When writing becomes healing

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in November 2007.

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Martella gave birth to a girl she named Viviana. Like many new mothers, Martella held the baby in her arms for pictures, and made prints on paper from her daughter’s tiny palms and feet.

But the occasion was not happy.

“Having a stillborn baby means dealing with very hard emotions,” said Martella, who lives in Lathrop. “For months my mind raced with questions of guilt and misgivings.”

To cope with the tragedy, she turned to the love of her husband, Jorge, but she also turned to poetry.

“Writing was a way of healing for me,” she said.

In fact, Martella, 35, has tapped into the power of writing poetry to grapple with the many challenges life has thrown her way.

When she was eight, her father left his wife and children for another woman.

“I was devastated,” she said, “and I still have difficulty with this.”

Martella’s mother, who was born in Taiwan and met Martella’s father when he was a Marine overseas, moved her young family from San Francisco to Oakland to live with her sister. “My mom was a strong woman,” Martella said, noting that her mother had to work three jobs—as a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, and a late-night janitor—just to support her family.

As Martella wrestled in her pre-teen years with her father’s absence, she became the victim of sexual abuse by a cousin. This went on for many years until she turned 14, when she stood up to him and said no more.

After high school, Martella took a few classes at Merritt College and started working. “Growing up with barely any food to eat sometimes,” she said, “it was great to be able to make my own money, so I left college and began working full time.”

Martella managed a Chevron service station and one day met a young man whose family had immigrated from Buenos Aires. “I soon discovered that Jorge was my soul mate,” she said.

A kind and caring husband, Jorge understood and loved Martella like no one else ever had. Then, a few years after the loss of their first baby, they were blessed in 2001 with a baby girl they named Izabella.

Though from the outside it appeared life was settling down for the Martellas, an avalanche of unresolved inner conflict led Martella to a nervous breakdown in 2005.

She began to see a therapist, and as she made progress, she leaned heavily on her writing for support.

“The month after I started therapy,” she said, “I started compiling a collection of my poems, which led me to write even more poems.”

Martella poured her tears and sadness into her work, writing about her father, her stillborn baby, the abuse—all of her life’s experiences.

The result is a book of published poems dedicated to readers “from broken homes and dysfunctional families” and those “molested as a child.” Martella states in her dedication, “Know that there is light at the end of that tunnel.”

And part of that light for Martella became the publication of her second work, this time a children’s book. Based on a happy experience with Martella’s 6-year-old daughter, the book is titled “Izabella and her Wardrobe.”

“My daughter was my inspiration,” Martella said. “She is quite the character, especially when it comes to her clothing.”

Martella’s goal is to write a ten-book series on various topics as Izabella grows older.

Both books, available at http://www.lulu.com/, are the expression of a caring woman dedicated to sharing her experiences with others on the path to healing.

As she writes in her book of poems, "Life isn’t always perfect; it’s what you make of it that counts.”














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Saying goodbye to Kent

This column was published in November 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.

In 1964, when Diane Nelson was eight years old, she made friends with a 10-year-old neighbor named Kent, a boy she came to love, a man to whom one day she would have to say goodbye.

Their families lived along Mines Road, a rural area a few miles from downtown Livermore, which back then had just one grocery store and stoplight.

“He was a pudgy boy with wavy blonde hair and big white teeth,” said Diane, who still lives in Livermore. “And he had arms that would stretch out as if to announce himself to the world.”

In contrast, Diane was “a skinny little tadpole with asthma,” prompting Kent to nickname her Wheezy.

Diane said Kent came to Livermore to live with his mother after she gained custody of the boy from an abusive father.

The two new friends often played together, building forts or hiking along a creek. At times they even played with dolls, though sometimes this would send Kent running for home in tears.

“One day we’d be with Popeye on the high seas,” she said. “The next we’d spend with Mr. Spock on the starship Enterprise.” Kent was a natural comedian with a galaxy of voices and characters.

“I can still see my mom laughing as he told us about his vacation with his family and a run-in with a woman in a big yellow muumuu,” she said.

At such moments, Diane would struggle for air, pushing oxygen into her unwilling lungs to express the laughter building inside.

Older and stronger, Kent would swing his little friend in circles on a patio as she wore roller skates and clutched a rope and screamed. Other days they’d gather friends and dance as an old radio crackled out the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

Then there were horses. Kent’s horse was King, and Diane’s—a little gray pony with a sweeping tail—was Suzy.

“We’d gallop down both sides of old Mines Road,” she said. “King liked to kick Suzy, so I had to be careful not to get hit by a flying hoof.”

Through it all, Kent’s mischievous and curious presence transported Diane somewhere else, into someone else.

During their teen years, they drove an Oldsmobile—the purple bomb—owned by Kent’s stepfather. “It looked like a space ship with its pointed fins and bulging headlamps,” Diane said, “and its worn-out springs seemed to levitate us down the road.”

Sometimes, though, Kent would drive recklessly, one time reaching 100 miles an hour along Tesla Road.

When Diane was a high school freshman, Kent asked the skinny tomboy on their first date. “We hiked up a hill and used big rocks to spell out Kent + Diane so airplanes could read it,” she said.

She wore his class ring, and the two went steady. Once they even made a show of kissing when they knew Kent’s 4-year-old sister was watching.

But that’s all it really was: a show. And eventually they stopped going steady, stopped dating, because something inside Kent made it impossible to be more than friends.

At 19, Diane left home to search for life’s answers. She found herself living with Moonies in a chilly Victorian mansion in San Francisco. One day Kent showed up on her doorstep.

“He’d come to talk to me, to save me from the cult,” she said, “and though I didn’t leave right then, his visit made an impression on me, and eventually I left and made my way home.”

As years passed and she married, she heard he’d moved to San Francisco to seek his own answers. Then, in the mid-1980s, Kent’s 30 years of life was slashed apart by the knife of his boyfriend, perhaps out of anger or jealousy.

