Growing up, we had a roast leg of lamb as our sunday dinner for as long as I can remember. I have not had it since my mom moved into an old age home 20 years ago. We were shopping at Costco the other day, and they had boneless leg of NZ lamb at a very good price, so we picked up a 5 pound leg.
One of the things that I LOVE with lamb is mint sauce. Heather had never had either leg of lamb, or mint sauce, so she was very excited to make it happen.
First I unrolled the leg, and then I made a rosemary, garlic, salt and olive oil spread that I laid across it all before I rolled it and then tied it using my best version of chef’s knots. (Not good!)
Next I put slits around the meat and placed thin slices of garlic in each slit all around the meat.
That went into the fridge overnight, before being cooked over a deeper pan on a grid over a water bath. I went hot, 450 F for 15 minutes, then about 15 minutes per pound at 350 looking for an internal temperature of 130 degrees.
While the lamb was roasting, I made mint sauce with water, rice wine vinegar, a little salt and sugar to balance it. I use about a cup of finely chopped mint, two table spoons of sugar, about a half cup of vinegar and about a cup of water along with half a teaspoon of salt.
In addition we roasted potatoes with rosemary and garlic, and made roasted asparagus )salt, pepper and olive oil.)
All in all, it was an amazing meal. Heather LOVED it, esp the mint sauce with the lamb, and for me, it was a real throwback to my youth. I really channeled my mom as I was in the kitchen pulling it together.
This one is inspired by the seasonal pizza, the Tricolore, offered for a limited time by Pagliacci. From their website, …” [the Tricolore] features burrata, an artisanal cheese that originated in Puglia, the region of southern Italy located in the heel of the boot-shaped country. Burrata’s exterior resembles fresh milky mozzarella, but when you split it open molten ribbons of cheese curd and cream spill out from the center. The cheese melts in your mouth. Our Tricolore features a generous layer of burrata over a Margherita base topped with drizzled pesto. We finish the pie with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt.”
This is a delicious pie. Super yummy. We added some spicy Korean sausage we had left over from an earlier pie, and we had trouble with the pesto squirting, but even so, it is a combination of seriously yummy flavors. We also had a yummy tomato sauce base from the scratch sauce we made last week. Gotta say, this one will be on our repeat list.
Its been quite a journey to get to here. I have had several realizations along the way. First of all, everything I knew about relationship was, well, wrong. For 30 years, I suffered the emotional abuse of the woman who was supposed to love me, which left me feeling lonely, sad, resigned and cynical. To be fair, when we got separated, it felt like being released from prison. I began to meet new people and in a very short time, I came to realize that instead of being unlovable, I was in fact, loveable. That had me create a clear picture of what was missing from my marriage, whch in turn gave me the clarity to create something new. I set out to create intimacy. This was back in early 2018 fully 4 years of exploring after my separation. We finally got divorced in 2017, so by 2018, I was ready to find my life partner.
I created a tattoo in the trash polka style that had the elements of what I set out to discover and find. I believed in attraction, which is represented by the pheromone symbol, I believed that life is random which the black and red strips represent. I believe we live in an infinite universe which the dots represent. Mostly, I wanted to be truly loved more than anything, which the lips represent. Together, the tattoo says I am lovable. It took me 7 months to get the tattoo on my chest over my heart.
With that resolved, I created a seeking post that was quite specific, painting a life of fun with a partner in crime. I put it out into the universe in the cities close to Seattle, including Tacoma, Portland, Vancouver BC and Denver as well as Seattle. I had a number of women reach out to me and even met a few before Heather, who was on her own search for happiness, found my post and made contact with me.
We courted for about 6 months, meeting for meals and drinks and walks in the park before we made the choice to begin our relationship formally. It was only a few weeks after that, that Heather moved in with me. For the next year we really took time to get to know each other, and when Heather’s divorce was final, on the winter solsctice of 2019, we celebrated by committing to each other that we would “create something new”. Then covid happend. For the next year, we spent 24 hours a day together and it was bliss. We really got to know each other inside and out. We were committed that we would not experience another long term relationship on the terms we had both expereinced in the past. In her case, Heather had dealt with a long term abusive marriage at the hands of her narcicistic husband, and she was committed to not have a similar experience. We were both on the same page. We were clear about what we did not want to create.
We spent the next several years being with each other, making great food, and even better cocktails, we explored a truly wonderful sex life and by any measure, we were happier that either of us had ever been. One thing that was true, and a real surprise for both of us, was the amazing allignment that existed between us. At the time, it was notable because each of us had been so out of allignment with our previous partners. To this day, that is still true. We are incredibly allinged.
When we started out, we were both of a mind that marriage was not the objective. In fact, we both made the choice overtly to “never get married again.” It was with that backdrop that our love blossomed. To be fair, Heather was the one who first shared that she was experinecing loving feelings toward me. I made the choice to be with that and to be loved by her. I was hungry for love. Internally, I beleived I was not lovable even though by then, I knew that I was. So, from early 2019 till late 2023, we blissfully made our way as lovers without a thought about marriage.
Then we began to explore mind-expansion. First with mushrooms and then with MDMA. To be quite clear, the impact was completely unexpected. Less so with the mushrooms, which made us laugh hysterically with statements like, “Be careful on that dangerous carpet” as I left the living room, our mirth occuring all day long. It was the experience on MDMA that changed everything. As you might know, MDMA creates a massive dopamine dump which has you see each other newly. I was clear that my feelings for Heather transcended anything I had ever expreinced. It took a few days to process, but we spoke about it one day in these terms when I said to her, “Having seen you newly, now I just cannot unsee you!” She agreed that it was a game changer. A shift in context. A new realm had been created. With that, we agreed that the next thing to do in our relationship was to get married. Wow! We were both on exactly the same page. Heather said, “Lets set a date to get engaged because I also want to ask you to marry me.” We had formalized our relationship initially on the winter solstice of 2019, and now we would take the next step on the winter solstice of 2023.
It was magical really. we both got dressed up and we met in the living room having taken MDMA for the purpose, and we spoke the words we had written to each other and we asked each other to marry. We both agreed, of course, and we set about creating the greatest engagement period we could imagine.
Our engament unleashed Heather’s creative mind. She set about making a “Love Quilt”. Her family are all Master Quilters and OH MY GOD, The quilt she created is mind boggling. The intention is that we first use the quilt to wrap ourselves in when we get married, and the use it as our bed quilt going forward. Its beautiful and made with such love. I am really moved by this quilt.
Not only that, she also made a flask with two spouts for us to drink wine from together at our wedding. The flask is painted to capture her “spirit animal” the Snow Leopard, and my spirit, the science of aliveness as represented by the prism breaking up whote light as referenced on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd being my favorite band also captures my preferered vibrational energy.
This period, the period between the winter solstice and summer solstice has been the most amazing time of my life. In about 2 weeks we are going to marry on the summer solstice. We have committed to create our marriage newly each and every day. When my previous marriage came to an end, I realized that my ex-wife and I had pretended to be married to each other. With Heather, we are committed that we are not prepared to be anything other than 100% present at all times with each other. Its going to be the greatest marriage in the history of marriage! We are so excited for the next stage to begin. It will be a whole new realm.
