Albert Hoffman, Fly in Peace

photo from CBC News



Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD in 1938, died this past Tuesday. As inventors go, I'd rank him with Edison and the Wright brothers who brought us light and flight.

Thanks Dr. Hoffman for enabling me to see all the conventions of my life in the center of a Hostess cupcake I rolled in my hand. Thanks for giving me the lens to watch a pelican fly overhead and recognize its pitch-perfect line in the universe's poem. Thanks for empowering my ears to hear a stormy day bathe in sunlight as Layla poured out of the record player. I know you meant it for medicine and not for tie dyed frolics (let alone how the CIA used it), but I considered your invention the most amazing elixir under a throbbing sun for a transmigrant from Yeshiva.

Even though the terror-lined passageways multiplied over the years, I'll never forget the marlmalade skies. For those of us who can't get our legs into a lotus position or stop swatting at mental mosquitoes when attempting to meditate, you gave us a view from the mountaintop and a glorious taste of transcendence.

"Young At Heart"

Last night we saw Young At Heart, a very entertaining documentary about a chorus of old folks whose repertoire is rock songs. The average age of these singers is 80, so as they belt out numbers from Sonic Youth to Springsteen, they also deal with memory lapses and mortality issues. One solos a Coldplay tune with an oxygen tank hooked into his nose.

There was one scene in particular, that makes this real-life documentary unforgettable. One morning - just before they are off to a gig at a prison - they find out that a member of their troupe has passed away the night before. They give a blistering performance, starting with Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" that utterly charms and disarms a skeptical bunch of prisoners in their yard. Before their last number, they reveal that one of their members has died and dedicate the song to him. As they sing Dylan's "Forever Young" the camera pans the audience one by one, and their emotions are visceral.

Forever Young
May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

Encore!

Yesterday I went up to Marin to see a play by the drama students at Saint Mark's School in Marin. They have an annual performance at the posh little Showcase Theatre near the civic center. My dear friend Jessica Sage has been the drama teacher there for the past eight years. I've seen a number of the performances, but this one was the last because Jessica resigned in order to travel for a couple of years with her partner Barry. They'll have a couple of lengthy stopovers when Barry performs for one Shakespearean company or another. Those gigs get set up a couple of years ahead. One might assume because they've lived in Marin - that they'll be traveling "first class" living off their inheritance or stock portfolios, but as lifelong theatre-people, cottage-renters, and artists, they'll be traveling frugal-class. They decided that the time had come to take a big leap or let those traveling dreams pass by. Barry is in his sixties. First major stop will be the solar eclipse in Siberia this August.

At the end of the play there was a standing ovation and the 8th grade actors were at the front of the stage bowing and pointing back to all the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grade actors behind them who were part of the 60-kid ensemble in the musical we'd just seen. Then one of the 8th graders called up Ms. Sage to accept a boquet of roses. She walked up there with a somewhat sheepish, modest grin (that might have been practiced for this occasion). But a young boy from the back of the stage, barely visible due to his height-challenged fourth-grade stature, must have called to her. He was crying and wanted to hug her, knowing she was departing soon. Suddenly a gaggle of little ones were holding on to her and I saw at least one other who was crying. That's when Jessica started to sob, even as she tried to compose herself.

The eighth graders each wanted to say something to her and they took turns telling the audience about Jessica's influence on their lives. Some have been in her classes all eight years. One called herself a "drama geek" who always tried to have lunch near Jessica. Another talked about Jessica's impending "epoch journey" and thanked her for preparing them for their own parallel "epoch journey" into high school. Jess was totally unprepared for their heartfelt remarks about how she'd given them courage and made them able to perform and dream about acting.

I was so proud and so happy she was witnessing these testimonies about her impact. What a reward for her high-energy years of work in the acting trenches. Not many folks who invest so much in their jobs get to hear that from the people they've touched and changed.

It was wonderful to see the really talented kids perform and sing so well. They knocked our socks off with their unexpected skill levels. But what is even more amazing is to see the performances of the kids who appear to be shy or gawky - taking big risks on stage with pubescent voices and bodies they no longer control. When these kids belt out their lines and their songs, you know that there was some magic worked by a drama teacher who believed in them and got them to believe as well.

