I want to hold your hand
What the Beatles knew, a fight foiled, a charged underwater encounter, and the virtues of a wide angle. Plus we announce the winner of last week's Birds-of-a-Type poll.
PICTURE & WORDS
The road to Oz
ON A RECENT SUNDAY afternoon at Seattle Center, I was delighted to catch the setting sun lighting up the metallic curtains that sheathe the Museum of Pop Art. In the photo, the shimmering pink and orange surface might first attract your attention, or it could be the curious boy in the lower right trying to figure out the red letters oddly suspended from a yellow tower. (I couldn’t.) You might notice how the clouds form diagonals that take you across and back again to the red letters. Or, from the boy, your eye might follow the young family up the twisty path whose curves echo the yellow climbing structure on the right and the blue-white side of the museum on the left, noticing the different ways that the two parts of the building reflect the clouded sky and trees. From there, your gaze might tumble down the silver slide, passing over the kids on top, and land on a little girl in her Sunday-best pink dress.
A wide angle lens can beautifully foreground a person or object while complicating the picture’s composition and story with compelling middle and background activity. Our knowledge of the actual relative sizes of things is playfully tricked. The happy result can be picture that engages your eye over and over, following sight lines around the frame to suss out what’s happening in each part and how the parts fit together. The wide angle takes full advantage of the camera’s capacity to register more detail in a fraction of a second than we can possibly perceive across our field of vision. The best such pictures force us to slow down and look more intensively. A glance on the phone misses too much. Unfortunately, that complexity makes photographs like this one difficult to read and appreciate on small screens and in the pre-formatted grids of social media sites. But that’s not a good enough reason to give up on making them—especially when it’s this much Sunday fun.
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
The vaccine line
By Barbara Ramsey
MEASLES IS A TERRIBLE disease. Its complications include blindness, pneumonia, and encephalitis. It’s also more contagious than most infectious diseases. If ten people are infected with tuberculosis—not just exposed to it, but actually infected—odds are that only one will get sick. If you simply expose ten unvaccinated kids to measles, nine of them will probably get sick. Once they’re infected, up to twenty-five percent of them will require hospitalization.
Few people remember it now, but there was a significant measles outbreak in New York City in 1989. It spread in waves and pulses to Philadelphia, the rest of the East Coast, and then westward to Chicago and beyond. Because vaccination rates were fairly good, the spread was slow. But in 1991, it arrived in the Bay Area. The local epicenter was Oakland, where my clinic, Native American Health Center, was located.
People were scared. Images of kids in the ICU crowded the nightly news. They wanted the vaccine. Our clinic, in the middle of the hardest hit area, was ready. We set up special Saturday morning clinics and radically stripped down the way we processed patients.
We had only two requirements. All kids had to be accompanied by an adult who at least claimed to be the parent or guardian. We didn’t ask for proof. And the parent or guardian had to bring the child’s vaccination record card with them. In California at the time, vaccination cards were bright yellow and though the cards could be mutilated, lost, or chewed by the dog, most people did an astonishingly good job of holding on to them.
As the gatekeeper at our special Saturday clinics, my job was to eyeball the parent or guardian and review the yellow cards for the one, three, or seven kids they brought. Once I’d made sure the child hadn’t yet been vaccinated, they were ushered into a room for the procedure.
On the very first Saturday, we had a line out the door. I felt great—we were providing a vital preventive service that would keep a bunch of kids out of the hospital. And after working out some first-day glitches, the line moved quickly, the kids were fairly well behaved, and the staff was at peak efficiency.
But after two hours of standing at my little podium reviewing yellow cards, a problem arose. Two women stood directly in front of me, each with several children in tow. A few minutes earlier, I’d noticed them speaking loudly and aggressively to one another. Now they were in front, jostling to be next in line.
“I’m next!” said the taller one.
“No you’re not!” snapped the other. “I was here first.”
“You’re a lying bitch. I was here first.”
Then they both turned to me and demanded to be next.
While I’m fundamentally conflict-averse, and would ordinarily have tried to ignore this, I worried this was about to boil over into fisticuffs. Somebody had to do something and that somebody was me. Fortunately, in that instant, an idea spontaneously came to me. I looked each woman in the eye and said. “Which one of you is going to be gracious enough to let the other one go first?”
The taller one squinted and hesitated, not quite comprehending. The other one had a pensive look, considering her options. Then suddenly, she spoke up. “That’s okay, let her go first.” she said with a superior tone. “She can go ahead of me if she wants it that bad.”
The taller one came forward. “Yeah, let me go first. Here’s my kids’ cards,” she said. But she looked dazed and unsure exactly how she’d won the battle. I waived her and her kids through.
Relieved that my idea had worked, I turned back to the second woman. “Some people!” she harrumphed. But I noticed there was a huge smile on her face. I had one, too.
