…to everybody who is donating to my fundraiser for Tengeru Hospital in Arusha, Tanzania! Here’s the list of honor to date:
Julie Gilbert
Austin Nguy
Carol Stamm
Matthew Frank
Mark Krikorian
Christine Woods
Sterling Wind
Libby Johnson
Robin Stavisky
Peter Tarantino
Peter Lee
Izabella Tabarovsky
Yvonne Burton
William Guthrie
James Everingham
Laurence Kancherla
Laurence is one of my “mom friends” extraordinaire from Palo Alto. Her boys are about the same age as Shefler and Rainier and have been their companions, at various ages, in school, Cub Scouts, and sports. Laurence is also one of those best type of mom who enjoys hanging out at school after pickup time to chat with those of us who agree with her that it is more important to socialize with other moms than to go home and actually get stuff done.
Amy Peck
Amy is Jeremy’s dad’s first cousin and lives and works in Washington D.C. as a psychologist and therapist. She’s pictured here on the far right with her daughter Katie standing next to her and some more cousins. Amy is one of the few reasons we are sad we didn’t move to D.C. But here’s hoping we can at least gear up for a visit at some point.
Riva-Melissa Tez
Riva is a polymath, technologist, and business dynamo whom Jeremy met through some entirely disreputable mutual political friends that we will not name here as this is a family web site. A native of the UK, she recently ditched the Bay Area for Nevada, showing that she is always at the forefront of coming trends. She has a highly entertaining Twitter account with many more followers than Jeremy has or probably ever will have. She is also a newly minted Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Jeremy currently works as a Senior Fellow.
Carol Chivers
Here’s a picture of Carol with her mom, Annette. The poster they are holding up pretty much sums up their general approach to all the people around them. Carol is a teacher by profession and I got to know her because she teaches Sunday school on a regular basis at our church. I’m not really sure I could honestly say I have seen her without a genuine smile on her face, unless she was making some other silly face to amuse the kids. Carol operates on the assumption that those around her will do their best if they are feeling loved and supported. I don’t think she really has to think about it or try very hard; her instinctive desire for your well-being shines through and makes Carol just a delight to be around and have in the community. Just the sort of person you love at your back when you are desperately wrangling your kids and attempting to not make a scene at church.
Corrie Crews
Guess where we know Corrie from? She’s one of Jeremy’s and Cathy’s first friends when they moved to North Carolina as young children, and they are still friends to this day. Corrie’s mom Vicki is a model of Southern womanhood and Corrie, despite having left NC for the decidedly inferior state of Georgia, is following in her footsteps. Fortunately, she still cheers for the Tar Heels. Corrie’s father, the late John Lotz, was the former top assistant coach to Dean Smith, on the University of North Carolina basketball team. Once when Jeremy got sick at age 9, John procured a get-well-soon card from the team, signed by, among others, James Worthy, Sam Perkins and some freshman named Michael Jordan. Needless to say, Jeremy has kept that card to this day.
Aparajita Sohoni
Apa was one of my physician colleagues at California Pacific in San Francisco. We attended the same residency program, as well, although not concurrently. Apa is as smart as she is beautiful. There were not so many female partners in the practice when I joined 15 years ago, but that female majority in medical schools does eventually march along, and now I am pretty much completely intimidated by the ladies, younger than me, that have joined us. A couple of years ago, I was driving along, probably coming home from work, listening to KQED as I usually did, and I was surprised to hear Apa’s voice reading her contribution to the “Perspectives” series. She was talking about the impact of the Affordable Care Act on her practice. Clearly, Apa has many other talents besides being an excellent physician.
Diane Reklis
Diane is one of my mom-friends, except that she’s a grandmother. Here she is with her grandson Rylie, who is about the same age as Rainier and similarly interested in soccer. Diane is one of those super-grandmothers who lives near her child and is hugely involved in the day-to-day care and upbringing of her grandchild. As a child raised by her own grandparents, I am very partial toward such selfless humans. I can only hope that someday I will have a similar opportunity.
Carol Stivers
Carol is a friend of ours from church in Palo Alto. I first met her after working with her husband Alan, a saint-like figure amidst our congregation as he somehow manages to run at least 50% of the community service projects AND maintain an extremely low profile in which he does not attempt to take credit for doing any of this. This is perhaps not the most illustrative photo of Carol’s face, but I nonetheless include it since her novel (pictured), recently published by Random House, is about a post-pandemic future dystopia. Topical, eh? And here some of you were thinking that church is just for dumb anti-science people.