Nuclear Warheads in the Mail

Last week a mystery was cleared up for me. It was revealed that the Defense Department had sent two nuclear bomb detonation devices through the mail to Taiwan even though Taiwan had only purchased battery-related devices for some US made helicopters. When the Taiwanese realized what they'd received, they notified our Defense Department. "Whoa! We just want to spy on and straif our dissidents. We don't want to nuke their whole home town!"

You've got to figure when a department the size of our Defense Department is fulfilling the number of weapons-related orders that it handles every year, mistakes are bound to happen. Even though I've yet to get some book other than the one I've ordered through Amazon, book titles are no doubt a lot easier to keep straight than all the different kinds of missiles, tanks, and helicopter gunships that we sell, let alone all their parts.

That clears up the confusion I felt when I received a box about a month back, from our Defense Department. I'd filed a freedom of information request about titanium tipped warheads and was expecting some thick files. Imagine my surprise when I cut through the packing tape and found a warhead itself! I can just picture that humongous warehouse with shelves just full of every which kind of cluster bomb, landmine, and waterboarding apparatus. It's probably as big as five Walmarts and probably underground somewhere in Idaho, with sub par florescent lighting. I can just see how some overworked federal employee grabbed a little warhead when he meant to grab the operation manual that was probably sitting right next to it.

At the time, my neighbor thought it might have nothing at all to do with my FOIA request, but instead was in lieu of the $600 stimulus package I'm due to get. He surmised that what with the bailout of the banking system a few weeks back when Bear Sterns went belly up, dollars are in short supply. He said it made sense that some of us might receive in-kind goods rather than cash. I told him I'd have been happy with an iPhone. That would be a lot easier to sell on Craigslist than a nuclear weapon.

Boy was I wrong about that. Within a half hour of posting it on Craigslist, I'd received a dozen emails from all over the place. And folks were offering more than my $600 asking price!

Now I recognize that the whole thing was just a bureaucratic mistake. Wish I had thought of that before I sold it to the guy with those mirrored sunglasses.

Omar and "The Wire"

Sally and I got a major addiction to HBO's, "The Wire." "True d'at!" The writers' strike opened up some TV time for watching DVD's of this incredible series that revolves around street crime and politics in Baltimore. There are so many compelling characters and several thematic levels that can be chewed on and digested. Yummy! What an incredible study of institutions and the ethics confronted (and usually discarded) by the players in each of those institutions.......law enforcement, street gangs, the dockworker union, city hall, and the schools. There are a number of heroes, but none that wear ten gallon hats and ride white horses. Some of them are even drunks, thieves, and killers. There's also many more folks who are just milking their respective institution, or trying to increase their power within it, or hold on to what they've got. It's such a dead-on reflection of the characters we see in our 9-5 lives. We've just finished Season 4, watching two hours on many nights and dealing with a little less sleep.

Both of us agree on our most favorite character: Omar. He's rips off drug dealers for his income. But he operates with a strong sense of ethics and he speaks like a poet. Plus he's fearless, even as he's hunted by just about everyone.

Wish there was an Omar t-shirt I could wear. Better yet, we could print up a bunch and sell them from a shopping cart rolling through the streets like another character, Bubbles, does. Only Palo Alto streets don't have many customers walking around outside, and I doubt the joggers would stop.

"Driven Out" Chinese Purge

I wrote a blog some months back about a town near where I grew up, called Pekin. The high school's moniker was the Pekin Chinks and nobody seemed to recognize they were using a racial slur as they cheered their teams. One longtime Pekin resident wrote a bitter comment decrying my comments about institutionalized racism. It made me want to find out more about the roots of the term "chink."

I still haven't found any answers, but in a well written and researched book, called "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans", by Jean Pfaelzer (2007), I found out about vicious cruelties to Chinese residents in Washington and California justified by some of our highest courts. There are dismaying parallels to events today.

