Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

How did you celebrate your 30th birthday?

I had a wonderful, wonderful birthday that year.

I was living in Berkeley, working for Katie Hall at Laurel Management in San Francisco. Jason and I had been dating for over a year, but he was still living in Sunnyvale. My actual birthday was on Friday, but the celebration was spread over several days.

On Wednesday night Jason and a couple of friends from the Foothill Conservatory theatre program joined me to see Berkeley Rep’s production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It was marvelous. One of the best Shakespearean productions I’ve ever seen. It was very stylized, but in a way that suggested “stripped down to the text” rather than a superimposed vision. There were only seven people in the cast and they did an amazing job of switching between characters. Both voice and movement were incredibly polished and beautiful and the lighting, in particular, was stunning. More than twenty years later I still remember the bare stage defined by a giant hawser of rope that the cast hauled about the stage to evoke different settings.

On Thursday night Jason and I went to the Oakland Arena for Stars on Ice, the professional skating show featuring Scott Hamilton, Kristi Yamaguchi, Tara Lipinski and Ilia Kulik. It was lots of fun and had a number of very original performances, playing with black light and blade mics, mixing and matching the pairs and singles skaters in interesting ways.

On Friday at work, Katie decided that since it was my birthday that day and Lycia Carmody’s the next, the company should buy lunch for everyone. So we had yummy Chinese food and they brought out a cake for each of us: carrot with cream cheese frosting for me and angel food with whipped cream and berries—both of which I happen to love. Then I went home to clean and cook and Tom Wethern—in town from Boston on a business trip—came over to hang out with me for a few hours.

On Saturday I got a package from Beckie with a videotape of Impromptu, one of my favorite movies, and a letter from my parents that was so sweet and supportive that I called to thank them and chat for a while. Anne and George were travelling in India at the time.

That evening was my birthday party. Jason was the first to arrive, followed by Rob Harris and Susan Lippincott. We played a couple of hands of four-way cribbage and then Bob Kindall &
Jessie Stickgold-Sarah arrived and that was critical mass, so we moved into the living room as people continued to arrive. About thirty more people showed up over the course of the evening. We drank wine and ate cheese and fruit and salami and veggies and artichoke dip and brownies.

I got some wonderful presents:

• Eric Rescorla brought me _A Beautiful Mind_, the biography of John Nash.

• Robert replaced the recording walkman that got stolen last year, so I could go back to recording books onto tape for
him.

• Jason gave me a cordless hand mixer and brought me a lovely little shell-shaped box from his mother.

• Lindasusan Ulrich and Alicia Bell gave me an IOU for the new cook book by the editor of Cooks Illustrated and a beautiful blue bottle of almond oil and Linda’s housemate, Laura, brought me vegetable soap.

• My housemate, Beth Dart, gave me a funky paint-your-own china kit.

• Linda Branagan, John Sweet & WesCarroll gave me a box with a Year of the Rooster pendant, a mango spice candle and stationery. Wes said later he thought of giving me invitations, but decided that would be too blatant. He also gave me possibly the nicest card I have ever received. The front had an Emerson quote: “What is success? To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” and inside Wes wrote “Yup, that’d be my friend Elizabeth.”

Steve Gisselbrecht called around nine and let Linda Marie Sauter, Jonathan Root, Jeff Fabijanic, and Tom (now back home in Boston) say Happy Birthday to me. That was really cool. Generally, the whole event made me feel very aware of how many people there really are out here who care enough
to come to a party and to think of me fondly, even from far away.

The last hour of the party involved a huge game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, which was very close, but Jason and I won. Dave La Macchia was peeved that I wouldn’t let them open the ten Episode One cards included with the deck, for fear of spoilers, since the movie wouldn’t open until May. The last guest left

around 3:30am, after which Jason and I lay in bed and laughed at each other for an hour before falling asleep.

We had a quiet Sunday together, making grilled cheese sandwiches with Scottish cheddar and watching Impromptu. And then he headed home and I cleaned up and that was how I celebrated turning 30.

What was the best job you've ever had?

The best job I ever had was working for Kathryn Hall at Laurel Management in San Francisco. It was a boutique financial management company—basically if you had enough money to pay someone $100,000 per year to look after your investments, you were our clients. My professional life was spent as an admin. One of the great things about that job is that the industry doesn’t really matter—every company needs someone to handle the logistics of business. So my first job after college was for a corporate travel agency, then for a marketing consultant and a patent agent, before winding up with Katie.

