Or this more benign email from my sister: “The Big Three for 2022”. Her list of resolutions at least was short. Only three items of proposed self-improvement, followed by the simple invitation: “Feel free to share your goals for the New Year if you are so inclined.” I have no such inclination.

And then there was this one from a dear friend: “Resolution Time: A Poem My Neighbor Wrote.” This poem, by the way, included a line that I find quite disturbing:

“No matter what happened
Yesterday or last year
Or in your childhood,
Today is a new beginning…”

Now that I am 74, despite decades of therapy, meditation, and being a therapist – and I do aspire to make courageous choices in the present moment – I am nonetheless more and more convinced that what happened in my childhood will continue to influence most days of my life, like it or not.

First, when I opened these emails I scowled. Then I ignored them. But eventually, I could not resist writing back, perhaps wishing to participate in the well-intentioned, if hugely annoying, exchange? Or, more likely, just wishing for revenge.

So, I am making my two lists.

Number 1: I resolve to do what I know I will do anyways. I will binge-watch the third season of Ted Lasso. I will eat baklava for breakfast every day.

Number 2: I am making resolutions, but I am making them backwards for the year that has just ended. I’m compiling a list of everything I accomplished last year. It is, much to my surprise, quite an awesome list. I am having a lot of fun and I am starting to feel pretty darn good.

With a Perspective, this is Sara Alexander.

Sara Alexander is a marriage and family therapist. She lives in San Francisco and Graton.

College applications are upon us once again, and I am in a state of PTSD-ed deja vu as I watch my beautiful boy fashion himself into a candidate worthy of acceptance into the hallowed halls of our venerable institutions of higher learning. A holistic process during which he must show himself to be, in no particular order: a sustainer of academic rigor, a leader in his community, an elevator of some grand passion, and yet somehow still authentic. In short, a fully realized human being at the tender age of 17.

All lessons learned from the last time fall off to the wayside, as a challenging process is made even more so as I tinge it with my frustration and unsolicited opinions.

“When I was at Uni,” I tell him, referring to a time 30-plus years ago and in another country, “we were only allowed to apply to five. There were no essays, and nobody even knew what an extracurricular was. Oh, and it was free—for everyone.”

He rolls his eyes, and truth be told, I am internally rolling mine too, for how is this helpful? But helpful or not, it was the truth, and here perhaps is another truth. This system, our system, may no longer be fit for purpose; Overly complicated, unduly stressful, and with no method to its madness.

Why all this hand wringing, you may wonder, for after all is it not his journey? Of course, but I defy you to show me a parent who is truly hands-off. I am conflicted. I believe in the worth of a good education—for the betterment of oneself, for the betterment of society—and yet I struggle with my hypocrisy as I contribute to a system I consider to be flawed and unfair, one that has lost sight of its actual purpose: Education not for profit but for the endowment of knowledge. Education, not as a social stratifier, but as a great equalizer.

So, as I watch him, I want to say, “Please do not worry. The sum of who you will eventually be is going to be so much greater than which university you attend now.”

Instead what I say is, “Have you finished your essays yet?”

With a Perspective, I’m Nirmy Kang.

Nirmy Kang is a Punjabi-British writer whose work explores her plural heritage and the universality of our common experiences.

As a small business owner, this holiday season I am up against an Amazon with unlimited resources and insane reach. Our little shoe store is old school, we measure feet and sit‐and‐fit our clients for top-notch comfort shoes. Nothing too sexy or slick about us.

Amazon and Zappos have entire departments specializing in social media, inventory management, algorithms to prompt you to buy more. At our store, we do it all ourselves, with a few people wearing many hats. we specialize in face‐to‐face, contact and we’ve leaned into new ways of connecting with our customers and community.

We hustled up a website although we had sworn we’d never sell online, we figured out how to fit shoes over FaceTime, and created plexiglass protection zones to keep us all safe.

If you want stores like ours to be around, if you want to browse in bookshops, or touch and sit on furniture before you buy it, now is the time to join the battle against the all‐powerful Internet Gods.

Before you take the one‐swipe‐to‐buy route this holiday season, please call your local businesses and give us a chance to battle Amazon. We’re scrappy and tough and, most importantly, we have you on our side.

You may have to wait a few more days than speedy two‐day Prime. You may have to do a curbside pick‐up or wait for me to return your call because I only have a few employees ‐‐ but I pay them a true living wage and give them benefits. They might be your neighbor.

Small retailers need you now. Literally, we will not be here without
you. The online giants are good at what they do, I do not deny that. And we are good at what we do: we know shoes and feet. We look you in the eye and thank you for making the choice to shop locally.

I am sure I can take on the almighty Amazon this season because I have you as my secret weapon.

With a Perspective, I’m Rachel Averbuck.

Rachel Averbuck lives in Sebastopol. Her shoe shop is in Santa Rosa.

Ten days ago I felt a slight tingle in my sinuses. It’s a common sensation we’ve all felt, often an early indicator of a cold. I drank some water and figured it would pass. The next morning I tested positive for COVID-19. I was told to quarantine for 10 days and that one of my symptoms could be the loss of smell and taste. I woke up the next morning to my routine coffee. Something wasn’t right. I plucked a sprig of basil and held it to my nose, nothing. I smashed the basil leaf hoping to release its odors. Still nothing.

That night my wife and I had dinner outdoors, about 15 feet apart. The meal was black lentils with Italian sausage and asparagus, topped with Parmesan cheese. Typically a mouth-watering meal. Nothing. And so it continued…a fully loaded sandwich, nothing. Green curry, nothing.

When I was told about this being one of the primary symptoms of COVID, it never really registered with me what it must be like. Until now. It set in for me that our sense of smell and taste are likely two of the things that we take most for granted in our lives. They are ingrained in us. They help orient us to our surroundings. They tap into our primal fight or flight instincts. They are fundamental to our survival.

And just like that, gone.

My hunger waned but I continued to shove tasteless food scraps into my mouth. I only ate because I knew I had to. I craved flavor. I considered eating an entire clove of garlic just to see what would happen. I crushed up dill seeds and held them to my nose, huffing away, hoping that a scent would break through.

A few mornings later I was sautéing onions, and there was a subtle flash of something. Eager with anticipation I sat down to eat the huevos rancheros I had prepared. As I bit down on the corn tortilla coated in salty egg, cheese and lightly charred onion, it was euphoric. I never knew food could taste so good. I tried to eat slowly, savoring each bite, but it was no use. It tasted so good.

I sat, with lingering flavors tickling my throat, in appreciation for what I had just eaten. I hoped that I would never again take for granted the privilege of tasting good food.

With a Perspective, this is Conor Hagen.

Conor Hagen is a filmmaker and photographer living in Kenwood.

Most people consider procrastination a four-letter word. To me, ASAP is a four-letter word. But we’re almost four months into the new year, so I’m starting to think seriously about making my New Year’s resolutions, and I think one of those resolutions should be conquering my procrastination habit.

Procrastination is as old as the Pyramids. Literally. According to a book on procrastination, which I have not gotten around to finishing, the Egyptians had two words that can be translated as “procrastinate.” One word is pro-procrastination, the other anti. “Procrastinate” comes from two Latin words: “forward” and “of tomorrow.”

It’s too bad dictionaries define the word negatively, because procrastination is neither laziness nor idleness. What might look like inaction to the casual observer is actually a prolonged internal period of preparing to begin, all the while knowing that, as Dilbert said, “Most problems go away if you wait long enough.” And let’s not forget procrastination’s positive by-products — all the dusting, organizing, rearranging.

We procrastinators are encouraged to carpe our diems. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” To which Mark Twain wisely replied, “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well.” In addition to remembering Twain’s advice, we can summon our inner Scarlett O’Haras, or quote the handyman from the film ‘Tremors’, who explains, “We plan ahead. That way we don’t do anything right now.”

Recently I discovered an online article insisting that I had not a procrastination problem but rather an impulsivity problem. If the author had he just postponed submitting the piece, he would have had time to realize that he was describing distraction, not procrastination.

Although I like the idea of being “of tomorrow,” I know I should live for today. I’ve thought seriously about this. I’ve slept on it – for many nights. And I’ve decided that, yes, I will. I will seize the day.

Tomorrow.

With a Perspective, I’m Lane Parker.

Lane Parker is a writer and editor in San Francisco.

It happens all the time.

Every day, women are told they are less than, that they act inappropriately even though they do the same things as men. These sexist ideals are especially prevalent in the debate community, and I’ve unfortunately received my share of these comments.

I sat down after giving my last speech and felt all the stress of the round leave my body. My partner and I used our shared document to communicate to each other while the judges decided our fate. Were we going to compete the next day or were we going home? Fifteen minutes later, the decision was revealed. “It’s a 2-1 for the affirmative,” said one of the judges. My partner and I turned to each other, big smiles on our faces, and high-fived. We had won!

I thanked my opponents for a good round, then asked one of the judges for feedback specific to our team. I wanted to hear what we could improve on, not what she was going to say. She called me to her desk, and I wondered, “Why does she want to talk to me individually?” Little did I know, the words that would come out of her mouth would be, “You spoke too loudly and aggressively for a female debater. You need to be subdued, because that is not our place.” I stood there in astonishment while she told me everything I did was wrong, because I was a woman.

This was one of the first experiences I had with outright sexism in the debate community. The sexism hasn’t been decreasing since it happened. Sexism in the debate community is so prevalent, yet it is one of the most ignored issues. It occurs in subtle ways, and such outright ways like the experience I had. It ranges from mansplaining, to losing rounds to male debaters because of the way that women are dressed. And yet for some reason, the entire range is ignored.

Raising awareness about this issue is important, because as society is changing, the debate community needs to as well. I long for the day when I don’t receive these sexist comments.

With a Perspective, I’m Anika Ganesh.

Anika Ganesh is a sophomore at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. Her piece was produced with free curriculum from KQED’s Perspectives Youth Media Challenge.

My daughter June has been having a hard time at night. Anxiety about the darkness, about being alone in her room. She called to me from her bed, needing extra snuggles to bridge the gap from awake to asleep. I laid with her and we talked about what might calm her mind. We decided to read a story. She inspected her bookshelf, looking for the perfect tale to read.

June landed on an old book of mine, a silly Halloween paperback I remember choosing from the schoolbook fair when I was her age. We read a few pages and I asked her, “Can I show you something cool?” She eagerly said yes, still at the age where she genuinely believes I have cool things to show her.

I laid the open book on top of her lamp for a few moments, hoping that there was no expiration on the glow-in-the-dark paint that lined the illustrations. I placed the book back in her small hands and clicked off the lamp. In her dark bedroom, the pictures shone a bright, glowing, yellow-green. She said softly, with the purest awe and wonder, “Oh wow.” As if it were the northern lights. As if she had never seen anything prettier.

I haven’t been able to think about this moment since without crying. And I’ve been thinking about why those two words have made me so emotional. Is it because I know that the days where joy is effortlessly found are numbered for her? That she will grow up, and adult heartache will replace her easy, innocent joy? Am I mourning my own adult heartache, asking myself, when was the last time you said, “Oh wow” and really meant it? I think yes to all.

So I will learn from her. I will relish a cup of tea that is the perfect temperature. I will delight in the warmth of my dog on my lap. I will be grateful when my partner and I laugh ’til we’re in tears. And I will always, always look at my little girl, my heart barely contained, full of awe and wonder.

She will forever be my “oh wow.”

With a Perspective, I’m Sophie Bloch.

Sophie Bloch is a single mother from the East Bay with a passion for being in the kitchen.

I wanted an apple for my morning muesli but the only one left had three soft brown spots. Normally, I would have tossed it out. But these were COVID-19 times. And I was doubly hobbled because a freak fall had broken my fibula bone. I needed an orthopedic boot just to stand up. Forget making a quick trip to the store.

I cut the blemishes away and grated my apple. It was delicious. And it made me think: How did I become someone who threw away food so easily?

Growing up in Berlin in the long shadow of World War II, I learned that food was precious. Nothing was tossed out. Every plate was cleared.

My mother shopped with just a string bag. Then she remarried and we moved to the United States. The neighborhood supermarket in St. Paul was a miracle; shelves of cereal boxes, pyramids of canned peas, piles of watermelons, an expanse of red meats, stacks of candy bars. I was awestruck.

Midsummer, my stepdad took us to the company picnic, a jolly lakeside affair. Tables were heaped with Jell-O molds and layered cakes. Grill stations featured men flipping burgers. You could take as much food as you wanted and no one cared if you finished it.

I remember the egg-toss game. People flinging eggs back and forth until they splattered, slicking the grass with gooey yellow patches. The winner pitched his egg into the lake and everyone cheered. I didn’t. When we left the picnic, half-eaten hot dogs and cupcakes were spilling from garbage cans. I felt sad. But over the years, I became careless with food.

I decided this was one BC — before COVID — habit I would break. Instead of stocking up, I would use up. My pantry is full of lentils, rice, tomato paste and more — so many ingredients to create meals I will gladly finish.

With a Perspective, I’m Christine Schoefer.

Christine Schoefer is a writer who teaches empowerment skills to women and girls

I was 3 years old when I learned that asking questions and listening to people was much better than making judgments or assumptions.

I learned this lesson when I lived in San Francisco. There were many homeless people who lived in that neighborhood, and there were two in particular who stood out to me: Scotty and Mike. The main reason I noticed them more than others was because they lived in our driveway. Each evening they would set up their tents and every morning they would pack them up. My parents noticed that they would leave our front yard cleaner than they found it, often sweeping the leaf litter before heading on their way. They were very protective of our family too, warning people who were making a lot of noise late at night. I think our house was safer because of them.

Scotty and Mike were some of the nicest people I have ever met. They used to bring me little presents and toys to thank our family for letting them sleep in our driveway. I could not help but worry about Scotty and Mike though, and wished they had a home.

One day when my mom and I were walking home from the park, I noticed that Scotty and Mike were setting up their tents. Being my curious little self, I ran up to them and asked, “Why don’t you have a home?” At the time I knew that there were many people that didn’t have homes, but a big part of me just wanted to make sure Scotty and Mike were okay.

Mike was the one who answered me. He knelt down so we were eye to eye and explained that they didn’t really want a home. He said that if they had one then they would have to deal with rent and other money problems. He actually thanked me for caring and being concerned. I simply nodded my head and didn’t even reflect on the bright smile that was drawn on their faces as I ran inside following my mom.

I still remember that day and how I made Scotty and Mike smile and how I made them feel good and appreciated. After that, I did not worry anymore about Scotty and Mike. They were living the life they wanted and I am happy I got to learn that lesson from such nice neighbors. I think if a 3-year-old can not judge a book by its cover and ask instead of stare, then everyone can.

With a Perspective, I am Jackie Tavernetti.

Jackie Tavernetti is in eighth grade at Kent Middle School in Kentfield.

Schools from coast to coast are struggling to stay open as the pandemic rages. With so many teachers out sick, schools are deploying everyone, even superintendents, to cover classes.

I was sent to teach first grade. Teachers may be essential workers, but classrooms feel like Russian roulette, all day in one room, sharing your air with dozens of others. Most essential workers in harm’s way have protection – health care workers are masked, gowned, and gloved; police wear protective vests; firefighters kitted out in fire-resistant gear. Teachers, in some districts, are not even issued masks.

But my district does have safety protocols, providing teachers and students with PPE and testing. The teacher was out sick with COVID, but she left a lesson plan – after reading and math, it was “show and tell” time.

One girl displayed a terra cotta pot and explained how she grew the tiny sprout. A boy showed a photo of his colorful pet parrot. Another girl showed a locket her grandmother gave her the day she was born. Each student, an object, a story.

And listening, for a moment I forgot about masks and hand sanitizer. These kids may be facing a world overflowing with problems – wars, wildfires, diseases – but during “show and tell,” amid laughter and “oohs” and “ahs”, school felt hopeful.

These six-year-olds, like every generation, will face their own set of challenges. But if they are as resourceful and enthusiastic as they are during “show and tell,” they will figure out solutions.

COVID is taking its toll, but school is still full of interesting things to show and wonderful stories to tell. These kids showed me that, and I can’t wait to see what they will show and tell all of us when it’s their turn to run the world.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

When Dennis came to see me, I could see something was wrong. He started telling me about fatigue, headaches, and trouble sleeping. After some probing, he shared that his marriage was tense, work was a struggle, and the stress of COVID on him and his family had become overwhelming. I decided to screen him for a mood disorder.

During the pandemic, about four in 10 adults have reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, up from one in 10 prior to COVID. Many adults report difficulty sleeping or eating, increased alcohol consumption or substance use, and worsening chronic conditions, often due to worry and stress over life’s changes due to the coronavirus. As the pandemic wears on, continuing and necessary public health measures can foster isolation and loneliness, while at the same time, so many people have lost jobs or left unsafe ones, both circumstances that would affect mental health even in better times.

Essential workers bear the brunt of the risk, exposing themselves to the virus every day. Among frontline workers, in some places, healthcare personnel compare current conditions to a war zone. They feel frustration getting protective resources such as testing and PPE, and it can be hard not to resent the unvaccinated who have increased the personal risk to themselves, as well as to the many health care workers they encounter.

After screening Dennis, I talked to him about his social support system and various coping strategies, including spending time in nature, meditation, exercise, and taking a break from social media and the news. Together, we decided we would start therapy and medication to help him through the crisis. I thanked him for his courage to seek help. All of us may need to reach out for support more than usual these days.

As we start 2022, let’s all help each other and ask for support when we need it, because when the virus starts to abate, we will still feel COVID’s mental health effects for months and years to come.

With a Perspective, I’m Dr. Baldeep Singh.

Dr. Baldeep Singh is a South Bay physician.

My sister died with COVID.

When I consider sharing this news, I hold the information and assess for understanding. Will this person empathize with my loss or will my sister’s death be another data point on a pandemic chart?

I can tell whether the response will offer empathy or judgment if their immediate question is, “Was she vaccinated?”

The first time I was asked the question — “Was she vaccinated?” — I was frozen with sadness. Is this all they care about? What about my sister’s life or my grief?

The second time I was asked the question — “Was she vaccinated?” — I was awakened with anger. Is this all they care about? What about my sister’s life or my grief?

The third time I was asked the question — “Was she vaccinated?” — I was broken with hopelessness.

I found myself asking, “Where is our humanity?” As in, “a state of being kind.”

Some will find it understandable to ask the vaccination question. I get it. But I find it unkind and unskillful when someone has died. If you lose your loved one, who struggled to breathe and died alone, you will understand.

“Was she vaccinated?” is not how anyone wants to be remembered, including my sister.

“Was she vaccinated?” is for you, and your own fear.

“Was she vaccinated?” is a question that builds fences and separates us from shared compassion and our collective humanity. Instead of asking “Was she vaccinated?” perhaps take a moment to breathe in the grief. From my experience, silence can be incredibly kind.

Simply saying “I am sorry for your loss,” or “I can only imagine how difficult this is for you,” or “I have no words,” are ways to be supportive.

You may still want to know the answer to the question, “Was she vaccinated?”

I know the answer, and my heart knows better than to share it, and instead to gently remind you, my sister died with COVID and I am grieving for us all.

With a Perspective, I am Anna Beuselinck.

Anna Beuselinck is a leadership coach and steward at a winery in Hopland.

Hand-in-hand my mom and I walk along the colorful cobblestone streets of Antigua, Guatemala. I am 7 years old and we are on our way to meet my mother— the mother I haven’t seen in almost seven years. As church bells chime, we hurry towards the bus terminal.

My mom— my adoptive American mom— hired a searcher to find my Guatemalan birth mother. Today is the day I meet her.

A few minutes later, we’re standing across the street from the terminal as a bus pulls away from the curb. While the haze of exhaust dissipates, a woman approaches us. She has thick black hair and dramatic dark eyebrows. My carbon copy. She is the woman who gave me life.

Face to face, instinctively, we move towards each other. Is this the bond of blood? Surprisingly, she feels nothing like a stranger or someone I have waited for my entire life. The interaction feels oddly natural. Hugging her feels familiar, like embracing an old friend.

At lunch, I sit on her lap and we share a plate of chicken and rice. The translator interprets her words but it doesn’t take language to feel her love. Within the next few hours, I become an older brother, a younger brother, and an uncle to two. I also learn I hate plantains.

I used to be afraid my mother might die before I met her. Or that she worried where I was, if I was safe. I worried about her, too.
Like me, many adopted children grow up wondering who they look like, where they get their personalities from— their adoptive parents or their birth parents. The questions are endless.

Recently, the Guatemalan government launched a program through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Council of Adoption. This service provides Guatemalan adoptees access to a database of information about their biological roots. For adoptees, this is far more than just a computer search engine. It could provide answers to the endless list of questions.

I hope more adoptees have the same opportunity to meet their birth mothers as I did. When we met, I got closure and answers to my questions. When we hugged goodbye, I knew she got closure, too.

With a Perspective, I’m Mateo Berger.

Mateo Berger is a junior at Redwood High School in Larkspur.

Many years ago, while hitchhiking in the now-defunct Yugoslavia, I took a room for a night with a family in the beautiful, ancient town of Ochrid, on the lake of the same name, in the shadow of then-communist Albania.

Three generations shared their low-ceilinged home. My “room” was the hallway. My bed, the only one. The rest slept in a single living space, trading comfort for a few dinars. Dinner was included, with everyone sitting on pillows around a knee-high table. Everyone except the gap-toothed, wrinkled grandmother, who crouched in a corner. The others occasionally tossed chunks of roast lamb her way, as if she were some aged pet. Easy to judge, hard to excuse. But what did I really know? I was a young, footloose stranger, being given a night’s hospitality in a land whose people and customs I knew nothing about.

In this country, not long ago, three generations often lived together, passing the torch to those related by blood. Elders contributed in their person what can be learned in no other way. Youth was a gift, offering up its promise. Adults negotiated the treacherous middle ground, sharing youth’s heartache and enjoying its success, while comforting their parents in their decline. Now, pressures of work and finance, the changing notion of family and longer life have made caring for the aged at home difficult and in many cases impossible. Residential care facilities have filled the void created by default.

This pandemic magnifies the isolation of those whose age, vulnerability, and utter reliance on strangers is their only shared history with their new housemates. Who is to say that Yugoslav grandmother wasn’t happier than those in the old age home, where all one’s needs are catered to but the one no facility can provide — a family, however dysfunctional. Our temporary self-isolation is nothing compared to that. Its lack can be a cause of death. Hopefully, we will put our minds, hearts and resources to creating compassionate alternatives to our present inadequate options.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Friedlander.

Richard Friedlander is an actor, author and mediator in the East Bay.

I’ve lost count of the number of times in the last 22 years my husband was asked if he would still be vegan if I weren’t around. Some have implied that I “whipped” him into giving up meat and that he would run for the nearest steak if I weren’t looking.

There has long been a connection in the public’s mind between eating meat and being masculine. Meat is macho; plant foods, effeminate. Meat connotes virility; plant foods, weakness. The media and those in the business of selling animal flesh (or cars or trucks or beer) reinforce these tropes with tired stereotypes and offensive ads, shaping the cultural perception that veggie burgers are for wimps, quinoa is emasculating and tofu will cause men to grow breasts.

Real men eat meat, so we’re told.

At this point, I know I’m supposed to counter these clichés by pointing out the fact that bulls and gorillas build muscle by eating plants and that countless vegan bodybuilders and endurance athletes are winning medals for their strength, speed and brawn.

And while that’s all true, that’s still a pretty myopic view of what makes a man. Having strength isn’t measured simply by the number of pounds you can lift. It’s also about standing firm in your principles, having the courage of your convictions and exerting control over your own choices. Conforming to social dictates and being afraid to challenge cultural stereotypes, or eat kale, doesn’t exactly signify strength, autonomy and independence.

Taking responsibility, possessing a sense of honor, showing respect and protecting the powerless — all of these are traditional masculine attributes to be proud of, and none of them are strengthened by the consumption of animals. In fact, I would argue it’s quite the opposite. Eating plants and sparing animals demonstrates concern, consideration and respect for others — and for self. The benefits are manifold and far-reaching.

My husband will tell you that he became vegan 22 years ago because it aligned with his intention to live simply and to let others simply live. It’s his strength of character I admire most, and that doesn’t come from eating a steak.

Real men eat plants, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

With a Perspective, this is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an author and animal activist living in Oakland.

This Perspectives piece was originally published June 30, 2021.

What would you do if your loved one needed your support — but you let peer pressure get the best of you?

I remember a sunny warm day in second grade when I learned a lesson I’d never forget. Life was simple back then, just hanging out with friends and almost never having homework. As a kid, waiting for recess was my biggest worry. The ring that reminds every student that recess has just begun and it was time to play had rung. I smiled and ran as fast as I could out the door while holding my lunch bag and couldn’t wait until I was seated eating my snack. I played with my friends as usual, but when it ended I spotted something unusual. My friends and I were walking back to class when I spotted my little brother in kindergarten crying on a bench. I became astonished and immediately wanted to help him but something was holding me back from helping him.

That thing was embarrassment. I knew comforting him was the right thing to do, but I was so worried about what my friends would think of me if I were to go over there. I didn’t want to embarrass myself so instead, I made the decision to just ignore him and stay with my friends. This decision would be the most regretful decision of my life and one I wished I didn’t make. At that time I felt so worried about my friends’ thoughts and if they would make fun of me for helping my little brother. I worried about it so much that it consumed the part of me that did want to ask what happened and how I can help. I felt so ashamed of myself for just ignoring and leaving my younger brother alone when I knew that he needed or would have liked my company at that time.

Now, years from then, I realize that many people also struggle with the pressure of how others think of them and let it control their actions like it did to me. Do not let others’ opinions stop you from doing the right thing or complicate your actions. In reality, most people aren’t focused on them and the opinions of those who are shouldn’t matter to you anyway. On that day in second grade, I learned this lesson and realized I shouldn’t value anyone’s judgment over my loved ones.

With a Perspective, I’m Teiji Futamase.

Teiji Futamase is an eighth-grader at Leonard Herman Intermediate School in San Jose. His piece was produced with free curriculum from KQED’s Perspectives Youth Media Challenge.

I have a great view from my home of container ships heading towards the Port of Oakland, where they drop anchor in the bay—sometimes for weeks—before they can unload their cargoes. Everyone I know is frustrated waiting for something from offshore, be it spare parts for their car, a new computer, the list is endless.

I get it, because the current supply chain problems are affecting my business. As a steel distributor, my job is to acquire steel for construction and manufacturing, and deliver the products on time. The closure of many U.S. metal manufacturers due to foreign competition means a growing dependence on offshore steel. The broken supply chain makes that dependence worse.

Efforts to combat abnormally cheap foreign steel have had limited success, and the huge surge in the demand as our economy attempts to return to normalcy has exasperated shortages and delays, greatly exposing our vulnerability.

In my view the biggest culprits are the shipping companies, increasing their rates by as much as 500% in the last 2 years. They have also jammed U.S. ports with super-large ships carrying thousands of containers, clogging our ports and slowing down turn around time. Add labor shortages at U.S. ports, and a shortage of trucks and the result is a clogged supply chain.

The broken supply chain could be a harbinger of change ultimately benefiting American workers and the catalyst to re-position our manufacturing closer to home. Some business experts call it “near sourcing”. This means replacing our dependence on products from Asia and Europe, where a complicated supply chain can easily break under stress, to encouraging a rebuilding of a manufacturing base at home, and in Mexico and Canada.

The pandemic has caused us to focus on our economic vulnerabilities and our strategic and national security risks due to our dependence on offshore resources. “Near sourcing” will create good middle class jobs and allow us never again, to be held hostage by foreign ship owners and a fragile supply chain.

With a Perspective, I’m Joe Epstein.

Joe Epstein lives in San Francisco.

When I was 6, a girl visiting from my native Taiwan admonished me for smiling at another child because she was black. Even at 6, I could not understand this blatant racism. My response in hindsight: “We wouldn’t even be in the country if not for the Civil Rights movement.”

The first Chinese exclusion acts emerged in the 1880s. By the time I was born in the 1960s the U.S. had fully reopened the doors to Chinese immigrants and my father arrived as a graduate student in that first wave of Asian immigration.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I celebrate the Civil Rights movement that helped foster the historic opening of immigration laws then. President Johnson spoke of lifting the “bars of discrimination” against immigrants. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was more explicit, urging us to “bring our immigration law into line with the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The following year, the Hart-Celler Act opened the doors to people coming from China, India, Brazil, Pakistan, all over — lifting the ethnic bans and quotas in place for over 40 years.

During my college years, Stanford was not immune to the forces around the world agitating for change. In 1989, our Rainbow Coalition of student groups staged a sit-in demanding that our studies and professors mirror our diversity. As police buses rolled in, this made national news. Coming from a scrappy, isolated upbringing in Chinatown, I began to understand the power of collective action. In my sophomore year, Coretta Scott King spoke of her husband’s legacy to an auditorium of rapt students. When I took the stage, it was no longer about representing my people. Our diversity carried a common message, that our humanity is made whole when quotas are lifted, walls torn down.

Privilege and politics can isolate us; we don’t need more walls. Today is a reminder that those of us who came to this country, or built our lives on the sweat of immigrants, should count the leaders of the Civil Rights movement among our kin.

With a Perspective. I’m Li Miao Lovett.

Li Miao Lovett is an educator in San Francisco.

Two of the most important females in my life liked and like pomegranates. My mom loved them and they were hard to find in East Tennessee in the 60s. And my three-year-old granddaughter is a pomegranate fool. As the days grow shorter pomegranates appear in the market.

They are such exotic fruits, and look like nothing else. I love picking apart the white mesh and discovering a bright red ball of lusciousness. They are messy, tart and sweet. Originally found from Iran to northern India, they have been grown for millennia in the Middle East. Some scholars believe they were the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden.

Not surprisingly due of the color of the juicy seeds many cultures associate pomegranates with the feminine. In ancient Rome newlywed women wore crowns woven from the leaves and the juice was said to cure infertility. The ancient belief in the health benefits are proving true. Pomegranates might help with heart disease, and even diabetes.

Those of you of a certain age might remember Edith Hamilton‘s classical Mythology book. Those myths were mind blowing for me and so much better stories than the ones I was hearing at the First Methodist Church.

Hades, the god of the underworld, wanted a wife. He kidnaps the goddess Demeter’s only child, Persephone. Demeter and Dionysius are two of the Gods quite appealing to us mere mortals. Demeter is the goddess of harvest and nature and Dionysius of course the god of wine and revelry. What’s not to love about those two?

After her daughter goes missing Demeter wanders the earth grieving. And the earth becomes cold and barren. Finally, after hearing the laments of starving people, Zeus sends an emissary down to straighten everything out. Hades agrees to let Persephone return to her mother but slyly makes her eat a magic pomegranate seed. This trickery necessitates that Persephone has to return to live with Hades for three months. And when this happens her mother mourns and winter once again besets the earth.

But without winter, how can we really appreciate the spring?

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

But in an impulsive act of quarantine indulgence, I accepted their offer. I named the white car Casper, after the friendly ghost. And while I still prefer to travel by Muni, I must admit owning a car has its perks. I take Casper to visit my grandparents in Vacaville every month. My four-wheeled phantom was there to rush my sick dog to the emergency vet one night at 3 A.M. The car even served as a satellite office when my neighbors ran a jackhammer all day while I was trying to work from home.

But the downsides soon became clear. Casper costs thousands of dollars to own and operate – so much more than my monthly transit pass. Meanwhile, sitting in traffic is stressful. I’d much rather be gliding down the street on my e-bike, groceries in tow, instead of cooped up in a metal box, inching my way home. And then, of course, there’s the guilt I feel knowing that driving is our city’s number one source of greenhouse gas emissions. I’ve realized that owning a car hardly symbolizes freedom. In fact, it’s the opposite.

This made me wonder. What would it take to make car-free, or even car-light, lifestyles the norm? It would take frequent, reliable transit service that’s accessible for all. It would require making sure residents have protected bike lanes and safe streets to walk, bike, and scoot in. It would mean guaranteeing that a shared car is available when people do need to drive. And maybe it even means nudging people out of cars by making driving just a little less convenient.

For now, Casper spends most of her time parked on the streets of the Sunset District. But when her time comes, I hope to shed this car for good, knowing that options will be there to match Casper’s convenience – without the fossil fuels.

With a Perspective, this is Paige Miller

Paige Miller is a clean transportation advocate. She lives in San Francisco.

Or this more benign email from my sister: “The Big Three for 2022”. Her list of resolutions at least was short. Only three items of proposed self-improvement, followed by the simple invitation: “Feel free to share your goals for the New Year if you are so inclined.” I have no such inclination.

And then there was this one from a dear friend: “Resolution Time: A Poem My Neighbor Wrote.” This poem, by the way, included a line that I find quite disturbing:

“No matter what happened
Yesterday or last year
Or in your childhood,
Today is a new beginning…”

Now that I am 74, despite decades of therapy, meditation, and being a therapist – and I do aspire to make courageous choices in the present moment – I am nonetheless more and more convinced that what happened in my childhood will continue to influence most days of my life, like it or not.

First, when I opened these emails I scowled. Then I ignored them. But eventually, I could not resist writing back, perhaps wishing to participate in the well-intentioned, if hugely annoying, exchange? Or, more likely, just wishing for revenge.

So, I am making my two lists for 2022.

Number 1: I resolve to do what I know I will do anyways. I will binge-watch the third season of Ted Lasso. I will eat baklava for breakfast every day.

Number 2: I am making resolutions, but I am making them backwards for the year that has just ended. I’m compiling a list of everything I accomplished last year. It is, much to my surprise, quite an awesome list. I am having a lot of fun and I am starting to feel pretty darn good.

With a Perspective, this is Sara Alexander.

Sara Alexander is a marriage and family therapist. She lives in San Francisco and Graton.

The marketplace of ideas is a vast virtual warehouse. Inside you can choose from an inventory that runs the gamut from the official version to the debunked and discredited. It’s all there and it’s open 24/7. Expert opinion is prominently displayed, but there’s no requirement that you select any of it.

Our shopping behavior suggests that this emporium of ideas could use a better layout. It appears that many of us stop in the politics section first and then look to accessorize that set of ideas with something from the science aisles. You don’t have to select something from the evidence displays before heading over to the theory section. You can select an explanation first and then handpick the evidence that supports it.

Another problem is that if we don’t find what we want in one aisle we can just turn down the next and look for a substitute. For example, if we’re in the market for authoritative guidance we may find the products in the religion section shopworn and outdated. So we do our shopping instead from the science racks. But in doing so we may be expecting the wrong thing. Science is a process of discovery that operates at a constantly shifting boundary between the known and the unknown. It offers answers, but these may be subject to recall as new information comes in. We can say that we want to follow the science but that means that we need to sign the disclaimer that we agree to follow a route that may not always be a straight line. That can be confusing and some may just stop shopping in the science section altogether.

Or, some may just go back to the religious inventory because those products come in containers without expiration dates.

Speaking of shelf life, we should all admit that our most cherished ideas, the ones we call our core beliefs, also don’t expire. And so our shopping trips to the market of ideas are more like getting our oil changed: routine maintenance and an assurance that we can continue operating in the same manner as always.

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.

Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.

I asked my friend if she’d made any New Year’s resolutions. Same as last year, she tells me. She wants to start meditating regularly and become a vegetarian. If only vegetables weren’t so labor intensive – prepping them takes hours and who has that kind of time?

I tell her about my kitchen epiphany.

Making borscht soup one day, I noticed undulating white and purple lines inside the red cabbage. Slicing the onion, I saw pale concentric rings. Carrot discs contained orange and gold circles. Beet wedges displayed crimson designs and halved potatoes revealed subtle lacework patterns.

Every ingredient had a hidden mandala. Mandalas are circles containing harmoniously arranged shapes and symbols. They can be elaborate or simple, symmetrical or free-form, colorful or black and white. Each mandala is a small, perfect cosmos for contemplation. Native American dream catchers are mandalas, so are the rose windows in medieval gothic cathedrals and the Zodiac circles of European astrology.

Once I discovered vegetable mandalas, I saw whimsical designs and repeating patterns in every piece of produce. Lemon slices have spokes radiating from a pale hub towards a bright rim. Halved apples reveal starbursts. Pomegranates contain chambers of ruby red jewels. Chopping and slicing, I tell my friend, is its own art show.

And it’s more than that. The perfect symmetry inside an orange calms my mind. Spiraling lines on zucchini slices remind me that beauty exists in humble places. Nature’s infinite compositions reassure me that creativity knows no limitations. Chopping produce can be a kind of meditation.

My friend raises her eyebrows. “Can we multitask meditation?” I shrug. We can think of it as paying attention.

With a Perspective, I’m Christine Schoefer.

Christine Schoefer is a writer and educator.

On a sunny weekend afternoon, we were riding in the car when my four-year-old daughter asked, “Why are Americans only white people?”

Blood rushed to my face. I am a second-generation Chinese American. My wife, her mom, is a second generation Korean American. Her pre-school is 90% Asian. Her toys and books portray characters of all races, and there’s no TV at home so she can’t be exposed to mass media. And yet somehow, it’s been instilled in her mind that only white people are considered true Americans.

I flashed back to the moment when I was at the pediatrician’s office, maybe a year older than my daughter at the time. The doctor, an Asian man, asked me, “Are you Chinese or American?” Without hesitation I shouted, “American!” Then the doctor laughed, saying, “No, you’re Chinese!” Apparently I was not allowed to be both. It was only in college, when I started reading about Chinese American history, that I realized my doctor and I were continuing a conversation that stretched back 200 years, since the Chinese first arrived in the United States in the 1820s. Though they were denied citizenship, these Chinese immigrants were Americans in spirit. They were 49ers during the Gold Rush, built the transcontinental railroad, even fought in the Civil War.

By raising my daughter in a multi-racial environment, I hoped to get ahead of an identity crisis that took me decades to sort through. But my efforts weren’t enough. Perhaps she has an ability, found only in children, to distill the emotions and thoughts permeating the air to their absolute essence. She has a sense, never articulated, that despite our centuries-long history, Chinese Americans are still fighting for their place in the great American story. The spate of anti-Chinese violence during the pandemic shows that our almond-shaped eyes, black hair, and pale complexion still leaves us othered, perpetual foreigners.

Back in the car I was stewing, while my even-keeled wife shot me a look to calm down. In response to our daughter’s question, my wife gave a straightforward reply: “We are American, just as white people are American. We are all equally American.” The nuances will, I guess, wait for another day.

With a Perspective, I’m Charles Feng.

Charles Feng is a physician living in the South Bay.

I’m in my mid 20s. For the first time in my life, I’ve finally got a salary, health insurance and a fancy title. But I took my time getting here.

After my high school graduation, I worked for years in food service — sometimes two or three jobs. During that time, it felt like I was behind my old classmates who were already working to get their degrees. But I needed time to grow, to figure out who I was and where I wanted to be.

When I finally felt ready, I enrolled in community college. It was there I fell in love with print and broadcast journalism. I learned to write, film, photograph and edit stories from professors of color who advocated for me and gave me the agency to cover what I cared about.

And after earning my associates degree, I transferred to a university, confident in my decision to pursue journalism as my major.

While at San Francisco State, I met even more people who provide opportunities for marginalized folks in journalism. These mentors taught me technical skills I needed and how to stand up for myself and other queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of color in the workplace.

During all those years of school, I continued to work part-time. I had to deal with egotistical chefs and managers, verbally abusive customers and a culture of coping with drinking and drugs.

So after being laid off at the beginning of the pandemic, I promised to put my mental and physical health first and not work in kitchens anymore.

It’s terrifying being a young adult trying to support yourself in this economy, during a global pandemic and ecological catastrophe. That’s what makes it so important to hold the door open for other marginalized folks.

I wouldn’t be here without the people who believed in me and guided me to where I am today. Now working at YR Media, I feel honored to continue the work to carve space for new perspectives, new voices, new futures.

With a Perspective, I’m Shaylyn Martos.

Shaylyn Martos lives in Oakland. Their Perspective was produced by YR Media.

I bake decent sweets, 75% of them actually come out correct. I play music and sing songs with my dad and cousin, but I miss notes and mess up lyrics. I try keeping plants in my room, hoping to have inherited my mother’s green thumb genes, yet every plant I have ever had has died. I write for my school newspaper, but I have the worst spelling that any teacher has ever seen. I play field hockey, on junior varsity. I’ve tried pottery and came out with a lopsided vase.

For as long as I can remember I have loved trying new things. Through middle school, I tried just about every activity I could get my hands on and hoped for something interesting every day. Until I got older. That excitement of trying new activities became taken over by the fact that I was supposed to start excelling at one hobby, instead of having many. The reality I ended up left with shined an unappealing light on the fact that I was decent at a lot of things, but not exceptional at one thing.

I watched my peers grow up, finding their passions and uncovering exactly who they wanted to be, while I stood, stuck in a body that couldn’t seem to figure out who she was. I felt constantly ashamed and embarrassed, I was supposed to be amazing at something that I could pursue, that could take me to college and beyond, but when I looked at my life, all I saw were started projects left unfinished. For every accomplishment a friend or family member made, a tangle of jealousy blasted up inside of me, yearning to have just one thing to myself.

As a high school student, constant pressure made me forget to live, forget to experience my youth. I was consumed by the lie that I should work only on my future instead of live in the present. When the thought of having to be above everyone else dominates your mind, you forget about the small things that make your life your own. The weekends I spend reading books in my room, learning to love the comfort of being alone. The new recipes I try, just for the fun of it. The late nights at my best friends’ houses where we order takeout and passionately rant about every subject we could think of. My brother and I making each other laugh so hard, we can’t look at each other, for the fear that we may never catch our breath. Those are the things I live for.

I may never excel at one thing, but these experiences are what make my life worth living, and remind me that being ok at a lot of things is better than my life being taken over by the idea that I am only meant to be great at one thing. I am simple, I live for what I love. And loving something doesn’t mean I have to be exceptional at it, I get to be exceptionally average at everything.

With a perspective, I’m Gillian Reynolds.

Gillian Reynolds is a junior at Redwood High School in Larkspur.

We’re coming on two years that we’ve been living in COVID, as Omicron surges on. Honestly, having to live in this constant state of uncertainty and unpredictability is taking its toll. On top of all of this are additional stressors; climate change, rampant crime, homelessness in the city and racial and political strife, I find myself yearning for some sense of comfort and reassurance.

So, I decided to turn to old Mr. Rogers episodes. It’s been a long time since I’ve visited his neighborhood. I was immediately reminded of his magical ability to communicate a calm and reassuring message that always left me feeling that everything would be ok.

As a psychotherapist, I can employ sophisticated therapeutic techniques, but Mr. Rogers reminds me that the most powerful gift is simply giving someone my full heartfelt attention and presence, to truly see them. I recently had a cable technician come over the other day for a repair, and I decided to not just leave him to do his business, instead, I asked him, “Do you like your job?” This seemed to catch him off guard, but I noticed he appeared to release tension from his entire body as he shared with me how his girlfriend just left him. He said he had to keep this job to help her get citizenship. I told him I was sorry that this happened to him and how he must’ve really cared about her. He seemed grateful for my understanding.

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that I have Mr. Roger’s gift to be able to be fully present with people. However, I am reminded how much it is a gift, especially during this pandemic to be able to truly see our loved ones, our neighbors, or the homeless person we walk past everyday. It’s little connections that can make a difference to a person who feels invisible and alone. I wonder what Mr. Rogers would say to us now? Here are Mr. Roger’s words, comforting then and comforting now:

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.”

With a Perspective, I’m Larry Lee.

Larry Lee is a San Francisco psychotherapist.

The last few years have been tough. In addition to the surreal state of things these days, my family has suffered several big losses, including the death of my mother. I try to see challenges in a glass-half-full sort of way, but lately this has been particularly trying. That said, at times I feel I’m making some progress.

Recently I took on a new job as a driver. Every day I deliver medication to people in need, many with terminal illness. I don’t always see them. Often a family member, or caretaker, answers the door, and I hand over the medication and I’m off to my next address. But occasionally someone engages me in conversation, and when they do, I listen, and if appropriate, offer my empathy.

By now, many of the homes and facilities I have visited before. Many of the people who answer the door I have seen before — I even recognize some by name. Sometimes I think I may understand just a little bit of what they’re experiencing, but it’s only my place to bring them what they need. Still, I feel for them, sometimes in a surprisingly profound way.

And strangely I feel connected, connected to someone I don’t know at all. It’s an odd feeling because I am a stranger…yet I am seeing them in a very private time.

In her poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver points out all of us — whether human, animal, plant, or any object of the natural world — belong to the same alliance. She writes, “[the world] calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

We all belong. We are all connected.

With a Perspective, I’m Pete Gavin.

Pete Gavin lives in Sonoma County.

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how past the sell date are thy branches. Not decorated, lit-up Christmas trees. I’m talking discarded Christmas trees, dumped on the sidewalk.

As every San Franciscan knows, once the holidays are over, do you see what I see? Sidewalks piled with old Christmas trees, nakedly stripped of tinsel and lights, thrown away on nearly every block. It’s almost a post-holiday tradition; the chilly walk to the corner store, passing heaps of chucked Christmas trees.