In late 1885, the mayor of Tacoma, Washington, led a mob of 300 into Chinatown one night and forced everyone out of their homes and marched them out of town, forcing them to leave their businesses and belongings. The Chinese brought it to court, citing the U.S. government's Burlingame Treaty which made it illegal to deprive Chinese immigrants of the same privileges in respect to residence as others in our country. The mayor's lawyers cited the Dred Scot case of 1857 that allowed slave owners to fetch their slaves who escaped to free territories because slaves did not enjoy the same rights as citizens. The mayor's side won - just like Bush's side won against the prisoners of Guantanamo who thought they'd have the right of habeus corpus and a civil trial as prisoners of the United States. I guess the "supreme" in "Supreme Court" refers only to power and not wisdom or justice.

In San Jose, California, near where I live, the first statewide anti-Chinese convention was held in 1886, attended by anti Chinese clubs and the Anti-Coolie league. In 1880, the California legislature had made it illegal to hire a Chinese person. Ranchers, growers, and canneries were forced into mass firings. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Only the nationality has changed. But in San Jose, the Chinatown neighborhood was burned down six times and rebuilt seven. San Jose passed ordinances limiting Chinese laundries and fireworks. They posted police in doorways of Chinese owned businesses to discourage would-be customers. When two drunk men shot at and assaulted a Chinese man in 1879, they were each fined $10.

Three Cups of Tea

photo by Trudy Rubin

Just finished the book, "Three Cups of Tea," the story of former mountain climber, Greg Mortenson whose life took a radical turn when tribal villagers in Pakistan nursed him back to health in 1993 following a harrowing attempt to scale K2, a Himalayan peak. He told them he wanted to build a school for their children and that he'd return to do so. First he went back to Berkeley, California where he lived a hand-to-mouth lifestyle picking up night shifts as a nurse-paramedic, living in shared apartments and sometimes out of his car & storage locker. He made a list of rich and famous people and wrote fundraising letters, amassing about $20 for his efforts.

Eventually he succeeds and the school is built, but there are all kinds of riveting and entertaining stories along the way - as Mortenson wends his way through inter-cultural and actual minefields. His integrity and purpose draw people to him on both sides of the world and though he continues to live on next to nothing, he finds ways to build school after school in villages throughout Muslim Pakistan and Afghanistan where none existed before, and where girls and education were never imagined in the same sentence. The story takes on another dimension as he sees the beginnings of what became the Taliban and Al Queda as well as the aftermath of the US war in Afghanistan.
Read new articles on Greg's blog.

For me it was more than an inspiring, well-told story. I loved that he started out typing letters that got him nowhere. And that he was doing it from the Berkeley haunts I know so well. It made it all so real and accessible. Sure, there are many ways to view "Dr. Greg" in a transcendent "hero" category. His skill set alone - mountain climber, nurse, language-learner - put him in a unique niche. But instead, he could have been a Greyhound bus rider, a writer, and a great cook and somehow engaged with people from another walk of life and decided to make a dream come true for them (and him). As the book goes on, Dr. Greg becomes larger than life in terms of his dedication, asceticism, and bravery, but at the outset he's someone we've all known or almost been. Perhaps the momentum of his work carried him into a more mythical level of "hero-person," but the ingredients that generated his life path are not secret ones. They just usually get moved further back on the shelf.

Birthday Partners

Antonin Checkov

My birthday was January 17th and I happened to catch a short feature called "Today's Almanac" on KALW, the smaller NPR station in San Francisco. I don't remember ever hearing it before as I don't often tune to KALW. But I found out about some very cool people whose birthday I share....





Anton Checkov, the great Russian "slice of life" story and play writer;
James Earl Jones, the actor who played Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope;
Muhammed Ali, the Champ
Al Capone, Chicago gangster
Benjamin Franklin (of course I knew that already; his b'day is written on many calendars)
Betty White

I wish I could have attended some of their birthday parties.

P.S. Two major earthquakes and the patent for the San Francisco cable car happened on Jan 17. January is named for Janus (Ianuarius), the god of the doorway.

birthday gift story

My dad turns 80 this April and last weekend I watched a videotaped interview I did with him ten years ago. My brothers want me to make a video for his birthday party. The party will be part of a full weekend which, of course, includes a Sabbath in an Orthodox setting. Family gatherings that fall on Jewish holidays, or even Sabbath, always cause me a lot of anxiety and apprehension - especially when Sally and my sons are coming too.