I wasn’t excited about the interview. I’d interviewed the day before with a corporate real estate company and that seemed more interesting, although I hadn’t liked their offices (dark) or the woman who interviewed me. Financial management sounded both high pressure and boring. But then Katie came bustling into the conference room of the entirely open-plan office with a stunning view of San Francisco.



She’s a relatively short woman, with short dark hair, multiple ear piercings and a warm smile. I didn’t know it at the time, but Katie was wearing what she always wore—a black Donna Karan suit and white business t-shirt. We talked about her need for an assistant, what the duties of the job would be, and then she asked me point blank “Why should I hire you over someone else?”

Without thinking much about it I said “Because I’m the smartest person you’ll get to take this job.” She looked a bit shocked, but seemed to like that I had the guts to make that claim. And sure enough, the next day I got the call that the job was mine.

I was Katie’s assistant. I answered her phone and dealt with her mail, did all her bookkeeping, kept her schedule, and planned her travel. I became a notary public so I could notarize client signatures. I did the filing. I planned events. On occasion I ran errands—I rescued her Amex card from the dry cleaners multiple times and bought five blenders at Macy’s for her charity frozen drinks bash, among other adventures. When she needed a new house, I dealt with all the paperwork and booked the movers. When her daughter called every day after school I talked to her until Katie was off the phone. When her husband called in a panic, I sorted out his problems and helped him feel like a priority—when I left he told me that I had saved their marriage. I calmed people down when Katie snapped too hard at them and managed the competing demands of clients who all thought they had the right to her time whenever they liked.

The work itself was rarely demanding and most of the time I was able to walk out the door at 5pm. Katie could be a pain—my least favorite habit was a tendency to yell at me for losing a piece of paper that I knew was on her desk—but she was also enormously generous and could be very kind. It was interesting to get glimpses of how the really rich lived and to speak to people like Sandra Day O’Connor and Gloria Steinem—neither of whom were clients, but consulted Katie about other issues.

Jason and I decided to move to London right after our wedding and giving up my job with Katie was one of my biggest regrets about leaving the Bay Area. We keep in touch with holiday cards and the occasional lunch when I’m in San Francisco, but I don’t really know what’s going on in her life. Looking at her bio now I see that she’s doing some really interesting things, serving on the boards of some great institutions, and part of me misses having an inside perspective on her world.

When I left they replaced me with two and a half people: an office manager, an executive assistant, and half of a bookkeeper’s time. This puzzled me, since I had not only managed my whole workload, but also planned several weddings, including my own. In the two years after I left, Katie went through seven assistants. On hearing this I wrote her an email that just said “KATHRYN HALL: STOP TORTURING INNOCENT WOMEN. I’M NOT COMING BACK.” She called me to laugh and tell me how much she missed me.

I love my life now: balanced between the demands of our family and home, Theatre@First, and First Parish, with a flexible schedule and the ability to set my own priorities and focus only on work that is personally meaningful. But I still miss working with Katie.

Describe the places you've lived.

Ravena: I spent the first fifteen years of my life living in the parsonage in Ravena, New York, a village of three thousand people twelve miles south of Albany. As a teenager I read an essay once about how every teenager believes they live in the most boring place in the world and I thought, with only a little sense of irony, “But in my case, it’s true!” I asked my mother once how come we never got to move and she laughed and promised that my time would come.

Puebla: For my junior year of high school I was a Rotary Exchange Student, assigned to Puebla, a city of about a million people a couple of hours southeast of Mexico City. I lived with two different families during my time there. It was a difficult year, but taught me a lot and definitely widened my perspective.

Columbia: I started my undergraduate career at Columbia College. My freshman year I lived in McBain, an older dorm a couple of blocks off the main campus, which I chose because I didn’t want to live in the First Year-only housing. My second year I had a single in a suite in Wallach, right in the center of campus.

Fenway House: After my first year at Columbia I went back to Ravena for the summer to help my parents move to the house in Clifton Park that they bought when they retired. Once that was accomplished, I hightailed it to Boston, where I stayed with my sisters in Somerville while helping out with a theatre production at MIT. That led to spending much of my time at Fenway House, an independent living group occupying a Georgian townhouse along the Fenway. For the next couple of years, Fenway House felt like “home,” even when I paid rent elsewhere.