UPDATE:
Now, as we approach our 3rd version of our wedding ceremony on the Summer Solstice, I can say that in fact, we have completely re-imagined marriage and each of us are happy and in love in a manner that is still both new and fun.
The next 10 years were a blur. Having 4 children under age 8 meant that we were basically logistics minded creatures. At one point, we realized that we had over 100 adults we were interacting with around our kids activities. Between teachers, coaches, extra lessons, music and so on, it was amazing. When the kids were little, it was mostly Melissa who was the primary care giver. As they got to the age of about 6, I came into my own as they took on sports and camping events. For example, all the kids participated in the Y-Guides (When Sam, the oldest participated, it was still called the “Indian Guides”. Anyway, there is a great campsite called Camp Orkila which is located on the tip of Orcas Island in the San Juan’s facing into the Straights of Juan de Fuca.
I loved taking the kids to the camp. There were lots of activities, like orienteering, rock climbing, air rifle, archery and so on. The camp was fun, only dads and their kids, and it was either an all boy or all girl camp. The kids went from age 5 to about age 8, which means that I got to go about 12 times. The ferry ride to Orcas Island is really spectacular as the ferry weaves between the islands.
In addition to camping with the kids, I coached their teams. All of their teams, except for swimming and water polo, which they got to enjoy at the Mercerwood Shore Club, a private swimming, diving and tennis club on the East side of the Island that we joined after we moved there. In any event, I coached soccer (what Americans call football), baseball, and basketball. I found it difficult to coach these American sports since I did not grow up with them, so I read books about the sports and watched the pro’s, the Seattle Sonics basketball team, which was great in those days, and the Seattle Mariners, who were crap mostly but had a good run at one point. In addition to coaching all the sports, I also earned my Soccer Coaching “C License” which had me coaching at Mercer Island High School where I coached the Freshman girls for one season, and then the JV girls team for about 4 seasons. There was one season where I was coaching all four kids soccer teams and the high school team. My daughter Mia was playing recreational soccer, Josh was playing his last year of recreational soccer, Quinn was playing Club Select and Sam was playing Premier soccer and of course I had the high school team. each team had practices and matches each week. Between work and coaching I was working like 20 hours a day it seemed.
I felt that I contributed to their lives in a really meaningful way during their formative years and it occurs to me as I write this now, that I was an excellent dad.
I took on being a dad with the view to exploring childhood through the eyes of my children. I was essentially an only child growing up, my sibs were 8, 9 and 12 years older than me. To be fair, I really did explore my youth newly as my kids grew up. We took them on trips to Hawaii, Western Europe, Colorado, California, Florida, NYC, Montana, Mexico, Canada and more. In addition, we made sure they all had music or art, played sport and that we had dinner as a family each night. Our purpose was parenting.
This of course meant that our relationship was not a priority. The result of that was the massive distance that was created between us by the time Mia was about 3 years old. From that point forward, there was practically no intimacy between us, and certainly no sex. For the last 10 years of my marriage I was depressed. I gained weight, drank more and generally kept to myself at home (watching cooking shows). I coexisted with Melissa, and felt the pain of her contempt.
I was feeling ambitious, and because I had been staring at that piece of dirt for years, I hired a landscape architect to help me design the hardscape. I had sat with those plans a while, when at a party one night, I met a guy who sold landscape rock. I went to work and started shopping for rock. I rented a digger and went to work. In the end, it looked great! I had built a patio! I was very proud of it too.
I mostly did the work myself, but did get help from a couple of contractors for the technical work like to properly construct the wall and luckily, my rugby friend Ryan was able to lay the slate professionally. I loved doing this project and really enjoyed the result. In the end it added value to the house which looked like this at the time before I took this on.
It was not long after I completed that project that Mia graduated from high school where Melissa and took her off to school across the state. We went on an extended road trip to Yellowstone after we left Wall Walla (the town so nice, they named it twice,) and it was on that trip I do believe that Melissa made the determination to leave me. She said otherwise, but it was downhill after that. Her behavior toward me deteriorated to the point of abuse. She was rude, disrespectful, cruel and unkind. I did what I could to cater to her as she pulled away. I was under no illusions, and was clear that we were not going to stay together. That was crystal clear. The last straw occurred when she went off to the Bahamas with a girlfriend, and while there contracted a bladder infection. I took care of her when she returned, but something happened that precipitated her stating that she wanted a divorce. She had fractured her right shoulder in a bicycle accident a few weeks prior to her vacation, and we she returned, after we dropped off her friend, we went to the Roanoke, a local pub, for dinner. I was sitting to her right at the bar. When our dinner came, we began to eat, and our elbows touched, which unfortunately lit up her shoulder fracture. She freaked out and started screaming at me at the top of her voice in this crowded pub. I was mortified. “Don’t talk to me like that, and keep your voice down.” I said to which she responded, “I’m leaving.” and she got up and walked out. I quickly paid the bill and followed her out. She was standing at the car so, I unlocked the doors and she got in. We drove home in silence. We walked in and I went to the living room to sit and lick my wounded pride. She walked in and sat across from me. “I want a divorce” she said as matter of fact.
I said, “Thank you for being straight with me for the first time in your life.”
The next few years were a real challenge to navigate. My children abandoned me, which hurt a lot given how much I had committed to them and supported them throughout their lives. About the most most important thing I did at that time was register for Landmark education. I remember the gasps when I stood up to share and said, “My dog died, my mom died, my house flooded, my marriage of 30 years ended when my wife left me and my business of 30 years failed all during the last 6 months.” It was through Landmark education that I chose to live an authentic life, and I made the choice to live into the distinction of the teaching. I finally met Heather, who, after a period of courtship, became my lover and constant companion. The almost 7 years since we became lovers have sped by. That pretty much brings me up to date at the time of this writing. Heather and I are happier than either of us had ever been. We have such a beautiful relationship. From when Melissa and I first talked about divorce, as well as during the process of getting divorced all the way till Heather and I moved in together, my life was messy. Now all that has changed and while my kids adhere to their group agreement to have no contact with me, after 9 years of that, I am at peace with it. I have resigned myself to the knowledge that they are firmly in their mothers camp. Its their loss because they have never known me while I have been this happy and fulfilled. I am living my best life. I am blissfully happy, I am in love with my beautiful, sexy hot fun partner, and we are living a transcendent life of bliss.
In 2024, Heather and I got married. We both consider it our first marriage even though we were both married before. The reason is that we are seeing ourselves newly and marriage newly and what we are up to is nothing like anything that we participated in in the past. So, yes, it;’s really our first marriage.
At about that time, I was nominated and elected to be the Treasurer of the Washington State Physical Therapy Association and to serve on the Board and the Executive Committee. I looked at their finances and committed the Association to purchasing a building in Olympia for their offices. It was a bold move that made the Washington State Chapter one of the most financially stable chapters in the country. At the time of this writing, the building is paid off and the chapter is healthy.
Melissa and I got used to being married and we continued to dive for recreation. We also ran in occasional 10K races and I continued sailing on both the Yellow Bucket and also on big boats, specifically Bravado, the Islander 40.