But the tape draws me in completely. I never watched it before. He talks about starting out in business with only a religious Jewish high school education, borrowing money to buy a kosher butcher shop in a little town he'd probably never been to - Peoria, Il, after working in the Chicago stockyards for three years. Marrying my mom as teen agers; paying $37 per month for a basement apartment as newlyweds; discovering that he could sell ad specialties with only catalogs in hand and starting "SelMor Advertising"; finding investors and buying a couple of machines to print ads on giveaway plastic items; ("The Graduate" with its immortal line about "plastics" had a special meaning for me.) Somehow, it's easy to see my dad as a young man braving a largely unknown world - just a few layers beneath the wrinkles and white hair of this later version. Stories pass by so quickly in retrospect, like the pages of a thick novel blown over to the final chapter outside in a sudden breeze.

It touches me deeply to hear of his early years. The story of a young man wanting to make a life....wanting "to become a man" as he says in the tape. A story so universal and far removed from our father-son dynamics.

Stories became nearly impossible to exchange across the chasm between my secular life and his orthodox life, a gulf that widened over 35 years as we traveled different trajectories. But this early chapter from an age- as young as my sons are now- is a time-warped-sort-of-bridge.

Tomorrow, I turn 55, and the connected, compassionate feelings that Ab's "young man stories" have imparted feel like a wonderful birthday gift one day early......or 35 years late depending which way the breeze is blowing.

New Year Resolve

Two years ago we received a holiday card from the Wolf family. The three of them were pictured on their front stoop in a wide shot that showed Lou's new prosthetic leg. The caption read, "We've got a leg up on the new year." Lou had his leg amputated months earlier following a sudden blood clot problem that occurred during a long flight from Southeast Asia back to the states. Lou is not the type to let major surgeries and life changes keep him down, and before long he was asked to mentor other amputees at Walter Reed Hospital and Army Medical Center in his hometown, D.C. (There is some irony there, since Lou was a conscientious objector in the early 60's and edited a magazine that, for decades, reported on CIA operations and "dirty business" throughout Latin America.)

Over Christmas and New Years 2007, the Wolf family joined us for a vacation at a small, eco-tourist resort 90 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, called Mar de Jade. Lou gave demonstrations of how his new computerized prosthetic could adjust itself for stair climbing etc. and Lou was determined to walk without assistance on the very uneven unpaved grounds, though he had to be caught a couple of times before hitting the ground. He asked my sons, Alex and Zac, if they might be willing to help him fulfill a dream of his. Could they help him swim in the ocean?

So, one morning, they hired a fisherman to take them out in his little boat. They helped Lou into the boat and then over the side and the three of them swam together for awhile, in what Lou described as a "peak experience." Lou was smiling ear to ear at lunchtime, while his wife wore an expression of tolerant relief.

With another new year upon us - a time for resolutions and wishes - I'm hoping to see a lot of Lou's optimism and uncomplicated resolve - in myself, my family, and friends - to take the steps toward what we see in our best dreams and hopes.

Smoking sections and Recycling

I sat next to a guy on the plane who remarked that plane travel used to be so much more fun when you could smoke. My first reaction was to ask him where he was from since I couldn't remember any smoking on planes. He said it was okay until 1995 and then I remembered those smoking sections on every plane. Though it's a bit scary to think my mind can be wiped clean like an eraser board after not seeing such a common image for a while - there is also something hopeful that something so woven into the cultural fabric can be removed. Maybe unfettered capitalism can actually be smoked out too.

On a related note, New Orleans doesn't have recycling pickups in most (maybe all) neighborhoods. I assume this is a post-Katrina phenomenon. But boy did it feel weird to throw bottles and newspapers into the trash buckets even though the number of years we've had recycling services aren't all that many. It's ingrained.

Coincidences on the Road

It's 1:30 AM and I just got back from bowling with my boys and Erin. The bowling alley had kept its 1960's era motif - none of those automatic pin counters and monitors above the lanes. We kept score with paper and pencil. Next to the very weathered lanes was a large dance floor and a little stage with a live blues band. Snooks, the bandleader, was as old and battle tested as the antique bowling pins, but nimble as a track star on his keyboard. People danced waving white white napkins and cloths as I guess they do in the "second line" brass bands that play for funerals in New Orleans.