“I didn’t find out until after the funeral,” she said, her eyes deepening. “And I don’t know the details of his death.”

Still sad and angry that she didn’t get to say goodbye, if she could speak to Kent today, she would push oxygen into her lungs to express her yearning for a childhood long gone, a time when she’d knock on his door and ask in a small voice if Kent could come out and play.

“And then I’d tell him goodbye,” she said, “and to keep King and Suzy saddled, because one day we’ll gallop again together.”











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English Class

Jim Ott's English Class at Las Positas College, Fall 2007

Hail to Halloween

This column was published in the Herald the day before Halloween 2007.

When I was a boy, I took Halloween seriously.

My mom recalls that just after my eighth birthday during the first week of October, she reminded me to write thank-you notes for the gifts I received.

“I will,” I promised.

But two weeks later I hadn't written the notes, so she asked me about it.

“Oh Mom,” I said, “how can I write thank-you notes when I’m so busy planning my Halloween costume?”

What I loved about Halloween was the permission to become someone else, to try on different personalities, to dream outside my limitations and assume the profile of a monster, a hunchback, a president.

The year I dressed as Lincoln, I tried out my costume before Halloween by standing on a corner at the end of our block. With a top hat made from black construction paper, I wore my dad’s dark coat and an eye-pencil beard, and I waved to motorists who, after doing a double-take at a pint-sized Abe, waved back.

As a mummy, I wrapped myself in torn sheets, then walked stiff-legged into my sister’s room to conduct a pre-Halloween fright test.

My Frankenstein success one year led to my Dracula triumph the next. My inspiration came from Boris Karloff movies and a stack of monster magazines I adored.

Through it all I discovered my love of drama and illusion. I learned to be resourceful, to use elements of my costumes from one year to the next. And I learned that although I loved playing a selected role in the evening theater of Halloween, I was always content to wake up the next day as myself.

And by the way, not once—as I read some years ago in a letter to the editor—did the earliest origins of Halloween send a satanic spirit to whisper into my ear.

In fact, the first time I read my own words in a daily newspaper was two decades ago when I wrote a letter respectfully disagreeing with a woman who’d written to say that Halloween should be abolished because it encourages the devil and pagan rites.

What’s often overlooked is that in the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 as All Saints' Day to honor Christian saints and martyrs and to replace the pagan harvest celebrations. This celebration was preceded by an evening of bonfires, parades, and dressing up as saints, angels, and, yes, devils.

So our modern day Halloween is derived from an evening grounded as much in Christian celebration as in pagan ritual. For youngsters, such discussion is just grown-ups overanalyzing a fun evening.

And fun is what the children from Dublin’s Happy Talkers and School of Imagination will be having this Halloween when they don their costumes and join Dublin city staff at city hall.

“Mayor Janet Lockhart has arranged for her staff to celebrate Halloween with our children,” said Mitch Sigman, who with his wife Charlene and a team of speech pathologists, teachers, and therapists provides care for youngsters with mental, physical and developmental disabilities. “With city hall decked out for the celebration and the staff in costumes, our children will trick or treat together.”

This is what Halloween is all about—the fun and freedom of stepping beyond our limitations, of gathering and sharing candy with friends, and of becoming anyone we dream to be.

Terror in a Russian Cornfield

This column appeared in the Herald in October 2007.

When Marina Strong moved to the Tri-Valley from Russia ten years ago, she couldn’t understand a certain habit of Americans.

“Everyone was always smiling,” said Strong, her accent and blue eyes reflecting her Russian heritage. “I wasn’t used to this. It’s not that we weren’t happy in Russia. We were. Eventually I came to enjoy the smiles of Americans.”

Strong, who lives in Pleasanton with her American husband and son, recently reminisced about growing up in a beautiful region of Moscow. Among her memories is a visit from Fidel Castro to her elementary school , and the fear she shared with fellow students that Ronald Reagan might start a nuclear war.

“We made posters at school begging Mr. Reagan not to push the button,” she said. “We were all afraid.”

Another memory—one she will never forget—involves an evening when Strong was 12. She and her friends, Galina and Angelica, got up the courage to ride their bikes to secretly harvest a few ears of corn from a field just behind a forest, near the Moscow River, a place forbidden to young girls.

“Boys went there all the time,” Strong said. “So we three, we gallant three, decided to go.”
It was the last day of a summer vacation spent flying kites and riding bikes.

“That summer we three were the whole world,” she said. “We were the three princesses in The Firebird, the three who battled the witch Baba Yaga, the Troika.”

Strong described her friend Galina as “a smart and brutally honest preteen, tall with a boyish haircut and hot temper who liked to argue about little things.”

Angelica was “a romantic girl with wavy black hair and blue eyes who made the boys quiet when she walked into a room.”

And Strong? She was “the glue that held our trio together whenever misunderstanding or jealousy lurked,” she said.


The cornfield was large and the stalks were high, with a grassy-fresh smell. The corn was irregular, grown as cattle feed, so the girls would have to search for the larger, ripe ears.

They left their bikes near the road and moved deeper into the field, chatting nervously.

“I remember asking Angelica if she’d gotten a call from an older boy we’d recently met from Denmark who was going to start at our school the next day,” Strong said. “He had bubblegum—which was rare in Russia—and all girls were already dreaming about him.”

Galina was suspicious that the boy’s gum was just a lure, and told Angelica he was just leading her on.

Angelica disagreed, saying he was kind and tall, wore knit shirts, and was not rude like other boys.

“I remember dusk had fallen and I was dreaming about that handsome boy,” said Strong, “wondering why he hadn’t thought of me when, suddenly, a scream broke my fantasy.” She looked to see Galina’s hand pointing, her mouth open, the color leaving her face.

It was a body, and the girls could see his boots in the dirt.

