A Million Years with You (31 page)

Heather delivered in a large tub of water. When the baby emerged, the midwife whisked him to the surface, where he took his first breath. That's how I met my little grandson, Jasper, dripping wet. Perhaps in honor of the time that Ramsay and Heather had spent in India, perhaps in honor of Ramsay's mountaineering in Nepal, or perhaps in honor of the
dhun
that helped Heather, Jasper's middle name is Jayashiva.

 

Ramsay's condition continued to improve. He received therapy at the Spaulding Hospital in Boston, got back his speech and most of his strength, and a year later it was hard to tell that anything bad had happened to him. He and Heather went back to France and sold their house (guides bought it, not surprisingly), then moved their things into the house across the road from our house with its view of the Wapack Range. The Wapack Range was not the Alps, of course, but at least Ramsay had his eyesight and could see it. Even so, needless to say, his guiding days were over.

Heather opened a chiropractic practice, which soon blossomed, and Ramsay with his lifelong friend Doug Frankenberger, both of whom were ardent musicians, converted the barn into a professional recording studio. The barn was a hay barn built by my father, but after its conversion it resonated like the inside of a cello. As for me, I got a rubber breast that looked something like the real one, and we all lived happily ever after.

To what do we owe this? To the skill and courage of the surgeon in Sallanches, whose name was Dr. Jacques Lemoine. He was an orthopedic surgeon, not a neurosurgeon, and he had never before done brain surgery. But he knew that someday he might be presented with a brain emergency, so he had done some reading and purchased some surgical tools. When he saw Ramsay, he knew that without immediate help, Ramsay would die or at best be left without brain function, so he performed surgery to relieve the pressure of the bleeding. Not many doctors would attempt brain surgery just from reading about it. But Dr. Lemoine did, and because of him, Ramsay not only lived but kept his intelligence, his eyesight, his speech, his memory, most of his strength, and all of his persona.

In Geneva, the neurologists couldn't stop saying how much they admired Dr. Lemoine. From what they'd seen during Ramsay's second surgery, they said he would have died without the first. As for our family, our gratitude is bigger than the Mont Blanc massif, and we will never find words to express it.

But Steve wanted to try. He went to Sallanches. “Vous avez sauvé la vie de mon fils,” he told the doctor.

The doctor was modest. “Oui, c'est le travail,” he said.

13

W
ASN'T IT FREUD
who said that if you want to be happy, you should marry the right person and find the right work? I never doubted that I'd married the right person, even after Steve decided to spend six months of each year doing research in Prague, where he went after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I'm reminded of his value as a husband by a rose-colored pillow. It now sits on our armchair in New Hampshire and makes me happy every time I see it.

Steve had retired from his political career, claiming that he could no longer listen to a senator saying why he must be reelected, and wanting to address his early fascination with Central European history, the subject of his graduate studies, he went to Prague to search the archives. He could not have done this earlier in life, as much as he might have liked to, because while the Iron Curtain was in place, the archives were closed.

Knowing Steve, he must have been excited. Massive archives were stored in many different places. The information they contained would be as vast as it was valuable. Steve knew that his search would take a long time.

He was fluent in Czech to the point that Russians took him for a Czech and Czechs took him for a Russian, so he needed no interpreter or any other help to live in Prague, and he found an apartment near the I. P. Pavlova bus and subway stations, at the corner of Sokolska and Rumunská Streets, not far from the Dvorák Museum and the famous Wenceslas Square. He'd stay there for three months, then come home for three months, then go back for three months. While he was gone I missed him, so I'd visit him in Prague.

Prague is a marvelous city. I was thrilled that Steve's work took him there rather than, say, to Fayetteville, North Carolina. Steve didn't need a car, although he had a secondhand Å koda which he bought from a friend, because around the corner from his apartment were the bus and subway stations, from which he could go all over Prague by public transportation, also anywhere else in the country, even to tiny villages in the mountains, and also to the railroad station, from which he could go anywhere in Europe. The longest he ever waited for the subway was just over a minute, and just under three minutes for the bus. At home we could barely get from our house to the garage that quickly. On one of my visits, we walked from Steve's apartment to the corner and from there took public transportation all the way to a hotel in Berlin.