These trashed Tannenbaums, having done their holiday duty and been scrapped on the sidewalk, meet various fates. The fire department and garbage collection agencies recycle Christmas trees, making energy from wood chips. One program replants trees on city streets, another re-purposes Christmas trees, feeding them to goats. There’s even a Burning Man-style hipster bonfire on Ocean Beach every January made up of collected ditched Christmas trees.

New Year’s day is the unofficial deadline for getting rid of your Christmas tree. But dumped trees show up on sidewalks months later: I once saw one in April. That’s putting the “ever” in evergreen. Spotting a cast-off Christmas tree way after the holiday…what is the story behind that overdue post-yule purge? Was it from a household so holly-jolly they couldn’t bear to see Christmas end? Do these people, finally tossing Christmas trees by Easter, also have stockings on the fireplace and mistletoe all year long, singing carols in May, chestnuts roasting on an open fire in August, sipping egg nog in July?

Not to mention those random windows with Christmas lights still displayed in February. Late for last Christmas, or early for next…or is it always the most wonderful time of the year at their house?

But maybe these every-day-is-Christmas folks are onto something. If Christmas means tidings of comfort and joy, and peace on earth, there are worse things than keeping the halls decked until March. So, have yourself a merry little Christmas and hang a shining star upon the highest bough.

Even if you don’t toss it until St. Patrick’s Day.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow works for the San Francisco Unified School District.

Most people consider procrastination a four-letter word. To me, ASAP is a four-letter word. But we’re almost four months into the new year, so I’m starting to think seriously about making my New Year’s resolutions, and I think one of those resolutions should be conquering my procrastination habit.

Procrastination is as old as the Pyramids. Literally. According to a book on procrastination, which I have not gotten around to finishing, the Egyptians had two words that can be translated as “procrastinate.” One word is pro-procrastination, the other anti. “Procrastinate” comes from two Latin words: “forward” and “of tomorrow.”

It’s too bad dictionaries define the word negatively, because procrastination is neither laziness nor idleness. What might look like inaction to the casual observer is actually a prolonged internal period of preparing to begin, all the while knowing that, as Dilbert said, “Most problems go away if you wait long enough.” And let’s not forget procrastination’s positive by-products — all the dusting, organizing, rearranging.

We procrastinators are encouraged to carpe our diems. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” To which Mark Twain wisely replied, “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well.” In addition to remembering Twain’s advice, we can summon our inner Scarlett O’Haras, or quote the handyman from the film ‘Tremors’, who explains, “We plan ahead. That way we don’t do anything right now.”

Recently I discovered an online article insisting that I had not a procrastination problem but rather an impulsivity problem. If the author had he just postponed submitting the piece, he would have had time to realize that he was describing distraction, not procrastination.

Although I like the idea of being “of tomorrow,” I know I should live for today. I’ve thought seriously about this. I’ve slept on it – for many nights. And I’ve decided that, yes, I will. I will seize the day.

Tomorrow.

With a Perspective, I’m Lane Parker.

Lane Parker is a writer and editor in San Francisco.

In 1989, I unexpectedly lost my job at the Wonder Bread factory. I had two young sons, seven and eight, growing boys always hungry. Times were kind of tough, and I didn’t know how we were going to have enough food for them.

Sometimes, we would go down to the local Chinese restaurant where I knew the head waitress. Her name was Lilly. Lilly knew I wasn’t doing too well. So when she’d see me and my sons come in she would go back in the back, and come out with all kinds of Chinese food. She never once asked me to pay.

I’ve eaten at that restaurant hundreds of times as a paying customer, and Lilly and I became good friends.

Two summers ago, I was at the restaurant when Lilly suddenly collapsed. Paramedics tried to revive her, then rushed her away. I learned the next day that Lilly had died. She wasn’t even 60 years old.

At the funeral, I told everyone how Lilly had helped my family and made me feel like I had dignity and respect in front of my kids. I told Lilly’s kids how proud she was of them, how she talked about them all the time. I told them that their mother was loved and that she touched people’s lives in ways they may have never known.

It was hard for me to stand up there and talk. Nobody knew my story, and I stuck out as the only black man in a Chinese service. But I did it, because I wanted the people who loved Lilly to know the difference she’d made in the lives around her.

These days, I volunteer every Saturday at a food pantry, and for the last 10 years, I’ve worked at my local food bank, helping to provide food, dignity and respect to people in need – the same things Lilly gave to me and my sons.

In honor of Lilly, I want to remind people to be kind to one another.

You never know how far-reaching the effect might be.

With a Perspective, I’m Lloyd Jones.

Lloyd Jones is a jack-of-all-trades employee at the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, making sure that food gets to the hungry.

500,000 Americans have died in the pandemic, leading to a 1% drop in life expectancy in the USA this year. We know the big picture.

But statistics can, paradoxically, mask the pain of individual loss.

To pry open the numbers, poignant articles called “Those We Have Lost” introduce us to people we don’t know who led richly-ordinary lives.

Then there are those we do know.

For the millions of us who have unexpectedly lost our person, our most intimate connection — lost them to the pandemic, or to a heart attack or a bike or car accident — statistics and articles are yet another heart-wrenching reminder of what it means when your person is gone forever.

When I lost my person, I was robbed of what a friend calls the cloak of love I had worn everywhere.

I know that losing your person means losing companionship, but also the very self and reflection of you your person carried in their eyes and heart.

Losing someone, especially someone with whom you were sharing the pandemic, means losing touches, affirmations, loving glances and even the mundane disagreements that are part of life.

Losing your person means eating alone, even if you seem to be with others in your pod.

Losing your person means that some friends, alarmed by grief and loss, do not know how to talk to you, so they fade away.

But losing your person brings unexpected people your way, people who know not to be embarrassed if you sometimes cry, which of course you do.

People who can simply say, “I’m sorry.” Or “I wish it were different.”

The drop in life expectancy is startling on a societal level, but losing your person and their rumpled hair and jokes remains an unimaginable catastrophe, incomprehensibly final.

Those of us left behind know that a statistic has a face and a smile. How can he be gone?

With a Perspective, I’m Ellen Greenblatt.

Ellen Greenblatt is a writer and writing coach in Berkeley, California.

I see your faces on TV. I feel you. My first full-time job as a nurse was on a new AIDS ward at SF General in 1983. I had been a nurse for just two years.

We were overwhelmed with people dying from a disease we didn’t understand, had no treatment for and most of the world was terrified of. The deaths we witnessed were painful, distressing, labored. I know full well that is your reality.

I know you cry in your cars on the way home. Overwhelmed by grief and physical fatigue. I know your shifts are long and include intense encounters with colleagues, patients and family members. Most of your own family and friends have difficulty imagining your work day.

A few people ask you for details, but my guess is most don’t. It’s hard to explain the experience you’re having while you’re still having it. And there are your own feelings and fears.

A respiratory acquired illness is terrifying in a way that a blood borne illness isn’t. I got a couple of needle-sticks working the nightshift. Late, tired and not wanting to turn on the overhead fluorescent lights. You live with a great vulnerability despite hoods, masks, gowns and all the gear that protects you but also removes you from the gift and experience of touch.

Sometimes the only thing I had to offer a dying, feverish patient was a set of clean, dry sheets, maybe something for pain or more oxygen.

Many of the good memories I have, and there are many, come from recalling the community who came to help. They volunteered, brought meals. They baked, sent flowers, wrote us poems, even entertained us. You don’t have the benefit of community there with you. There are even some in the community who don’t believe COVID is real, complain that masks are unreasonable.

I am older now, and benefit from a little perspective.

I offer you my deep gratitude for your character and skill. I offer my admiration for your bravery. As I understand it, bravery is doing your job even when you’re scared to death.

With a Perspective, I’m Marcy Fraser.

With the holidays coming, I search my kitchen for the nutmeg kit my sister gave me when I was 15. I have used it every December since for my annual glass of eggnog, which I never drink without thinking of her.

As a teenager, Lisa could not wait to leave home, and she was always on the lookout for things she’d need when that glorious day came. She collected a trove of thrift store dishes, scented bath soaps, classy luggage and clothes she wasn’t allowed to wear in our parents’ home. Clearly, she was planning to take the world by storm.

One day she handed me the nutmeg kit – a small jar filled with whole nutmegs, a booklet of recipes and a miniature grater about the size of my thumb. She’d found the kit on sale for such a low price she’d been compelled to buy several, including one for me.

I had no interest in anything connected to the kitchen and knew nothing about the uses of nutmeg. Still, I was thrilled to have the kit, partly because it was evidence that Lisa had given me a thought and partly because it kick-started me into thinking about my future.

My when-I-leave-home stash ended up being nowhere near as elaborate as Lisa’s, mostly because I couldn’t envision what I’d need, beyond crate loads of books. But I did have a few bargain basement coffee mugs, a box of first-aid supplies and that nutmeg kit, along with the burgeoning awareness of the possibilities of my own life.

Lisa moved out, and two years later, so did I. We ended up on very different paths. In 2006, she died, a victim of the pharmaceutical opioid scam that has since killed thousands.

The nutmeg kit is the only thing that remains of my hope chest. Because I only use it at holiday time, it’s still half full. There are four whole nutmegs left, more than enough, I now realize, to last the rest of my life.

Lisa never imagined that she was giving me a gift that would outlast us both. But you never know what gifts you actually bestow when you give someone a present. A lot of times, it’s more than you think.

With a Perspective, I’m Heidi Swillinger.

Heidi Swillinger is a Bay Area journalist and book editor.

One cold, dark morning, the clouds seemed heavy, the sky ready to burst and the air full of suspense. At school drop-off, I heard mounting whispers in the backseat of my car. Something big was about to happen. The legend of Lake M was about to appear.

Every year, at least once, when days look like this — wet and ready for a downpour, my kids’ school has come to expect the phenomenon of Lake M. As the kids stay indoors for classes, rain falls without a break. And on a patch of concave black-top land, between the clustered school buildings and green running grounds, water collects. It collects and collects until it touches the playground on one side and the music room on the other.

One by one, enterprising reporters from each class keep track of the water level. In true elementary fashion, inaccuracy abounds by a few feet. Finally, at some point in the day, during or after school, everyone gets to see the legend for themselves. Right in the middle of their school, before the good authorities drain it away, is a lake! Wet socks notwithstanding, the kids dip their toes, their feet and sometimes even their ankles. Splosh. Squelch. Squirt. They jump, they run and cries of pure joy echo everywhere.

These past few months of the pandemic have been hard on all of us. It has rained and it has poured. But even as we grapple with the deep, wide lakes in our own lives maybe we all need to take a cue from our kids to appreciate the miracles that also spring with it.

A handwritten letter from a niece, a baking recipe mastered, an interesting podcast discovered, less traffic on the roads, flexible hours you can control, morning pillow fights, game nights, outdoor hikes. If we open our eyes, Lake M is all around us, all we have to do is splash.

At pick up that afternoon my son ran to me wet to the bone and screaming with delight, “I saw Lake M.” And I replied, “Take me there. I want to see it too.”

With a Perspective, I’m Sandhya Acharya

Sandhya Acharya is an author of children’s books.

On a beautiful fall day on my last trip to London, I visited my two favorite landmarks in Hyde Park: 1) The Animals in War memorial, which commemorates animals who have died in wars and conflicts; and 2) a secret Victorian pet cemetery installed in 1881 when a local family persuaded the gatekeeper to let them bury their beloved dog in his favorite spot in the back garden of the gatehouse. A tiny tombstone still stands bearing the inscription, “Poor Cherry. Died April 28. 1881.”

By the time the private little cemetery closed in 1903 when it ran out of space, 300 little graves filled the back garden. Touching inscriptions on headstones for companion dogs, cats, and birds can still be seen:

“Daisy: dearly loved and deeply mourned.”

“Darling Dolly – my sunbeam, my consolation, my joy.”

“Prince: He asked for so little and gave so much.”

In Paris is the Cemetery of the Dogs, dating from 1899 and considered the oldest public pet cemetery in Europe and one of the oldest in the world. Forty-thousand animals are buried here, including such famous dogs as Rin Tin Tin.

America’s largest and oldest pet cemetery — installed in 1896 — is in Hartsdale, New York, a five-acre property that is the final resting place for more than 80,000 animals.

The story of animal burials in general and “pet” burials in particular is a fascinating one, a changing one and a very old one. Many human cultures buried animal remains, and archaeologists have unearthed ancient pet burials dating as far back as 14,000 years, revealing much about our ever-evolving relationship with animals.

There was a time when dogs and cats were seen merely as utilitarian. Then they became companions, and then family members, evidenced by the care with which they were buried and the affection about which they are written. Today, only 1% of companion animals are buried in pet cemeteries, though the trend is increasing.

But whether they have their own public plot, are buried in back gardens or cremated and kept in special boxes or urns, what’s certain is that our relationship with our non-human animal friends — be they furred, finned or feathered — is complex, ancient and worthy of remembrance.

With a Perspective, this is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an author and animal advocate in Oakland.

Recently the U.S. surgeon general released a stunning report highlighting a dramatic increase in psychiatric challenges among teens and young adults. Teenage girls, for example, had, a 51% increase in suicidal emergency room visits since COVID began. Even before the pandemic, 20% of children and teens had a diagnosable mental health or behavioral disorder. The dual crisis of the pandemic, and other social challenges, has worsened the mental health of us all, creating a “national emergency,” in the words of the report, but its especially bad among young people.

As a college professor who has taught psychology for about 30 years, I have certainly witnessed the dramatic decline in student mental health. Tragically, this fall term, we’ve mourned the loss of three students, two who died from suicide.

Some will argue that teens today are soft, lack resilience and are coddled. Yet we must remember that this generation, born around or after September 11th, has experienced major traumas reported every hour with non-stop media coverage. How could young people not be struggling and traumatized? As they look to a future of climate change, economic challenges, social upheaval and political leaders who often act like toddlers having temper tantrums, how could they maintain much hope and good mental health?

The surgeon general’s report specifies what we can do about it, stating, “We can all work together to step up for our children during this dual crisis.” While many people may feel powerless, kindness is our superpower. It can often make the difference between life and death. Compassionate, respectful acts of kindness are readily available to us all. When in doubt, be kind, in doing so you might save a life, especially a young life.

With a Perspective, I’m Thomas Plante.

Thomas Plante is a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University and an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.

The excitement in the school gym was palpable. There was a din of chatter among parents who hadn’t seen one another for almost two years, and playful laughter among middle school kids smartly‐dressed and assembled in their musical groups – the string orchestra, jazz band, and concert band. Visible were sparkles in everyone’s eyes and you could surely ‘see’ the smiles under their masks. The school’s annual winter concert had returned.

Festively dressed in a long, red blazer was the school principal, who warmly welcomed the audience with a few words. Over the past few weeks, she said, when she needed a lift to her spirits she would wander over to the music room to listen to the students rehearse. Now it was the parents’ turn to have their spirits raised to the rafters in the bright, spacious gym.

Under the versatile leadership of the conductor, the string orchestra musicians swept and whisked their bows across their violins, cellos, and double basses in their set that included an allegro from an opera and a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Next, the jazz band got feet tapping and heads bobbing to a four‐piece set featuring Nutcracker Swing and the crowd‐pleasing Brazil, with solo efforts by sax, piano, and trumpet players, each of whom were showered with exuberant applause after their individual efforts.

The jazz band was then fortified by more wind, brass and percussion for the concert band segment that filled the space with such a richly‐satisfying harmony that the discordant world outside the doors of the gym ceased to exist.

When the band concluded their final flourish the audience sprang to their feet and clapped with unbridled enthusiasm, even catharsis. Proud parents hugged their talented kids and the sweet sounds of friendly chatter and hearty laughter again suffused the gym.

There hasn’t been a lot to cheer about since the pandemic began, but for 90 minutes at that suburban middle school there was plenty of cheer. The maxim of ‘cherish the moment’ could not have been more appropriate last night. What will next month bring? Next year? Who knows, but in these times of uncertainty, I am certain that when given a happy moment like this, I am going to cherish it.

With a Perspective, this is Evan Ho.

Evan Ho works in the business school at UC Berkeley. He lives in Orinda.

I still remember the time I refused to move to a different place. In  the beginning, I was confused when my parents told me we were moving to an apartment in SoCal. I remember telling them, “Are we taking the trees?”

A few days into my summer break, we checked out the place, and while my parents saw the apartment, my sibling and I looked around, and we noticed the place had gates and entrances, a big parking garage and the walls were painted white. We saw it did not have any spaces for kids to hang out in. Those were important parts for my sibling and me, other than wanting to see plants, flowers, and more colors.

Eventually, my family and I moved here before I started middle school and found out other kids there felt the same. We hung out together and helped each other choose the possible afternoon games we could play using the laundry rooms and the space in the parking garage. When we were not playing, we enjoyed snacks and put any money each of us had together for everyday objects to play.

While I’m an adult now, play and connection is needed in our everyday lives as it helps us discover the world and how it works.

Before moving, I was able to play without any rules. I was able to go in my front yard, and there was space that I could play in, making and choosing my activities like climbing trees, tag games, and sometimes inviting people on the block and from my school over to hang out. The memories I had growing up there, such as building a bike ramp with them, made me realize how having spaces we could hang out in lets kids create and grow for the rest of their lives.

I’m sharing my childhood because I had the opportunity to try out ideas, build strengths and community, and talk and gather with others. Kids don’t get that now. They get fewer opportunities, are encouraged less to play or even connect, and lack the space for it. It seems like not exploring children’s ideas on important parts is becoming more of a priority.

It is time to welcome kids’ opinions to better the social environment and show what happens and comes out of play as an important part of supporting them.

With a Perspective, I’m Jaime Flores.

Jaime Flores is a first-generation graduate student at Cal.

The day I started kindergarten was the day we put my grandma into a senior home. Soon we had become part of the small core of “regular visitors,” those who visited even on days that weren’t holidays. As I grew up, my grandma’s memory slowly disappeared.

During our weekly visits, I was vividly aware of the impact my grandma’s decline had on my mother. I remember seeing my mom flinch when my grandma just couldn’t place her. I remember how quiet the front seat seemed as I watched my dad reach out and squeeze my mom’s hand on our drive home after visits. We all struggled to communicate with my grandma, but eventually, I found the way I could always get her to hear me: music.

My grandma had always loved opera, musicals, and jazz, and I love to sing and perform. So on our Sunday visits, we sang through Fiddler on the Roof and The Music Man and worked through Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Gershwin. I attempted Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and more successfully mastered Audrey Hepburn’s “Moon River”. My mom recalled my grandma’s favorite pop songs, and I discovered the pure tones of Karen Carpenter. I learned that, like my grandma, I favored Paul over John as we sang through the Beatles hits. The cruelly remarkable part of my grandma’s illness is that although she rarely remembers her children’s names, she can still perfectly hum the overture to Oklahoma. As she sings along, tightly clutching my hand, it’s as if we’re trying to retrace her steps through the melodies to find something important that she left behind.

One visit, we sang the last phrase of our favorite song together: “Please don’t take my sunshine away.” After, she turned to me and said, “Ellie, I love you so much.” I was amazed. I couldn’t remember the last time she said my name. That interaction showed me that love endures even when so much else is stripped away. Although dementia has taken away her memories, my grandma will continue to hold on to what has always mattered to her most: music and how much she loves her family.

With a Perspective, I’m Ellie Lauter.

Ellie Lauter is a senior at Redwood High School in Larkspur. In her spare time, she performs in musicals and works with kids at community theater companies.

I’ve always loved mending clothes, smoothing out frays and tears. How satisfying to rescue a favorite article of clothing from waste and restore it to full use.

And then there’s mending as a subversive activity, not to be overlooked. I used to bring a pile to the dull weekly staff meetings at school. Other teachers wistfully watched me salvage wasted time as the principal droned. But then he caught on and banned “hand work.” I still mended on my own time. It calmed me.

One restless Friday afternoon in my middle school classroom, I wracked my brain for some activity to get us through to dismissal time. My students were mostly boys — squirrelly, easily bored. But they’d enjoyed learning some unusual skills — tying a Windsor knot, patching a bike tire.

They swarmed back into the room after lunch, a raggedy bunch in worn jeans and holey sweatshirts. Inspiration! In my desk, I kept some of those little sewing kits you pick up in hotels and save for a sartorial emergency. Gathering the boys, I announced they were going to learn how to mend. They had no idea what I meant.

I turned to Kevin: what would happen to his beloved red jeans when the holes got so big his mom couldn’t stand it any longer. He replied sadly, “She’ll throw them away.”

My opening!

It was as if I were teaching them magic. After the colossal challenge of threading the needle, they were off. Their techniques were non-standard, often ingenious, but they mastered the basics — pull the edges of a hole together, fill in the empty space. Heads were bent over the cloth and a rapt hush filled the room for two hours. They didn’t even want to stop when 3:00 rolled around.

To rescue the irremediable. To make the ugly beautiful. That held them, and hooked them. They took home their tiny sewing kits as if they were wreaths of laurel.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

As a small business owner, this holiday season I am up against an Amazon with unlimited resources and insane reach. Our little shoe store is old school, we measure feet and sit‐and‐fit our clients for top-notch comfort shoes. Nothing too sexy or slick about us.

Amazon and Zappos have entire departments specializing in social media, inventory management, algorithms to prompt you to buy more. At our store, we do it all ourselves, with a few people wearing many hats. we specialize in face‐to‐face, contact and we’ve leaned into new ways of connecting with our customers and community.

We hustled up a website although we had sworn we’d never sell online, we figured out how to fit shoes over FaceTime, and created plexiglass protection zones to keep us all safe.

If you want stores like ours to be around, if you want to browse in bookshops, or touch and sit on furniture before you buy it, now is the time to join the battle against the all‐powerful Internet Gods.

Before you take the one‐swipe‐to‐buy route this holiday season, please call your local businesses and give us a chance to battle Amazon. We’re scrappy and tough and, most importantly, we have you on our side.

You may have to wait a few more days than speedy two‐day Prime. You may have to do a curbside pick‐up or wait for me to return your call because I only have a few employees ‐‐ but I pay them a true living wage and give them benefits. They might be your neighbor.

Small retailers need you now. Literally, we will not be here without
you. The online giants are good at what they do, I do not deny that. And we are good at what we do: we know shoes and feet. We look you in the eye and thank you for making the choice to shop locally.

I am sure I can take on the almighty Amazon this season because I have you as my secret weapon.

With a Perspective, I’m Rachel Averbuck.

Rachel Averbuck lives in Sebastopol. Her shoe shop is in Santa Rosa.

You say a‐la‐MEE‐dA, I say Alameda, at least the Spanish‐speaking part of my bilingual brain does.

I recently moved to the Bay Area from Seattle (by way of Florida and my native Puerto Rico). Now the city and street names that bear the linguistic stamp of my forebears are everywhere, and I can’t help but think how much that would have delighted my dad.

He would have gotten a kick out of learning that the humbly named Palo Alto was an affluent center of the tech universe. And the litany of saints ‐ San Jose, Santa Clara, Santa Rosa ‐ would have warmed his very Catholic heart.

Mira, Papi: El Camino Real; Vallejo; Benicia; Martinez!

Pride in his language and culture was central to my father’s identity. Whenever he faced bigotry over his accent, he was quick to point out that his people had named his adopted state La Florida in the 1500s.

My brain’s focus on Spanish pronunciations in my new California surroundings was inevitable. To my dad, the town Central Floridians pronounce OH‐VEE‐DOE was always Oviedo. We’d visit historic San Agustin, not St. Augustine.

Despite my teenage eye‐rolling then, I’m so grateful now that Spanish was spoken in my home and that I’ve never lost it. It breaks barriers, and I can connect with so many more people because of it. I met some of my dearest friends when we overheard each other speaking Spanish.

This holiday season, my father has been on my mind more than usual. He would have been 92 on Dec. 3, and he would have loved Northern California: the lemon tree in our back yard, the warmth of the sun and road trips to read out loud, together, the names on the highway signs.

With a Perspective, I’m Agnes Torres Al‐Shibibi.

Agnes Torres Al‐Shibibi is a copy editor. She lives in San Jose.

Growing up, I felt undeniable warmth and joy every Christmas. The warmth radiating from the kitchen as my family cooked would always make me smile, and I’d feel truly at home. All year, no matter what kind of pain I felt, I pined after that feeling. The possibility that Christmas could give me this feeling of wholeness, joy, and peace for even one day kept me going.

Last year was different. When COVID hit, I spent long months anxiously waiting for Christmas. I was so hopeful that it would be a day I could feel that sense of love by being surrounded by family again, especially after feeling so much dread.

But as someone with anxiety, I was debilitatingly afraid of catching COVID. There was no way I would feel comfortable meeting with my family for our annual celebration without being vaccinated.

Before I knew it, Christmas 2020 rolled around and the virus was increasingly dangerous. Although my family members wanted to have a smaller meeting, I couldn’t say yes without compromising my physical and mental health.

That Christmas was easily the worst one I’ve experienced. The fact that I couldn’t recreate the warmth and joy I depended on was beyond heartbreaking. What else could I spend the entire year looking forward to?

This year — now that my family and I are vaccinated and getting boosters — I am beyond excited to make up for lost time. I only get a limited amount of time back home, so I want that time to be worthwhile. Especially since this is my first year of in-person college, I only get so many opportunities to make memories with my loved ones.

But now that the Omicron variant keeps spreading, I’m trying not to lose hope. I keep spiraling about the worst that could happen: millions of deaths and a reinstated lockdown. To keep myself grounded though, I’m trying to focus on what I can control: spending quality time with my family and trying to celebrate the holidays in a way that makes us happy.

With a Perspective, I’m Ivelisse Diaz.

Ivelisse Diaz is from Oakland and attends college in Tacoma. Her perspective was produced by YR Media.

College applications are upon us once again, and I am in a state of PTSD-ed deja vu as I watch my beautiful boy fashion himself into a candidate worthy of acceptance into the hallowed halls of our venerable institutions of higher learning. A holistic process during which he must show himself to be, in no particular order: a sustainer of academic rigor, a leader in his community, an elevator of some grand passion, and yet somehow still authentic. In short, a fully realized human being at the tender age of 17.

All lessons learned from the last time fall off to the wayside, as a challenging process is made even more so as I tinge it with my frustration and unsolicited opinions.

“When I was at Uni,” I tell him, referring to a time 30-plus years ago and in another country, “we were only allowed to apply to five. There were no essays, and nobody even knew what an extracurricular was. Oh, and it was free—for everyone.”

He rolls his eyes, and truth be told, I am internally rolling mine too, for how is this helpful? But helpful or not, it was the truth, and here perhaps is another truth. This system, our system, may no longer be fit for purpose; Overly complicated, unduly stressful, and with no method to its madness.

Why all this hand wringing, you may wonder, for after all is it not his journey? Of course, but I defy you to show me a parent who is truly hands-off. I am conflicted. I believe in the worth of a good education—for the betterment of oneself, for the betterment of society—and yet I struggle with my hypocrisy as I contribute to a system I consider to be flawed and unfair, one that has lost sight of its actual purpose: Education not for profit but for the endowment of knowledge. Education, not as a social stratifier, but as a great equalizer.

So, as I watch him, I want to say, “Please do not worry. The sum of who you will eventually be is going to be so much greater than which university you attend now.”

Instead what I say is, “Have you finished your essays yet?”

With a Perspective, I’m Nirmy Kang.

Nirmy Kang is a Punjabi-British writer whose work explores her plural heritage and the universality of our common experiences.

Eighty years ago today, December 7, 1941, people in the United States were shocked to hear that Pearl Harbor had been bombed in a surprise attack. Across the nation, families wondered and worried about their “boys” in Hawaii. Communications were delayed. Other needs took priorities.

Here in Sonoma County, three families would learn that their sons had died aboard battleships that morning. Two died in the early explosion of the USS Arizona. They were among the more than 1,000 who died aboard the ship.

Rudolph Theiller Junior was born in Cotati and grew up in Sebastopol. He had graduated from Analy High School just a year earlier.

George Maybee was born in Ukiah and grew up in Santa Rosa. He was the “old man” of the bunch, having graduated from Santa Rosa High School a decade earlier. George worked for his father in the family wood-working business.

About two weeks after the attack, both families were notified that their sons were missing. Christmas was not a celebratory time. In February 1942, the families received notice that their sons were presumed dead. The “boys” are still inside the Arizona.

Neither Theiller nor Maybee are known to most local residents. Their names appear on the war dead monuments. Ball fields in Sebastopol are named for Theiller. A plan to name a park for Maybee went nowhere.

Aboard the battleship California was Andrew Billy Montgomery. He had taken the first name William. Billy was born in Ukiah and graduated from Santa Rosa High in early 1939. The California suffered its major damage somewhat later in the attack. Billy’s body was quickly recovered and his family was notified on December 17. Thus, Billy became “Sonoma County’s first known World War II casualty.” The County named a major road for Billy. A large shopping center and housing development are called “Montgomery Village.” A high school bears his name. After temporary interment in Hawaii, after the war, Billy’s body was brought back to Ukiah.

So, by the whims of fate, the first two likely Sonoma County casualties are virtually unknown. But, even though the “Montgomery” name is well known, few today can associate it with his Pearl Harbor sacrifice.

Let’s pause today to remember all of those who served and “gave all” during World War II.

With a Perspective, I’m Michael Von der Porten.

Mike Von der Porten helps businesses with their one and five-year planning processes.

Do you ever feel as if you want to help but don’t know how?

I once felt a rush of happiness run through my body when I helped an elderly man pump his gas. I was just standing when I saw him struggling while no one around would help. While my gas was pumping, I walked over to him and offered some assistance. He gladly said yes and I proceeded to pump his gas. He thanked me and said, “I don’t know what I would’ve done without your help.” It made me realize kindness comes from the heart in moments like these, not when you’ll gain recognition for it.

Another day at the grocery store with my grandma, I saw a similar situation: an old man behind a mountain of bananas struggling with a flimsy plastic bag, those plastic bags that are always so hard to open.  I walked over and politely asked if he wanted some help. He turned around with a big grin on his face and said yes. While I was opening the bag he was using, he asked if I could open some of the other bags he had in his cart. Of course I opened the other bags as well. When I walked away, I felt good about what I had done.

I learned that spreading kindness doesn’t have to be a huge gesture. Sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest impact. Happiness is contagious and one good act of kindness can make someone else want to do the same.

Everyone gets so caught up on what’s happening on their tiny little screen these days that it can distract you from the real world. People barely notice what’s going on around them — or don’t even notice when someone is having trouble. I hope that others spread kindness whenever they can. It doesn’t take much to put a smile on someone’s face.

With a Perspective, I am Nathalie Jimenez.

Nathalie Jimenez is a junior at De Anza High School in Richmond. Her piece was produced with free curriculum from KQED’s Perspectives Youth Media Challenge.

Plants power our lives. We, of course, require them for our daily sustenance. Humans have always depended on trees, palm fronds, grass, and tules for shelter. We weave cotton and flax into clothing. And in our modern world we regularly ingest plants that slightly or even heavily poison us.

One of the strongest human urges is to shift our perception of reality. We grind and roll up leaves and smoke them for pleasure. We eat fetid fungi erupting from the rotting ground for powerful hallucinogen experiences. And some bread molds have gifted us LSD. But by far one of the most widespread methods to alter our reality is drinking a beverage made from rotting fruit and vegetables – wine, beer and alcohol. Fermented juices play a central role in many rituals football games, holiday dinners, rock n’ roll, dancing and Holy Communion. Pretty odd combination when you think about it.

Thousands of years ago one of the most sacred plant in Europe wasn’t the grape but mistletoe. The legends and myths of this plant abound. The power associated with this hemiparasite shrub makes sense. Imagine a cold bleak winter, no leaves on any tree, and apparent death throughout the land. There, vibrant and alive, was the mistletoe, not only green but bearing fruit.

Mistletoe was thought to be holy light that came directly from the gods via lightning bolts. It generally grew on apples, willows, cottonwoods but rarely on oaks. The Druids, the priestly class of the Celts, considered oak trees sacred and oak trees with mistletoe were doubly sacred. At the winter solstice white robed priests would cut the plants and then later channel that innate vitality into fertility rites. Our modern tradition of kissing of the mistletoe is nothing compared to what our ancient forebears did and they didn’t even have to ingest it.

Plants are indeed potent. I’ll drink to that and happy holy days.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

Birthdays have always represented a contradiction for my family. As Cambodian refugees who fled the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime, we, like many other Cambodians, found a living in California’s nascent donut shop industry back in the 1980s. However, birthdays, like the donuts my family sold, were quintessential American traditions that didn’t exist in our lives prior to my parents coming to the United States.

My earliest birthday memories consist of a frothy strawberry cake from the local Asian bakery topped with eight spiral-striped Wilton candles. I had carefully selected them from the 24-count box the cashier had talked my mother into buying despite her misgivings about the additional cost. After lighting the candles, my family sang an off-key rendition of the birthday song while I stood awkwardly at the head of the table, uncomfortable with all the attention. I was
relieved when it was all over and I could escape.

I don’t remember anything about what the cake tasted like or if I even got any presents, but I do remember my mother carefully pulling the pastel candles with their slightly burnt wicks from the cream, diligently wiping the frosting before taking them to the sink to rinse them off.

The next time I saw them, they had been dried and put back into their original box with the other 16 unused candles. And every year, like clockwork, my mother would reuse the same tapers and add just one new one for me.

We’re no longer struggling just to get by, but the ingrained frugality of our immigrant background, the gratitude for our escape from genocide and war, and the incorporation of traditions that embody American ideals, is a constant reminder of how lucky we are.

I have a 3-year-old daughter now who will never grow up like I did. The stories her grandparents will tell her will seem as foreign as the Cambodian language they speak. But as her fourth birthday approaches and I prepare for our family’s first ever collective video call in a year where she has only heard their voices, I pull out her own set of burnt candles and get ready to add a new one for her.

With a Perspective, I’m Selina Kaing.

Selina Kaing works in the tech sector and is a writer.

Recently, I joined a local Meet Up hiking group online. I did so because a friend wanted me to accompany her on one of their hikes. And I figured it might be a fun way to meet new people. To my surprise, the morning after I signed up, I got an email telling me I’d been removed from the group. Here’s a partial quote of what it said: “We are adults in our 20s to 40s who are physically fit, intermediate to strong hikers. That means fast paced … you should find a group that better fits you.”

They determined my couch potato status based solely on my profile photo. Ouch. It wasn’t the reaction to my gray hair and wrinkles that stung. I’m in my early 60s, after all. It was the assumptions about my level of fitness that irked me. I’ve always been active and athletic. I did a half-ironman triathlon at 49 and climbed Mount Shasta, lugging a 50-pound backpack, at 60. Like many people my age, I exercise daily. For me, that includes a mix of running, hiking, walking and yoga.

Being booted from the hiking group was the most blatant ageism I’ve experienced. But I encounter more subtle forms on a regular basis. I see it in job ads peppered with phrases like “perfect for recent college grads,” code for “old folks need not apply.” I see it in the way I become a little more invisible every day. I hear it in comments about my decision to stop coloring my hair.

Aging isn’t always easy, that’s for sure. There are definitely times I look in the mirror and wish I could turn back the clock. Yet in many ways, I’m more comfortable in my own skin, energetic and engaged with life than I was in my youth.

You can call me old. But please — don’t tell me what I’m too old to do.

With a Perspective, I’m Dorothy O’Donnell.

Dorothy O’Donnell is writer who lives in San Francisco.

Do you ever feel like you don’t even know who you are? I often feel unfamiliar with my younger self because of my actions that were much unlike me today. From being hated by teachers to almost being arrested and overall a nuisance in school, I used to let others influence my decisions but I’ve changed for the better.

I was led to this unhealthy mentality of trying to be cool to please the clique I was in. I saw that these kids who acted up got all the attention and I wanted some of that popularity too. I’d commit actions otherwise seen as ridiculous by everyone else in the grand court of the school, but in the moment I would feel a rush of validation and felt like I finally belonged.

This behavior only got worse as time went on. It started with clowning on the teacher for laughs with my friends, but it quickly got out of control and almost led to something that could have gotten me in serious trouble.

One gloomy day after school, we jumped fences, climbed ladders and ended up on a rooftop of a corner store. When a neighbor threatened to call the cops, my friend shocked me by challenging their authority. I felt a rush — of fear. All I could think about was my future and what my parents would think of me.

Sure, acting out got me the attention I wanted, but it wasn’t worth it in the end. I noticed every frown and expression of disappointment from my peers all along too, but in the moment it felt good. Looking back, I feel regret.

I could go on explaining the rigors of being someone with a toxic mentality and what I did but what I want to say is: you should never have to be someone you’re not to feel valid. I did the most to fit in but ended up almost ruining my life because I wanted to seem cool.

Although not everyone can relate, I believe everyone has the chance to better themselves. Nothing is impossible as I’ve proven with my drastic change from being a reckless little kid to being someone with goals and opportunities in the future. I am thankful to have grown into a true version of myself and to have overcome that act. I’ll use my newly gained recognition of who I am to better myself in the ways I can change and when I do, I’ll do it for myself.

With a Perspective, I’m Wilfredo Molina.

Wilfredo Molina is a junior at De Anza High School in Richmond. His piece was produced with free curriculum from KQED’s Perspectives Youth Media Challenge.

The holidays we observe in this last quarter of the year are, to some extent, about scrambling up the relationship between the outside and the inside.

Halloween kicks things off by letting what is usually on the inside go outside instead. Trick or treating means kids are out at an hour when they would normally be inside, and costumes are a display of something that might otherwise stay hidden: an alter ego, or alternate identity or a personal creative spark.

On Thanksgiving we flip it in the opposite direction. Now the external comes inside. A large array of food is prepared and over the course of a few hours we set about putting it inside our bodies. If our home and table can accommodate them, we invite in friends and colleagues to share in the bounty.

Christmas continues in the same vein. And, on top of that, we drag trees inside our houses and tell our children that their presents were delivered by a man who broke into our house by coming down something that was built to expel smoke.

But this year, of course, is going to be different. Many of the activities we’ve always done inside have been forced out into our backyards and sidewalks. For the better part of this year our lives have been about keeping what is outside out and what is inside in. After all, that is what wearing a mask is all about.

And so, this holiday season, we need to flip things around. The upcoming holidays that were about bringing the outside in need to reverse direction. Now, more than ever, things that we may have kept to ourselves need to be shared. This year no good wish or kind word should go unexpressed. If there is something you can spare —money, time, clothing, food — that needs to come out as well.

Which brings us to New Year’s and the end of the holidays. The convention is that we ring out the old and ring in the new. No need to change that. We all want to get out of this year and into one that offers more hope and promise.

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.

Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.

A small item in a local paper catches my eye. Volunteers are needed for the Thanksgiving dinner at a local church, a dinner for the homeless people in the neighborhood. Almost on the spur of the moment, I call and commit to two shifts – prep work at 9 a.m., and serving, beginning at noon.

When I arrive, I see a dozen or more people already at work. “Put on this lovely disposable apron and these rubber gloves,” says Chuck, the volunteer in charge. “Then grab that turkey leg and start slicing.” Our small army quickly fills six large aluminum roasting pans with turkey, chatting about the work and ourselves.

Next come the vegetables. There are no subtleties here: “Cook ‘em til their mushy,” says Chuck. “Our guests don’t have teeth.”

In another room, two dozen pies are being sliced, while huge jars of applesauce and cans of cranberries are poured into Dixie cups, which are placed on trays and stacked.

As each task is finished, we volunteers jump into new ones. While there are, indeed, too many cooks, the spirit that infuses this basement is alive with humanity.

At noon, the guests begin filtering into the basement. Volunteers seat them then come to the kitchen, sending we serving staff into a scurry of activity. We soon find a rhythm: white meat, then dark, then down the line, each plate cared for by five people before it reaches the guest.

Somehow, very quickly, it’s 1:30 and the pace slows. Though the dining room is still humming with activity, my service is no longer needed. I deliberately take my time leaving. I’m inspired by these people – the volunteers, the guests, the young woman who, after slicing turkey and washing dishes, plays the out-of-tune piano so there will be music with the meal. I am almost reluctant to leave.

Like most Thanksgiving meals, the food is the draw here. But the sense of community – at least for me – is the real reward.

With a Perspective, I’m Dan Goldes.

Dan Goldes is a nonprofit consultant and documentary filmmaker in San Francisco.

When my mother died 18 years ago my Thanksgiving died with her.

At first I did not think much of it, and was glad that I might never again have to fly during the most god-awful travel days of the year. Besides, “all things Thanksgiving” had already been devolving for a while. First, she didn’t want all of us kids to come home at the same time. Next, she began buying her pies at Costco. But it was still the one holiday of the year we could we all enjoy. There was none of the “how-Christian-or-how-Jewish-do-we-celebrate?” ambiguity that came with Christmas and none of its psychotic consumerism and hyper-activity. There was none of the dreary “who-will-kiss-me-at-midnight” angst that could trump the forced merriment of New Years Eve.

And we all loved food, possibly more than each other. But we loved each other enough to get ourselves to Detroit to perform some new re-enactment of childhood Thanksgiving rituals.

After Mom died I went looking for a comfortable spot at a Thanksgiving table. I tried being the guest at homes of friends, and homes of friends of friends. I tried inviting an equally wistful sibling to town and cooking, or eating out. I even learned to host, to survive frenzy in the grocery stores and slavery in the kitchen, to bake the sacrificial bird and answer that great unanswerable question, “How big of a turkey do we need?”

But, more often than not, all my choices have surprisingly uncomfortable trade-offs.

Now I am grateful to notice that aging is obliging more friends to come up with a holiday re-design. As their children grow up and move away, as their usual hosts age or die, they find themselves asking: “Where will I go this year?”

I am glad for their company in this changing world where limitations force some of us to find a spot at a new table. Or to set a table where others might happily sit.

With a Perspective, I’m Sara Alexander.

Sara Alexander is a marriage and family therapist who cooks, writes and makes short documentaries. She lives in San Francisco and Graton, California.

With Thanksgiving coming, many families are planning to sit down to a meal together for the first time since life was upended by the coronavirus. But along with turkey, this holiday is famous for generous helpings of clumsy conversation. The clueless cousin asking questions about your love life over the yams, or the right-wing uncle ranting between bites of pumpkin pie are as much a part of Thanksgiving as cranberry sauce.

Arguments have always been guests at Thanksgiving and etiquette experts advise avoiding discussing religion and politics, but this year a new topic has been added to the menu of cringe worthy questions: Are you vaccinated?

While it seems a simple question, it’s awkward to ask. Vaccination status is the don’t-ask-don’t-tell of 2021. Everybody has a story of hesitating to ask an anti-vax co-worker or neighbor if they’ve had the shot, since it seems so impolite.

But COVID has killed millions, and as cold weather moves us indoors and the holidays approach, it’s time to make communication as catching as the virus. Everyone has a right to know all the facts to make an informed decision about level of risk. Professionals recommend asking guests about their vaccination status before a crowded indoor event. Some even suggest an “are you vaccinated?” check box on the RSVP reply for weddings. Good manners are all about making people feel safe, and an irony of pandemic party planning is that being polite requires this impolite question.

The HIV epidemic taught us when it comes to disease prevention, frank questions and honest answers can keep people healthy.

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful these amazing vaccines are available to everyone. So, before over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house you go, it’s OK to volunteer your own status and to ask if your dining companions will be vaccinated.

Just don’t ask about religion or politics.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow is a San Francisco teacher.

Most of the time only my spouse and I dine at home. You would never guess this if you looked into my 32 cubic foot refrigerator.

You would find several stir-fry sauces, three kinds of milk and two drawers full of fresh vegetables and fruit. Pushed to the back would be containers of half eaten cottage cheese, several leftovers, and pickles. About once every two weeks, I throw out a third of what’s in there. This makes me typical of the American consumer. Think of carrying three bags of food out of the supermarket and dropping one in the parking lot—but never picking it up.

I’m not proud of this. Recently I’ve begun a project to waste less food as a way of doing my part to effect climate change. Landfills are the third largest source of methane gas in the United States. I began with a fridge reality check. After emptying it of all spoiled items, I checked off the food I’d collected: lettuce with slimy brown leaves, clotted milk and moldy leftovers. Although many food and non-food items can be composted, only the vegetables in this stash qualified. Why had the food gone bad? Mostly because the quantity was greater than two people can eat. Finally, I scraped and filled a paper bag with the food I’d removed from my fridge. There was a lot, almost a full bag.

I am determined to repeat this fridge reality check in a month and find less food for my paper bag. How will I do this? Some by planning meals ahead of time and shopping for only what I need. My goal is half a bag in a month and less the following month. I will have saved money, eaten more of what I cook and achieved a small goal that effects climate change.

With a Perspective, I’m Sara Orem.

Sara Orem has been a professional chef and now teaches at the Osher Lifelong Learning Center at UC Berkeley.

The gathering of 52 English colonists and 90 Wampanoag Indians in 1621 marked the beginning of what we call Thanksgiving today. Enduring a year of starvation and disease, for the Christians it was a time to praise God for the abundance of the harvest. For the Native Americans, it was a time to praise the Earth for the same.

For me, 400 years later, not much is different. Community, gratitude and seasonal crops dominate my thoughts, though I have to work hard to drown out the constant talk of baked turkeys, roasted turkeys, leftover turkeys and turkey pot pies.

I’ve been celebrating a vegetarian Thanksgiving for 23 years and a vegan one for 16, and deciding what to serve each year is the most difficult part; not because of the lack of options but precisely because there are so many.