“We gave a quick look at each other, then at the boots,” Strong said. “They were black and dirty, in an odd position.”

Without speaking, the girls knew he'd been dead for days. They dropped the corn, forgot about their bikes, and ran.

Strong’s thoughts raced along with her legs. “I thought he must have been killed for stealing the corn. It was a prohibited place, and I thought if I survived this, I’d be grounded forever.”

When she got home, she said nothing to her parents and couldn’t sleep that night. The next day, Strong met her friends at recess.

“We secretly discussed the murder scene,” she said, “and whether to notify the police.”

The girls decided to go back, and if the bikes were gone, they’d report the stolen bikes and the dead body. If they found the bikes, they'd then decide what to do next.

“After school, we took a bus to the field,” Strong said. “It was quiet. The bikes were where we left them. But what about the body?”

Strong and her friends wanted to do the right thing, to be brave, so they began to search. But they couldn’t remember where the body was. So they searched all afternoon.

“And then we saw them,” she said. “The old black boots.” But the boots were not in the dirt. They were on a full-grown man, weightless, hovering a few inches from the ground.

“We started to laugh,” said Strong, her face breaking into one of those smiles she now enjoys. “The man was just a scarecrow.”

Catching up with Hammett

This column appeared in the Herald on October 2.

Let’s try something fun in my column today.

My wife and I recently read, and enjoyed, “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective novel published in 1930. Many people are reading the book thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Called “The Big Read,” this national initiative is designed to restore reading to the center of America culture.

So to have a little fun as I share what I’ve learned about the author and his work, I’m writing the rest of this column in the black and white prose style of Hammett. Here we go:

I stepped through the door into the television studio. The lights glared as TV30’s able cameraman adjusted chairs on the set.

Suddenly, stepping from a shadow in the corner, there she was: a brunette in lipstick and heels. She held a thumbed over copy of Hammett’s book.

“Hello Jim,” she said, removing her glasses. “Ready to tape another show?”

“Sure,” I said, holding up my own copy of Hammett’s masterpiece.

She was Kathy Cordova, a woman who’d seen the inside of scores of books and interviewed dozens of authors on “In A Word,” the show we host together on Tri-Valley Community Television Channel 30.

This day, as long as the cops didn’t bust down the doors, we’d be discussing “The Maltese Falcon.” Joining us were two guests: Mark Coggins, a Hammett expert and detective fiction writer; and Hailey Lind, author of “Brush with Death.”

Sure, I learned a lot about Hammett that day, and you’d be smart to tune in to watch the show. But

I’ve learned even more since then. Here’s just a taste:

Hammett was born on a farm in Maryland in 1894. He quit school at 14 to go to work. In 1915, he was hired on at Pinkerton’s National Detective Service, where the whittled-down prose of the reports he wrote foreshadowed his later fiction.

In 1918, he did what most all-American boys did and joined the army to fight the war to end all wars. But he never got overseas. Instead he drove an ambulance at Camp Mead, Maryland. He was discharged honorably due to a bout with tuberculosis.

After moving to Frisco in 1921, he started penning short stories at the public library. He sent one to H.L. Mencken. Sure enough, it was published, and as they say, a writer was born.

“The Maltese Falcon,” in 1930, was Hammett’s second novel.

While Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot preceded Sam Spade, Hammett gets the credit for transforming the well-mannered detective story for American audiences.

In Hammett’s hands, the detective story took on an urban toughness, uttered through a prose style of slang and grit and realism. The motivations of a detective like Spade are often questionable, since his choices seem at once both selfish and altruistic.

Hammett’s 80 short stories and five novels are part of the fabric of American literature and culture. Every novel has been made into a movie. The most famous, of course, is John Huston’s 1941 “The Maltese Falcon” starring Humphrey Bogart, the film most credited with launching the Film Noir era in Hollywood.

Now, before I pull this page from my typewriter, toss it onto my editor’s desk, and walk off into the evening in search of another column idea, I want to illuminate for you knowledge-starved readers what I learned about the term “hardboiled detective.” Popularized by that great newspaperman Damon Runyon, a detective is hardboiled when he—or she—is fundamentally a good egg, but hard on the outside.

Who knew?

For information about the many events taking place in October to commemorate “The Big Read,” visit the Pleasanton Library www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us, or drop by Towne Center Books in Pleasanton. For TV listings of “In a Word” on Comcast or via webcast, visit www.tv30.org.

Local pilot looks back at 9-11

This column was published in early September 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.

Six years ago on September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers had been destroyed, after our nation’s skies had been cleared of all air traffic, Bob Tucknott skirted the main entrance of the Hayward airport and drove a little known route onto the airfield to get to his plane.

“I was immediately run down by a security guard,” Tucknott said. “I explained the situation and told him to call the tower.”

Authorized to use any runway, Tucknott lifted off from Hayward for a short flight to Oakland. From there, he flew with his daughter, Renee, on a special mission to San Diego.

“I’d gotten a call from the director of the Alameda/Contra Costa County blood bank,” said Tucknott, who reminisced recently about his unique experience on September 11. “The director asked me to fly blood samples to San Diego by 11 p.m. that night. The samples were from a large supply of blood waiting to be shipped on a C-5 cargo transport from Travis Air Force to 9-11 survivors in New York and Washington D.C.”

A volunteer with Angel Flight West, which arranges free air transportation on private aircraft in response to health care and other compelling human needs, Tucknott received the call at 3 p.m. and got busy trying to obtain flight clearance. It took him three hours, but he finally got through to the head of the FAA.

“I was given a discrete squawk code that was given to the air traffic controllers from Hayward to San Diego,” he said. Tucknott also called the various controlling agencies to let them know the type of plane he was flying and the nature of his cargo.