The Restaurant: By the end of my sophomore year, I was ready to leave Columbia. After a summer at Fenway House I got an apartment on Central Street in Somerville with Rachel Mello and Pete Dilworth. We named it after the Arlo Guthrie song and the Douglas Adams novel, inadvertently jinxing ourselves to never having any food in the place. I lost about twenty-five pounds over the course of five months while working retail and making poor life choices.

Wellesley: I transferred to Wellesley College and spent my first term living in Claflin, one of the gorgeous old dorms by the lake. My first room was an odd en suite single tucked inside a gigantic room with its own terrace, but unfortunately I didn’t get along with the other woman sharing this arrangement and she worked out a deal for us to both get singles after the first month. After a summer back at Fenway I moved into Freeman, one of the “new dorms” built in 1953. I spent most of that year commuting between Wellesley and Fenway House several times a week and at the end of it I convinced MIT to let me officially live at Fenway as a Wellesley student and only went out to campus two days a week for classes.

Between June 1988 when I left Wallach and January 1990 when I moved into the 2-4 at Fenway, I switched rooms nine times and got to the point that I could pack all of my stuff in four hours and unpack it in six.

Cognito: Dave, Drea, Rob and I agreed to look for a place to live together, the summer after I graduated. We found a brand new duplex near Sullivan Square with two singles and a large finished basement that Rob and I planned to share. Only then he and I broke up, halfway through the month between signing the lease and moving into the new place. So Drea and I shared the basement and Rob took one of the rooms upstairs. After the first year, the other unit came available and—in a process that I would describe as “working out a deal” and Dave has described as “kicking them out”—we split the household, with Dave and Drea moving next door and recruiting Alex and Len to join them, while Rob and I remained in our original half with Id and Eva joining us from Fenway.

Winslow. After two years in Cognito (get it?) Rob decided to move to California and I agreed to live with my then boyfriend, Alan. We found an apartment on Winslow Ave in Somerville, right around the corner from the Davis T. The apartment included a room with its own bathroom that we rented to couple of different guys—Jonathan Williams and Dave Tames—but Alan and I were mostly focused on each other, for good and ill.

The Ranch: When Alan and I broke up, I moved out with no real plan. Friends of mine had a group house on Linnaean Street with an empty room they let me use for a few months. The house was in flux at the time, with several of the original housemates moving out and others moving in, with varying degrees of rancor and drama. It was clear that staying was not a long term option, but I was very grateful for their hospitality while I sorted out my future. The basement had been renovated in grand style with an 8-person hot tub, cold plunge, sauna, lounge, and gym. I spent a lot of time drifting in the tub, staring at the gold stars on the tiled ceiling, moping in luxury.

Hillside: steve & Tom had been living in a ground-floor apartment Hillside Street on Mission Hill for a few years at that point and when Tom was diagnosed with cancer, steve begged me to move into the vacant apartment on the 3rd floor, along with Id. This was long before gentrification reached the Hill and the place was falling apart. During our housewarming party the porch fell off its foundation, its outer edge suddenly about two feet lower than the door. At night I could often feel my bed shaking and eventually realized that the whole building was swaying in the wind. Then there were the repeated incidents when I thought I heard someone gasping for breath, only to realize—after making Tom come up to look under all the beds a few times—that it was the improperly vented plumbing losing pressure when a toilet flushed in one of the lower units. We paid $789/month for that three-bedroom apartment and when we moved out the landlord raised the rent to $2400.