When people think of a vegan Thanksgiving, I think they envision something lacking because we’re all taught that a proper main dish comprises some type of animal flesh. But really I think what matters most is having a beautiful centerpiece on the table and a focal point on the plate, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is through things that can be stuffed, such as winter squash, little pumpkins, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms or corn husks.

Even before I stopped eating animals, for me, Thanksgiving dinner was always all about the side dishes, and there’s no dearth on our table: mashed potatoes, rutabagas, mushroom gravy, bread stuffing, cranberry walnut relish, fresh corn, green beans, roasted vegetables, cornbread, homemade biscuits and green salad. Dessert options range from pies, cakes, cobblers, cookies and crisps. With just a few switcheraoos — vegetable broth and plant-based milks and butters — our Thanksgiving feast is as traditional as it is beautiful.

Despite murmurings that it’s not a traditional Thanksgiving dinner without the turkey, the truth is we all shape our traditions out of our values, but we don’t have to choose one over the other. We can enjoy food-based rituals where nothing need be sacrificed – not taste, familiarity, a sense of community or an animal.

With a Perspective, I’m Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an Oakland-based vegan author and educator.

Hi everybody. I’m Tom from TomTech, here to tell you about the world’s first 3D, fully-immersive, 360-degree wrap-around social media platform. It’s called The Universe. And it’s available now, exclusively from TomTech.

Like Facebook’s newly-announced Metaverse, which founder Mark Zuckerberg described to The Verge as “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content – you are in it,” The Universe is an embodied social media experience, or social media extravaganza as we like to say, that offers a richer, more immersive experience than anything currently available on those boring little rectangles — ahem, cell phones — you carry around in your pocket.

Thanks to our breakthrough proprietary headset technology, The Universe offers an infinitely scalable aural, visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experience where the lag time between you and your avatar has been reduced to zero.

That’s right: zero. You think something and your avatar instantly thinks it with you. You move this way or that way, jump up and down, or wave at your neighbor, and your avatar moves with you. You say something and your avatar says it at exactly the same time. Or you pass a little gas and your avatar stinks up the room, as if you were there, because you are.

You might think that the world’s first 3D, embodied, fully-immersive, 360-degree wrap-around social media experience would cost you hundreds of dollars a year, or require you to give up your privacy and sell your personal data (and your soul) to advertisers. But no. The Universe, and a lifetime of experiences for you and your avatar, is available for the low, one-time price of $20.

That’s right. For twenty bucks, you’ll receive an official Universe headset (it’s a hat) and instructions on how to log in to the best, most realistic social media platform on planet earth (you put it on your head and put your phone away).

So join The Universe now and “Live. For Real.”

The Universe, and the phrase “Live. For Real.”, with that pretentious punctuation in there, are copyrighted trademarks of TomTech, Incorporated, OG, LLC. The use of such words and phrases, without the express written permission of TomTech, is strictly prohibited.

With a Perspective, I’m Tom Moriarty.

Tom Moriarty teaches writing and rhetoric at San Jose State University.

The same week that my 19-year-old daughter left for college in Illinois, my 89-year-old father moved in around the block from our home. As we settled our first-born into her dorm, it was bittersweet; so excited for her and yet we will miss her. We’re keeping her bedroom ready for her, but we know that any returns to the nest will be temporary.

And as she starts her life and in her first home away from home, her grandfather is going through a parallel process settling into what may be his last. He moved to San Francisco after spending the past nine years in a senior living facility with my mother in suburban Chicago. When she died and COVID hit, he came for an extended visit that resulted in his decision to move here and to start fresh.

Most folks express surprise that a self-described “old geezer” would move from the security and comfort of an elevator building with wrap-around services to an older walkup apartment above a pet supply store. But my dad began his life in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens and it feels like a fitting bookend on the other side of the country. He’s delighted with the place, especially his small balcony overlooking the street. In fact, within his first week, he shocked us all when he slept out there. “At night, the street below is like a stage set,” he said. He’s right. It is, though I had never noticed.

My daughter, too, shocked me a bit when she and some friends got dressed up and crashed a wedding reception, dancing and having a wonderful time. My initial alarm at their unconventional behavior pretty soon gave way to admiration for their daring and spunk.

The sandwich generation usually refers to the burden of caring for both our children and our aging parents. But for me, the unexpected gift of this time is the joy, and even role-modeling I receive from both the younger and older generation.

With a Perspective, this is Hanna Clements-Hart.

Hanna Clements-Hart is an executive coach in San Francisco.

A few years ago I recovered from a difficult battle with mental health problems. For a long time my range of emotions had been depression, anxiety, or numb. Going to therapy helped. The medications probably did, too. As I got better I thought that I could help others who were suffering like I had.

I enrolled in a program to become a therapist. I felt stable and confident. I was exercising more than ever. I quit taking anti-depressants and stopped going to therapy. I didn’t think that I needed them anymore.

I did pretty good for about a year.

Then things began to slip. The anxious thoughts returned. A panic attack signaled that it was time to go back on meds. I returned to therapy. But things didn’t improve. I went through a carousel of different anti-depressants. Months passed and nothing helped. I fell out of shape and began having a hard time just sitting still. I took a leave of absence from the therapist training program. How could I help someone else when I could barely keep myself together?

Things worsened further. I went through several chilling rounds of electro convulsive shock therapy. It didn’t provide any relief. The anxious feelings became unbearable. One day before my 46th birthday I was admitted to Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital. I spent five days there.

The hardest part about my hospitalization was knowing that my teenage children knew where I had been. What kind of an effect would it have on them? I felt ashamed and guilty. I had been good at hiding my mental health struggles from everyone. Maybe that was part of the problem.

The lonely months of COVID isolation passed by and my wife and I separated. My goal became just making it to the end of the day.

Six months have passed since my hospitalization and some days are really hard.

But there are also times when things settle down and I fantasize about how amazing it would be to feel good again.

I wonder how many others are out there, just holding on like I have been? I wonder why it is so embarrassing to talk about mental health struggles? I also wonder what meaning and purpose I can find in it all.

Recently I’ve started to force myself to get out more. I’ve also been reconnecting with friends. They often ask the same question that I can’t seem to answer in full.

Hey Slush! Where have you been?

With a Perspective, I’m Jonathan Slusher.

Jonathan Slusher lives in Half Moon Bay.

I was raking leaves in my backyard recently on a crisp, October morning. There was much activity nearby as the pyracantha bush was in full bloom and many birds were feasting on the red berries.

Suddenly a wave of birds flew from the bush, flying in all directions. One wayward flyer headed toward my house, hit the window and fell to the ground. I ran to find a small finch, lying on its side, very still. I cupped my hand over the warm, feathered body, being careful not to move it, just providing warmth … and waited. Sitting motionless for several minutes, not knowing whether the bird was dead or alive, I finally was rewarded with a blink, nothing more, just a flutter of the eye which indicated the little creature was alive.

I lifted my hand slightly to gain a better look at my newfound ward. Soft layerings of pinfeather upon feather, artfully marked around the face and beak, no doubt provided a protective camouflage for this house finch. The soft upper feathering gave way to larger quilled tail feathers, perfectly positioned, providing an evenness of balance from head to tail. The house finch, from a distance, would suggest a rather ordinary-looking bird, but from my vantage point, the details and markings evidenced a remarkable work of nature.

For a brief moment in time, I warmed a wild creature beneath my hand and, with its closeness and momentary need, I thought about the genesis which binds us all together.

A few more minutes passed; I slowly removed my hand. The bird shook its feathers, looked sideways, took one glance at me … then flew, quickly blending in with the trees, the sky, the total picture.

With a Perspective, I’m Deidre Silverman.

Deidre Silverman lives in San Rafael.

It seems inevitable. In addition to American Girl dolls and the game of Risk, the Toy Hall of Fame named the simple pail of sand as one of this year’s inductees.

Who doesn’t remember the feeling of sand between our toes, and, if we had tumbled in the sandbox or on the beach, in our mouths? I remember first realizing sand could flow like water from my sand pail, could reform itself, when dampened, into material for sculpting and molding. How often had these small grains helped me build castles and produce sand pies?

I’d later learn sand could be used as an abrasive, when I took sandpaper and rubbed smooth pieces of wood I’d later want to stain. How many times have I seen sandbags outside building entrances, protection against floods? How big a supply of sand we had during Boston’s winters, when our sidewalk and steps could never have been managed without a sprinkling of sand.

But it’s the days spent, as a child, in those sandboxes and at the beach, an endless sandbox, that I remember as I note sand is now in the Toy Hall of Fame. More recently, pre-COVID, I’d had a chance to visit sand when I played with my granddaughter in her favorite part of the playground near her home in Warsaw, Poland. There, the universal favorite of every child was present – sand, and plastic toy shovels and pails. Didn’t matter that she couldn’t speak Polish with other children. Just sitting in that space, wielding a little yellow shovel, dampening the sand with some water from the fountain nearby, meant all were builders, visionaries about all the phantasmagorical creatures they were molding, all the small cakes being readied for snack time, ultimately shared, sand being that kind of community connector. That’s probably another reason for naming sand a prize winner. Its dimensions are infinite; its adaptability endless.

Maybe Congress could install a sandbox next time it needs to work on playing well together?

With a Perspective, I’m Barbara Simmons.

Barbara Simmons is a retired educator and a published poet.

I’m a very slow test taker. When I first took the PSAT in high school, almost everyone finished before me, making me feel like I’d done something wrong. When it was over, I felt so awful I literally ran out of the room. I needed to get out of there.

After spending my first year of college entirely online, test taking became even more complicated. Some teachers looked for ways to ensure their students weren’t cheating. That’s how my friend Jack was introduced to virtual proctoring, software that monitors you while taking an exam.

Jack said his experience felt invasive. His proctor had him take a 360 view of his room before the test. Having this proctor watch him and take note of everything he did was extremely nerve-wracking. And if that were me, I bet I’d be freaking out even more.

Hearing more about virtual proctoring got me pretty worried, so I dug into it. I talked to a bunch of people about their experiences. One student told me she had to stand on a table — next to a ceiling light — because the AI didn’t know how to handle anyone who wasn’t white. Another said these services demanded so much data she was suing the company for violating privacy laws.

Here’s the kicker for me: I found a stat on a proctoring service’s site. It said less than one percent of its users were found to have done anything dishonest. When I found that, I was enraged. Do we really need to be doing this?

Even as we transition back to in-person learning, virtual proctoring continues. It’s completely understandable for teachers to want to stop cheating. But can we at least look at some other way to do that, one that doesn’t infringe on our civil rights and privacy? Teachers using this problematic software might end up fostering distrust between their students. And if we the students can’t trust our teachers, how are we supposed to actually learn anything?

With a Perspective, I’m Zoe Harwood.

Zoe Harwood is from El Sobrante and attends college in Santa Cruz. Her Perspective was produced by YR Media.

Against my will, I am learning how to give eulogies. My summer was overshadowed by the deaths of two dear friends, and I found myself asked to speak at their memorials. I was very much the reluctant eulogist.

We tend to think of a eulogy as “high praise for one who has died,” but I found the word’s deep roots to be truer: speaking good words, blessing.

“The Celebration of a Life,” reads the invitation. I struggled to compose words describing how my friends had shone so brightly through all their lives.

But we weren’t gathering to compliment the deceased. Human vanity and ego don’t survive the grave. We, the survivors, were trying to incorporate a painful new reality, to comprehend it and find a means to move past it.

What those of us left behind needed was comfort. My true task was to help the living towards acceptance and peace.

Henry James wrote about grief, teaching that sorrow rolls over us in great waves, and yet still we remain where we are. One friend wrote, as she neared death, that she was not frightened, for all of us walk alone down this path one day. And both friends had let us know that they were ready to go, no matter what the rest of us wanted.

It became clear to me that, to manage our loss, we needed to hold each other now, in the moment, and then try to go on with more generosity, deeper appreciation. So, how better to honor the dead than by offering good words to those who remained behind, keeping their memories alive.

As I rose to speak, I was poignantly aware that our mourning had only just begun. We would need to keep our hearts open to each other for a lifetime to come.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

To say that I am excited kids 5 to 11 can now receive the COVID vaccine would be the understatement of the year. I know there is a lot of hesitation around getting kids vaccinated, so I want to share my reasons for vaccinating my 6-year-old daughter this weekend.

For me it comes down to the fact that there is a much higher risk of my daughter having a bad effect from COVID than from the vaccine. While kids are thankfully at less risk than adults, COVID was the eighth leading cause of death this year for kids in her age group. And COVID doesn’t just cause death–many kids were hospitalized, have lingering effects, or just had a really unpleasant illness. The COVID vaccine, on the other hand, caused no severe side effects in the trial and was extremely good at protecting kids from being infected with COVID. So on an individual level, I think the COVID vaccine will protect my daughter with a very low risk of adverse effects.

Vaccines don’t just protect individuals, though. They are also crucial at protecting our communities. With enough people vaccinated, there are very few hosts for the virus, which brings down spread. It also reduces the likelihood of even scarier variants evolving. Kids do seem to spread COVID, although at potentially lower rates than adults. But this means that even if my daughter isn’t seriously affected by COVID, she could pass it on to a vulnerable adult.

The vaccines are very good, but as with any medical intervention, not perfect. My grandmother recently died from a breakthrough case of COVID she caught in a Florida nursing home. Vaccination rates for Florida nursing home workers are under 50%, the second worst rate in the nation. I wish more people in my grandmother’s community had been vaccinated to help protect her.

If you are hesitant about vaccinating your kids, I hope you reconsider and choose to protect both your children and your community.

With a Perspective, I’m Katie Wilkinson.

Katie Wilkinson is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at San José State University and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project

My daughter June has been having a hard time at night. Anxiety about the darkness, about being alone in her room. She called to me from her bed, needing extra snuggles to bridge the gap from awake to asleep. I laid with her and we talked about what might calm her mind. We decided to read a story. She inspected her bookshelf, looking for the perfect tale to read.

June landed on an old book of mine, a silly Halloween paperback I remember choosing from the schoolbook fair when I was her age. We read a few pages and I asked her, “Can I show you something cool?” She eagerly said yes, still at the age where she genuinely believes I have cool things to show her.

I laid the open book on top of her lamp for a few moments, hoping that there was no expiration on the glow-in-the-dark paint that lined the illustrations. I placed the book back in her small hands and clicked off the lamp. In her dark bedroom, the pictures shone a bright, glowing, yellow-green. She said softly, with the purest awe and wonder, “Oh wow.” As if it were the northern lights. As if she had never seen anything prettier.

I haven’t been able to think about this moment since without crying. And I’ve been thinking about why those two words have made me so emotional. Is it because I know that the days where joy is effortlessly found are numbered for her? That she will grow up, and adult heartache will replace her easy, innocent joy? Am I mourning my own adult heartache, asking myself, when was the last time you said, “Oh wow” and really meant it? I think yes to all.

So I will learn from her. I will relish a cup of tea that is the perfect temperature. I will delight in the warmth of my dog on my lap. I will be grateful when my partner and I laugh ’til we’re in tears. And I will always, always look at my little girl, my heart barely contained, full of awe and wonder.

She will forever be my “oh wow.”

With a Perspective, I’m Sophie Bloch.

Sophie Bloch is a single mother from the East Bay with a passion for being in the kitchen.

In 17th century England a bumper was a large wine glass filled to the brim. “Aye, I’ll have another round of bumpers for me buddies.” Eventually it came to mean a lot of anything, unusually large, but not just wine. Now we use it mostly when referencing a “bumper crop.” And this year many have noticed a bumper crop of acorns.

Beginning a month ago it was literally raining acorns in my backyard from two magnificent oak trees. Both the deciduous valley oak and the evergreen coast live oak dropped thousands, yes thousands, of nuts. It was hard to walk on my deck!

Friends all over the Bay area reported the same spectacle – a biblical flood of copious acorns.

The official term for this periodic explosion of seeds is ‘masting’. Many species of trees and shrubs do this, not just oaks. But since oaks dominate in many California habitats we really notice their effect. Scientists aren’t clear what causes masting but it is surely related to ideal environmental conditions during the spring when the trees are in flower and setting fruit. One statewide study found oak groves from different species 180 miles apart synchronizes their masting! How does that happen?

The evolution of this phenomenon may have something to do with predator satiation. In other words, the myriad of animals that eat acorns will be overwhelmed by the sheer total available. Therefore, many acorns will survive and propagate more oak trees. And during the years of low seed production the numbers of seed eating predators will be kept low. At least that is one boom or bust theory.

In 1990 the California legislature found that California’s oaks help define our landscape. ‘Golden hills dotted with deep green trees’, they called it. And in recognition of their many benefits to livestock, wildlife habitat and our own enjoyment, declared the first Friday in November—California Oak Day.

Hey, that’s today! I’ll drink a bumper to that.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist living in Santa Rosa.

A few years ago, a close friend had an advanced form of prostate cancer. A successful entrepreneur, he wanted nothing more than to live, but the disease was terminal, and he was in extreme pain.

He decided to take advantage of California’s End of Life Option Act. The act gives mentally competent, terminally‐ill patients with less than six months to live, the option to take aid‐in‐dying medication. One of his concerns was the requirement of a 15‐day waiting period between the first and second verbal requests. In the midst of his suffering, he had to anticipate how long he could hold out and also plan the time so his children could fly in to be at his bedside.

On October 5, Governor Newson signed SB 380 into law. The new bill extends the act for another 10 years, and it also makes several improvements.

The most significant change is the 15‐day waiting period has been reduced to 48 hours. Other improvements include:
• Healthcare systems will have to post their aid‐in‐dying policies on their websites.
• If a doctor will not support a patient’s wishes, the doctor will have to document the request and, if asked, transfer the patient’s records to another practitioner.

While these changes might not seem monumental, they confirm that end‐of‐life choice has gained acceptance and will now be easier to access and implement. In fact, in a recent survey, three out of four Californians said they support the act.

California is one of 10 states to support end‐of‐life choice. From its inception, in 2016, through the end of last year, over 1800 Californians have chosen death with dignity. Consistent with other states, not a single instance of coercion or abuse has been documented.

Let’s hope that more states join the movement—and the choice becomes as accessible as possible to all Americans who are terminally ill and do not want to suffer at the end of their lives.

With a Perspective, I’m Stewart Florsheim.

Stewart Florsheim is a writer and content strategist living in the East Bay.

On a recent October weekend we visited a local West County winery. Sitting outside in the brisk air we learned that they, along with their sister establishments, required indoor masking for all visitors and staff. All staff were vaccinated and all visitors were seated outdoors.

Later that evening we went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie at our local Rialto theater and a young employee diligently checked our proof of vaccination before we could enter.

And at a recent music event at our local Hopmonk Tavern, we were asked to be masked while the broad-beamed and imposing bouncer checked our vax status.

In each instance I thanked these employees for holding the line. In each instance they uniformly confessed that they rarely if ever received a kind word.

Quite the contrary. Nearly every one that I spoke with had been attacked, screamed at, or abused in one way or another. Some teared up as they related their stories.

As public health departments across the country have become gutted, our service workers and small-business owners who, at times independently implemented and enforced mask, vaccine, and social distancing protocol, have in effect become front-line public health workers.

This is a job which they did not ask for, did not want, were not trained for, and that most definitely was not in their job description.

We may at last be on the verge of being able to experience a public life that feels almost normal. It’s happening despite uncivil behavior. And if we, in fact, succeed, it will be because of common citizens: baristas, and checkout clerks, hostesses and movie theater owners, exercised an uncommon valor.

With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.

Andrew Lewis lives in Sebastopol.

Lots of people enjoy this time of the year because of the rain on scorched earth, the crisp air, the sunset-colored leaves, or the pumpkin-flavored everything, seemingly sold everywhere.

But for me, it’s all about Mis Muertos.

Día de los Muertos is a time to honor our ancestors, an active appreciation of the ways people we love continue to shape us, even after they die. Especially when they die.

I’ve always enjoyed the ritual of building an altar – displaying photographs just so, situating candles amidst bright orange marigolds and calaveras, and the purposeful ‘ofrendas’ selected with special care – in my case, Dodgers swag for my Tata, a bottle of Chilean wine for my friend Emilia, an Almond Joy chocolate bar for my mom.

My mom on my altar. This is the third year she’s there.

She died in April 2019 after eight long years with Alzheimer’s. I never thought I’d reach the point where thinking of her would make me smile instead of cry.

It happened in the cliché “I have become my mother” experience so familiar to those of us in middle age.

I was hiking the golden hills above Oakland, trails she loved and traversed all her life. I turned the corner to watch the fire-tinged sun set over the San Francisco Bay, and it struck me that her coping mechanisms have become my own, especially during this tumultuous time: hiking these hills, adopting a dog, soaking in the tub, getting lost in a book.

I recognize her in the not-so-healthy outlets too, like the occasional overconsumption of news and wine.

I have her dark, arched eyebrows and petite posture, but also her neurotic worry for my teenage children and the state of our world.

This is the truth about our muertos: they are us, we are them.

With a Perspective, I’m Karina Moreno.

Karina Moreno works for a charitable foundation in San Francisco.

I was hoping that anti-Asian American racism and hate would gradually diminish with the vaccines and the number of cases of COVID decreasing. Sadly it still seems that AAPI racism continues.

Most recently, a white male YouTuber went after a local female newscaster saying she had an “aggressively Asian face”. What does this even mean? It’s not even grammatically correct. He made himself perfectly clear when he added how most Asian newscasters were more “Americanized.” This is wrong on so many levels.

This is an old racist trope, as well as a misogynistic judgment of a woman based solely on her appearance. Sending the oft-given message to people of color, that one needs to act and look more white and less ethnic to be acceptable.

Sadly, many Asian Americans have had cosmetic surgeries to Europeanize their features to be more acceptable. The reality is that Asian Americans, in spite of being citizens for multiple generations, are still perceived as perpetual foreigners, no matter how impeccable your English may be or how you look.

Then his cohort adds his two bits, “I wish she woulda kept her fan.” You can’t make this stuff up. Who made this Youtuber the arbiter of how an Asian American female newscaster should look like? It’s insulting and unfair to reduce the efforts of this reporter who has had to struggle through the ranks to attain her position in a highly competitive profession. I feel sad for our daughters who may have to ask themselves what an “aggressively Asian face” is and struggle with whether they are perceived this way.

Part of me doesn’t even want to dignify small-minded comments like this. Once again, this is an example of the false choice people of color face when targeted by a racist comment, to confront it or try to let it go and walk away. At this point in my life, I’ve intentionally decided to voice my disgust, because unexpressed outrage becomes in-rage. I feel it is important for me as a man to say I find this unacceptable and am outraged. I stand by this reporter and all other women who are mistreated like this.

I have your back.

With a Perspective, I’m Larry Lee.

Larry Lee is a San Francisco psychotherapist.

I used to love Halloween because it was innocent, creative and simple. At most a week before, I’d buy some candy, scrounge around the closet for a costume, and viola! By 8 pm on the evening in question, the last kids knocked and received their candy, and we all moved on.

Consumerism has ruined Halloween, as it did Christmas, but this year I am fighting back. Instead of garish plastic horrors of half decayed hung men, I bought a funky-looking pumpkin at the farmers market. And I am embracing my Hispanic heritage, and creating a altar for my beloved, deceased dad.

Last night, my daughter and I hand-painted calaveritas, ‘skulls’ in English, and perhaps we will try to make traditional ones of sugar. We are decorating the house with colored paper cut-out banners and flowers of crinkly crepe. I will make my aunt’s Guatemalan delicacy, fiambre, a concoction of pickled vegetables, cheeses and sausages, naturally and brilliantly colored with beets,
decorated and seasoned with chiles.

The Hispanic approach to the Day of the Dead embodies more than a preference for bright colors over somber blacks and greys. it signals that death need not be depressing or macabre. It should be a welcome aspect of a well-lived life. In time, I hope to join my father and other departed loved ones on altars built by my decedents. When it is my turn I hope to gracefully make way for the new vibrant generations as precious marvelous and multi-faceted as ours’

Meanwhile this Halloween I will joyfully partake of bright colors, strong flavors and happy music, celebrating the majestic cycle of existence, and the transcendental role of family and enduring love.

With a Perspective, I’m Jeanne Sole.

Jeanne Sole buys electricity for the City of San Jose, and its residents and businesses. She lives in Belmont.

One toasty morning a few months ago I went to the market looking for ingredients to whip up one of my favorite hot-weather dishes; a feta, mint, and olive oil spread for gluten-free toast. I found feta, but where was the mint? I wondered aloud to my husband. “I know,” replied a woman nearby. “What are you making?” I was delighted to tell her about this simple spread we had learned about from Gus, the owner of a Greek restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village, and share with her Gus’s non-recipe recipe.

I left the market happy and with my mint, realizing right away how much I had missed talking with strangers in a year-plus of living through a pandemic. I hadn’t even tried since early on, when a woman in a different market shouted, “Get six feet away from me!” as I came around the corner of an aisle. I got it. In those dark pre-mask, pre-vaccine days, I was a stranger who could be carrying a deadly virus.

But now most shoppers in the Bay Area have been vaccinated, and masks are the social norm. Conversations have resumed in lines at farmers markets. When I walk my dog in the neighborhood, I no longer have to do the COVID shuffle to keep a safe physical distance from others in our path. I can stop to let strangers pet her. That makes everyone happy.

Social science research confirms that talking to strangers enhances mood, and makes us more empathetic. People often underestimate how rewarding talking to a stranger can be. Yes, it may push us out of our comfort zone, but that’s a good thing for our mental health and well-being. And as I can see from those who ask how old my puppy-like mini Aussie is, it’s also good for the people we talk with.
One-time strangers may even become friends. I met my pal Firoozeh at the San Jose airport at 6:00 one morning nearly 20 years ago, when my mom and I were sent to the wrong gate. What a fortunate turn!

So go ahead: reach out and talk to a stranger today. I think you’ll be glad you did.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

Debbie Duncan writes children’s books from her home on the Peninsula.

Which is better? The storm, or the morning after? I was swept away on a wave of nostalgia when I first woke up to the sound of gentle rain. It filled me with that rare contentment that comes from getting something you have wanted for a long, long time, and were not sure you would ever get. Like love, or sex, or peace of mind: the hope that this planet has a future that vaguely resembles the past.

They were all mixed up in my mind the first morning of rain. Then we lost our power. Flashlights, camping lanterns…all gathered from far corners of the house where they had been forgotten for too long. We ran to the neighbors to borrow batteries, chatting on the doorsteps, that wonderful feeling of ‘we-are-all-in-it-together’ mixed with yearning for ‘life-how-it-used-to-be’: storms every winter, dripping umbrellas, wet shoes, stuck indoors. Now all those experiences have a strange new glow. I can’t imagine ever being bothered by them again.

Then a few days later, The Big Storm. Wind that knocks branches off of trees, and floods the roads, and makes us wonder if we have enough food and where is the rain gear? It is just amazing to be Out In It, ignoring Nixle alerts that say “Stay Home. Stay Home”. But why? Why stay home when the world is an exciting new place? Wet, windy, wild, wonderful.

Or maybe the best part is today, the morning after. Like staring, sated, at your lover over a cup of coffee. The driveway matted with wet pine needles exudes an extraordinary smell. The paths are now made of golden maple leaves that gleam in the low-slanted morning light. The meadow has become briefly a small lake. Cars speed through the flooded road spewing walls of water with a risky nonchalance. There is a new carpet of apples under every apple tree, picked by the wind during the night, and the tiniest green grasses are already sprouting in the dead brown fields.

The Drought did not disappear during the storm but, just the same, for a moment …I am grateful to inhabit a Crazy, New, Coming-alive world…

With a Perspective, this is Sara Alexander.

Sara Alexander is a therapist and filmmaker who lives in San Francisco and Graton.

Five years ago, I woke in my best friend’s guest room to news that two of my heroines were speaking at a nearby rally. It was day two of a weekend with law school friends from decades ago—women practiced in gently turning aside unwanted attentions, listening politely to sexist jokes, fighting against “the mommy track.” We were private women, “good girls.” We believed in change effected quietly.

Hours later, we cheered wildly as a senator introduced a presidential candidate by claiming as a badge of honor an insult hurled by her male opponent: “We nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes.”

That election wasn’t the one we’d dreamed of, but that moment of turning the insult back on the insulter did mark a change. More people stomped their nasty feet in protest against the new administration than attended the inauguration.

A single woman marching is a lonely woman. But one woman plus another plus another equals power.

What followed?

#MeToo — women saying aloud what so often had been kept secret for fear it was somehow our fault. Harvey Weinstein put away in a maximum security prison for twenty-three years.

#TimesUp — Hollywood women dressing in black, talking about belonging in “the room where it happens.”

We marched our nasty feet to vote in the next midterms for the largest turnout ever, favoring Democrats by a record 19% to elect 110 women to Congress and return one to the Speaker’s seat. Two year later, Kamala marched her nasty feet into the Vice Presidency.

Yes, Texas is now trying to undermine a woman’s right to choose. The percentage of venture capital going to female-led startups fell to 2.3% last year from a paltry high of 2.8. Only one woman was recognized by the Nobel committee.

But as Maria Ressa, that journalist honored with the Peace Prize, says, “Don’t be afraid, because if you don’t use your rights, you will lose them.”

In other words, be as nasty as you need to be. Change is a loud, messy thing.

With a Perspective, I’m Meg Waite Clayton.

Meg Waite Clayton is the author of seven novels. She lives on the Peninsula.

Last September, I drove along a vast stretch of Highway 80 with my husband and adult daughter, listening to a baseball game. We were returning to the Bay Area after backpacking in Colorado, a last-minute detour to avoid the wildfires ravaging parts of California. The Giants were at home, playing the Atlanta Braves and leading 4–2, until Atlanta scored three runs to pull ahead. In the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and down to his last strike, Giants second baseman Donovan Solano hit a home run to tie the game and send it into extra innings. Our car erupted in cheers.

The 2021 Giants were projected to be good-to-middling, maybe winning 75–80 games. They went on to win 107 games and the division. In doing so, they gave me a feeling sorely lacking in this difficult pandemic season: I felt cheerful.

Last week, the season ended for San Francisco. Fans of other teams will continue riding the postseason roller coaster, while Giants’ fans contemplate both a disappointing loss and the magic of a season like no other.

Here’s what I’ll remember: we’re barreling down I-80, the night so black we could’ve been hurtling through space. It’s the bottom of the eleventh now, the game still tied. The bases are loaded with just one out, but the Giants have run out of position players to pinch-hit so the manager, Gabe Kapler, sends pitcher Kevin Gausman to the plate. We groan. Pitchers are generally terrible batters. Gausman hits a sac fly to right field and from third base, Brandon Crawford breaks for the plate and executes a perfect fade-away slide. Once again, the Giants win. And there we are — my husband, daughter, and me — beleaguered from the year, still grimy with Colorado dirt, flying through the dark expanse and screaming for joy.

With a Perspective, I’m Bora Lee Reed.

Bora Lee Reed is the communications director for UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

Well, some anatomist did when the word ‘muscle’ was coined; it comes from the Latin word ‘musculus’ – meaning little mouse named such because the movement of a muscle is reminiscent of a little mouse moving under a blanket.

In fact, a number of terms for our anatomy have animals hiding within.

The coccyx, commonly called the tailbone, is the small triangle-shaped bone at the base of the spinal column and named for its resemblance to the beak of a cuckoo bird. ‘Coccyx’ comes from Greek for cuckoo bird.

The cornea, the transparent membrane covering the surface of the eye comes from the Latin word ‘cornu’, meaning “animal horn,” because – delicate though it seems – this tissue is surprisingly hard, like an animal’s horn.

Another anatomy term comes from cornu. Keratin is the tough protein that is the main structural component of hair and nails in humans and hooves, claws, feathers, beaks, and horns in other animals.

The cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity of the inner ear is called such because it looks like a snail shell: snail is ‘kokhlos’ in Greek.

And if you think you’re going to have trouble remembering all of this, you’re underestimating your hippocampus, the part of our brain crucial for long-term memory. The hippocampus was a mythological sea creature who was part horse – ‘hippo’ is Greek for “horse” — and part fish. An Italian anatomist thought this area was suggestive of the curves of the Hippocampus’s tail, and so it was named.

We also have a few less scientific terms for parts of our anatomy inspired by animals: cowlick, dewlap, crow’s feet, buck teeth, harelip, goatee, ponytail, and pigtails.

These and many more animal-related words reflect how deeply rooted animals are in our consciousness, in our history, in our lives – and deep in our animal bones.

With a Perspective, this is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an author and animal activist living in Oakland.

My face was very red that July day, as if I had been puffing up a hill, which is exactly the effort it took to keep from falling apart. This was the day my son came home from war.

We had been tracking him for days; text messages traveling like little miracles from Logar Province to my cubicle in Fairfield. Over the days they came from locations that were increasingly safe: Bagram, Romania, Frankfurt. I was so afraid that something would go wrong when we had come so far.

Now we were walking toward the gym on base for the homecoming ceremony. The scene was jubilant and it was heartbreaking. And it was no longer about me and my son.

Children were spilling out of minivans with American flags and signs that said “Welcome Home Daddy!” A little girl toddled before me in a dress floating in red, white and blue. It felt like a high school pep rally, no more no less. Because unlike the woman with the red face, these kids had done this before.

My thoughts returned to the day my son deployed. Pulling up to the drop off point we parked behind a station wagon. It belonged to his staff sergeant, a sunny young man with many deployments under his belt who would keep my boy, the green lieutenant, safe. In the back of the station wagon was a quilt and the sergeant’s son. His eyes were sad but his mouth was stoic. The quilt was soft, pastel, and handmade, and completely at odds with the moment at hand.

As we put the Forever War behind us, there’s an image I can’t erase. That day in the gym, 400 women and men stood in formation, many with children, soft quilts in their cars and “Welcome Home” signs on their minivans. Each one ready to give their life for me. For us. It kind of takes your breath away, and your face red too.

With a Perspective, I’m Ann Miller.

Ann Miller is a communications professional living in the Napa Valley.

A geological time scale spans billions of years. But one interesting thing about geological history is that some changes aren’t gradual at all, but instant. Like asteroid impacts or massive waves unleashed by falling glaciers, they suddenly and forever alter the earth. I think that kind of rapid change on an otherwise long, evolutionary scale can occur in more subtle ways too.
Like growing up, for example.

In the summer after ninth grade, I worked at New York Hospital in Manhattan. I was a volunteer and did a variety of jobs. One day I was sent to an upper floor to pick up a package from a lab. I handed the requisition to the woman sitting behind the desk, and as she retrieved the package, I noticed a poster of the hospital on the wall. Just the hospital building, standing out against a bright blue sky. “Wow,” I said with a laugh. “Someone made a poster of New York hospital?” The woman placed the package in my courier pouch, but as she gave it back to me, quietly said, “Some people think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.”
Though I didn’t fully grasp it until a few years later, those words pierced my teenage armor, sending a shock wave of new cracks and contours through my brain. I suddenly knew where I was, and that this place truly mattered. I knew that every doctor, nurse, and staff member understood that. And I knew — in a way no lecture could have ever convinced me — that in a place built to save lives, a churlish attitude was shameful. A glacier had been dislodged, and the gorge it carved in my mind was permanent.
At times, the road before me seems laden with nothing but brick walls, and it’s easy to let frustration suffocate hope. But it’s also helpful to remember that even though change is often slow or insufficient, it can occasionally come all at once, and reorder the world as we know it, sometimes for the better.
With a Perspective, I’m Jim McClellan.

Jim McClellan is co-founder of a logistics software company focused on the wine industry. He lives in Marin.

The winery where I work is suffused with the smell of fermenting grapes. Tall redwood doors are thrown open, cool morning air clearing out carbon dioxide that’s gathered overnight as yeasts ferment each ripe grape. Cream-colored bins brim with tight clusters of grapes waiting to journey from vine to bottle. The crush pad is abuzz with beeping forklifts, tangles of white hoses, sweaty faces, and purple-stained hands. No one is still, except the bees gorging on pools of sticky juice. A bacchanalia in miniature. It’s been a dry, hard year for them, too.

Irrigation ponds are dried to a few inches of algae and green sludge. The mountains that hem in our valley still bear burn scars, and skeletal trees stand in dark relief. This multi-year drought weighs heavily on us, and the windy, warm days that usher in Fall set us all on edge—one spark, and we would surely alight in flames again.

And yet, we adapt and persist. The vines still set forth tender shoots and ripened their clusters through this dusty, dry summer. Vineyard managers employ creative methods to better retain water in Napa Valley’s many soil types, and this record-breaking drought will serve as a case study for the dry years to come. There is excitement about the 2021 vintage, a window into the concentration and purity hard-wrought from the dry ground. So many are eager to visit Napa Valley, delighted to taste and buy the wines we are so well known for.

And the beauty of our valley remains unmatched, despite the challenges and changing conditions. On my drive home last night, low lavender clouds nestled against the hillsides, and the golden grasses shined in the evening glow. Clusters of grapes hung heavy on vines, waiting to be picked.

The future is uncertain, but we are moving forward with the cyclical beauty of this place, seeing the potential for a bright future alight not just with flames but possibility.

With a Perspective, I’m Karen Trippe Mannix.

Karin Trippe Mannix lives and works in the Napa Valley with her husband and young daughter.

Once at a party, I told someone I was a teacher, and he mentioned he always wanted to be a teacher. “Why didn’t you?” I asked. He said he wanted to make decent money, so he became a dentist.

He wasn’t wrong. My first year salary as a public school teacher, 28 years ago, was $25,000. Even then, not great for a job requiring four years of college and two years of graduate school. That dentist did hurt a bit – his job required four years of college plus four years of dental school. The average dentist in California earns around 10 times my starting salary.

My early years as a teacher, I was shocked by the poverty of my co-workers. The teacher in the classroom next to mine, with five kids of his own, went fishing at 4 am, selling fish to help support his family. One teacher worked nights as a bartender, another worked a grocery store shift. Full-time teachers juggling second jobs, trying to make ends meet as baristas, waiters, or shop clerks.

The news has been filled lately with stories of a dire teacher shortage. Last year, almost 14,000 California teachers retired. And even with new teachers being certified, the state needs 6,000 more teachers to staff schools. California isn’t alone – 48 states reported teacher shortages this school year.

Salary isn’t the only reason teachers are bailing. But the low wages, long hours, and classrooms of unvaccinated students are all contributing to the teacher shortage. Even before COVID, some 50% of new teachers quit within the first 5 years.

But there is hope. Governor Newsom has proposed increased pay for teachers. And superintendents throughout California are in favor of better salaries for teachers. They understand our state needs to offer a living wage to find and keep the best teachers if we want a highly qualified work force of tomorrow.

I could have told that dentist there are other compensations besides money. That look on a student’s face when a light bulb finally goes on is worth a lot.

And 28 years later, my students still make me smile. Any dentist should understand the value of that.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

When I opened my front door yesterday I saw yet another box with that blue smiling arrow on the ground. What the hell is that, I thought? I have been ordering so many random things from that particular online retailer that I sometimes forget what items will show up a couple of days after I click that amber “Buy Now” button.

This year is the 700-year anniversary of the death of the great writer Dante, whose work, The Divine Comedy, stands among the most memorable and influential books of Western literature. At times I feel like I’ve lost my way, becoming a mindless consumer of goods, so I am wondering if I am at risk of being placed one day in Dante’s 4th Circle of his Inferno, where the Hoarders and Wasters are condemned to pushing around large boulders and crying out in anguish for eternity.

I am also thinking about this subject matter for three other reasons: first, the news about all those cargo ships stuck in Purgatory outside the ports in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere; second, the fact that the material object gift-giving season will soon be bearing down on us; and third, the ghastly sight of all the excess stuff spewing from the mouths of parking lot donation bins, or the desolate sight of enormous roadside self-storage facilities, which in the U.S. collectively take up over two billion square feet. That’s a lot of space for things that are not being used, yet global factories keep pumping out new things to load onto ships to head to our shores.

I feel partly responsible for this depressing state of affairs. After reading The Divine Comedy I am determined to avoid Hell. I will not be a Hoarder and Waster. I will not join a group of people, who, in the translated words of Dante, according to one scholar, “were so skewed and squint-eyed in their minds their misering and extravagance mocked all reason.” No, midway in my life’s journey, I will reform my consumer habits and conscientiously take care of the Earth and my own soul.

With a Dantean perspective, this is Evan Ho.

Evan Ho works in the business school at UC, Berkeley. He lives in Orinda.

I’ve worked in retail and customer service since I was in high school — so about three years now.

I’m a full-time college student with my own bills to pay, so I can’t afford to focus only on school without having a job. Not to mention I live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country.

When the world shut down in 2020 and I was furloughed from my retail job, I had no choice but to turn to unemployment. Luckily, due to the 2020 CARES Act I was able to receive help. But it left me and many others in the same position with a lingering question — how am I making more money on unemployment than I was at my regular job?

Once I returned to work, I ended up only staying at that retail job for a little under two months until I quit and moved on to another customer service position at a spa. But now I’ve finally left the customer service industry for good — I hope.

I was tired of dealing with unappreciative and entitled customers, working long, tiring hours for mediocre pay, and coming home mentally drained from work that I had no passion for.

And I’m not the only one. Studies show that young people like me make up the biggest bracket of this mass exodus known as ‘’The Great Resignation.”

I’m not sure if any amount of money would have kept me at any of the jobs where I worked. But I know that I was not compensated enough for the emotional and physical labor I put into them. The pandemic made me reevaluate what my time is worth and my own value.

So I quit — something that may not be feasible for everyone working a retail or customer service job. And even though I’m still figuring out what my career will look like, I’m much happier.

With a Perspective, I’m Nina Roehl.

Nina Roehl is 21 and lives in San Francisco. Her Perspective was produced by YR Media.

My wife and I recently moved to an over-55 condominium community, after living in a very private and lovely country setting for many years. We’re very happy here, but the first Tuesday after we arrived we were shockingly awakened at 6:15 am by the garbage collection truck, on its twice-weekly run. The prospect was awful, and we were dismayed.

And then something strange occurred. One morning, immediately after the garbage truck left, I became aware of a profound quiet. No sounds at all. It was no different than the time immediately before the truck arrived, but the extreme and sudden contrast made it seem deeper and stiller. And now, each subsequent collection time I find myself looking forward to the truck’s arrival so I can soak in the silence of its departure. It’s not pleasant to be awakened in the dark by a garbage truck, but I have come to look forward to the gift of silence it leaves behind.

What a surprise, and a delightful one at that, to actually look forward to anticipating the unpleasant noise so I can soak in the deep wonderful silence that follows. And because the effect was so unexpected, I am now looking to identify similar experiences, and apply the lesson I’ve learned. I’m looking for instances in which I can look past the initial difficult moment or unpleasant experience and anticipate something positive in its wake. It’s like the moment of relief when I get past being stuck in heavy traffic and zoom off down the highway, or coming in out of the rain to revel in the dry warmth of a hotel lobby.

Not every unpleasant experience has an enjoyable aftermath, but I am surprised at how often that garbage truck has given some negative experience the pleasure of a soft and warm landing

With a Perspective I’m Ray Pestrong.

Ray Pestrong is a retired professor of geology at San Francisco State University.

So, Frances Haugen caught Facebook with their pants down. It’s hardly surprising that they would optimize their algorithms to keep people as engaged as possible to keep feeding them ads. We consume ads and in return, we use the platform for free.
The problem of course is that, just like with local TV news, outrage and fear are what gets people’s attention best and Facebook’s algorithms are designed to serve up more of whatever people react to, which amplifies that outrage and fear to global proportions. But it’s free speech and we pride ourselves on that.

Facebook claims that they cannot possibly moderate content to keep out misleading or incendiary posts, that they cannot police their platform, that the best they can do is to use algorithms that look for keywords in people’s posts, but it’s a primitive tool and I’d guess that it’s not very effective.

There are 2.89 billion people using Facebook. A simple meme can spread like wildfire, growing exponentially in a matter of minutes. Swaying public opinion has never been easier and it’s lucrative for the company too. But of course, we have to preserve free speech, right?

Recently, YouTube announced that it will ban anti-vax conspiracy videos. They’re admitting that they are complicit in spreading misinformation and that they have a responsibility to stop it. That’s a big deal. They’re acknowledging that they can’t let people post whatever they feel like – that someone must step in and make that judgment call, in this case, that spreading misinformation will lead to infection and for some, death. Social media platforms have avoided that kind of responsibility like the plague, but they should have known that by building global platforms, sooner or later they’ll have the responsibility to moderate it.

Now, Facebook is under more scrutiny than ever, and like it or not, they’re going to have to make changes. I doubt Congress will intervene. After all, they use the platform to great advantage to spread their own messages, so any meaningful change is going to have to come from the users and from the investors. It may be their platform but it’s our content.

It’s time for Facebook to take a stance on what the platform is supposed to be for. Is it our community where we make meaningful connections or is it a place where we are fed whatever garbage advertisers pay for?

With a Perspective, I’m Brian Walker.

Brian Walker is an audio engineer and musician who lives in the East Bay and works with Silicon Valley companies to develop state-of-the-art speech for personal voice assistants.

