Fran Moreland Johns

Family and Friends, General interest, Health, Healthcare, Lifestyle, seniors, World Affairs

On Covid-19, Flexibility and Compassion

March 10, 2020by Fran Johns1 Comment

Covid-19 globe I don’t know about your neighborhood, but Covid-19 is making life interesting here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Difficult for many, devastating for some, and interesting for the rest of us. As of this writing (I recommend the CDC site for accurate data on other areas, other updates) we have sped past the first hundred confirmed cases in the state, and who knows how many of the 10,000+ Californians in self-quarantine are also my Bay Area neighbors.

This little virus brings with it a large bunch of life lessons. Some of them are shared here, as a public service.

First off (I hate to bring politics ever into this space, but what can you do?) if you ever believed anything said by our commander in chief, this is a good time to mend your ways. Covid-19 is not a Democrat hoax, it is not going to disappear in a short time, you really shouldn’t go to work if you’re sick, a vaccine is at best many months away, and good luck finding those test kits that anybody who wants can get. This is only a life lesson in the sense that, in today’s crazy information-overload reality, Truth is hard to find. So, Life Lesson #1: Seek Truth. Read several newspapers if you still read news. Otherwise, visit the CDC site and scroll through more than one mainstream news source, please; do not believe Facebook will give you Truth. Watch PBS and occasionally Fox News; if one disseminates truth, the other reinforces your neighbor’s version of truth – and we’re all in this together. Covid-19 greenie

Other life lessons are happier, and equally easy to learn. For instance, at my church we very quickly learned to replace hugs and handshakes with fist bumps and peace signs. Not as much fun, but whatever. The ushers are equipped with bulletins and hand-sanitizer. Choir members last Sunday spaced themselves three feet apart, which looked rather elegant – but they sounded the same, i.e. gorgeous. We also learned translations of the word Covid into Hebrew and Yiddish, which I have already forgotten, and which doesn’t matter anyway since the name was chosen by the World Health Organization thusly: Co and Vi come from coronavirus, D stands for disease and 19 (as in 2019) = the year the first cases were seen. To connect all this: I belong to a Presbyterian church that is heavy into hugs, scientific truth and interfaith understanding.

As to flexibility, this viral pandemic is teaching us, wisely, not to be so rigid about stuff. I was dismayed when the San Francisco Symphony cancelled a concert on my regular series that I really wanted to hear; and the political roundtable at the Commonwealth Club, a favorite regular program at which I always volunteer, similarly disappeared. But symphony season will resume in good time, and do we really need to talk politics late into the evening when it invariably produces nightmares? Sleep is better. That long-planned trip to Tucson in a couple of weeks? Probably not the wisest thing for my octogenarian cardiovascular system. Purpose of trip, however, was to join my daughter for a visit with a childhood friend of hers (whose mother, lost to cancer decades ago, was a good friend of mine) – and they can definitely have a ball without me.

So take deep breaths and wash your hands. We and the planet will survive in good time.

Moon & clouds

Death and Dying, end of life, General interest, Healthcare, Medicine

Cycles of Living and Dying . . .

March 4, 2020by Fran Johns7 Comments

Sebastian entered the world eight weeks ahead of schedule, weighing all of two pounds. His lineage is Korean/African American/German, which may offer an insight into how determined, individualistic and utterly beautiful he is. He had emerged from NICU (the neonatal unit at Kaiser) and gotten his fighting weight up to nearly six pounds when he first came to visit my husband Bud.

Bud w Sebastian 1.3.19 — *Sebastian (unimpressed) meets his honorary grandfather*

That was about mid-January. In early February, about the 11^th, Bud’s congestive heart failure of many decades took a sudden downward turn, and by Valentine’s Day he was in his last hours of life on this planet. Sebastian came to visit – well, he brought his parents too, but they are not central to this story.

His mom plunked Sebastian onto Bud’s chest, as he lay breathing heavily on his hospital bed, red balloons snagged from the downstairs dining room floating around. The last deliberate movement I can associate with my husband as he died was his left arm making a sort-of patting gesture toward the tiny pajama-clad bundle of new life on his chest.

We should all sign up for this: old life ending as new life begins. Seeing life as a natural continuum might not make much difference as we enter, but it could help us take more control of our exit – simply by confronting the fact that we will indeed exit. I like to think that my husband’s last moments were somehow heartened by the certainty that life does, and will, go on.