Tom and Heidi and done some work on the house. They had installed a deck in the back and put a hot tub downstairs in a glassed in porch. The room had been lined with cedar planks and the hot tub was a circular wooden tub about 8 feet across. They also made the family room downstairs hospitable by installing a brick hearth and a wood burning stove.
We used to go diving with our buds and then come home for a crab and sea cucumber fry and a soak. I remember a shore dive on the peninsula in the Hood Canal region we went to with a group of friends, and we all gathered sea cucumbers and Dungeness crab. We came home, everybody skinny dipped in the hot tub to warm up and then we cooked up the feast. It was fun.
The sea cucumber has 4 strips of muscle in the shell. So you slice it open and strip out the muscle layer, slice it up, bread and fry it and its a lot like calamari.
Well Melissa and I turned the downstairs into the Master Bedroom. The house was a split level with two bedrooms up stairs and a tiny bedroom downstairs. So we built out the shower downstairs to make a double shower, and we re-carpeted and painted. The one bedroom upstairs was a guest room and the other became a study since it had doors going out to the porch.
Later, we updated the kitchen, opened the wall up, installed a table and new cabinets and lighting.
I did a lot of the work but we also paid a neighbor, Jack, who was a contractor to do a lot of the work. I remember one time being in the attic when I accidentally set fire to some insulation with a light getting too warm. I snuffed it out but that was close.
We took a few trips during this time. Probably the most significant was to London where we stayed with my sister Carol, and then when I came home, Melissa went on to Europe with her mom. We also went skiing in Canada at Big Sky, we went to Hawaii, we went to Oregon, we went to San Diego. But mostly we were home bodies working on being home owners.
During this time, I was racing big boats on the Sound, and my friends Mitch and Brad invited me and another fellow on a “Macho Cruise” so called. The idea was that we would sail Mitch’s boat, a 34 ft Sloop, out to the open ocean and back without stopping. This was ambitious. Mitch and I and sailed, and Brad had not, plus he couldn’t swim. Mitch’s other friend he invited had also never sailed overnight.
We met on Lake Union and we went out into the Sound through the Ballard Locks.
We made it through the locks in the dark and we sailed out into the night…our first encounter was with a giant freighter as we crossed the shipping lanes and Mitch fired up the engine to get us out of the path of the vessel. It was a bit scary. We realized we were in trouble when I said to Mitch…”whats that green light” and we looked across from east to west before we saw the red light on the port bough…He said “OH FUCK” and gunned it….we got safely out of the way, and sailed North in light air.
I went to sleep about midnight, finding comfort among the sails below.
In the morning I woke up and went up on deck to find Brad manning the wheel. “You drive” he said as he went below.
I was single handing the boat in light air as we crossed into the Straights of Juan De Fuca. It was blue sky and the Olympics were out in all their splendor. It was magnificent.
I sailed along and then noticed an aircraft flying back and forth…..it was an Orion prop plane and it seemed to be flying back and forth in a pattern.
I watched it for a while and then it suddenly flew off….I didnt think much of it until a Trident Submarine surfaced nearby heading South into the Sound towards Bremerton. I got quite a surprise. Those things are HUGE!
We sailed on and crossed the Straights with some fanfare….it was windy and the tide made it choppy. I was lying at the bough at one point, watching a Dall’s Porpoise playing in the bough wave.
They look like little Orca…and they are ridiculously good swimmers.
We sailed out to the open ocean and turned around and started to work our way back. The wind was too strong and the waves too big. Brad went below and I ventured onto the foredeck to take down our jib. I sat on the bough pulpit and wrapped my legs around the structure and pulled the sail down as we plunged through the waves…. I was soaked when we pulled into Victoria.
We spent the night and then in the morning started to make our way back. We returned without much excitement compared to the journey out.
Our lives changed when Melissa got pregnant, or at least she thought she got pregnant. She had all the symptoms but it seemed like she miscarried around the 6 week mark. She seemed to be super tired leading up to when she lost the baby. She was heart broken. We had been “trying” to get her pregnant for going on a year.
Then, well, we just kept trying and then finally, she got pregnant with our first born, Sam
Our life really did change at that time. We were no longer a happy go lucky couple. We had a child on the way. All of a sudden, everything had changed. We now started getting ready for a child in our lives. Nesting level 10! As the impact of that reality set in, we thought of ourselves differently. We were going to be parents.
We rented a big old house in Laurelhurst, 4323 43rd Ave NE the same neighborhood as Eric and June, Tim moved in and we located an office there. It worked for a little while. We learned how to bill and Tim and I tried to find a way to work together. In the end, it didn’t work out so well and we decided to go our separate ways. Tim was from West Virginia and he went back there. Melissa and I moved into the Laurelhurst house. I changed the name from Orthopedic Physical Therapy Associates to Chasan Physical Therapy and launched my career.
One of my very first patients was a home care patient that I had treated through his initial care on the Burn Unit . His name was Frank and he had suffered a terrible injury when he had fallen off a roof he was working on and pulled a large bucket of hot tar on top of himself. He had 80% second and third degree burns, and he lost his right leg in a high above knee amputation. It was working with people like him that had me really appreciative for my fitness, vitality and well being.
At this point, Melissa and I were already struggling with our relationship. Melissa wanted to set a date to get married and I was really reluctant to do that till we worked out the many issues between us. We found another therapist, this woman, Dawn Gruen, literally saved our relationship. She was incredible and we loved her. Sadly she died after losing a fight to cancer at a young age. She really had us look at what we were dealing with in ourselves and with each other over the years.
With Dawn’s help, we finally hit a good rhythm, seemed to be on the same page and set a date to get married. We made the decision to go on a “Dive Honeymoon”. So we registered for SCUBA classes at Underwater Sports, and started learning about diving. We initially got certified as PADI divers by completing the required skills and we embarked on a series of shore dives. Next we committed to the Advanced Certification course. It was interesting. We had to learn some advanced skills and pass skill tests including search and rescue, underwater navigation, a deep water dive, a current dive and a night dive.
Of the skills, the deep water dive and the current dive were the most interesting…the night dive was just, well, spooky. For the deep water dive, we had to dive to 90 feet. The dive boat we were on took us to where the depth was 90 feet and in we went. Up until then the deepest we had dived was 40 feet. There is really not much life in the Puget Sound deeper than that since the light doesn’t penetrate that far. But the dive was a 90 foot dive so we started to descend. What happened to me was that as I got deeper, and my BC (Buoyancy Control vest) compressed, I started to sink faster and faster. I was adding air to my BC as fast as I could but I just kept sinking….I hit the bottom with a thud and always wondered what would have happened if there was not a bottom at 90 feet. It took a minute for my BC to fill enough to lift me off the bottom.
The current dive was interesting too…in this case the boat dropped us on one side of a channel between two islands where the current was moving. We dropped down to about 40 feet and the and current swept us along the wall. It was kinda like being on a conveyor belt.