“What an eerie flight that was,” he said. “As we flew that evening, there was complete silence on the airways. We were the only ones talking to controllers, who were all still at their positions.”
Tucknott said it’s usually difficult to get a word in edgewise with controllers, but this evening some seemed a bit bored and chatted with him and his daughter about their mission.

When Tucknott asked if any other airplanes were in the air, he was told two F-14 fighter jets were high above him. “It wasn’t until two years later I found out those F-14’s were actually escorting me to make sure I was who I said I was. They had orders to take me out if I deviated off course.”

As Tucknott landed in San Diego at 10:30 p.m., a crew was waiting to take care of his plane and carry the blood samples to a Red Cross truck for testing. Given the late hour, the weary couriers spent the night, then flew home the next morning using the same secret code and procedures as they had used flying down to San Diego.

“The flight was just as quiet,” Tucknott said, “though I started to pick up some police helicopter traffic flying in the L.A. basin.”

Tucknott, who owns an electrical contracting firm in Pleasanton, earned his pilot’s license 32 years ago. He has volunteered with Angel Flight West for 15 years, and has flown 236 missions for the non-profit organization.

His missions have included transport of children, deaf patients, rescue dogs, campers, adult victims, burn victims, and, among other human tissue, corneas.

In fact, Tucknott and a co-pilot once transported two corneas in the span of three hours harvested from an accident victim in the Stanford area to a recipient who was prepped and waiting in San Luis Obispo.

“The controllers recognized the urgency of the situation and gave us priority handling,” Tucknott said. “God was good to us and gave us a strong tail wind going down, which got us there in record time.”

Tucknott said the entire flight and transport were conducted without signing one piece of paper.

“This seemed a little unusual in today’s world with liabilities and the value of the cargo we were carrying,” he said.

Tucknott smiled as he went on to say that by the time he and his co-pilot were finishing their lunch in San Luis Obispo, the cornea operation was complete and the patient had a new set of eyes. To support the missions of pilots like Bob Tucknott, and to learn more about Angel Flight West, visit www.angelflight.org.

Keeping up with my brother

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in September 2007.

When I was kid, my older brother, Bill, knew how to do everything.

He knew the right way to throw a football, how to throw a baseball, and, in his teens, how to pole-vault.

He did his best to teach me what he could do, but at four years younger I was never able to do what he did quite as well.

I suspect many readers have older brothers or sisters just like this.

Over the years, it seemed my brother could always run faster, golf better, and dive better. And while he went on to pole-vault in college and gained a scholarship, I could barely get that pole to lift me even a few feet off the ground.

The story is similar when it comes to our careers. Although I’m proud to serve as the president of a respected regional financial institution, Bill has headed up huge divisions for Bank of America, both in the United States and Hong Kong. He was on the managing committee for BankBoston and ran their consumer lending division. He’s been second in charge of the fifth largest national bank in Australia, and he served as the interim president of Atlanta’s Federal Home Loan Bank. Currently he is president PEAC Ventures, a management consulting firm, and serves as a director of E*TRADE Bank.



I remember when it really hit home that my brother was somebody in the banking world. Many years ago, after he moved to Atlanta, but was working in Foster City for Visa USA, he was telling me he’d attended a company event and got to meet Annette Benning, Rupert Murdock, and the comedian Garry Shandling.

“Really!” I said, impressed.

“Yeah,” he replied. “In fact, here’s the program from that night.”
I looked and saw that my brother’s name was actually on the program and that he’d been introduced by Garry Shandling. Then I looked at my brother’s title.

“You’re the chief operating officer? The number two guy for Visa?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“You didn’t know that?” he said.

It is a bit odd I didn’t know this, especially since my brother and I have stayed in close touch over the years. In fact, we were so close as kids that I recall a vivid childhood dream where I was playing in our front yard, and my brother could see from the screened porch of our home an older woman—with her skeleton showing through her translucent skin—walking along up next to the houses, coming my way, her head staying level as her legs lifted over steps and bushes, me oblivious to her approach. In the dream the gray-haired woman was certain to get me, and my brother tried several times to call out a warning, but no sound came out of his mouth.

What’s odd about this isn’t so much the dream, which portrays the fear of failure in protecting a younger sibling, but that I don’t know if I had the dream or if my brother did. It seems like he would have had it, but because I remember it so clearly it feels like I had it.

Of course, who had the dream doesn’t matter any more than what our titles are, who’s the highest jumper, or who can throw a perfect spiral. What matters between me and my brother is what matters to everyone who has an older brother or sister, that every once in a while we get to speak by phone or read an email or birthday card, or see in person a smile that no matter how old we get we’ll immediately recognize as one we’ve known forever.

Running 30 miles

In late August, Pam successfully ran her first ultra-marathon, a 50 kilometer (30-mile) race through steep terrain through Redwood Park in Oakland. This was my second 30 miler. Our time was 6 hours, 33 minutes.

Always nice to see this sign after 30 miles...

A Visit to San Francisco

In August, we visited Crissy Field, saw my sister and her family's new home at the Presidio, had coffee and bagels in a cafe, saw a movie (Arctic Tale), and rode bikes and ran almost halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a spectacular day.

Mysteries of running revealed

As fog slammed into the Golden Gate Bridge on a recent Sunday morning, I found myself yelling at a Livermore city official. “Doug!” I shouted to Doug Horner, Livermore’s newest city council member. He was passing within a yard of me, his glasses fogged, his S.F. Giants hat snug on his head. He was running toward Marin as I was running toward San Francisco. He looked up at the sound of his name, but, caught in the flow of more than 4,200 damp humans running the San Francisco Marathon, he didn’t see me.

This was my tenth marathon, Horner’s first, and also my wife’s first.

My wife, Pamela, who is the economic development director for the City of Pleasanton, trained many months for the race, and ended up beating her goal by running it in 4 hours and 15 minutes.

