Bye, bye,Berkeley

B is for beginning life in my new (to me) home. I shot the above photo at the height of the rhododendron season.

Bye, bye, Berkeley, the city where I was born and where I lived for most of my life, first as a child, then for the more than sixty years that my husband Otto was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California.

This little house in Port Townsend, Washington, is now my legal address. It belongs to my son Otto and is right across the street from the house where he and his wife and my dear friend Kristin live. As I become more and more dependent on others because of age, arthritis, etc., they are the angels in my life, taking care of me in a thousand ways and claiming to enjoy it.


All of my children have been wonderfully helpful. Daughter Candace will meet me in Berkeley next week to help me with the disposition of a few of my belongings in the big house on the hill which I still own. The grand piano will be sent to Port Townsend, where it will dominate my small living room. But what is nicer than a house with home-made music?!

I have had a wonderful time redecorating the interior of my new home with sometimes unusual color schemes that I have dreamed of but never tried before. My dragons will move here too, in fact will be the theme of my house which I have named Dragonhaven. There will eventually be a sign out front proclaming it!

Since the photo above was shot, ramps have been built to enable me to encircle the house in my wheelchair or reach the wheelchair-friendly walks of Port Townsend or be loaded in an auto for longer trips. (I'll tell in some future blog of some of memorable trips we have already made.)

This blog is definitely egocentric, not to be confused with the educational, informative, and creative entries of other ABCers. For their entries, click here or on banner.

Where I Come From

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "I come from..." Follow link to participating blogs for some fascinating entries.


Having been born in 1921, I come from the first quarter of the twentieth century, when our family car was a Model T that Daddy had to crank to get started. The place that I was born was the Alta Bates Sanitarium in Berkeley, California, then a single building, now a gigantic hospital complex that occupies several blocks. Fortunately the family into which I was born offered all the love and security that anyone could ask.

Allen Sterling holding Allen Sterling Jr.
Pearl Sterling and Phyllis (me)

It was only much later that Berkeley became known as Bezerkeley, although there was enough bizarre behavior even then to merit the name - for instance, the Boyntons, who lived in a replica of a Greek temple without walls except for sheets hung to hide their more intimate activities. Every morning Mr. Boynton would leave in his business suit, fedora on his head, briefcase in hand, and take the #7 streetcar down the hill to his business day while his wife wore her toga and his children carried bag lunches of nuts and dates to school, where they purportedly exchanged them for roast beef sandwiches.

In my public primary school the girls were taught scarf dances on the lawn with filmy lengths of pastel voile held at the corners by four girls. I still remember the tickling of grass on my bare feet.

What does this have to do with where I come from mentally or psychologically? Otto and I have lived in many countries, but since 1947, when Otto accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley has been home base (although a little bit of our hearts are always in Brazil).

We have lived through the movements that have swept Berkeley through the decades, from the decorous ‘50s through the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s, and have lent our whole-hearted support to many of them, joining in protesting the Vietnam war, housing hippies and manning switchboards to acquire needed services for them - even doing some dumpster-diving to procure soup ingredients for feeding the hungry on weekends when other food services were not available.

We were already pacifists, but much of the idealism of the sixties rubbed off on us. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Berkeley tried to pick up the pieces for the Vietnam veterans who became the new street people, injured in mind or body, addicted to drugs or alcohol to kill the pain.

Where does this leave me? I really couldn’t say. In front of the computer, I guess, picking and choosing a few words to describe 87 years of living. And still in love with “Bezerkeley.”

J is for Jacaranda

The letter for Mrs. Nesbitt's ABC Wednesday Round 3
and ABC Wednesday Anthology is J.

During the various years that I lived in Brazil, usually for months (but once for two years) I thought of the gloriously blooming Jacaranda trees that abounded there as being purely tropical. I haven't been back to Brazil for more than thirty years, and in that time, Jacaranda has appeared in Berkeley, California, one tree at a time. These two are in front yards a block south of my house.

Here the lacy branches of blue-blossomed Jacaranda permit the pale pinkish-purple Bougainvillea beyond them to be seen.