Author: punchwpadmin

words by Sheri Baer

A quick trip over 92 followed by a left on Skyline and I see the turn-off for Woodside’s Ciara West Equestrian (CWE). Bay Area riders come to this 145-acre facility for horse boarding and training, and indeed, I spot several heading out on the property’s panoramic trails.

I am also here to see a horse, but I’m anticipating a very different experience: Equus Coaching, quite simply, life coaching with horses.

Standing by a 50-foot-diameter round pen, CWE founder Steven Ciarametaro introduces me to the equine mindset—which is shaped by horses being both prey and herd animals. “There are two questions horses are always asking themselves,” he says. “Number one is ‘Am I safe?’ and the other is ‘Are you in charge or am I in charge?’”

Steven goes on to explain the history and main principles of Equus Coaching. Back in 2006, renowned life coach and ‘horse whisperer’ Koelle Simpson founded the Koelle Institute for Equus Coaching based on a horse’s intrinsic ability to provide direct and honest feedback. Drawing from her own experience, Simpson recognized the potential in naturally-skittish horses to be four-legged guides to deeper insights. “We work with horses because horses are very sensitive to their environments,” Steven says. “Through evolution, they’ve been able to protect themselves by being acutely aware of what’s going on around them.”

As Steven talks, I check out Sparrow, a 1,200-pound former police horse who appears to be hanging out contentedly in the pen. A mare in a nearby pasture neighs. Suddenly hyper-alert, Sparrow’s ears twitch up and whip toward the sound. I learn that if I watch Sparrow’s ears, I can see where his attention is—and what it means when he drops his head, makes licking and chewing gestures and expels loud gusts of air. “You can see he’s releasing tension. He’s relaxing a bit with us,” Steven interprets. “Koelle refers to Equus as the language of horses.”

Equus is a relatively new language for Steven, who also happens to be fluent in seven human ones. Recently certified as an Equus Coach, he previously spent nearly 20 years in the Silicon Valley tech world focused on software training and certification. While still working full-time, he rediscovered riding, which led to buying his own horse and then taking over the Woodside facility in 2015 to launch his own boarding and training business. A few years into it, the Koelle Institute contacted Steven about holding local Equus Coaching workshops at CWE. Intrigued by what he saw happening, he also connected with a workshop student, Nina Clarke Ericson, a Palo Alto-based clinical psychologist who specializes in life, leadership and dating coaching.   

“I’ve always loved horses,” says Nina, “and when I found out about Equus Coaching, I literally cried. I thought, ‘Wow! This is the perfect marriage of two of my greatest passions: helping people and horses.’” Nina received her Equus Coaching certificate through the Koelle Institute’s one-year program and immediately followed it with the Master Facilitators certification, which equipped her to conduct group sessions. She bases her Equus Coaching practice at CWE, meeting clients here several times a week.

“This is not therapy, but you can go deep,” Nina says, citing issues ranging from death, divorce and depression to work transitions, overeating and empty nests. “Clients learn to identify and express authentic feelings and that’s reinforced by the horses,” she says. “My preference is to do almost all my work up here. It’s experiential learning, so it’s very powerful; it gets into your brain better.”

Steven explains it this way: “The horses are truth-tellers—they tell you what you need to know. When your outer reality is aligned with what you’re feeling inside, that’s when the horse feels a connection with us. It’s the same thing they’re looking for within their herd, and the horse reacts in a way that’s immediate and visceral. You feel it as much as you see it.”

After the initial briefing, I watch a demo with Nina. Sparrow eyes her as she enters the pen and approaches her with curiosity. Nina greets the horse by blowing air off the back of her hand directly under his nostrils. Sparrow inhales Nina’s breath and exhales deeply in response. They commune for a bit and then Nina starts walking away. Sparrow notes her movement and begins to follow.

Stepping out of the pen, Nina gestures that it’s time for me to go in. “Do whatever you want,” she counsels.

I don’t want to be too aggressive since we’ve barely met, so I stand a distance away and look directly at Sparrow, willing him to come to me. A piece of hay catches Sparrow’s attention. Another horse whinnies, and his ears flick in that direction. I smile warmly at him, trying to look appealing. Nothing is happening. I can feel my smile becoming forced, even desperate. Minutes go by.

Nina checks in. “What do you want to do?” she asks me.