The supply chain was one of those things that most of us didn’t think about much before the pandemic. One could argue—a bit facetiously— that this indifference can be traced back to our childhoods. Think about the stories we were told about how presents got to our house. Their arrival was not the end of a long sequence of handoffs and processes but the benevolent act of a single actor like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. A bit of that childhood innocence still remains when we marvel that all we have to do is tap our phones and—shazaam!—a package arrives at our front door the next day.

But the fact that we took for granted the vast and intricate web that delivers all our stuff, either to our homes or the shelves of the stores where we shop, doesn’t mean that some of our fellow citizens aren’t interested in detecting other networks of connections. After all a conspiracy theory is just another form of supply chain: people in different locations handle a sequence of steps that result in some desired outcome. For example, destroying valid ballots and replacing them with illegal ones requires the diligence and coordination of multiple actors. The more byzantine and elaborate theories imagine connections that span the globe just like the supply chains that produce semiconductors or automobiles.

Obviously conspiracy theories have been with us for a lot longer than our modern world of logistics. But, still, the existence of the intricate choreography that delivers sweaters and cooking utensils to our front door provides a template for imagining more nefarious enterprises. Just because you can’t see all the steps involved doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. You simply begin with the outcome—the delivery of a book to your house or an unwelcome electoral result—and trace the sequence back to its origin.

But in the end the difference is this: the supply chain is how things happen, a conspiracy theory is an attempt to explain what happened, and sadly, about as true the stories we were told about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.

Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.

When the Europeans first landed on the shore of this continent there were many animals new to them. So naturally they used the names from the native inhabitants. Opassum in the Algonquin language group meant ‘white dog’ corrupted to our opossum.  Aroughcun was the “one who scratches with hands”- it became  raccoon.  And squunck, skunk, was the bushy tailed animal that urinates. Yep, I’ll say!

And in Maine this summer I saw many “chitmunks” , again from the local native dialect which maybe means “goes down tree headfirst”.  I love that one! The eastern chipmunk is very common and the only species found east of the Mississippi River.

But California is the center for chipmunk biodiversity. We have 13 species! And the real chipmunk ground zero is the Sierra Nevada. Driving from the Bay Area to Mono Lake you go through the territory of the Sonoma, yellow-pine, long-eared, shadow, lodgepole, alpine and finally the least chipmunk in the Great Basin Desert.

The species are  very similar. All have stripes through their head and along the sides of their body and very long tails, whereas the larger golden mantled ground squirrel only has stripes on the side of its body not on its head. Favorites of visitors, chipmunks are rated at about 9.8 on the cute scale. They thrive in campgrounds eating dropped scraps but of course also hunt for seeds, fruits, insects and even bird eggs.

They forage underground digging up fungi like truffles. And, in fact, are responsible for the survival of these choice edible mushrooms which no longer can rely on air to disperse their spores. At high elevations the alpine chipmunk stores enough food to last the winter. It doesn’t hibernate but just goes into a deep sleep, wakes up, grabs a bite and back to sleep.

One of the things I have in common with chipmunks was discovered by researchers carefully monitoring the inside of the burrows —  we are both fastidious housekeepers. And I like truffles as well.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

 Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

It happens all the time.

Every day, women are told they are less than, that they act inappropriately even though they do the same things as men. These sexist ideals are especially prevalent in the debate community, and I’ve unfortunately received my share of these comments.

I sat down after giving my last speech and felt all the stress of the round leave my body. My partner and I used our shared document to communicate to each other while the judges decided our fate. Were we going to compete the next day or were we going home? Fifteen minutes later, the decision was revealed. “It’s a 2-1 for the affirmative,” said one of the judges. My partner and I turned to each other, big smiles on our faces, and high-fived. We had won!

I thanked my opponents for a good round, then asked one of the judges for feedback specific to our team. I wanted to hear what we could improve on, not what she was going to say. She called me to her desk, and I wondered, “Why does she want to talk to me individually?” Little did I know, the words that would come out of her mouth would be, “You spoke too loudly and aggressively for a female debater. You need to be subdued, because that is not our place.” I stood there in astonishment while she told me everything I did was wrong, because I was a woman.

This was one of the first experiences I had with outright sexism in the debate community. The sexism hasn’t been decreasing since it happened. Sexism in the debate community is so prevalent, yet it is one of the most ignored issues. It occurs in subtle ways, and such outright ways like the experience I had. It ranges from mansplaining, to losing rounds to male debaters because of the way that women are dressed. And yet for some reason, the entire range is ignored.

Raising awareness about this issue is important, because as society is changing, the debate community needs to as well. I long for the day when I don’t receive these sexist comments.

With a Perspective, I’m Anika Ganesh.

Anika Ganesh is a sophomore at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. Her piece was produced with free curriculum from KQED’s Perspectives Youth Media Challenge.

You knew this was coming. You knew it when your child was 2 and she climbed into a wicker basket, asking you to push her around the kitchen floor. “Again,” she said, when you were exhausted.

She breezed through elementary, middle and high school and there you are, dropping her off at a university in New York. You help move her into a dorm and good Lord. Three girls crammed into a tiny space. “I can’t live like this,” she says.

You share a goodbye dinner at a sushi restaurant. You won’t eat the spicy tuna roll. You will stare at it. Later, you will watch your child walk away with a TJ Maxx bag, a plastic sunflower sticking out the top.

Your child will fly home for Christmas. She will talk about awesome bagels. She will say New York’s cool but she might transfer back to the Bay Area. Your heart will leap; don’t say a word.

Before your child returns to New York, she will get her wisdom teeth out. You will buy her mango smoothies, feeling powerful by helping her. Then, before she leaves, you will cry at a stoplight.

The night before your child goes back to New York, you will have a special dinner. It will be sad. You will admit to yourself that you didn’t see your child much while she was home. You saw her rush out to meet her boyfriend, heard her return at 2 a.m. But she was there.

You will know it doesn’t matter where she finishes her degree. It doesn’t matter if she has straight A’s.

You will think about the wicker basket, the plastic sunflower sticking out of the TJ Maxx bag, the sad sushi restaurant. You will know that what matters, the only thing that matters, is that she is your child.

With a Perspective, I’m Mark Clevenger.

Mark Clevenger is a college counselor in Menlo Park. His daughter Chloe is attending St. John’s University.

Naming places and buildings for people is a tradition stretching back centuries.  Important people have been honored with statues for millennia. But, times change and it may be appropriate to replace some of these recognitions.

The process for evaluating such changes needs to be consistent and fair.

The process must be public.  Citizen committees should include broad representation with good publicity and outreach.  This is an opportunity to bring the community together, and to educate us all about issues and history.

Next, we must look at the reason the name was honored. If it was meant to intimidate or suppress, the name must go. A plaque in Monterey honored army officer Garnett for designing the California State Seal. Was it put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to recognize his design work or support lost-cause ideology?

A serious study of the person’s life is necessary. The standards against which this biography are measured must be carefully considered.

Some standards are likely universal.  The hunting of unarmed civilians such as that the namesake of Patrick’s Point is accused should never be justified. That may have been unremarkable in Patrick’s time, but] If we have the “right” Patrick, the name should be changed.

Other standards will generate more debate.  Does the possible mid-19^th century ownership of property, as one Santa Rosa school board member advocated, warrant removal?

A life history is complicated. Outstanding accomplishments can be tainted by now-questionable acts. Midlife change may show a different person at each stage. To evaluate each person, their biography must compared with the standards of the time in which they lived.

Then, the biography needs to be evaluated through today’s lens.

If standards have changed, we must choose whether to  retain the name and seize the opportunity to educate, for example by putting up interpretive displays and websites.  Shall we explain the evolution of thinking and laws over time, or shall we simply eradicate the name?

Does Jesse Peter, Junior’s collecting of Native American materials for museums by now-questionable means require his name to be removed from his museum?

Name changes will always be needed.  Let’s be inclusive and make good decisions.

With a Perspective, I’m Mike Von der Porten

Mike Von der Porten helps businesses with their one and five-year planning processes.

Before all of today’s electronic media, we subscribed to a whole stack of newspapers and magazines.

We got local and national newspapers daily. And domestic and international news magazines weekly. Plus, all sorts of fun and interesting publications about music, fashion, and entertainment, including — and I’m not ashamed to admit this — Mad Magazine.

Of course, now we get most of our news online, and headlines cascade like an avalanche through our news and social feeds. But we still crave the newspaper.

So while we’ve stopped getting so many publications, we still get the Sunday papers.

The Sunday papers. Those wonderful, fat, crinkly, bundles of tactile, real-life delight.

And I can tell you, they’re tonic.

Every Sunday those magnificent newspapers thump onto our porch, with their come-hither headlines and long columns of insight and wisdom, analysis and criticism, features and reviews.

Something we can count on. Stalwart friends. Committed to their newsy mandate and always happy to come on inside.

Our tradition is to make lots of strong coffee, arrange a yummy platter of snackable, breakfasty food … then spread those newspapers across the floor, like butter on toast.

We crawl from section to section — I always start with the comics — find a pillow or bolster to lean on, and read. Sometimes share an article. Sometimes read out loud to each other.

Sometimes this goes on for 90 minutes. Sometimes all day. Often, we enjoy various sections all week long.

And for that precious time, we feel connected to the world. Informed, not marketed to. Not yelled at, threatened, cajoled, seduced, or misled into engagement. Truly, blissfully connected.

All of this is just a long, wordy love note to the journalists, columnists, photographers, artists, editors, and craftspeople who persist in getting those newspapers to us.

If it weren’t for you, the whole COVID ordeal would have been truly unbearable. So thanks.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Levitt.

Richard Levitt is an East Bay writer who teaches martial arts, yoga, and creative problem-solving.

It used to be said that the only things you could rely on were death, taxes, and the San Francisco Giants. Then the Giants won three championships, some corporations paid no taxes and only death remained. However, since the Renaissance shifted the goal from the greatest good to personal happiness, personal death has assumed a greater importance than when it was generally accepted that most people existed as fodder for others. While Copernicus and Galileo proved that we were not at the center of the universe, our newly-released egos disagreed, and we began to believe that civilization peaked in the minuscule era of our personal zenith and went south when we did.

Life moves in a parabola. We are born knowing nothing, instinctively fearful of life and relying on others for support. As we grow, we acquire more and more information, respond to more and more stimuli. For a few wonderful years, at our peak, we know the world intimately, in harmony with all that life has to offer. We breathe in the roses at the precise moment they let go of their fragrance. We are the makers of the True Renaissance that only we understand.

And then the world moves on and we fall away. We try to interpret the present according to the past and inevitably, we fail. Our aging bodies betray us. Intellect gives pleasure where once we held out for passion. We are bewildered at how everything and everyone else grows old.

Thanks to technology, we continue to push back the age when we can expect to die, but technology’s implicit, long-range promise is the death of death itself.

What then? As creatures that still live and die, we are nowhere near adjusting to the doubling of our life span or the break-up of the family structure technology also has helped bring about. Who knows the consequences when endless life and an unlimited amount of leisure become commonplace? The joke may be on us. We may find out what the wise have always known: that to know what it is to live it is necessary to die.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Friedlander.

Richard Friedlander is an East Bay mediator, actor and writer.

I am idling at the wheel behind a couple cars at a stop sign. A few seconds tick by, then the driver just in front of me explodes with a furious bleat of honks. He’s jerking back and forth in agitation. Well, yes, why isn’t that car up at the front moving? I lift my hand to add my horn to the protest when I glimpse an elderly woman painfully creeping to the end of the crosswalk. Cars move forward. My face flushes in shame.

In mere seconds I’ve generated a great deal of anger…yet the incident was so insignificant. How often this happens.

I see a woman drop a bag of dog waste on the shore trail and I call after her in barely disguised irritation — “Uh, excuse me, but you left that bag!” She turns and patiently explains, “I use bright red bags so I always can find them when I come back this way after doing my two miles. Who can carry it that far in this heat!”

“Be curious, not furious,” I chant to myself, but it’s a challenging discipline. I have to mentally transport myself to the other side of a chasm of strong emotion and look back from the other person’s viewpoint. But if I can allow curiosity to nudge aside my anger, suddenly a new perspective opens. I can take a few beats, breathe, pose a few questions.

To make it a first impulse to inquire, to be generous enough to ask why takes a lot of practice. But saying, “Tell me what’s happening here” or “Please explain” opens the door to empathy.

Reaching out to investigate, willfully suspending anger, requires self-awareness as I hurry through my busy day. But it can help me connect to others instead of seeing them as obstacles. And it certainly lowers blood pressure and lightens my mood.

I’ll keep trying.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

It was yet another day in eighth grade. I was sitting in the corner of the classroom, quietly doing my math homework, when my best friend walked up to me and asked, “Parvathy, are you balding?” At first, I laughed- she was obviously joking, right? But one quick look in the girl’s bathroom mirror confirmed my worst fears – I was, in fact, losing my hair.

After a visit to the dermatologist, I was told that I had alopecia areata, a common autoimmune disorder that affects about one in every 500 Americans. Normally, this condition really isn’t a big deal. The hair, which falls out in small patches, grows back in a matter of weeks and sometimes months. Unfortunately for me, I had a rarer form, where the hair would take about four years to grow back to its full length. And when it did grow back, it would be stark white in color.

Now, at 13 years old, I thought my life was over. I truly believed that I would become an outcast and that my friends would start ignoring me. So for about a year of my life, I did whatever I could to cover that little part of me up, with hats, and hoods, and bows, and clips. Eventually, though, I got tired of hiding my hair. I found that it really wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it was. My friends didn’t stop being my friends just because I happened to be balding- in fact, they found the whole thing pretty funny. And soon, I found the funny side to it, too.

Now, almost three years later, I still have white hair. But I stopped being insecure about it and I’ve pretty much accepted that it’ll be there for a while. I now view this event as just a small bump in the road, even though three years ago, I truly thought that it was the end of the world. Let this be a lesson that the things you think are a huge deal right now, probably won’t even matter in a couple of years.

With a Perspective, I’m Parvathy Nair.

Parvathy Nair is a senior at Notre Dame High School in San Jose. Her piece was produced with free curriculum from KQED Learn Youth Media Challenges. For more information visit KQED Learn.

I wanted an apple for my morning muesli but the only one left had three soft brown spots. Normally, I would have tossed it out. But these were COVID-19 times. And I was doubly hobbled because a freak fall had broken my fibula bone. I needed an orthopedic boot just to stand up. Forget making a quick trip to the store.

I cut the blemishes away and grated my apple. It was delicious. And it made me think: How did I become someone who threw away food so easily?

Growing up in Berlin in the long shadow of World War II, I learned that food was precious. Nothing was tossed out. Every plate was cleared.

My mother shopped with just a string bag. Then she remarried and we moved to the United States. The neighborhood supermarket in St. Paul was a miracle; shelves of cereal boxes, pyramids of canned peas, piles of watermelons, an expanse of red meats, stacks of candy bars. I was awestruck.

Midsummer, my stepdad took us to the company picnic, a jolly lakeside affair. Tables were heaped with jello molds and layered cakes. Grill stations featured men flipping burgers. You could take as much food as you wanted and no one cared if you finished it.

I remember the egg-toss game. People flinging eggs back and forth until they splattered slicking the grass with gooey yellow patches. The winner pitched his egg into the lake and everyone cheered. I didn’t. When we left the picnic, half-eaten hot dogs and cupcakes were spilling from garbage cans. I felt sad. But over the years, I became careless with food.

I decided this was one BC — before COVID — habit I would break. Instead of stocking up, I would use up. My pantry is full of lentils, rice, tomato paste and more — so many ingredients to create meals I will gladly finish.

With a Perspective, I’m Christine Schoefer.

Christine Schoefer is a writer who teaches empowerment skills to women and girls

In 1966 my parents purchased eight acres just outside Mendocino. Their dream was to eventually leave Berkeley and retire on the land. In 1985 they achieved it.

There’s a creek just north of Mendocino called Jack-Peter’s Creek. A bridge on 101 crosses the creek. My father, Jack, who served in the Navy, used to salute when we hit that bridge; if I was in the car, I too saluted, acknowledging our namesake connection.

Last year my Mom died, a victim of Alzheimer’s. She was not bitter nor regretful — but rather, accepting; she had lived a long full life, and at some point, simply became tired.

Now my father lives alone on the land, in the house we built with redwood milled from our forest, with cold water flowing from our spring, with markers in the garden for the many pets who once roamed the land. It’s the place Dad knows best, and he would feel lost anywhere else.

Today, when I cross Jack-Peter’s Creek, I still salute in deference to a tradition lasting over fifty years. A few weeks ago I was in the car with my 92 year-old father, heading to Fort Bragg. When we drove over the creek, I saluted as usual, but my dad did not. I wasn’t particularly bothered nor surprised, but quietly I wondered when he had stopped our little tradition.

Rituals are valiant human attempts to keep things constant, but as Heraclitus said, “The only constant in life is change.”

With a Perspective, I’m Pete Gavin.

Pete Gavin is a retired middle school English teacher.

When I moved to Silicon Valley from Boston in the early ‘80s right away I knew it was different. Casual Fridays? Beer blasts? … In the office? What’s going on here?

As a tech reporter, I’ve covered countless product launches and interviewed many of the big and small names that put Silicon Valley on the map.

San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium was home to one of the first computer shows, the West Computer Faire. Its pony‐tailed impresario, Jim Warren, patrolled the show floor on roller skates. At one of the Faires, an upstart software company called Borland threw a toga party Animal House style. Fun! Borland eventually flamed out, but its brilliant founder Philippe Kahn invented the camera phone over a decade later. Not a bad second act. Now he’s developed a smart bed. Yeah, that’s a thing ‐ and oh so Silicon Valley.

It’s always been so important here to make a splash with any new product. The Moscone Center blasts rock and roll for an hour before the start of an event and laser light shows get more intense every year. Intel figured out how to use drones to light up the night sky with neon messages and designs. So cool!

In‐person events have been on extended pause during COVID, and it’s unclear if they’ll ever return to their former glory. Having hundreds of thousands of people return for a Dreamforce conference now seems more like a nightmare. Hopefully, some scaled-down version of in‐person events will return soon because the virtual events we’re stuck with are virtually not as good.

Pandemic aside, technology marches on. We all have personal devices, but their power now lies in being connected to the big giant computers the personal computer revolution was supposed to obsolete. Perhaps connectivity itself is revolutionary, but I’d be more impressed if the place that made “user interface” a well‐known phrase didn’t have us all hunched over staring at our tiny screens.

We don’t need another TikTok clone or more ways to do disembodied meetings. Silicon Valley has the brains and resources to figure out what people and society at large actually need. We can create the next truly revolutionary product ‐ and have fun doing it, Silicon Valley-style.

With a Perspective, I’m David Needle.

David Needle helped pioneer online news reporting and has written for many publications and websites.

They’re not my favorite flower, not even close, though they are quite beautiful. I keep them and care for them because they were a gift, entrusted to me by my mother some years before she died. Over the decades, I’ve moved a few times, and each time I’ve dug up the rhizomes and carried them with me to wherever I landed.

Looking around the new landscape, I’d select a likely spot, replant them, and wait–and hope. They took a while to get established, but each spring, my garden was alive with irises, delicate and fierce just like she was. In each new place, they’d gradually begin to flourish and bloom more and more extravagantly every year. Whenever I see them, I think about my mother.

I think, too, about Afghanistan, and Syria, and Haiti, and all the other places in our troubled world that give rise to streams of refugees, millions with no option but to leave the only home they’ve known. Often they leave with only what they’re wearing, or perhaps a single sack to hold a life’s memories, dreams, and treasures. How do you choose what goes in the sack, and what you must abandon? How do you leave behind a country, a history, perhaps a family, not knowing where you’ll next find welcome, much less home?

Flowers are a luxury, to be sure, and having a garden in which to plant them even more so. A garden signals hope, and faith, and a belief in a future that holds crops, or shade, or even pretty flowers. But a garden also embodies duty and dedication, and reminds us not to be complacent, or take for granted the stability it signifies. So many are uprooted, searching, and desperate for refuge.

We owe it to them–and to ourselves–to remember their humanity, and our own.

With a Perspective, I’m Peggy Hansen.

Peggy Hansen is an organic gardener and photographer in Santa Cruz.

Here were people who had endured any number of challenges to come to this country and call America home. They brought their small children to be educated and trained in our schools, they brought their aging relatives who had departed familial and racial ties to embrace what we have to offer, and they brought their families to celebrate the promise they perceived in our institutions.

I felt honored by that trust, and realized that it was we and not they who should be grateful for the ceremony. Women and men in colorful costumes that reflect pride in their heritage, brown, tan, white and black faces that would soon be enriching our neighborhoods with exciting customs and cuisines. Voices that sound curious and challenging in new ways of using language, new music, new handicrafts, new art. Surely, some were here because of intolerable living conditions where they came from, but what underlay the motivation of each new citizen was a trust and sense of hope that is inspiring and hugely complimentary to those of us who were born into this culture that for us required no expression of choice or commitment.

So my message to these new neighbors is this: Thank you for joining and complimenting us by wanting to be our neighbors. I hope that I and my countrymen and women live up to the trust you have expressed. Please know that regardless of your race or religion or country of origin you are very welcome.

With a Perspective, I’m Larry Murphy.

Larry Murphy is the retired owner of an Irish pub. He lives in Sonoma.

It’s September and students are heading back to school. Unlike last year, when the pandemic forced schools to shutter and students to pivot to learning online, this fall schools are open for in-person instruction. Although COVID continues to disrupt life, with 100,000 Americans diagnosed and 1,000 deaths every day, school feels surprisingly normal.

There a few indications of contagious illness—hand sanitizer, posters reminding kids to social distance—but schools feel pretty much the same as the “before times.”

There is one obvious difference, though. Students are wearing face masks.

For such a small piece of fabric, masks in schools have been a huge controversy—whether students should be required to wear masks has provoked shouting matches and protests at school board meetings from coast-to-coast. With some states mandating masks in schools and other states banning masks, the debate has moved from classrooms to courtrooms, both proponents and opponents filing lawsuits in 14 states.

As a teacher, I wear a mask all day, too, following the CDC recommendation of indoor masking by students and staff. And I’m trying to understand parent’s concerns about kids wearing masks: “not comfortable, doesn’t like it.”

This is about more than comfort—with COVID surges among school-age kids, it’s a public health emergency. Masks reduce the amount of respiratory droplets spread by students, protecting your child and other students from getting sick.

Masks are temporary and non-invasive. Nobody loves wearing one. But if masking is what it takes to keep our kids safe and our schools open, than I’m willing to be uncomfortable. Seat belts are uncomfortable too, but they save lives.

And I’ve noticed something interesting.

My students don’t mind. The kids are calmly putting on masks and getting on with their school work. Unlike the adults raging on TV news, my students are taking it in stride with a mature and uncomplaining attitude about wearing masks. They get it.

The kids are all right. It’s the grown-ups who are having mask meltdowns.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

I recently joined the global movement to go plastic-free for a month and discovered a few things.

First, plastic is everywhere. We’re wrapped, coated and contained in it from edible to sanitary products, first-aid to flowers. Try buying plastic-free pasta or anything in a grocery bakery—impossible. So, I started going old-school. I baked bread, paid extra for yogurt in glass jars, brought mesh bags to buy produce. I switched from liquid to bar soap and used newspaper to line my trash cans. COVID boosted plastic usage with our need for takeout and individually wrapped items. It also eliminated our ability to buy in bulk for a while, another great way to avoid plastic. If I took out, I asked for paper plates, aluminum foil or cardboard. Salsa in those tiny plastic pots? Nope. Instead, I poured it directly on my chips before leaving the taqueria.

Second, I had to slow down. Grab n’ go was a nonstarter. I had to ask the butcher to wrap my chicken and wait. I ordered lunch meat from the deli counter. I dined in as much as possible. When I told people I was trying to avoid plastic, we brainstormed workarounds.

Third, I learned about interesting alternatives. Laundry detergent strips, perfume fountains where you can refill your bottles and natural silk dental floss. Stumped by options for bottled dish soap, my Italian brother-in-law suggested adopting his mother’s tradition of using drained pasta water. I’m still noodling over that one.

Going plastic-free is tough. But now that I’m plastic woke, I can reuse reusables, avoid plastic water bottles and straws, bring my own coffee cup and, to my family’s delight, bake more at home.

With a Perspective, I’m Stephanie Denman.

Stephanie Denman is a communications consultant living in the East Bay with her husband and two teens.

For five years, I provided care for my mother who experienced dementia. My mother lived in low-income senior housing, and I wanted to keep her in her familiar setting for as long as possible. I thought surely there were programs and safety nets for people on limited incomes like my mother. We lived in one of the most affluent counties in California. I quickly realized that I was both her “program” and “safety net.”

As a person with a full-time job, this was a daunting responsibility. Working with a non-profit social worker, I tried to get my mother the assistance she needed since I couldn’t be with her all day. For more than a year, I was unsuccessful until another social worker in private practice showed me what I was doing wrong and helped me apply successfully. If somebody like me with a college degree couldn’t apply without professional direction, how were struggling elders without children to assist them faring?

Towards the end, when my mother experienced debilitating falls, when I realized I could no longer keep her safe, when her behavior became erratic and violent, I implored her doctor for advice. She recommended my mother for hospice. Then and only then, my mother and I were able to get more services, otherwise unavailable.

I learned firsthand, that a large part of our healthcare system depends upon family members to provide unpaid caregiving, with scant direction or meaningful support.

Caregiving is an equity issue as it is largely unpaid or underpaid, particularly by women, and often by women of color. As a nation, we are failing our vulnerable elders with our spotty, haphazard approaches to caregiving. Unless we improve, we can expect no better for ourselves in our own time of need.

With a Perspective, this is Margaret Stawowy.

Margaret Stawowy is a librarian, poet, and poetry editor living in Marin.

I was only 7 years old when I began to hide my name.

I was making my first-ever order at the local Starbucks when I was asked to repeat my name. At first, confusion struck. Nevertheless, I clarified each syllable, letter, and even offered pronouncers for the vowels.

Yet, what I thought would only happen once, kept happening — when making a restaurant reservation, shopping or even having an offhand conversation. Maybe it was malformed pronunciation, maybe an unclear accent or maybe just a bad day — but when the time came, my name was simply confusing for the “conventional” American.

Over time, Pranav became “Pat.” It was never something I considered significant. It was just an issue of convenience — right? In fact, I was told I was more fortunate than others. My name is fairly short, and compared to “Rishabh” or “Jyothi,” it’s phonetically simple. Still, even if I was “luckier” than others, that didn’t change the fact that my name didn’t fit convention.

But a couple months ago, I was ordering coffee with a friend of mine. And when the barista asked for my name, I told them it was “Pat.” You know, just like I normally do. Yet, my friend didn’t understand. Why did I shorten my name for convenience? And if so, is it even worth it?

Before that, I used to believe that Indian names were too esoteric to be understood. It was never something I questioned, or even considered. But, by changing my name, I was only adding to the problem. By avoiding ‘incomprehensibility’, I was also neglecting any hope to normalize names like mine. Avoidance can only renew institutions, not reform them.

Visiting the same Starbucks 8 years later, I no longer shorten my name. Now, I take the extra step to clarify the pronunciation. And that coffee shop I visited as a 7-year-old hasn’t gotten it wrong since.

With a Perspective, I’m Pranav Thurgam.

Pranav Thurgam is 15 years old and lives in Dublin. His Perspective was produced by YR Media.

I have COVID. I’ve gone from living during the pandemic, to being part of the pandemic. Things feel different on the other side.

When this started, my young stepson thought people were going to turn into zombies. He told us he was ready to fight them. I am a COVID zombie now. Hiding away. Alone in a house. Sweltering in the heat of another scorching climate disaster summer. Each night when I go to sleep, I am aware that I carry inside my body the virus that has wreaked havoc on our planet. It’s part of me now and may be forever. It’s in my blood. As I close my eyes it settles in and sleeps with me.

Recently, I went into town to get a hard copy of my positive test result. As I got out of my minivan, a shirtless, mask-less youth with a large backpack approached to ask for something. Through my double mask I cut him off, “I have COVID. You better stay away from me.” He jumped backward, eyes wide, and booked it down the street. We COVID zombies are frightening.

This morning I was feeling better, so I went outside to attack the vine enveloping our woodshed. Balancing on an old fiberglass doghouse, I reached upward with a flathead screwdriver and my slim fingers to remove offshoots that had grown within the grooves of the metal runner from which the door hangs, making it impossible to open.

As I worked at it, the vine became the virus. A wasp stung me, but I barely felt it. Was it the COVID in my blood? Or the me in my blood, making short work of the pedestrian venom of a simple wasp. Or was it my vaccine, making me immune to wasps? When the heat made my endeavor unwise, I went inside. But I’ll be back at it tomorrow, and I’ll finish the job.

With a Perspective, this is Katy Van Sant.

Katy Van Sant is a writer and Spanish interpreter from Oakland and Southern Humboldt County.

Going back to school is no laughing matter…except when it is. The theme of the college freshman writing class I teach is “What’s So Funny,” and we devote the semester to reading about, writing about, and researching humor.

At the beginning of the term, I ask everyone to stand up and tell a joke or funny story. I assure the class that it’s not a competition, and an unfunny joke is as valuable to our research as a funny one, as we analyze the characteristics of each person’s contribution.

“Who wants to go second?” I ask, because I’m ready to kick off the joke-fest with what I think is a very funny story called “The Talking Dog.” I launch into the joke, paying careful attention to my audience’s reaction. Under normal circumstances, I’d be able to gauge how the joke was landing based on people’s facial expressions: a smile told me I was doing fine, a yawn was a signal to speed things up.

But this semester, our first time back in the classroom in 17 months, is different. Everyone is wearing masks, and, therefore, it’s impossible to read the reaction of the class. And it works the other way around: I can’t use my facial expressions to convey the anticipation, surprise, and disappointment built into the narrative of the joke. While it’s great to be in the same room with my students, things are definitely not the same.

Last year, when I taught the class remotely on Zoom, I could see my students’ unmasked faces. And while telling a joke on Zoom has its drawbacks, so does telling a joke wearing a mask.

Studies have been conducted recently about the effect of videoconferencing on human interaction, and how “Zoom fatigue” has affected the way we communicate with one another. Now we need studies on “mask interfacing.”

As we head back to school and work — vaccinated, tested, and masked — we have to look for ways to find joy wherever we can. Telling someone a funny story is a surefire way to connect. But don’t expect a rousing chorus of laughter or even a simper, though we might as well assume that behind those masks are ear-to-ear grins.

With a Perspective, I’m John Levine.

John Levine is a teacher, writer, and occasional actor who lives and works in Berkeley.

Ten days ago I felt a slight tingle in my sinuses. It’s a common sensation we’ve all felt, often an early indicator of a cold. I drank some water and figured it would pass. The next morning I tested positive for COVID-19. I was told to quarantine for 10 days and that one of my symptoms could be the loss of smell and taste. I woke up the next morning to my routine coffee. Something wasn’t right. I plucked a sprig of basil and held it to my nose, nothing. I smashed the basil leaf hoping to release its odors. Still nothing.

That night my wife and I had dinner outdoors, about 15 feet apart. The meal was black lentils with Italian sausage and asparagus, topped with Parmesan cheese. Typically a mouth-watering meal. Nothing. And so it continued…a fully loaded sandwich, nothing. Green curry, nothing.

When I was told about this being one of the primary symptoms of COVID, it never really registered with me what it must be like. Until now. It set in for me that our sense of smell and taste are likely two of the things that we take most for granted in our lives. They are ingrained in us. They help orient us to our surroundings. They tap into our primal fight or flight instincts. They are fundamental to our survival.

And just like that, gone.

My hunger waned but I continued to shove tasteless food scraps into my mouth. I only ate because I knew I had to. I craved flavor. I considered eating an entire clove of garlic just to see what would happen. I crushed up dill seeds and held them to my nose, huffing away, hoping that a scent would break through.

A few mornings later I was sautéing onions, and there was a subtle flash of something. Eager with anticipation I sat down to eat the huevos rancheros I had prepared. As I bit down on the corn tortilla coated in salty egg, cheese and lightly charred onion, it was euphoric. I never knew food could taste so good. I tried to eat slowly, savoring each bite, but it was no use. It tasted so good.

I sat, with lingering flavors tickling my throat, in appreciation for what I had just eaten. I hoped that I would never again take for granted the privilege of tasting good food.

With a Perspective, this is Conor Hagen.

Conor Hagen is a filmmaker and photographer living in Kenwood.

I love nearly all the creatures that inhabit our planet. For me a banana slug is the epitome of grace and form, the naked head and see-through nostrils of a turkey vulture excites me like that of no other bird, and even the lowly opossum has a kind of inner beauty that I find touching.

But as a card-carrying naturalist I must reluctantly confess a deep-seated dislike for yellow jackets. Sorry.

I assume this antagonism dates from my early childhood. As a wee lad of five I ventured too close to a hive and was promptly attacked and repeatedly stung in the ear and head. Over and over. As a teen-ager I would often push the lawn mower over yellow jacket nests and get stung. They often build their paper nests underground in abandoned gopher holes. And once, while I was riding my motorcycle, a yellow jacket flew into my mouth and stung my tongue. I grew to hate them.

This summer there have been a lot of yellow jackets, for some reason, in my backyard. Unlike our useful honey bees, yellow jackets sometimes sting without provocation. I’ve seen them just land on a hand and zap the person. As if this weren’t bad enough, they then release a chemical that attracts all of the other yellow jackets in the neighborhood.

So what good are these little beasts, besides making more yellow jackets? What role do they play in the natural scheme of things? Well, they eat nearly everything including rotten carcasses and spilled soft drinks. So they act as scavengers, keeping the world a bit tidier and reminding us to pick up after ourselves.

Fortunately, there are a few natural predators that help to limit the population. Birds like black phoebes will eat a few and western toads will sit outside the hive and snag them as they fly out.

But one of the most effective controls are striped skunks. These nocturnal predators dig out entire nests and consume the larvae, eggs and even the adults. How they tolerate the stings is a mystery to me but I am glad they do. I wish I had one of these smelly mammals in my backyard. But maybe just for a couple of nights.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

Ryan was one of the strongest people I had ever met, but you’d never have known it just by looking at him. A bespectacled boy of 13, lightly dusted with dark brown freckles that would lift off his cheeks when I made him laugh, and an unkempt mop on his head of the same color. He wasn’t in peak condition, but he didn’t care to be. To some, Ryan was just a nerd, geek, loser, or some other hateful word spat at him like venom from passersby. The curious thing about Ryan, however, is he never seemed to mind. He always looked happy, always a slight grin, never a care in the world.

Ryan didn’t open up to anyone but me. I learned from Ryan his dream of becoming an author, and stories he would write about space and the great beyond outside of “our little green and blue marble.” When he talked about the universe, his eyes would reflect the stars he spoke of, even in broad daylight. He dreamed of being as far from this world as possible. It wasn’t until later that I learned why.

Ryan told me he was moving the night before he left. We were walking at night through our quiet town, listening to the wind through the bare branches and the shuffling of the occasional pedestrian past us. Normally Ryan was chipper on these walks, but this evening he was silent. I thought nothing of it until I heard a sharp inhale, only to look over and see tears across each cheek. “I need to tell you something,” he whispered.

I thought I had known Ryan, but his parents’ divorce, their eviction, his mental illness and his craving not to be alive were news to me. That cold February evening on a park bench, Ryan clutching my jacket tightly, crying into my chest with my arms around him was the last time I saw or heard from him. I never got a new house address from him. His phone would go straight to voicemail, until one day his number belonged to someone else. Spring came, summer passed, and still no hint of the astronaut gone missing. That is, until I found a letter in my winter jacket pocket, the one I hadn’t touched since the last night with him. Inside was a note that read:

“Dear Jack, I am no longer on Earth. I’m happier here. Thank you. Sincerely, Ryan.”

I often think of how I was too late to help him. All I hope is that wherever he is now, drifting through galaxies and stars through the endless ocean of space, a true astronaut at last, he is happy, looking at our little green and blue marble.

With a perspective, I’m Jack Green.

Jack Green is a graduate of Redwood High School in Larkspur.3

Around September 11 each year, I see a lot of Facebook posts saying, “Never forget”. But I’d rather see posts that say, “Here’s how I remember.”

In the days after 9/11, people lined up in droves to donate blood. Something struck me, and I wondered where all those donors would be eight weeks later, when they were eligible to donate again. I resolved to become a regular blood donor.

That was a nice idea, and I tried – and repeatedly failed. Either my blood pressure was too low, or my hemoglobin was too low, or I got woozy just from the finger prick. But I kept trying. And the first time I successfully donated, I nearly passed out. But I learned how to prepare myself to donate, and what to do during donations and afterwards. And I became a regular blood donor, thinking about 9/11 every time.

As we had kids, scheduling became harder, and I got out of the habit. But when COVID-19 shut everything down, I knew that this crisis would change life even more than 9/11, and my resolve was renewed. Fewer blood drives and reduced capacity due to COVID made it harder to schedule appointments, but I’ve donated seven times since March 2020, and recently made my 50th donation with American Red Cross.

I know that not everybody can donate blood, but we can all do something active to honor those who died on 9/11. Last year, my friend Pete challenged people to “Go read some good history. Learn about our past, where we’ve come from, and how we got here.”

My younger friend Samantha said that her generation only knew that something awful had happened, but didn’t know details because parents and teachers found it too painful to talk about with children. So we can challenge ourselves to discuss difficult things with our children, family, and others.

“Never forget” is wonderful. But “Do something to remember” is even better.

With a Perspective, I’m Steven Paradise.

Steven Paradise lives with his wife and four children in Livermore.

Our three-year-old daughter, Frances Darling, took her first steps two years ago at our family cabin that her Great‐great‐great‐grandfather built.

The Hideout, as we call it, is in the woods near Echo Summit. This special place is where I learned about building fairy gardens and family. It is where my mom learned how to chop wood and light one‐match fires and sing campfire songs. It is where just last year my grandfather watched all his great‐grandchildren play in the creek behind it. Where my great‐grandmother’s old kitchen cabinets went to live their second life when they remodeled their Mill Valley home.

Our six‐year‐old son, Landon, helped stack firewood with his grandma and played in the tunnels that his great‐great uncle carved out of the Alder trees. We all helped gather rocks to line the path through the ferns to its door and chipped in on repairs.

My kids, who are the 6th generation of cabin goers, love nature and getting dirty and hiking to Lovers Leap and helping because my mom’s love for this place spilled over onto us. When I ask my children where we should meet in our dreams at night, they always tell me, “At the cabin”.

It breaks my heart to know there won’t be any more first steps taken there on those 100‐year‐old floors. Others are having their hearts broken too by the devastation and loss of the Caldor Fire.

When I close my eyes, I see our treasured heirlooms, each with their own story, going up in embers. The antique pie safe and Victrola, the vintage perpetual calendar, the quilts sewn and wood carved by the hands of the generations before me. I see the living room chair in the living room where my mom sat with her grandkids to read bedtime stories, the same chair that my grandparents read to me in.

I am reminded to open my eyes, hug my family tight and be grateful for all the memories and stories. I am thankful for our safety and our
homes and the firefighters’ tireless work.

When my mom told Landon what happened he said, “That makes me very sad grandma…but you know what? If we all work together, we can rebuild it.”

With a Perspective, I’m Linsay Bodenheimer.

Linsay Bodenheimer is a Novato native.

One of my main goals in life has been to raise my kids so they wouldn’t turn out to be quite the jackass that I am. Part of bringing up kids is giving them self-esteem, and both my wife and I wanted to impart a sense of self-worth and confidence to our children that would carry on throughout their lifetimes. We read to them at an early age, helped them through sports and homework, and advised them on how to converse and understand their fellow humans. These are tools we hoped would guide them to be successful in their careers and socialize with a large circle of friends and family.

But like an alcoholic telling his kids not to drink, imparting the virtue of self-worth is difficult when the adviser constantly questions his own. Looking back as a child of the ’60s, I squandered many opportunities to embrace my abilities and pat myself on the back. I remember being asked by a school counselor whether I thought I was unique and I remember thinking that I was not at all. I would struggle for years to accept that I had a place in the world, a world that admires confidence and scoffs at doubt.

My children are both successful in different but amazing ways, having survived my parenting while flourishing under my wife’s. There is a modesty and humility to both of them that made me recently come to this conclusion: parents can raise winners who think they’re losers, and that might be just as bad as the other way around. Confidence balanced with humility is a goal that’s as difficult to reach as happiness, the ultimate destination we wish on our kids.

I’ve come a long way to accepting who I am, something that’s a struggle for some and joyful journey for others. Allowing myself to be imperfect for my children and accepting who I am makes me a better parent and human being. Raising my opinion of myself and raising children who don’t see a jackass gives them insight into their own inner-critic.

And that’s the balance I’m talking about.

With a Perspective, I’m Les Bloch.

Les Bloch is an East Bay construction manager.

We are not all in this together. Not all of us. That person blithely walking through a crowd without a face mask is not in this together. That person who won’t keep their distance from me is not in this together. That company that makes workers choose between life and family; that entrepreneur who opens on their own is not in this together. Price-gougers; those selling health workers damaged goods are not in this together. That person ignoring senior lines is not in this together. Fake charities are not in this together. The corporation that pockets misdirected federal funds is not in this together. That faith group oblivious to the health of non-believers; that politician trading needed equipment for support; whoever disregards medical evidence is not in this together.

Neither is one making a hostage of our right to vote. Or the white person not driven to act when a black man is kneed to death in the street. Those who assure us with a smile that we’re all in this together while knowing we are not are not in this together.

The first casualty in any war is truth, and this is no exception. What Londoners loved about Churchill during the horrendous months of the Blitz was that he didn’t lie to them. And his faith in their ability to absorb the truth did bring them together and gave them faith in him and courage.

A platitude comforts only those not elbow-deep in the unavoidable truth. Not those on the front lines, who are too busy trying to save others to even think about whether it’s true or not. Or the neighbor who looks out for those who would be endangered without their help. Or the stranger who gives me a friendly wave as we pass by at least 6 feet apart. Or the investor who shares part of their astounding gains with the financially strapped. Or the elected leader who feels the grief of those in pain and trouble caused by the virus or injustice. These are the ones who know that no one is safe unless all are safe. These are the ones who are truly in it all together.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Friedlander.

Richard Friedlander is a mediator and author in the East Bay.

If you’d asked me pre-pandemic where school landed on a list of priorities between one and five, it’s likely I would have listed it at a four. Ask me this year, and the answer would probably be two. I know it might sound weird for a kid to say that he wanted to go back to school, but trust me, what I’m about to share with you might convince you otherwise.

Everything moved really slowly this past year: I rolled out of bed, ate breakfast, then stared at my computer screen for seven hours a day. I rarely ever left my house, even to go see my friends. Even though I had my family, I felt isolated.

The past year made me re-examine the flow of time. Why is it when you’re having fun, time flies, but when you’re bored, it moves so slowly?

Scientists have researched this question. There’s a lot of documented cases of people suffering from physical and mental illness and distorted senses of time after extreme isolation. Our brains are used to taking in a lot of information daily: sounds, encounters with friends, processing conversations. The effect of taking these things away starves us of what we’re used to and stresses us out, according to science writer Michael Bond. It turns out, this experience of having an information-starved, restless mind is a form of boredom.

So there’s a scientific explanation for the ” boredom” that I and millions of other students suffered from during lockdown: My mind was active, but didn’t have many places or people to focus on. My room was certainly not a good environment for schoolwork. There was no-one to interact with in person, the routine was too repetitive. Nothing changed for long periods of time, and it stressed me out.

I am not the first kid to report struggles with online school and many high school students don’t cope well with it either.

My mind is still active, and now that we’ll be going back to school in real life, I hope that more real life social interaction will help me keep my mind active.

With a Perspective, I am Griffin Ting.

Griffin Ting is a junior at Miramonte High School in Orinda.

He’s looking at me with blank eyes, searching for the answer to my question.

My Dad is sitting across the table in a small Italian bistro. My son and I have flown across the country to spend the weekend with him, visiting some of his favorite old places: The beach – where we left his walker behind, took off his shoes, and rolled up his pants so he could shuffle into the ocean’s edge as he pressed against me, the restaurant where our family had gone together for years for grouper sandwiches and homemade chips that my Dad would scoop up by the fistful. The nature preserve, where we tried to remember the names of the birds. Blue heron. Anhinga.

I smile back at him, hoping to relieve the weight of my question. “Susie, Dad. My name is Susie.”

My Dad is 84, with the fingers of dementia raking every corner of his mind. I live hundreds of miles and events away, but I am here, now, feeling the dogged longing of a child, wanting him to know and claim me as his own. “Susie,” I say again, “I’m your daughter.”

My Dad is the gentlest man I’ve ever known. My brothers and I had nicknames for him when we were growing up – Saint Vic, The Buddha. I remember him lying on the cold wooden floor of our house, reaching for our ankles as we played “Mother May I.” I remember him showing up straight from work to coach my soccer games, wearing dress pants and a striped tie, trying not to look worn-out. I remember him sitting in the front window late at night waiting for me, the only light on the street, asleep with a newspaper on his lap as I rolled with my boyfriend into the driveway.

And now I am here – and I want him to remember too. I want him to remember me entering the front door, walking quietly to him in the chair by the window, and placing my hand on his shoulder as I kissed the top of his head.

“Dad,” I’d whisper. “Wake up.”