The night dive was so crazy. We put glow lights on our snorkels, and we swam out to the end of the oil dock at Edmonds Underwater Park. About half way out, Melissa freaked out and “dropped” her weight belt….so she could not descend. She went back to the shore and the next day we came out and I did a search and rescue to find her weight belt. For the night dive you realize as you descend that you are in the darkest dark you can imagine. It is PITCH black. Then you turn on your flashlight and BOOM color everywhere. There is a fish in the Puget Sound called a Rat Fish. They use the oil from it for gun oil. It has a poisonous spine on its back and it is a nocturnal fish. I had never seen one but when you turn on your light underwater, it turns and comes straight at you….it’s spooky
Well the instructor felt bad for Melissa, who definitely had the skills to get her Advanced Certification, so he awarded her the certification in any event. We were ready for our honeymoon.
By the time our wedding arrived, on August 4th, 1985, we had been together for 3 years. Our wedding was planed for SeaFair Sunday. We got married on the grass, outside of my cousins place in Broadmoor on the golf course. We were serenaded by the Blue Angles flying over our wedding.
We went from the wedding to a downtown hotel for the night and then on to the airport in the morning. Next stop Kauai.
We had a blast in Hawaii. We LOVED Kauai. We did two dives a day for two weeks with every 3rd day off so we could degas. It was amazing.
There were two situations that stand out in my memory from those dives. The first, we were diving a dive spot called Kitchen Sink. It was in about 90 feet of crystal clear water where several items from dismantled old ships had been dropped to create a graveyard of shorts that formed a false reef years before. It was well populated by fish, moray eels, shells etc. Imagine a 40 ft reef, sort of circular in shape, in 90 feet of water in the open ocean.
Melissa had opted not to dive that day. She suffered from motion sickness and the ocean was a little choppy. So she stayed ashore. I dived with the Dive Master as my dive buddy. We were down exploring the reef when I looked up to see the Dive Master with his hand on his forehead, indicating a shark. I turned around and behind me about 30 feet away was a shark that looked to be about 15 feet long and about 2 ft wide.. He was big…he was coming toward me lazily. My blood pressure skyrocketed. The shark came closer. I crouched in among the reef making myself as small as I could. The shark swam around the reef a couple of times before flicking its tail once and disappearing. I mean it was gone. I have never felt so out of my element as I did at that moment.
The other experience occurred while I was diving with Melissa as my dive buddy. We were in about 60 feet of water. We spied these amazing shells – a really nice cone shell that looked like this:
I picked it up and it was alive…there as clearly a snail in the shell, so I put it down. Melissa was not satisfied with that so she picked it up and handed it to me to put in my goodie bag. I shook my head no and set it down.
I swam off. She followed. What I did not know was that she picked up the shell again and slipped it into my BC pocket.
What Melissa had forgotten ( I think, and maybe she knew LOL) was that the snail is poisonous and has a deadly spine it uses to kill things…like divers who are stupid…and who put them in their pocket…
Well we got on the dive boat and Melissa said “Hey, why did you keep putting that shell down, I was trying to give it to you?” I said “Well it is alive so we can’t take it”. She cocked her head and said “Oh, I put it in your BC pocket”…I was like Startled…and looked in the pocket and this is what I saw…
The snail had extruded it’s poisonous spine and lucky for me it had gotten caught in the webbing of my BC pocket and was pointing parallel to my trunk and had missed me by millimeters! I was very, very lucky.
I have it that my new wife tried to assassinate me on our honeymoon! In any event, we loved the experience. We took helicopter rides, we went to a Luau, we dived the beach called Tunnels where we saw Black Tipped Reef Shark.
We had a great time. We were young, we were in love, we were on an adventure and we sat in a restaurant on the last day having lunch before we head to the airport to come home and we seriously debated staying. We almost did.
I had just started my practice, I had signed a lease to move my office into a medical building on Pill Hill, and Melissa had a great job on the Burn Unit. She was super close to her sister and her other sibs and her mom, so she wanted to come back. So we reluctantly came home.
We set about buying a house and we ended up making an offer on a house on Superbowl Sunday of 1986. Melissa met Tom and Heidi and we really got along with them. They accepted our offer and we had our first home.
I drove down to find a place to stay and I got a killer apartment near the Rose Garden on Vista drive. It was the 3rd floor of a big old house inhabited by a retired doctor and his wife. They had had twin sons, so, they built out the upstairs apartment for them. I worked at Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children for 6 weeks and then the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center. It was there that I met a girl named Vicki that I fell head over heels in love with. When I came back to Seattle, she came and spent a week with me and I asked her to marry me. She said no. (Ironically she was in a long term relationship at school – she went to Stanford – with boy who’s name was also Neil. Anyway she felt like she had promised herself to him, and so she declined. I was her summer fling.
Back in Seattle I did my last internship at Harborview Medical Center. I had worked there on weekends as a PT Aide, so I was familiar with the PT clinic on the rehab floor. But my clinical was rotation was on the Burn Unit and it was there that I met Melissa. The way that meeting went was like this. I had noticed her because she was beautiful and she seemed to laugh a lot. She was working as the ward secretary and I was a student PT. I had patient I was working with who had a closed head injury and one day she was alone at the desk as I walked Charlie by. He said to me randomly looking at my name tag “Say, did you ever try those Neil Chasan drugs?” I laughed and said to Charlie, “No Charlie, but see that cute nurse sitting over there behind the counter? (we all wore scrubs on the Burn Unit) Go ask her that!”
So he walked over to her and asked her….”Did you ever try those Neil Chasan drugs?” She said “what are you talking about Charlie?” I jumped in and said “He is talking about me…he is asking if you have tried me…” She laughed.
Later, I asked her out on a date. She was tall, 6′, blonde, and beautiful. Kinda my dream girl. We agreed to go see the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman“. Well I picked Melissa up at her condo and we started to head to the movie but it was a beautiful late summer afternoon and the lake was golden like On Golden Pond, so we decided to get teriyaki to go and to go have a picnic on the water’s edge.
We were laying on the blanket talking and getting to know each other when we discovered we had the same birthday. I mean exactly the same birthday. Well we worked out the time difference and we figured out that we were born about 10 minutes apart. We smooched a bit and we talked till dark, then I took her home. When I got there and was getting ready to go she said “dont leave”.
We literally had one date. I moved in and that was that. More or less. Melissa was going to school in Spokane and I was not quite done with school, well I was, but I had to take my Boards and get a job and find a place to stay and so on. So for the next 6 months or so we dated across the state. One week I would drive over and one week she would. He had this little 1600 chevy that ran out of oil one day up at the pass and I had to go tow her into town.
Probably the most significant thing that occurred during that time was in 1982 I became a US Citizen. The process involved taking a class to get familiar with US Civics, American History and to take in the culture. I remember the final interview at the State Department one day. A dour and very humorless man asked us questions like “Who is your Representative in Washington?” and “What at the Cabinet positions and who are the Cabinet members?” and the question I guessed at but had no awareness of the answer to “what do the colors on the American flag stand for?” (“The colors of the flag of the United States of America; White signifies purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valour, and Blue, signifies vigilance, perseverance & justice.”). Well we passed the test in spite of my wrong answer, and we went to a Chinese Banquet hosted by Dr. deLateur at Harborview, who was the Head of Rehab, and who loved my mom and me. The banquet was amazing. One amazing dish after another, beautifully presented and shared at the table by the dozen or so people in attendance. By the end, I think the 10th course, the waiter would bring out an amazing platter of food and show us and we would all murmur our appreciation, then he would take it away. It was the most incredible eating experience of my life to this day.
