Remembering an Old Friend

https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2016/10/30/claudia-harrison-childrens-advocate-dies-cancer/93010314/

I do not know what made me think of Claudia yesterday or motivated me to pursue an update.  I'd had a few occasions to reach back this calendar year.  My Ramapo '69/'70 classes gathered last spring, my class '69, Claudia's '70.  I opted not to attend but tracked down a few old friends shortly thereafter whose presence at the reunion would have been more of an incentive to attend.  No, I did not have Claudia in my mental awareness let alone must see again list.  In August I gathered with some other former classmates not seen since graduation.  One was the daughter of my mother's close friend, each parent dying young of the same malignancy just few years apart.  I was never close to her daughter but it was great to see her again and learn how well the half century has treated her.

I wasn't all that close to Claudia either but our mothers were close friends and I admired her.  Maybe it's the daughters of the mothers' chums that restored the awareness but it was the admiration that induced me to seek her life's summary.  I remember her more from Hebrew School and related activities at the JCC of Spring Valley than from public school, a friendly energetic person who would run for office, make fast quips, and always seemed more cheerful than anyone else.  She had an older brother who appeared around the synagogue and it's youth activities, though less a presence than Claudia.  I graduated first, moved on to college, and come the next admissions cycle learned through our mothers that she was headed to Tufts.  And there the contact stopped.

While Claudia never made it to Medicare/Retirement age, she may not have looked forward to retiring.  Her obituary, at age 64, reinforced my impression that energetic, self-directed people remain that way indefinitely.  She was engaging to me at a time when few people were but the tributes reflect an innate drive to be the person who not only derives satisfaction in mingling but shares that with the recipient.  The obit gives a good summary of what I would have predicted for her, success in what she set out to do and attention to the most neglected.  I admired her back then with far less reason than I have to admire her today.

New School Year

While medical calendars tend to begin and end in July, my mind has never abandoned the academic calendar which runs from September to June.  Even in medicine, residents learn the basics over the summer and function thereafter.  Pro and college football work out their glitches over the summer but do not keep score for bowl games until the fall.  High Holy Days arrive at this renewal time.  Having just completed some travel around metropolitan St. Louis, the schools in Missouri and adjacent Illinois opened in mid-August.  We saw one of the high schools in a fairly remote winery area with a full parking lot.

Locally our public schools begin two days after Labor Day, as does my Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) fall session.  My first curriculum notification for the class on Philosphy and Technology has arrived.  Other sessions on the history of vaccinations, a discussion group on controversial topics with each participant taking a turn, a course on wine, and I try to introduce a new skill each time, this attempt at Mah Jong.

I have a new workspace too.  It took seven months to recapture but My Space should serve me well for classwork and writing.  Not only return to school, but even in retirement, there is an element of return to work.  I'm sort of eager to take advantage of this fall's opportunities.

The Lives They Lived

While the time flexibility of retirement takes a working lifetime to, routines develop.  It's a time to forge new interests or recapture old ones.

Way back when, in an era when a copy of the Sunday Times would not set me back that much and was readily available sans employment ads in the hinterlands in which I lived, a walk or drive to the pharmacy or 7-Eleven for a week's reading enjoyment would conclude my weekend in the best way.  Of its many features, the one that made the top of my list came in the first magazine of each calendar year, devoted to The Lives They Lived.  As a young doctor, I took an initial fascination to the obituaries as my patients in Boston not always survive my most expert care.  I inherited most at the end of their lives, often people with declining physiologic function without a lot of appreciation for what they might have been like in their prime.  The obituaries in the Globe or Patriot-Ledger restored life to what had too often been viewed as protoplasm.  Some of these people trusted to my care at the very end did some pretty remarkable things before they needed medical care.  Newspaper obituaries gave an abstract, whether my patients, a relative, or a more public person.  But that one issue of the Lives they Lived took a few dozen people of accomplishment and restored their lives within a page or so from a list of positions held to a description of the kinds of people they were, their branch points, their passions, their foibles.  By the end of an essay, I knew each of theirs better than I perceived my own.

As I moved into practice, the Patriot-Ledger became the News-Journal, again reminding me that everyone had a time in which they were not on their last legs, even if I didn't know them that far back.