I want him to stir, to wake, and look up at me with recognition and relief as he says my name, followed by the only thing that seemed to matter to him.

“Susie.

“You’re here.”

With a Perspective, I’m Susan Dix Lyons.

Susan Dix Lyons lives in St. Helena. Her father, Victor Dix, passed away on August 21. He was 87.

Raindrops were falling on our deck, patio, and as far as I could see. I walked outside, and smelled the no- longer-familiar-wet cave odor on our patio bricks. I inhaled deeply, and went back to bed.

I needed to get ready for work soon, but I wanted to savor hearing rain again. I remembered the many storms I had heard over the 20-odd years we have lived in our house. I hoped I would soon be listening to massive winter storms created by atmospheric rivers. Unfortunately, the pattering ended long before my alarm went off.

I found another glimmer of hope when I read about the Black-backed Woodpecker, whose habitat is the ponderosa and lodgepole pine forests of the North American West, which have experienced regular wildfires for thousands of years.

Jewel and fire chaser beetles have heat sensors under their legs that can detect a fire 40 miles away. The beetles feast on the now defenseless burnt trees, and soon, the trees are filled with their offspring. The woodpeckers evolved black backs and wings, to help them blend in with the charcoal covered trees. As they feast on grubs, they are hidden from the hawks and other birds that also soon return to the forest.

I found a photo of the nine-inch woodpecker, with its darkened body and bright yellow cap, which made me smile. Woodpeckers found opportunity in destruction, and Nature, without compassion, but with time and natural selection, protected them.

Fires in the West were suppressed for decades, and forest destruction was only delayed, and made worse. Man-made climate change makes these fires even more catastrophic.

If we can understand and accept the realities of our Western ecosystems, and fight to prevent climate change from getting significantly worse, maybe regular rains will fall again upon our roofs as yellow capped birds flutter through rejuvenating forests.

With a Perspective, I am Beth Touchette.

Beth Touchette is a North Bay science teacher.

Back in March, my grown-up daughter asked me to take her backpacking. It’s not every day that an adult child wants her mother’s companionship in travel, so I chucked my other summer plans and made a reservation for late August in Desolation Wilderness, southwest of Lake Tahoe, a location guaranteed to delight a beginner.

All spring I excitedly pawed through gear, refreshed my memory about purifying water, gingerly test-started the tiny gas stove, planned great meals. I day-hiked with a pack loaded with weights to get in shape. I was in heaven.

Now, though, the fires. First, the Dixie Fire worried me. Then, the Caldor Fire struck. My heart sank. The wilds of California that I love, that inspire and restore me, are in grave danger. I mourned for the lands. And I lamented that our trip was doomed.

Every morning as I monitor air quality in the Sierra, the situation degrades. This is drought; these are our times. Yet, though I can’t rescue the wilderness from fire, I recognized that I could salvage the joy of a few days solo with my daughter. I needed to pivot and be flexible.

Researching furiously, I envisioned other forms of togetherness. The point was to keep my eye on the main goal: time together.

The plan’s changed every day, every hour, but I’ve been willing myself to stay positive. Now we’re looking towards the coast — even daring to see a silver lining in burning less gas to get there. Day hikes, a kayak excursion, a swim in the bay?

This is California today. And still, the focus needs to remain on what we can control and of that, what’s most important to safeguard. Time together. The good we still enjoy. The tremendous comfort of knowing nature’s capacity to heal. Holding onto that in the midst of grieving the great losses California endures, off we’ll go — who knows where —-traveling together.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

Sometimes my parents call me “crazy” for not controlling my emotions. When it comes to my mental health, I brush it off. It is a very uncomfortable topic in my household. In fact, we rarely speak about it at all. But I can’t really blame my parents, since it is rarely talked about in the Latino community.

I was around 14 when my depression had gotten worse. I was a freshman at Richmond High, and starting to lose motivation for everyday things. Sometimes, it was hard to even get up from my bed. My grades were getting worse, and I didn’t care. I eventually fell into unhealthy habits, such as self-harm. I couldn’t tell my family, since I knew they would be uncomfortable and brush this off, or they would tell me to just start acting happy, as if my emotions were an off and on switch. My depression was a terrifying topic in my home.

But I read. I read books from school and I started reading comics on my phone. Soon I was inspired to write stories of my own. I slowly began to pick up on my old hobbies, like sketching and drawing. Those things made me really happy and over time I got better.

It has always been deeply rooted in our culture to never speak about our feelings or our mental struggles. We always have to seem “tough.” Expressing emotions will make you seem weak. This is obviously unhealthy but it is something that many older Latinos (such as my parents) have always grown up with and pass on to their children.

And I’m pretty sure that I am not the only person that has had to deal with this. I am trying to spread awareness about mental health among Latino teens. I want other Latinos to stop denying it and instead speak up more so others can find closure and seek help.

Not everyone can find things that can make their mental health better, as I did, in writing random stories and sketching. While that did help me, everyone heals differently. Finding and seeking help such as therapy needs to be normalized. We have mental health issues too, and we need more help, no matter how much those in this community want to deny it.

With a Perspective, I’m Isabella Montano Ponce.

Isabella Montano Ponce is entering her senior year at Richmond High School.

I lost a few pounds recently, four to be exact. I wasn’t trying, and it sort of crept up on me, the way things often do when there’s too much going on. Since my weight had been stable for decades, I was a bit surprised—I’d thought my set point was a certain number, and now suddenly it wasn’t. I’m not sick, but it seems I’d been exercising just a tad more, and eating just a tad less, and, well, four pounds worth by and by. The new weight seems to be sticking, so it looks like my set point isn’t so set, or maybe it’s been reset.

The idea that things, like weight, have a certain baseline value that they try to achieve or maintain, or a system has a certain status at which it functions best, isn’t new. Many of us have internalized this concept, especially when it comes to our bodies and our habits. We weigh this amount because that’s what our metabolism wants us to weigh, and it isn’t possible or desirable to change that, we think. We do these things, and don’t do those other things, because that’s what we’ve always done, or never done. Is that valid, though, or useful? Maybe—to a point.

The idea that a set point may not actually be set, or at least not set in stone, is intriguing at my stage of life, which would politely be called ‘late middle age’ these days. If this one thing can change, and the world doesn’t end, what other possibilities for reinvention, or a little exploration, might be waiting? Maybe you’ve never gone camping, or you’ve never tried Ethiopian food. Or maybe there’s a wild hare you’ve been burying that keeps resurfacing, asking you ‘what if?’ What if you said yes?

With a Perspective, I’m Peggy Hansen.

Peggy Hansen is an organic farmer and photographer in Santa Cruz.

UFO’s have been in the news a lot lately. The government released imagery and conjecture on numerous fast-moving objects tracked and photographed by military aircraft. Growing up in the 70’s, I fondly remember TV and movies obsessed with the subject. Hard evidence was dubious to nonexistent, but UFO’s were part of our cultural zeitgeist.

Much to my surprise, some of my good friends couldn’t care less about these recent UFO images. I get it. We’ve been through a frightening pandemic, wildfires, stressful, polarizing and threatening politics—alien visitors are a stressor we don’t need right now. Our country needs hope and tranquility, not an alien invasion.

In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed an imprecise, yet provocative, equation to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Here’s the idea: there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, many of which are surrounded by habitable planets. Using the Drake Equation, astronomers estimate between one and many thousands of intelligent civilizations may have existed in our galaxy. And what about in the whole universe? Easy math, just multiply your chosen Drake Equation results by 125 billion.

In reality, space travel is exceedingly difficult. We’re still years away from getting a person on Mars. Getting to the closest star would take 80 years—travel any faster and weird stuff starts happening with time. The laws of physics make space travel a serious, if not impossible, challenge.

I then had a realization. The Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1903, yet just 66 years later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. SpaceX will soon send their “Starship” on its first orbital flight: a 100-passenger spacecraft designed for interplanetary travel. Technology has come a really long way in 118 years. Some of the intelligent life contemplated by the Drake Equation could have started billions of years ago – there could be thousands of civilizations that are billions of years more advanced than we are. You can develop a lot of technology in a billion years.

While there’s a scintillating abstraction to pondering our alien neighbors, the actual mathematical probability is not abstract at all. In fact, that probability is likely a lot higher than most of us think.

With a Perspective, I’m Grant Young.

Grant Young is an industrial psychologist. He lives in San Francisco.

It’s the time of year when, pandemic constraints notwithstanding, young adults go off to college or move out of the family home in pursuit of a career or adventure. I find myself alone, finally, in my own home, and I am delighted to be able to organize my things and my space solely to my own desires. For the first time in decades, I wake to a clean and quiet home and feel happy. I know where the scissors are; I know there is soap in the bathroom; and I know that the kitchen is clean and ready for me.

My daughter is in the Midwest, charting her own course for the first time, my husband’s ashes are scattered in my garden, and I am reclaiming a bedroom and too many drawers to count. It feels like a lot; it feels like just enough; I feel guilty at having so much and also grateful and proud.

I am acutely aware of the privilege of having a whole house to myself. My husband and I purchased our home 23 years ago with the help of inherited money, but all the subsequent years of mortgage payments were ours. I just wish it weren’t so hard for so many families to find affordable housing in Oakland and I wish that feeling lucky didn’t also feel so unfair. I am learning to live with gratitude and joy for my well-being and using those feelings to fuel my efforts to bring greater justice and peace to my community.

Sharing personal living space with others is a challenge. My insecure daughter has an insatiable need for beauty products that exceeded the capacity of the bathroom cupboards and my dear husband rarely put anything back where he found it. Now that they are gone, I sort through the remains, find lost things, and remember the excitement for the various purchases: the art supplies, the hamster cage, the golf clubs. In the process of throwing away and donating items I am creating space for my new life, one where friends are my family and there is room to grow.

With a Perspective, this is Joan Cardellino.

Joan Cardellino is a retired State of California employee.

My favorite conspiracy theory about the coronavirus vaccine is that each shot contains a tiny microchip designed to track our every move.

I admire this particular piece of nonsense because it overlooks the fact that most of us have already been tagged and can be tracked down by Bill Gates or the government pretty much at will. Big business and other nefarious actors can also use the device to read our minds and accurately predict which products we’ll buy and who we’ll most likely vote for.

And to make matters worse, these masters of the dark arts of persuasion can even nudge us toward certain brands or candidates or ideas, and not only predict what we are going to do, but almost make us do it. All with just the push of a button.

The microchip delivered via the vaccine is allegedly so small that it’s all but impossible to detect. The device I’m talking about is much bigger, and if you feel around for it, I’m pretty sure you can find it.

If you’re listening to the radio while you’re still in bed, slowly stretch your arm out and reach over onto your bedside table, toward the glowing light. If you’re listening to this in the car while driving, carefully run your right hand through the center cup holders in your car. If you’re out walking and listening via podcast, quickly plunge your hands into your pockets, front and back. And if you’re reading this online, look up for a moment, let your eyes adjust, and then quickly look back down at your hand.

It’s a flat, rectangular object, bigger than a deck of cards, but smaller than a paperback book. It’s made of metal, plastic, and glass. And it glows in the dark.

There’s no way to get rid of it because, even though it’s wireless, it’s completely wired into our daily lives. And who knows what our friends might be saying about us on Facebook or TikTok if we don’t have it with us at all times?

So go get the shot and stop worrying about being tracked. Bill Gates, the government, and all your favorite brands – and even your mom – have been following you for years.

With a Perspective, I’m Tom Moriarty.

Tom Moriarty teaches writing and rhetoric at San Jose State University.

We are — all of us — stretched beyond anything we could have ever imagined. Teaching is always demanding but this year, this time, this horrible pandemic is like nothing else. Hours and hours and more hours of prep, nights, weekends, new extensive tech expectations, children who are struggling, administrators who want more, parents who need help.

We take turns consoling each other. One day I might feel like I can’t do anymore, stretch any wider, and my colleagues hold me up. Another day it’s someone else. Another day it’s yet someone else. And now, my school is back to in-person instruction. Some families need to keep their children at home and in distance learning, which means we are responsible for teaching the children in front of us at the same time as engaging with those on a screen. Masks, face shields, clip on microphones, weekly COVID tests, thermometers, air filters, touchless sinks, constant sanitizing, outdoor classrooms, disinfectant sprayers. It is beyond exhausting and we count the days, sometimes the hours until the next day off.

Together we persist.

Why? Well, it’s our job. And in this time when millions are without work, without homes, without health, we are the fortunate ones. It’s more than that, though, more than “we’re doing this because we have to.” Sometimes when I’m there on campus, sometimes, I can see through the veil of my tiredness. I see children who are overjoyed to be together again. I see educators coming through with the impossible. I see maintenance staff going above and beyond. I see students who are learning.

And yes, for us teachers, the Friday afternoon, socially distanced happy hours make all the difference. The camaraderie, virtual hugs, shared tears and laughter, keep us going, help us continue to put one foot in front of the other. Of course, Diplomático, the smooth rum our Venezuelan colleague brings to share, doesn’t hurt.

Together we persist.

With a Perspective, I am Alisa Peres.

Alisa Peres has been teaching, mostly Spanish or music, in Bay Area elementary schools for over 30 years. She lives in Berkeley.

After spending my first year of college remotely, I’ll be attending school in person this fall. Last year, I had to take initiative to meet people virtually at my school. And as a Black person attending a predominantly white institution, I had to extend myself even further to surround myself with people of color. So when I was voted into my school’s Black Student Union Board, I was ecstatic that my attempt to find community worked.

My perspective started shifting when I connected with the previous BSU president. Several aspects of her experience struck me. She had worked with the university president to advocate for a more inclusive environment. She fostered a safe space for Black people on campus. She led and organized protests. And while her work is powerful, I know that based on past experiences I can’t handle that.

In high school, activism became my whole world. When I led Oakland student-teacher walkouts with my friends, I felt like the only way I could do anyone justice would be to sacrifice my own well being. By the end of the protests, I experienced some of the most intense burnout of my life.

As people of color, we take on an additional burden of “fixing” institutions. We don’t have the luxury or time to be ordinary students because we often need to push back in order to be seen.

This issue isn’t isolated to my university. Students of color across the United States have to navigate a society that’s designed to impede their success, while attending educational institutions that are founded on their oppression.

As I prepare to start my life on campus, I’m realizing that it’s not my job to change the school, nor is it the job of any other student of color. It’s my job to find my interests, meet people I enjoy being around and advocate for causes that I care deeply about. The school’s responsibility to become a more inclusive space should not be solely placed on the shoulders of students of color.

With a Perspective, I’m Ivelisse Diaz.

Ivelisse Diaz is 19 and lives in Oakland. Her Perspective was produced by YR Media.

It’s 4 p.m. Saturday; closing time at the municipal shelter where I’m a volunteer dog walker. The kennel attendant comes around to shut off the lights, but because it’s mid-summer, one hardly notices the difference.

If you have to wind up at a shelter, you could do worse than this place. The population is creeping back up to pre-COVID levels, but most of the time, we manage to get dogs out twice a day for walks or playgroup. These short reprieves from life in a kennel help break up the boredom and loneliness, but they’re no substitute for life in a home.

Though it’s hours before the sun even thinks about setting, the day is over for the animals here. They know the chance of one last walk or another belly rub is now zero. I sneak a look at my current favorite, a roly-poly pit bull named Princess, and her eyes follow me until I’m out of sight of her kennel. It strikes me how painfully never-ending it must feel, the wait until late morning for the shelter to reopen — and contact with another living being.

My hope is that for all the misery it’s wrought, the pandemic ultimately helps us understand how devastating isolation can be for any social, sentient animal. That for all of us, sheltering in place should be a temporary state. And I hope that as awareness about pet adoption spreads, so too does education about what it means to bring an animal into your home — and the time and effort it takes to keep that pet thriving.

At most shelters in the Bay Area, staff and volunteers do their very best. But shelters are meant to be safety nets, not replacements for life with a family. They can be terribly lonely environments for dogs and cats who, just like us, are social creatures.

At 4 in the afternoon, sun on my neck, Saturday still feels young. My family is waiting for me at home, and we’ll spend the rest of the day together. But I will be back here tomorrow.

And just then, it occurs to me: On Sundays, the shelter closes at 3 p.m.

With a Perspective, I’m Leslie Smith.

Leslie Smith is a writer living in Oakland and a fan of pigs, pigeons, pit bulls and the otherwise misunderstood.

I was with the kids at the front of the march when it began at Judah and the Great Highway, and I was at the back of the march with the bicyclists when it ended at Lincoln and the Great Highway. Before the march I was somewhere near the middle of the crowd that had gathered just below the sand dunes and about 60 seconds by foot from the ocean.

One thousand or so people had gathered to protest the scheduled opening of the Great Highway on the following day, a Monday and the start of a work week with autumn looming on the horizon. Not surprisingly, I didn’t know a single person in the crowd at the rally and on the march. I had only been living at Ocean Beach for three months and I was just getting to know the neighborhood and my neighbors. The Sunday gathering felt like a kind of rite of passage. By virtue of my participation I was part of the community, and one of many San Franciscans who want the Great Highway to remain closed to automobile traffic and to be a kind of permanent park where people walk, jog, bicycle, roller skate, skateboard and breathe the clean salty air, an essential part of life in the pandemic.

I had fallen in love with the car-free Great Highway long before the rally and march. Still the rally and march reinforced my love for the paved strip that runs parallel to the Pacific. Together, they reaffirmed my vow to drive as little as possible and wean myself from the culture of the car.

I even made a friend. Jodie Medeiros is an advocate for safe streets in San Francisco. I ambled with her and talked with her. We had something in common with one another and with the kids, parents and grandparents who want open space at the edge of the city where they can feel safe, free and independent.

With a Perspective, I’m Jonah Raskin.

Jonah Raskin is a performance poet.

My good friend, now 83, let’s call her Harriet, is moving to a new senior independent living community.

In order to be admitted she was required to take a battery of cognitive tests. Harriet is more mentally fit than most people I know, and generally quite calm, but she was anxious about these tests, even though, or maybe because, she was trained as a Marriage and Family Therapist…as was I. While she expected to pass, at the same time she fully understood that her future was at the mercy of some test-giver’s assessment.

Harriet’s examiner turned out to be a middle-aged female social worker. The mental health portion included a few dozen questions that might be found on any standard mental health assessment and about halfway through she was asked: “Do you ever feel afraid that something really terrible is about to happen, any minute now, and that there is nothing you can do about it?”

Harriet replied: “Yes, of course. All the time. I’m Jewish”.

For a long moment the test administrator had an odd look on her face and said nothing at all. And then she laughed! “Right,” she said, “I know exactly what you mean. I’m Jewish, too. We’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop!”

And few questions later she was asked: “Have you ever experienced physical or verbal abuse?”

Harriet replied: “Of course. I’m a woman.”

This time her interviewer did not miss a beat: “And a feminist?” she surmised, correctly, and then she was off and running on a long heartfelt lament that her own colleagues and friends were not feminists. And how disappointing that was. And how worried she was for young girls today, including her own teenager daughter, who do not understand how they are sexualized and victimized in their social media world.

The test ended, Harriet passed, and invited the social worker to lunch.

I work hard to convince my clients, and remind myself, that it really is okay to feel whatever we feel, and to think whatever we think. But speaking our truth always comes with a certain risk. I wonder if I would have been as honest as my friend. And as courageous.

With a Perspective, I am Sara Alexander.

Sara Alexander is a therapist and filmmaker living in Graton and San Francisco.

TGIF! You made it through another week and the weekend is almost here. But before you get too fired up about Friday, let me point out today is Friday the Thirteenth.

Superstitious or not, nearly everyone knows Friday the 13th is supposed to bring bad luck. This day has been considered unlucky for centuries. Some theories are biblical – 13 guests at the last Supper before Friday’s crucifixion. And the Code of Hammurabi from Babylon, one of the earliest legal texts, mysteriously omitted number 13 from a list of 282 laws. Another theory points to a medieval massacre on Friday the 13th. Whatever the reason, a poll found Friday the 13th, along with black cats, breaking a mirror, and walking under a ladder is thought to bring bad luck by about one in four Americans.

And they are not subtle about it. Paraskevidekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th) has a real effect. Airlines report fewer reservations for flights on Fridays the 13th, casinos note decreased attendance, weddings are rarely planned and plenty of people find a reason to reschedule any business deals or surgeries on this day.

Experts say superstitions are not harmful, unless you’re so paralyzed you can’t get out of bed. Some say superstitions are actually beneficial, providing a sense of control over life’s uncontrollable happenings. Athletes often have good luck rituals before events, and most cultures recognize some kind of good luck omen.

If you’re freaked by Friday the 13th, your bad luck could be worse. Some years have up to three Fridays the 13th, but today is the only one occurring in 2021, hopefully the universe telling us this year has brought enough bad luck already, and maybe we’re done.

So, pack your rabbit’s foot, your lucky penny, your horseshoe and a four-leaf clover and get on with your day. Just don’t walk under any ladders. No sense tempting fate.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

When you’re game viewing in East Africa you want to see the Big Five — lions, rhinos, cape buffaloes, leopards, elephants. But the local guides also emphasize the Little Five — leopard tortoises, buffalo weavers, elephant shrews, rhinoceros beetles and antlions, all part of the fabric of nature.

Back here in faraway Santa Rosa I had a little bit of fine sand left over from a project so I spread it under a tree. And low and behold within a short period of time appeared these tiny conical pits. One of the Little Five! Antlions! I was thrilled.

These craters have the perfect angle of repose to trap small prey. When an ant stumbles into the pit a tiny avalanche occurs. Gravity and loose sand grains prevent the insect from escaping. At the bottom is a ferocious creature. Bristles all over the body anchor this animal firmly in the sand and poking out of the head are massive pinchers. As the ant struggles frantically to escape, the antlion undermines the sand, creating more instability, and the ant slides into the bottom. The giant pincers grab it and pound it to death.

I must confess as a small boy and even a grown-up naturalist I have found guilty pleasure in dropping ants into these pits and watching the resulting struggle. I know, I know some of us never grow up.

These predators are the larval form of a winged insect which fly mostly at night and can be mistaken for a dragonfly. They are short-lived and after finding the ideal location to lay eggs, they die. The eggs hatch into the familiar larvae. Cruising around backwards in soft sand searching for the perfect pit place, they leave curly random tracks, which gives rise to the other common name- doodle bugs.

Just the other day I watched an ant fall into the largest of the pits. A savage battle ensued that went on for minutes with the ant finally escaping. Hey, you don’t have to go on an African safari to witness drama; it could be in your front yard.
This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

I recently stumbled upon an anguished fight on social media between two friends. What are we becoming, I wondered? It’s as if some diabolical sorcerer had turned everyone in this country against one another.

Years ago, when my wife and I lived in Vermont, we looked forward to that venerable expression of American democracy — Town Meeting Day. On the first Tuesday of March, folks gather in churches and school cafeterias to discuss matters of importance. The town budgets are read and each line item is discussed. Votes on referendums are done by a show of hands. You see where your neighbors stand, as they see you.

One year our town debated a land trust tax. The third generation dairy farmer who had been preserving land his whole damn life was not going to pay an additional $92. The wealthy newcomer from Texas whispered to his wife that he could pay the whole amount and wouldn’t even notice. And the progressive families begged us to tithe so that their children would have a future.

The conversation grew angry and heated.

Then, in the back of the hall, a town member raised his hand. Larry, you might say, was a man of child-like thoughts. We all watched as he clomped up to the front in his boots and flannel and stood uncomfortably before us.

Larry looked about and stuttered. Tears welled in his eyes. The tension was palpable. Then, in a broken voice, he began to sing.

“We all live together … we have to love one another.”

And so it went until he finished.

We sat in stunned silence.

“Thank you, Larry,” the moderator said.

In the final tally the tax failed by one vote. Andy Palmer, the wood worker, smiled, “I liked that one,” he said. “It’s always fun when it’s close.” And then we gathered at the long tables, lunch was served, and together we broke bread.

With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.

Andrew Lewis lives in Sebastopol.

Our household, like many others, has been through numerous pandemic pursuits – hikes, swims, mid-day boogies, gardening, baking, board games, and every combination thereof. But one day, the books lying askew, the pom-poms strewn everywhere, the mud-soaked feathers and sticks lying on the carpet, the relentless meal planning, the fights for more screen time—got to me.

I burst.

I spewed some “clean this right now!”, “go to your room!”, “no more video-games!” and then I went to my room and sulked.

Later that day, my nine-year-old handed me a note. He said it was his writing assignment.

“If you are not feeling cheerful,” the note read. “I can make you feel better by hugging you.”

My heart was already melting.

“And if that doesn’t help,” the note continued, “I will help you by telling you a joke.”

That made me groan and smile at the same time.

But, wait, the note wasn’t done. “And if that doesn’t work as well,” it concluded, “Can you just change your mind?”

Sometimes we all need reminders to step back and see that in spite of all our troubles there are still things to be thankful for; for the books that in spite of lying askew offer straight flights into fantasy. The pom-poms that, even as strewn, offer pops of color in the day. The mud-soaked feathers and sticks reminding us of the gift of nature around us.

The reasons to be grateful are everywhere if we care to look—the comfort of meals, the assurance of limitless connections through our screens, art, music, letters, laughter; the possibilities are endless. And sometimes, being happy is as simple as deciding to be.

I put the note away and, per advice, changed my mind. And just like that, I did feel better.

With a Perspective, I am Sandhya Acharya.

Sandhya Acharya is an author of children’s books.

I like to tell people younger than me that I’m old enough that I survived all those diseases no one catches anymore. That’s an exaggeration. I did get measles, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever and so many ear infections that I was deaf for a year.

However, I never caught the scourge of my cohort: polio. But it was a close thing. For the first few years of my life, my mother kept close watch over me each summer, staying away from public swimming pools and other perceived sources of infection. I still remember being trundled off to Clara Barton Elementary School in northwest Detroit to receive the Salk vaccine. As we waited in line, my mother whispered none-too-softly in my ear, “You will take your shot without any crying or carrying on, and you will be grateful!”

The vaccine worked, despite its crudeness and occasional safety issues. In my life, I have known several people with leg braces or withered limbs that trace back to a polio infection, but all have been my age or older.

My life experience inevitably informs my opinion of COVID vaccine hesitancy. I was a member of the biotechnology community for all my working life and followed the development of the mRNA vaccines closely. I trust the work and the community and was vaccinated as soon as possible. I’m willing to admit that not everyone shares my experience and might have trust issues with the biomedical community.

But I really wish that someone each vaccine doubter trusts as much as I trusted my mother would pull them aside and whisper in their ear, “You will take your shot without any crying or carrying on, and you will be grateful!”

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Wolber.

Paul Wolber is a scientist and technical manager in Silicon Valley’s biotech industry.

Imagine.  Just imagine.  It’s something that envelopes and rewards us, something that has gotten us humans to the moon, something that stretches our brains like hamstrings in yoga class.  It started with language 40,000 years ago.  Before the written word, Homo sapiens carved statues from mammoth tusks and told stories of the hunt.  Imagined details and embellishments were added to paint a more vivid picture in the mind’s eye.  Our ancestors’ first frontier was this vision in their larger, more capable brains.

Albert Einstein famously stated that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. It makes sense that one of the most celebrated minds in history believed that those who could activate their imagination should be valued.  Every human construct has relied on imagination—our forefathers imagined a government different than any other in the world.  Imagined ideas become reality, from governments to religion, from the bow and arrow to the iPhone. Every innovation, every inspiration has its roots in imagining. Art, music, literature, sports, and all the sciences.  By activating our brains to imagine what could be, we work towards seeing our visions become reality.  All human history first took place inside our heads, a dreamt yet unrealized solution to a problem– or unintended and terrifying guess gone wrong.

We take imagination for granted.  North Korean citizens suffer from a single dictated story designed to crush any thoughts of reality.  For governments like Saudi Arabia and China, unchecked imagination is a threat.  The Thought Police are real.

In a quiet moment, imagination projected the Theory of Relativity behind Einstein’s wise eyes. Appreciate your brainstorm.  See the future.  Imagine what can happen if you let your mind explore things yet to be.

With a Perspective, I’m Les Bloch.

Les Bloch is a project manager in the East Bay.

Several years ago, I was volunteering at an underfunded county animal shelter socializing cats, cleaning their cages, and providing some enrichment to their little lives. Adoption days were few and far between, and one day I impulsively decided to bring a cat home to give her some reprieve from the cage.

That’s when I became a foster failure — not because I adopted her, but because my good intentions turned into a nightmare for my own two cats — and me — for all the stress it caused. Characteristically sensitive, both of my cats immediately fell ill and developed crystals in their bladder — preventing them from urinating. Fortunately, after much discomfort and many medical interventions, they recovered — and the little shelter cat was subsequently adopted.

While I could have learned a better way to foster without causing stress to my entire household, I overcorrected, and for 20 years — though I remained a supporter of and volunteer for animal rescue groups — I swore off fostering.

Until I decided to try again a few years ago.

This time, I prepared. I gave my foster kitties their own safe place, while making sure my own cats felt secure and unthreatened. I’ve now successfully fostered 10 cats and have seen them through to their adoptive homes. And my cats have hardly noticed a thing.

While I have a system in place to make it work practically, I’d be lying if I said the process wasn’t difficult emotionally — an aspect of fostering I think many people see as a barrier. After all, how do you remain emotionally unattached enough to let them go when the time comes?

It was a question I posed to the head of the rescue group I work with, and her answer was perfect: “I don’t want our fosterers to be emotionally detached. It’s our emotional attachment that makes us better able to care for them until they find their forever home.”

And she’s right. I give them everything I have, and while the initial goodbye is hard, it’s not long before I’m curled up with my own cats looking at photos of my former fosters thriving in their adoptive homes.

With a Perspective, this is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an author and animal advocate in Oakland.

Let’s face it: the days of pretending like our differences don’t exist are over.

And yet, there continues to be a lot of hand wringing amongst business leaders and HR professionals, as they wonder whether they should allow sensitive or political topics to be discussed in the workplace.

Of course, avoiding tough conversations — whether you’re at work, or at Sunday dinner with the extended family —is a lot easier, especially if you all have differing views. And that has been the approach most businesses have taken – being noncommittal feels safe and easy.

But more and more, people want to know what their organization stands for.

If you value diversity, that also includes embracing diversity of thought. As an HR professional, I always recommend that my leadership team puts their perspective out there, while at the same time, modeling acceptance for differing points of view. As leaders, it’s important to be transparent about what you stand for — and to accept that not everyone shares your point of view.

For example, at my current company, we believe that #BLM was not a political issue, it is a human rights issue. To further that perspective, we embraced Juneteenth, bringing in a variety of black speakers to share their experiences, and we open up the floor to anyone who wants to participate, in an effort to educate and raise awareness.

But we don’t insist that every single employee join in these conversations. Because I know that some people don’t want to, or aren’t ready to.

Of course, we need to navigate these waters carefully, but openly. I for one am never afraid to “go there.” I know that I may stumble from time to time. So I make it a point to listen to my team, as they help guide me with their feedback. Once you open the door, however, it can’t be closed. This means supporting, as opposed to editing, a wide variety of conversations.

My goal is to work with leaders to create a safe space for the team, as we raise awareness, foster connection, and encourage mutual understanding. Acknowledging the very major and real historical, sociopolitical issues of our time is the right thing to do, and it also drives engagement and deeper relationships. In this moment, it’s simply too critical to ignore.

With a Perspective, I’m Tracy Cote.

Tracy Coté works for a San Francisco-based HR software provider, delivering people operations solutions to small companies.

I call it a fishing trip, and spend most days with a fly rod splashing through the streams and lakes, but my thrill with these trips isn’t about fish. It’s the way I feel when I’m away from the chaos of city life and closer to that place we all came from.

We are all products of the same raw materials as the trees and the mountains, the ospreys and the bears, and of course, the trout. Thanks to Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and others, we know that we all started as molecules and atoms that through time evolved into astonishingly complex organisms, some who fly, some who swim, and some who think in logical ways. Redwood trees or daffodils, people or bugs, we’ve all made the long journey together.

When we can manage to get away from the man-made things — skyscrapers, bridges, smartphones — and put ourselves among the creatures of nature our bodies and minds seem to remember those beginnings. We become possessed of the calmness of homecoming. I am grateful for stunning architecture, lifesaving medications, electronic marvels, but art and science inspire a different kind of wonder.

That’s why so many of us take ourselves and our families camping or backpacking. We endure the discomfort of tossing around in a bedroll, drinking lousy coffee from a tin cup, shivering in the morning frost, because it’s the only way our minds and our spirits return to that place where we all began.

I’ll be heading back up to the lake in a few weeks. For the first few hours I’ll be dodging semis on I-5. But when I head west into the Trinity Alps, or east into the Cascades, even though my GPS will tell me that I have driven far from where I live, I’ll be coming home.

With a Perspective, I’m Larry Murphy.

Larry Murphy is the retired owner of an Irish pub who lives in Sonoma with his wife, Rose.

They say fortune favors the brave. I think there’s some truth to that, as I was reminded in a recent discussion about childhood memories.

I spent a few summers at a great camp for boys in the Adirondack Mountains in New York. Willie, the camp’s director, was a larger‐than‐life figure. Like his love for the camp, Willie’s energy was boundless, and he made me feel like I was the most important kid in the world whenever he spoke to me. Everybody loved Willie.

One summer in the mid 1970’s, the camp had beautiful new outdoor basketball courts put in. They had been roped off so Willie could open them in a special ceremony. On the ribbon‐ cutting day, all of us gathered several rows deep around the courts. There were a few hundred of us there, and the air was abuzz with excitement.

Willie appeared and, as he was dribbling the ball around, thanked all those whose hard work had brought these courts to life. But all any of us could think about was when he’d take the first official shot; he made a few fake layup runs, keeping all of us laughing and delirious with anticipation. But then he moved toward the corner, stopped, spun around, and took a jump shot from about 15 feet. As the ball rose through the morning summer air, time slowed, and in that single beat of silence, with every pair of eyes willing it toward the hoop, the ball described the arc of our collective dreams.

When so much was riding on a single act—when the world was watching—that was when our true selves were revealed. He seemed to be saying, live your lives boldly; courage transcends success and failure.

In many countries, the number 8 is considered the luckiest, and when I learned years later that Willie had died on August 8, 2008, I thought back to that shot, and knew that Lady Fortune had always been by Willie’s side.

The decision to take a hard shot when an easy one would have sufficed made a difference in the lives of every boy watching. And I’m sure that the roar that went up after the ball went in is still echoing across Lake Champlain.

With a Perspective, I’m Jim McClellan.

Jim McClellan is co-founder of a logistics software company focused on the wine industry. He lives in Marin.

When Javier came to see me, he had gained 10 pounds. It was a surprise but since staying at home during COVID, he had stopped exercising and had started eating more. The result was the “Quarantine 15”, the weight gained due to pandemic stressors, such as losing jobs, living in tighter quarters, and facing an unknown virus. More than 40% of Americans say they’ve gained weight during the past year.

Prior to COVID, in the US, in 2018, over 40% of American adults met criteria for obesity, while more than 9% had severe obesity. As with many health indicators, obesity affects Black and Brown populations disproportionately compounding the impact of COVID where more “essential workers” support families and cope with understaffing at work due to illness and childcare issues.

I do not wish to “fat shame” anyone. Social, economic, and cultural factors increase obesity, and living in neighborhoods with few to no healthy food options, while big business promotes convenient and highly processed foods, also contributes to obesity. But along with the opioid crisis and COVID, obesity causes unnecessary, preventable illness and death, including type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol and blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.  You can also add worse outcomes from COVID to this list.

We now need public health initiatives comparable to those waged against cigarette smoking. As a health care provider, I do my best to address personal behavior, but sadly for Javier, I have fewer options than I would like. I remained empathic, referred him to a nutritionist and provided some guidelines on exercise, but his situation reflects a larger public health issue, compounded by COVID. We need to generate the political will to make broad scale community changes to take on this growing crisis. Our nation’s health depends on it.

With a Perspective, I’m Dr. Baldeep Singh.

Baldeep Singh is a doctor of internal medicine in the South Bay.

This had been a hard one. I shrugged the backpack off my shoulders, thrilled when it fell from my hips, wallowing in the lightness of only my full weight on my shattered legs. During this backpacking trek through the High Sierras it was obvious that I’m older than I ever was. But younger than I’ll ever be. So, for as long as I can, I’ll go. I take small cautious steps on the uphills, and even slower and more timid ones on the way down. I’m not there to break records, I’m there, I’m there… well, maybe that’s reason enough. I’m there.

We drove through Yosemite on the way out. Without reservations, we couldn’t stop. We were only allowed to pass through.

It was beautiful, all green and piney. And we volleyed back and forth, “remember that time when…” In the 20 years that we’ve lived in California we’d visited Yosemite enough times  to have enough stories to pull us along much of the road. Soothing and sappy stories. Good times.

It was slow at first, the patches of scorched trees. A few here and there, but the patches kept getting larger until we were driving alongside miles upon miles of scorched white trunks with black limbs, creepy landscapes straight out of a Tim Burton movie. Pine forests replaced with chaparral spotted with zombies, hundreds, thousands of ravaged brown, black and white limbs, grasping, and gasping.

We weren’t talking any more. This was more than a perfunctory “moment of silence.” There have been decades of silence. Neglect. Regret. Grief.

It felt like Sunday nights when I was a kid, that lump in your stomach, that dark dread of what’s coming. The safety and warmth of the weekend all false, the big blackness out there, the blackness that will swallow you whole.

Just passing through. We were just passing through.

What have we done?

With a Perspective, I’m Simi Monheit.

Simi Monheit is a transplanted Brooklynite who writes fiction in Monte Sereno.

The amount of creativity and time wasted by working around this simple act is enough to solve both our energy and employment problems in one swoop. The trust and fellowship that is lost would fill a black hole in space. “Hey, I screwed up” often is enough to put an end to a dispute, and when it isn’t, it’s a good start toward a resolution. Sometimes, it leads to an apology; sometimes, to creating an atmosphere where people are not afraid to give and receive helpful ideas. This applies to relationships across the board: whether it’s a presidential candidate speaking to the electorate, co-workers, marital partners, strangers or friends. You open up, people open up to you.

When Alexander the Great crossed from Europe to Asia, he stopped at a town called Gordium, famous for a huge rope set in a cart that was so intricately knotted that no one had ever been able to untie it. The legend had grown that whoever succeeded in doing this would conquer the world. Alexander strode up to the cart, took one look at the knot, and wasted no time considering what would happen if he pulled this or that strand here or there, or in working out some clever circumvention or self-serving excuse or blaming his failure on somebody else. He had a world to win and only 10 years in which to do it. He drew his sword, and with a single stroke put an end to the knotty problem. And then he went on to conquer pretty much the entire known world.

Alexander might not have made the connection, but if a demi-god, someone close to perfection, could display such humility, isn’t there a chance that we, too, might resolve many of our problems – very few as entangled as Gordian Knots – with a simple “It was my mistake”?

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Friedlander.

Richard Friedlander is a mediator and actor in the East Bay.

Out there, the world is haywire, lurching from one agony to the next with no apparent rhyme or reason, and no apparent will to modify its disastrous course. It’s the Twilight Zone writ large, and it’s unprecedented, terrifying and almost inconceivable.

The trees don’t know anything about all that, though, nor do the hens, the bees, the deer or the mountain lions that come by on their regular patrols. The weeks pass, and with them seasons, just like they always have. Each one brings responsibilities and chores. It might be picking fruit, pruning trees and berry canes, and spreading mulch to help the soil retain moisture. Some weeks it’s pulling weeds, clearing brush and repairing fences. Others, it’s preserving harvests and planning the next season’s plantings. Feeding every plant and animal has a cadence too.

Time is different on the farm, untethered from our human expectations and busy demands. It flows upstream, downstream or even sideways, and there are occasional dead zones or rapids that have you checking the calendar and scratching your head, confused. How, you wonder, can those apples be ripe already? How is it possible those apricots are still green, when it’s nearly July?

My other job is out there, in that Twilight Zone of pandemic, economic devastation, brutal inequality and racism, and bitter division and divisiveness. I’m not immune to its effects, from anxiety and despair to a stubborn flame of hope that we will manage a way out, and forward. And resolve, to do what I can to help us get there. But it’s a priceless gift to come home to the farm, to its troubles and delights, and listen to the cries of red-tailed hawks and ravens. I wish you all a place of such profound refuge, whatever that feels like to you.

With a Perspective, I’m Peggy Hansen.

Peggy Hansen is an organic farmer and photographer in Santa Cruz.

I am a foodie and dining out with my family is one of my favorite activities. I enjoy everything about it — deciding where to go, getting dressed, watching my mom put on make-up, eagerly waiting to be seated, and feeling happy when it’s our turn.

My favorite is this Asian restaurant with two tall horses at the entrance, with their heads in the sky like airplanes. They look like royal guards! Once they let me in, I soak in everything around me. The bright and glittering décor, people placing their orders, or getting impatient when it doesn’t come, and servers bringing food out (helps me decide what to order). The best part – fortune cookies on our way out!

During the pandemic, we had to stop fine dining. My parents suggested food truck instead. It did not sound fun, but I figured anything is better than eating at home.

The scene at the food truck? Very different from fine dining. It was in an empty parking lot and social distancing meant we had to eat in our minivan. It was dark outside and all I could see was a light shining inside the truck. There was no fancy menu or fine cutlery. No iced water with lemon on top.

My sister and I curled up next to my mom and started to play made up games. It must have looked fun because she put her phone away and joined us.

Our next trip was even better. I put cozy pillows in the backseat and wore my comfiest PJs. We got creative with games and laughed a lot.

Now that we can go back to fine dining, if you asked me to pick one, I couldn’t. They both come with yummy food, and while I like the hustle and bustle of fine dining, I also love the cozy picnics in our minivan.

So, what did I learn? Be flexible and if you get a lemon, make lemonade! This is Shreya Pai with a perspective.

Shreya Pai s a rising 4th grader at Bullis Charter School in Los Altos.

At six years old, I sat in front of a piano for the first time. With my Crocs-clad feet dangling several inches off the floor, I allowed my teacher, Ms. Jones, to gently guide my fingers through simple three-note melodies. Little did I know that this was the beginning of my 13-year-long journey with the instrument.

Over the years, I grew to love everything about the piano: the gentle ridges between the keys beneath my fingers, the smell of old sheet music, the sound of notes blurring together richly with a press of the damper pedal.

So when quarantine hit and I could no longer attend my weekly lessons in person, I didn’t think it would affect my piano playing. After all, my instrument wasn’t going anywhere. I would be able to keep practicing, and I made plans with Ms. Jones to have lessons over Face Time every Wednesday.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that these virtual lessons don’t really work for me. Internet issues always rudely interrupt my etudes and sonatas, leaving Ms. Jones incapable of giving me feedback.

It began to dawn on me that the instrument itself wasn’t why I loved piano. It was the connections that it introduced me to. I miss playing duets with Ms. Jones, and chatting with her about classical music history as I pull out my sheet music.

My weekly lessons used to be a little escape from the world. Whether I was dealing with middle school drama or high school stress, I knew I could find respite in Ms. Jones’s sunny living room, where I could focus solely on music.

While I feel lucky to be able to continue to play piano through the pandemic, I also am sad when I realize that after 13 years of lessons, my last one was spent entirely online. This fall I will be going off to college, and won’t have time to take another lesson with Ms. Jones again.

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that music is important because it draws us together. And that is hard to recreate over a screen.

With a Perspective, I’m Genevieve Schweitzer

Genevieve Schweitzer lives in Kensington. Her Perspective comes to us from Y-R Media.

The first attempt to extort money from my daughter’s life came three minutes in, when a hospital worker entered the birthing room – uninvited – to snap a picture of our newborn. Upon leaving hospital the next day, we were invited to purchase ‘the first ever picture’ of our baby.

The first credit card offers arrived during elementary school – never too early to experience the burden of debt I suppose – followed quickly by the GATE programs. Your child has been identified as gifted and talented – enroll her in our summer school now. Financing options available.

And then soccer, enjoyed by the poor and shoeless throughout the world, but in the United States monetized by ‘college-bound’ youth teams weighed down with uniforms, warm-up suits, cold weather coats, turf cleats, grass cleats, back packs, tournament fees and multiple professional coaches. And a roster of 20 fee-paying kids for an 11-person game.

Junior year signals the arrival the SATs, and like the first buds of spring, numerous third-party vendors emerge selling costly programs of dubious value to boost your child’s score.

Still, my responsibility is nearly over, my daughter – with perfect teeth – is heading to college, towards independence, towards her own medical bills, and to the joy of paying down student debt.

As I approach the other end of life — sad to see my daughter leave, but happy see her flourish — I turn to my laptop screen, where, like vultures on a carcass, my email begins to fill with financing proposals for my funeral – so as ‘not to be a burden on my children’.

With a Perspective, I’m Luke Pease.

Luke Pease is filling his empty hours with paragliding, guitar and learning Mandarin.

Before I started gardening, I loved visiting my friends’ floral sanctuaries. Sitting in a lounge chair, I’d let colors and scents wash over me. I saw only the blooms, the blossoms, the delightfully shaped vegetables.

I’m a big city person, raised among brick and concrete, so it took me many years to believe that I, too, could learn to garden. I started with “can’t fail” flowers like daffodils and nasturtium. Gradually, I entered more deeply into nature’s vast repertoire. This summer, I’m tending lilies and sunflowers, roses and poppies, carrots and parsley. And I’ve noticed a strange shift in my way of seeing.