Rabiatu Abdullah
Rabi was one of my classmates in emergency medicine residency at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. This should tell you quite a bit about Rabi: afraid of nothing, not easily impressed, eminently practical and forward-thinking. My kind of girl! Originally from Nigeria, Rabi grew up in a diplomatic family and so also spent a fair amount of her childhood in Brazil and the US. Although she ended up at Hahvahd for med school, I still love her. Rabi now works and lives in Ireland, oops, I mean Oakland, with her husband Cormac and sons Declan and Donovan. She’s one of those people protecting the rest of us from the plague. If you somehow win the lottery and score her as your doctor when you hit the ER, you can basically breathe a sigh of relief.
Mark Hemhauser
Mark is a singing buddy from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley. Here’s Mark entertaining Rowena when we were on tour with the choir in England. Not always easy having a 13-month old along on a choir tour, but having people like Mark, who was CONSTANTLY helping out, carrying things for us, pushing the stroller, making silly faces, taking photos, etc etc., makes it a joy, actually. Mark is originally from the east coast, so we share some inarticulate sensibility there, but he is just generally a thoughtful, insightful, and gentle presence and really nice to be around. Mark is a librarian at UC Berkeley and enjoys two-wheeling when he is not laid up recovering from some injury inflicted by the four-wheelers.
Amanda Hoehler
Amanda was one of my colleagues at the pediatric ER I worked at in San Francisco. I know people say that health professionals who work with critically ill children are superheroes and all that, but Amanda actually IS a superhero. Notice the Pearl Izumi leggings in the photo? She’s about to leave for work. On her bike. From Sausalito. To Pacific Heights. She also routinely runs ultra-marathons and that sort of thing. She once invited me to do one of these races with her, some kind of 30+ mile trail extravaganza or something like that. This was recently, not back in the day when I was able to squirt out a marathon every couple of years or so. Although I had some convenient excuse as to why I was unable to join her, I have saved up that invitation in my brain as a sort of esteem-building talisman that I can pull out when I am feeling particularly pathetic, as in “Amanda once thought I could do an ultramarathon with her! I must be at least a little cool”. Either that or she’s just really nice. When Amanda is not caring for the sick and injured children of SF, she volunteers at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, where they rehabilitate our amphibious mammalian brothers and sisters.
David Fedor
David Fedor survived working with Jeremy for the better part of a decade at the Hoover Institution. He knows more about energy policy than many tenured professors in the field. Jeremy appreciated the opportunity to take credit for a great deal of this knowledge in their many co-authored papers. David is modest to a fault, but really kept the trains running on time at Hoover. Like Jeremy, David is from the fine state of North Carolina.
Disa Dimmitt & Aide Juarez Valerio
Disa is an ER nurse that I worked with for many years in San Francisco. Which is to say, of course, even if you didn’t know anything else about her, that she’s a badass. She was also one of the particularly good nurses I’ve had the pleasure of working with, highly competent, efficient, and quite capable of managing her patients just fine without much input or complaint. I quickly learned that if she was worried about a patient and wanted me to come and check on him, I had better drop everything and DO IT NOW. All ER nurses are a strange sort of angel, but Disa is one of the archangels that you want on the team when there is a difficult code or resuscitation. Disa has had the good sense to move to Portland.
Josh Knowles
Here’s Josh (the bald one) with his wife Juliet. Josh went to preschool with Jeremy. He and Juliet are now both academic physicians at Stanford and have exploited this privilege on 5 occasions to come and visit our newborns as inpatients, Rainier in this case. Josh is a cardiologist specializing in familial hyperlipidemia and Juliet is a pediatric neurologist specializing in epilepsy. Both also have PhDs and they have 2 little kids. Pretty impressive family, but they always have time to stop by for dinner or a visit or a birthday party or whatever.
Dan Gordon
Dan is a college buddy of Jeremy’s. Here he is with his wife Tami showing some Warrior pride. This is a great picture of Dan, who approaches life with precisely this look of gee-whiz cheerful optimism. He takes an eminently reasonable, rational and fair-minded approach to politics, which explains why he was smart enough to stay out of politics as a career. Dan and Jeremy also worked together at RealNetworks and traveled together in China, many years ago, where they walked a few miles in the hot sun to avoid being “ripped off” by a rickshaw driver. Dan has the best sense of direction of anyone Jeremy knows– very handy in a travel companion.
Jenny Frazier
Jenny was Jeremy’s date to the senior prom. I guess she had a pretty good time, since she’s still willing to get involved with our little project, here. Jenny has two young daughters with flaming red hair who seem to have just stepped out of a Hanna Andersson photoshoot in every picture she puts on Facebook– they are that cute! She attended college at Drew University in Madison, NJ, coincidentally Anna’s hometown.
