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 wanted to garden. So when an apartment opened up next door that had a yard, she saw an opportunity. We moved into the apartment building next door, going from being on the second floor of an apartment building to a townhouse with a yard. This was important for many reasons, the most significant being that my mom had a green thumb and loved to garden, and the other reason being that we loved to have people over for Sunday lunch and it had been difficult to do in the apartment. One of the first things I did there was cultivate an avocado seed to get it to root in a jar of water, then I planted the avocado tree at the bottom of the garden. In a few years we had avocados!
You can see in the picture above the apartment building on the corner, that was Marin View. Next door, to the left is Hiawatha. You can see the park to the left with the trees. That park had no trees when I was there and we used to play soccer and fly model airplanes there. The park to the right was a river valley really and not much good for sport, although I hit golf balls there. The building on corner of our block to the left with the white roof, was a bakery where they made the best kooksisters. and the red roof on the opposite corner from Marine View was the corner cafe.
I had the back bedroom with a porch off the back that was glassed in and it overlooked the garage area. My parents said I could make it mine, which was awesome. One day soon after we moved in, my dad said to come with him. I jumped in his car and he took me to a pet shop and be bought me a 2 ft fish tank, the odds and ends that go along with needing fish and a few fish. I quickly became expert at tropical fish. I read all I could and I spent as much time at the fish store talking to the proprietor about how to put a good tank together. I got sort of mental about it and found a 6 foot tank, and also bought another smaller breeder tank. My friend Eddie also got a 6 foot tank and we become super close around our fish
I started breeding purple cichlids
These were Egyptian Mouth Breeders and quite hard to breed. and I sold the fry back to the fish shop for a Rand each. I had about 20 at at time to sell them.
I painted the porch a shocking green to complement the fish. I had a Tropical Fish Factory. I was breeding Black Mollys, and guppies and had this amazing algae eating “shark” that I loved to watch.
I missed my dog, so I also got a budgie. Not a fair comparison, but I loved my budgie. He used to ride around on my shoulder. He was this green and yellow love machine.
I loved this little guy and even though he lived on the porch outside, I played with him every day. He used to crouch on my shoulder while I rode my bike and he chirped little love songs in my ear in a tone that was one of recognition. Later, I got him a mate when we moved into the apartment at Hiawatha. His mate was blue.
And I used to look in their cage every day for an egg. And sure enough, one day she had laid a couple of eggs. I was excited, and watched the incubation period with amazement and anticipation. One day I came home and there was a beautiful little turquoise budgie sitting on the stick next to his parents. I had not disturbed the eggs once I saw the mom incubating them, so I had no idea what the baby looked like. I had heard him, but not peaked. The delayed gratification was worth it.
Gradually, the parents died and I was left with the baby. He was being trained to be out of the cage and being the little one, flew away one day to my great sadness. I looked for him daily for months, but he never returned. I stopped keeping birds after that. One day as I was getting ready to leave the country, I heard budgie song and looked up into the avocado tree I had planted so many years before, and there was a turquoise budgie being a wild bird. Was it him? I don’t know…but it could have been.
I had other hobbies.
One day I went with my dad to a crafts fair. I am not sure why, but I got mesmerized by a woman making water candles. I immediately came home and purchased a bunch of wax, and Eddie and I started making water candles. I showed them around and a gift shop ordered some and also a Chinese restaurant nearby special order bright red ones that they purchased several for their tables.
During my primary school days, my dad seemed larger than life. He took us on trips, like to Durban where I caught my first fish on the pier, got exposed to the wonders and creatures of the ocean at the Durban, especialy the massive Groupers that were in the salt water aquarium. I ate ice cream on the beach, and played in the surf always wary of the Bluebottles, jelly fish and shark nets.
One of my favorite trips was the time we went to Paradise Island off the coast of Mozambique where we snorkeled, water skied and went deep sea fishing. To get there we first had to across the border into Mozambique on our drive to the coast. The border crossing was always the same. A long line of cars that you pushed to the front so you could save gas, then a little hut and a pole across the road that the border guard lifted so you could pass after they checked your passports. Then the drive through the bush to Lorenzo Marques, now called Maputo, where, as I recall, we are Prawns Peri Peri in a restaurant in a tent. As I recall, the prawns were Tiger Prawns, so big I could only eat 6! Then, on to the coast where we met and then flew with Iris and Laddie on his small plane to the island. That holiday was the best adventure. I loved the island. Everything about it. I remember climbing a palm tree to pick a green coconut. A local yelled at me but I plead innocence because I had permission. He took his machete and cut the green coconut open and we shared the water.
Paradise island was magical. Azure blue water. Crystal clear. Abundant fish and cowrie shells. In the evening the local fisherman would lay their catch out on the beach and we would barter for fish. The hotel chef would then prepare the fish for our family dinner. I just loved it all.
I went out on the deep sea boat with my dad one day. It was mostly boring (I was 6) but I have one great memory. My dad was fighting a fish. I looked over the side as the fish neared, and the deck hand reached over to gaff the fish with a long hook. I watched as the red fish on the end of the line was gaffed. But instead of impaling his hook into a red rock fish looking creature, he gaffed 150 pound Hammer Head Shark that took the fish! All of a sudden it was mayhem as he held on to his hook with all his might and the skipper pulled out a shotgun and shot the shark allowing them to muscle it onto the deck.