In my own garden, all I see is work: intrusive branches, wilting leaves, weeds, snails. Instead of sitting down to the pleasure of gazing and sniffing, I’m either standing or squatting: pruning, clearing, watering. Snip, snip. Looking around as I rub my achy back, I make a to-do list for the next day. Even on my walks along Berkeley streets, I pluck foxtails and pinch off dead roses.

Fully committed to tending, I no longer visit plants for idle enjoyment. Gardening work pulls me into a different kind of satisfaction. Especially the harvesting: cutting off lettuce leaves, pulling up onions, digging for potatoes.

It’s always the raspberries that make me happiest: some displaying boldly, others hiding under downy leaves, all of them bursts of sweetness. Whether I pluck the berries in the morning or at dusk or by the light of the full moon, it’s always a labor of love. The line between work and pleasure disappears.

And yet, I’ve decided to get a comfortable chair so I can quietly savor all those hues and designs and perfumes, at least for a little while, every day.

With a Perspective, this is Christine Schoefer.

Christine Schoefer is a writer and educator.

Millions of years ago a tropical forest flourished throughout California. Rainfall exceeded 80 inches per year and both temperature and humidity were high. Large broad-leaved evergreen trees dominated a landscape interspersed with conifers.

Slowly the climate became drier and cooler and most of the tropical plants retreated to coastal areas or south toward the equator. Eventually nearly all the tropical plants died out. In the Bay Area we are left with two reminders of those ancient times– the Coast redwood and the bay tree.

The bay tree has many common names – California laurel, bay laurel, pepperwood, and Oregon myrtle. It belongs to the Laurel family which  is characterized by aromatic oil glands in the leaves. Many economically important plants such as camphor, sassafras, cinnamon and avocado are in
this plant family.

Bay trees now grow in cool wooded canyons and valleys in the Coast ranges and in the foothills of the western Sierra Nevada. In Oregon, bay trees reach their greatest size. The hard durable lumber of these magnificent trees is sold as Oregon myrtle and fashioned into lampshades, bowls, and other curios.

Native Americans ate the pit of the bay fruit. Uncooked seeds are very acerbic so they roasted them to eliminate the bitterness. Then they either ate the cooked seeds directly or made them into cakes for later use. They also placed bay leaves in their nostril or bound them tightly to their heads. The pungent oils allegedly cured headaches. My experience is that sniffing these leaves can give you a headache! The leaves could also cure rheumatism, stomach aches, colds and even repel fleas.

Most of the bay leaves that we use to flavor soups and sauces come from the European bay. However, the upstart California bay is rapidly supplanting the Old World bay. At my corner market a small jar of 20 premium, California bay leaves cost over five bucks. How sad that we feel more comfortable using leaves purchased in a bottle than those picked from the trees growing in our backyard. Oh well.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective

Michael Ellis is a naturalist living in Santa Rosa.

The crowd gathers like clockwork, even though we know the pin’s fall is as predictable as sunrise. Tantrums vanish, eyes grow wider with expectation as the pendulum comes closer to a pin. My daughter, who has the attention span of a butterfly, stands transfixed by it. With every swing, we expect that the pin’s end is near. Yet somehow, the pin stands — like a resolute little David, against the Goliath pendulum.

The crowd jumps with expectation, then gives out a resigned “Oh that was close!” Finally, when the pin falls, the children’s faces are jubilant, as though they have experienced something profound. To me, it was the feeling I get after reading a very good book.

It is the pendulum’s lethargic buildup of suspense, like chapters in a good book, that draws the crowds, and the surprise that something so small could withstand the onslaught of something so big. Like a tenacious little dandelion growing in a busy road.

It is a simple thing, but we breeze through so many great things in our lives — a museum exhibit, a nice landscape on the way to work, or that severely dog-eared library book. That day, the Foucault’s Pendulum succeeded in slowing us down, and stayed with us like a little mile marker in time.

With a Perspective, this is Bhaskar Sompalli.

Bhaskar Sompalli is a scientist. He lives in the East Bay.

It was a quick run to pick up a few things, to one of those national chain drugstores found in every neighborhood in San Francisco. As I browsed shaving cream, a man in the cosmetics aisle began shoving items into a backpack. Body wash, skin creams, shampoos, entire shelves quickly emptied.

I stared as he filled his bag. “Are you going to pay for that, Sir?” shouted a store clerk, as the man sauntered out, to alarms blaring. I asked the clerk if that happened often.

“Every day,” he said.

Every day must be right, because everyone I know has a story of seeing a flagrant five-finger discount in this drugstore. Last month, a video of a guy riding a bicycle into one of these drugstores, filling a trash bag with goods and peddling out without bothering to pay, went viral. With a shoplifting rate four times the national average, this drugstore chain is closing stores in San Francisco.

And not just this drugstore chain. Other retailers in San Francisco are also reporting such brazen theft, they are reducing store hours or shuttering locations. Some say the pandemic economic crisis has caused this rise in rip-offs. Others blame Proposition 47 for reducing shoplifting of less than $950 to a misdemeanor.

But I feel for employees, with both crazed crooks risking their safety and store closures risking their jobs.

My surreal drugstore run added to the zombie apocalypse feel of the city these days. On my way to the drugstore, I passed boarded-up shops, raggedy people sleeping on sidewalks, and stepped around one wild-eyed guy shouting at unseen voices. The scariest side effect of a prescription turns out to be just going into the drugstore to buy it.

Crime is a result of many factors, and drugstores don’t sell a cure for this epidemic of shoplifting. I don’t have the answers, either.

But I do know I might think twice before another quick run to pick up a few things.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

Last week I learned how to time travel. After I finished work in the afternoon, my family drove to the coast from Santa Rosa, via the Bodega Highway, as we’ve done dozens of times. When we descended down to Doran Beach, everything was still familiar and current; a lone egret perched on the edge of the wetlands, fog resting above the ocean. The sand was warm and the Pacific was the color of green sea glass. It was beautiful and normal.

Then I did something I hadn’t done in so long. I tugged on a wetsuit, tucked a boogie board under my arm, and headed out into the soft surf. I positioned myself at the base of a rising wave. The time traveling commenced.

Suddenly, I was sucked 35 years into the past. I was eight, tan, and singularly focused on the wave building behind me. It pulled me back, slightly, and then spit me forward. My small hands gripped the top of the board and my skinny legs kicked furiously. Salty white wash sprayed up my nose, burning in a good way.

I rode the wave the whole way, to dry sand full of bits of broken shells. When I rested my head on the board, my mind did wild somersaults from the past into the present and back again.

Watching my kids swim in the ocean has always brought me joy, but this was happiness of a different kind. It was an old, resurrected exhilaration, the pure pleasure afforded by sliding down a swell of water on a cheap piece of Styrofoam. It was the joy of my grandfather, chest deep in the sea, holding me steady on my board with his Navy tattooed arms, eyeing the horizon, and gently crying out, “Go, Jenny, go!” when a perfect wave approached. It wasn’t just that I was recalling what it felt like to be a child, free in the sea for hours at a time. I was living it again and it was amazing.

When I popped up to my feet, I did exactly what I had done decades earlier. I charged back for the next wave, and the next one, and the next.

With a Perspective, this is Jennifer Liss.

Jennifer Liss is an education writer. She lives in Santa Rosa.

When I find myself unable to sleep through the night, I grab a blanket and stretch out in my chair in the living room, the light beside me casting a warm, yellow glow allowing me to read, pet the cat, or listen to the night sounds of the house.

About 10 years ago I had my first real bout of insomnia. It was dreadful. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep a wink. Things had changed at work, and I just couldn’t let it go. As each day passed into night, I felt more pressure to arrest this new pattern and finally tumble into sleep. Deep, beautiful sleep. But the more I tried, the harder it became. I was caught in a vicious cycle of my mind. I became desperate and found myself in the ER one night, begging the doctor for relief. He gave it to me in the form of a shot. Finally, my prayers were answered.

But I had entered a new phase of my life. No longer would I take sleep for granted. I created new routines and formed a novel appreciation for the tenuous patterns of the mind.

My relationship with sleep has now evolved to a place where when I wake up in the middle of the night – and by no means does this occur every night – I don’t fight it. I just go with it. It’s strange, but now I almost treasure those nights I find myself in my chair, a cat in my lap, my dog at my feet, a good book in my hands.

It’s actually the best time.

With a Perspective, I’m Pete Gavin.

Pete Gavin is a retired middle school English teacher

I am a pro‐choice Catholic, and a partner in a same sex marriage, attending a parish in San Francisco, for 36 years. Until the onset of the pandemic, as a lay Eucharistic minister, I distributed the Eucharist at a local hospital. Some American catholic bishops would gladly deny me Holy Communion, not for my gay marriage at least for now — but for being pro‐ choice. Threatening to withhold communion from pro‐choice Catholics, like president Biden, does not obliterate the stories of women worldwide having abortions, often in unsafe settings, and worried about the salvation of their souls.

I grew up in Rio de Janeiro, where abortion is still illegal. Though it was easier for women of means to obtain safe abortions, those poor and mostly of color, rather than facing the shame of unwanted pregnancies, would commit suicide by setting themselves afire, or drinking poison. Others died from botched abortions. The front page of the papers would carry their stories and pictures of the corpses. Sadly, some of these women were like sisters to me.

When I was conceived, my parents were penniless, but my mother refused to abort me. Personally, I don’t favor abortions; but they will happen, legally or not. I prefer that they be done safely. As a medical social worker at a community hospital I referred women seeking abortion to the appropriate services. Those requesting adoption of the unborn were also referred out. Catholic clients often feared talking to priests about abortion. They trusted Divine Mercy instead. Faith leads me to believe they eventually found God’s comfort within themselves, whatever their decisions.

Being pro‐choice does not mean to be pro‐abortion. Weaponizing Holy Communion is wrong, and the bishops know it. My prayer is that all women may exercise their reproductive options, without priestly interference.

With a Perspective, I am George Woyames.

George Woyames is a retired social worker living in San Francisco.

Where I live, in Marin County, the sun shines most of the year and you can see into the next county as clearly as peering in your neighbor’s window. But I am a writer so when I need to dream, I drive to San Francisco and let the fog clear my head.

I drive to where I grew up: the Sunset District. This is where you’ll find long blocks of attached, stucco houses. And here, I love to walk when it’s foggy. Here the fog softens the things you see and the sounds you hear. Sometimes, your view can be completely blocked so that even the houses on the other side of the street can vanish in seconds as if by magician’s smoke.

And yet the fog is cozy.

Within the thick walls of my childhood home, I remember how the fog made our small house seem all the more important by hiding the outside. Beyond the windows the world often just disappeared and this disappearance of things forces you to remember what is there or to assume what is there. This is why the fog is great for dreamers— artists and writers— not only because it shuts out the world, but because it can allow the imagination to surmise, even to conjure.

The Sunset District’s backyard is the Pacific Ocean. Yet, there are no fishermen, no boats, no beach restaurants, no seashell shops, and no boardwalk. Hidden behind sand dunes that are themselves hidden from view by The Great Highway, the sea is a secret. This planned indifference makes the neighborhood for me even more seductive. What a thrill to know that behind the predictable, peaceful rows of houses, roars the largest ocean in the world, wild and unfathomable. Indeed, its gray vastness seems infinite here. Like another sky.

The Sunset District is a remote San Francisco neighborhood. And a place that, by expanding our vision with the grandeur of an ocean, yet limiting it with the mystery of fog, can encourage us to dream.

With a Perspective, I’m Maxine Rose Schur.

Maxine Rose Schur lives in San Rafael and is a travel essayist, children’s book author and writing instructor.

It’s no secret that one of the things holding America together is a phenomenon that seems to suggest the opposite: regularly breaking apart. We’re taught to push boundaries, and our history is a long trail of breakage, healing, and new opportunities made possible by the process.

Hemingway famously said, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” I think that can be true for countries as well.

I lived in Japan for several years, and that’s where I first learned about “kintsugi,” which is the art of fixing broken pottery with a highly visible lacquer, often gold or silver. With kintsugi, the break stands out more after it is fixed, not less. The lines of repair are there for everyone to see, adding new contours, textures, and colors to the piece. It’s as if the item has a new set of golden veins that restore its youth and luster.

The point with kintsugi is not to conceal flaws, but rather to expose and even celebrate them for the natural part of life they are. The repair becomes not just a fix but the very thing itself, adding a unique element of beauty while endowing the object with new strength and durability.

At this volatile moment in our country, when boundaries seem to be breaking daily, it may be helpful to reflect on how many golden veins of repair we have in our foundation. They reveal what might have been broken in the past, but what is now the alloyed bedrock of our world. We’re better because of those breaks.

We are, of course, all flawed and imperfect, but those imperfections can be markers on the path to a better place. I’d like to think that the Japanese notion of kintsugi might in some way reflect the gold of American dreams. Like most other countries, we, too, can break, but by exposing those broken places and letting the world see how we’ve incorporated them, we can still symbolize the power of human will, and the uniquely American strength we all share.

With a Perspective, I’m Jim McClellan.

Jim McClellan is co-founder of a logistics software company focused on the wine industry. He lives in Marin.

The drought is real. We have to learn to pinch droplets. My solution: everyone should go backpacking.

I don’t mean just hide up in the hills. But on every backcountry adventure I’ve had, water became more precious than gold. I learned to treasure it. Forest regulations require camping at least 200 feet from any water source. But what with avoiding slopes, rocks or anthills, my tent usually gets pitched a good ways from the water.

Hiking all day creates a powerful thirst. Cooking takes water, plus washing before and cleaning up. A little personal hygiene before hitting the sack is considerate of your tentmate: more water.
All that water has to be purified, because giardia lurks in even the most pristine wilderness. Whether by straining every drop through a little hand pump while straddling mossy boulders creek side or using the spiffiest new devices, the process is laborious. Then you have to tote all those bottles and pots back to camp. I see myself hunkered down pumping away, clean elixir slowly filling each container, trying not to swear when I knock over a freshly filled one and have to begin again.

Backpackers are ingenious at stretching their precious hoard of water: using the pasta water to wash dishes, filling the coffeepot with leftover trail water, soaking the breakfast skillet with old coffee. You never discard H2O, even if it’s nasty-hot. Brush teeth and bathe using one slender pint bottle and the “lather, scoop and slap” method to wash the essentials.

I appreciate what backpacking taught me. Once you’ve had to haul and purify your own, clean water flowing from a tap is miraculous. I wince hearing someone take a long shower or run the kitchen tap carelessly. But my struggling garden is my ally: grateful for old coffee and used dishwater.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

Those last three words are jarring to American ears accustomed to the familiar cadence of our Declaration of Independence.  It’s like having the lyrics of a familiar song changed.  What happened to my pursuit of happiness?

The differences between these two versions say so much.  The UN document may appear to be setting the bar a little lower, selecting essential rights from a list of our most basic needs.  But one can also see the tragic arc of history here.  The confident self-assurance of the Enlightenment in which men proclaimed their freedom from superstition and tyranny has, by the mid-20th century, been replaced by an awareness of our vulnerability to persecution and annihilation.

There is, as well, a subtle but powerful distinction about the role of government.  Security of person, our Constitution’s Second Amendment notwithstanding, is shared collectively; it is something that government provides.  In our Declaration, however, government has stepped back; it allows people the room to pursue what they want.

It is this elevation of the individual that is so quintessentially American.  After all, we are not merely free to pursue this thing happiness, but the goal itself is something that each of us would define differently and experience subjectively.  And debates on public policy often focus not on collective effect but infringement of individual prerogative.

But there is an even more profound difference.  The UN Declaration says that we all have a right to be secure.  Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, wrote that we had the right to go after something; he asserts the right to a quest, not a guarantee.  The key word in his phrasing is pursuit and not happiness.  And on this Fourth of July in particular it feels like his formulation was prophetic: collectively we are not a happy bunch, but individually we are definitely engaged in the pursuit.

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.

Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.

As July 4th approaches, the inability of our republic to deliver on the promises made in the Declaration of Independence is disturbing. The horrific police brutalities inflicted on minority citizens, and the senseless killings plaguing communities of color and poverty call for a new declaration.

The second paragraph of the 1776 Declaration states: “We hold these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed … with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Yet these “truths” have not been true for many Americans, in letter or spirit. The Declaration fails to recognize that we actually are a country of men and women, of many different races, sexual persuasions and religious beliefs. It ignores our duty to protect such rights for all humankind regardless of race, color, ethnicity, religion, national origin or sex — not just men or whites. The asserted “truths” are not “self‐evident” to the many Americans suffering from acts of violence and discrimination.

A 21st century Declaration might better read: “All humankind is entitled to fully enjoy certain unalienable rights, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or physical or mental disability, and that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equal economic opportunity and freedom from slavery or oppression. To secure these rights, governments should act under rules of law applicable equally to all.”

A 21st century Declaration would provide a more civilized and egalitarian framework of governance. Since 1776, we learned what a genuinely inclusive and enlightened society can be, and what the rule of law means. We should meet the challenge and work toward achieving — in fact and in deed — a new and true declaration of independence for a civilized and humane society.

With a Perspective, I’m Victor Schachter

Victor Schachter is the president of a Bay Area non-profit dedicated to promoting peaceful dispute resolution and the rule of law around the globe.

Students aren’t the only ones learning in a classroom. Teachers are learning too, sometimes from their students.

In 2014 in Oakland, I taught 9th grade remedial reading to some of the too many kids reading near 3rd grade level. My most memorable student was Pedro, excellent because of his attitude and behavior as well as his work. Many good kids in reading classes aren’t happy in school because it hadn’t served them well. Yet Pedro didn’t have that angst. What really got my attention, though, was the way he moved: calmly, deliberately, one step at a time. When the bell rang, Pedro closed his binder, and one by one put his things away.

I’m not exaggerating that Pedro changed my life. I admit to often trying to do too much. I find myself with myriad things in my hands and multiple thoughts in my head. Watching Pedro day after day, his manner became a balm. I started to check myself when I felt rushed or frantic. I came to call this physical patience. When approaching the car or the door with keys, purse, water bottle, bags, books and more, I could stop and realize that I can only do one thing at a time. I might have to drop something before going on.

It’s akin to what my husband calls having soft hands when catching a softball; the gentle acceptance of the ball rather than frantic grabbing. It’s a spiritual shift toward letting go of having to be in control.

I will be forever grateful to this sweet boy, now a young man, for teaching me this. I call it Pedro’s gift. Wherever you are, Pedro, thank you.

With a Perspective, I’m Celeste DuBois.

Celeste DuBois is a retired Oakland public school teacher of French and Reading Strategies.

I’ve lost count of the number of times in the last 22 years my husband was asked if he would still be vegan if I weren’t around. Some have implied that I “whipped” him into giving up meat and that he would run for the nearest steak if I weren’t looking.

There has long been a connection in the public’s mind between eating meat and being masculine. Meat is macho; plant foods, effeminate. Meat connotes virility; plant foods, weakness. The media and those in the business of selling animal flesh (or cars or trucks or beer) reinforce these tropes with tired stereotypes and offensive ads, shaping the cultural perception that veggie burgers are for wimps, quinoa is emasculating and tofu will cause men to grow breasts.

Real men eat meat, so we’re told.

At this point, I know I’m supposed to counter these clichés by pointing out the fact that bulls and gorillas build muscle by eating plants and that countless vegan bodybuilders and endurance athletes are winning medals for their strength, speed and brawn.

And while that’s all true, that’s still a pretty myopic view of what makes a man. Having strength isn’t measured simply by the number of pounds you can lift. It’s also about standing firm in your principles, having the courage of your convictions and exerting control over your own choices. Conforming to social dictates and being afraid to challenge cultural stereotypes, or eat kale, doesn’t exactly signify strength, autonomy and independence.

Taking responsibility, possessing a sense of honor, showing respect and protecting the powerless — all of these are traditional masculine attributes to be proud of, and none of them are strengthened by the consumption of animals. In fact, I would argue it’s quite the opposite. Eating plants and sparing animals demonstrates concern, consideration and respect for others — and for self. The benefits are manifold and far-reaching.

My husband will tell you that he became vegan 22 years ago because it aligned with his intention to live simply and to let others simply live. It’s his strength of character I admire most, and that doesn’t come from eating a steak.

Real men eat plants, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

With a Perspective, this is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an author and animal activist living in Oakland.

When the pandemic hit, lockdown began and I found myself at home every evening, I decided to be more faithful about writing in a journal.

Unlike the diaries I’ve kept off and on since third grade, however, I gave my pandemic jottings a focus, one I learned from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. It’s called the Three Good Things practice: simply write about three things that went well that day. It could be as simple as enjoying the first cantaloupe of the season, or as memorable as receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

What I soon learned was that the practice makes me look for good things as my day progresses, and thus improves my happiness. It also helped me deal with those nights in the past year when I worried about my adult daughters — working on the front lines or out protesting racial injustice, or simply unable to come back inside the family home. We all missed hugs.

Now that everyone in my orbit has been fully vaccinated and California is opening up again, I wondered if I could try the Three Good Things exercise on 15 months of restrictions. With the obvious caveat that I wish COVID-19 had never been inflicted on the planet, are there certain aspects of lockdown life I’d like to see continued?

Well, yes. I hope senior shopping hours join early bird dining in our culture. What a privilege for us oldsters! I’ve gotten to know a few of the workers I see in the 7 a.m. hour every week. We’ve been through a lot together. Those stores are keeping my business.

I’m also now committed to wearing a mask when shopping indoors or while outside in a crowd. I like not getting colds or the flu. It took months, but I finally have a defogging method for my glasses, and masks that fit and keep me and those around me healthy.

Years ago a friend and former co-worker always asked, “What’s the purpose of this meeting?” Now, after months of meeting only online, I know I’ll consider whether a gathering or project must be in person. KQED even makes it possible to record Perspectives from my dining room table. You can’t beat the commute!

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

Debbie Duncan writes children’s books from her home on the Peninsula.

Three times last month, my Black sons, aged 13 and 12, heard other children their age using the “n” word, at school and at soccer, two places they should feel safest. As my husband and I, who are also Black, helped them navigate the shame and hurt they felt, I wondered what else we could have done to prepare them for this.

Five years ago, driving north on 280 , we came upon an obstruction marked by orange cones. My husband was driving, changed lanes and apparently cut off a white man. He was so angry. After we cleared the obstruction, he got in front of us, slamming his breaks. Eventually he moved his Jeep Wrangler next to us, gave us the finger, and called out the “n” word, making what I later realized were monkey gestures. My kids, 8 and 7 at the time, were in the back seat, horrified.

“What did he say? Did he say ‘cheater’?”

In that moment, I wasn’t prepared to teach them what the “n” word meant, so I said yes, he did.

It wasn’t until I pulled out my phone and started recording that the coward scurried off the highway.

I do not recall the first conversation we had about the “n” word with our sons. Our weapon of choice has always been to work hard and excel. That way, the racists have less power. That is what I have tried to apply in my own life, although the experience of racism continues to sting and shock and set me back.

I cannot help feeling, though, that my boys should not have to carry the burden of working extra hard to prove their worth. Also, the last thing I want for them is to attribute every setback or negative experience to race. It’s a constant struggle to help them focus on what they can control, while not giving power to what they cannot.

I know it’s their reality, but it still makes me mad. And it makes me feel powerless.

With a Perspective, I’m Marcelle Taylor Dougan.

Dr. Marcelle Taylor Dougan is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health and Recreation at San Jose State.

They’re secretive and fussy. They hide themselves annoyingly and cleverly, under sheets or mounds of leaves, perfect dark, damp cover to hide them as they grow. They don’t like just any kind of forest, or any kind of tree, or even any kind of soil. More often than not, they keep close company with poison oak, far too close for my particular comfort. They’re dirty, full of frills and folds, packed with debris and soil, and sometimes bugs. And mistakes can be deadly: this game is not for the untrained. So, it’s completely fair to wonder, why do I hunt for mushrooms?

These days, wild mushrooms can be found at many markets, cleaned and trimmed and without risk of getting ‘oaked’ when reaching out to harvest them. They’re pricey, to be sure, but maybe not outrageous for a special treat with a short seasonal window. And when you figure in the time I spend foraging, and the average yield per outing, in truth they might be cheaper than ones I wildcraft.

So now you’re thinking its just nuts to try to find them on my own, risking poison oak, or even poisoning–why not just buy them? The answer is all those things, all the mysteries that make them impossible to predict and difficult to find. It’s the chance to find and follow deer trails, to visit and revisit secret spots year after year and see what may be waiting. It’s the challenge and the lure of reforging a connection to our heritage, of retraining the senses to interpret so much more, and much more differently, than most of modern life allows. And, of course, it’s the omelettes, or pasta dishes, or simple slices sauteed in melted butter. It’s wilderness itself, and it tastes like nothing else.

With a Perspective, I’m Peggy Hansen.

Peggy Hansen is a photographer and organic farmer in Santa Cruz.

I just finished my first year at Mills College. It’s been a weird year to say the least. I started my college career learning completely online. And I made it work. But it wasn’t how I thought my first year would go — attending Zoom classes all day from my childhood bedroom.

So when the news broke in the spring about Mills closing, I felt so lost. Just like that, friends I just met started planning to transfer. Others looked to see if it was possible to finish an accelerated degree. We were all over the place.

My plan for college is now flipped upside down — along with many of the school’s first year students. My original plan was not only to graduate in four years with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Economics, Policy and Law — but also complete my accelerated master’s degree in five.

The potential merger with Northeastern excites me because it may allow a pathway for me to achieve these goals. But it still feels like the uncertainty is playing with my feelings.

Even though Mills College could stay open if negotiations work out, it won’t be the same. College students like me will be losing a safe space — a place of progress and inclusivity made specifically for women and non-binary students.

I came to Mills because I was looking for a college that my activism would thrive in. And even though it was hard making friends or seeing where I belonged on this “virtual campus,” I was finally finding my footing. And it feels like I’ve had the rug pulled from under me.

My future at Mills is still a bit unclear. I’ve already mapped out a pathway that’ll allow me to graduate spring 2023 — an entire year early. It’s not going to be easy taking on heavier course loads each semester. And there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to enroll in all the classes I need each year. But to me, it’s worth it if it means I can still graduate with a degree from Mills College.

With a Perspective, I’m Valeria Araujo.

Eighteen-year-old Valeria Araujo lives in Oakland. Her Perspective was produced by YR Media.

Californians feel an understandable sense of relief as the economy is reopened and more normal life resumes. But COVID‐19 is still killing hundreds if not thousands of people around the country, and many, many more in countries where vaccine supplies are far less available or not at all. Less than 10 percent of the world’s population has been fully vaccinated, most of them in rich industrialized nations like ours. In other countries like Mexico, where I grew up and still have a large family, only about 12 percent of the population of about 130 million has been fully vaccinated and the total number of deaths is estimated at around 600,000.

These numbers are abstractions until they touch you personally. Through all of 2020 no one in my family got sick with COVID‐19, but that changed quickly this year: first my mother got it, then one of my sisters, then two of my brothers along with members of their families. My younger brother, Paco, died after three weeks in intensive care, while Luis miraculously survived after being unconscious in the ICU for almost two months. Paco’s death has shaken our family on both sides of the border in unimaginable ways, and I feel deep sorrow and empathy for the millions here with relatives all around the world suffering terrible losses who can’t practice the rituals for the dead because of the pandemic.

It is easy to focus on our immediate surroundings and ignore the great pain and suffering that many parts of our one world are still experiencing. This is a worldwide pandemic and no one is completely safe until everyone is safe from this terrible disease. Solidarity with our local neighbors who lost relatives and friends in distant places is a good way for me to remember my brother Paco and for all of us to honor our common humanity.

With a Perspective I’m Pedro Hernández‐Ramos.

Pedro Hernandez-Ramos is an associate professor and current chair of the Department of Education at Santa Clara University.

I keep thinking about this grandfather I saw, driving by in his big truck, looking out his window with teary eyes. It was our Pride Flag giveaway, with a steady stream of vehicles driving through our U-shaped church parking lot, for two hours on a recent Saturday. Parents with babies in car seats in the back of their sedans drove through, as did one whole block of neighbors, getting Pride flags to welcome a new lesbian couple to their street.

Our Bay Area suburb is bashful and residential. People drove through spontaneously, probably on their way to or from getting groceries. Thank God we’re on a main street, so people could easily see the young adults on the sidewalk, waving LGBTQ+ flags the size of bed sheets.

As they drove through and were given a Pride flag, many told us, “My niece just came out” and “I have a teenager who’s trans.” We were privileged to hear these announcements, and I wished I could see the joy on their loved one’s faces when they put up the rainbow flag, now with brown and black stripes.

Then, the grandpa in the big truck drove up, grey hair and Santa Claus cheeks under his mask. As we handed him the folded Pride flag, he reached out his hands to receive it like a birthday cake full of candles.

“My granddaughter just came out,” he said, looking down at the folded rainbow in his hands. “Wow! Wonderful! Congratulations!”

We erupted in cheers. That’s when his eyes welled up with tears, so we kept cheering: “What a great grandpa you are! Good for you!”

More tears. Collecting himself, the grandpa put the gift down in the empty seat next to him and drove off.

With a Perspective, I’m Barbara Foltin.

Rev. Barbara Foltin is head pastor at Faith Lutheran of Castro Valley.

Last spring my busy life as a mom came to a halt. No sports or crazy carpooling schedule. All the multi-tasking and calendaring just stopped.

I found myself wondering how I would fill all of my free time. How many times had I wished for things to slow down and now they had! Now was the time to do all the things I never had the time to do. I could learn to play the ukulele. Teach my kids French. As weeks turned to months, this new, slow normal felt pretty nice. Like all families, we found other ways to fill our days now free from endless obligations. We played board games and took lots of family walks. For the first time in a decade, I had not one list of things to do hanging over my head.

A friend recently asked how I felt about our year “off,” that if I had known restrictions were going to last a year, would I have done anything differently? I panicked. I never touched a ukulele and my kids still don’t speak French. What had I done? Had I wasted an entire year just taking walks? No checklists with accomplishments? Had I done nothing with my year filled with an empty schedule?

Life has reopened and I am back to my multi-tasking ways. An article entitled “Doing Nothing is Something” ended the guilt I felt about my family’s “year off.” The journalist’s critique of the relentless structure we are used to made me see the beauty of a checklist free year. Consumed with making every minute count we don’t recognize the importance of doing nothing. That just being is something.

I thought about the last year and what I had done with those quiet days now long gone. We are back at carpooling and calendaring. My kids still don’t speak French, but c’est la vie! A year of doing nothing was really doing something pretty special.

With a Perspective, I’m Nicolle Plescia.

Nicolle Plescia teaches French and social studies at Redwood High School in Larkspur.

Come June, like a lot of people, I think about my father. For him, this was a time of joy: Father’s Day, his wedding anniversary — and, for a high school math teacher who clocked three decades in that role, June brought school’s end.

Also like a lot of folks, I’ve tried over the past year to sort priorities and clutter: what to hang on to, how to ensure the days matter. One piece of paper I’ve kept, in a flimsy frame, propped against a shelf of poetry books, was given to my father by his grandparents. Issued by the U.S. Treasury War Finance Committee in 1945, it certifies 7-year-old Boyd as owner of a War Bond, “thereby becoming an investor in this country’s fight for human liberty and a contributor in a world struggle to make life free and forever peaceful for all men.” Encircling the text are 22 familiar faces — including Thumper, Donald, Goofy, all seven dwarfs, and Mickey in the upper right.

Another paper, hand-calligraphied and mounted on oak, was presented by the board of trustees of the village where we lived in the outskirts of Chicagoland, in appreciation for his years as Superintendent of Roads and Forester and Weeds Commissioner. I remember those years in the late ’70s; in the Midwest, when a winter snowstorm hit, the phone line installed in our living room would ring loud and shrill at 5 a.m. Time for the snowplows to hit the roads. On the certificate of appreciation, dangling from an illuminated letter T is a vine of three pink blossoms and one blue, the stamen of a flower just about kissing the F in Forester.

But I can let this go. Those years were just a sliver of his life — one that ended too soon. It was in June almost 30 years ago that he retired. His last day of work he had a stroke. He never came home. He was 55. For me, each year brings increasing poignancy just how young that is. But then, the pandemic has driven home lessons of terrible loss for so many.

As for the bond from a time of global conflict, I’ll keep that a bit longer. It’s a gateway to my father’s childhood, epic backdrop to the beginning of his story.

With a Perspective, I’m Steven Saum.

Steven Saum is the editor of WorldView magazine and lives in San Jose.

We drive on a Friday morning, the valley’s early sun fading behind us as we near the city. Across the Bay Bridge, San Francisco is wrapped in fog.

It’s Senior Skip Day and my daughter has asked me to go to SFMOMA with her. There’s no way to overstate the happiness this invitation gives me. In a couple of months, she’ll move across the country to start college, and there’s nothing I want more than time by her side.

“It’s still the best city,” my daughter says, as we exit the Yerba Buena tunnel and the skyline rises before us. I glance at her perfect face and agree. “It’s your city,” I say.

There are things I want to tell her, but when I think of the years that brought us to this moment time flattens and everything tumbles together. The landmarks and milestones. The disasters, human and natural. The wonder and sometimes luck of it all.

I want to tell her that the bridge we’re traveling over has one of the longest spans in the country, and that the first time I held her to my breast I felt her surge in my heart like a monument. I want to share that the bay is a drowned river valley submerged by a melting glacial ice sheet, and that I will always remember the warm winter-rain scent of her as a baby, the way she said “let me see” whenever I looked at something beyond her gaze, the crossing of her small teeth before braces. And does she know that the earthquake that occurred the year I graduated from college lasted 15 eternal seconds, and that sometimes I found her dancing alone in her room, captured by something seismic only she could feel?

I want to share that the hour on the tower clock of the Ferry Building is changed twice a year, by hand, and that I loved it every time she insisted I carry her across the playground to her Kindergarten class, her long legs tapping my knees like pendulums.

I want to say that, yes, beautiful girl, this is the best city, because this is your city – and its cool winds and waters will live inside you forever, waiting for each sweet return to welcome you home.

With a Perspective, I’m Susan Dix Lyons.

Susan Dix Lyons lives in Angwin.

As California plans to reopen with fewer COVID restrictions this month, are we prepared for how people will behave? So far, it seems that many have forgotten how to act in public. There has been an explosion of people fighting on airplanes, spitting at service workers, fans attacking people at sporting events, and other examples of aggression.

Bad behavior is nothing new and technology makes it easier to capture these moments and share them with the world. But there is something about coming out of the pandemic that makes so many of these incidents seem especially ripe for our times.

Stress in America has never been higher according to research by the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America studies. People are really wound up tight, frustrated for good reasons. When you add stress to frustration, you’ll get aggression according to the well-researched frustration-aggression theory. Moreover, divisive politics has a toxic effect on our culture. Social media and cable news fan these flames.

Finally, many elected officials and other so-called high status models who act badly offer permission to others to do likewise. Research on observational learning demonstrates that we tend to watch and imitate the behavior of people we find to be high status or admirable. If these models are reinforced without negative consequences, their behavior is more likely to be copied.

So, what can be done about all this? Let’s take a deep breath, de-stress ourselves, and treat others as they wish to be treated. The Golden Rule isn’t a heavy lift. Living together on an increasingly fragile planet is a challenge. Unless we all find a way to get along, things won’t end well for any of us. Respecting others, treating them with compassion and finding commonalities would go a long way. Pushing back on the negativity, demonization and divisiveness is critical too.

We live in stressful times on multiple levels yet we all have the potential to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We all need to step up and do so now.

With a Perspective, I’m Thomas Plante.

Thomas Plante is a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University and an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine.

For many years I’ve imagined a future scenario where I can no longer travel. I am confined to my home, too infirm or just plain too old to get out. But I knew when that day came I could find enough excitement in my own backyard to keep myself amused for the balance of my life. Well, what do you know? That day is here and much sooner than I expected.

Though I live in downtown Santa Rosa I have a relatively big yard with some magnificent native trees. I was an early shelter-at-home person so I have been home now for a month, rarely leaving. And since I’m a naturalist I have binoculars, a spotting scope and a microscope. This enables my view to expand or become incredibly focused.

I’ve been watching avian and mammalian drama unfold daily. The other day a new western gray squirrel showed up in the oaks and now three of them are chasing each other around, acting — duh —  squirrelly. Females are very territorial and aggressive, so maybe the new arrival is an unwanted female. Stay tuned to As the Oak Tree Turns.

My poor California towhees get beat up every day by the dominate scrub jays. But the crows whomp up on the jays- a literal pecking order! On the telephone pole out front every morning a Nuttall’s woodpecker drums. Drumming is done by both male and female woodpeckers to attract mates. They find a nice resonate tree trunk or a telephone pole and pound on it rhythmically. I wish them luck finding a mate.

But the most exciting bird news is the arrival of rufous hummingbirds to my feeder. These golden jewels are flying from Mexico to Alaska and are cruising through the Bay area fueling up. These diminutive travelers migrate 4000 miles!

I suppose like many of us in a more privileged position (and believe me I count my blessings daily) the gift of this most trying period has been to slow down and just witness the natural wonders that surround us. And this time around at least, my backyard adventures will soon be over.

This is Michael Ellis, with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist and lives in Santa Rosa.

When the invitation arrived, I hesitated.

A family party, celebrating my niece’s college graduation. The new normal for pandemic-era parties: evites include date, time and that every guest is vaccinated, party held outdoors.

A party seemed terrifying. After months of quarantine, I wasn’t mentally ready to go from socially distanced to social. Still, the invitation said everyone was vaccinated, and I hadn’t seen anyone except in family video calls, where off-key renditions of Happy Birthday had been sung, and glasses clinked at the screen for special occasions.

An actual party gave a whole new meaning to social anxiety, but I put on pants and went.

Entering to pantomimed air hugs, the back yard was crowded. But as the evening wore on, my mask came off. Food was delicious, drinks plentiful, the toasts to congratulate the graduate touching and hilarious. And, as we sat around talking and joking, I realized how much I had missed this. Just sitting around the backyard, with the dumb jokes, goofy behavior and well-worn stories that are part of any family gathering.

And, in this familiar setting, with the world so changed, I was suddenly, unexpectedly close to tears. My niece, graduating, while I remembered the day she was born. My brother and sister-in-law, with a silver anniversary coming up. Was it really so long ago I gave my best man speech at his wedding? I remembered sitting in this backyard with mom, gone now almost two years.

I was grateful for the dark, as I choked up for not just my family — for all our families. For the weddings and graduations and back yard get-togethers lost to lockdown. One in four Americans report losing a friend or family member, and around the world, nearly four million lives taken by this virus. Four million who will never again sit around with their family like this, sharing good times and bad.

It was a wonderful party. And that evening, I was grateful for more than just the dark. Although COVID has taken so much, it’s also given me something: a new sense of gratitude for simple things, for the chance to just sit around a backyard and laugh.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

I am idling at the wheel behind a couple cars at a stop sign. A few seconds tick by, then the driver just in front of me explodes with a furious bleat of honks. He’s jerking back and forth in agitation. Well, yes, why isn’t that car up at the front moving? I lift my hand to add my horn to the protest when I glimpse an elderly woman painfully creeping to the end of the crosswalk. Cars move forward. My face flushes in shame.

In mere seconds I’ve generated a great deal of anger…yet the incident was so insignificant. How often this happens.

I see a woman drop a bag of dog waste on the shore trail and I call after her in barely disguised irritation — “Uh, excuse me, but you left that bag!” She turns and patiently explains, “I use bright red bags so I always can find them when I come back this way after doing my two miles. Who can carry it that far in this heat!”

“Be curious, not furious,” I chant to myself, but it’s a challenging discipline. I have to mentally transport myself to the other side of a chasm of strong emotion and look back from the other person’s viewpoint. But if I can allow curiosity to nudge aside my anger, suddenly a new perspective opens. I can take a few beats, breathe, pose a few questions.

To make it a first impulse to inquire, to be generous enough to ask why takes a lot of practice. But saying, “Tell me what’s happening here” or “Please explain” opens the door to empathy.

Reaching out to investigate, willfully suspending anger, requires self-awareness as I hurry through my busy day. But it can help me connect to others instead of seeing them as obstacles. And it certainly lowers blood pressure and lightens my mood.

I’ll keep trying.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

As often as I can, I take a road trip from San Francisco over the Sierra Mountains down into the desert country on the other side. Such a trip is often motivated by a desire to forget my own and the world’s problems; in a sense, to get lost.

On the western side of the range, the drive up the long, forested slope is slow and gentle. But as soon as one hits the Sierra crest and starts the relatively brief decline, the road becomes steep and precipitous. The views are spectacular — the deep granite canyons of the mountains, the shimmering golds of the desert, and the baby blues of Mono Lake topped by endless sky.

The Sierras were created by battling tectonic plates but it is only when I reach the eastern side that I can really contemplate such a struggle. From the desert floor below, the mountains appear to rise like brutish teeth bursting forth to gnaw on California’s backbone. The plates really show their stuff here, giant earthmovers that when ready to blow show no patience for anything getting in their way. Battling it out, these subterranean masses of rock and fire used earthquakes and volcanos to fight for influence.

I possess nothing so effective to get my way as these dramatic forces, but they seem familiar nonetheless. Sitting fuming in San Francisco traffic or at home watching the TV news, I often become my own version of fracturing earthquakes and erupting volcanos.

It is at these times when I long to let go of striving altogether, to drop the need to effect outcomes. A trip to the eastern Sierras offers tantalizing opportunities to do just that. Viewing the mountains from the desert country below, I feel my ego shrink in direct proportion to the immensity of the landscape and the forces that created it. The thing called “I” starts to disappear, replaced by a much humbler, yet at the same time vastly expanded, view of the world.

Once again, I become gratefully lost.

With a Perspective, I’m Carol Arnold.

Carol Arnold is a retired environmental planner. She lives in San Francisco.

When I married the writer Julius Lester in 1962, I knew our interracial union was illegal in some states, yet living in New York I wasn’t worried. Even when our parents wouldn’t come to our wedding, at a brash 22 I shrugged it off.

Only when the Civil Rights Movement exploded and Julius traveled South did I understand the barrier of Southern laws. We could be arrested — or killed — if we traveled together. One biracial Virginia couple, Mildred and Richard Loving, had been jailed for marrying and threatened with prison if they didn’t leave Virginia. So they left—and sued.

Five years into my marriage, on June 12, 1967 I was listening to the radio when I heard, “In Loving vs Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled state bans on interracial marriage are unconstitutional.” I screamed, startling our daughter.

“Don’t cry, baby,” I said. “We’re legal now!”

Forty-eight years later on another June day, the Supreme Court once more ruled on a landmark marriage case — this time for same-sex couples. By then I’d been in a committed relationship with Carole Johnson for decades. As we watched Justice Kennedy deliver the Court’s majority opinion, we wept. Our California marriage would be nationally recognized. And the Court repeatedly cited Loving as establishing the right to choose a marriage partner.

This June 12, celebrated as Loving Day to honor the historic ruling, I thank Mildred and Richard Loving for insisting on their right to love. Their emblematic name is not a coincidence, because truly, they left a deeply loving legacy.

With a Perspective, this is Joan Steinau Lester.

Joan Steinau Lester is the author of “Loving Before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White.”

You knew this was coming. You knew it when your child was 2 and she climbed into a wicker basket, asking you to push her around the kitchen floor. “Again,” she said, when you were exhausted.

She breezed through elementary, middle and high school and there you are, dropping her off at a university in New York. You help move her into a dorm and good Lord. Three girls crammed into a tiny space. “I can’t live like this,” she says.

You share a goodbye dinner at a sushi restaurant. You won’t eat the spicy tuna roll. You will stare at it. Later, you will watch your child walk away with a TJ Maxx bag, a plastic sunflower sticking out the top.

Your child will fly home for Christmas. She will talk about awesome bagels. She will say New York’s cool but she might transfer back to the Bay Area. Your heart will leap; don’t say a word.

Before your child returns to New York, she will get her wisdom teeth out. You will buy her mango smoothies, feeling powerful by helping her. Then, before she leaves, you will cry at a stoplight.

The night before your child goes back to New York, you will have a special dinner. It will be sad. You will admit to yourself that you didn’t see your child much while she was home. You saw her rush out to meet her boyfriend, heard her return at 2 a.m. But she was there.

You will know it doesn’t matter where she finishes her degree. It doesn’t matter if she has straight A’s.

You will think about the wicker basket, the plastic sunflower sticking out of the TJ Maxx bag, the sad sushi restaurant. You will know that what matters, the only thing that matters, is that she is your child.

With a Perspective, I’m Mark Clevenger.

Mark Clevenger is a college counselor in Menlo Park. His daughter Chloe is attending St. John’s University.

I recently watched a 3-year old who does not know how to read share a book with a 1-year old who does not know how to talk. Snuggled together in a chair, they both already knew the behaviors of a good story time. The 3-year old pointed to text and pictures and waved her hands around as she named things, and the 1-year old, undeterred by the occasional swat away to prevent him from bending the pages, followed closely, punctuating the conversation with an occasional appreciative ‘OHHH’ and his only word—“uh-oh.” They were having a good time.