Bud was fortunate in other ways. Having reached his 90^th year, he had been vocal about his readiness to die and had expressed his wishes clearly in writing. There are many good options now: hospice or palliative care, enforceable documents like DNRs and POLST forms (Do Not Resuscitate, Physicians Order for Life Sustaining Treatment,) etc. And in a growing number of states there is a right to confront mortality by hastening one’s dying. In California where I live there is the End of Life Option Act which gives terminally ill, mentally competent adults the right to ask their physician for life-ending medication. For many, that is a way to meet life’s end with extraordinary peace.

A relatively new organization, End of Life Choices CA, is part of this continuum, this big picture of Birth/Life/Death/Peace. EOLCCA provides information and personal support re California’s End of Life Option Act and all other legal end of life options. It is among several nonprofits dealing with critical aspects of end-of-life care – and helping us all see more clearly that death, like birth, is a universal experience.

When training, recently, to be an EOLCCA volunteer I met a remarkable fellow volunteer named Lori Goldwyn, who may understand both ends of this continuum as well as anyone around. After earning an M.S. degree in Education and working in women’s health for several years, Lori had a homebirth 30 years ago that led her to become a childbirth educator and labor doula. “I came to believe in the value of supporting the natural process as much as possible,” she says, “for both the mother’s and her baby’s sake. A woman in labor contends not only with the pain of labor,” Lori adds, “but with the intensity of realizing that there’s no way out. She can’t escape, quit or divorce this one. The only way out – as is true with the rest of life – is through.”

Eventually the link between natural birth and natural death became clear. “While being with my mother in an inpatient hospice in 2010,” Lori says, “I was struck by the similarities between the birthing and dying experiences.” That epiphany led to her working in hospice and palliative care, as an End of Life Doula, and now also as a volunteer with EOLCCA. Her website, Comings and Goings, reasserts the validity of this continuum with this subtitle about Doulas: Caregivers to those on the threshold points of our Earthly existence. Moon & clouds

“When we get that terminal prognosis, or as we lie dying,” Lori says, “there’s no escaping this reality, this ultimate inevitability.” She quotes the Italian director Federico Fellini: “All we can do is try to become aware that we are part of this unfathomable mystery. We are a mystery among mysteries.”

As he grows, I think Sebastian will also understand this mystery, this continuum, as well as anyone. Sebastian started off in a softly-lit incubator watched over by his mother, a nurse. Weeks later, his honorary grandfather was leaving the planet. And they were able to trade greetings on their journeys.

Arts, California, Celebrities, Fine Art, General interest, Lifestyle

My Little Corner of Black History Month

February 7, 2020by Fran Johns6 Comments

In celebration of Black History Month, this space would like to share a couple of personal encounters with the Arts and Literary history of African Americana. Just because.

Art first. Soon after I arrived in San Francisco, there was a gallery show of the work of Benny Andrews. Benny Andrews was just my #1 all-time favorite African American artist, thanks to having first encountered his work in my undergraduate days (R-MWC 1953, BA, Art.) As we entered the gallery my new husband Bud grabbed my hand and said, “C’mon, I want to introduce you to Benny.” Well, I knew Bud knew everybody, especially every artist alive, but personally? He had gotten hooked on art in one class during his own senior undergraduate year (Albion, 1951, BA Economics & Political Science) and since then had spent every spare moment hanging out at galleries and museums. But Benny Andrews? Could he really know Benny Andrews? And more to the point, could I possibly do anything but gush embarrassingly in front of a famous person who happened to be my #1 all-time African American artist hero? I went into panic mode. There were a LOT of people milling around looking at beautiful paintings; bunches of them were gathered around the artist. I tried to think of something intelligent I might say, but it wasn’t happening.

Benny Andrews drawing — *“The Guitar Picker” (With apologies for photographer’s ghost)*

Meanwhile, my good husband, all 6’4” of him, was plowing ahead, aiming straight toward Benny Andrews, with me in tow. There was no escape, and my brain was on freeze. In a matter of moments we were standing face to face. Briefly acknowledging Bud, Benny reached out and gave me a giant hug. And said, “Aren’t you darlin’ to come see my pictures!”

Sometime later we were able to buy his utterly beautiful pencil drawing “The Guitar Picker.” It’s now at the National Gallery in D.C. But just thinking about it makes me smile, and remember that gentle, kind, incredibly gifted man saying “Aren’t you darlin’ to come see my pictures.”

My other famous artist story has to do with my #1 all-time favorite living African American artist, Radcliffe Bailey. Met him in real time, after admiring his work at Atlanta’s High Museum (and elsewhere) for years, when he turned up at a milestone birthday party in California for my friend Liz Campbell Moskowitz (no slouch of an artist herself.) She introduced us offhandedly, and I said, with something less than socially acceptable composure, “OMG! You’re Radcliffe Bailey!?! I love your work! That room of your paintings is the first place I go when I’m at the High!” He was polite about my effusion, though.