Berkeley: In 1996 my boss decided to shut down the Cambridge office I had managed and focus on his contract in Germany. I had been more or less single since the breakup with Alan. And then Id decided to move in with his boyfriend. I remembered a conversation with Alicia about possibly being good housemates and called her to see if she were looking that fall. She said she’d love to live with me, but had just accepted a job at the library in Berkely, California. “You don’t wanna look for an apartment in Berkeley with me, do you,” she asked. I thought about it for a weekend and decided why not? We agreed that she would fly out there and find us a place, while I packed our belongings into a UHaul and drove them out. I had many adventures with my friend, Glen, along the way, while Alicia found us the best apartment in the Bay Area. It was the garden level apartment of a Victorian house recently bought by a young couple who planned to renovate it. They had started with the basement, planning to rent that out to friends and setting the rate accordingly, but those friends backed out the morning that Alicia happened to mention to another of their friends that she was searching. So we had a gorgeous, newly renovated three-bedroom flat in a prime location with friendly landlords upstairs for just $1200/month. I lived there for four years: the first two with Alicia, the third with Beth Dart (sister of an MIT acquaintance) and the fourth with Jason. He and I looked all over the Bay Area before deciding he should move in with me, but everything we saw that was remotely comparable was twice the price. If we’d had any idea of returning to that area from London, I think we would have sublet it and hung onto it.

London: Jason had long thought that he would like to take advantage of his company’s policy of letting employees transfer easily between offices to work in the UK and when we decided to get married he convinced me to quit my job and move to London. We found a huge three-bedroom flat in a maisonette on Green Lanes very near Manor House, just across Finsbury Park from the train that would take him up to the office in Cambridge once a week. It was recently renovated and the landlord had insisted that the entire place be painted a bright pineapple yellow. The builders said that he’d wanted even the ceilings yellow, but that they decided that was just too much and “forgot”. It was overwhelming at first, but we soon learned to appreciate it in the dark grey days of a London winter. We had a large deck looking out over a garden that stretched down to the New River—a canal dug in 1613 to bring fresh drinking water to the city and never renamed—so we were surrounded by green in the midst of the city and got to see foxes roaming the garden at dusk. In our two years there we had fifty-three overnight guests and many happy memories.

Arlington Heights: As the time approached for us to return to the States, we agreed that we would settle in Boston, where all of our siblings were living. We were debating whether to rent for a year, or try to buy a house immediately, and Beckie reminded me that she loves real estate and would be happy to help in any way she could. I told her to find us a house and she proceeded to do just that and with a power of attorney and five signed checks she bought 33 Rhinecliff Street. We did fly home to walk through it with the inspector, so it wasn’t quite sight unseen, but she gets all the credit. We lived there, less than a block from the elementary school, until Alice was five years old.

Infinity House: I really wanted to build a deck. In looking into what that would entail, we realized that it would make more sense to first install the ductless air conditioning we’d been considering, and that if we were going to that, we’d want to add the additional floor that the house was permitted to have before that…at which point I suggested that it might be simpler to just buy a different house. We looked at this one, in the heart of Davis Square, but decided it needed more work than we really wanted to undertake and kept looking. But the one thing you can’t change in real estate is the location and eventually we realized we weren’t going to find a better one, so we bought 13 Park Ave and had it gutted and rebuilt to be our dream house…with a deck on the third floor next to my office. It’s on the corner, so it’s on the odd side of Park Ave and the even side of Chandler (which becomes relevant during snow emergencies and street sweeping) and the only number that is both odd and even is infinity, so that’s our name for it, which no one else ever uses, but makes us chuckle.

Where next?

Was there anything unusual about your birth?

I was born in the middle of an ice storm.

My mother was forty-three at the time and the doctors had warned her that I would almost certainly be deaf and might well have Down Syndrome. My father was recovering from kidney surgery.

Mom had arranged with a neighbor to drive her to the nearest hospital—half an hour away—and bring our car back so that my father could get his rest and join us the next day. But when the labor pains began around ten o’clock at night and my mother called Mrs. Bailey, she was too afraid to drive at night on the icy roads. My mother said that was fine, she would drive herself, if Mrs. Bailey would just come along to bring the car back after dawn. I’ve never heard any details of that drive, but they made it.

I was born about three-thirty in the morning. The call woke my father who said that for a third girl they could have waited until nine o’clock. He loved that story when I was younger, but later apologized to me, telling me that he little knew at the time just how lucky he was.

What are some of your favorite drinks?