On Christmas, when we exchanged Hannukah and Christmas gifts, Zac gave me a framed photo he'd taken of a "hippie looking woman" dancing at the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Fest last April.


Who do we see at this bowling-blues place, dressed much more demurely, but still partying hard, but this same random woman from Zac's photo. We introduced ourselves and told her how her likeness would now grace a home in California. She loved it. Turns out she lives in Austin and was just visiting her sister in New Orleans which makes it an even bigger coincidence.

Long ago I learned that when traveling, expect coincidences. Some cork gets unplugged and as routines get spilled out on the ground, the unexpected pours in - finally free to show its face. Or we're finally free to turn and notice.

Two days ago I went for a jog and stopped to walk through one of the many cemeteries lining both sides of Canal streets. Cemeteries with their countless stories etched in stone are always a draw for me, but New Orleans cemeteries, with their above-ground crypts and monuments are an amazing site in themselves. After a few random twists and turns through crowded rows of crypts, whose family do I come upon, but the Nevilles - ancestors of my favorite New Orleans band! A year or two ago I read a spellbinding oral history of the Neville Brothers. There before me was Arthur J. Neville Senior and Arthur Junior. Out of easily 10,000-50,000 graves in those neighboring cemeteries on Canal Street, I end up at the foot of the Nevilles. What's more, Arthur Sr. has the same birthday as me, or vice versa. I'm not sure how distant these Nevilles are from the brothers in the band, but the oldest of the Neville Brothers is also named Art.
Tomorrow is my last day in New Orleans. What a treat to have spent so much time with Alex and Zac and so myuch better than phone calls.

Alex the organizer. new Years.

Young Love, Family, and Good Ears are Blessings

My son Zac and the love of his life, Erin, moved into their own cozy apartment, after sharing a house with a fellow Habitat for Humanity worker - roommate for the first year or so of their relationship. He is 24 and she is 21. So young. On the first day of my visit to New Orleans, I had a start when I walked into their bedroom and saw a large photo of me and Zac's mom when we lived together in St. Louis - all decked out in our embroidered hippie clothes and headbands. We were about the same age.

Zac's brother Alex is also visiting from San Diego - his first time in New Orleans. Alex and Erin got along famously during this first meeting.



Zac & Alex at one of Zac's Habitat for Humanity Houses in Progress

We went to an NBA basketball game the first night. I had a wonderful feeling sitting next to the three of them high up in the New Orleans Arena (next door to the infamous Superdome), enjoying their laughter and the great energy they were sharing, only slightly bittersweetened by the fact that I couldn't make out much of what they were saying, now that my ears aren't doing the same quality job that I took for granted all those years when I was younger.

New Orleans - not Mr. Rogers neighborhood

Deborah, Jan, Alex, and I all made our way on separate flights to New Orleans yesterday. Zac and his vibrant girlfriend, Erin made a lot of airport trips in heavy traffic. We got to see their new one bedroom apartment on a different end of the Uptown neighborhood than their big old rental house. The house has four units that were recently restored very nicely. The houses just next to them are still vacant, boarded up, and one is completely crushed in on itself. It looks like at least half the houses in their neighborhood are still boarded up.

House next door to Zac & Erin:


House across the street from Zac & Erin:


Jan's friend generously gave us her home in the Mid-City neighborhood. It's amazing - twelve foot high ceilings and large rooms on both floors, lots of wonderful built in shelving; big, inviting kitchens on both floors; lots of art. Her house is one of only two inhabited ones on her block. They had a couple feet of water flooding their home after Katrina but have renovated it.

Yellow house we are staying in:


Same Yellow House (photo) during Katrina flood:
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7fCDxl_ZhwDzM6S78HazkzutlpV8BSI0JJ5yGNUAkdpFH7IOMxxTTXxToT38BkX7S63Re3jS-vSBEc8m2GObH11LECGkvnEO-5B0VvTMhwZt1rreudPyd4BAV6Zpr1kMPNT0/s1600-h/ourhouseundrwtr.jpg">

The good news is that some people are moving back home and reclaiming their neighborhoods. But meanwhile, there is something surreal about these neighborhoods. I wonder what the kids who live here think about coming home from school to a block with no other people.