Memorable moments came from a trip we took to Austria, where right in the center of downtown Vienna I noticed an enormous sign with red letters saying
THIS IS NOT VENICE
. Most Austrian signs are in German, of course, but this was in English because English-speaking tourists, especially American tourists, are easily confused. Venice? Vienna? Anyone could mix those up and ask the Viennese where we could find the gondolas.

However, the most memorable moment, the moment involving the rose-colored pillow, came on the journey to Vienna. We went in Steve's car, leaving his apartment one morning to drive several hundred miles along a two-lane road. Scares came every few minutes. Often we'd see two cars coming at us, one in our lane, one in the other. And if that wasn't enough, the road was used by Czech farmers on their tractors and by Germans accustomed to the autobahns.

We would round a bend doing fifty miles an hour (which was almost too fast for that road) and come up behind a tractor doing five miles an hour. We would look back to see if we could pass, only to see a car with Deutschland plates hurtling toward us at ninety miles an hour. Steve would slam on the brakes, the farmer would look back at us with irritation, and the Deutschland car would swerve into the oncoming lane and whiz by with its horn blowing.

We did this all day, Steve driving. But our difficulties seemed about to end as we approached the Austrian border. Steve took his passport out of his pocket and asked me to get mine. I searched my tote bag, but my passport wasn't in it. I searched my pockets, and it wasn't there either. But by then I knew where it was—on the table in Steve's apartment. I didn't know how to share this information, and for a while I said nothing. But when we were almost at the border, I was forced to blurt it out.

And then came Steve's reaction, and this, not the drive, is why I remember the experience. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, absorbing the meaning of what he'd just heard. Then his face relaxed. Pleasantly, he said this could happen to anyone. He brushed aside my apologies, made a U-turn, and drove us back to Prague in perfect friendship. We got there late at night.

We still wanted to go to Austria, and decided to try again in the morning. As we were leaving the apartment, Steve asked to see my passport. I showed it to him. Then we walked to the corner, got on the subway, went to the railroad station, and took the train.

On our return, while walking from the subway, we passed a store window in which I saw the abovementioned rose-colored pillow. I knew it would look nice on an armchair at home and thought of buying it, but Steve thought it would be expensive. We certainly didn't need it, so I forgot about it. But the next day he bought it and gave it to me so I'd feel better about the passport. As indeed I did. Every time I see that lovely pillow on the chair, I remember how nice Steve was while driving back to Prague. I seemed to have taken Freud's advice about marrying the right person.

 

As for work, I liked it in almost any form except schoolwork, which I did but without enjoyment. As a child, I didn't see why I needed to know what my teachers were talking about, as my ambitions were to be a boy or a lion tamer or a firefighter, even though back then they didn't have girl firefighters. My attitude did not improve in college. I did the classwork only because I had to.

But I liked every other kind of work, for which I thank my surrogate parents, Tom and Kirsti Johnson. For all their intelligence and ability, they spent years of their lives working as servants. Their work did not have high status, but they nevertheless had high standards. They wanted to do everything well, and they had dignity, so when they told me that all work has dignity, I knew they were right.

When I was fourteen, they took over Dad's farm in Peterborough to raise chickens, and I stayed with them as long and as often as I could—all summer and on all school vacations. Tom was of course responsible for the outdoor work, but he had plenty of help in the form of me, my brother, and a boy my age named Arnold Autio, one of Kirsti's relatives, whom Tom and Kirsti more or less adopted after his parents died. Arnold and my brother helped Tom from morning to night, and I did too, but being a girl, I also helped Kirsti in the kitchen. Many kids who worked on farms didn't like it and moved to the city as soon as they could, but Tom and Kirsti could make anything fun, and we couldn't do enough for them. For years thereafter I welcomed almost any kind of work, and this helped me do things that might otherwise seem hopeless, and sometimes to finish projects I might otherwise abandon. It didn't seem to matter what the projects involved.

