Do you Remember?

I'm trying to track down a set of Russian teacups. Not the cups themselves, but the story of when and how they were given by a Russian  matriarch to an American one more than two decades ago. Everyone remembers it differently and the emails go back and forth.

I'm revisiting a lot of stories these days as I put the finishing touches on a book about events in 1989. My primary sources often do not match. They are books written on the same events by myself and my fellow participants, but the cultural and personal points of view made the versions very different even when they were fresh. Now, so many years later, our collective memory is even less reliable. There are holes and reinterpretations, coloring from decades of retelling and forgetting, dreaming and re-editing to fit the evolution of our lives. Archive material exists and fills in the missing gaps, but I am left with a respect and fascination for the power and weakness of memory itself. What we forget is as telling as what we remember; what we choose to write about reveals as much about us as the story itself.

For many years, my mother carried in her heart the story of my father's return from Europe after World War Two. She nursed the romance and the pain of it into one terrific story. How much of it was true and how much polish we will certainly never know. When she died, my father picked up the tale from exactly where she left off and made it his own. The story was unreliable, but that was not the point. It connected them to each other and us to them. Now, with my father gone, the story is ours to carry forward with additions and commentary of our own.

I love this process of unravelling. It  gives me an excuse to reconnect with people that I care for and to hear their stories once again - to learn which parts of our remarkable adventure have survived for others and to speculate on why. It's too easy, though, to get flustered  by the differences and pass over where and how the stories are the same. As I take respite from my historical plunge, I'm reading Michael Paterniti's The Telling Room, a book ostensibly about a kind of cheese. Really it's about a village, about story-telling and about unreliable and contradictory narrative. And I've been sharing a rich texting dialog with my wise friend Jacqui, one of the characters in and one of the sources for my book. Yesterday she forwarded a  new New Yorker piece about the scientific reasons memories are, at best, unreliable. She reminded me that I'm writing a memoir with the opportunity and license to tell what I remember, which is as true as any history can ever be. Maybe truer: a distillation from the heart. 

 It's good advice.  I'm going to forget about when and how the teacups traveled from the Soviet Union to America. It's the story of the gift that counts.

Cow Heaven

Ever since we started taking little road trips around northern California, I have been looking for the perfect photo opportunity, one where I could show  the uniquely local combination of dairy farm and sea. Who knew that cows could be raised and grazed right up to the ocean's edge? Not this east coast/midwest girl. It seemed incongruous to me that such a thing ever existed, much less  continues into the twenty-first century. It seems, somehow, impossibly romantic. Incongruous.Profligate. 

I don't know why the quest to record this bucolic paradox has taken on increasing importance in my mind, but the idea of capturing the Pacific Ocean and a grazing cow atop an impossibly steep ridge in the same frame has become a little goal of mine. It's not that the image is hard to come by. It's more that there's never a place to stop the car on an ascending curve, never a straight stretch with sufficient shoulders, never the right light, the perfect cow.

This morning we woke early with the intention to follow the dawn across the hilltops of the Point Reyes national seashore, no ambition other than a few shots of the newly verdant hillsides in impossibly golden light. These protected lands share space with historic ranches that at one time produced all the butter for San Francisco , sending their  sweet golden product by ship to the bankers and miners that founded the town just to the south. The scattered  ranches remain today tucked into the hills; most of them are still producing milk and cream for the local cheese industry, think Cow Girl Creamery and Point Reyes Blue. Their names are most pedestrian: Ranch "H" Rand "I", Ranch "J." Their settings are beyond compare. 

Turns out this was the day. Everywhere we trundled along the ridges and the valleys, cows posed compliantly against the rising sun and distant sea. Mist rose from the deep pockets and indentations,  diffusing golden light  to frame the shots.Elk grazed in meadows just beyond the fences.

The morning's glory went well beyond the satisfaction of getting several of the shots I had been coveting. It was one of those ephemeral moments when one feels completely untethered and glad to be alive. Wide open spaces, equally open heart. Joy, it was, that caught me there, high above the ocean and the mist. Grace and thankfulness. Peace and wonder. Like the light around me, the feeling didn't last, but in that perfect moment, I felt a little tug of heaven there among the cows.

From Team to Family

After all of the dust settles on a career, you have only two things to take out the door with you– an assorted collection of accomplishments and friends. And though you’ve been paid all your life for the former, you couldn’t have done it without the latter – lasting partnerships with people who work as hard and laugh as often as you do. 

Though teamwork is often touted as a vital ingredient to success, I submit that the best work gets done when a team evolves into a family. The leap is subtle but hard earned and difficult to describe. It depends on the skills, goodwill and personality of those involved with perhaps a little serendipity to boot. Vital to the formula is a hyper sense of purpose, a noble goal that engenders passion for both the process and the outcome. Success requires a diminishing of the self for the vision of the whole. I’m sure if there was a more specific formula, the how, but not the heart of it would be taught in business school.

 I carry two such accomplishments with me out the door, perfect examples of this winning formula – projects that had no precedent and therefore no recipe for success, projects so big and unfathomable that all reasonable people said they couldn’t be done. One occurred early in my career, when I managed the business affairs of an international expedition - the first-ever crossing of Antarctica, a joint venture with the Soviet Union. The other was my last assignment, strategic planning for the consolidation of some seventy independent IT operations into a single government organization. At first blush, the two seem utterly unrelated. Yet in retrospect, they each boast the necessary ingredients: a lofty goal, significant complexity, uncharted territory (no recipe, no map) and dedicated colleagues determined to see the challenge through.

 And here’s the wonder: Even as I bid farewell to my more recent partners, I am reconnecting with the other ‘family’ from so long ago. Phone calls, emails, warm, embracing hugs. From across the decades and the continents we connect to remember what it was to be a part of something so remarkable. Why now? Like our story, we have matured. At the end of our careers we appreciate better that such moments come around but rarely in a lifetime - near-impossible challenges met with just the right people and timing to beat the odds. In each other, we recognize, even and especially after all these years, the mark of family and the pleasure of success.