These two little ones already have a head start for future success, in school and beyond. I couldn’t tell their native intelligence, nor could I predict whether they would be poets or mechanics or mathematicians, but because they already know how to sit still, albeit oh so briefly, and look at and discuss, sort of, a printed page, they are, even now, ready for the conventions of school, of collaborative learning, of the business and academic world.

As I watched these two, I was struck by their good fortune in the midst of the inequities of the world, but the teacher/optimist in me still believes that even small steps can effect large benefits. Instead of just replicating and perpetuating what is, many groups are changing the pattern. Pediatricians endorse reading to kids from infancy, and even “prescribe” and give books to new parents. But because hardworking, less affluent parents might not have the time or resources to do what they know is good for their kids, we can help: just Google “volunteer to read to kids,” and opportunities pop up.

I became a teacher decades ago with the grand ambition to change the world, and I have retained that goal. My idea of the world I can change has, however, been tempered by humility and years. I now believe that if I, or any of us, can make a difference in the life of one child, we have indeed changed the world. Helping a child to love reading is changing the world.

With a Perspective, this is Ellen Greenblatt.

Ellen Greenblatt is a Bay Area educator.

My 87-year-old mom and I drive the wide open fields outside of town. We can’t stop in at any restaurants because she might catch the deadly virus and die. We keep moving though we have nowhere to go.

Right on Road 99? Why not? We’ve got all day. Left on Road 45? Sure! We crane our necks for red barns, infinite fields and the sudden appearance of an almond orchard. She points at huge clouds forming over the mountains. “Wow, look at those!” She turns her head for a sheep or a cow and I supply the word. We pull over to watch the beauty of a horse.

We don’t talk much because she can’t find the words anymore. Words and memories are no longer kind to her, but one thing she has always loved is going for a drive. Cruising a road we’ve taken a hundred times, she’ll remark, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this way before.” Out of nowhere, she’ll suddenly blurt, “We’re really out in the country!”

Mainly, we listen to music, her old favorites. Maria Muldaur sings, “Hasn’t it been a long hard climb? / Everything taking its own sweet time …” and she nods and the fields give way to foothills. We wind through green hills, belting out “American Pie” and when Don McLean croons, “This will be the day that I die,” my mom remarks quietly, “Hopefully not.”

We turn back toward town and James Taylor croons, “In my mind, I’ve gone to Carolina …” My mom was born in Charleston and often mistakes my brother and me for her brothers. In some ways, she really has gone to Carolina in her mind.

If I yawn, she asks, “Tired?” and then offers to drive though she hasn’t in years. “I still can, you know,” she adds. I thank her and say I’m fine.

As the sun sets over the mountains, I ask her if she’s tired of sitting in the car.

“Actually,” she says with a laugh. “I’m happy to be out of the house.”

Evan Nichols teaches English and ESOL at Merritt College in Oakland.

This past year, Stop Asian Hate reported more than 6,600 hate incidents nationally against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, more than 40% in California. The AAPI community is responding with unprecedented political activism, grassroots organizing, money and visibility. While we’re standing up for ourselves, we should also consider our past allies and how we can be better allies to others.

My father, Wen-Lan Chen, came to the U. S. at the end of World War II with other Chinese engineers touring coal mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He was able to enroll at Penn State, thanks to a white faculty member who made room for him, despite millions of returning soldiers enrolling through the GI bill. He found jobs, stayed in the U. S. and avoided persecution in China. That professor changed the trajectory of our family.

My parents knew the racism of motel owners and landlords who refused them rooms. But they reached across racial lines and sold our home to a Black family, helping integrate our Chicago neighborhood.

The School of the Arts in San Francisco is named after Ruth Asawa. During World War II, she and her family were sent to an internment camp in Arkansas. She was denied a job as a schoolteacher due to her race. But at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, she was mentored by Josef Albers, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, and Buckminster Fuller. Ruth later inspired a love of art among children and families of all backgrounds in the Bay Area.

John Duong endured the atrocities of a Khmer Rouge camp in Cambodia, landing in Wisconsin in 1981. Catholic nuns arranged housing, his first with indoor plumbing and electricity. The nuns helped clothe him and fill out forms in English. John has founded an investment firm supporting entrepreneurs of color.

As Asian Americans, our future progress relies on standing with others who have known racism and discrimination. This is not always easy or simple. But if hatred is the other virus, solidarity is the cure.

With a Perspective, I’m Milton Chen.

Milton Chen has worked with educational media and foundations and is an author, speaker and nonprofit board member.

Well, some anatomist did when the word ‘muscle’ was coined; it comes from the Latin word ‘musculus’ – meaning little mouse named such because the movement of a muscle is reminiscent of a little mouse moving under a blanket.

In fact, a number of terms for our anatomy have animals hiding within.

The coccyx, commonly called the tailbone, is the small triangle-shaped bone at the base of the spinal column and named for its resemblance to the beak of a cuckoo bird. ‘Coccyx’ comes from Greek for cuckoo bird.

The cornea, the transparent membrane covering the surface of the eye comes from the Latin word ‘cornu’, meaning “animal horn,” because – delicate though it seems – this tissue is surprisingly hard, like an animal’s horn.

Another anatomy term comes from cornu. Keratin is the tough protein that is the main structural component of hair and nails in humans and hooves, claws, feathers, beaks, and horns in other animals.

The cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity of the inner ear is called such because it looks like a snail shell: snail is ‘kokhlos’ in Greek.

And if you think you’re going to have trouble remembering all of this, you’re underestimating your hippocampus, the part of our brain crucial for long-term memory. The hippocampus was a mythological sea creature who was part horse – ‘hippo’ is Greek for “horse” — and part fish. An Italian anatomist thought this area was suggestive of the curves of the Hippocampus’s tail, and so it was named.

We also have a few less scientific terms for parts of our anatomy inspired by animals: cowlick, dewlap, crow’s feet, buck teeth, harelip, goatee, ponytail, and pigtails.

These and many more animal-related words reflect how deeply rooted animals are in our consciousness, in our history, in our lives – and deep in our animal bones.

With a Perspective, this is Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is an author and animal activist living in Oakland.

Concerning love, there’s one type that I’ll never be seduced by. The sensuous ads featuring the year’s sleek, alluring models have no effect on me.

I’m talking about cars, of course. I don’t trust cars. I just want the machine to get me from Point A to Point B. I’ve never loved any — any — car. I don’t name my cars, though I have called them names.

I don’t want a relationship. It’s not that I’m not romantic. I, I just have baggage. See, I grew up in the 1960s and 70s with all our family cars breaking down. Highway 17 to Santa Cruz used to have overheated cars on the shoulder every few miles, and we always had one of them. I thought everyone drove around with milk jugs filled with water in their trunk. I could light a road flare at age 6.

Later, when I got my own car, I had to settle for a $250 Chevy Impala — $250 because it was technically totaled on the driver’s side. My door didn’t click shut. It just sort of wedged shut, and I used my shoulder to block it open. A darkly stained lap belt suggested that perhaps the driver had also been totaled. I continued spending time marooned on the side of freeways, sometimes hitchhiking, leaving the cars that betrayed me.

So now, autonomous driving is coming. Wow. A game-changer! A whole new, futuristic level of distrust that I feel.

Look, I know that driving is dangerous, and self-driving cars are already logging millions of miles without a scratch, but, still, I don’t trust them. If I resent my car so much now, how much more acute will my resentment be when the car knows everything? I have a wife for that.

The cars are ready. But I am not. I’ll keep my milk jugs of water, thank you.

When you see me stranded on the shoulder, please smile and wave.

With a perspective, I’m Steve McMoyler.

Steve McMoyler works in Silicon Valley.

Well, it’s been over 50 years since we hung around together, Doug. We had great plans for life after high school, didn’t we? You were going to search for the holy grail of physics, the unified field theory, and I was going to design elegant electronic devices. I remember that you kidded me that I would end up building better refrigerators. But I think that if anyone was likely to have found that theory, it would have been you.

I’d spent the summer before our sophomore year working as a library page at MIT and was all afire to go there. I talked with you so much about it, I think I put the notion in your head, too. Anyway, when MIT rejected me and took you, I gave you the MIT pennant I’d had up over my bed and wished you well. It was only fair: I was smart, but you were brilliant.

We drifted out of touch when I went off to New Orleans and you to Cambridge. I started down a path that led to a hitch in the Air Force in Germany, and you stayed the course at MIT. When I got your letter saying that your Navy Reserve Seabee unit had been activated and sent to Vietnam, I scratched my head and wondered what that had to do with the unified field theory, but I was preoccupied with getting ready to try civilian life again.

Then in September 1967 I got the letter from my mother with the newspaper clipping: “Sailor killed in Vietnam.” It seems you were in your bunk when that artillery round dropped on your tent. I’d like to think that you were like the soldier the World War I poet Wilfred Owen described:

“There, in the happy no-time of his sleeping, Death took him by the heart.”

I’d also like to think that in that “happy no-time” you found your own unified field theory.

With a Perspective in memory of Douglas Carroll Coker, I’m Winston Tharp.

Winston Tharp is a retired broadcast engineer who narrates audio books from his East Bay home.

A dear and well-intentioned friend of mine only recently got vaccinated. His reasons for wanting to wait it out were several. His dad had been one of the Tuskegee Airmen. And he believed that resilient natural systems if unimpeded can figure things out.

He reminded me of how we bring our own stories to a decision.

As a doctor, my wife has treated 90-year-old survivors of polio who lost the use of their limbs. She has witnessed firsthand the consequence of a nearly eradicated disease. Few in our generation have had this opportunity and may feel polio is not a problem. The vaccine was so successful that it eradicated the very understanding of why the vaccine was desired in the first place.

As for myself, a turning point came from a friend who was a CDC epidemiologist. A study early in his career revealed that some of the strongest pockets of vaccine hesitancy were among communities of wealth or privilege. Residents were sufficiently insulated from diseases that they felt no need to take action. Not having directly experienced the disease, the perceived risk of the vaccine appeared greater. In his withering assessment, my friend stated that, consciously or not, folks were choosing to reap the rewards of herd immunity without having to bear the cost. Even more crushing: because no vaccine is 100% effective, disease incident rates among vaccinated were higher in communities where there was strong vaccine hesitancy: in the case of the affluent towns, the unvaccinated were infecting those who had born the cost of the vaccine.

But for those in India or other places of the world where vaccines are simply not available, these words might be even more infuriating. Because, quite simply, we have a choice.

And choice, after all, is itself an immense luxury.

With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.

Andrew Lewis lives in Sebastopol.

As my senior year is coming to an end, I just can’t help but reminisce on these last four years at my high school. Remarkably, a quarter of it was done during a pandemic.

I’ve missed many key senior year moments: football games, homecoming and prom. But most of all, I’ve missed my peers. COVID – 19 has robbed from me my community, and those once-in-a-lifetime moments.

I did my best to virtually hang out with my friends and make things work in a tough time. But it just wasn’t the same. At first, it felt strange to talk with my 6-foot-tall friend and not have to lean my head back to make eye contact. Now, I am used to it.

COVID – 19 has eliminated something in all my friendships: the ability to live in the moment. As we all one by one turn 18, we have gotten busier and have less time to connect. We are now forced to plan out our virtual calls sometimes days in advance. I fear that when I start college, the frequency of even these planned calls might decrease as we focus more on our diplomas and our career paths.

Tomorrow I graduate, closing another chapter of my life. I have had many emotional transitions, before starting at new schools and moving to new towns. But this transition in particular feels different. Come next August, it is likely I will never see all my friends in the same room on a daily basis ever again.

While I’m nervous for this new chapter of my life and leaving precious moments behind, I’m excited to make new beginnings.

Unexpectedly, COVID has prepared me for this departure. While I’ll be in another state for college next fall, connecting virtually won’t be foreign to me anymore.

With a Perspective, I am Pratham Dalal.

Pratham Dalal is 18 years old and lives in Dublin. His Perspective was produced by YR Media.

Most Saturday mornings when I was a kid, my mom would tell me to clean my room. I wasn’t allowed to come out until everything was spotless, including my dreaded clean up spaces: under the bed and in my closet: the two places I enjoyed shoving things to give the illusion of cleanliness.

I would begrudgingly head upstairs after breakfast, isolated in my room; flipping through old yearbooks, painting my nails, and occasionally, painstakingly making piles to be organized and never quite knowing how to organize them. Sometimes, I’d be in there all day — the task monotonous, but the time soaring by.

Many people have been experiencing this same bizarro phenomenon with the pandemic isolation. Where have the last 14 months gone? Without set routines and social interaction, I’ve had a hard time creating structures that provide a familiar sense of time. Every day has started to feel like a Saturday cleaning my room.
My kids are growing and changing, but since we are never apart, I just don’t notice it.

At the beginning of the shelter in place, I began to see a new baby around my townhouse complex, carried around by his grandfather. He speaks no English, but we always seemed to be out for a short walk the same time each day, so we started waving to each other. A nice, silent, neighborly relationship developed.

This baby has been my benchmark of the passage of time through isolation. Each time I see him, I notice him growing and changing. I watched him learn to smile at me as I waved, then months later, wave back. Yesterday in the driveway, he toddled out of his garage with his grandfather, and I saw him walk for the first time.

Over the course of the pandemic, it has been moving to watch this child blossom. My baby sundial friend reminds me that beautiful, significant things are going on outside of the vortex that has become my home. While everything seems to be standing still and passing by at the same time, babies are learning to walk past milestones. It reminds me that time still exists and we are, in fact, moving forward.

With a Perspective, I’m Vanessa Dueck.

Vanessa Dueck is a writer and aspiring elite runner in the South Bay.

I wanted an apple for my morning muesli but the only one left had three soft brown spots. Normally, I would have tossed it out. But these were COVID-19 times. And I was doubly hobbled because a freak fall had broken my fibula bone. I needed an orthopedic boot just to stand up. Forget making a quick trip to the store.

I cut the blemishes away and grated my apple. It was delicious. And it made me think: How did I become someone who threw away food so easily?

Growing up in Berlin in the long shadow of World War II, I learned that food was precious. Nothing was tossed out. Every plate was cleared.

My mother shopped with just a string bag. Then she remarried and we moved to the United States. The neighborhood supermarket in St. Paul was a miracle; shelves of cereal boxes, pyramids of canned peas, piles of watermelons, an expanse of red meats, stacks of candy bars. I was awestruck.

Midsummer, my stepdad took us to the company picnic, a jolly lakeside affair. Tables were heaped with jello molds and layered cakes. Grill stations featured men flipping burgers. You could take as much food as you wanted and no one cared if you finished it.

I remember the egg-toss game. People flinging eggs back and forth until they splattered slicking the grass with gooey yellow patches. The winner pitched his egg into the lake and everyone cheered. I didn’t. When we left the picnic, half-eaten hot dogs and cupcakes were spilling from garbage cans. I felt sad. But over the years, I became careless with food.

I decided this was one BC — before COVID — habit I would break. Instead of stocking up, I would use up. My pantry is full of lentils, rice, tomato paste and more — so many ingredients to create meals I will gladly finish.

With a Perspective, I’m Christine Schoefer.

Christine Schoefer is a writer who teaches empowerment skills to women and girls

As an activist, I never thought I’d ever wish this but with all of this anti-Asian American racism, especially the attacks on our elderly, I wish that we were invisible. But this is a false choice. For decades as a psychotherapist and diversity consultant, I’ve been a persistent advocate of making the contributions of Asian Americans more known in this country’s narrative. However, instead of celebrating and affirming Asian Americans, we are all witnessing the scapegoating and senseless victimization of AAPIs, especially ironic considering May is AAPI heritage month.

I am experiencing outrage fatigue as I see attack after attack, with few being specifically characterized as racially motivated hate crimes. It’s crazy-making to know in my heart of hearts that what I see is based on race, but to not have it validated. It’s as if COVID and the former president have made us visible for all the wrong reasons. Asians being seen as carriers of disease is history repeating itself, regressing to a time when Chinese immigrants were detained at Angel Island for fear of the “diseases” they may bring. It’s almost as if the Pandora’s box of racial hate and intolerance manifesting as misguided aggression toward Asian American Pacific Islanders has been reopened. Never did I imagine we’d be reliving any semblance of this history again.

The recent stabbing of two Asian American elderly women on Market street waiting at a bus stop perpetrated by a 53-year-old man was painful to watch on the news. He had both a criminal and psychiatric history revealing shortcomings in our mental health and legal systems. It’s also been hard not to notice that some of these attacks have been Black on Asian victims. It’s sad that what should be uniting Asian and African Americans together in a parallel process of racial pain and solidarity, has instead exacerbated tensions between the two communities.

I am certainly not suggesting that becoming more invisible is the solution to protecting our elderly and vulnerable. On the contrary, we have to lay claim to all of these racist incidents and to have them fully visible. I am witnessing a movement where Asian Americans are discovering our voice of protest and rage. It’s been long in coming. We can be quiet no more.

With a Perspective, I’m Larry Lee

Larry Lee is a San Francisco psychotherapist.

In 1996, early one Sunday morning, I went to Grace Cathedral and discovered my first labyrinth. There are two of them, one outside and the other inside — identical copies of the famous one in France. I had no preconceived notions of what to expect. I just knew from a friend that you walked it and it was cool.

I didn’t have much time and parking was difficult but I rushed in and found the indoor one. I took off my shoes and started walking it. I soon realized that it would take me a while to do. I started thinking that I had parked in an illegal place and maybe my car would get towed. I hadn’t allowed enough time for this. I was supposed to be at some friends for breakfast at 8:30 and then I had a hike to lead at 10 and I wasn’t really prepared. My mind was full of clutter and my head was ringing as I walked around the path. I was all alone in a big room but I could hear muted singing and prayer from next door. It sounded so nice. But damn it where was the center? I had to get to it and leave. Now I realized I was committed to the path, I couldn’t stop now. I just couldn’t walk out across the labyrinth but I had places to go, important things to do.

Then I began to slow down, realizing that this wasn’t the point of the labyrinth. I was supposed to pay attention to my walking and not let all this other stuff interfere, so I did, just watched one step in front of the other, my breathing slowed and almost immediately I found myself in the center, the light shining on me. I closed my eyes and immersed myself in this place, a wonderful peace suffused me, I bathed myself in it and then slowly walked back out … knowing with my body that it didn’t really matter if my car was towed or I was a few minutes late for breakfast or all of the things I had planned in my life had not come out as I wanted, that the point was to take one conscious and mindful step at a time and the rest will take care of itself.

And like nearly everyone I’ve had my yearlong share of struggles, especially recently. I still walk labyrinths, hundreds of them, and always find peace in the journey and faith in the not knowing.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

After months of lockdown, I am now able to drop my kids at school. I can pick up groceries, go for a run, even eat at restaurants. Things are going back to normal. But when I check the news in India, the country of my birthplace, I am confronted with a different scenario.

India’s COVID cases have seen a sharp uptick and the infrastructure is overwhelmed.

Grief, anger, bitterness is mounting, and blame is being passed around – the hubris of the government, the nonchalance of the collective public, the insensitivity of the media, the virulence of the variant, and so on.

But how does it matter? It doesn’t change the numbers I see

Population: 1.4 billion
Vaccinations: 3%
Daily Cases: more than 300,000
Daily Death Rate: more than 4,000

And more numbers:

Countries affected by COVID: 200 plus
Total COVID cases: 163 million
Total Deaths: 3.4 million
Months since COVID: 15 plus
Global Vaccination rate: 4.6%

Every country across the globe has struggled. Lockdowns enforced, schools closed, jobs and lives lost- everywhere. Even as we deal with the grief, anger, bitterness – let’s not lose sight of the fact that what the world needs most of all is the realization that You and I are not that different.

Some of us might be doing better now. Israel may be 56% vaccinated, the US might be considering taking off masks for vaccinated people, New Zealand may hardly have any positive cases but the nature of this virus is such that I can’t help asking – until the whole world is safe, are we really safe?

Perhaps, it took a virus to show us how interlinked we are. When one part of the world is suffering, how can we celebrate in the other?

So even as we relax and plan our vacations, we have to remember that people elsewhere are struggling to breathe. We still have work to do. Research, question, vaccinate, donate – do what you can.

We are already united by COVID. Now, let’s defeat it. With a Perspective, I am Sandhya Acharya.

Sandhya Acharya is an author of children’s books.

I was saddened by the news that 86-year-old Bay Area cycling icon Joe Shami died in a collision with an SUV in Lafayette last month. Shami had ridden to the top of Mt. Diablo 615 consecutive weeks, a phenomenal feat for a cyclist of any age.

A former marathon runner, Shami began serious biking in his 50s when his knees started hurting. For nearly 12 years, he rode 40 miles round-trip to the 3,800 foot summit of the Bay Area’s highest peak every week, regardless of heat, high winds, rain and even snow.

As a casual cyclist in my late 60s who reached the summit of Mt. Diablo just once, I was amazed to learn of his achievements. One of my regular routes takes me through the traffic circle where he died.  A fatal crash for such an accomplished rider was a potent reminder of the risk of cycling among cars and trucks without a metal shell and air bags to protect you.

I’ve had a few recent accidents, one from a large pothole and another when a careless cyclist cut me off. Fortunately, I survived without serious injury, but the fear of another fall has made me more cautious. In the past, I’d run some stop signs and speed downhill.  Not any more.

Since I love cruising on two wheels through the scenic East Bay hills, I’m determined to keep riding despite the potential danger. That said, we can all do more to improve safety for motorized and human-powered vehicles.

According to Caltrans, more than 60% of fatal bike crashes were caused by distracted drivers hitting cyclists, even when riders used bike lanes and observed traffic laws. Earlier this month, I had the right-of-way in the circle where Shami died when a motorist sped up to the circle from a side road with a phone in his hand. I swerved to avoid him, but he stopped in time.

If you are driving as you listen to this, please consider the tragic loss of the remarkable Joe Shami, and resolve to keep an eye out for cyclists every moment you’re on the road.

With a Perspective, I’m Tom Epstein.

Tom Epstein is a writer and community volunteer who lives in the East Bay.

I used to make fun of my grandpa for writing me “thank you notes for my thank you letters.” It seemed sappy at the time, but I was recently reminded of how meaningful — and lasting — it is to be thanked.

My parents were emptying their storage unit and asked me to claim the boxes that I’d left with them almost 30 years ago before moving to Europe. I brought them home, opened one of the time capsules, and started sifting through old prom portraits, postcards from my travels, an autographed photo from Mark Harmon, 1986’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” and faded black and white newspaper clippings from my high school plays.

Buried amidst my paper memories was a file of commendation letters I received as a flight attendant in the late 1980s. Reading the passenger thanks still made me feel good all these years later. It felt special knowing that people took the time to write and express their appreciation. When someone says “thank you” it’s as if they see you — even for a few minutes — before life hustles on.

Philosopher William James said, “After basic needs are met, is the need to be appreciated.” Handwritten letters are rare these days, but even a quick email thanks for a job well done, or for getting in touch makes a difference. Thank yous can take other forms, like a wave when a driver allows you into their lane, a nod when someone stops to let you cross in the crosswalk and of course a smile for essential workers, caregivers and family. And giving thanks is a “twofer.” Harvard Health writes that gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. So, thanking and being thanked makes you happy. Give a shout out to the universe when you wake up each morning and set a positive tone for your day. It’s tough and toxic out there. Let’s challenge ourselves to make thanks-giving a daily ritual. Thank you for listening. And thank you — grandpa, wherever you are — for thanking me for my thank you. I get it now.

With a Perspective, I’m Stephanie Denman.

Stephanie Denman is a communications consultant living in the East Bay with her husband and two teens.

My daughter’s friend Jenna was coming over. At least I thought it was Jenna.

My daughter is a high school sophomore. She’s got a solid group of friends, some of whose gender identities are in flux. Keeping up to date with them has been difficult in the pandemic. Except for the occasional socially distanced backyard visit, kids don’t come over. So I don’t get to match names to faces, chat a bit and learn a little something about them.

Take Jenna. Jenna started high school using he/him pronouns. Then she switched to she/her pronouns and changed her name to Charlotte. But “Charlotte” wasn’t a fit, so she chose Jenna. I’m comfortable with Jenna declaring her gender and pronouns. But could I trust my middle-aged brain to remember which name to use?

It’s not just Jenna. There’s Tristan, who’s nonbinary. There’s Kai, who uses xe/xem pronouns. And there’s Eleanor, who now identifies as non-binary and uses she/they pronouns, but kept their birth name. I sometimes have trouble keeping track of who’s who, and what to call them.

You know who I have gotten to know really well during the pandemic? The characters of “Call the Midwife,” the BBC drama about childbirth and community. My favorite character is Shelagh. She was born Shelagh Mannion, then became a nun and changed her name to Sister Bernadette. She trained as a nurse, left the convent and became Nurse Mannion. She then married Dr. Turner, and became Shelagh Turner, or Nurse Turner.

I can remember all that, so why not my daughter’s friends’ names and pronouns? It helps that Shelagh isn’t wearing a mask, that I see her pretty often and that name changes like hers are culturally accepted. But when I think about it, I realize that TV’s fictional nun-turned-nurse-turned-wife changed her name for the same reason that my daughter’s friends did: love.

Shelagh changed her name for love of god, love of vocation, love of spouse. My daughter’s friends change their names and pronouns for love, too: we call it self-acceptance. Maybe realizing this will help me remember their names. An end to quarantine would help, too, so I can see them more often than I see Shelagh.

With a Perspective, I’m Sarah Hoffman.

Sarah Hoffman lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two children. Names in this Perspective have been changed to protect privacy.

Adults see us teens in many ways and have their own expectations for us. They get these assumptions of our school life based on the way they lived their own education . They were raised differently, so their school life was way different from ours. Technology has advanced and it’s caused many changes in our lives. Our understanding of our lives today is more clear to us than when they were our age but adults don’t see that.

Adults think teens only have to go to school, do their work, get good grades, and pass — or at least these are their expectations. But because of the pandemic, school has gotten really hard. I’ve heard many adults say teens have no reason to stress. I’ve had teachers in my experience tell me that young people don’t have to deal with “real world” problems like working and paying the bills. But, in my perspective, I find this very wrong.

To begin, we have many classes, each with constant assignments. They start to pile up, stressing us out and affecting our mental health. When I’m struggling with school work, I overthink my future. What if I don’t pass this class? Or what if I fail? How would that affect my ability to go to college, if I can make it.

I also think of my parents because what if I can’t take care of them when they finally rest and stop working. These are the thoughts that go through my mind when I’m struggling to reach my goals.

We are often balancing just as many commitments as an adult would on their work calendar. School is a huge part of our life. And for the last year, it’s been online. Adults haven’t ever had to experience these problems as youth, relying on technology for education. It’s made school more difficult than it ever was, having to deal with computers with little support at home. High school went from notepads to emails and Zoom calls. Technology made us mature faster like we’re adults at work.

With a Perspective, I’m Jose Castro

Jose Castro is a 10th-grader at Fremont High School in Oakland.

Last month, schools in San Francisco re-opened for in-person learning after more than a year of online school. With an already existing teacher shortage worsened by the pandemic, I was sent to cover a kindergarten class for a few days.

Walking into a school after all these months, I was nervous. Five-year-olds are germy. But the school district had strict safety protocols, with daily health screenings for parents and students, and testing and vaccinations for staff.

This first day of school may have been in April, but it wasn’t so different from any kindergarten day. A couple kids cried, a few couldn’t decide between clay, Legos or puzzles at free time, and by 1:30, everyone was so worn out they needed a nap, including me.

But some things have changed. The jar of goldfish crackers for snack time is gone, replaced by individual packages, and masked kids sat alone and socially distanced at round tables spread far apart. The day began with hand sanitizer instead of the “Good Morning” song, since singing spreads infectious aerosols.

Playing close together was not allowed and nobody shared crayons or tossed a ball. In hallways, teachers reminded kids to keep masks on and students extended arms like airplane wings as they walked, to stay distant.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is the joy of learning. These 5-year-olds were so happy to be with other kids in a real school, not on a screen, they absorbed lessons like sponges. By day two, they had all mastered writing names and simple adding and take-away and couldn’t wait to come back. “I love school!” one student told me when the bell rang. And I knew what she meant. Schools may look different now, but the cheerful energy of a building full of kids is still there, under the masks.

History is not taught in kindergarten curriculum.

But these youngsters are learning history by living through history. And years from now, when their own children start school, maybe these students will tell them the story of the COVID generation starting kindergarten, masked and distant, in the great pandemic of 2021.

With a Perspective, I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

About a year ago I read an article about a term used by epidemiologists and statisticians: “Update your priors.” As I understand it, update your priors means changing your beliefs based on observed evidence. Since then I’ve watched as the pandemic became a series of updated priors.

Take masks. They were in short supply when COVID hit, so we were advised not to use them unless we were medical professionals or felt sick. I donated a box of N95s to my local hospital that I’d bought during wildfire season. Pretty quickly, though, evidence piled up showing that wearing a mask is one of the most effective means of reducing coronavirus transmission, especially indoors. Mandates followed. Yet certain Americans stuck with the no-mask advice even during those painful months and waves of deadly infections, and blamed officials for changing guidelines. Now the CDC has decreed that those who are fully vaccinated are free to ditch the mask outdoors … in most situations. Update your priors!

Last May I was afraid to touch the handle on my mailbox and constantly washed my hands. I also took my shoes off after grocery shopping, and felt guilty about not wiping down those groceries. Then scientists concluded that the primary mode of COVID transmission is airborne. Ohhh. Another update was called for when it became clear that a person didn’t have to feel sick in order to have COVID or spread it. Asymptomatic transmission? That was novel!

Updating your priors requires flexibility, an open mind and a willingness to revise beliefs as evidence warrants. It argues against making judgments that are immovable. Now when I learn more about an issue or a person that makes me feel as if I should change my mind, I say “Update your priors!”

It’s why I’m allowing my environment to become, well, a bit less sterile now that I’m fully vaccinated. It’s safe to be social! And because the outside world has lots of good bacteria that strengthen the immune system, perhaps that handle on my mailbox isn’t so scary after all.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

Debbie Duncan writes children’s books from her home on the Peninsula.

Throughout the Bay Area high school seniors are finalizing their college decisions. This can be a joyous time of year. But for many, the decision is not where to go to college, but whether or not they can afford college at all.

Over the past 50 years, the cost of college has increased significantly and financial aid has not kept pace. In 1970, federal Pell grants covered more than 75% of the cost of attending a public university. In 2021, they cover just 28%. In 1970, students graduated with an average student loan debt of less than $1000. Today, that number is more than $30,000.

In California, we are fortunate to have excellent public university systems that provide high quality, accessible educational opportunities. Full time tuition at most CSU campuses is less than $8000 per year, a fraction of what private universities cost to attend. But even at that relatively low rate, many students struggle to afford tuition and living expenses.

The pandemic has exacerbated these struggles and had a disproportionate impact on our Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian Pacific Islander and adult students. Over the past year I’ve had countless conversations with students who are struggling to continue their education, worried about debt and having to make decisions between paying for classes and paying for electricity. Campus food banks have seen record demand and emergency grant funds have been quickly depleted.

We must strengthen our investment in our students and communities by making higher education more affordable. As Congress considers President Biden’s American Families Plan, I stand with education leaders from across California who are calling on Congress to expand financial aid and double Pell. Doing so will significantly increase college access, improve student outcomes, strengthen our workforce and make this a joyous time of year for many more families.

With a Perspective, I’m Heather Lattimer.

Heather Lattimer is a professor of education and dean of the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University.

A big challenge for me as a teacher was trying to get the kids to have empathy for their future selves. Every day, we’d devote 15 minutes to making a schedule for completing assigned work. The kids would place next to nothing on tonight’s “to-do” list, but pile up tasks for the nebulous, limitless weekend. I’d beg them to imagine how they’d feel Sunday night, confronting the heap of all they’d postponed. No luck. Everyone believed in a future self who was superhuman, needing no sleep, immune to pain.

Yet, I’ve spent years struggling with the same issue myself. Who hasn’t?

Why do now what can be postponed for the rosy future in which all is possible with zero effort?

It’s taken a lifetime to begin to get it. The pandemic did nudge me along. Things I formerly would procrastinate now had to be scheduled: grocery shopping in an empty store at 8 a.m., picking up a book at the library within an assigned 15-minute time frame. Worse, reserving a lap lane at the pool required planning two weeks out. I laid out the garden on paper in January to minimize trips to the nursery and monitored household supplies to leave time to order them online. I even stockpiled birthday cards and stamps; sprinting to the post office last minute was out of the question. How orderly my life began to feel.

Just as poor grades on a report card often were the catalyst for my students to develop paced work habits, this year seared the same lesson into me. I lovingly cared for my future self.

But now, of course, I’m off the leash. Sadly, I can feel myself reverting to my old ways. I procrastinate with abandon, run out of Tylenol and printer ink, rush to the pool just before closing time, plan meals last minute and have to dash to the store.

In the mirror, Future Me looks back, craving a lot more.

With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

I’ve been part of Bay Area music for 40 years. In the 70s, I discovered the Mabuhay Gardens. This North Beach restaurant-by-day, punk-rock-club-by-night hosted that decade’s legendary musicians and in my ripped Iggy Pop T-shirt, I was hanging around with the best.

By the 80s, I’d sung in about 10 bands, some for years, others for days. As the 80s became the 90s, I stumbled into the San Francisco drag counterculture, singing alongside artists who had a genius for style and witty lines.

The brilliance of many of these performers was lost to the ravages of AIDS. So by the time the aughts rolled around, I kept singing, but with all those names crossed out in my address book, I felt a little too sad to rock out anymore. A nightclub owner suggested a Judy Garland cabaret act.

It was a hit, and I’ve been performing as Judy for over 20 years. But live cabaret doesn’t play with COVID, and I haven’t had a gig in more than a year. These days, I work in a high-end grocery store, performing for an audience of one in my checkout lane.

I’ve gone from counterculture to checkout counter — a grocery store Auntie Mame. My youngster co-workers love hearing stories of the 70s, at least I hope they do, when this city was filled with outrageous originality, not total e-business solutions.

I didn’t think 20 years as Judy Garland would help me get through a pandemic, but they have. And I’m hoping we all wake up from this bad dream soon, to hear that clang, clang, clang of the trolley again. And you’ll be there and you and you … and you’ll be there …

With this Perspective, I’m Connie Champagne.

Connie Champagne has been an actor, singer and entertainer in San Francisco since 1980.

I received many calls from my son’s preschool asking me to pick him up early. His challenging behavior was disruptive, and they had tried every resource available to support him as best as they could. With interrupted days in care, he missed valuable time in school. The whole situation was stressful. I thought about the cause of his behaviors. Many “what if’” scenarios overwhelmed my thoughts as he faced risk for being removed from preschool.

Suspended? At age 3? Was that possible?

I wondered about my options without care. As a full‐time student and worker, I had to think about what financial cuts I needed to make to care for my child. Fortunately, the center my child attended provided social‐emotional support. With the assistance of his teachers and mental health consultant, we addressed his needs. He stayed in school and my son thrived.

My experience made me reflect on other children and families of color in early learning programs today who are at risk of suspension or expulsion. It’s alarming to learn from the U.S. Department of Education, that Black and Latinx children — specifically boys — are expelled or suspended at higher rates than whites in early learning programs due to challenging behaviors. Black boys make up 18% of the male preschool enrollment, but 41% of male preschool suspensions according to the Civil Rights Data Collection. The national Survey of Children’s Health found that an estimated 50,000 children under five were suspended, and 17,000 were expelled, across the nation in 2016.

For a family, removing services that they rely on to support their basic needs creates more problems. It adds additional stress when looking for alternative care and affects parents’ capacity to maintain a job when they have to balance parental and financial obligations. This pressure can develop harmful effects on children and damage parent‐child relationships.

I believe that creating strategies that keep children in school start with helping them learn to identify and respond to their emotions. This will form healthier relationships with other children and adults. I trust that meeting these needs early in life can form the foundation for a healthy adult life and a successful educational path.

With a Perspective, I am Leticia Monroy.

Leticia Monroy is a first generation Latinx graduate student at UC Berkeley who also works in an early learning program serving children and families across the Bay Area.

If you’re not a fan of international soccer, you probably missed last month’s sudden rise and fall of the Super League, a grab for ever more bucks and entitlement by a dozen of the richest clubs in Europe, half in England. Conspirators included a Russian oligarch, an Emirati Sheikh and several billionaire Americans. The Super League bypassed the normal competition for entry to the European club tournament known as Champion’s League, allowing its members to play each other in big-money games without the inconvenience of earning it by finishing near the top of their domestic leagues.

Those leagues use a system that is virtually unknown in America. Every year, the worst performing clubs are demoted or “relegated” down to the minors, while top minor-league teams are “promoted” up to take their place. It’s meant to prevent a permanent aristocracy, which is exactly what the “Super League” tried to create. The subsequent uproar from English fans in particular turned into a rare defeat for the owners, who quickly and shockingly capitulated within two days.

Unsurprisingly, this rich-get-richer scheme reportedly had American roots. Despite the up-by-the-bootstraps American mythology, our social mobility compares poorly to other developed economies. Going from bottom to top is rare, but it’s even harder to move down from the top. Why? Because not only are U.S. sports leagues free from the concept of relegation, our social, economic and political systems are too.

Our tax code allows generational wealth to pass untouched, admission to elite colleges favors legacy applicants and the offspring of wealthy donors, our property-tax based system for public education cements rather than mitigates social gaps, and on it goes: the justice system, campaign finance, the healthcare system, access to capital.

The USA is the Super League’s dream realized at a national scale: a permanent upper class where the only thing relegated is the uncertainty of dropping out of it. Who would have figured the home of Buckingham Palace would reject the Super League’s Royalism, while our rogue Republic, alongside sheikhs and oligarchs, would be the very embodiment of it.

With a Perspective, I’m Ali Shah.

Ali Shah is an attorney. He lives in Sunnyvale.

They say happiness is good health and a poor memory, perhaps more accurately the ability to gloss over bad memories. As a Chinese American, the recent wave of violence against Asian Americans has surfaced some of those memories.

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, when my mother went to enroll me in school, she was asked to select my race: white or colored. Through a brief process of elimination, she checked colored, but the nice white lady corrected her form, exclaiming, “Oh no, you’re not colored!” That encapsulates much of my time in Alabama: as “other,” never quite fitting in, neither Black nor white.

I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much from my elementary school days. If I concentrate I can hear echoes of “ching chong” and “chink” and “jap” accompanied by the pulling of eyes. In middle school I was deemed smart, quiet, mostly invisible, sometimes a curiosity. In high school I remember a friend coming over, expressing shock upon lifting the lid of a big pot to find a whole beef tongue sitting upright. And a more permanent reminder in my high school yearbook, with a caption under my sister’s photo, “How do you blindfold a Chinese person?” Answer: with a piece of dental floss.

I saved a recent email from Berkeley’s school of public health dean Michael Lu for his pithy summary of anti-Asian American racism. He wrote: “We are made fun of for the way we look. The way we drive. What we eat. What we wear. How we speak. How we parent. We are treated like perpetual foreigners no matter how many years or generations we have been in this country. A guest in our own home.”

These are the experiences that led me — like so many other Asian Americans I’ve met — to migrate to California where I’ve had the luxury — unlike my Black friends — of not thinking about my race on a regular basis. Until recently. The attacks in the Bay Area have been jarring. But the silver lining may be that we are finally having a conversation about what it means to be Asian American.

With a Perspective, I’m Alice Chen.

Alice Chen is the chief medical officer for Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange.

Nearly every month for 20 years I drove to my friend Seth’s house in San Francisco for a poker game. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. Either way, I always left feeling lucky. Because those evenings were only partly about poker and mostly about the friendships. Along with the laughter, we have seen each other through deaths and divorces, the arrival of grandkids and the onset of retirement.

Our nights together always started in the kitchen, devouring Seth’s quesadillas while we talked about sports and TV shows and random topics such as who was funnier, Richard Pryor or Robin Williams. And then we played cards and made fun of each other for three hours or so.

My poker crew is a community I treasured even in good times, and never more so since we stopped playing 14 months ago, locked down by COVID‐19.

I’ve missed those guys all the more because of the other losses I’ve experienced.

I was laid off last July and four months after that my 83‐year‐old mother contracted the virus in the nursing home where she lived. She died two weeks later with only an attending nurse at her bedside. We buried her the day after Thanksgiving.

The pandemic has robbed me and so many others of things we cherished, but it also has underscored what we value most. As a result, the primary emotion I experience these days is not regret or despair, but gratitude. I’ve remained healthy, along with the rest of my family and friends, including my poker buddies. And now we’re all vaccinated.

Conversations have begun about scheduling a game, maybe this summer. Putting that poker game back on my schedule would feel like a different kind of inoculation, a shot of normalcy.

It’s been 14 long, hard months, but I still feel lucky. And I am eager to play again.

With a Perspective, I’m Kevin Cool.

Kevin Cool is a freelance writer and editor in Half Moon Bay.

“That’s so gay,” joked the boys at the bus stop. It was raining buckets, and, umbrella-less, our hair was matted to our faces. Freezing water dripped from atop my head down my cheeks, but no rain could compete with my blood’s temperature, which ran cold.

“Oh sorry,” he stammered trying to redeem himself. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

I ducked my head down and tucked my short, stubborn hair behind my ear, a defense mechanism I use to hide. “The boy sees me as gay. That is all. Nothing more. In his mind, I am just gay. Never mind that I am an empathetic human, regardless of my sexuality,” I thought.

The downpour intensified, as my anger did. “What do you mean by that?” I snap at the boy. “And why would you say it, regardless of if you’re standing next to a gay person or not?”

“Hey chill out! It was just a joke!” he digressed. Just a joke? I’m not buying it. “Just a joke” makes a whole audience laugh, not just the straight people. “Just a joke” is objectively funny, not cruel. “Just a joke” is not “that’s so gay.” It can’t be!

To use “gay” to describe an action or a look makes zero sense. Why do I so often hear that a haircut is gay, or a person’s walk, or dancing? Is a haircut attracted to a haircut of the same sex? Does a person’s walk spend hours in the closet, hiding a crucial part of itself from loved ones? Does a dance feel shame? Does it know pride? Saying something or someone is gay as an insult strips the word from its oppressive history and erases the experiences of truly gay people. “That’s so gay” is a weaponous phrase meant to demean and generalize. It pushes people back into the closet and is never “just a joke”.

Confrontation is critical when entire groups of people are put down. Next time you hear “that’s so gay “ I invite you to be a change-maker by simply asking, “What do you mean by that?” Chances are, like the boy at the bus stop, the speaker will be shocked by what they learn.

With a Perspective, I’m Olive Savoie.

Olive Savoie is a graduate of Lincoln High School in San Francisco. Her Perspectives piece was produced in partnership with 826 Valencia as part of KQED’s Youth Takeover week.

Photography started as a way to creatively kill time during quarantine, but now, a year later, it’s my favorite hobby.

The past year has been an unbelievably stressful one. Online learning, simply put, is hard. It can be boring, repetitive, and stressful. To cope, I started going on long walks and taking photos of anything that caught my eye.

I’ve been taking photos for as long as I can remember. Working my way up from a Dollar Store quality, hot mess of a camera to an iPhone 11.

My obsession with photography drove me to explore the Bay Area, capturing images from the powerful Black Lives Matter murals in Downtown Oakland, to neon signs advertising cheap liquor, to the colorful candy-lined aisles of a grocery store.

My favorite photoshoot has to be my trip to the then-brand new Salesforce Transit Center, in downtown San Francisco back in May, when I was just beginning to feel very, very trapped. I did my best to capture both the cavernous size of the three-story building, and how empty it was due to COVID. I took about a hundred shots that day, two of which now hang prominently on my bedroom wall.

With a worldwide pandemic and virtual learning, everyday is difficult, but photography has been therapeutic.

What’s going on in my life definitely affects what my photos look like; if I’m in a good mood, I’ll take bright and colorful photos, if I’m sad, stressed, or bored, they’ll be dark and lonely. My best shots happen when I’m feeling overwhelmed. They are chaotic and messy explosions of different colors. Seeing the world through my camera has given me a new sense of appreciation both for what surrounds me, and what’s inside of me.

In many ways, my camera has been my companion this past year.

The process of taking a picture, editing it just right, and getting it printed for my bedroom wall is very rewarding. It’s a way to both document this crazy pandemic world, and express myself.

With a Perspective, I’m Luke Thomas.

Luke Thomas lives in Albany. His Perspective was produced by YR Media as part of KQED’s Youth Takeover week.

Parents often think that kids should be introduced to ‘real life’ at a young age but I’m not so sure about that. My mom always tells me about all she did for me and for herself. She came to the United States and made it on her own. She often tells me to try my best and about all the advantages I have because of having papers at birth. I was seven when I first remember my mom having that talk with me. I was young and still a child. I felt pressured to be just as strong as her.

Introducing kids to what parents think is real life is harmful at least in my case. When I was a 7-8 year old I was put to clean after my brother and take him to school, I didn’t get to be taken care of and till this day I still take care of everyone around me like my two-year-old sister. My mom and many more parents who do this to their kids could be more clever on how the lessons of ‘real life’ are introduced to children. Being patient and kind to the mistakes their children might do is key. Kids need hope and encouragement, not pressure. Some parents even threaten to kick their kids out as soon as they turn 18 to learn real life skills. I can’t imagine how terrifying that would be.

