Back Home

Some unpacking today.  A chance to readapt to Eastern Daylight Time.  Coffee from my own Keurig machine.  And it's a treadmill day, but later when my internal clock has reset a little better.

Travel had its fun elements. Visiting my daughter was its purpose, fulfilled.  Tourism wore me out but I can say I visited some unique places.  Stopping in at small mini-marts that were not WaWa's or having a rather large choice of which place to get something to eat brought a few moments of satisfaction, though not something I'd want every day.  I much prefer my house, with my yard, and a car that gets me where I want to go when I want to go there, though at the price of having many fewer places that I might want to go.

From the time I left my daughter's apartment until arriving at my house took about ten hours, half of it in one of those airborne cylinders, assigned to the middle seat both ways.  Tired for sure.  A little stiff.  But still remarkable to cross the American continent in that short a time.  Equally remarkable to putter around SF which attracts people from everywhere to settle on a one way ticket.

Worn Out

Still visit new places the way I've always done.  Settle where I am going to stay, usually a hotel, but sometimes stay with my kids.  Then I venture outside, walk the neighborhood, get familiar with the transit system or when I have a car, my own or a rental, drive around the area, noting the supermarkets or clusters of restaurants.  Not changed much in pattern from my 20s to my 70s.  Not changed much from one location to another.  Even on the Big Island, I would walk around Kona a bit, noting the breakfast places, where the Walmart and Walgreen's could be found.  And then see the sights for which the area is known.

Toured out in SF.  Been to Alcatraz, Muir Wood, Healdsburg, and Stanford this trip.  That's my fill.  Mission Street, the main walking distance thoroughfare, has charm one time, but its utility is really access to the cheap city bus that enables transfer to other places.  Been through the City By the Bay in multiple neighborhoods by public transit, by tour guide taking us through much of the city to eventually depart the city via the Golden Gate, and by private car with kids driving.  Seen the coast, seen wine country, seen the mega-university and its environs, visited a suburban house of my wife's cousin.

My last few trips away have mostly been a day or two longer than they should have been.  Mammoth Cave I cut by a day.  Airfare has gotten expensive, so it pays to stay an extra day sometimes to get a lower return trip fare, as is the case with SF now or Florida last winter.  DC a couple of spring breaks ago was probably right, three days at a hotel.  A full week seems too long to be away.  I don't take well to doing nothing now that I've been retired long enough for the novelty of doing nothing to have worn off.  While Florida's beaches and pools offered relaxation, and probably in the right amount, as did Hawaii, I also need to escape the resort element.  The big cities, though, don't seem to have that resort element.

With a day to go before my return home, I feel worn out.  Not exactly overextended, but a feeling that I've really completed what I came to SF to do.

Repacking

Transcontinental Travel.  I packed but need to fully redo this.  I think of California as being warmer than my home in the mid-Atlantic.  When temperatures are integrated over the year it is.  San Francisco does not get snow.  People probably own a coat.  They may not in San Diego.  And there are beaches and surfers, though San Francisco does not get swimmers.  At home we do.  So our winters are colder, but our summers are considerably hotter, and it's not even astronomical summer yet.

I packed t-shirts and shorts.  Modern electronics has also given us weather.com. I could see the SF forecast for most of my intended time there.  It's not really summer there, while here people plan their outings at the Delaware Beaches or Jersey Shore after Memorial Day.  My destination is more a glorious spring.  Better for long pants and polo shirts with an undershirt beneath.  And layering.  I am bringing a sweatshirt and a windbreaker.  And enough socks for daily use.  All in a carry on and a backpack.

Visit to the Bay Area

When I set up my six month projects about six months ago, the family category went to visits with each of my children who have moved onto their own adulthoods.  We made it to St. Louis to see my son this summer but delayed visiting my daughter in Oakland until just before year's end.  We made it.  While the purpose was family visit, each geographic subset of America has its own uniqueness.  Rather than immerse ourselves with other tourists as we have done with prior San Francisco journeys, we included ourselves among the people for the most part on this trip.

San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley while contiguous each have their own character.  There was something a little foreign to us mid-Atlantic types, not a trip to the zoo but more one of exposure to a different country.  I still noted same sex couples engaged in some type of courtship or public affection, though much more mainstream than my first time there forty years back.  LGBT exists at home but in a smaller subset of the public and less visibly apparent.  The people seemed much younger.  When I go to shul at home, I am among the youngest there even though I have a genuine Medicare card.  On the BART train in San Francisco I am typically the oldest.  This may label living in the Bay Area as a young person's sport, and maybe it is.  Those uphill walks took their toll on my legs and my lungs.  People my age may still be around, having graduated from public transit to personal vehicles, despite a gasoline price more than I dollar a gallon above what I pay.  Or, worst case, the absence of my contemporaries on the BART may reflect negatively on local longevity.