Here's a video clip of her training on a long run:

Scenes along the 26.2-mile route included a runner with hair shaped into foot-high spikes who dashed away from a sprinkler to save his hairdo; a retired Army Ranger carrying a POW / MIA flag and calling cadence; and a runner dressed like a Greek, complete with armor helmet, breastplate, a shield, and a spear.

Of course, creative outfits are part of the San Francisco running culture, mostly associated with Bay to Breakers.

But while Bay to Breakers is reasonable at just over seven miles, the marathon requires many hours of running. And for non-distance runners, this can be a mystery: Why on earth would anyone run for three, four, five, and, for some people, six or seven hours straight?

Bill Radulovich, an elementary school principal in Pleasanton who has completed 60 marathons and ultra-marathons, says that running long distances “is an existentialistic thing” and allows individuals to “ create the meanings of their own lives.”

Radulovich believes that running long races can create personal transformation and growth in life: “You set demanding goals, dedicate yourself toward them, work through adversity and discomfort, and you forge a new self.”

Having achieved his personal goals in racing, these days Radulovich trains and supports his daughter and a few of her college-age friends. This year alone he has run 5 marathons, 3 of which were as a pace setter for the girls.

“Watching them as they forge new selves is the greatest gift that running has given me,” he said.

While the marathon as a race was inspired by the story of a messenger named Phiedippides who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. with word of a Greek victory—and then died of exhaustion after delivering the news—some scholars believe that particular run never happened. While Greeks did use couriers to cover distances, this story cannot be found in records of the time, and didn’t appear until 600 years later. Plus, if a courier did run to Athens, it probably wasn’t Phiedippides since even before the battle he’d been dispatched to cover 150 miles to Sparta to seek help as the Persian enemy was gathering in Marathon.

While dedicated runners may feel disappointed learning this, we can take heart that Phiedippides, who ran the 150 miles in two days, was actually an ultra-marathoner.

Another tidbit about the race is that the distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, came about by chance. When the modern Olympics were established in Greece in 1896, the marathon was 24.8 miles, and then varied every four years depending on the venue. When London hosted the Games in 1908, the distance was planned at 26 miles, from Windsor Castle to London. But because the royal family wanted a better view of the finish, the distance was extended 385 yards to the royal box. This set the official distance forever after.

Many aficionados argue that the most prestigious of all marathons is Boston, which has been run every April since 1897. To run Boston, a runner has to qualify by completing a prior sanctioned marathon no slower than a certain time, depending on age and gender.

And speaking of gender, women were not allowed to run the Boston Marathon until 1972, nor the Olympic Marathon until 1984. While it’s often assumed race organizers in those days tended toward male chauvinism, many race officials truly believed they were protecting women from the damage of strenuous running. This mind-set became prevalent after the 1928 Olympics when three women collapsed during an 800-meter run. While the women simply hadn’t trained enough, the world saw this as evidence that women didn’t have the stamina for long distances.

Over time, and with the running boom of the 1970s, women began successfully completing marathons, and in recent years marathon attendance has increased thanks to more women seeking the personal fulfillment that comes with finishing the long race.

It’s this fulfillment that prompted council member Horner to start training. ”My wife has run three marathons, my brother and my brother-in-law have both run one, so in a way, I also wanted to be in that club,” he said. “I wanted to be able to say I’ve run one. After it was over, I was filled with a huge sense of achievement and satisfaction.”

A life etched with courage

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald on July 24, 2007.

She awoke to the rush of night air and a drop of water falling to her face from the wooden awning above the back door. That’s when she realized she was being carried. That’s when, at six years old, Sandra Kay looked up into a man’s face obscured by a light-colored bandana.

"He came in through the back door,” said Kay, 41, whose green eyes flickered as she told her story sitting outside a coffee shop in Pleasanton. “He walked right past my brother sleeping in the living room, past my parents’ bedroom, down the hall to my room where a friend was sleeping over, and lifted me from my bed.”

The man carried Kay’s little body out the back and into the garage. There, he told her to shut up. There, he violated her.

Later that night, after she was let go, Kay stood pounding on her parents’ bedroom door.

The Hayward police investigated, dusted for fingerprints, and identified the man. He turned out to be the nephew of either a friend or neighbor, Kay said. He was on parole, and knew the back door lock was broken because he’d helped move furniture in the house.

But before police could make an arrest, the man’s roommate--a former cellmate--accused him of stealing tools or some other personal items. The roommate drove to the man’s place of work and shot him to death.

Because of her young age and the certainty this man would never bother her again, Kay recovered emotionally from the assault. Yet some years later when Polly Klaas was kidnapped from her bedroom as a friend was sleeping over, Kay’s wounds re-opened. “So many things were similar,” Kay said. “I've always felt a spiritual connection to that beautiful girl.”

Ten years after the assault, when Kay was 16, she went to San Francisco with an older girlfriend to a dance club that welcomed minors 18 and older. Kay had a false identification, and soon found herself dancing with a charming young man named Pierre.

“As a chubby high school girl,” Kay said, “I usually danced alone or with female friends. I was so glad for the male attention.”

After a few dances, Pierre invited Kay to step outside to talk. She was surprised at how much they had in common. When he asked what books and movies she liked, he’d respond, “Me too!”

“It's painfully clear to me now, his strategy,” she said.

After more dancing and after her girlfriend called it a night, Kay accompanied Pierre to a payphone to call around to see if other nightclubs would welcome minors. Expressing frustration with the payphone, Pierre suggested they use the phone in his nearby apartment.

“I thought I’d met someone pretty special, so I went to his apartment,” Kay said. “In an instant, this man went from a dance partner and friend to an angry, mad-looking, violent and evil man. He used physical force, intimidation, and threats to take out his rage by violating my body.”

Eventually, Kay was let go. “He took me back to my car and gave me a rose, if you can stand that,” she said.

On her way home, Kay pulled over to call the friend she’d gone out with: “She told me I’d been raped and not to take a shower. She came and got me.”

