To start with, the biggest thing in our lives during the last couple of weeks, Michele has bacterial pneumonia. Well, she had it for about the last three weeks, but she is now on the mend. Even as an observer, I can tell you bacterial pneumonia sucks. It started as if it were the flu and then just continued to get worse. When we still thought it was the flu, Michele suggested I go to Richard and Tracy’s weekend home at Point Reyes Station without her to see Tracy’s parents, Arlene and Al Grubbs.

I agreed, and the payoff for the cold and wet winter was my drive through Marin’s acid-green hills. The payoff for the drive was a lunch of delicious pizza made by Richard and Tracy in their wood-burning oven and seeing Arlene and Al.

I had brought my camera and watching, through the viewfinder, Courtney and Arlene play Bocci Ball with Richard and Gina, I felt like I was watching a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, or, maybe, Fashionable Country Living. The grass was so green, and the background of the Point Reyes Hills was picture-perfect. For me, it was a perfect sweet spring day.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” Stephen Hawking in the intro to A Brief History of Time.

Today was a beautiful Spring Day, warm under a clear blue sky. It seems like the long, cold, rainy winter is ending.

Both my email and my blog disappeared last week at about the time Michele left for Mexico, although there is no connection between the two. I know Michele went to Mexico to see the Great Eclipse, but I have no idea why or even how the blog and attached email disappeared; all I know is that, when I went to make an entry in the blog, it wasn’t there. All I got was a sign that said This site can’t be reached. Check if there is a typo in srstern.com.

Every morning, I would get up and go to my website only to see This site can’t be reached. I would text Michele, and she would tell me that she was working on it and that the site was still there. She would say, “They say, ‘They can see it.'” whatever that means. About a day after I gave up – but, obviously, Michele hadn’t – there it was…back.

Also, on the good news front, I am getting a new heart valve—or, to be more accurate, a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement. This means that they will not have to open my chest to get to my heart; they will just fish a new bioprosthetic valve in through my groin and up a vein to my heart. In my imagination’s eye, it is sort of like one of those collapsable paper umbrellas you get with rum drinks, only safer. The cheery handout I got from the surgeon’s office said that it will Help you live longer, Helps you feel better, Less invasive procedure, Shorter recovery time and Almost 98 out of a 100 patients are still living within two years and more than 2 in 100 patients will die.

So, as far as I am concerned, it is good news All The Way Down.

About two weeks ago, I caught the flu – I have no idea how – and I ended up in the hospital. In retrospect, that may be the good news. I have an artificial aorta valve, which, when I got it in 2002, had a projected life of about eighteen years. But I have now had the valve for almost twenty-two years, and, recently, I’ve been having trouble breathing. I’ve been complaining that the valve is starting to give out, but my doctors didn’t seem to feel any sense of urgency. My stay in the hospital has changed their minds. This is all by way of saying that I’m not particularly hale or hearty, but I hope I will be so, with a new valve, in a couple of months.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from an aborted trip to Death Valley. It was aborted because the adjustable suspension on our VW Touareg started to give out, and the warning on the dashboard started flashing: Stop! Apparently, a rat had chewed through one of the hydraulic lines, so we limped west to Lone Pine and then north to Reno.

She cared about shit. Michele Stern

Michele’s second cousin, my second cousin-in-law and friend, Marion Kaplan, passed away a week or so ago. I don’t think she would have said, “Passed away,” actually. She was not a “passed away” kind of person. She was a “tell it like it is” kind of person. She was a hitchhike, at nineteen, from South Africa to Kenya-type person. However you want to put it, Marion is gone, and the world is less interesting.

When I first met Marion Kaplan, sometime in the oughts, we were in Arkansas, and she was planning on going to Chicago to take a picture of “the young senator who gave the keynote speech at the Kerry Democratic Convention.” I was surprised at how confident she was that she would be able to meet him and get his portrait — that is until she said she had some friends at Life magazine who could help. Now I know that was so typically Marion.

I bonded with Marion over photography and our mutual curiosity about almost everything. I differed from Marion in the guile required to satisfy that curiosity firsthand. What is it like to sail on a dhow? Marion knew; in the early 1970s, she sailed on a dhow from Dubai, which was still a small fishing village in the Persian Gulf, to Mombasa, Africa.

I had the pleasure of accompanying Marion into the great American Outback. One memory that sticks with me is stopping at a pass overlooking the Smoke Creek Desert. I thought it would be a good place to take a photograph. By the time I got out of the car, collected my photo gear, and switched to a wide-angle lens, Marion had, somehow, levitated two hundred yards down the road, camera in hand, stalking the best view.

Another memory from an addendum to that trip is when Marion and I were driving south on Highway 395, just north of Minden, Nevada. Marion said, “Stop!” “pull over!” I’d driven this section of 395 maybe thirty times without stopping or even seeing it, but Marion knew a good picture when she saw it.

I’ll miss Marion. She was an extraordinary woman and a remarkable person. I’ll miss her emails remarking on some world event or something she disagreed with on my blog. Marion Kaplan has enriched my life.

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