I graduated from college and took off to see my friends in Switzerland and Austria. It was a great trip. I got to see my sisters who were living in London. When I showed up and Sue’s place, she was not aware that I was coming, I had wanted to suprise her. I knocked on the door and when she opened it she started jumping up and down and screaming. She hugged me and kissed me and made me feel welcome. I remember helping Rex wall paper the bathroom. I have this image of him in the empty tub, admiring his work. A few days later I took a boat train to Europe where I had the following experience. The day started out crazy. Rex, my brother in law, drove me to the train station. But he took me to the wrong station. So we had to run a few blocks to the right station. He was wearing sandals that had an opening on the top of the foot and a pigeon shit into that very spot as we were running…he was cursing and running carrying a bag for me. Anyway, I got on the train and transferred to a ship and off we went. I met this amazingly beautiful French girl, Natalie Cohen, and we got a along great. She invited me to meet her parents when we landed. So we landed and she had a heavy bag which I carried for her. She took my camera bag and was ahead of be because of customs. Well I didn’t have a French Visa, so they stopped me. I had her bag and she had my camera….I waited till she made her way back and we exchanged bags, hugged and cried and we went on our way. On the boat on the way back, I connected with a Greek fellow who had a big bottle of Ouzo and he got me and several people around us seriously drunk. A full 24 hours passed and I was back in London. I rebooked my ticket through Holland and tried again.
I arrived in Zurich and hung out with Suzi Schmidt for a few days, then went on to Austria to see my friends. I met Suzi at the train station in Vorarlberg. She looked sad and I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Barbara had accidentally shot and killed Gunther when they were playing with her dads Luger that they had found. It had a single bullet in the chamber and it had pierced his heart. He had died pretty much instantly. She was in an asylum and I could not see her. I was devastated. I made the most of my time in Austria, it was so beautiful there.
Suzi was a senior in high school, so, she invited me to come to her class for the day. I went and was asked to talk to her class about life in America, which I did. The kids all spoke english well enough to understand me. I went to parties with her and then her boyfriend drove me to Heidelberg in Germany where I could catch a train to Frankfurt. The Train ride along the Rhine was amazing. The castles are really quite incredible.
I had the good fortune to sit next to a man who spoke English, and who, it turns out, was an historian. He told me the history of every single castle along the voyage. I returned to the states after saying good bye to my sisters in London. I remember the last night in London. I wasstaying with Carol and Mal, and had made friends with the neighbor, she was 19 and super cute and she came over to say good bye. She hung out with me for a while and we shared all sorts of stories.
I came back and applied for a job in various places.
I planned on staying at my parents at least till I got a job, and I was lucky to get a job pretty quickly at Harborview Medical Center as a first year PT. My job was interesting. I was replacing the Chief who was out on leave and I got to have several rotations. I was to spend 3 months on the Rehab floor, 3 months on the Acute Orthopedic floor, 3 months on the Burn Unit and 3 months on Outpatients. The funny thing is that my first rotation was in Rehab replacing my mom, who was moved up to Acting Chief and my very first patient, Sheri, was an acute polio patient who contracted the disease from her baby’s live virus inoculation. It was crazy. She was in a lot of pain at first and I remember her crying…”I don’t want you, I want your mother…” It’s funny now, but then it was very scary. Nobody in the hospital had ever seen acute polio and nobody knew what to do for her. She and her amazing husband Rusty and I became good friends.
I continued to sail the Yellow Bucket with Bobby and Roland, and race Bravado on weekends again, but now there was a new twist. I was seriously dating Melissa and so my weekends were often occupied. Melissa finished school and moved to Seattle. She shared a house with a few nurses and I often spent the night there. Eventually, the home owners son came back from school so Melissa moved out I was in a house with a couple guys, Dave and Vern that Melissa had found for me, and Dave decided to sell the house so we were both homeless at the moment. We decided to get a house together. So we found this tiny little house on 81st in Greenwood, I cant remember the address. We lived there for a while.
Anyway, we campaigned the Yellow Bucket around the western region and qualified for the National Championships. In our last race of the series, we were out in front with a new suit of sales, and as we rounded the final mark just as we were taking down the spinnaker, a screw sheared off the diamond spreaders and our mast folded in half. It was a wooden mast and so the sharp splinters tore through our sails. Melissa happened to be watching us through a telescope when it happened. We were devastated. Well, Roland secured a new mast and got the sales repaired just in time for the Nationals.
We drove to Flathead Lake in Montana, stopping in Spokane to stay at Melissa’s parents home. It was very intimidating meeting Melissa’s parents. Her dad was a Presbyterian Minister and quite religious and I was this short Jew from Africa. Bob, her dad, was a recently retired Commander in the US Navy. I was quite intimidated to be honest. I don;t think he said 10 words to me.
We drove on to Flathead and camped out while we raced.
The first day we got there, there was a lot of measuring of the boats. Thistles are a one-design class which means that every boat has exactly the same stuff. Nobody has a technical advantage and so the result is due to boat handling and tactical skill. It was fascinating to watch this process both as an observer and also as a participant. We had a new mast and a newly repaired set of racing sails that we tore up when we demasted during the last race, and so we had to sail the boat to tune it up. The trouble was that there was really heavy air. It was howling.
Flathead was a long lake and as the mountain sides heated up, the air was sucked up the lake caucusing massive rollers at the end of the lake where the race was. So we had this 6 and 10 foot rollers coming in and 40-60 mph gusts and it was hairy!
At one point were heading down wind wing on wing with all three of us literally standing on the stern to keep the nose out of the water so we didn’t pitch-pole . The gust died a little and I dived to the mast to let the Mainsail down. Like the other boats in the water (there were a few), we just rode out the worst of the storm.
The first day of races had us racing an Olympic course in the morning, which meant light air. The cold air tumbling off the mountainsides set a steady breeze of about 10 knots with little variance and that meant all 100 boats on the starting line wanted to be at the same spot of the line at the start. We jockeyed for position but got skunked in dirty air at the start and finished 52nd overall. The Olympic class racers who were there crushed the race. The next day, the race was divided into two fleets. We were in the second fleet of 50 and as a result our races were very competitive. In fact, we won the last day light air race as the pictures below illustrate. It was very gratifying to be so competitive considering it was only our second year on the boat. ‘
These pictures were taken at the Nationals on Flathead Lake. In the image on the left, we are in the middle leading the race and in the image on the right we we are on the right covering the boat behind us. We won the race, our only win of the week. Melissa and I went on to Glacier National Park since we were all the way over there. It was amazing.