“I want to interact with the horse,” I respond, feeling dejected. “Then why aren’t you?” she questions. “I don’t want to impose on him,” I reply.

Nina thinks on this. “Why don’t you go up to him,” she suggests, “and if he doesn’t want to interact, he’ll tell you.” So I approach Sparrow, greeting him with the same exchange-of-breath I saw Nina demonstrate. Sparrow exhales his tension with an audible sigh. I start to pet him, and soon he is nuzzling my shoulder.

Nina and I talk about what just happened, which causes me to reflect on the many times I’ve hesitated—didn’t introduce myself, stake a claim or make a request—for fear of putting someone else out. “The way we do anything is the way we do everything,” offers Nina, quoting a favorite saying of life coach Martha Beck. Through this one simple interaction with Sparrow, I know exactly what she means.

“What does that feel like when you make a decision that really fits—that’s coming from your heart, your gut—rather than what you think you should do?” Nina queries further. I register the feeling so I can remember it. In a later session with Steven, I greet Sparrow differently. I know what I want, and I act on it. And when I walk away from Sparrow, occasionally glancing back with a confident smile, I hear the gratifying sound of him clip-clopping behind me.

A bit later, my PUNCH cohorts—publisher Sloane Citron and managing editor Silas Valentino—arrive at CWE, so we can better understand what happens in a group session. After going through individual briefings and sessions (Sloane is matched with a mare named Rosie and Silas with Odey), we watch as the pens are reconfigured into a 120’ by 60’ arena. Nina gives us the lowdown on herding—how we’ll set goals and work together as a team to move the horse around obstacles. “You will not be able to talk to each other; you can only communicate non-verbally,” she explains. “We use this for families, couples and executive teams—it shows how you communicate with each other, but it’s also a really fun bonding experience.”

Nina and Steven demonstrate first. Sparrow, who is now rested, responds readily to their tight movements and gestures. Our first turn in the arena doesn’t go so well. Silas isn’t quite following directions. I wave my hands in exasperation. After attempting to intercede, Sloane steps back and becomes an observer. When we break to discuss, we talk about how our behavior maps to office dynamics—how we naturally fall into certain roles and what we can do to better align as a team.

When we try again, we watch each other closely for cues and start gesturing more effectively. Sparrow responds to our uptick in confidence. We get him to maneuver around a barrel and trot up the side of the arena. Eyeing a barrel in the far corner, I point to it with clear intent. We each move into position, but it looks like Sparrow is going to cut the barrel just short. With a surge of collective energy, we somehow divert Sparrow’s direction, who makes the intended turn at the very last second. Words burst forth: “We did it!”

“Sometimes this just sparks a realization and then you know what to start working on,” Steven comments as our session wraps up. A final question comes to mind. “Is this easier if you’re a horse person?” I ask, thinking regular riders must have an inherent advantage. Steven shakes his head. “When you’re riding a horse, the horse can’t not react,” he responds. “Here, you’re asking the horse to interact and giving the horse the opportunity not to—that’s the really powerful thing.”

Hey there! Look closely, and you can find me in this mop of curly hair. The name is Henry. I’m a one-year-old mini Goldendoodle growing up here on the Peninsula. Jill, John, Parker and Reed are the best family that a golden boy could ask for. Even though I’m only 17 pounds, I have a ton of energy. My family always takes me on morning runs along the trails at Stanford University. I love meeting new people and playing with other dogs. If you see me, feel free to ask to give me a belly rub. In the middle of the street or walkway? No problem. I’m always happy to oblige. Sometimes my family takes me on a long drive and we end up finding cold white stuff. I love running around in it, the more the better. When it gets warmer the white stuff is gone, but that’s fine with me. I get to hike with my family, and I’m always in front, so I can run up and make sure the trail is safe for them. When I come back they know that everything is okay up ahead. Getting out is great, but everyone has been at home a lot more lately. It has been the best time! I get to hang out at home and practice my signature doodle sploot. I love all the extra belly rubs and attention that I’m getting, but I’m going to need a haircut soon. What’s taking them so long? All this hair is making me hot! Oh well. Gotta go. I hear running shoes and my leash being pulled out.

words by Silas Valentino

Before taking his first sip, the spy novelist praised the barista.