Fran w Radcliffe Bailey 2.16.19 — *Radcliffe Bailey & me*

This was a couple of years before he married Leslie, daughter of Liz and the renowned photographer Gordon Parks. I think I’m unlikely to top those two encounters any time soon.

As for the Literature area.

In the late 1960s, Bud (whom I would marry in 1992 but with whom I was not then in contact) owned a house at 2777 Pine Street in San Francisco. A graceful Victorian built in the 1870s, it sold a few years ago for three or four million – but in 1968 the neighborhood was not one you’d wander around without risking bodily harm. Bud lived in the ground-floor apartment, and rented the main house to Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. At the time, Black Panther leader Eldridge was out on bail following an attempted murder charge. He would eventually skip the country and later return, find religion, design provocative menswear, become a Mormon, struggle with cocaine addiction and die at age 62 in 1998. That was 30 years after he’d been Bud’s tenant. “I had no problems with the neighborhood,” my husband used to say of that time; “either the cops or the Black Panthers were there at any given time; usually both.”

Kathleen Cleaver (who had answered the For Rent ad and signed the lease) would go on to earn a J.D. from Yale Law School and eventually become a distinguished lecturer at Yale and at Emory University. But between her tenancy on Pine Street and her later career she joined Eldridge in exile in Algeria, and became the mother of two. On Pine Street, she handled the family finances. Because they were chancy at best, the rent seldom arrived on time. (When the Cleavers skipped town they were two months in arrears. So my husband went to the Black Panther headquarters in Oakland and said he’d like to have his rent. You did what? he was asked. “I said I wanted two months rent. They paid.”)

Cleaver letter — *(More apologies for another photographer-ghost)*

When cleaning out our safe deposit box recently I found the letter at right. The letterhead is that of Ramparts, a radical publication for which Kathleen Cleaver wrote. I’d known of the letter’s existence; my husband included it in a story he once wrote, and had offered it to several museums but gotten no response. So I mentioned finding it to my daughter and said I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. “Frame it, Mom,” she said. Thus the document shown here. It reads:

Mr. Johns:

Please excuse the delay but I have been so god damned busy with these pigs and courts and chaos that I completely forgot to pay the rent. You are so very sweet to be so unobtrusive and gentle with me. I think you are the perfect landlord and I would just like to warn you that you should prepare yourself for any day now some kind of assault on this house. I think it is beautiful, I love it, I won’t go away, but the local, federal, international, secret and off duty pigs as well as reagon (sic,) rafferty, shelton, wallace, alioto, et al want to do us in, Eldridge first, then me.

Here’s the rent.

Peace, Mrs. Cleaver

General interest, Humor, Lifestyle, Politics & Causes, Technology

Is There An App For The Inept?

January 25, 2020January 25, 2020by Fran Johns4 Comments

Apps In-appt: /i’ napt – having or showing no patience with technology.

There are, as far as I can determine, something over two million apps one can download onto one’s phone. Google says one thing, Apple says another – but there are a LOT of apps out there. I know people who seem to have most of them. I have sixteen. Most of the ones I have were installed by the Apple people and thus may not be un-installed (so I just let them sit there and entertain each other.)

I actually use a couple of apps. My Routesy app, for example, can magically, immediately determine exactly where I am standing in downtown San Francisco, and tell me how soon the #2 Clement or the #3 Jackson outbound will be arriving. Or where’s the closest Apps1 BART station and when the next train to El Cerrito will be departing. I love the Routesy people. Because I choose to believe that somewhere, somehow, there are real people who sit around programming my Routesy app to the most intimate degrees. I also occasionally use my Maps app. But the time it was telling me to turn left onto Laguna in 400 feet, and my Apple Watch buzzed my wrist when I got to Laguna – that was a bit much. I mean, who told my watch? I find this almost as spooky as the occasional Dick Tracy-type conversations I have with my wrist because I can’t reach my cellphone.

My question is: who is the App Director of the Universe? And with more than two million of them out there, why hasn’t she created any app for me?

Here are the only apps I would ever need, please:

Apps2 The Find-It App. It wouldn’t actually have to find stuff. It would just cause the designated item to beep until I got there. The item which has vanished: book, keys, wallet, checkbook – all those things I would like to find. I don’t need that Find-My-Phone thing; I’m sitting here holding the phone, for heaven’s sake, with all these superfluous apps staring at me.

