Christmas Letter 2024
If 2023 saw us do a good deal of traveling, 2024 was filled with family and friends visiting here, with one exception. That was the 40th birthday of our nephew Charles Opalak, for which his wife Liz organized a blowout “Cousinfest” in Greenville, SC, where they moved after Charles finished his residency in neurosurgery in Richmond, VA, and joined a practice there.
It was especially good to see Emily and Tom Opalak, and their children, last seen at Roz and Dave’s wedding. We also caught up with Rob Irons, the classicist who every family needs to have in its orbit.
Charlie, the son of our niece Roz and her husband Dave, has won hearts on both coasts. After meeting our granddaughters Caroline and Sarah in Greenville, he saw them again when they visited for a week on Halloween. A month before Charlie was born, our friends Tanja and Max von Ehrlich had a son, Philip, in Zurich. We look forward to them meeting!
In March, Sallyann Wright and John Parman visited for two weeks, spending part of it at the ridge house that Michael is restoring.
John, aka “American John,” does stand-up comedy in Dudley, the West Midlands town where they live. His moniker reflects the fact that he’s never lost his indelibly made-in-Berkeley accent.
In the summer, Sallyann and John went to Greece, also a destination favored by Bojana, Michael, and Elizabeth. I need to get there.
Just before Easter, Marius Parmann, his wife Nina, and their children came to Berkeley and had lunch with us at Bo and Michael’s house. They live in Oslo — Marius is the youngest son of my cousin Margaretha Parmann.
A school break in the fall gave Alison and Ross and their girls the chance to visit us. They had good weather, taking the ferry and exploring the city.
Kathy was in heaven to have them with us. Despite wondering if I was out of practice, I read them Make Way for Ducklings, which they liked.
Friends visited from afar. Valerie and Geoff Wigfall managed to squeeze us in at the end of their whirlwind West Coast tour, then Marie-Christine and Bernard Zeller stayed for the two hottest days of 2024. Luckily, they were in the one part of our house that stays cool, but they went out walking on the Berkeley campus in the blazing sun. I’m sure they’re telling their Parisian friends that Berkeley’s weather is like Sicily! (They headed north, stopping to see Alice Parman, John Zerzan, and their family in Eugene. Alice’s grandson Hugh and Bernard compared sketchbooks, she told me.)
Visitors from England: Andrew Rabeneck, who stayed with Marie Fisher. Kathy and I had dinner with them at Corso; and Julie Bartlett. Joined by Elizabeth Sullivan and Chuck Davis, I had dinner with her at Chez Panisse. Chuck turned 90 in September, and Kathy and I went to his birthday party.
My Phoenix friend Rocky Hanish and his wife Mary stayed with us. Rocky, my friend and neighbor Peiting Li, and I talk monthly, our Sketch call, so we took the occasion to have dinner together at Chez Panisse.
Speaking of Rocky, he and I are now both collaborating with our friend Elham K. Hassani in Rome, working on a book chapter on urban regeneration and artificial intelligence, and proposing a design studio at Arizona State University, where Rocky teaches, that focuses on Phoenix, a desert metropolis in need of healing. Elham was a visiting professor at a university in Tashkent in November and we joined her by video as she presented a paper we wrote on this topic, as applied to desert urbanism.
The Pallas Gallery, Elizabeth’s remarkable project, now has an annex that drew the favorable notice of a San Francisco Chronicle cultural writer. She’s been writing for Architect’s Newspaper and Seattle’s ARCADE. I’m now again an issue editor at that venerable design/cultural mag. Can’t stay away.
August 30th was our 50th anniversary, which we celebrated in style at Chez Panisse. Ross was in town for a memorial for our neighbor, Michael Farrell, the father of his (and our) good friend Brendan Farrell, so he joined us.
Our grandson Conor graduated from College Preparatory School in June and is now at UCLA, studying computer science. He loves LA.
Our return from Greenville was followed by a joint “birthdays” party for Kathy’s sisters, Laurie and Lenore. I’m fairly sure that these two events contributed to my cholesterol count alarming my doctor, but worth it to see everyone. Lenore’s husband Michael Opalak (father of Charles and Tom) made a board of photos of the three sisters at different points in their lives. (I suspect Laurie’s husband Chuck Smith had a hand in it.)
Death is alas a feature of life at this point. Turid Parmann, the Norwegian cousin closest to me in age, died of cancer and dementia this fall. I visited her in Bergen in 2011 and again in 2017, meeting others in my family there. I’m grateful to her youngest son Torstein for keeping me informed and also for making every effort to ease her downward, outward path.
Our friend and neighbor Stanley Lubman also died in the fall after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. A pioneering and well-known China trade lawyer, he wrote Bird in a Cage (Stanford, 1999), an important book on Chinese law. He and his wife Judith endowed a foundation that helps others with Parkinson’s. Exercise is part of the regime and Stanley was working out on his porch with his trainer the day before he died. This tenacity led me to imagine he’d live on forever. He didn’t, but he made it to 90.
Sue Bender, widow of my longtime writing partner, Richard Bender, is still here. Laurie and I visit her, and I’ve also seen her with my friends Dorit Fromm and Emily Marthinsen. She turned 91 this fall, living in their apartment in Oakland, remodeled to resemble their house in North Berkeley (but the size of their beach house in Amagansett, Dick told me).
What do you do with yourself in retirement, I’m sometimes asked. Well, I write fiction and poems, among other things, the former the result of three writing classes I took with Valerie and Geoff’s older daughter Clare Wigfall, who teaches from Berlin. Laurie and I have both taken them. I love writing fiction, but it’s hell to edit. So far, I’ve written four works of fiction plus a selection of poems. Making books is part of the fun, and the miracle of short-run printing means I’m not stuck with boxes of them in a closet.
Kathy claims to be winding down. We’ll see. Michael has been helping her locally, as they own several properties together. Ross has ably managed the rowhouse we own with him in Richmond, much improved by the work he’s organized, earning him the gratitude of its neighbors. (It’s in that city’s Fan District, at the end of a gorgeous, almost English block of rowhouses.)
It’s been wonderful to see people from afar, finally reciprocating their kind hospitality to us, and mark birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions. Life’s here to be savored, these events remind us. Please enjoy the holiday, however you celebrate it, and say a prayer for a peaceful new year. In that spirit, one more photo (from Thanksgiving) of Charlie, sprite and live wire.