Barry Eisler arrived by bicycle with a helmet full of hair and ordered a small coffee from Saint Frank, a bijou café he had just discovered near the train tracks in his adopted town of Menlo Park. He cheerfully commended the staff for the pleasant set-up and then paused to soak in the scene.

When you’re a creator of worlds (or a career novelist), every new arena is subject to being fodder for an unwritten plot.

When he’s writing about a specific location in our shared world—bars, restaurants, judo and jiu-jitsu training academies, streets and alleys—Barry insists on precision for these scenes, often snapping pictures of the European door handles and checkered bathroom tiles that grip his attention to later ensure accuracy while writing.

If mistakes occur even after exhaustive scrutiny, there’s a perennial page on his website updated with mindful corrections and annotations, where he’s rectified errors like inaccurately-described refrigerators in a Trader Joe’s beer aisle or the precise suffering that an exsanguinating chest entails.

Such a meticulous process produces novels weighty with detail; so much so that The New York Times describes Barry’s fastidious prose as “kind of nerdy” in a glowing review of his 2016 novel Livia Lone. His principal character is the anti-hero John Rain, who has appeared in 11 espionage novels and counting, as the assassin for hire who operates by his own personal code. The series has garnered praise from Keanu Reeves and Elizabeth Warren for its immersive mystery adventure with comprehensive hand-to-hand sequences in martial arts.

The books are also damn fun to read. Barry objectively composes stories using a particular writer’s commandment; quoting T. S. Eliot, Barry explains how “the giving famishes the craving” or how he grounds readers in his world by prudently revealing information for each who, what, when, where and why.

“This is what I need to ground you in the story,” he explains. “I have to nourish you with something every sentence. Every piece of information is used to seduce you out of your daily life and into the story—how am I going to get you to pay attention? I famish to make you hungry for more.”

While writing his first book during the 1990s, Rain Fall (later retitled A Clean Kill in Tokyo), Barry and his wife of 30 years, Laura Rennert, a literary agent and fellow author, were living as expats in the Japanese capital.

He was well underway with a storied career, graduating from Cornell Law School in 1989, spending three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations before becoming a lawyer specializing in technology for an international law firm.

But Barry was tacitly saturating in interests he describes as dry kindling awaiting a spark. From reading arcane research like the puckish body disposal book Be Your Own Undertaker or hearing the Japanese pianist Junko Onishi perform at the Club Alfie to earning his black belt at the Kodokan Judo Institute in Tokyo, Barry simmered in his curiosities.

His fire to write ignited one night on the subway platform at Ōtemachi Station. An image flashed before his mind of two men trailing someone down an alley. He started asking himself questions—Why are they following him?—before forming answers: It’s because they’re assassins. Well, he thought, then who hired them?

Each question and answer framed the next, nourishing a story with an appetite and a bite.

“Every answer you get, you subject to those questions. Then it turns out there’s a mirror image phenomenon. When I teach a class on openings, the best example I’ve come across is The Key to Rebecca,” Barry says, of the Ken Follett bestseller.

“It begins with: ‘The last camel collapsed at noon.’ It’s not everything because if I give you everything, you’re not famished. That sentence suggests that it’s probably a desert. Sand dunes. Okay, I’m starting to see it. What’s it about? Well, tell me this: Is what’s happening good or bad? The word ‘last’—it sounds bad. This guy is in trouble. Think of all the things you’re beginning to realize. My question now is, ‘Who is this guy?’ There’s a lot of craft in the balance between telling you and nourishing without telling too much.”

Barry is a natural teacher, both for himself and with students. He’s taught classes on technology licensing at Santa Clara University School of Law and often instructs writers in courses or at seminars. Sometimes he can’t help himself from pausing a movie he’s watching with his daughter to point out a storytelling technique.

Teaching is as sacred as anything for Barry and he recalls a moment of clarity while training at the Kodokan Judo Institute in Tokyo. He was struggling to nail the triangle chokehold when a senior student came over and swiftly repositioned Barry’s left arm from the side to the back of his opponent’s neck. It was a three-inch difference to complete the move that took only seconds to learn but left Barry struck.

“I remember walking home from training that night thinking about this guy,” he says. “He had trained for over a half-century and then came over to me to impart some wisdom for free that had taken him all that time to learn.”