PERSONAL HISTORY
It’s in our hands
IN MY EARLIEST memory, I’m walking down the alley behind our St. Louis flat with a little girl, holding her hand. We’re on our way to kindergarten. I can’t say with any certainty that it truly happened. I do know the image lodged in my brain at an early age and stuck. In the movies, a first kiss signifies mutual desire. In life, a first and lasting gesture of affection is to wrap your fingers together. As a teenage boy eager for such attention from a girl, the feeling when it happened was electric. It made me happy inside.
Even earlier, with my hand in my mother’s, I knew I was safe. Listening to the chatter of small birds—bushtits are my favorite—I know they are telegraphing to each other as they move, “I’m here! Okay, now I’m over here.” Holding mom’s hand was likewise a way to reassure each other, “I’m here.” Because her hand was so much bigger, mine could slip out for an anxious instant. The connection was dropped and had to be re-established quickly. And hand-holding was passed down the family line. I was the oldest of six kids and in a crowd it was my job to make sure all connections were secure. I’m reminded of those days when I see a group of tiny school kids on a field trip in a hand-holding train.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the Beatles second hit song after “She Loves Me.” By rights, they should have released them in reverse order—how do you know she loves you until she holds your hand? It was a song my mother loved to sing with us in our VW bus when we took little jaunts to the store or to the creek to swim. The Beatles must have intuited that the first move in their lifelong relationship with us was to offer to hold our hands.
The last time I held my mother’s hand was in a hospital room twenty-two years ago. She gripped tightly at first. When her hand finally let go, she wasn’t here anymore.
Barbara and I still hold hands when we walk side by side. Our fingers reflexively reach out to lace together. When I see other couples in the neighborhood holding hands, young and old, I feel happy that I, too, still have a hand to hold.
On the day of Barbara’s heart surgery, I knew her life was in peril, but tried to avoid dwelling on the thought. When I’d said goodbye to her in pre-op at 7:30 that morning, the surgery was projected to take four hours. At 3:30 in the afternoon, the head surgeon finally called. She told me the procedure had been more difficult and complicated than they’d anticipated, but successful. I asked if Barbara was out of danger. She hesitated and then offered that the riskiest part was over.
Barbara was too sedated and groggy to visit after she was moved to the ICU that evening, so I went back to her sister’s house where I was staying. At four in the morning I woke abruptly. I instinctively grabbed my phone and saw that the hospital had called a few minutes earlier. There was no message.
When I hurriedly called the number, a nurse in the ICU answered. She told me to hold on. A long minute later, she held the phone to Barbara’s ear. I barely recognized her voice, a weak and broken whisper, but I understood her. “I need you to come hold my hand,” she said.
A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS
BILL CURTSINGER was one of the first people to photograph animals under the Antarctic ice. For over three decades, he worked there and in other undersea locations around the globe for National Geographic magazine, producing thirty stories, six of them on the cover. On one of them, while 120 feet below the surface in Antarctica, this enormous leopard seal banged into Bill’s strobe light and he took the shot.
In this picture and many others, Bill’s photographs transcend traditional wildlife photography. As National Geographic Fellow Brian Skerry puts it, “He took on immense challenges under difficult conditions and returned with photographic poetry.” More recently, Bill has ducked the limelight and runs a boatyard coffeehouse here in Port Townsend with his wife. But a couple years ago, we mounted an exhibit of his work at a local gallery and published a small book of his photographs. The leopard seal is on the cover, and both the book and fine prints from the exhibit are available on his web site.
BIRDS-OF-A-TYPE CARDS
THE WINNER of last week’s poll was… a tie! Deco Duck was ahead most of the week until a Nouveau Nuthatch scrambled up for the tie. Pop Plover was a close third, with poor Bauhaus Bluebird bringing up the tail. This week’s poll emphasizes fonts we love. Please cast a vote for your favorite. I’ll publish the results and run another poll before the final runoff to follow.
"A long minute later, she held the phone to Barbara’s ear. I barely recognized her voice, a weak and broken whisper, but I understood her. “I need you to come hold my hand,” she said."
This made me tremble with tears. Thank you for so generously sharing this intimate moment.
Waking up from surgery years ago, a surgery that had the potential to leave one side of my face paralyzed, I became aware of someone working around me, changing my sweat-soaked hospital gown, rearranging the sheets on my bed in the PACU. I moved the muscles of my face and found that everything was in working order. Unable to open my eyes more than a crack, as the nurse's hands worked near my own hands, I reached for her hand. She stopped, her hand in mine, for the briefest but most reassuring of moments. I was back. I had made it. And I was in good hands until I was fully awake.
Although I did not know her name, I wrote her a thank you note and took it to the PACU along with a small gift. PACU staff found her by the date and time of my surgery. In my note, I thanked her for holding my hand, even for just a second, and explained how deeply comforted I was in that moment.
She came to my office (I, too, worked in the hospital) not long after with a card and a gift for me! She told me that she had never, in her entire career, received a thank you note because most patients are not aware enough to register what is happening so soon after surgery.
Thanks for this post which brought me back to that moment - that sweet connection that holding hands offers us.