Category Archives: Family

Jim Compton

Current Affairs, Family

Don’t mope, take action.
Accept mistakes, lessons learned.
Every day, something good.
Help others, humor.
A project. A random note from Jim Compton to himself.

Jim Compton, my sister Paula’s husband, died earlier this year after a long bout with Parkinson’s disease. Without him, the world is a dimmer, less fun, and less interesting place.

Jim was born Dinsdale Michael James Compton in London in 1930, but he was known by almost everyone as Jim Compton. When The War started, Jim, along with almost all of the other school-aged kids, was sent to the country to get them out of range of the German bombers. Jim was smart, exceptionally smart, and that led to his being accepted into a boarding school, established in the 1400s, that educated children from working-class or poor families. From there, he was accepted into Oxford, where he earned a PhD in Chemistry, and then went on to a postdoctoral position in Canada. His research spanned physical chemistry, solid-state physics, and medical technology.

According to Paula, “Jim always said that he would rather do a bit of everything than become a distinguished specialist in a single field.” Although he rarely spoke to his family about his scientific accomplishments, his professional footprint was significant; he filed at least 7 patents and published more than 30 papers, ranging from “Neutron capture cross-section measurements for U-238 between 0.4 and 1.4 MeV” – whatever that means – (published in The Journal of Chemical Physics with W. G. Schneider and T. C. Waddington) to developing methods to use radioactive isotopes to visualize and measure how air and blood flow through the lungs, providing a critical diagnostic tool for identifying lung diseases and blockages (I think I was on the other end of that paper when I was tested at Sequoia Hospital for asthma; thank you, Jim).

More importantly than his academic accomplishments, in my opinion, Jim had a contagious love of life that was hard not to catch when he was around. He lived in the moment. He was curious about everything, kind, and funny. Jim Compton was a remarkably nonjudgmental man. I’ll miss him, we’ll all miss him.

Israel & The Slaughter of Palestinians

Current Affairs, Family, War, What's a man?

My father, who died just before I turned 28, was a secular Jew. However, he was proud of being Jewish. He never said that we were the chosen people, but I suspect that was more because he didn’t believe in a Chooser than anything else. Still, he thought we were better than the people who looked down on us. We were more compassionate, more inclusive, more accepting, all Jewish virtues he strongly believed in.

In a way, I grew up feeling that my compassion and inclusiveness were a result of being Jewish. In a Of course, I believe everybody should be treated equally; I’m Jewish sort of way. Now, watching Israel slaughter Palestinians in Gaza and constantly terrorizing other Palestinians in the West Bank, that all seems like a lie. To a certain extent, who I believed I was now seems like bullshit. It is more than disheartening.

If there is any consultation, it is that I am not alone in my anger and existential grief. Below is a short (-ish) conversation between two very smart, very compassionate people about Israel, Palestine, and being Jewish during the horror of what is going on. Please give it a try.

Happy Anniversary

Family

Last week, Michele and I celebrated our 25th Anniversary on the East Side of the Sierras. We had a stellar anniversary dinner at the Lakefront Restaurant – elevation 8600 feet – and two days of anniversary wandering around. We are soul mates but it has not always been an easy 25 years – for either one of us – but being together has always outweighed being apart. And for a couple of soulmates that love the desert, the mountains, and each other, this was a delightful place to be. 

 

Free Will vs. Compelled

Americana, Current Affairs, Family, Politics, Psychological Musings

Church-2678We had Easter at Michele’s familial home the weekend after the Indiana pizzeria said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding. Sitting around, what I like to think of as the typical American family table, we had a couple of interesting conversations about politics that spilled over to religion (or religion that spilled over to politics). We were, very roughly, evenly split between Liberals and Conservatives and the Conservatives were spit between those who had gone to church that morning and those who hadn’t.

One thing we did agree on, surprisingly, is that people should have the right to be assholes, within limits, but that governments shouldn’t. To be clear, I wouldn’t say that we completely agreed, but we did come close to agreeing that there were differences between public acts in public spaces and private acts in private spaces. We all agreed that if a store is open for business, they have to serve everybody that walks in, but we differed on how restrictive they could be in the hypothetical catering of a wedding.

That conversation drew us into a – unexpected, for me – minefield. Maybe it shouldn’t have been unexpected, because I was the primary wanderer, owing to my fascination with religion’s special privileges. It is illegal for me to take peyote because I enjoy it, but, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, I can take it if I am taking it as part of my religion. My question was Why should religion get special privileges? The only answer I got to this question was something along the lines of We are a Christian Nation, as if that would answer it. As the conversation staggered on, however, my question did get answered in a fashion.