Barry stops short of calling himself autodidactic because he says it’s too broad of a term, but he admits an adept ability to be his own teacher. While wrestling in high school in Milbourn, New Jersey, Barry read whatever he could find to enhance his ability on the mats.

During his undergrad years at Cornell, Barry’s blend of interests for geopolitics, martial arts, escape intervention and forbidden knowledge led him to apply to the CIA. One of the tests was a geopolitical and history exam and to prepare, he would bounce an inflatable globe while lying on his bed to constantly quiz himself on Botswana, Paraguay and every corner of the world. He left his exam feeling confident but second-guessed himself on who was the then prime minister of Australia.

“When I got back to my apartment,” he says, “I called the Australian embassy to ask who their prime minister was and the voice on the other end in a thick accent said, ‘It’s Bob Hawke, mate!’”

Barry scored a 50 out of 50.

His experience in the CIA suggests an insider’s perspective for his novels of espionage with characters working for government agencies, but Barry is quick to brush that aside, often joking that the CIA is a malfunctioning bureaucracy or “a post office with spies.” He’s more interested in the facts that lie in bare view.

“Most of what’s secret about the CIA is already available,” he reasons. “How do I know the CIA is intent on influencing and infiltrating the mainstream media? John Brennan, the former director, is an analyst on MSNBC. Half the staff on cable news are retired CIA.”

Since publishing his first book in 2003, Barry has released a new title nearly every year. His John Rain series, and the more recent series centered on the heroine Livia Lone, are released to international fanfare. A bar in Osaka, Japan, that Barry wrote about in his first book, often receives mail from readers looking to connect with the author.

“What’s nice about getting older is that I’m not jealous of other people. There are writers who are galactically better than me,” he says, before breaking into a smile, “but no one else can write these stories. And if I wasn’t born, these stories never would have happened

When Joel Simon was 11 years old, a glass Coca-Cola bottle washed ashore at his feet. “Hecho en México” read the label. This well-traveled bottle had ridden the waves north, up the California coast, and was funneled by the tides to Alamitos Bay in Long Beach.

Joel imagined the marine life that the bottle must have seen along its journey: a pod of bottlenose dolphins gliding effortlessly along the surface, highlighter-orange Garibaldi damselfish patrolling their reef territories and a giant squid amid a nighttime feeding frenzy.

Although the bottle was unable to speak, Joel still found a way to unlock the marine theater. Using some rubber bands, a belt, an old bicycle valve and a rubber hose, 11-year-old Joel fashioned a homemade breathing apparatus out of the bottle. It could only hold enough air for three breaths, but the apparatus gave Joel a newfound liberation underwater.

“Being able to essentially stay underwater with this Coke bottle for about six minutes,” Joel recounts, “I had every bit of thrill that I’m sure the Wright brothers did, even if they’re only 18 feet above and I’m only 18 feet below. This was a real adventure into a new realm for me.”

Joel’s childhood ingenuity and unbridled passion for the aquatic world has carried on into his adult life. The Menlo Park resident has been photographing underwater life for over four decades and managing his snorkeling tour company, Sea for Yourself, for the last 25 years.

He now finds his joy in the familiar, whereas most divers and snorkelers find it in the unexpected. “For the truly attentive and the truly alert,” he says, “all is familiar and all is new.”

Growing up in Long Beach, Joel regularly swam, surfed and sailed in the coastal waters. He remembers diving around the old bridge pilings in Alamitos Bay with his homemade scuba gear, enamored with the barnacles, starfish and anemones enveloping the underwater columns. By age 16, he had upped his equipment and training, becoming a scuba-certified snorkeling camp counselor at the YMCA on Catalina Island while volunteering for various marine biology research projects.

But it was not until the early 1970s that Joel first had the idea to photograph the depths below. Today, waterproof cameras are abundant but back then, underwater photography was specialized and arcane.

So Joel had to pull off another feat of ingenuity: He built his own plexiglass, waterproof camera housing system.

“The thrill of being able to take your own pictures underwater was an amazing extension of the intrigue of that marine environment,” he says.

Marine life appears alien to terrestrial-centric human eyes—Joel’s photography style leans into that unfamiliarity. His most captivating photographs are known as macro images: Intense close-ups of patterns or textures of aquatic organisms that blur the line between abstraction and reality.

“For the most part, this is exactly how the camera saw them,” Joel says. “I’m not doing any special Photoshop.”