Kay and her friend went to the police and identified the man from a folder of photos. He was wanted for raping two other girls. Everything he'd told her was a lie: his age, his occupation, his name.

In court, the defense questioned her clothing that evening, suggested her culpability since she was out after hours, magnified the crime of using a fake ID, and delved into whether or not she was a virgin.

“None of it worked,” Kay said. “He was sentenced to twenty years and deported to his country, which I think was Armenia.”

Fast forward a year. It's October and Sandra Kay is now 17 and she's walking to her boyfriend’s apartment. She hears someone behind her and thinks it's her boyfriend about to surprise her, so she quickly turns to surprise him first. But it's not her boyfriend.

“Some guy in a hood with a gun jams it against my head and tells me to stay quiet.”

Kay was forced into her car and ordered to drive, ending up behind San Leandro High School. The hooded man covered her head and dragged her out of the car.

“And here we go again,” she said, “the rage, the anger, the rape. Only this time, my soul popped out of my body and hovered over to the left. And somehow I knew that this man was taking out his rage on this body, but not on me.”

Then ordered back into the car, Kay drove as the man held the gun to her temple, his hand shaking as he yelled and debated over and over whether he should kill her.

Near train tracks, he had her pull over. “I thought this is it. I'm dead.” But he flipped up the rearview mirror so it pointed to the sky, opened the passenger door, and fled down the tracks into darkness, leaving her with threats that he knew where she lived, knew her boyfriend, would be back if she contacted police.

“And so my post trauma began,” Kay said, “living in a fear so paralyzing I would not move from a sitting position on the couch.”

Kay had to start over to learn how to talk, how to move, how to trust. “It’s a debilitating, chronic, and inescapable fear all the time for a long, long time,” she said. "With post trauma, because it's a neurological and spiritual injury, not a physical one, you can't see it like you can see broken bones, but the same process needs to take place, only internally. It's like being paralyzed physically from the neck down, like being dropped on cement from an airplane."

The lengthy healing process after trauma also involves calming the automatic startle response, dealing with the hypervigilance triggered by any number of stimuli. Kay remembers while working at a Togos being stricken with fear as a man's hand reached for change, a hand that slightly resembled the hand of the hooded rapist.

Today she credits her return to health with realizing that post trauma is a neurological disorder that needs to be treated medically. “Talk therapy can only go so far,” Kay said. She also makes sure to get sufficient sleep with over-the-counter medication, when needed. “Healing cannot take place without proper sleep,” she said.

The mother of two beautiful children, Kay is a courageous survivor who writes a blog at www.shesayswithasmile.blogspot.com. She’s also a published poet and a volunteer with Tri-Valley Haven where she gives her time to assist women in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault.

And just over a year ago, on her cheek, probably somewhere near the spot where that tiny drop of water awakened her when she was six, she walked into a tattoo parlor and celebrated her survival by having a small Japanese character etched onto her cheek.

The tattoo reads courage.

To honor Sandra Kay and join her in making a difference, visit www.trivalleyhaven.org.









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Warm sand and good words

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald in July 2007.

For the past 15 years, for the week of the Fourth of July, I've loaded up the car with kids and fishing poles and beach chairs and driven to Twain Harte, a small town in the Sierra north of Sonora.

These annual treks into the mountains often yield moments that find their way into this column.

Faithful readers may recall that I taught my youngest daughter how to fly fish on a trip to Twain Harte, and how, in another column, I was "pitched into a rushing river. In an instant, I was downriver from the raft, abducted by brute force from my wife and daughters, my head dunking under from time to time, my mind flooded with thoughts of drowning."

So as we drove last week through Escalon on our way to the Sierra, I asked my wife and daughters to be on the lookout for ideas for my column: "It's not necessary that one of us encounter a near-death experience," I teased, "but if one of you would like to volunteer, it would be good for the column."

Thankfully, no one had to be airlifted from the edge of a cliff, though things got pretty exciting when my eldest daughter found several great books in a used bookstore, and my youngest daughter found the perfect stroke that earned her a free game of peewee golf.

And what my wife and I found was time. Time to sit and read for many hours on the beach at Twain Harte Lake. No e-mail. No computers. No phones. Just warm sand and good words.

One of the books we read, and enjoyed, was Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, subtitled A Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia.

The book recounts Gilbert's travels as she seeks happiness from life in the aftermath of a difficult divorce. Her writing style is friendly and comfortable.

Gilbert's insights got my wife and me thinking about how great it would be to take a year off, perhaps to travel, to cook more, to write, to rediscover aspects of ourselves we've put on hold.

While we love what we do and the life we have, we know that building a good life means trading away certain freedoms. If only we could clone ourselves and live several lives.

And yet a theme of Gilbert's book is that after the pleasure of food and friendship she enjoys in Italy, and after her spiritual successes in an ashram in India, she discovers love in Indonesia, and, ultimately, the joy of simply living.

Perhaps that's the message from this year's trip to Twain Harte: that good stories need not always be about cliffhangers or near-death experiences.

Sometimes the best story is rediscovering the quiet wisdom of reading, the love of being with family, and simple joy of living the life we have.

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Snapshots of a Georgia Bike Ride

This column was published in June 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald

I recently took a week off and flew to Atlanta to visit my brother. I brought my bicycle, and we rode with several friends and 1,600 other cyclists in the annual Bicycle Ride Across Georgia, or BRAG.

Picture roads that run for miles alongside farms and fields, past tiny white country churches, through towns whose names are proudly painted on water towers, towns such as Americus, Cordele, and Baxley.

Picture cyclists riding these roads, quietly crossing Georgia, sleeping in tents on the grounds of high schools and colleges, or staying in hotels, each day rising to pedal east nearly 500 miles in seven days from Columbus to Savannah.