Goldman Sachs distributes wealth to each other

According to Wikipedia, Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, has been on the Fortune 100 list of best places to work since 1998. No wonder, since the average salary of its 30,522 employees was $661,400 this year. That's a bit misleading since the median was somewhere in the $300,000's. The happiest employee must be the CEO, Lloyd Blankfein who took home over $70 million this year. He must have put in a lot of overtime... many a late night moving money from hither to thither and back again.

It had to be the overtime, because if he only worked a 40 hour week and took two weeks vacation, he'd have been earning $35,000 per hour.

Phone Home

photo by David W. Quinn


AT&T announced that it is getting rid of its telephone booth and public pay phone business. The telephone booth is an integral feature of my personal urban geography. Throughout my high school dormitory years, I depended on pay phones for my favorite parts of my week - my link to worlds outside the cloistered yeshiva-seminary. There was one in the hall with a long shelf below it that I could squeeze myself onto for my Sunday night calls with my Mom. There was a booth on the first floor where I had more private conversations with Estee, the girl I befriended who wound up in an adolescent mental ward after hurting herself. We'd exchange late night stories about our respective institutions. Somebody showed me how to drop a nickel down the nickel slot and in the same fluid motion, hit the coin return gizmo as the nickel was falling, and the dial tone came on. Later we learned the formula for creating credit card numbers and made countless long distance calls on some unsuspecting business' dime. I'm sorry AT&T, if I hastened your departure from the business. Actually the pay phone business kept growing in spite of all the felonious adolescents of the '60's. Cell phones have been the undoing of the business and in ten short years we've gone from 2.6 million U.S. pay phones to under a million. Lord knows we could use the booths today as much as ever - even phoneless ones - so all those cell phone users could take their business meetings off the sidewalks (especially the "bluetoothers" who look insane as they walk along gesticulating and shouting and scaring the subdued homeless folks who have to share those downtown walkways.

The Flow of Memory

I've heard that smells are the most effective trigger for old memories, but sounds can work too. It just might take longer for a sound-memory to activate. Last night at 3 AM, one finally kicked in for me.

Living with Sally, I've found that it's best when (not "if") I wake up in the night to pee, to find my way to the bathroom and fumble for the toilet and sit down rather than stand. I don't want to turn on any lights and wake Sally or myself any more than necessary. Also the seat will be down. Also, in the dark, it's just a much safer practice than aiming in the dark. Last night while sitting and peeing, the sound brought me all the way back to my childhood home and hearing my rather modest mother pee. (She never left the door open as my brothers and even my dad were wont to do.) Her sitting made a different sound than what the rest of us intoned and I must have noted it at the time and filed it away for a 3PM retrieval, at least 45 years later. (I left home at 13 for a high school yeshiva-seminary.) If I've peed four times a day and add a bunch for all the nighttime excursions over the past decade, that would come to at least 70,000 urinations before everything synced up for a memory of my long departed Mom. Not the one I would have chosen, given a choice, but the truth is, I like just about any that ever bring her directly into my brain for a moment. At 3 AM in the dark, I smiled and appreciated the sound.

Confronting Prejudice and Bias

November 15th was the "Not In Our Schools" event - a collaboration of three high schools - for which I was the project coordinator. Over 300 students, teachers, and parents came to the Los Altos High School Theater to see a screening of the documentary, "Not In Our Town..." and participate in a community conversation facilitated by Milton Reynolds of "Facing History and Ourselves." The documentary, produced by my old friend, Patrice O'Neill, portrays communities in Northern California where a hate crime occurred and where the community found a creative, empowering way to respond. It provided a springboard for a conversation about the kinds of prejudices we encounter every day at school and even inside ourselves.

There were numerous poignant comments made during the community conversation that I will not forget. One young woman stood and in a voice wavering with pained emotion, told us of her friend, a bisexual, Muslim boy, who endured endless teasing and some bullying at school. One day, he jumped in front of the CalTrain and killed himself. Though she was his friend, she blamed herself for not having intervened and stood up to those who belittled him.