The next year we went to Barazuto on the Mozambique coast. It wasn’t the same as the island but it was still fun.
We went to Durban and stayed at the Surf Crest Hotel on the beach. I almost broke my neck on the trampoline there. But i loved swimming in the salt water pool, eating Red Toffee Apples, and playing in the surf. I remember getting stung by blue bottles though. Painful. The aquarium was astonishing. The Grouper are really massive fish, and I remember those and the tiger shark in the tank and as I noted, I caught my very first fish at the pier in Durban.
Durban was cool. Natal, the province where Durban is located, is the home to the Zulu Nation. The Zulu are a proud people who are decedent of Shaka, King of the Zulu. They are very colorful people and one of my enduring memories is of the Rickshaw Rides on the beach front in Durban. The bead-work on those Rickshaws and headdresses are amazing.
I LOVED going to the game reserves to see the big game. We always used to count the big game we saw. The best was to see a kill, or at least a chase. You get really good at looking for animals. Its hard to see them sometimes since they are so camouflaged. You learn little tricks, like if a leopard is in a tree, it forgets its tail and its tail hangs down, so you look for the swinging tail.
I remember being chased by elephant while my dad filmed his 8mm film of the elephant crossing the road getting as close as he dare. Imagine my mom backing up while my dad hung out the open passenger door with his camera mounted on the door yelling “Faster! Faster!”
My dad was vibrant in those days. He raised money for the school to build a swimming pool that they named after him. He ran, as I recall, to try to win the Mayor of Johannesburg seat. He lost. He was the President of Allenby Country Club where I swam and he played Lawn Bowls. In short, he was larger than life to me then.
I have this memory of a big crate of oysters arriving and us all sitting and shucking oysters and eating them at a big table in the yard. I remember that day because my brother Derrick was home from the army camp, which I thought was cool. I wore his helmet all day, and he had brought his rifle home which was very impressive. My dad shot it aiming at some eucalyptus trees off in the distance. It was very loud!
We went on a trip with our standard 5 class (6th grade more or less). We went to the caves at Umshangla rocks and to the Kruger Park. What I remember is that my parents gave me 3R for a weeklong trip. I spent it at the first store we stopped at about 3 hours into the trip. So, I was….. deprived… my friends all had pocket money but I didn’t. It was my first awareness of being poor. Well I say poor, but I mean in comparison to my friends. We had so much more than the native Africans, that it was hard to feel poor. It really was colonial living. I am somewhere in this picture…
My progress in gymnastics had my parents bring me to a diving club that met at Ellis Park on the other side of town. I more or less hated it. We had to get up super early and the water was really cold. I wasn’t fond of diving. The pool was impressive. There were 2 one meter boards one on either side of a 3 meter board, and on the deep end side of the dive pool there was a 5 meter and a 10 meter concrete tower.
One of my worst experiences as a child occurred when I was standing at the edge of the 10 meter platform trying to get my courage up to jump when I was pushed off the board … I fell a little awkwardly trying to get my feet underneath me and luckily wasn’t badly hurt. My ego was mostly bruised. I’ve struggled with height since then. I’ll say more about my gymnastics later.
During the year before I broke my arm, just 6 years old, I got to go on an ocean cruise with my parents, on a Union Castle Line cruise ship called The Rainer Dell Mar. It was a big purple ship with a red and black chimney and white masts etc.
I loved that voyage. We were gone a month in all. About 10 days to cross the ocean leaving from Cape Town. I remember departing and the thousands of colored streamers that were thrown from the ship to the shore. There was a band playing on the dock and people were very cheerful.
I had the run of the deck and made friends everywhere. A sailor taught me how to play the slot machines, and I made a fortune in 5 penny pieces called “tickies”. I remember carrying handfuls of coins in my shirt back to the cabin.
There was a movie theater on the ship that played several movies, one of which was Bambi, that I couldn’t get through because the fire scene was too scary for me.
I remember coming into Rio de Janeiro early in the morning as the sun was rising. The water, which had been brilliant blue, was brown as we entered the river mouth and the Sugar Loaf mountain and the Christ Statue looked over the city.
I remember bits and pieces from that trip. The hot Coco Cabana Beach sand, so hot, I couldn’t walk on it. I remember the castle in Uruguay, the yummy steak at the BBQ by the river in Argentina.
I have flashes of other memories as I write this, one being the Crossing the Line Ceremony on the ship. The sailors all dressed up as women with wigs and balloons in their shirts and were tipped into the pool after having shaving cream (I think) pies shoved in their faces. It was a big fanfare with Neptune being the judge and jury. Of course all the travelers were watching and laughing and applauding. Being only 6 I took it more literally.
Two tastes have stuck with me from that voyage. Thousand Island dressing, which I’d never had before, and Hearts of Palm which I just love, both alone and also in a salad. Its a real treat for me.