As the daughter of a very strong woman I have seen the challenges that being a parent has brought upon my mom. The hope she gives me to keep going and achieving all she has hoped for is a part of my life I’m always going to carry. Even though she puts pressure on me, she has taught me the valuable lesson of standing on my own two feet. She tells me she appreciates how I’m the kid that helps keep our lives running. I understand that everyone else needs attention, and while I also need attention, I know that my independence is a gift my mom has given me that will serve me in life.

Thank you mom.

With a Perspective, I’m Kimberly Higareda.

Kimberly Higareda is a 10th-grader at Fremont High School in Oakland. Her Perspective was produced as part of KQED’ s Youth Takeover week.

The term YOLO means “you only live once.” I have heard this term thrown around so many times but I’ve never really taken the phrase to heart. As a teen, I thought there was still so much time. I was scared to have fun but ever since corona hit, I wish I could go back in time when everything was carefree and exciting.

Sitting in my dark familiar room, I was looking at the photos hanging on my wall from all my fun memories and wondered when can all this happen again?

In middle school, during summer breaks my family would always go on trips to new places, but as I got older we went on less trips because school got harder and more time consuming. After six hours of school, I had volunteering, clubs and other commitments to focus on. I never seem to have time for fun anymore. I’m either swamped with school or working for experience. It seems like my teen years are slipping away.

2020 was the year that I wanted to allow myself to experience new things. But then COVID ruined my plans. It closed everything down and I haven’t even been able to see my friends. With all of my junior year being online, I hope I could have the true senior experience.

I regret not going out more. I don’t want to grow up so fast.

I want to have fun while I can. I want to travel every continent in the world, go cliff jumping, go scuba diving and wake up really early to watch the sunrise. I know that all this is possible, but I’ve been too consumed with work to step out of my comfort zone.

This pandemic has taught me to value every moment with my friends. If there’s an opportunity to do something new, do it. You only live once, so why live with regrets.

With a Perspective, I’m Karen Chau.

Karen Chau is in the 11th grade at Washington High School in San Francisco. Her Perspective was produced as part of KQED’s Youth Takeover week.

As a kid, you usually have a role model or someone you look up to. It’s most likely fictional characters from a popular movie franchise or from your favorite story books. This character is someone who inspires you to dream big and makes you feel like you could be just like them.

Growing up, I never had that. No character reflected my story. I was a Pakistani-American girl who had big dreams, aspirations, and all I could find in my movie collection and on my bookshelf were the usual stories of white girls falling in love with their princes, which are great! But I was never fully confident in myself because the stories of girls who look like me were never really acknowledged.

Around my freshman year of high school, I discovered the comic book series of the superhero Ms. Marvel, the story of an out-of-place Pakistani-American girl who turns into the superhero of Jersey City.

Comic books are not exactly the trendiest with teenage girls. In fact I had never opened a comic book until this one but Ms. Marvel was special— she represented me.

Even though I was much older when I discovered my “fictional role model,” it was the most incredible feeling. It was the first time in my life where I could read the pages and say, “She is just like me.” I felt like a proud little girl and I ended up buying every single book.

I even introduced my little sister to Ms. Marvel, and she fell in love with the series. It’s nice to watch her feel like a superhero every time she reads it. Every child should have that experience.

This circumstance growing up has shown me that representation is important. The older generations of minorities never got to see themselves in the superheroes of their childhood. In film and media, the stories of people of color were not being told for the longest time, and it affects how society sees them as well as how they see themselves.

This paperback comic book showed me that as a daughter of immigrants, I am strong and I am powerful. It is not a blockbuster movie or award-winning novel, but it is a start to society acknowledging people who look like me. One step at a time, and who knows, maybe the little girls and boys of the future will see Ms. Marvel on the big screen.

With a Perspective, I’m Alina Jafri

Alina Jafri recently graduated 12th grade from Santa Clara High School. Her Perspective was produced as part of KQED’s Youth Takeover week.

A desert is an area that receives less than 10” of annual rain; we have three distinct deserts in California. The smallest is the Colorado Desert, which is a subset of the largest desert in North America – the Sonoran Desert.

The Sonoran is low- elevation from 0 to 2000 feet, has blisteringly hot summers, mild winters, mostly monsoon-type summer rains, a large diversity of trees and columnar cactus. Our portion of this desert lies in eastern San Diego County and in Imperial County, along the Colorado River hence the name. This desert is exceptional to the rest of the Sonoran in that it does not have the saguaro cactus and most of the rainfall occurs in the winter, rather than the summer. Two characteristic plants are the ocotillo and creosote. Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is our most protected example of this habitat.

East of the Sierra Nevada beginning in the Owens Valley and stretching all the way to the Oregon border lies the Great Basin Desert. This desert is high – 5 to 7000 feet, has brutal winters, precipitation mostly as snow, few tall trees or cactus, and the dominant shrub is the Great Basin sagebrush. This desert is by far the largest in the U.S., covering nearly all of Nevada and large parts of adjacent states.

The biggest desert in California is the smallest one in the US — the Mojave Desert. This desert is transitional between the two previous deserts. With an elevation of 2 to 5000 feet, the winters can be cold but not as cold as the Great Basin and the summers hot but not as hot as the Coloradan. The plant that outlines the Mojave Desert is the Joshua tree. Many parts of this desert are actually below 2000 (Death Valley) and many mountains rise high out of the Mojave and are more like the Great Basin.

All three of these deserts are rain shadow deserts – high mountain ranges block the moisture bearing clouds from the ocean. California has some of the greatest biodiversity in all of North America. Much of this remarkable assemblage of life is due to the three deserts that exist in our fine state.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist living in Santa Rosa.

Dying well in a pandemic isn’t easy. It takes planning and attention to detail. My beloved friend Fran struggled with serious, chronic illness her entire life. She began planning for her death 20 years ago.

Fran had spent plenty of time in hospitals over the years, and always made the best of it. She charmed every staff member, provider and even her hospital roommates.

I think Fran never planned to die in a hospital, but the pandemic made that idea absolutely horrific. Fran was a woman of community and loved having friends and family nearby.

When it became clear that her battle to survive was drawing to a close, Fran approached her care providers about the Death with Dignity Act. This 2016 California legislation allows terminal patients to access a cocktail of medications to end their life. It is difficult to qualify. She had to demonstrate that her illness was terminal, that she was not being coerced, was not depressed, and was of sound mind and able to make such a permanent decision.

Fran easily qualified. The medications sat in her closet for a year. It gave her peace to know that each morning she was making a conscious choice to stick around.

Last month, Fran asked her husband to get the medications down from the shelf in the closet. She called her friends and family, letting them know of her plan to take the medications that night. She got to say her good byes.

With the pandemic raging, Fran allowed two friends to be as close to her side as social distancing allowed. Her brave husband sat beside her while she drank the cocktail and, faster than any of us expected, quietly and peacefully died. She showed no sign of pain. It was exactly as she had wanted it.

While most people will not qualify for the Death with Dignity Act, many will choose to die at home. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to examine many of our practices, but perhaps none more carefully than how we die. In the United States, only about a third of us die at home. Now, during the pandemic, when dying in a hospital means dying alone, the idea of dying at home has taken on new meaning and urgency. Fran showed me just how beautiful that choice can be.

With a Perspective, I’m Laura Weil.

Laura Weil is a certified nurse midwife living in San Francisco.

In a few days, my kids will be going back to in-person school. It’s been a long year. A year of no field trips, no racing each other around the tracks, no monkey bar throw downs, no impromptu bey-blade battles and no lunch-time shenanigans. As the end gets nearer, they seem more restless. There are more tantrums, more arguments, more-meltdowns. “Is this really happening?” they seem to ask.

Even as I manage these flare-ups I find myself in similar disbelief. Can I really stop waking up at unearthly hours just to catch some quiet time? Can I really drop my kids off and spend the rest of the day uninterrupted by calls for lost objects, iPad chargers and snacks? Can I stop constantly thinking about what to make for that next meal? And then, as I slowly give myself permission to relax, breathe, smile in anticipation, I feel a tug.

You see, this past year, when the kids log-in, I have often listened in stealth. I have danced to joyful songs, seen cuddly kittens purr into the screen, learned stuffy names and waited eagerly for story time. I have gotten used to break-time hugs, art-hour, making sun-catchers, forming marshmallow constellations and snuggling into blanket forts.

I have also learned how the teachers manage interruptions, listen to suggestions from 6-year-olds and keep them engaged even as they are reduced to just a face on the screen. How they redirect frustrations, empower and encourage kids even in such unnerving times.

Our kids’ math and reading levels may have taken a hit, but school has been educational in a different sort of way — not just for our kids but for us adults too. So, as we get ready to regain what this year took from us, maybe we should think about what it gave us too.

Maybe, it was time to admit that I might actually miss this year … just not enough!

With a Perspective, I’m Sandhya Acharya.

This year I started observing, in a quiet, private way, a particular day of the year. It is what I call my un-birthday, the day before I was born.

More than a few decades ago this was the last day before my version of the experience we call life got started. The observance of this date acknowledges that there were a whole lot of days without me in the millennia before I was born, and a lot more to follow after I move on.

I shared this concept one evening at the dinner table and got the immediate feedback that this was more than a little morbid. And yet I’d argue that a two-day observance like this—a celebration of the before and after—is appropriate for those of us who are getting on in years.

As we age our birthdays become an awkward combination of celebration and stunned bewilderment, an occasion to have a party while simultaneously asking yourself, “How did this happen?”

Observing your un-birthday provides a way to sort out and separate these disparate feelings. The day before your birthday is the time to accept that this relentless addition of days has never paused and will, someday, come to an end. It is a time to be humbled by the enormous disparity between the number of days you didn’t or will no longer exist, and that precious span of time we call a life. And based on that, it is the occasion to realize that the time has gone by quickly because it wasn’t really wasn’t all that much time in the first place.

But once you’ve done that you can wake up the next day, watch your odometer click over another notch, and accept this additional year not as a burden but as a gift. If your un-birthday was a quiet pause for reflection, this is the day for candles and sugar, for wine and song. The anxiety and dread? That was yesterday. Now is the time for gratitude. Your lifetime pass to the circus is still valid, so enjoy it, and use it while you can.

With a Perspective, I’m Paul Staley.

Paul Staley lives in San Francisco.

I became aware of the personal and collective costs of disconnection when I walked into a detention center. Some call these places juvenile hall. In each unit there were young men and women out of school. From what I saw, youth only had an hour to go outside and spent their days in a 6‐by‐8‐foot box that did not have much inside. There was only a bunk, sink and a metal door with no natural light. Food given through a small slot. Roaches and ants would also make their way in. I wouldn’t want to be in a place like that.

While I’m not them, I’m an adult. These are kids who are out of school and out of work.

It was also the first time I visited California county juvenile jails, but in a sense, I had been there before. As a teenager living in a low‐income neighborhood, I remember thinking to myself, “There has to be something more out there than this.” I worked any job I could get to cover rent, put myself through school, working weekends, housekeeping and delivering products. I did not see the services I wanted to see, so I took whatever was near distance and possible for me to manage to go to school and work. But I wish I had the healthy food choices that I tried to find, and the jobs and services that could teach me how to create and run programs. These challenges and the process of transition to adulthood have an extra dimension for young people who are in juvenile halls and are managing the move from these places.

The lessons we are all learning are not new and are important in overcoming these problems. It is the reality of young people who are disconnected and have very little happening for them.
And now, it has gotten complicated with the interruption of schools and services.

While the world is going through a difficult time, youth deserve immediate and equal support. We fall behind when young people are not supported. Adopting strategies and building opportunities that reconnect young people with education and the community can bring many benefits and would help many young people in California’s poor areas build a better life.

With a Perspective, I am Jaime Flores.

Jaime Flores is a first-generation graduate student at Cal and has worked providing direct services to young people, adults and communities of color in institutional correction facilities.

Recently, I joined a local Meet Up hiking group online. I did so because a friend wanted me to accompany her on one of their hikes. And I figured it might be a fun way to meet new people. To my surprise, the morning after I signed up, I got an email telling me I’d been removed from the group. Here’s a partial quote of what it said: “We are adults in our 20s to 40s who are physically fit, intermediate to strong hikers. That means fast paced … you should find a group that better fits you.”

They determined my couch potato status based solely on my profile photo. Ouch. It wasn’t the reaction to my gray hair and wrinkles that stung. I’m in my early 60s, after all. It was the assumptions about my level of fitness that irked me. I’ve always been active and athletic. I did a half-ironman triathlon at 49 and climbed Mount Shasta, lugging a 50-pound backpack, at 60. Like many people my age, I exercise daily. For me, that includes a mix of running, hiking, walking and yoga.

Being booted from the hiking group was the most blatant ageism I’ve experienced. But I encounter more subtle forms on a regular basis. I see it in job ads peppered with phrases like “perfect for recent college grads,” code for “old folks need not apply.” I see it in the way I become a little more invisible every day. I hear it in comments about my decision to stop coloring my hair.

Aging isn’t always easy, that’s for sure. There are definitely times I look in the mirror and wish I could turn back the clock. Yet in many ways, I’m more comfortable in my own skin, energetic and engaged with life than I was in my youth.

You can call me old. But please — don’t tell me what I’m too old to do.

With a Perspective, I’m Dorothy O’Donnell.

Dorothy O’Donnell is writer who lives in San Francisco.

Three years ago, when I was assigned to teach an applied math class that included personal finance topics, I thought I had a decent amount of financial knowledge, especially since my mom has worked at a bank for the past 40 years. Well, as it turns out, you don’t know just how much you don’t know until you have to teach it.

At the age of 28, I was learning about topics like marginal tax rates, amortization, index funds and Roth IRAs the night before I taught these topics to my students. And while my mom had taught me a lot, I still felt frustrated that I never learned these skills explicitly in school.

Knowing that my 17- and 18-year-old students are not too old to develop healthy financial habits, like early saving and investing, feeds my passion for teaching financial literacy.

However, access to personal finance education is not equal. In 2018, one in six high schoolers were required to take a semester of personal finance; in schools where 75 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which we know disproportionally serve Black and brown students, only one in 25 students had the same graduation requirement.

It is these inequities in schools, compounded with many other factors that perpetuate the wealth gap in our country and world.

Currently, only a quarter of California high school students have the choice of even taking a semester-long personal finance course. April is Financial Literacy Month, and I advocate to have personal finance as a graduation requirement in all U.S. high schools by the year 2030.

This pandemic reminds me that there is so much more value in this world than money, and at the same time, money has so much value in this world. With financial literacy education in all high schools, we can empower students with knowledge that might make future pandemics less oppressive.

Money habits start young, but teaching them doesn’t need to be solely up to families. My mom would agree.

With a Perspective, I’m Charlotte Sivanich.

Charlotte Sivanich teaches math at Gateway High School in San Francisco.

Spring is in full swing, and gardeners of all varieties are striving to help their plants thrive.

I remember hearing, many years ago, that plants grew better if you talked to them. The words didn’t matter; simply talking produced beneficial results. I also remember being skeptical.

Sure, plants send signals to people all the time. If a plant gets too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, we know because it droops, turns brown, or shrivels up and dies. It’s an elemental, though ineffective, way of communicating. But plants responding to our attempts at communication? That sounded like science fiction.

Now all that could be changing.

Back in 1926, Aldous Huxley described his tour of the Bose Institute in Calcutta, during which, using graphs and bells, researchers demonstrated the instant reactions of plants to stimuli such as sunlight, electric shock, and chloroform.

Roald Dahl had his own take with his 1949 short story, “The Sound Machine,” in which a hobbyist builds a device that allows him to hear the otherwise inaudible cries of plants as their stems are cut.

Huxley’s science and Dahl’s fiction have met in recent years, with researchers striving to find out what kinds of information plants might transmit. Scientists now know that plants communicate with each other through the soil using chemicals in their roots. Engineers have embedded spinach leaves with carbon nanotubes and shown that the plants can quickly detect explosive chemicals and send signals in reaction. The doors are open to a variety of plants one day being able to convey to us a variety of information.

It turns out plants respond not to the human voice but to the carbon dioxide exhalations of the people talking to them, what scientists call “the CO2 fertilization effect.”

Still, in this brave new world of science fact meeting science fiction, there may come a time when we talk to our plants and our plants talk back. Wired to speakers and using algorithms to translate chemical reactions into spoken words, our plants might be able to effectively communicate specific needs to us. They might say, “I’m thirsty,” or, “I’m cold.”

Or even, “Talk to me.”

With a Perspective, I’m Lane Parker.

Lane Parker is an author and editor in San Francisco.

My 7-year-old son and I were sitting on the same bench we had sat at most every afternoon during the pandemic. He had just finished another day of Zoom school and I was starting to worry about a new tick he’d developed from all of the screen time. “I just want to go to sleep so this day can end,” he said.

Previous to this, there had been red flags that the isolation was getting to my two school-aged children, kindergarten and second grade — the constant bickering, the frequent emotional outbursts. But this? Wanting to go to sleep to not have to endure another pandemic day? This was a whole new level of despair.

Like a lot of Bay Area families, mine is not originally from the area. Aside from the occasional sympathetic phone call from far away relatives, my family is on our own and fairly isolated.

Our public school district announced in late March that in-person learning was going to begin on April 1. All of the instruction is still online as before. There are now two afternoon in-person sessions per week that are a time for connection with classmates and teachers.

At first I was apprehensive, wondering why the school chose this option instead of a different hybrid model. Since the school is right across from my house, I decided to opt in to try and give my children a slightly more normal school experience. On April 1, I dropped my son off to be with the five others from his class that signed up.

An hour and 20 minutes later I picked him up. As soon as I saw his joyful face as he skipped out the doors of the school, I knew my decision was right for him. On the way home, he excitedly told me all about his time: making a name tag, finding out he has things in common with a new friend, even getting a non-virtual book to read, picked out by his teacher. It’s these small things that we used to take for granted that now mean the world to my children.

Distance education has been isolating. I am thankful for the decision to open up, even a little bit. Now I see my son smiling each evening when he goes to sleep saying, “Only a few more days until I get to go to school!”

With a Perspective, I’m Vanessa Dueck.

Vanessa Dueck is a writer and aspiring elite runner in the South Bay.

When the pandemic began, I started an Instagram account photographing a changing San Francisco. After looking over thousands of photos, here’s what I observed: Over the last year of quarantine, San Francisco considered most construction an “essential service” so building continued, despite the fact that construction workers were one of the professions most likely to contract COVID-19.

Sequestered in our homes for months on end, we focused on interior space. We knocked down walls, hung new art and repainted the bathroom. We created mini offices in cramped apartments. Or we threw up our hands and moved to a new home, city or state.

Restaurants moved outside to sidewalks proving San Francisco city government can actually respond to planning and zoning issues in just six weeks — if there is a will.

San Franciscans embraced the idea of “home as billboard.” Using street facing windows to post political signs is a time-honored tradition here. During the pandemic, this reached new heights: signs appeared thanking essential workers and supporting the BLM movement. We shared our emotions with every passer-by.

Previously ignored places like roofs and tiny yards were seized as social spaces. Roof decks with string lights, and fire pits in gardens, illuminated the night, and conversations drifted over fences.

Shuttered businesses were covered with plywood murals.

Streets closed, creating flexible spaces for kids learning how to ride a bike or roller skate.

Quiet streets came alive. On my block, we started casual happy hours. We shared lemons, dahlias and even salmon, easily, because we saw each other more. And we had more time to chat — and listen. We talked about boredom, finches and robins, the sighting of coyotes and shooting stars.

As we begin to emerge from the pandemic, I share deep feelings of sadness and loss about the last year. We have changed how we think about our home, workplaces and the public spaces we share. Whether this will continue will depend upon our embrace of these new collective forms of connection — perhaps one of the few positive outcomes from the grimmest of years.

With a Perspective, I’m Margie O’Driscoll.

Margie O’Driscoll is a San Francisco-based strategist who works with nonprofits and governments on design and policy issues.

I have not been on Angel Island since I was a teenager and a visit was long overdue. But I was not fully aware back then of the historical significance of Angel Island to my family. My great grandfather and grandfather were detained there several times even though they were U.S. citizens.

Angel Island, unlike Ellis Island, was not built to welcome tired and poor huddled masses but to reject as many Chinese immigrants as possible. Many had long forced stays. There were hysterical fears of Chinese at the time, and, yes, the term invasion was often invoked, fomenting anger and scapegoating them for depressing wages. Thus, the first federal immigration law was also the first directed at a single racial group — the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chinese American citizens could be deported. All skilled and unskilled laborers were systematically excluded.

Upon docking, I tried to imagine what it would have been like for my grandfather, 12 at the time. He’d have to face an arduous interrogation of very detailed questions such as, the exact location of a village neighbor’s house, or where the clock was in his home. A wrong answer could get him deported. He succeeded and  he got to San Francisco to live with his father, whom he barely knew, because the laws made long separations of men from their families the norm.

As I walked past the carved poems on the barrack walls in the museum, I could almost hear the pained voices of the words “brutal injustice,” “despotic acts.” I peered out of a window at a residential barracks, half of one glass pane was clear where I could see San Francisco and the other half, the view was fogged up and blurred, a perfect metaphor of the immigrant’s destiny, one who is allowed onto this country’s shore and the other whose hopes and dreams are lost in the fog of the bay, so close only to be turned away.

It is chilling and sad to see the clear parallels with what we are witnessing today at the U.S.-Mexican border. I remember the pained anguish in my grandfather’s eyes when he told me about his time there, over 70 years later, as if it were yesterday.

I think the ghosts of Angel Island are crying once again.

With a Perspective, I’m Larry Jin Lee.

Larry Jin Lee is a psychotherapist and father of two. He lives in San Francisco.

Hear that? It’s the sound of floodgates opening for Californians ages 16 and up to sign up for COVID-19 vaccines. Just as I’ve been grateful the past year to live where masks are the social norm, I’m delighted we Bay Area residents are second only to metropolitan Seattle/Tacoma in our eagerness to be vaccinated. Yes, that makes it harder to secure a coveted appointment, but it also means we will achieve herd immunity that much faster and be able to climb out of this pandemic.

I’ve been a sucker for vaccine selfies since December, when I cried at a pic of my RN daughter smiling after getting her first vaccine at the Florida hospital where she cares for COVID patients. I also love vaccination stories, especially those that show perseverance.

Storytelling in the face of obstacles is at least as old as the ancient Stoics, who believed that storytelling can help avoid negative emotions to a setback — a setback such as spending hours refreshing a computer screen or returning to a pharmacy night after night for a potential leftover vaccine dose. To do this like a Stoic, think about the story you will want to tell years from now.

Storytelling is useful for kids, too. My vaccination story involves getting the oral polio vaccine after church at a community clinic at my elementary school. I was 8. I’d already had a polio shot, but the Sabin vaccine was on a sugar cube! The only instruction was not to eat for an hour. Lunch wasn’t for a while, but we did stop at the market on our way home. Mom and Dad gave my brothers and me 10 cents for a treat at the drug store. I bought Pez candies. Then I ate one from the Donald Duck dispenser. It tasted just like the sugar — OH NO I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO EAT I’M GOING TO GET POLIO AND DIE. I was horrified.

I never told my parents, who I realize now probably shouldn’t have tempted us with candy money. I never got polio either, only immunity from it. But I did end up with a good story.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

Debbie Duncan writes children’s books from her home on the Peninsula.

The day was too inviting to be indoors. I pushed my work aside, and took a fast walk to a nearby field. It was a perfect spring afternoon. The field was a lush green from recent, most welcome rains; the sky was cloudless. As I turned into the field, my eye was caught by a dense, black form floating several feet above ground, at the far end of the field. I approached slowly to get a closer look, but even from a safe distance, I could hear them. A swarm of honeybees, moving as one entity, with their queen safely ensconced in their midst, swarming in search of a new nest site.

Over an hour passed. I walked beyond the field, keeping my eye on the swarm and when I returned, the colony had settled into a small nearby tree, but this site was only temporary. Within days, the colony would find a new, more protected site where the queen would begin colonizing the hive by laying as much as 1,500 eggs per day, most of which would develop into female, worker bees. The social structure within a honey-bee nest is complex, with bees constantly grooming each other, maintaining “bonding,” which is essential to the colony’s survival.

Experts theorize that honey bees pollinate more than one third of all the foods we eat; and bees also help to balance the ecosystem, yet worldwide their numbers are decreasing rapidly due to climate change, pesticides, herbicides and colony collapse. Environmentalists have sounded a warning alarm for many years: bees are vital and must be protected.

So, if one day you should see a strange, black mass floating above ground, sit back, at a safe distance, and marvel at the amazing nature of the honey bee.

With a Perspective, I’m Deidre Silverman.

Deidre Silverman lives in San Rafael.

As an HR professional, I often have conversations where managers reject candidates for lack of an indefinable quality called “presence.” Professional presence, executive presence, personal brand — these have become the new code words for mimicking company leadership.

Do you look, speak and match the company’s self-image? A suit in a bank, a hoodie in a high-tech company, green hair in a nonprofit, even pounding the table to get your opinion across.

Presence is one way that companies unintentionally discourage diversity. You may not want to wear the company sweatshirt or remove your nose ring. But a condition of employment becomes who the company wants you to be, rather than who you already are.

I know an HR leader who is coaching a manager on his executive presence. He is educated and performs well. But his strong accent, unruly hair and peculiar attire make him a challenge to promote. My take: The employee doesn’t need coaching; the leadership team does.

Hiring and promotion decisions are largely focused on culture “fit,” rather than culture “add.” You might be inclined to hire people who went to the same school and like the same music. But those are qualities for friends. Business colleagues should come from many walks of life.

Diverse perspectives add value and promote innovation, growth and retention. Sixty percent of female job applicants look at leadership team diversity. This is not about lowering company standards. It’s about broadening acceptance.

Be aware of natural biases. Challenge yourself and your assumptions, as well as those of others. Focusing on dated concepts of what “success” looks like will keep your company from hiring and promoting the best people. Make room for different voices. Recognize your biases. And don’t buy into the faulty concept of presence. Focus on the things that matter.

And guess what — it’s not flip-flops or a blue suit.

With a Perspective, I’m Tracy Coté.

Tracy Coté works for an HR software provider, delivering people operations solutions to small companies.

I have practiced ballet for the past 15 years and recently started to learn American Sign Language. Human communication is an art. I find happiness in expression through movement, challenging the typical ways and norms of communication. Words can often take up space, an endless combination of syllables spoken into a never-ending void. Constant chatter back and forth like roosters competing for the loudest crow. That is why I, and many introverts, choose our words and embrace the unsaid. There is beauty in silence.

I vividly remember my sixth-grade history teacher telling the class that once we let words out of our mouths, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten. As a firm believer in the saying “if you can’t be kind, be quiet,” this seemed blatantly obvious to 11-year-old me. In a world that promotes booming voices, it often feels like I am a whisper and my voice gets lost among the many. We live in an extroverted country. Schools and the workplaces are designed for
extroverts. Positions of power seem to be given to those who make the most noise, rather than the ones with the strongest ideas. From politics to social media, it is just a competition of sound. I know that there would be more kindness and love communicated if we all took a pause before each sentence. There is peace in silence.

Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bill Gates and Sir Issac Newton, were and all are introverts themselves and have changed civilization as we know it with their ideas. Instead of trying to change introverts, extroverts need to learn that silence is beautiful. It provides a stillness that the bustling world so desperately needs. I, and many like me, learn more by listening than by talking.

As I have matured, I realized that many people do not listen to understand, rather they listen to reply. Actively listening to our classmates, coworkers, friends and family creates stronger connections to one another. Life is not always about stringing words together, rather cherishing the moments and breaths in between. As we all continue to gracefully dance and navigate our ways as we grow, we must remember that sometimes a handshake or a hug will fix what a thousand words cannot. Words have a purpose yet there is wisdom in silence.

With a Perspective, I’m Avery Grant.

Avery Grant is 17 and is a student and dance teacher. She lives in Marin.

Patriotism was plentiful in my childhood as a Filipino-American U.S. Navy brat. But despite how American I was, I often felt like a foreigner in my conservative Southern hometown. I thought things would change once I moved to the Bay, where I was finally surrounded by people who looked like me.

I realized I was still an outsider.

The United States has erased Asians from its past. History books gloss over the estimated 200,000 Filipinos killed during the Philippine-American War. The horror of Japanese internment camps was hastily covered in my high school American History class. I learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act from young adult fiction books. And although AAPI representation is improving in Hollywood, progress is slow.

On a personal level, anti-Asian racism has led me to grieve the lack of knowledge I could have had growing up. I was never taught about the role that Filipino-American labor leader Larry Itliong played alongside Cesar Chavez in shaping modern day labor unions. I knew nothing about racism perpetrated by White men against Filipinos in 1930s Stockton, or how legislation made it impossible for Filipinos to have interracial marriages. I would guess that many other Filipino-Americans like me are also in the dark.

The events of 2020 and 2021 have exposed the dark reality of being Asian in America. We enter conversations with non-Asian colleagues to come out feeling othered. We feel at a loss for words when non-Asians ask, “What are you?” then quickly defend themselves when met with blank stares. We must wade through the vast expanse of the Internet to find information about our ancestors’ experiences in this country stated in their own voices. We are subjected to dismissive excuses (e.g., “bad days”) for violence against us.

I say all of this to affirm that the Asian experience is the American experience. The historical trauma we are experiencing is very real and, at this moment in history, will not be erased.
With a perspective, I’m Sarah Javier.

Sarah Javier is a postdoc and health equity researcher at Stanford Medicine.

At a recent checkup at Kaiser, a nurse suggested that although I’m not eligible for the COVID vaccine yet, I could come to the clinic at closing time to see if I could get a leftover shot. She said I could even bring my daughter, who isn’t a Kaiser member. It didn’t work, but I still left feeling amazed.

Yes there have been problems around the vaccine rollout. But let’s focus for a minute on the fact that all Americans are getting healthcare without having to worry about deductibles, co-pays, in network or pre-authorization. It doesn’t matter if they have an HMO, PPO, HSA, or even who their insurer is. And there won’t be a surprise bill later.

Can you imagine trying to do this through our regular healthcare system? I can. During my husband’s 10-year battle with cancer we also had to battle a system whose goal often seemed to be to deny care.

With treatment options running out, my husband’s doctor got permission for compassionate care use of a new drug. That meant that the manufacturer would give it to him for free. However, our insurance company declined to pay for it to be infused. After he passed, I got a big fat bill for the ambulance that brought him home to die, because I failed to secure pre-authorization.

Our healthcare system is not just overly complex. It is inhumane. The vaccine rollout is letting us experience a healthcare paradigm that is not based on profit, but on the fact none of us can be assured of being healthy until all of us are.

Let’s not let this moment go to waste. The pandemic showed us how closely the economic health of our nation is tied to the health of our people. Let’s design a healthcare system to take care of all of us, always, for the good of our country.

With a Perspective, I’m Lynn Bruno.

Lynn Bruno is a Bay Area based social media and executive communications consultant.

A full moon rises after sunset, appearing dramatically low and huge in the sky. If you are walking under a forest canopy, as the lucky few of us on the recent monthly Full Moon Hike offered at Point Reyes National Seashore, it’s mighty dark before the moon shows itself. But oh my, when it does, amidst the croaking frog symphony, it’s impossible not to gasp, to feel small, to feel humbled by your great good luck.

Brandon, the excellent Point Reyes education guide leading our small group, had stressed safety before we started since, after all, a full moon hike meant we were walking in the dark. But just before we turned back, he proposed that each of us might, one by one, take a solo hike in the dark down the 3-foot-wide trail. I chose to use a small light to make sure I didn’t trip over something and, you know, ruin the hike for everyone, but, as instructed, I aimed the light at my feet and remained surrounded by the deep forest darkness.

I was surprised that I was not afraid of animals or the dark itself, but I was taken aback by how very solitary I felt and how my mere six or seven minutes alone on the trail in the dark took on a significance that I have since returned to in my mind again and again. Although I appear to be an extrovert, I am all-too-aware that everyone goes through life alone, and walking on this trail in the dark made my awareness concrete. Not only that, many of us either have no idea what lies ahead or don’t know how to get where we think we want to be going. As I walked alone, I realized that, as a newly-solo person, my life would be, at least for now, like this walk in the woods — alone, unable to see where I was going, unable to know when the path would end. Oddly, the realization was comforting.

Ellen Greenblatt is a Bay Area writer and writing coach.

With coronavirus reducing classrooms to computer screens, students have been learning from home for a year. There’s been a lot of talk about kids falling behind in math and reading, and as an elementary school teacher, I am concerned about what students have been losing with remote learning. But I’m also concerned about what they’ve been gaining: Extra pounds.

In fact, the average kid has put on seven additional pounds during the pandemic.

With in-person school canceled, physical education classes and youth sports programs are canceled, too. But it’s not only organized sports — just going to school gets kids moving. Remember walking or biking to school and those steep staircases in school buildings?

At home, without a school schedule and a school lunch, some students are sleeping in, snacking all day and grabbing a soda and a bag of chips for lunch. It may be every middle school kid’s dream school day, but this perfect storm of sedentary behavior and junk food is resulting in so much unhealthy weight gain for kids that one pediatrician called the lock down rise in childhood obesity an “epidemic during a pandemic.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, one in five children and adolescents are now affected by obesity.

Childhood obesity is serious, with a potential to cause lifelong health problems. Diabetes, heart disease and even cancers have been linked to being overweight as a kid. Childhood obesity can reduce an individual’s life span by five years.

Teachers are trying to help, motivating students to stick to Zoom class schedules. I’ve seen teachers lead follow-along P.E. on computer screens, with students dancing, jumping rope, tossing balloons and doing yoga. Some high school students are keeping fitness logs, listing daily physical activity. And school districts are providing nutritious lunches for pick-up at school buildings.

It’s ironic that in keeping students healthy and safe from the virus, remote schooling has exposed them to a different health risk — weight gain. Rising childhood obesity is just one more reason that all of us, students, parents and teachers are eager for schools to safely reopen. For the health of all of us.

With a Perspective. I’m Richard Swerdlow.

Richard Swerdlow teaches in the San Francisco Unified School District.

A friend of mine, Bob, called me about a feisty bird, which he called a Blue Jay, that’s been flying against his bedroom window and whacking into it over and over again. He wondered what the bird was doing and how he could stop it. He also watched the jay feed a squished earthworm to another.

I get a variation on this question every year. The bird he saw, while the dominant color was blue, was not a Blue Jay. It is either a scrub jay or a Steller’s jay. Blue jays are common in the eastern U.S. but do not normally cross the Rockies into the West. Here in the Bay Area we have two widespread species of jays. The scrub jay (the dominant color is blue and gray) thrives in many suburban yards, chaparral and scrubland. The Steller’s jay, with a prominent crest and much bluer, usually frequents forests. The members of the Corvid family, which includes crows, ravens and jays, have little or no difference in size or plumage between the sexes.

That whacking performance Bob witnessed is clearly related to territory control which is in turn a breeding behavior. The jay sees an image of itself in the window and assumes that it is a stranger invading his turf. He therefore “attacks” it to defend his terrain. It is probably the male doing that behavior, though in a monogamous mated pair the females can also be aggressive. The feeding behavior he saw was the fortunate couple sharing food resources therefore reinforcing their pair bond. Mating could follow this. Because you know the same thing often happens in humans. A nice dinner proving financial fitness followed by, you know.

To prevent the bird from injury you must ameliorate the reflection. A paper silhouette of a falcon or an accipiter hawk plastered on the window often does the trick. But eventually the testosterone will wear off and the scrub jay will stop. And hopefully both the bird and the window will still be intact.

This is Michael Ellis with a Perspective.

Michael Ellis is a naturalist. He lives in Santa Rosa.

I grew up surrounded by the smell of donuts and coffee. My parents are Asian immigrants who have owned a donut shop for over 20 years, and it was the center of my childhood. My sister and I would sit around at the donut shop and do our homework. Years later as an adult, I’m still there often helping out or eating dinner with them.

My parents work late nights — sometimes returning home in the early hours of the morning. They’re busy the entire night working the register, hand-cutting dough, and using heavy machinery to fry the donuts.

When the news about the shootings in Atlanta broke, I kept refreshing the “Find My Friends” app to check their location. I was relieved when I heard the front door open.

The next day, I tagged along with my mom while she ran some errands. She could tell I was worried. After a long walk, she threw her arm over me asking, “What do you want to eat? I’ll get you whatever you want so you can feel better.” I smiled and told her I was okay. But she knew. The next day I found a basket of strawberries in the fridge, my favorite fruit.

As a family, we don’t talk much about the recent acts of anti-Asian violence — probably because we don’t want to live in fear, although my parents have started closing their shop earlier.

There is no doubt that these incidents have brought a lot of emotions, but they are also bringing us closer. My parents are sharing more stories about their childhood in Vietnam and Cambodia. How my great grandmother would wake my mom up at 5 a.m. to do chores — just when the air was finally cool enough for her to fall asleep. Or how there’s this fruit they’ve never found here, but grew on many trees back home.

There are a lot of kids like me, who grew up playing at our parents’ nail salons, restaurants, laundromats and stores. Along with those childhood memories, we also carry the worry for our parents. Those feelings never really go away, especially right now.

With a Perspective, I’m Amber Ly.

Amber Ly lives in San Francisco. Her Perspective comes to us from YR Media.

We lost a Bay Area legend last week. Benicia born and Oakland raised, a critical thinker, a leader, a feminist, a social justice warrior, and committed to the pursuit of knowledge. Mills College, as we know it, died of COVID-19 related complications. She was 169 years old.

Or did we?

What is happening with Mills College is not unprecedented. Women’s colleges have suffered from declining enrollment in recent years, with several forced to close or start admitting men in order to survive. There are just 34 women’s colleges left in this country, down from 230 about 60 years ago.

As an alumna of Mills, this is a shame. I sat next to classmates who were encouraged to bring their children to lecture with them when childcare fell through. I learned in a classroom racially and economically diverse. And I learned from the Oakland community, because the pedagogy of Mills and Oakland are interconnected deeply.

If Mills College closes, what happens to the current students, the incoming freshman who have already put down tuition payments, the deep network of alumni, the professors and the staff? What about the 135 acres of land?

Maybe nothing! This isn’t the first time the Mills community has gone up against challenge. Mills has survived the Civil War, World War I, the Depression, and World War II. In the 90s, student protesters occupied the campus for 13 days, rescinding school leadership’s attempt to start admitting men. The tenacity of the Mills community is boundless, organizing to Save Mills is happening, but is it enough?

COVID-19 is unlike anything else in our country’s history. And like COVID, Mills College’s fate remains uncertain. What is for certain is – although I am sad – I am grateful for my time there, humbled to have learned what I learned there, and am honored to be a Mills alumna now and forever.

With a Perspective, I’m Molly Curley O’Brien.

Molly Curley O’Brien has an MBA and master’s from Mills and is Director of Government Affairs for a wildfire recovery and resiliency organization.

請聽聽我們 Please Listen to us

We are frightened, upset and frustrated

請跟我們說話 Please talk to us

In Hoisanwah, Thai, Mandarin,
In Vietnamese, Khmer, Cantonese In Korean, Japanese, Hakka,
In Tagalog, Cebuano, Teochew And in many languages we speak
Which may or may not include English

請看看我們 Please look at us

We are many in a loose category.
We are your doctors, lawyers, nurses, engineers, We are your janitors, caretakers, grocery workers We are your therapist, acupuncturist, masseuse

請認識我們 Please know us
We are not your model minorities.
We are not your immigrant poster child
We are not your tools used to diminish the suffering of others.

請幫幫我們 Please help us
We are also your tired, your poor, and your huddled masses.

請聽聽我們 Please listen to us
We are your friends
We are your heung li. We are your neighbors
We are your fellow Americans. 我們是你們的美國同胞

With a Perspective, I’m Billy Zeng

Billy Zeng is a fourth-year medical student at UCSF.

It’s been a year of fear, trimming expectations and hoping to control fate. Chastising my kids to be careful, scolding when someone forgets the mask, scowling at rule-breakers – it’s been exhausting. And pretty much fruitless: people will do what they will do.

Now, two dear 80-something friends in Philadelphia, exhilarated by their vaccinations, announce they’re embarking on a 6000-mile road trip in a big rental RV. They’ll help their adult daughter and boyfriend move east from California. Never mind they haven’t driven anywhere in five years, let alone in a 32-footer. Overlook recent health crises and other frailties. Ignore the prospect of a crowded return trip with four adults, plus the couple’s four dogs and five rats —in one RV.

They’re off— East Coast to West and back in three weeks. White line fever!

Of course, I protested. Then I cajoled, reasoned, begged them to reconsider.

What if…and what if…?

Then I shut up.

I thought of my late father. A go-getter and adventurer, he dove in the Red Sea, learned to ski at 45, trained to be a volunteer EMT in his 50s, paddled the Grand Canyon in his 70s. As infirmities multiplied in old age, he mourned losing his active life. Finally, at 85, he declared he was going on another scuba trip. In the warm Caribbean, he’d glide and dive, blissfully moving again. The family put down their collective feet, throttling his freedom, and he sank into depression. I regret our decision still.

What were we saving him for?

So, reflecting on the new horizons we all cherish, I’m thinking: embrace living. Too soon it’s all over. If my friends’ idea of freedom is to risk emergencies and misadventures far from home, let them spread their wings.

I wish them Godspeed sailing across the continent, free as swimmers in azure southern waters.
With a Perspective, this is Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.

I tell him how much I love him, and last of all I say, “You’re a good boy.” I say it very carefully and clearly so that the words will mix in with his dreams, so that no matter how his day has gone, those words will be a part of him.

Each morning as we head our separate ways, I say, “Be good. Have a fun day!” These words are so different from those said at night. There is no stone, no ritual. They are just words I say, rote words, words said almost without thinking.

One morning, it was as though Ian had heard them for the first time, for he paused and said, “You be a good man today.”

Those words struck me and were with me the whole day. They are with me still. I try to use them when my demons are with me, on those dark days when I fight them from one long minute to the next. The days when my demons find the light at the end of that long, long tunnel and try to put it out. When those days come, I don’t feel like such a good man, I don’t feel like much of a man at all.

But then I come home and I look at my son — walking the journey of his life — and his constant struggle to make sense of the world and to find his place in it. His words come to me.

“Be a good man.”

I have so much to learn from him.

With a Perspective, I’m Hank Smith.

Hank Smith teaches kindergarten and music.

She lay on her side on the pavement. When we found her, she had already been flapping in vain for hours, baking in the unseasonable heat.

My mother-in-law had planted milkweed in the hope of attracting Monarchs. And it had worked. The butterflies came and fluttered about for days. They lay eggs that hatched into larvae that were eaten or disappeared.

But one was different. She had found her way onto a wall where she had spun a chrysalis and had hung silent until this morning when a beautiful wet winged Monarch had emerged.

During the day, though, something had gone wrong. Her wings were not tucked properly and she could not fly.

I considered how if given a chance, in her own short life she could accomplish more, proportionally, than I ever would. She would travel unimaginable distances, buffeted by wind and rain and smoke toward a destination she had never known.

We stopped what we were doing and picked her up and nestled her in some milkweed. She allowed us to reset her wing. She clambered weakened, her wings now erect. We left her in the garden shade.

By the evening she had died.

Saddened, I sat in the warm dark. I thought of this fragile miracle that survives less often than not. These gossamer things journey the length of the Americas. The Monarch is not a butterfly. She’s a system, comprised of wing, and plant and wind and temperature and even ourselves. And when the system works, the migration, the annual improbable pulse of life continues. And that pulse is now threatened. But like her, we still have to try, I thought. We have to stop. We have to observe. We have to listen.

With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.

Andrew Lewis lives in Sebastopol.

It’s no secret that one of the things holding America together is a phenomenon that seems to suggest the opposite: regularly breaking apart. We’re taught to push boundaries, and our history is a long trail of breakage, healing, and new opportunities made possible by the process.

Hemingway famously said, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” I think that can be true for countries as well.

I lived in Japan for several years, and that’s where I first learned about “kintsugi,” which is the art of fixing broken pottery with a highly visible lacquer, often gold or silver. With kintsugi, the break stands out more after it is fixed, not less. The lines of repair are there for everyone to see, adding new contours, textures, and colors to the piece. It’s as if the item has a new set of golden veins that restore its youth and luster.

The point with kintsugi is not to conceal flaws, but rather to expose and even celebrate them for the natural part of life they are. The repair becomes not just a fix but the very thing itself, adding a unique element of beauty while endowing the object with new strength and durability.

At this volatile moment in our country, when boundaries seem to be breaking daily, it may be helpful to reflect on how many golden veins of repair we have in our foundation. They reveal what might have been broken in the past, but what is now the alloyed bedrock of our world. We’re better because of those breaks.

We are, of course, all flawed and imperfect, but those imperfections can be markers on the path to a better place. I’d like to think that the Japanese notion of kintsugi might in some way reflect the gold of American dreams. Like most other countries, we, too, can break, but by exposing those broken places and letting the world see how we’ve incorporated them, we can still symbolize the power of human will, and the uniquely American strength we all share.

With a Perspective, I’m Jim McClellan.

Jim McClellan is co-founder of a logistics software company focused on the wine industry. He lives in Marin.