The Internet being what it is, all sorts of information has been entered into cyberspace by somebody, organized for easy retrieval with some type of wizardry that I don't understand, and now allowing The Lives They Lived to be moved from an annual January treat to a daily reminder of the glories of what people can accomplish.  Each day, double preceding shabbos, I call up two lists.  One is On This Day which I search the death anniversaries for the following day.  As with my patients, I do not recognize most of the people on that list, reinforcing my belief that people can do some very important things without my knowing about it.

Then comes the daily death anniversaries in Wikipedia, which has links to the biographies, typically in encyclopedic detail.  My pattern of search has taken a few forms over my first retirement year, but the first go round is generally limited to people who might be Jewish or were Islamic.  Sometimes I was right, sometimes not.  You cannot tell by a name.  While intermarriage has been a 20th century population scourge, as I read the obits of the Jewish people, 19th century Europe had its attrition that way too, but the couples mostly persevered and achieved.  In recent months, I've become intrigued by people listed as European who were adults in World War II.  Eminent scientists turned on their Jewish colleagues sometimes and protected them sometimes.  Composers, authors, entertainers suffered displacement but were able to hit the reset button.  In modern America, all avenues to Jewish prominence were open, though not always with propagation of the religious identity.

Next I go back to the beginning of the daily list, picking out obscure people from the middle ages who were princes in city-states before they became nation-states.  Life spans beyond 60 were uncommon, as appendicitis which I just recently experienced with prompt reversal would have been lethal at that time.  More importantly, even the most sophisticated regencies were surprisingly tribal, with an insatiable desire to usurp somebody else's position or behead anyone whose thoughts posed a challenge.  By the 18th century, we start to see the list move from yichus to prominence achieved by one's own talent or diligence.  I call up all the scientists and physicians next.  My final review goes to those who failed to reach age 50, which includes a surprising number of people who lived amid respectable medical care.  There were suicides, transportation trauma, warfare, malignancies, and a variety of other events that shortened life spans, though they were long enough to perform some major athletics, composition, writing, or art.

There is something just inspiring about people who had the motivation and talent to excel. In addition, as a youngster I used to like to browse the Encyclopedias in the school or public libraries.  Those multivolume tomes have been made obsolete, though replaced with electronic forms.  I've recaptured my fascination with browsing them again with not particular assignment other than my own curiosity to fulfill. 

Bank Campuses

While riding in the shuttle van after dropping my car for service, the driver took the first passenger to work at the JP Morgan Chase data processing campus.  I had never been there before though I pass it regularly.  A long driveway keeps it hidden from the road.  It reminded me of a college campus, several brick buildings with landscaping, an inviting silver colored sculpture at the entrace where the other fellow in the car departed, a hill with other buildings beyond our drop point, and a parking garage that blended architecturally with the other structures.  A very inviting place from the outside.  The passenger did not wear a tie, and other strollers looked like they did not work at bank headquarters but I do not really know if the working conditions inside are closer to those of a hi-tech haven or a modern sweat shop.  The exterior left me impressed.

It's been about 30 years since banks have come to Delaware in big way, initially because there was no state usury limit, but staying even when competitive interest rates have come down.  Some of these are more easily visible from the street, invariably landscaped, clean, with tasteful sculpture.  The kind of places you would trust with your money, or at least appreciate that the sometimes extortionist credit card interest rates supported architecture and art. 

Our legislators had insight.  The state's dominant chemical industry had a finite life, requiring some diversity of the workforce, an educated and talented one.  They did not piddle their efforts on lurid abortion bills or batter each other over Confederate statues, not then and not now.  They did not neglect the now, those roads or schools that everyone needs, but the elected officials of our state had and have a much loftier committment to what elevates its inhabitants than those Yayhoos of Old Dixie that depend on intimidating their opposition as their primary metric.  Chemistry would not survive forever and we dealt with that reality effectively.  Other places languish in the past, whether a church dominance in public affairs, subservient minority populations, a Civil War long since decided, or pre-automation manufacturing.  The world belongs to the visionaries and the amiables, as the JP Morgan Campus and our Legislative Hall which enabled it, so forcefully attests.