan and I speculate that she may have had difficulties with her stepmother or home life in general. Theodore and his new wife, Almedia, went on to have 15 children--for a total of 21 for Theodore. Perhaps there was just no space or peace for Maggie or perhaps she became an unpaid nursemaid to her younger siblings. Or perhaps her father was the problem.  My new cousin Carol's research turned up that Theodore was a "mean" one--so mean that Almedia refused to be buried anywhere near him. (Her children honored the request and put her at the other end of the cemetery.) In any case, Maggie left for a new life.

It could be that the ever-growing database of genealogy tools will help shed light on Maggie's fate. Yet with the huge time gap--more than a century since her disappearance--and the lack of oral or written records, I'm not optimistic. We may well have to settle for remembering her with kindness and compassion, and reminding ourselves that every single advance in women's rights over the past century has been well worth fighting for. Rest in peace, Maggie.




A mystery almost solved: what happened to the Anasazi



In 1976 I moved from Chicago to Colorado in 1976, and I still remember the feeling of wonder, that a landscape so different from the flat Midwest was in the same country. I started learning to backpack almost immediately, hiking at altitude among trees and rivers, breathing the dry, crisp air, wondering at the temperature extremes between night and day. Within a couple of years, I had branched out to a different landscape: the red rock formations of western Colorado and Utah, archeology-rich Northern New Mexico, and the cliff dwellings of the Four Corners region, home to Mesa Verde National Park. Here I am in two pictures from the late 70s on a trip to Utah. The first includes my dog, Sophie. The second shows something of the human/landscape scale that fascinated me.



On a later trip to Mesa Verde, I was fascinated by the structures that were home to the Pueblo people for 700 years. There were about 25,000 of them in the area in the mid-1200s, and then suddenly they were gone. Called the Anasazi (Navajo term for "ancient foreigners"), they disappeared; by the 1280s, no one remained. The prevailing speculation was that a drought period had forced people to move. But where? How to know centuries later? I confess I rather liked the mystery. It was part of what still seemed exotic to me--a world so different from what I had known.

Today, I find that I like the solution even better than the mystery. Recently going through back issues of one of my favorite magazines, High Country News, I found an article by Krista Langlois, which explained how much of that mystery has finally been solved.  (Click here to read the full story.) The reasons were rooted not only in science, but in the stories of indigenous people today, specifically  origin stories of Native Americans speaking the Tewa language in Northern New Mexico.

The science was not surprising, given the data-crunching powers of modern computing. In 2001 a multi-disciplinary team of scientists formed the Village Ecodynamics Project. For the next 13 years, they analyzed population history at thousands of sites in the Southwest. The next step was  analyzing soil data and estimating natural resources and agricultural yields. Next came a computer simulation of human and environmental history, a kind of "Sim City for the ancient Southwest," Langlois calls it. They ran it 500 times, tweaking the data each time, and finally patterns emerged.  The patterns cast doubt on the dominant drought theory, as the Anasazi were already gone by the time the drought hit full force. Still, mystery remained.

Another line of inquiry turned to the social fabric of this ancient world. One project researcher, archeologist Scott Ortman, developed a theory that inequality was at work. Between 900 and 1200 the population tripled. Yet each family was still farming its own plot of land, living around a family-sized kiva. Over time those plots of land got smaller, creating a community of haves and have nots. There is evidence of violence and sudden departures. Perhaps this is not surprising either. As I read, I thought of many places in rural Europe in the 19th century, when mass emigration ensued for the same reason.

What did surprise me, however, was learning that Ortman's work is also rooted in listening to the oral histories of Tewa people, stories that told them that they were descended from the Anasazi. Instead of dismissing them as myth, Ortman started looking for clues connecting them to their ancestors at Mesa Verde. He found them. DNA analysis was involved, but more interesting to me was the linguistic connection: a word for a kind of roof found in ceremonial kivas, a work for pottery derived from older words for woven objects typical of Mesa Verde pottery; and other words and stories.

As Langlois explains, Ortman speculates that as Mesa Verde's people realized their world was unraveling, bringing changes in the food supply, overcrowding, and violence, they decided to migrate to the Northern Rio Grande, a place they knew about from traders. Oral stories say it took them "12 steps" to travel from their ancestral home to their new one; this could refer to the 12 days it may have taken them to walk the 250 miles between the two sites.

Ortman's research suggests that while the Anasazi moved to various places across the Southwest, the six Tewa-speaking tribes are the "most direct cultural descendants." Here's a map of their probable journeys:


Still, the mystery hasn't been completely solved and may never be with so many centuries separating us from that culture, but the complexity of the solution is much greater than the simple explanation I once accepted. And it's satisfying. Knowing some of the pathways these communities took builds a bridge to our time: the very common story of migration, of seeing a new place for the first time and making a life there. It's also a bridge in the sense that equality and inequality played a role for the ancients as well as for moderns. Droughts are cyclical, Langlois points out, yet the descendants of the Anasazi in the Tewa Basin did not flee. She writes, "The societies and traditions that developed were so strong they persisted through waves of colonization and through industrial development and the large-scale mining of the earth....Puebloans in the Northern Rio Grande structured their communities around a central plaza where work was shared, ...rituals held, and the harvest was inequitably distributed."

Happy to let go of the simplistic explanation I once casually accepted decades ago , I look forward to another visit to the Four Corners region some day, this time with a deeper perspective.