When people think of me, it’s usually with a dietCoke in my hand. When I lived at Fenway House we had a Coke machine in the butler’s pantry (which was therefore known as “Coke Alley”), so I drank a lot of Coke at first. Eventually I decided that I didn’t want to be drinking that many calories and overcame my distaste for artificial sweeteners to the point that now a regular Coke tastes a bit like drinking maple syrup. The caffeine affects me very little—I can easily drink down a dietCoke or a cup of strong tea and be asleep ten minutes later. Most days I only drink three or four, but I drink them slowly and always have one open at my desk. In rehearsals, where I tend to be talking—and projecting my voice the length of the hall—for hours, I go through about one an hour. Recently Jason has been making tea more often, which tends to mean I drink less dietCoke, but I prefer my tea with honey (if I can’t have milk and sugar) and I’m trying to keep my sugar down, so I’m limiting my tea intake.

I’ve never developed a regular coffee habit. I enjoy it as an after-dinner drink, but not enough to bother making it home most of the time, so I used to drink a cup once a month or so. Since we moved to Somerville, we’ve developed the habit of stopping at Starbucks en route to First Parish on Sunday mornings, and I’ve learned that what I really want is a vanilla latte. That way I get coffee with a bunch of milk and some sugar, without having to mess around with it, or figure out the right code for the balance I want.

We drink wine with dinner most nights, so we go through a lot of wine in the course of a year. We started getting into wine when we lived in California. Jason and I spent many weekends driving around Napa and Sonoma Valleys, visiting wineries and beginning to figure out what we liked. While we travelled around Europe we got to try a lot of different wines in their home regions. When we lived in Arlington we were invited to be part of a wine buying group and for many years would buy six or eight cases at a discount twice a year. Since that ended, we’ve been a bit adrift, but recently found a website that does a similar buying program. When I was reading textbooks for blind and dyslexic students I got to read sections of the Oxford Wine Encyclopedia and that was a whole education in itself. I like a wide variety of wines from whites (Albariños and New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs are favorites and a Meursault is a special treat) to rosés (particularly Italian ones) to reds (old-vine Zinfandels, Montepulcianos, and Dolcettos always catch my eye), but it all depends on the occasion and setting. One of my favorite things is to sit at a wine bar, snacking and drinking different wines with a good bartender to guide me through them.

I never really felt comfortable in bars before I started spending time with Hatem. Being a woman probably had a lot to do with that, but also I don’t like beer very much and ordering cocktails always seemed complicated. At a restaurant I usually have a strong sense of what to order—what this place will do well—but in a bar I’m pretty clueless. For Hatem, bars are comfortable spaces and he talks of spending hours alone at various bars, nursing a beer over a good book. He got me more interested in cocktails and then we started hanging out at Spoke, where they make many marvelous concoctions and also the best Paper Planes. A Paper Plane is an even mix of bourbon, aperol, amaro, and lemon juice. Made right it’s perfectly balanced: fruity without being too sweet, citrusy but not too sour, pleasantly boozy but not biting, able to please even folks who think they don’t like bourbon. The only problem with a Paper Plane is that it’s far too easy to drink!

Do you know what your first words were?

Mom always said that I started talking when I was nine months old and haven’t noticeably stopped since.

My first word was “baby,” which my mother always thought made a lot of sense, since it’s what everyone said to me: “Look at the baby!” “Hello, baby!” “Where’s the baby?” “What a pretty baby!”

My second word was “Becca,” my sister’s name. My crib was on the other side of the wall from her bed and after Mom tucked her in at night I would kick the wall right by her head and chant “Becca! Becca! Becca!” until she came and got me to sleep in her bed. When Mom came up to bed she would put me back in my crib, saying “Why can’t you leave that child to sleep alone!”


Do you prefer summer or winter?

I vastly prefer winter over summer.

Summer is hot and sticky, it smells of garbage and sweat. There are bugs--bugs that bite, bugs that crawl, bugs that breed in every corner. The air is still and lifeless. Everyone is cranky because it’s too hot--they think they like warm weather, but tempers are much more volatile. I think people associate summer with vacation and let that nostalgia blind them to its unpleasant features.

I do rather like summer nights, as long as my bedroom is air conditioned. There is something lovely about sitting on the front porch, or in a sidewalk cafe, late into the night, wandering the streets as the jasmine blooms. I wish it were possible for summer nights to be the longer ones, but sadly, that’s not how the physics of seasons work.

I don’t love winter. Snow is lovely, but it messes up schedules and traffic. Cold is better than heat--it’s lovely to be comforted by a roaring fire and a nice hot toddy and there’s a clarity of thinking on still winter nights when the air takes your breath in great clouds of steam. But winter tends to create obstacles and difficulties that make life a little harder and as much as I enjoy the dark, it does get monotonous.

