Jolted
In a crisis, solace can take unexpected forms. Plus: The Sun King commissions a font.
EXHIBITS
I’VE BEEN INVITED to create two solo exhibits this year. The first, opening at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center’s downtown gallery on March 14th and running through June 8th, reprises work from my book, Aves. Artist Thya Merz will curate the second show at Finistere next summer, based on work featured in my recent books, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and Animal Portraits. And don’t miss my pal Brian Goodman’s talk this Friday at Grover Gallery, also in Port Townsend. He’s exhibiting “If These Walls Could Talk”—a remarkable set of photographs from inside a decaying building. –Kerry
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
Shaken and stirred
ON OCTOBER 17, 1989, at 5:04pm, I was sitting at my desk at the Oakland clinic where I worked, writing a note in a patient’s chart. A nurse practitioner and midwife were still seeing obstetrical patients, but my patients—unusually for me— were all gone by 5 o’clock. I looked forward to going home early.
Suddenly the building started to shake violently. The plate glass window a few inches from my face shattered. Terrified pregnant women began to scream. The floor pitched and tilted. As the shaking just kept going, terror slowed my sense of time. I heard more screams and felt the waves of energy emanating from the floor, the walls, the air itself. The ground was threatening to open up and swallow me.
Just then a cry soared over the sobs of our prenatal patients. “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy…” I recognized the voice of the midwife, Mary Catherine O’Donahue, an Irish-American woman who’d been educated by nuns. She apparently hoped to calm herself and any nearby Christians by reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the top of her lungs. But to me, the sound coming from her throat was ominous, as if she were summoning the apocalypse. Mercifully, someone hugged her or shushed her. As her voice trailed off, so did my fear of the world’s imminent annihilation.
The shaking finally stopped and I staggered out of my office. A dozen women, both staff and patients, stood in the long hallway, stunned and silent. They looked frightened but I must have looked worse. From a doorway to my right, a girl, no more than fifteen, appeared. No one can be eleven months pregnant, but that was exactly how she looked to me. This fragile-looking teenager with a huge belly walked over to me and put her arm around my shoulders
“That’s OK, Dr. Ramsey, you’ll be alright.” She squeezed me a little.
I instantly realized I had to pull myself together. Here I was, the medical director of the goddamned place—the captain of a ship that (who knew?) might collapse at any minute. Here she was, a small Latina with her frail arms comforting me in my moment of panic. Forget the Virgin Mary. I needed to imitate this former virgin.
“OK, folks!” I shouted, “Let’s make sure everybody’s all accounted for! We might need to evacuate this place and nobody should be left behind.” My terror transformed into hyper-vigilance and I started to take charge.
The rest of the afternoon and evening was a blur. Despite complications, we managed to get everybody out of the building. Our level-headed janitor rescued two people trapped in an elevator between floors, one of them in a wheelchair. I persuaded several employees not to drive home to San Francisco, and we found friendly folks able to shelter them overnight in Oakland. Later, I realized their route home would have taken them over the Bay Bridge, which had partially collapsed.
I never found out what happened to the pregnant teenager. Something tells me she turned out to be an excellent mother.
–Barbara Ramsey
TRIPS
IN A LONG OVERDUE trip to Berkeley, where we lived until the fall of 2015, Barbara and I recently revisited our “old” life. We reconnected with family members and dear friends—often in fine restaurants of the East Bay—and with a couple of dogs we love. In a future issue, I hope to write more about the experience of visiting a place as familiar as your face that has moved on without you. –Kerry
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
THE SAN FRANCISCO band 4 Non Blondes’ hit What’s Up? was featured prominently in Sense8, a sex-celebrating sci-fi thriller by the Wachowski sisters, creators of The Matrix. The song, here performed live in Osaka by the Playing for Change Band—with an dazzling riff by guitarist Roberto Luti—repeatedly asks the question on a lot of our minds right now, “What’s going on?” We’re long-time fans of Playing for Change, which synchronizes songs from musicians performing around the world. Another favorite: The Band’s The Weight, recorded on five continents with musicians that included Ringo Starr and the late Robbie Robertson, whose son produced the video.
FOR THE LOVE OF TYPE
Romain du Roi
THE SELF-PROCLAIMED “Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, commissioned what is arguably the first custom typeface in 1692. Based on a mathematical grid (8x8 for caps), the Romain du Roi or “King’s Roman” was created for exclusive use of the royal printing house by the Bignon Commission, led by the clergyman and librarian Abbot Bignon. The typeface constituted a transition from Renaissance faces based on calligraphic forms to the classical “modern” ones, such as Baskerville, Bodoni, and Didot. Similarly, Louis XIV, who built the Palace of Versailles, is credited with leading France out of the Middle Ages with reimagined cities and arts commissions, while also conducting wars that triggered financial calamity.
Snippets
“I HAVE GOT TO MAKE everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. –The Marginalian
LOL. Of course, I saw the mistake only when I read my email, and immediately then. Sigh. Hope you had a good birthday.
Great story