Picture these other snapshots:

A little girl in cornrows waves from her porch as her brother rides his Big Wheel in a dirt yard adjacent to a train track.

A police officer holds off traffic and waves us through a stop sign, smiling when we say thank you.

Acres of unfamiliar, leafy plants turn out to be tobacco.

We ride along rows of peanut crops and see a sign pointing the way to Plains, Jimmy Carter’s hometown. We see Billy Carter’s gas station.

A church group of black youngsters in matching aqua shirts reaches out to us to offer icy water bottles as we near another rural town.

On a downhill, a mother and her 14-year-old son—Chylon and Zac Thatcher—pass us on their tandem bicycle as “Strawberry Fields Forever” flows from a speaker above the rear tire. I tuck in behind them for few miles and sing along.

We wake one morning to heavy rain. The forecast is for thunderstorms. I tell my brother I didn’t fly all the way across the United States to sit in a hotel room. So our team sets out to cover the 78 miles planned for that day, and by mid-morning the rains yield to clear skies.

A dead armadillo, the sixth we’ve seen, lies along the side of the road. We’ll see other dead animals as well: two possums, a rattlesnake, two raccoons, and two hawks.

On Wednesday, the layover day when cyclists may rest or choose to ride one of several loops, we opt to ride the longest route, and nine hours later my odometer—which I reset every morning—ticks to 105 miles.

On another day, at a rest stop with morning temperatures beginning to rise, retired school principal Allyn Bell stands with friends. At 69, Bell has ridden BRAG for the past 16 years.

“I’m not a natural athlete,” he says in a thick southern accent, “but I can easily ride a bicycle 50 or 70 miles a day. I hope to ride each year until I’m at least 80.”

After a day’s ride, Rachel Fulton, a 33-year-old tattoo artist from Columbus, tells me this is her first BRAG. She’s riding with friends and enjoys the challenge. I ask about the tattoo that spills along her shoulder and upper arm, and she tells me it’s an Irish and Celtic theme, a tribute to her heritage. “I may get a tattoo related to cycling if I finish the ride,” she adds, “maybe something like a gear.”

At another rest stop, Alabama residents Ed and Melody Scott give water to their 13-year-old pound puppy, a Corgi Sheltie mix named Sadie. The Scotts tow Sadie in a covered carrier, and when I pass them later she seems content to glide along the many hundred miles.

And then there’s Joe Ninke, whose extended bicycle includes a platform with railings for his 5-year-old yellow lab, Luckie. This is Luckie’s and Joe’s second BRAG.

After each day’s ride, we record our mileage and take afternoon naps in our hotel rooms and call home and watch the Braves and Tiger Woods and the Weather Channel.

In the evenings we play a card game called nine-hole golf with Gene Zurik, Deborah Kalish, Parks Avery, and his daughter Jessy, who just graduated from Georgia State University and will attend law school in the fall. Each day Jessy drives our luggage to the next hotel and checks us in.

Her dad, Parks, has a quick wit and a knack for telling stories. He’s funny and grew up in the south and is an expert at mimicking a Scottish accent.

My brother takes to calling him Angus, after Angus Hisloop, a Scotsman Parks met ten years ago on a business trip to London. Parks and my brother banter with Scottish accents about sporting events and the names of dogs, and as the cards are dealt for another hand, I take a sip of sweet tea and marvel at this snapshot of life deep in rural Georgia.

It’s no wonder Bicycling Magazine named BRAG one of best 50 bike rides in the United States.

Chylon and Zac Thatcher

Joe Ninke and Luckie

Sadie

With Bill, my brother, in a small town called Fitzgerald deep in southern Georgia

Watching TV with Dad

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in 2007 just before Father's Day

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite things to do on a Saturday afternoon was to settle into a comfy chair in the living room and watch a movie on TV with my dad.

The movies were always in black and white because my parents didn’t see any compelling reason to buy a color TV. As long as Walter Cronkite and Ed Sullivan and Sunday football games found their way into our home through the antennae of our Zenith, not even the invention of the remote control could prompt my dad to buy a new TV set.

My sister enjoys telling the story of going off to college and sitting down one evening in a dorm room with friends to watch The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, only to jump up in amazement when Dorothy landed in munchkin land and everything turned to color.

"I had no idea," she said.

Of course, these were the days before VCRs and personal computers. The only cell phone we’d ever seen was in the shoe of Maxwell Smart. So in those years—the early 1970s—my family did things such as go to the library on Thursday evenings, drive out every so often on a Sunday after church to watch planes take off and land at the airport, and gather on occasion in our living room to listen to my dad read a poem by Longfellow or Poe.

I know this sounds nostalgic, but it really was like that.

And then there were those Saturday afternoon movies.

I’m sure my brother and sister occasionally came downstairs or from outside to watch TV with us, but what I mostly remember is just me and my dad watching films where the hero was always fighting some adversary or injustice, films like the 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts or the 1940 Henry Fonda classic, The Grapes of Wrath.

Born in 1930, my dad, whose name is Bill, spent his childhood in a rough and blue-collar neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. His mother died when he was three, and his father worked in a steel mill.

After high school, my dad enlisted in the Air Force and then went to college. He became a high school history and English teacher, and later a guidance counselor at a community college.

Not unlike the characters in those movies, my dad emerged a hero for our family, a role model whose choices in life were as instructive as his words.

As a teenager, I remember feeling fortunate that my dad liked watching those movies, as it gave me an excuse to spend time with him.

These memories came back on a recent Saturday afternoon as I sat with my 15-year-old daughter in our living room watching a movie we’d picked up at the video store: the black and white 1962 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.

My daughter, a voracious reader, read the book on her own last year, and will read it again next year as a sophomore. But she hadn’t seen the movie, and I hadn’t seen it in many years.

