About 2020

 

The year started off calmly enough, with birthdays - mine, Elizabeth's, and my friend Richard Bender's (who turned 90). Richard's drew guests from as far away as Tokyo (Yu Serizawa). A lecture I heard by Buzz Spector led him to give my card to my design professor, Leslie Laskey. Buzz kindly emailed me a snapshot of Leslie holding it. (They had a show together at a gallery near Leslie's house in St. Louis. Leslie turned 99 in 2020.)

Here below are photos of Kathy with me and Elizabeth at Chez Panisse for our birthdays.

Dinners out are now a distant memory. One of the family's favorite local restaurants, Corso, closed for good later in the year. Luckily, Chez Panisse has survived. 

One 2020 project is to edit the oral history of Chuck Davis, architect of Monterey Bay Aquarium (and much else) and a founding partner of EHDD, successor to the firm started by AIA Gold Medalist Joseph Esherick. Chuck lives on Albany Hill and he hosted dinners with the history's orchestrators, (from left) Helen Degenhardt, Laura Hartman, and Karen Fiene.

I'm close to finished editing it. There was a final session on Zoom, another example of that great migration. Zoom proved to be a lifesaver. Thanks to it, I can now join the meetings of the editorial and design end of ARCADE, the Seattle design magazine. In August and September, I took a six-part writing class over Zoom from Clare Wigfall, below, who lives in Berlin.

Clare is the daughter of our friends Valerie and Geoff Wigfall. I've known her since she was four. (She and Michael Parman were classmates in Berkeley, but the family moved back to Blackheath in London's orbit.) The class was wonderful - Kathy's sister Laurie took the next session.

In June, Sarah Gray joined Caroline as our third grandchild. (Conor turned 15 in September; a week later, Caroline turned three.) Unable to resist, Kathy flew east in October to stay with their parents, Alison Powers and Ross Parman, in Richmond, Virginia, then took the train to visit her younger sister Lenore and her husband, Michael Opalak, in Fairfield, Connecticut. 

The back garden was a lifesaver in 2020. We had a bumper crop of tomatoes. Kathy opened a second front across the street, a source of green beans and even more tomatoes. Except for the fetid air from the region's wildfires, we had a pleasant summer. About those wildfires...

Elizabeth took this unnerving photo in mid-August. She was at the family's Inverness Ridge house, which Michael is restoring. Kathy was on her way there to spend the night, so they came back together ASAP and we waited nervously for 10 days or so. The fire came within a mile of the house, but spread south and was finally contained. Whew! Michael has done wonders with the house, and Elizabeth has made her own contribution. 

We rearranged our own downstairs rooms to make them more livable. A few pre-pandemic gatherings led us to flip the living and dining rooms. We added a large painting by Patricia Sonnino. I bought two others from her (also below - left and bottom right; top right is by Leigh Wells). both painted in Wyoming. In a pandemic, you really appreciate having art in the house.

 

Even the barn has art now, thanks to my friend and neighbor Peiting Li, who gave me the calligraphic piece on the right and the inkbrush sketches on the left, below. We've used Zoom to continue the conversations we used to have over lunch. It's like our writing rooms converged. I talk monthly now with my undergraduate classmate Norm Spatz in Montréal via Zoom. He's organized calls with other classmates from that era, which is fun.
 

Two friends caught Covid-19 in 2020 and lived to tell the tale. Michael Sorkin, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Design Book Review, did not. William Menking, a founder of The Architect's Newspaper, died of cancer. (I just heard from Richard Ingersoll, the longtime editor of Design Book Review, that he's back from the dead; his wife died earlier in 2020.) In September, the Japanese architect Minoru Takeyama died. I'd known him since 1975, when he visited Berkeley on a Fulbright. Here he is with Richard Bender in Tokyo.

The photo below was sent by Sallyann Wright and John Parman earlier in December. They love to walk in the West Midlands countryside and visit towns in the vicinity of their house in Dudley, near Birmingham, UK. This wintry scene reminds me of where we've been through this year - contemplation mixed with constant signs of our mortality. God willing, here we are.

I didn't see it, but my friend Richard Hammond, armed wih a Celestron and the open night sky of Joshua Tree, caught Saturn trying to line up with Jupiter. It feels like a good way to end this, with hopes that 2020 will be equally singular and that the various baleful things that came to a head will be behind us in 2021. One of the Covid-19 survivors posted a photo of herself that, as her mother noted, spoke to her being "wonderfully back on track." It felt auspicious.