Over the next year or two we more or less lived life. I took the engine of my car apart when it started blowing blue smoke out the exhaust. I picked up a Haynes Manual and diagnosed that I had dropped a head gasket. I took the head off and took it to a shop to get skimmed and reinstalled it. I started the car up feeling accomplished and blue smoke came out the exhaust. I was stumped. With sense of failure, I drove the car down the street to the gas station to put gas in the tank, and as I was going in to pay (you could not pay at the pump in those days), an old man sitting on a coke box said to me as I walked by “you need a new automatic transmission modulator”. Just like that. I was like “Huh? what’s that?” so I went home and pulled out the Haynes Manual and looked it up. It was a little piece attached to the exterior of the transmission housing that took me a few minutes to remove and replace once I had a new one, and it cost about $23.00. I installed it, and cautiously started up the car and VIOLA! no blue smoke. I felt great. This is pretty much the color of the car I had…kinda ugly, but a very cool car.
My brother had started working at Chateau Ste Michelle, and so I bought a couple of cases of wine…Melissa freaked out. She was worried I was an alcoholic… it was sort of funny in retrospect when it actually took us years to finish the wine.
My relationship with Melissa continued to grow. We were living together in that little house in Greenwood. I had started my own practice doing home care after my stint at Harborview came to an end. My class mate, Tim Cavender, who worked with me at Harborview, and I had taken a couple of classes on starting a private practice together, so we set about creating our business identity. My parents were freaked out. “Where are you going to get your patients” they fretted. But not knowing what I didn’t know, I pushed ahead undaunted.
One day, Melissa’s sister Carol and her future husband Ray were over and I had been shopping for a diamond for Melissa and I gave it to her as a gift. She freaked out. We were engaged.
Now to be fair, Melissa and were struggling to get to clarity in our relationship. We loved each other and at the same time, we struggled with the Christian/Jewish thing. We struggled with our different way of arguing. I liked to argue and was righteous about it, and her family didn’t argue and were righteous about it. Melissa was very controlling and I hated that. I found it very hard to overcome, and add to that, that half her family were hard core evangelical Christians, I was dealing with an up hill battle to be complete about it all. In truth, we didn’t fight “well”. At times we would go on long car drives in order to make us sit next to each other and talk.
One time, we drove down to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth we got mouse ears. We had a blast. We liked the Oregon Coast, so we went car camping along the coast, almost dying one night from stupidity.
The situation was that we parked the car at the top of these cliffs. We walked down the stairs to the beach. The high tide line was a really long way away from the foot of the cliffs. There were lots of logs and then the tide was well out. We hiked around the cliffs to a slightly higher spot where it looked like the sea had not been in ages, and we pitched our tent. We went to sleep and at about 3:00 a.m., I had a dream I was on a submarine. I woke with a start and heard water. I went out of the tent and the ocean had filled the bay, we were stranded. The water was kissing the little hill we were on and occasionally a wave would push up on the mound where our tent was. I didn’t know what to do. Melissa was asleep. Should I wake her? What would we do? I sat there watching the waves, thinking at best we could hug the foot of the cliff and make our way back to the stairs leaving our stuff behind so we could move quickly. If the water started to fill in, we would have to go now. I watched the water closely, it seemed to have reached its high mark. Over the next 3 hours I watched thankfully as it gradually receded. The logs that were so far away had moved up the beach to almost the foot of the cliffs. We were really very lucky.
I had taken a communication course by Bob Weyant at Harborview called “Communication Skills for Supervisors”. Bob was an Industrial psychologist, and his work was super interesting and well conceived, so Melissa and I tried to practice the communication techniques for ourselves. But it wasn’t enough, so I asked Bob for a referral, and he referred us to a counselor. A guy named Gill Sandy who was not terribly sympathetic to our struggles and more or less said “You are not compatible, you should not get married.” I remember the last occasion we saw him, sitting in his office, Melissa taking off her ring and handing it to me and leaving the room in tears. I went after her and asked her to reconsider. “We can work it out” I said. She agreed to try to work it out. We seemingly loved each other and we wanted to make it work. I really should have listened to him.
The other activity I took up while at University was sailing. I loved being on the water and I loved sailing. I started with Lasers at the UW sailing club, graduated to 420”s and 505’s and learned spinnaker sets on an E-scow. I met Brian Williams who got me a ride on fast big boat called Bravado, which was an Islander 40 that was super competitive. We used to go on weekend long races around the Sound. I was the foredeck monkey because I was small and agile, so I handled changing the head sail and the spinnaker and then I was in the cockpit grinding or tailing winches or just being ballast on the high side when we were on a longer leg. Over time I learned how to fly the spinnaker and how to read the shifts and manage the luff of the sail. I also started to pick up on racing tactics especially around the start and during the race as well. I loved racing. We had so many occasions where we were tacking up the beach to avoid the current that we would run aground and have to use the spinnaker pole to push ourselves free. I became masterful at repacking the spinnaker below deck once we rounded the downwind mark.
So I started PT school and was enjoying class a lot. It seemed like I could get interested in PT as a profession. I had my first neuro test, but had forgotten that we had a test scheduled so I came to class super stoned. In those days I was smoking 5 joints a day. I was so high that I totally bombed the test. When the results came out, the teacher called on me to stay after class and she asked me if everything was OK because I was very much active in class and obviously was interested in the material. I told her I was high and she suggested that I stop smoking pot during PT school. About the same time, I had an argument with my dad and he said “Its time for you to stop smoking pot”,
I stopped. It was hard, I had to first smoke less and then gradually stop altogether. It took about 6 months to quit completely. It was hard because all the girls I dated smoked pot. I was playing soccer with a bunch of stoners on a team called Homegrown, and it was literally everywhere. But I worked at it. I had been doing Ti Chi and so I used my Ti Chi practice to distract myself. I remember dong long super slow form walks up the middle of the street at night for study breaks.
The first year and second year kids took some classes together. In one of those classes I met Bobby who told me that her and her husband Roland were going to buy a boat to race. She asked if I would be interested in being a crew on a Thistle. It sounded interesting, so I said “sure”.
i arrived at the dock at Leschi, and there Bobbi and Roland were with the Yellow Bucket. The Thistle is a flat bottom 17 ft long boat with a retractable centerboard and a 30 ft mast with a fractional rig (which means that the head sale and the spinnaker do not go all the way to the top of the mast).
We practiced and practiced and practiced. We practiced mark roundings, sail changes, tacking and jibing and capsizing and righting the boat. We practiced in light air and heavy air. In rain and sun. We were a good team. We raced every Tuesday night through the Summer and Fall and we took the boat down to San Diego for the Midwinter regatta.
In that regatta, there were a couple of experiences I had that were memorable. The first happened in the open ocean off of San Diego during the Olympic Course Regatta. We were sailing under the spinnaker. Now keep in mind that we are really close to the water and the boat is flat as we are going down wind. I glance down and see a massive grey whale heading the other direction right next to our boat about 3 inches below the surface . I put my hand on its back as it went by us and the it dived right behind the boat, its tail fluke being larger than our whole boat. It looked like this…(I didn’t take a picture at the time).
The other event was very stressful. We were sailing on Mission Bay and the breeze was stiff, not heavy, but around 10 knots. One of the things that happens before a start is all the boats jocky for the start. It’s crazy and you have to keep yoru wits about you. We were on a broad reach, which means we are motoring, and, impoirtantly, we were on a port tack. A bot underneath us yelled “Starboard”, which means they have the right of way. Roland had a brain fart, he called “TACK” which means he wanted to get onto a starboard tack. He hardened up intending to put the boat over, but being on a broad reach meant that instead of tacking, we just accelerated as the sail tightened up, and we hit that boat at full speed a mid ships. We broke his rail. He flew a protest flag, and we had to do a 360 (two ciricles) for a penalty. This meant that we missed the start, and were part of the parade.
