I’ve been married to my best friend and Anam Cara, Bonnie, since 1980. We first met in 1975, when we were both on staff at a summer camp called Camp Shiloh, for inner-city teens from East New York/Brownsville, Brooklyn. Between camp sessions, on a day-long staff canoe trip down the Delaware River, and totally by chance, Bonnie and I ended up sharing the same canoe — and it’s been quite a ride ever since! Living in a town in New Jersey close to New York City in the 90s and the aughts, Bonnie and I raised our three children, who are now in their 30s; each one discovering their own Anam Cara to wed, as their own lives unfold. One couple lives near Lille, France; one couple and their three young children live in Durham, North Carolina; and one couple lives in Ewing, New Jersey.
Growing up in the Chicagoland Area, I attended the University of Illinois to study science and carry out undergraduate research in antibiotic chemistry (BS ‘77). Following graduation, I helped run an inner-city after-school program in East New York, and played a bit-part as a community organizer. This experience led to my interest to pursuing a career in education, and I enrolled in a graduate program at Columbia University Teachers College (MA, ‘80), while student-teaching in New York City schools. After Teachers College, I taught a year of high school chemistry in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, while Bonnie completed her graduate work at Bloomsburg University. In 1981, we moved to Urbana, Illinois, where I began natural product drug discovery research at the University of Illinois (PhD, ‘86), and Bonnie began her career as a certified Speech Therapist for special needs children in Champaign Schools. My thesis research was the isolation and structural elucidation of a series of five novel anticancer molecular compounds from a Caribbean sea squirt (I named this series “the ecteinacidins”), one compound in the series is now commercially available as a chemotherapeutic.
In 1986, I received a three-year National Institutes of Health grant to carry out post-doctoral research in the genetic engineering of antibiotic producing microorganisms at Institut Pasteur, Paris. Our first two children were born in Paris, where we lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the 12th Arrondissement. In 1990, I joined Merck’s natural products drug discovery research group in Rahway, New Jersey. Bonnie and I settled in the neighboring town of Westfield. In the 1990s, Westfield was still an affordable place to live, and our house was close enough to public schools for our children to walk to each school — first was Tamaques, followed by Edison Middle School, and finally Westfield High School, graduating in the years of ‘06, ‘08, and ‘10. In 2009 I left Merck Research Labs and returned to teaching, and I found it was good medicine for a wounded soul. Initially I taught at both Rutgers University and Westfield High School, but two years later, I took a position at the Montclair Kimberley Academy Upper School, where I also served as Science Chair. During our years in New Jersey, Bonnie enjoyed a long and fulfilling career as a Speech and Language Therapist for students with autism (ages 5-21) in public school settings. We both retired from teaching in 2020 and moved from New Jersey to Durham, North Carolina at the height of the pandemic lock-down.
Bonnie and I now live a short walk from Duke Campus and a short walk from our son, daughter-in-law, and their children. Bonnie helps out regularly with day-care for our grandchildren, and she also enjoys singing in a large community choir. Having the ability to be a nurturing presence for grandchildren is truly a precious and cherished gift for both of us. When not too busy with the child-care, cooking, and working on the house, I love to practice what Eckhart would call “Gelassenheit” in a local clay studio; most of my work is wheel-thrown functional tableware. It is a wonderful place for me to play, let go, and meet fascinating people. I gain both pleasure and insight from writing this blog, and from the conversations it stimulates.
Since our happenstance pairing on a canoe trip down the Delaware, some fifty years ago, Bonnie and I comfort and support each other as we pass through the stormy and frightful rapids as well as the still waters in this life journey. And in the moments when we can remember, we offer gratitude for all.
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