As we watched Gregory Peck play the father of Scout and Jem, the hero who stands up to social injustice, I thought of my dad, the depression-era boy who finally did buy a new TV with a remote control and now, at 77, watches movies in color with my mom in the same living room in Los Gatos where we all grew up.

I thought of him as I sat with my daughter on that Saturday, our faces turned toward the television on an afternoon that has already begun to fade into a black and white past to which I hope she’ll look back, one day, and remember.

Teen fathers find a new path

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald on May 29, 2007.

Two years ago, Wilmer Callejas was a 16-year-old gang member in East Oakland. He stole cars. He beat up rival gang members. He rode in cars involved in drive-by shootings.

Though he attended school, Callejas didn’t listen to adults or even his parents who warned him about the possible consequences of his behavior.

“What they said went in one ear and out the other,” he said.

In fact, with five arrests to his name, he’d spent time in juvenile detention, once serving as long as five months.

But that all changed when his 15-year-old girlfriend sat him down one day and told him she was pregnant.

"When she told me, my heart stopped,” Callejas said. “I was scared and didn’t know what to say.”

His girlfriend’s parents encouraged their daughter to have the baby, but they were skeptical about Callejas as a father.

“They thought I was a bad person,” he said, “and I was. But I decided I would do whatever it took to turn my life around.”

Callejas did what few teens in his situation ever manage to do. He found a way to leave the gang. “It was really hard to get out,” he said.

Dressed in jeans and a white In-N-Out Burger shirt, Callejas sat down with classmate Miguel Morales for an interview at Horizon High School to talk about their lives and hopes since becoming fathers.

The school, located in Pleasanton, is open to Tri-Valley school-aged parents, and provides high school curriculum, pre-natal and parenting skills training, counseling and therapy services, personal finance and budgeting, employability skills, and even an on-site childcare facility that doubles as a laboratory for soon-to-be parents.

Most of the 50 students enrolled at Horizon are mothers.

In fact, Callejas and Morales attend the school with their girlfriends—their babies’ mothers. And the couples bring their babies with them.

“We all go to school here,” said Callejas, smiling.

Unlike Callejas who is a junior, Morales, 19, will graduate this June. “I’d dropped out of school in Livermore and was starting to affiliate with gang members when my girlfriend got pregnant,” Morales said, crediting both his girlfriend with encouraging him to go back to school and the low student-to-teacher ratio at the school for helping him be successful academically.

Since enrolling at Horizon, Morales has earned all the credits needed for a diploma. He’s passed the high school exit exam, interned at the City of Pleasanton, gotten a job at Mervyns Department Store, and now supports a son—14-month-old Gabriel.

Both fathers live with their girlfriends and babies. Morales lives in Livermore at the home of his girlfriend’s parents, and Callejas lives in Oakland in his parents’ home.

“I pay rent to my parents for a room for the three of us,” said Callejas, who works at In-N-Out Burger near the Oakland Airport. Callejas said he also pays for car insurance and gas.

Both young fathers have hopes after high school. Callejas wants to become an auto mechanic or work in auto body repair and Morales plans to attend a trade school in Hayward to learn glass cutting.

As for other plans, when asked about marriage, the young men shifted in their chairs and smiled, and seemed a little embarrassed. In retrospect the question was premature.

What isn’t premature, though, is the devotion and commitment and the love in Callejas’ eyes whenever he steps into the daycare center and lifts his 18-month old daughter Analicia into his arms.

“My daughter has changed my life,” he said.














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Gifts from Janet

This column was published on May 15, 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.

Last year for Mother’s Day, I introduced readers to my mother, Janet. I shared how my mom’s enjoyment of writing poetry inspired me to become a writer.

I received many responses to the column, especially about the short, one-page stories she’s written in recent years to her grandchildren about her childhood memories in Minnesota and southern California.

Along with the stories, she’s written two books of poetry, and all of her works—given as Christmas gifts over the past few years—are contained in slim volumes simply bound with the assistance of Kinko’s.

My mom, who was born in 1933 and never went to college, has a straightforward writing style. Her poetry is never flowery, and her prose doesn’t try to be clever. While some of her stories recall tender and funny and memorable scenes, some simply depict a moment in time that captures who my mother was as a girl, moments that would otherwise be lost forever.

One example is her story about how my grandmother made clothes for my mother and uncle in the 1940s. With neither time nor money to sew pockets or zippers into pants, my grandmother instead inserted elastic into the waistbands.

But when my mom turned ten, shortly after moving to California, she got “a pair of blue denim pedal pushers with a zipper and pockets,” she writes. “I think it was Christmas. I put on the new pants and my roller skates.

"Out I went to skate up and down the sidewalk in my neighborhood. I stopped in front of the houses where my friends lived. Slowly I took something out of my pocket, looked at it, then put it back and skated on. I made several trips up and down the sidewalk that day. I was so proud of those pockets and was hoping someone would notice.”

Similar to her stories, my mom’s poetry speaks in a voice all her own. It doesn’t pretend to be Wordsworth or Dickinson. She simply writes from her heart, giving her readers a gift of herself.

And so, before this Mother’s Day fades from memory, here are a few stanzas from a poem by my mother. The verse is appropriate for Mother’s Day.

In sharing these words, I hope you’ll be inspired to pick up a pen or sit before a computer and simply start writing. Don’t worry about your style or whether the poetry or stories are dramatic. What’s important is that you capture your memories and write down what you’ve learned and know about life. Your children and grandchildren, though busy with their busy lives, are counting on you to preserve those memories.

Stanzas From “Contentment,” by Janet Ott

You cannot know before you have
one of your own how a child can burrow
into all the spaces of your heart, can fill
every vacancy.

You cannot know before you hold
your child and look into those soft eyes,
see the sweet smile and touch the softness
that you could fall so hard in love.

You can never know contentment, the long
lasting kind of contentment that fills your
soul, until a little child puts a tiny hand on one
cheek and with sweet lips, kisses the other.







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