Funny thing. The guy we hit was a hell of a sailor and managed to WIN THE RAGATTA with a broken boat. It turned out that he had just purchased that boat and wanted Roland to replace it. Roland said, he had insurance. As he and Roland had words, Bobby and trailored the boat for the trip back to Seattle.
We continued to improve and sailed together until I went down to Portland for my clinical internships. At the time, I was dating a girl named Karin who was a year behind me in school, an athletic girl who played basketball. We were just starting to get close as I left for Portland. We lost touch pretty quickly then.
My mom and dad purchased this home in 1978 for $40,000. It was a crazy house that had 9 doors in the kitchen. I lived upstairs in the finished attic and there was an unfinished basement that I worked with a couple different contractors to finish off as a rental unit.
I had two rooms upstairs. I built a desk into one and slept in the other. I grew pot in the cupboard for a while till my dad asked me not to…actually what happened was that I came home from school one day and saw my dad sitting on the steps outside. He was literally green. I asked him what was wrong and he said “I discovered your pot plants”, I said “Oh, is that all?, I thought someone had died!” He asked me to stop smoking pot and I said to him “tell you what, I’m not going to stop smoking now, but if in future, you see my behavior changing, and you ask me to stop, I will”. He accepted that since I was an A student, held down an job and went to school.
At that time I worked as a furniture refinisher with a couple guys about my age and the owners Floyd and Max who were in their late 60’s. Dave was the son and Dan was a worker like me. I was the new guy, so I got the dirty jobs of stripping furniture and sanding it down. I learned a lot about how furniture went together, and how to refinish it. I also got to meet some interesting people.
At the time, the Sonics were a big deal in Seattle, and I refinished Paul Silas’s living room furniture. Bringing the item to his home was interesting. First of all, meeting him. He is a very large man. I think I took him up to his belly button! Second, he literally had a half court in his living room. Seriously.
I loved school. I was meeting people, learning a lot and earning an income to pay for school. I also met and enjoyed a relationship with Sue Newcomb who I met at a Halloween Party in one of the Dorms on campus. We dated for about a year. She was a lovely girl from Portland and she introduced me to American ways of life. It was a fun fling. I got cold feet when she asked me to marry her in a back handed way. She said she could “make me a citizen….if I wanted.”
After a couple of years I took a job at Sax Floral, a nursery, where I made potting soil, maintained the greenhouses, watered plants, and delivered flowers. For both the furniture refinishing job and the nursery job I made minimum wage of $3.00 an hour. During the Fall I used to spend the daylight hours fixing broken glass on top of the greenhouse. I remember writing physics equations on the glass so I could memorize them.
I went to see the movie Deer Hunter with my friend Josh Levine. I was sitting next to a girl on my left, who was sitting next to her friend. Her partner and Josh both left at the same time to go get refreshments or use the bathroom, so I struck up a conversation with her. As she was leaving, she slipped a piece of paper into my hand – her name and phone number.
I called her and we agreed to meet for a date. A BBQ at her place. What was weird about that was that the guy who she went to the movie with showed up…they had an argument and he left….it turns out he was her fiance! She had just broken up with him….It was a little awkward at first…but Maryellen and I got along great and we were together for a couple years. We went to Vancouver one weekend to stay with our friends Frankie and Barry. We explored the city and on our way back, we were in a long line at the border. We were smoking pot and the car was full of smoke. Maryellen asked “why do they have borders anyway?” I answered “Oh you know, smuggling, drugs that sort of thing” We looked at each other and laughed. We were about 3 cars from the front. We opened all the windows and Maryellen put the small amount of pot under her seat. The border guard took one look at us and told me to get out of the car. I got out. He said to open the trunk. I opened the trunk. He went through our stuff and walked to the front of the car. My door was open, so he climbed in. He started poking around and finally came up with the little box I had made when I worked at the furniture refinishing place with a small amount of pot and a small pipe. Maryellen was crying. He said “Pull over there” so we did. They told us to get out.
Once out he said to me “we are going to go through the car. Are we going to find any more pot?” I said “no”. He said “If we do, you are going to prison” I told him that I understood and “no, there was not any more”.
They put Maryellen and I in a room together. About every 20 minutes, someone would come in and say something endearing like “we are going to throw the book at you”…Maryellen was not coping well. I would tell her “think of whales swimming, think of eagles soaring” to try to keep her calm. I was freaking out too. I only had a green card and it could be revoked. But eventually a senior officer came in and asked me where we got the pot. At that time, in Seattle, it was legal to have an ounce.
“I got it on the street in Seattle” I told him
He said “you can go, don’t be this stupid again”
I said “yes sir, and we left before they changed their mind”
We laughed all the way back to Seattle.
Maryellen was a PhD music major who played early music on the piano and old instruments like harpsichords. She finished up at the UW and went off to UCSB to complete her PhD. and she invited me to come down to visit her…I never had the money to go since I was paying for school on minimum wage, so I didn’t go. But years later, when I finally did get to Santa Barbara, I realized if I had gone, I would never have come back. Its amazing down there.
Working at the greenhouse one winter, I was sweeping snow off the glass when one of the owners kids threw a snowball at me. It hit me in the face and I took a step back only to fall through the glass. I was up about 20 feet off the ground…it was going to hurt….I was falling and as I fell I saw a pipe going past my face so I reached up and grabbed it. It was a hot water pipe, but it wasn’t scalding hot. I swung a second and then dropped the remaining 5 ft down to my feet. I suddenly appreciated my gymnastics experience. Needless to say, the kid ran away and I got fired for “playing dangerously on top of the greenhouse”.
Maryellen asked me to make a commitment to her, but I just couldn’t. I was in school and had just been accepted into PT school and she was done. Plus she was in California pursuing her PhD, and she wanted me to come down to be with her. She gave me an ultimatum. Either come or she was going to join the Peace Corps. I said no, so she joined the Peace Corps and went to Kenya for two years. She ended up marrying a fellow Peace Corps volunteer she met while in Africa. We lost contact during the time soon after she returned.
I continued to ride my bike to school along the Burke Gilman Trail and I rode everywhere. My mom had a little Subaru that I got to drive around and then later a Datsun B 210 they gave me when I graduated.
After I was accepted to start in PT School the Fall, I took some classes that I was interested in. I took Astronomy which was amazing and I took Philosophy which I excelled in and I took Child Psychology which I enjoyed as well. I took the summer off and worked at Tasty Home Bakery where I made 1,000 croissants before breakfast each day. The baker was this 80 year old guy and he was married to a 20 year old woman. When they hired me, they said “we have two rules. Rule 1. Don’t eat the profits and 2. do NOT hit on the owners wife. I laughed at the time, but she had said this in all seriousness. One day I met her. A seriously beautiful and super flirtatious girl who got the attention of the baker because she could literally crack 4 eggs at a time! She used to follow me into the walk in freezer and tease me…but I needed the job and I always thought she was setting me up. So I never bit.