I think that in standing up and sharing her painful experience, this brave young woman motivated many to do something we haven't dared to before. How many of us have witnessed slurs and prejudice that injure people we know, but said nothing? It's not easy, or comfortable to be an "upstander." But that small act of courage can make a world of difference.

(The event included a great burrito dinner catered by students from Los Altos High and a mountain of desserts baked by students at Saint Francis high.....also a student art exhibit from students at Mountain View High and a short performance by "Camp Everytown" kids.)

Housing in Palo Alto

Currently, a lot of community leaders are furious at the Association of Bay Area Governments which expects Palo Alto to add 3700 units of housing over the next five or so years. The fact that other communities are bearing the cost of housing while Palo Alto enjoys the revenues of a jobs-housing imbalance doesn't carry any weight locally. The fact that we are contributing heavily to global warming by requiring so many workers to commute in has not yet caused an outcry. The fact that housing sprawl to cheaper areas keeps gobbling up open space and farmland is a total yawn. In our recent City Council election, none of the 11 candidates talked up "smart growth", let alone high density housing along transportation corridors.

In beautiful Palo Alto, most neighborhood leaders are very vocal against housing developments, especially anything high density. We don't have the room. We don't want more cars on our already congested roads. Our schools can't handle more kids per classroom. High density housing (30 units per acre) doesn't fit in architecturally with the rest of the neighborhood. If any space along a transit line becomes available, we should bring in more retail outlets because that brings more sales tax revenues. Housing brings additional expenses (read taxes and fees) what with police, fire, and utilities services to provide. It's probably a pretty familiar refrain in communities across the country.

But in Palo Alto, housing values have gone up more than almost anywhere in the world. A house that sold in the 20 thousands in the early 70's is now worth well over a million dollars. (Median cost in 1970 was $33K and in 2006 it was $1.3 million dollars) In most cases they are bought by wealthy young couples who knock them down and build a much bigger place in its stead. Over the past 35 years, Palo Alto has become a financially gated community. Our kids can't come back and live here unless they become corporate or finance managers like many of their parents.
A digression:


This is what the house looked like that I rented with my kids for 13 years. (It's actually our old neighbors' house, but exact same model.)


This is the new house going up and replacing our old 950 sq ft. rental.


This is the new house next to my old neighbors' house. This "Mutt and Jeff" effect is a common sight througout Palo Alto.

Every day an army of teachers, nurses, waiters, clerks, nannies, gardeners, utility workers, police, and non-profit employees commute in and out of town to make everything function for the successful residents. The Palo Alto population balloons up to 90,000 in the daytime, even as many of the 60,000 residents fan out among the familiar corporations of the Silicon Valley.

Maybe the growing concern about global warming will wake people up to see that our "neighborhoods" extend far beyond Palo Alto and we need to care about the region and the planet. It would not be a bad thing at all if the baker's kid attended the same school as the Google manager's kid.

We'll see how the political battle plays out this Spring and Summer as the City updates its housing element (that dictates how much housing the city is prepared to develop) as required by the state.

Underpaid UC Chancellors

Easy Job - Minimum Wages



Hard Job - Perks Galore!



The governing board of the University of California system has a plan to boost the chancellors' pay about 33% over the next four years. That would bring UC Berkeley's Chancellor Robert Birgeneau to about $482,000 in addition to whatever other perks and benefits he gets. (It's a safe bet he gets his own locker at the University's gym facilities.) The governing board claims that the raises are needed to keep pace with salaries at private universities. I guess if you pay bupkas, you'll end up with some kind of boob running the college..... someone like say a Ph.D from the physics department (full professor average salary this year - 90K - 165K according to a pay scale chart. Or someone green behind the ears who could never handle the scope of responsibility, like say.... Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi ($212,000 salary in '06-'07). After all, an underpaid Chancellor would undermine the amount of knowledge UC graduates come away with. We also need them to figure out ways to pull protesting tree sitters off of their perches. Don't forget all the ribbon cutting they have to get right as well.

A new law went into effect last month that forces the Regents to vote in public meetings on executive pay increases. The law was a result of public outcry following a series of articles in the Chronicle that revealed "as much as $4 million in special perks and extra compensation had been awarded to departing officials of the California State University system during the past decade without public disclosure." (see SF Chronicle. This week there will be two public votes on these latest raises.