The Cancel-It App. It would quietly reach out to everyone scheduled to attend that meeting, webinar, Zoom conference or other tedious event on my calendar and inform everyone of its cancellation. If something were really important it could be re-scheduled for next week, but my guess is 90% of the time nobody would notice.

The Stifle App (named in honor of Archie Bunker. If you’re too young to know who Archie Bunker is you don’t need this app anyway; you are inured to excess ambient noise. This app would infiltrate all news channels and stifle every politician who adversely affects my blood pressure. Fake news Thus I could still check what’s going on – I balance my PBS/MSNBC intake with occasional Fox News programs in a generally vain attempt to understand my country and my fellow citizens – without putting my health at risk.

This is all I’m asking. You can keep the whole two million apps (minus Routesy and Maps) if I could just have those three. Is this asking too much?

General interest, Nature, Religion

A Little Moon Worship for the New Year

January 4, 2020by Fran Johns6 Comments

Full moon Maybe 2020 could be the Year of the Moon? The moon, I think, has to have some mythological connection to peace and serenity, despite its less noble connections and the recurrent idea that man (woman, perhaps?) will one day set foot upon it. God forbid. In any event, wouldn’t it be lovely to be feeling peaceful and serene, some 300+ days from now, as we say Goodnight, Moon to 2020?

I am simply a moon freak. Moonshot clouds 1.2.20 After my umpteenth Facebook posting of moon photos I happened to wonder, publicly, if there isn’t a good name for moon worshipper – which prompted friends to suggest Artemisians, or Selenians, or (not my favorite,) Lunatics. The nice thing would be that Artemisians/Selenians would be utterly inclusive, since the moon does not shine arbitrarily on just a chosen piece of planet earth. Thus it would be pretty hard for one group of earthlings to claim to be chosen by the moon over some other group.

Moonshot1 1.1.20 And Lord knows we could use a few less exclusionary religions on planet earth. I admit to being a committed Christian, but I lean heavily toward interfaith collaboration. Especially when it comes to the Brahma Kumaris. Brahma Kumaris believe all religions are valid – imagine that. Plus, they have women priests, among whom a personal favorite is my California friend Sr. Chandru whose name roughly translates to Sister Moon. Selenians – I’m going with Selene, even if she had fifty daughters and that seems a bit much – would shine benevolently upon all humankind, while veering somewhat toward feminism. Masculinity would be okay in Selenianism, but only in a cuddly, non-aggressive Man-in-the-Moon sort of way. The only definitively male-type moon figure I find, after what was admittedly not a mythologically extensive research effort, would be Thoth, and do we need Thothism, for heaven’s sake? Moonshot 1.1.20

Most of the photos accompanying this paean to the moon were shot from my pillow, which happens to be aimed squarely at a 7^th floor west-facing window (or from that window itself.) It has featured, of late, a progression of such beautiful interactions between moon, clouds and the ever-lit urban landscape below as to make reading myself to sleep virtually impossible without regular interruptions to take iPhotos. In other seasons, when it’s full and on the wane, the moon will suddenly appear in all its glory at about 4 AM or so, shining into the bedroom as if demanding to be appreciated.

The thing about moon appreciation is that it requires absolutely no energy or profound thought; it bears no political implications, and it is immediately reciprocated with nothing but more beauty. Lest you think this movement leaves something to be desired during the non-moonlit hours, serious Selenians tend to be also cloud appreciators. Seriously. I happen to be member #45,662 of the international Cloud Appreciation Society; check it out.

Moon & clouds So, back to the proposed Year of the Moon. Over the year just past there have been floods and fires and hurricanes and tornadoes, all at least partially related to the actions of us earthlings. And endless wars and bad stuff. But if you discount the newspaper’s front page (all known Selenians read print newspapers) there has also been much to appreciate (see ‘Happy Old Year from Mother Nature’ on this very page.)

The Year of the Moon, should we Selenians prevail, will feature even more to appreciate. Feel free to pick your own appreciation for the year: a good harvest; an electoral victory; yellow tulips; economic strength; peace and serenity; disappearance of (fill in your own blank;) good health; universal healthcare; early rainfall. We will plan to check in this time next year, to see how well it’s gone.

General interest, Lifestyle, Nature, Travel

Happy Old Year from Mother Nature

December 28, 2019by Fran Johns2 Comments

Farewell, 2019.

It’s not been the best of years for human beings. Fires, floods, extreme weather events (Hello, climate change deniers?;) migrants around the globe fleeing poverty and violence; a lot of us in the U.S. watching with horror & dismay as reproductive justice disappears and democracy is threatened on a zillion other fronts.