While I was in my freshman physics class, I met Karlene who was this amazingly beautiful half Indian girl that I was in love with. But she was seeing a boy named Stephan. Karlene and Stephan and I became fast friends, and spent a lot of time together. Karlene and I used to study physics at my place weekly. I was so infatuated with her. She knew how beautiful she was and she loved the attention I gave her. I never one time hit on her. I just adored her. She became an MD and married an MD and has and MD son. They live in Spokane now and all is well with Karlene.
Stephan invited me over one night to his amazing Queen Anne home that had floor to ceiling windows that looked over the city from the top of the South slope of Queen Anne hill. Karlene was there and it was the first time I smoked pot. I remember getting so damn high.
Stephan was an amazing skier. I had taken the “graduated length method” at Fiorini Sports in the U-Village. Learning this way, you got slightly longer skis each week until you were able to ski on regular skis. I went up on a bus with the program each week in the winter to Snoqualmie Pass, and bit by bit I learned how to ski. Then I asked Stephan to take me skiing. He did. To Alpental.
We went night skiing. I drove up to the pass. Stephan smoked pot. Once I got there, I did too. It was strong stuff. We got super stoned before we got tickets. I managed to get my ticket and stuck it carefully to the wire (It was the first time I had bought a ticket), only to realize that the wire needed to be on your jacket. Oops! Anyway we got to the lift I managed to board it without too much trouble. Everybody seemed to know Stephan. Well the lift went up. And it went up and up and up and up and then it turned a corner and went up and up and up and up. I was terrified. I literally fell down the mountain that night. Stephan in the meantime, was killing the moguls, taking jumps, doing tricks and so on. I went into the lodge cold and wet and embarrassed. Later, when Stephan had had enough, we went to the car and I discovered that in falling down the mountain, I had lost my car keys on the hill. Luckily, I knew there was a spare set and my folks were home so we called and asked them to bring us the spares. We hung out and got higher and higher waiting for them to arrive. They had never driven to the ski slopes before so it was a treat for them.
We arrived in Seattle on September the 4th of 1977. It was a beautiful day. Going through Customs as we entered the country, we dealt with an immigration agent who was an old hippie with long grey hair. He went through the forms one by one and when he came to one particular form, the one that said that if there was a draft, I agreed to be drafted. He took 10,000 pounds off my shoulders. Or at least if felt like that is what he did. Instead what he did was tear up the form saying ” we don’t have a draft in this country”. It turns out that just prior to our arrival, Jimmy Carter had cancelled the draft, which had an amazing impact on me. I had grown up with the idea that I would serve in the military for most of my 20’s and now that was gone as a consideration.
We went through customs and came out of the door to see Nicola, Terry and Jo along with Eric with a big bunch of balloons welcoming us. We got into Eric’s big green station wagon and he drove us to his home in Laurelhurst in the NE section of Seattle. We went on the Express Lane which was largely in a tunnel so I did not really get a glimpse of Seattle until we emerged and I could see lakes and water and green everywhere.
We pulled into their neighborhood and it was very clear that people were milling around, playing with Frisbee’s in the street, washing their cars, and so on…my impression was that the whole city was on vacation. I didn’t know that it actually WAS a public holiday.
Eric and June had a beautiful home in Seattle, with a wonderful view of Lake Washington and Mt. Rainier. They had invited friends, Bob and Marilyn, Beth and Marty, Gene and Rachel, who my mom and dad had met the previous year and we got adopted into the extended Seattle family. Eric and June had a spectacular view of the Lake and the Cascade range, and it felt really good to be here.
We lived in an apartment in the University Travel Lodge across from the University Village shopping center while my parents searched for a house.
I got a job painting the interior of a big old house in the University District with a woman in her 50’s named Virginia. She was wonderful. She had a southern accent and was married to her psychiatrist husband who practiced in the house. I hardly ever saw him. But Virginia and I talked and talked as we prepped and painted. She introduced me to a French Press for a delicious coffee blend she had concocted from this little coffee store in the U Village – Starbucks. At the time, there were two stores. One in the U Village and at the Pike Place Market. Who knew?!
I loved Seattle immediately. It’s a beautiful city, in a beautiful region, and there were no troubles like existed in South Africa. People were seriously chill by comparison. Terry and I hung out, we trained together. Terry was a top ranked cross country skier and was getting ready to head to the East Coast for college. It was really great to have my cousins in town.
Eric told me that I had to “show up for a test on Saturday” at an address he gave me and an appointed time. I didn’t know what it was, and it turned out to be the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the “SAT”. and I had no idea what that was. I completed the test and scored well enough to secure my entry into the UW. I went to the college to register for classes.
My dad and I had an interesting experience that sort of illustrates what the change in culture was like for us. We went to buy a car and he and I were both amazed that every person we dealt with was a woman. South Africa was as sexist as it was racist….so the bus driver, the car sales person, the insurance sales person, the bank loan officer – all women. My dad and I actually talked about both that that was the experience and also that we were amazed by the experience of seeing women in those vocations.
My first day of school was the next day. The very first person I encountered on campus was a carpenter. She was a woman too and I realized what a different country I was in.
My first class at the UW was The History of the United States since 1940 lectured by Otis Pease. It was a brilliant class that gave me a context for the United States that I had moved to. You have to understand that in South Africa we had no American history at all. All we really knew was what we had seen in Hollywood movies. American history since 1940, the war years, WW2, Korea and Vietnam as well as the shifts in culture here at home with the Civil Rights moment and Title 9 made for an interesting introduction into the then current context.
I will say that I found the Seattle Times and Seattle PI to be very regional newspapers with little international or national news. Growing up in South Africa had made me hungry for news of the larger world.
I also registered for Math 101. This was a lecture delivered in Kane Hall…There were 1000 people in the class. It was really hard to get my head around a class that big – bigger than my entire high school. I made the point of sitting at eye level with the professor so that when I had a question, he would see me.
It was hard trying to get used to dealing with foreign grad students who didnt speak English. In my Chemistry class, for instance, my first TA was from China and literally spoke no English. My second one was from Italy and barely spoke English. I almost failed Chemistry as a result.
I used the money I made painting Virginia’s home to pay for school and to buy a bicycle and I rode my bike to school every day for 5 years. It wasn’t a long ride, but it finished with a stiff up hill climb both ways. The campus was huge. There were 35,000 students there every day and lot and lots of buildings.
As a Freshman, I had to go see the Freshman Adviser….a meeting that had a profound influence on my life.
I don’t remember the name of the woman I talked to. She asked me what I was interested in? I said “sports medicine and computer science” she said “There are no jobs in computer science”. And that was that.
I mean this was 1977 and at the very moment there probably were not that many jobs in computer science…but she directed me to PT where there were presently 40,000 jobs open in the USA. I figured that because my parents were struggling to get settled. My dad was having a hard time finding work, and my mom didn’t have her license yet, it made sense to go into a career where I could get employment quickly, so I agreed with her assessment and made the decision to pursue the pathway to PT.
I can’t help thinking how differently my life might have gone if I had pursued computer science back then.
My Life: A Memoir 