Tien-An Yang
I was lucky enough to be randomly assigned to room with Tien-An my freshman year in college. Somehow we nonetheless ended up lifelong friends. Here’s a picture of Tien-An with the love of her life, her son Elliott, who’s now 3. Tien-An grew up in NYC, went to Stuyvesant High School, then Yale College, Cornell Med (for an MD/PhD): you know the type, brilliant, perfect. She now lives in San Francisco and works as an ophthalmologist, contributing to my bias toward ophthalmologists as one of the medical specialties with the best culture and people. Tien-An shares my love of baking, cooking, eating, choral music, and photography but takes all of these things to a completely different level. Elliott has interfered minimally with her jet-setting foodie lifestyle, in which she speed-dials for the three-months-in-advance, impossible-to-get, Michelin-starred restaurant reservation and then plans the rest of her vacation around that.
Eileen Altman
Eileen is Associate Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Palo Alto (FCCPA), which we have been attending since soon after Rainier was born (11 years!). Here she is getting ready to baptize Libbey. Eileen has watched our family grow and guided us along the way. Eileen is a true Southern lady, transplanted from Mississippi, and her warmth and personal insight are unmistakeable. The clergy was a second career for Eileen, but clearly a calling. We thought we had to leave FCCPA behind, but now we are members of the virtual Zoom congregation and really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of the community, whether we are separated by continent or quarantine.
Kristin Howell
Kristin is pictured on the left in this photo with her husband, Dave, and Eileen Altman (see above) making up the rest of the crowd. I met Kristin because Dave is the senior pastor at our church. She grew up in the Bay area and works as a school librarian in Palo Alto. As you might expect of a school librarian, Kristin is a storyteller extraordinaire. She is a writer and lyricist for the fantastic church musicals and puppet shows we enjoy every year, in addition to her own grown-up writing bona fides, and she represents a huge, if sometimes behind-the-scenes, part of the extraordinary welcome that all children feel at FCCPA. Kristin and Dave have recently launched two adult daughters into the real world, a couple of fine young ladies if I may say so, and are attempting to replace them with a rather large Labrador Retriever.
Ellen Goldberg
Ellen is a college singing buddy of mine. Turns out, she loves Tanzania, too! Here she is visiting with some of the locals. Ellen grew up in the D.C. area and majored in chemistry at Yale. She’s one of these amazing people who balances science AND business acumen and is therefore able to actually accomplish something useful in this world. After working in management consulting and the pharmaceutical industry, graduate work in chemistry, and an MBA, Ellen put her talents to work at getting valuable treatments for diseases like breast cancer on the market. She now runs her own consulting business. Ellen lives in Reno with her husband Barnaby.
David Sasson
Here’s David, Jeremy’s childhood friend, putting Shefler in his place, an activity we highly value. David found out that he got his first job in tech when driving across country with Jeremy shortly after college graduation. He knew nothing about tech at the time, having studied classics or something similar in college, but soon became ridiculously successful in the field. David has many embarrassing stories about Jeremy from high school that so far he has politely declined to put on the Internet. He is also the answer to the question, “What sort of person would you get if you crossed several generations of distinguished Syrian Rabbis with Southern Baptists from rural North Carolina?”
Avikk Ghose
Here’s Avikk with his wife Elaine. What makes Avikk great is a bit difficult to articulate in a brief photo caption, and he’s not someone who can be easily pigeonholed. A few anecdotes: Avikk once owned and ran a taqueria in Seattle; he is now CEO of a medical informatics startup and runs a charitable foundation. He is a practitioner of Krav Maga and an excellent cook. He has been friends with Jeremy since long before I became part of Jeremy’s life, but he won me over immediately when we met, probably because at the same time that he is a charming flirt, he also couldn’t care less what you think of him. If you get to meet Avikk, don’t miss out on his comic stereotype of a Bengali accent.
Jan Libbey
My cousin Jan, pictured here sitting with my uncle Mark, is one of my real-life heroes. Jan grew up in Iowa but not in a farming family. At some point after settling down into a fairly conventional existence with her husband Tim, Jan decided to buy a farm (in the literal sense) and start their own community-supported agriculture (CSA) business, in which they grow organic vegetables and deliver them to local members, who pay for a subscription at the beginning of the year. Needless to say, this was not exactly an easy road to take. Their farm is called “One Step At A Time Gardens” and that pretty much sums it up. Hard work, no giving up. Jan has become something of a leader in her local agricultural community and the CSA movement. She and Tim host interns each year on the farm to learn about CSA work. Supposedly they’re sort of retired now, but I just saw watched a video of Jan working on a big greenhouse of lettuces, so I’m not really sure exactly what that means.