Arctic - bird on water — Arctic bird in flight

But here’s the good news: The beauty of Nature remains unchanged.

Oh, we can mess with it, threaten it with things like removal of environmental protections in the name of “deregulation.” (Deregulation is reflexively a great good thing? Hello again.)

But as the bumper sticker – too good to waste on a bumper, so it’s still on the bulletin board – some friends sent many years ago says, Nature Bats Last. We let too many glaciers melt; Nature will erode our beaches and flood our low-lying cities. (Could we flood Mar a Lago, please? Just a tiny bit?) We let the planet warm with our irresponsibility; Nature will get our attention with devastating wildfires across multiple continents. Hurricanes. Tornadoes.

Sunrise - SF 10.19 — San Francisco Sunrise

Meanwhile, Nature keeps right on offering us beauty: forests, flowers, lakes, creatures of amazing varieties. Recently I was lucky enough to spend a few days in the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador. Just before the oil spill that threatens even that fiercely protected habitat of an amazing variety of Nature’s wondrous creatures of air, land and sea.

Earlier in this inscrutable year I was also lucky enough to visit Amsterdam in tulip season, and to walk on some of the fast-shrinking tundra and glaciers of the Arctic Circle. And to watch the sunrise and sunset over San Francisco. Same thing. Nature’s beauty is astounding, even where its carefully-protected creatures and its bountiful provisions are threatened. So here is a fond look back at just a few of the blessings of Nature I crossed paths with over the past 365 – well, 362 so far – days. And here’s hoping we humans will do a better job of expressing our gratitude in the New Year. Peace & joy to us all.

dove of peace

General interest, Lifestyle, seniors

A Few Random Cures for Insomnia

December 2, 2019by Fran Johns1 Comment

Insomnia - sheep I have taken to waking up at three or four AM in a state of (pick one) sadness, anxiety, unidentifiable angst or worry over the future of the planet. It’s not something I recommend, and hopefully it will not become a permanent habit. But I do note that I wrote about it on May 22, 2016. Had totally forgotten that profound essay, which may say something about its profunditiy. This one, however, is about solutions! The earlier one did in fact have a bunch of potential solutions, because it was inspired, at least in part, by a wonderful New Yorker piece that the inimitable Patricia Marx wrote about the limitless assortments of insomnia aids currently on the market. What follows are the things that get me back to sleep – – – eventually.

Watching the night skies. This has to be #1. Works best for me, thanks to the happy circumstance of having a large window that looks westward over San Francisco 7 floors below. I often get reflections of the city lights onto the clouds (or fog) above; occasionally I get a setting moon. Night sky 11.19 Staring heavenward does not require turning on the lights or getting out of bed – unless the sight is so remarkable I feel the need to capture it with my iPhone camera. The conviction that something more competent than the planet’s current inhabitants is in charge enables me to talk myself down from whatever woe has me in its grip.

If I do the turn-on-the-light-&-make-a cup-of-tea thing, there are the wonders of modern technology for #2. My smart phone spends the night in another room (something I find necessary to my sanity) so accessing it requires a measure of wakefulness (see above.) But then there it is with its handy little Calm app. Or better still, I will pick it up to find my friend Liz has just sent a video of tall trees in a Georgia forest sending their fall leaves off into a symphony of gentleness. Trees by Liz If that doesn’t lull me back to sleep, there’s an entirely other solution now that the accursed device has injected itself into my insomnia. Ninety percent of the non-existential things about which I am stewing have simple answers that Safari can provide: Yes, that book I need is available at my Western Addition Library branch! Here are the directions to a repair shop! An email just arrived from the editor I thought didn’t like my story! (What’s he doing up at 4 AM? Not my problem.) Spirits calmed or problems solved, I can then manage to go back to sleep.

And now that the light is on, the book is there. I am pretty careful not to keep Bram Stoker or Franz Kafka on the bedside table, or any of those excellent books about apartheid or the Holocaust, however fine they might be for daytime reading. But I’ll have A.S. Byatt, or Laurie Colwin, or Edith Wharton – any of those lovely friends who can pull you so deeply into a story that they will displace the cause of the insomnia. Of course, you might not want to put the book down, but that’s another problem altogether. Universe

Insomnia is not an easy foe. It may indeed require calling in the troops Marx uncovered – eye masks, stretchy hats, blue lights, Valium, whatever. But before you go to all that trouble and expense I hereby recommend the good book, the internet solution or the celestial assurance that the universe is in good hands – if you’ll just go back to sleep and quit worrying about it.