I always like visiting Universities.  UCalBerkely has acquired international renown.  Even in winter intercession, there were still people around, perhaps disproportionately Asians who are common at major American colleges but might have been  majority here.  Buildings were large, as would be expected for a campus that may be double or more the size of my own large alma mater, and far more spread out than I am used to.  It may not be possible to schedule a chemistry class in sequence with a political science class if getting from one location to the next is prohibitive.  Or perhaps they have a shuttle system during the school year that enables that.  We toured their Botanical Gardens, properly labelled, most enjoyable even in winter.

A lot of travel to nearby places took place by Lyft which has a pretty efficient system, though the price of short trips adds up.  Some of the most interesting people were the Lyft drivers which included a retired Hawaiian engineer whose daughter is a pediatrician at Stanford and a fellow from East Africa who was an airline pilot there but now in training to be an American pilot.  No better short cruise than the local ferry from Oakland to Embarcadero.  Saw an old friend's pottery exhibit.  Ate vegan at a farmer's market far larger than anything we have at home.  Not a lot of big chain restaurants.  Not a lot of holiday decorations.

We went to shul on Friday night, New Age experience with songs and conga drums focused on creating mood.  My daughter observed that I was the only straight man in attendance.  I prefer to be the one telling jokes.

Now settled back into the familiar.  Food from megamarts.  Car to get me where I want to be when I want to go there.  Keurig maker with ample assorted pods.  And I am again the one who tells the jokes.

Antisemitic Gay Pride

Gay Pride Week

While I've always looked at this as a civil rights application, I may be a minority.  Always could be challenged too, as the opinion has remained static but the experiences that reinforce them have not.  This week, what I perceive as civil rights has encountered a clearly antisemitic interface from within and external animus from people who are running out of groups to hate without reprisal.  I may be more of a centrist though probably not a good umpire if it means accepting the antisemitic components.

My own history arrives in packets, there being no ongoing reason to revile anyone or protect anyone.  The first exposure that I remember involved a few snickers among friends.  A junior high teacher had been unexpectedly suspended and amid rumor, homosexuality emerged as the reason.  Never confirmed.  He was never my teacher so I lacked any incentive to say he does his job well or that this is as convenient an excuse as any to remove a man who lacked professional skill.  I think he disappeared.  This being my teen years of the 1960's, out of site, out of mind.  Everyone I knew had some interest in girls though my crowd tended to begin dating more in college than high school.

I did not know any gays in college either.  Not that there weren't any but they escaped my attention.  As I proceeded onto medical school we had one effeminate professor who we wondered about but for all I know he was married with a family.  The subject never arose again.

One turning point came at about mid-residency.  I thought I would have to move out of university housing at the end of my second year.  In anticipation I scheduled vacation for the final two weeks of the contract year.  My expectation proved correct and I arranged for a new apartment to which we moved in June.  That left me with two weeks of vacation and my wife between the end of her visiting professorship and the start of her post-doctoral position.  At the time, airlines, whose fares were first being deregulated, started advertising bargains to the west coast so my wife and I agreed to take advantage of this.  We flew to Los Angeles, enjoyed the glamour of the entertainment industry and the mansions, drove along the coastal highway to San Simeon and to extraordinary scenery, settling in Berkeley which gave us easy access to San Francisco by public transit.  It was there, for the first time that I encountered openly gay male partners.  Some were effeminate with smooth faces, some make-up, attended hair but male clothing.  There were partners walking on the streets holding hands as I did with my wife.  In the restaurants the servers were similarly effeminate.  I had no emotional reaction, to my surprise, perhaps.  It was not quite like going to the zoo to look at biological specimens, more like visiting a foreign culture that I had read about but never actually seen.  Little did I realize that what would become AIDS was beginning in that place at that time.

As a VA hospital physician on the east coast, AIDS made its appearance in the mid1980's, a lethal disorder with opportunistic infections.  The VA had its share of gays, perhaps even more infected from shared hypodermic needles.  This now became part of history taking.  Yet, unlike San Francisco, had I seen any of them at the mall, none would stand out.  My role was clearly to treat infection and its end organ involvement so I really did not involve myself in much social history other than some drug abuse referral.  Not long after, I began fellowship.  There are some subtle endocrine features of AIDS but they are generally subordinate to the more dramatic infectious, pulmonary, and oncology events so I really didn't see any.

