ROADTRIP
1971. A momentous, interesting, and difficult year. It started around February when I received a letter inquiring whether I would be interested in the position of Director of the Lane Library at Stanford’s Med Center. This was before the highly regimented and choreographed hiring protocols of today. Someone nominated me for the post, and it was not an offer I could refuse. This promised to be an excellent career move after a couple of years of being assistant director at Yale.
We had already scheduled a trip to India for early April in order to show our two kids, aged 23 and 5 months respectively, to Juthica’s family in Kolkata. So I planned an interview trip to Stanford for the end of March. It was to be two whole days of meetings with faculty groups, library staff, and Medical School administration. There was a lot to organize before the California trip. Assembling a vast inventory of indispensable, baby oriented consumer goods unavailable outside the Occident. Getting visas, booking fares. Consulting with pediatrician about medical requirements. Getting recommended vaccinations and inoculations. Got all this done just in time for my interview trip. I had been to California only once before, for a brief trip in the middle of summer. This time I left New Haven from freezing weather and knee-deep slush to arrive at Palo Alto into weather perfection. They put me up at Ricky’s Hyatt House, in the middle of what to me seemed like a lush, tropical garden. My first day was wall-to-wall meetings mostly with Medical School Faculty and Administration. It went well, I thought. The next day was to be spent with library staff, library |
administration, and more Med School Faculty.
As I was dropped at Ricky’s after dinner of day one, I realized that I felt more content than I had in a long time. Weather had always been very important to me. I cannot tolerate the heat, especially with humidity. The day was sunny, brilliant, medium warm and absolutely non-humid. Nothing could be more comfortable. And almost everyone was telling me that this day was typical of about 8 months of average weather in the area. Getting to my room I checked the time, a little after 8 pm, that is, 11 pm in New Haven. So I dialed home, dying to tell Juthica about how fantastic the day had been, and wanting to share my optimism that I was doing well at the interview. She picked up on the first ring. Before I even had a chance to say “hi”, she asked “Do you think you can come home right away?”. Her voice cracking, she sounded out of breath, as though she had been running hard. “What on earth…?” I started asking. “It’s Indrani. She is burning up. A fever of 104.5 – they think she might have meningitis. We spent the day at the ER. Oh my god…” she dissolved in uncontrollable sobs. I tried to get more details, but she did not know. The only thing clear was that she badly needed moral support. And that our daughter was in dire straits. My pleasant fantasies about life in California instantly receded and pragmatic requirements took over. Reserve the earliest flight out. Figure a way of getting to the airport. Let the Stanford folks know that something came up. |
The first two was easy, I could do those by the phone. The Stanford challenge was more daunting. I didn’t know how to contact any of my hosts after hours. I wasn’t even sure of most of the names or their spellings. Then I remembered that I had a list of meetings crumpled in my pocket. On the list I found the name of one of my interviewers who was fuzzier and warmer than the rest, and with whom I had more of a general, personal, rather than strictly professional conversation. I looked up Earl’s home number in the phone book and called to explain my predicament. I asked him to please contact everyone I had on my schedule the next day and to excuse me, as I had to unexpectedly fly back home to deal with a medical emergency of my little daughter. And I started getting my things together to catch the red-eye back East. The taxi ride to the airport was very unpleasant. My mind was flipping back and forth between worry and anxiety about little Indrani and disappointment that this episode blew any chance of bagging the Stanford appointment, so there goes my chance of moving to California…
The flight seemed interminable. When I finally got home, totally exhausted, Juthica received me with deep circles under her red eyes and started sobbing as she collapsed into my embrace. I got the story out of her in short, disjointed fragments. Almost as soon as I left for the trip Indrani’s fever spiked explosively and her pediatrician feared meningitis. They did a spinal tap, during which she screamed like a banshee and Juthica felt her heart being torn apart. Thankfully the test was negative. After a series of additional tests ruling out various causes one by one, what remained was a violent reaction to the cholera vaccination a couple days before. So in actual fact, by the time I got home the storm had already passed. In theory I could perhaps have stayed in Palo Alto to finish my interview, but there was no way to presage that. Thankfully Indrani mended fast and was in good shape within a few days when we left for our Indian visit. It was not an easy |
trip, what with a toddler and a babe in arms, in 100 degree weather with 100% humidity. But it was necessary for family reasons.