I remember one night late, close to the end of the trip, when I came out of the cabin to go to the bathroom and the whole ship was alive! My parents had put me to bed about 6:00 and I had no idea that anyone else was awake. I felt totally ripped off.
I was born into a northern suburbs dwelling reform Jewish family, the youngest son to two older sisters, Sue (8 years older) and Carol (9 years older) and my brother Derrick (12 years older) of Cynthia and Selwyn. I was born when we lived at the Kelvin Rd house, but I have really no ongoing memory of 16 Kelvin Road. There was one time when I do recall the maid beating a snake in my bedroom, a Cobra as I recall, coiled to strike! My earliest continuous memories are related to a time only after we moved into our house at 44 Linden Road. My earliest childhood memory there is driving my blue peddle car up and down the long driveway at the Linden Road house. I think that memory is so strong because the new driveway was so long that I really got up a head of speed in my little peddle car.
44 Linden Road 1962-1970
Linden Road was a double story house with 3 upstairs bedrooms and a glassed in patio. My parents room and Susan’s room opened onto the patio. Derrick and I shared the patio, which means that it was more or less my room since Derrick was mostly no longer home being that he was in England at Leeds University. When I was 6 he was home for a little while, and then again when I was maybe 12 years old. My parents room and Carol’s room opened onto a wooden deck on the opposite side of the house over looking the Stead Neighbor’s house.
The house had two bathrooms and both were upstairs. My parents had a full bathroom on suite while all the sibs shared the other bathroom and separate water closet with just a toilet and sink. That little room lived at the top of the slate covered stairs. I remember it vividly. There is a memory trick called the “memory palace” where you use your childhood home to recall non-related items. I can vividly recall this home with great detail, and used that trick once to great effect while studying in college.
I remember my kindergarten years going to the little nursery school down the street. Certain features stand out. In addition to the long driveway that I used to drive my sky-blue pedal car up and down, one of my favorite memories is of the sweat pea flowers. My mom planted sweet-peas outside along the whole length of the fence facing the street. It was about 50 feet long and the spring bloom had a wall of aromatic pastel flowers outside. We literally had full vases of sweet smelling sweet peas all over the house! It was glorious.
There was a “Wendy-House” in the backyard, underneath a great big old oak tree that I loved climbing. There were fig trees, a mulberry tree, a green-gauge tree, a granadilla vine, and a couple of plum trees. Summers were great. We spent all our time outdoors climbing trees, playing cricket and one bounce (a soccer skills game), and we ate so much fruit off those trees. My neighborhood friends or my cousins or even my siblings boyfriends were all at one time playmates.
I also kept silkworms because we had a mulberry tree and silkworms eat mulberry leaves. I recently read about how it was illegal to take a mulberry leaf out of China, who were trying to protect their silk trade. It was always a fascinating thing to watch a silkworm making its cocoon. And it was magical to watch them emerge as moths and mate and lay eggs. We kept the silk worms in a shoe box that had a few knife-poked holes in the lid. Picking fresh mulberries while we gathered leaves for the silk worms was fun. We would be stained purple from the juice running down our chins.
We also used to keep an eye out for the occasional chameleon that showed up in the yard. They were fun animals to play with. They really could change color effortlessly. I was fascinated by how their eyes moved independently and with their ability to gradually blend into the background. Sort of like those body paintings where the model is disappeared into the background.
We used to try to catch those giant grasshoppers when they were around to watch them feed on grasses we pulled, but the best insects to capture by far was the Preying Mantis – super creepy to watch as it decapitated the male as they mated.
This is the tale of my life. It’s told to give context and color to my life, mostly I am writing this with my kids in mind. It occurs to me that they don’t really know that much about me. I realized that my kids really have no real understanding about my youth, where I came from, what my experience of life has been and what drives me. This blog is meant to fill in gaps and give context.
Two verses of Maya Angelou’s poem And Still I’ll Rise resonate with me as a poetic summation of my entire life:
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries.
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
My story is broadly divided into my time in South Africa, and then and my time in America. My time in America is divided into the period from my arrival thorough my marriage and up until the birth of our first child, Sam, and then the period of being a couple with children, and finally the period following my divorce. This first section covers the years 1959-1988.
South Africa: 1959 – 1977
I was one of the very last colonialists in South Africa.
I was born in Joberg, Joes, Johannesburg – Peter Tosh sang “what’s the word? Johannesburg”.
For me, Joberg occurred as a big dirty ugly city with no redeeming value. It was originally a gold mining town, and large yellow sulfa filled mounds of sand are dotted around the city along with the sometimes still active gold mining derricks. These mine dumps, so called, are the major feature of the city. It was also the case that the deep mine explosions when the miners detonated the dynamite to break up the rock, would cause tremors through the city like an earthquake.
I lived in the suburbs north of the city. Bramley first and then Glenhazel where I lived till we left. Unlike the bushveld, which were rolling grasslands with occasional trees, the suburbs of the city was heavily treed with a large variety of trees. The northern suburbs were also quite nice, filled with stately homes by any stretch of the imagination. The northern suburbs of Johannesburg certainly spoke of opulence compared to the squalor of the townships not far away.
My Life: A Memoir 