To back up, when we are in Napa on a Sunday morning, or around a religious holiday like Christmas, Michele usually goes to church with her step-father, Jim (who was one of the church goers in the group, duh!). During the conversation, Michele’s stepfather said something, I don’t remember what, that led to Michele countering that she wasn’t raised as a Christian and wasn’t a Christian now. Jim was surprised, If you aren’t a Christian, why do you go to church with me? Michele said that she went because she enjoyed it. That was even more surprising to Jim.

Isn’t that why you go? asked Michele. No, I don’t go because I enjoy it, I go because, as a Christian, I have to go, Jim  said, laughing in a dismissive way as if that should be self-evident. In a way it was the answer that I had been looking for.

Still, not being a believer, Jim’s answer shocked me. Actually, I am a little reluctant to say Not being a believer, because I think of myself as a believer in A Divine that transcends what we know of the ordinary world. I don’t believe that science knows all the big answers and we are now only working on filling in the details, I don’t believe the world is all material and we are only a result of our DNA. I do believe that there is A Mystery, I’m just not a believer in any particular religious dogma (and I especially don’t believe that there is a personal God that cares how we act, that holds a grudge if we don’t go to church, that is interested in how we have sex or what we ate for lunch).

My life is not governed by a god telling me to live it a certain way. Not being a believer in that dogma means that I don’t get my morality from somebody’s interpretation of what God wants us to do. The church goers were pretty adamant that, without God telling us the rules or providing the moral guidelines, to say it in a little less dogmatic way, we would have no morality. Michele said that she is a Scientist and her morality is based on the scientific principle that acts have consequences. I sided with Michele and added that I liked the Buddhist Eightfold Path that includes don’t harm others and the Church goers looked at us like we must not have any moral principles at all, like maybe we were OK with serial killing.

Looking across the table, I could almost understand that somebody could believe that they weren’t homophobic, but their God is and they have no choice but to follow along. That gulf between our beliefs, between our belief structures,  seems much bigger than I had imagined.

Michele’s Opening at Sweeties

Around home, Art, Family, Local events

Sweeties-9943Michele is showing her pictures at Sweeties. They are beautiful but I am not sure what to call them, let me explain.

About a year ago – maybe a year and a half, maybe eight months ago – Michele got a Sunprint kit for Granddaughter Charlotte. If you know Michele well, you will know how hard it would be for her to not get a Sunprint Kit for herself. It just hit all her hot buttons. Anyway she did and she started playing with it right way (when I say playing, I mean playing in the deeper sense, as in playing the piano).

The process is simple: place something on a piece of bluish, sensitized, paper and put it in the sun, then develop it in water. What happens is the bluish paper fades in the sun leaving only the shadows blue. In the water, the shadows turn white and the exposed paper turns blue, reversing the exposed image.

Sunprint 1-

It didn’t take long for Michele to get interested in the mid-reversal.

Sunprint 1--2

She first took the paper out of the water and tried scanning the dripping wet paper, trying to control the paper with paper towels and rags. The she tried photographing it with her iPad, and – finally – using a camera on a tripod. After about a year, the mid-process scans and photographs were hidden away in the computer and the finished – but not as interesting – Sunprints graced every available horizontal surface.

Then Michele started printing the mid-process images – eventually on Epson Hot Press  Bright, 100% cotton fiber, acid-free, lignin-free, paper – and they were beautiful. Framed, with hand torn edges, they make a striking show.

Sunprint 1-9945

Michele’s artist statement says, I am not big on change, even though as the iChing claims, change is the only thing we can be certain of, so it is in my nature to try to hold on to memories and bits of beauty. One of the things I love most is my garden, if you can call it that, since it is really just a tamed bit of woods in Portola Valley. I’ve noticed that every day the garden changes, just a little; something new has bloomed, something else has withered away.

Thinking we might soon be moving from our home, I started using sunprint paper as a way to record the flowers in my garden. As I did this I became fascinated with transitory images that emerged as the water hit the paper. It is a brief moment when dark and light comingle as they exchange places. These giclée prints freeze that moment during the processing of impermanent images of impermanent blossoms that grace our impermanent residence on this ever-changing planet.

Reading that statement and looking at my pictures of Michele’s opening at Sweeties, below, reminds me that we are both trying to do the same thing, freeze that moment.

Sweeties-9953

Sweeties-9947

 

Sweeties-9964

Sunprint 1-9950