Spring is lovely--I’m especially fond of flowering trees and the light mist of spring rain. There’s a great lift to the spirit as everything unlocks and unwinds from the tension of the winter months and spirits lift as the light returns. But spring carries the threat of summer and especially with the world warming, is all too brief.

Really it is fall that I love. The warm colors of foliage redecorate the neighborhoods and hillsides, turning our street into a golden cathedral and carpeting the world with the crunch of freshly fallen leaves. I’ve often fallen in love in the fall and it brings the sense of new beginnings. The heaviness of the summer air lifts and my mind feels clear and ready for the start of the school year, the church year, and the theatre season. I love fall foods--beef stew and pumpkin pie, cider donuts and cranberry cocktails. It seems right for the world to be slightly cooler when I step out of doors and my favorite clothes are sweaters, jeans, boots, and a leather jacket. Fall is the time of year when everything seems right--if only it could last longer each year.

A friend posted this list of behaviors (it was originally an ADHD quiz, but the consensus is that it's deeply flawed for that purpose) and I found it a fascinating dive into how her brain works. We so often assume either that other people's brains work like ours do, or that we are extremely unusual (or both! we contain multitudes!). So I decided to fill it out.

Please note that I'm pretty confident that I do not have ADHD and I'm not using this as a diagnostic tool.

( Probably more about me than you care to read. )

I think the thing that I am noticing most is how young the questioner seems to me--a lot of my answers would have been very different thirty years ago. It's good to see the ways that the work I've done and the experiences I've survived have had impact and taught me how to be kinder to myself and others, to work more effectively, to build better relationships, to live the values I hold closely. And yet there is still work to do and this really points that s

I'd be intrigued to read some of your answers to these questions. Don't feel like you need to do the whole list--you could pick five that feel interesting. I confess that I haven't been reading DW much these days, so if you do these, please comment so I know to go look.

When I first encountered this question, I thought surely I must have done, but I couldn’t think of a story. Then came our most recent trip to Iceland.

Everyone tells you that if humans were really rational, we’d be much more worried about travelling by car than almost anything else we do. That lesson really came home to me as we drove back to Reykjavik from a lovely day on the Snaefellsnes peninsula.

We’d gone up to visit the Vatnshellir Cave, inspiration for Journey to the Center of the Earth. It’s an impressive magma tube, but the real highlight is the scenery along the way. Snow covered volcanoes on one side, pounding waves on the other, mysterious standing rocks and vast fields in between make for stunning views. We stopped along the way for a delicious lunch at the Langaholt Guest House and made it up to the cave in time for our three o’clock tour.

The day was overcast and colder than it had been in Reykjavik, with a strong wind blowing. Traversing the hundred feet from the welcome center to the cave entrance was a very chilly moment. Our guide was charming and told the obviously old jokes with the right amount of sheepishness. Standing in silence in the absolute darkness underground is always a profound experience. Jo had a little trouble with the open spiral staircase down into the depths and was very glad to be back on the surface.

I drove about halfway back toward Reykjavik before we stopped for gas and Jason took over. I fell asleep in the passenger seat and was awoken by Jo and Alice simultaneously saying “Whoa!” from the back seat. When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see a think out the windshield. We were in a complete whiteout of snow gusting across the road.

As each gust enveloped us in snow, Jason would slow down as quickly as he could. The road was also slippery with snow and two or three times I could feel the tires fishtailing over the pavement. From the drive out I knew that what was on either side of the highway was usually a fairly steep drop into a ditch and then either farmed fields or vast expanses of lava rocks. Each time the car began to slip I imagined us going off the road, the car rolling over into the sharp rocks, and us all freezing to death or dying from our injuries before anyone would find us. So, I thought, this is how it ends.

But Jason kept the car on the road and as darkness fell we approached the tunnel under the Hvalfjörður. We were all looking forward to more than three miles out of the wind and snow. As we came down the hill toward the tunnel, Jason said “What is that?” and we looked across to see a line of headlights stopped all the way up the hill on the other side of the fjord, with little blue lights twinkling their way down the empty lane opposite. There was a crash in the tunnel. It was closed.