Ines von der Schulenburg
Ines (front), pictured with her parents and husband Philipp, is from Germany, Munich to be exact. She and Philipp and her two sons have been living in Palo Alto for the last few years because of Philipp’s job. Their older son, Karl, is Libbey’s age and we met while they were attending preschool together. Karl’s little brother, Paul, is a bit younger than Rowena, and still cute enough to serve as pet to Shefler. Ines is an MD too, an internist in Germany, but (like me) has been taking time off to be supermom while they are in the US. I really can’t say enough about what a positive, encouraging, warm, and faithful friend she has been to me. The Schulenburgs are moving back to Germany this summer (probably?) and we hope to intercept them there at some point in our travels. I think their favorite thing about California is the beach.
Jean Libbey
Jean is the widow of my grandfather’s brother. I very much identify with the extended family that is descended from my grandfather and his two brothers, who produced a raft of high-quality second cousins of mine (you can find some of them in other places in this blog!). Jean is sadly the only living member of that generation in my family, and, as such, is both tasked with and, fortunately, very well suited for the roles of family historian, keeper of tradition, and shepherd, keeping all of the families together. Jean, with her husband Scott, raised their four children in various places around the US (and in England!) and has traveled all over the world. I admire her ability to blossom in just about any environment. Take note of where this worldly lady has chosen to retire: Grinnell, IA, where she is an active member of the social and intellectual life of her community, and continues to play the cello and swim. She recently participated in the famous Iowa electoral caucuses; we should all hope for more such thoughtful and level-headed people to choose our future leaders. When I grow up, I hope to develop something akin to Jean’s loving wisdom, as well as her perfect hair.
Deborah & Stephen Shefler
Stephen is Jeremy’s mom’s brother, Deborah his wife. You probably recognize their last name. Deborah and Stephen live in Oakland, where they are blissfully and stylishly retired from long and impressive careers as lawyers. I was torn between showing a glamorous photo of them dressed up for some black-tie dinner party and something much more bedraggled in which they are babysitting our kids and looking the worse for wear. This was a compromise, and it’s a good photo because it depicts one of their many important gifts to us as a family: on all four occasions in question, Deborah and Stephen have been faithfully on call to swoop in and take care of our children while we are off at the hospital giving birth to the next one. Here they are with brand-spanking-new Rainier, having just brought Shefler to the hospital to meet his brother for the first time.
Philip & Linda Carl
Here are Jeremy’s indefatigable parents with us on a camel trek in Morocco. In medical parlance, we say “appears younger than stated age”. Philip & Linda live in Chapel Hill, NC, where they are enjoying retirement from UNC with a bevy of well-educated and culinarily adventuresome friends. Their combined talents are too numerous to catalog, but I will mention that Philip is a very entertaining magician and Linda is an extremely accomplished home chef. They were next scheduled to visit us in Europe right about now, but, sadly, that trip will be deferred until things get back to normal. In the meanwhile, we can’t thank them enough for their regular science and art history lessons for the kids, constant cheerleading, cooking tips, not to mention generous charitable contributions 🙂
Cathy Carl
This is Cathy Carl, sister-in-law extraordinaire. Cathy lives in San Francisco with her new sheepdog puppy, Ruby. Cathy is Jeremy’s sister, so many of you may know her story: grew up in Chapel Hill, NC, went to UNC from which time she has nurtured a serious grudge against all things Duke. Her sparkling career is in advertising and brand development, and you probably own something that she influenced you to buy. A good thing. Cathy loves Burning Man, cycling, interior decorating, white-water rafting, Peloton, kite surfing, weddings, burritos, and her nephews and nieces. She was sad to see us leave the Bay area, but has been a faithful follower of TOMS and supportive of all our crazy endeavours. Thanks, Cathy!
And more thank yous…
…to our above-and-beyond hosts in Whitley Bay, UK (just outside Newcastle), Stephanie Beckman and Yit Arn Teh. These guys are old St. Mark’s Berkeley buddies of mine (all of us before kids). They have continued their jet-setting lives by recently settling in northern England after living in Dundee, Scotland for 10 years, where they started their family and postgraduate careers. Stephanie and Yit moved into this home about a month ago, finished hosting Yit’s parents for 7 weeks just a few days before our arrival, and nonetheless found it in their hearts and home to host the SEVEN of us for two nights. Pretty magnificent, don’t you think?…to Anna’s cousins Nancy & Chris Viola in Silver Bay, Minnesota, who housed us, fed us, took us fishing at their cabin on beautiful Lax Lake, played endless games with our silly kids, and listened with interest as Jeremy talked politics. You guys are the best!!!!…to Jeremy’s cousin Kathy in Portland, Oregon, who, after receiving the very last-minute missive that we were visiting Portland, delayed her long-planned trip to the Oregon coast, sent her husband Bill on ahead (thanks, Bill!), showed the kids a good time at a local playground, made us dinner, and then put us up in her house. She then drove to the coast as planned, leaving us in charge of the house and the cats! Thank, you, Kathy.