On to solo practice.  Even covering colleagues on the weekends, no AIDS, no visibly gay people.  It changed forever, though, when I signed up for a Facebook account.  I had read about this fad-like opportunity as a feature in the NY Times when visiting NYC for a weekend.  I jotted down the information on how to sign up, and did as soon as I returned home.  My attraction, as that of many others, was to reacquaint with the old friends from years back, mostly high school, a little college.  Many of us had been chums since kindergarten, separated by college, and never expected to contact each other at any subsequent event other than a high school reunion.  Facebook changed that in a week.  Within a short time I had sent a share of "friend" requests and received a similar share.  The service, once the high school was identified on my profile, would select out potential people who might be familiar and we would offer each other contact.  The flurry continued about a year, then hit a steady state with minimal additions, though some deletions for death or irritating political postings that appeared in excess.

One old friend, literally a fellow kindergartner, had achieved a distinguished career, including his name on the credits of some TV shows that I watched regularly.  He had some interesting educational experiences, retired from his primary occupation a little earlier than most of us, started a post-retirement business with equal enthusiasm, and had established household with a male partner which he maintained for about the same duration as my traditional marriage.  I had no reason over our entire childhood to detect any social difference between him and anyone else in our group.  He was still one of us, a schoolmate, a cub scout with his mother who took her turn as Den Mother still alive and functioning as she approached 90.  Instead of his name appearing on the credits, as his new business entered a popular niche, he would appear on the screen or as a guest in a widely trafficked location.

That was likely my transition point.  I would never do anything to hurt this kind, accomplished friend.  As AIDS moved from lethal to chronic and gay expanded from discrete outside a few metropolitan centers to a more open LGBT pride that we have now, the presence also moved from don't ask/ don't tell to something more contentious.  We have protected age, religion, race, gender in the workplace, housing and military.  Running out of people to look down upon never really happened, but the ability to deny them public access did, except for the gays.  Equal access and opportunity is something conceptual.  Steadfastly refusing to participate in any activity that would incur harm to a personal friend resets the position differently.  Torah is subordinate to Derech Eretz.  I miss enough of the mitzvot, that I can forgo any that might require me to harm a friend, let alone other people's friends.

Since my first visit to San Francisco, I've been there a few additional times, including once after reconnecting with my only known personal gay friend.  The community is still there and with steadfast support of a population that while mainstream would also never betray a friend.  These men, and probably women, seemed less visibly on visits there subsequent to my first time there.  I don't know why.  But they are no longer a curiosity.  They are people who contribute economically, engage in charity and in religion, probably shop at better stores than I do, take good care of patients if they are physicians, and advance science.  On behalf of my friend, who I would never harm personally, I would never harm these people collectively either.  Though for the same reason, I discourage antisemitism from any source, particularly one that diminishes itself by taking the position it did,

Some Time Away

I've been off about a week now, primarily to attend the Endocrine Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco followed by a respite in wine country and an intended viewing of Yosemite which did not happen for having underestimated the distance in my planning.  There were a lot of side projects to be attended from my estate planning to semi-annual project planning to computer upgrades for work to some writing that also did not happen, underestimating my stamina during the conference and my tolerance for wine afterward.  The synagogue annual meeting came and went in my absence, passing by my intent to transform from participant to observer.  But I'm rested and ready to return, though perhaps in a different form from when I left.

Travel probably reveals more about me to me than I learn about the place I visit.  I find myself generally more tolerant of glitches than I am at home.  Perhaps if I were a geek, San Francisco would be a permanent destination, easy to absorb into the technical world.  While there I passed by stores know for their exclusivity.  I am not a person who seeks exclusivity or indulgence, much the opposite.  New things intrigue me.  I never get tired of Chinatown and as I diverted my path toward the Golden Gate Bridge, I got to see if not experience some of the neighborhoods.  And across the bridge I encountered extraordinary scenery and eventually viticulture on a scale not imaginable in the East set amid the usual collection of fast food places and chain motels only a short car stop away.

At the convention I encountered research on how medicine is practiced and how things that I experience randomly can be quantitated.  My pet peeve of inadequate resident supervision has an outcome measurement that somebody did and discussed with me.  My interest in core science was a lot less than that, though a necessary component of understanding what I do professionally.  And it was reassuring to know that the grand professors had the same prescription plan impediments that I do.  Moreover I have the same skepticism of the role of leadership of the Endocrine Society that carries over to my Jewish world and my medical world.

So in a few days I return to usual activities and some catchup.  While will again have a $10 bottle price limit even though I can now tell the difference from the premium stuff I got to taste at the vineyards.  My interest in acquiring stuff has been blunted by the rejection of overabundant premium stuff which infused San Francisco.  I am a little more committed now to carving out some time each week to set the patients aside in order to focus on the more creative observations of medicine.

And there will be the next half years projects outlined.