On return to New Haven I got a call from my mother that my father was about to have major surgery. My parents had settled in Vienna after leaving Hungary in 1957, but were frequent visitors to Budapest to see their many friends and connections there. That is where they were just then, and it is there that my father was diagnosed with carcinoma of the colon. My uncle, his brother, a dentist (which in Hungary was a medical specialty) referred him to the leading abdominal surgery professor in Budapest wanted to operate without delay. So I got on the phone right away to book the next flight and left in the morning. I was becoming quite adept at arranging last moment transportation. By the time I got to Budapest my father had just gotten through the surgery. He was heavily sedated, but in stable condition. By the next day he was alert and seemingly on his way to a good recovery. I stayed three or four days and left feeling confident that all was well. The doctors felt that they had caught the tumor at an early stage and that all malignant tissue was removed. I flew back to New Haven in a positive mood. The morning after my arrival I got a call from my uncle George who lived in New York. Thinking that he called for news about his brother, I started telling him how robust father had been the day before, when I left him. Strangely, my uncle did not respond. There was silence on the line when I finished my account. He then said in a small and failing voice that my father had left us, that he was “gone”. This made no sense. I asked him what he meant. He whispered that my father, his brother, died late last night. |
I nearly laughed, telling him that he is imagining things. After all I had just returned from seeing him, and he was in great shape. I asked him how ever he got this crazy notion. My mother and my aunt had called him the night before, while I was still en route, to give him the news. Almost immediately after I left my father’s fever spiked to a catastrophic level and he passed away within hours. It was a surgical complication. General sepsis had set in. The surgery professor had good credentials, but the hospital had nothing in the way of patient monitoring systems. Had there been one, the developing infection could have been diagnosed in time for antibiotics to solve the problem.
This was an incredible shock. Unexpected and unnecessary, both. I left his bedside reassured that all was well. And now it was all over. It may sound banal to say this, but my father had been my best friend. There was nothing I could not discuss with him. How could this happen? I felt a void. I was frustrated and furious. Vienna had world class medical care – why didn’t he go back there to get surgery done? Hungary had third world medical standards at the time. My parents had good insurance, so money was not the issue. It was my uncle’s recommendation and perhaps my dad’s nostalgic Hungarian sentiments. Who knows? It was this ill-advised decision that killed him. He had been in good general health. I could have had a father for a good 10 – 15 more years… While still in a deep funk over this, I got a call at work from Stanford. It was the Med school dean informing me that they would like to offer me the position. The call caught me completely off guard. I had banished any thought of Stanford from my mind. I had written it off. After all, I had made it look |
like I blew them off, quitting half way through my interview schedule. And here they were, offering me the post. I guess they must have had a pretty weak candidate pool… In any case, I accepted right there on the line, without playing the dignified role of having to think about it, discuss it with my wife, looking into logistics, and all that bunk.
The call was providential. It helped enormously in getting me out of my depression by forcing me to start planning and strategizing. A huge to-do list materialized instantly: resignation letter to Yale, put two houses up for sale, arrange trip to Stanford to look for housing, look into kindergarten/school for kids, inform all our friends and relatives, decide what to ship and what to sell or give away, etc. For all this we had barely two months. There was no time or opportunity to mope around. The first house we owned in New Haven was a four-family Victorian close to the University. We lived in one apartment and renting out the other three paid for all the running expenses of the building. Indrani, our first child was born there. When our second was on the way we bought a single family house, and kept the first to help finance the new venture. Selling the first house was quick and easy. As soon as we told the news of moving to California to our good friend and next door neighbor, a professor of public health at Yale, he offered to buy it over drinks in our back yard. We closed on a handshake. The second house required a more conventional approach. We listed it with an agent. It was not an easy sell, as it had features not everyone would want. It had a double building lot and a swimming pool. The former made the property more expensive, and most people in New Haven would consider the latter not a feature but a liability, as the swimming season is barely two months long… |