Here I must also thank my mother's mother, Gran, who, when I was very young, taught me perseverance with the following bedtime story. A princess must empty a granary before sunrise, but the piles of grain are so enormous she knows she won't be able to move all of them. Something bad will happen to her if she doesn't, so she starts to cry. An ant for whom she's done some service sees her. He tells the other ants and they help her. Since the story was supposed to put me to sleep, what I would hear after that little introduction was Gran's voice saying, “An ant came in and carried out a grain of wheat, then another ant came in and carried out a grain of wheat, then another ant came in” and so forth, ant after ant, grain after grain, into my dreams.

For me to go to sleep was the reason for the story, but the take-home was that the granary was empty by morning, and the moral is that a seemingly impossible task can be accomplished if you don't give up. Yes, the ants, not the princess, did all the work, but they didn't stop until the grain was moved. Since I must have fallen asleep hundreds of times with the ants and their achievement in my ears, the information got stuck in my brain at a rudimentary level.

 

The success of the ants was useful when I worked with Tom and Kirsti after they took over the farm, especially when I was weeding their enormous vegetable garden, and to this day the story enters my head if I take on a lengthy or difficult task. For instance, on the day before my eightieth birthday, frost was predicted, so I took apart a large vegetable garden that was planted by our son and a friend. They were somewhere else and the garden, which was near our house, needed immediate attention. I gathered all the vegetables that remained and brought them to the house, then drained the sprinklers and rolled up miles of hoses. I pulled up all the posts of the electric fence, making sure to keep all the little gizmos that held it in place, and rolled up miles of electric wires. I piled the organic matter into a wheelbarrow and dumped it on the compost pile. I then packed everything else into the garden shed, from which I first cleaned out many years' worth of mouse droppings. All that work took most of a day, but I did it without resting because my aim was to finish the job while I was still in my seventies, and by morning I'd be in my eighties. An ant came in and carried out a grain of wheat. Another ant came in and carried out another grain of wheat. In time the job was finished.

While I was at it, I also cleaned out the glove compartment of my son's Ford pickup so that anyone, not just him, could find the registration. He never asked me to do this, so I'm sure I was interfering, but I couldn't restrain myself, because the truck symbolized a similar experience that happened after a monstrous snowstorm when the man who normally plowed our driveway didn't come. Our driveway was ninety feet long and ten feet wide, the snow was three feet deep, I was seventy-something, Steve was away, and our son was still living in France so couldn't help me. But with the perseverance of those ants in mind, I shoveled the whole thing down to the gravel, meanwhile composing a rewrite of Gran's story: “Liz dug up a shovelful of snow and threw it in the woods, then another shovelful of snow and threw it in the woods, then another shovelful of snow,” and so on. At least it was downhill.

When the driveway was clear all the way to the road, I walked back up the hill, went straight to my car, and drove into town to buy the Ford pickup and a snowplow. Price was no object. When our son came from France to live across the road, we gave him the pickup, and from then on he plowed the driveway.

 

So I learned from my Finnish surrogate parents that all work has dignity, even sweeping up mounds of mouse droppings because the result is cleanliness, which is important, especially to Finns, and I learned from my gran that any task can be accomplished, even moving three thousand cubic feet of snow. But nobody told me that some kinds of work are better than others. That I found out for myself.

I'd always wanted to work with animals, and when I was in my early thirties, not long after we moved to Cambridge, I was offered a job in the monkey lab of a prestigious university. The scientists at the lab were having trouble with a monkey who was destined to be the subject of their experiments; I supposedly “had a way” with animals, and they hoped I could persuade the monkey to eat.