We sat at the rotary where traffic turns left down onto the tunnel approach, trying to think if there were any option. The road around the fjord would add another thirty miles to the journey. The weather showed no signs of clearing for at least a couple of hours. The sign pointing to the right said “Akranes”.

What time is it, I asked, after about ten minutes of sitting there. Six-thirty, with at least another hour to Reykjavik, even if the tunnel opened right this minute. So we drove into Akranes while Jo found a plausible restaurant online and guided us to it.

The Gamla Kaupfélagið was almost deserted on a Wednesday night in the middle of a snowstorm, but they welcomed us in and gave us a marvelous meal. We had a wonderfully earthy lobster soup and wild mushroom risotto, delicious lamb and salmon, and one of the best tenderloins of beef I’ve ever eaten. We would have been perfectly happy to find an open pub, but this was a meal almost worth the trip!

Snow was still falling as we finished dinner, but our server told us that the tunnel was open, so we set off again. I offered to drive, but Jason said he was okay to continue. We made it to the tunnel, enjoyed 5770 meters of shelter, and then continued out into the night.

For miles at a time, Jason navigated from one post to the next, through the snow. He would sight one and drive toward it, hoping that by the time he reached it, the next would be visible. If it wasn’t, he’d slow or stop until the wind revealed it, and then proceed. Sometimes there were streetlights for a stretch, which helped. When the drop-off to the side was especially steep there would be a section of guardrail, which was lovely. He kept one eye on the GPS, to know whether the road was curving or straight ahead, because there was no way to know from looking. It was tedious and terrifying.

Finally we caught up to a pickup truck and with great relief followed them. They were actually moving a little more slowly than Jason had been, but it was wonderful to let them find the path for us. About ten miles from the city, the road we’d followed south turns to the west and at that point the wind was no longer blowing across the highway and we could see clearly ahead. Before long we were navigating the tiny streets to our flat.

We kicked off our boots in the entryway and shed our coats as we moved into the living room. We didn’t die, I said to Jo. She agreed that while it had seemed unlikely a few times, Jason had done a spectacular job and gotten us home safely.

We spent the next day wandering around the city, not ready to get back in the car yet. And then the following day we went snowmobiling up on Langjokull glacier. Much safer.

What do you admire most about your mother?

My mother strove all her life to be of service to others. She was raised on a tobacco farm in rural North Carolina during the Great Depression, but thanks to her father’s value for the education he never got she went to college and became a teacher. As the wife of a smalltown minister, she was his professional partner, working alongside him to care for their congregations. She taught Sunday School, ran the women’s groups, served church suppers, hosted events, and listened to everyone’s problems with a patient smile.

She was an amazing housekeeper, eking nutritious meals out of a meagre budget and keeping us all clothed in handmade clothes and hand-me-downs. She saved everything that might be of use and knew how to clean anything and how to fix and reuse everything.

Beyond the scope of home and church, she volunteered as a member of the Women’s Club, serving as local, district, and state president. In 1978 she became the first woman on our School Board and served for eight years. After Dad retired and they moved to Clifton Park, my parents spent a decade working as an interim ministry team, finally recognizing the joint nature of their ministry and even putting her in the pulpit occasionally. When my father’s health had them sticking closer to home she joined the Friends of the Library where she ran their enormous, semi-annual book sales and was instrumental in their campaign to build a new library.

She suffered fools with remarkable grace, often adopting as her special friends the people that no one else could stand. She had high standards of behavior and could give a set down with admirable firmness, but was never rude, or cruel—to strangers, at least. She was a very political animal, remembering names and key facts to make others feel recognized, remembered and known. She wanted to be respected and admired and cared deeply about the impression she made and the reputation she built.

Mom really wore herself out downsizing and moving to Arlington. But even in her last community she became an integral part of yet another church, working on their rummage sales and showing up regularly to the weekly women’s coffee group. She adored Alice and loved to have her come to spend the day with her, or stay overnight, especially after my father passed away. One of the hardest things for her about aging was accepting others’ service and not feeling bad about herself for needing their help.

In January of 1990 she wrote me a letter and opened by saying that it seemed so strange to write the new year, like something out of science fiction. It seems like there ought to be a whole new way to be, she wrote, but I don’t know any way to be except pouring myself into service to others, which is its own kind of selfishness. May we all be so selfish.