Joel has three primary tenets for underwater photography. First, he says that people must feel comfortable in the water, adapting to currents, pressure and temperature changes. Second, they should know the limitations of their snorkeling or scuba equipment.

Finally, and for Joel this is the most important, people should learn about the aquatic ecosystems they enter—not only to figure out the best photography opportunities, but also to respect the well-being of the organisms.

“I do firmly believe that snorkeling is one of the most benign ways that people can interact with a wilderness environment,” he says.

Following his father’s advice of “Do what you love and do it well,” Joel searched for a way to turn his love for the sea into a career. After moving to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University, he worked with Peter Voll to establish the Stanford Alumni Association’s Travel Study program. Joel says he was the “pseudo” director of aquatic trips before branching off to start his own snorkeling-specific travel company, Sea for Yourself.

“My goal is to provide an infrastructure that allows people to visit and literally immerse themselves in a wilderness environment in a way that gives them comfort and confidence that might not otherwise be accessible to them,” he says. “That’s really important to me.”

Over the company’s many years of operation, Joel and his colleagues have led educational trips to prominent reef environments such as Fiji, Palau, Bonaire and the Great Barrier Reef. He’s also guided several groups to Tonga to snorkel with humpback whales. Joel says the baby whales behave like puppy dogs, curiously swimming up to the snorkeling group with playful energy.

Joel emphasizes that he wants the trips he leads to be more than just snorkeling—he wants the group to leave enriched with knowledge and respect garnered from the local culture. For instance, he once gifted a local lobster fisherman in Mexico a bottle of rum in exchange for the fisherman’s stories from the sea, passed down from the fisherman’s father and grandfather.

“I always want to be respectful of the environments we visit,” Joel explains. “Whether it’s the terrestrial coastal communities or the marine environments.”

Over his many years of travel, Joel has noticed changes in the communities he visits. With cellular technology now connecting many of these island habitations to the world economy, marine environments that were once resources have become commodities.

But Joel is comfortable with the sea changes. Beyond the local communities, he notices large, year-to-year fluctuations in reef ecosystems. Since the reefs withstood a millennia of extinction events, he’s confident that these environments will persevere past human-induced climate change. Joel says even visiting a reef at different times of the day produces a variance of experiences for the observer.

“You could go to one channel, for example, during what’s called a slack tide when there’s not a lot of water movement and take a look around, but when you come back two hours later and there’s more of a current flying, you’ll have an entirely different experience,” he notes. “The dynamics of the underwater community are oftentimes really contingent, if not dependent, on the tides and the currents. If you had just visited a place one time, you’d never know about that.”

Joel’s perspective and photography of life beneath the waves offer a glimpse into the otherwise unforeseen world. The images stir up intrigue that helps those of us on dry land become further interested and more attentive to marine ecologies.

“When we can talk and communicate both about the strengths and the vulnerabilities of marine environments, those images provide a connective tissue,” Joel says. “And if they can be visually intriguing simply from a point of aesthetics, that’s all the better.

Los Altos resident Seema Mehta was walking the Stanford Dish trail one early morning, gathering her thoughts over the recent sudden passing of her mother, Indumati. As she turned her gaze eastwards, this Perfect Shot of a full arch of a rainbow revealed itself. “It wasn’t raining where I was, yet this rainbow presented itself to me boldly and magnificently,” Seema says. “It felt like a magical moment.”

Image Courtesy of Seema Mehta

I saw a headline for TV shows that were being taken off the air, and when I clicked on it, I discovered that I’d never heard of a single one of them. With 200 networks and a zillion streaming services, producers are churning out new shows like the Fed is printing money. Like the stars in the sky, there are just too many to count.

How all these channels and shows make money is a mystery. There are only so many eyeballs out there and they keep getting divided by more and more programming. Soon, there will be a show for each and every living American. Mine will be called The Confused Aging Jew, and you’ll find it appropriately on the Lemon network.

Now that we’re limited in our entertainment options, we’re watching more television than ever. And it was a ridiculous amount to begin with. I was brought up to think of TV as evil and mind-destroying, and I remember that my dad would not allow us to watch certain shows that he deemed reprehensible, like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Munsters. I somehow survived.

There does seem to be a good number of excellent TV shows on now, and I’ve read how prominent film actors who have tired of the ambiguity of film work are proclaiming their passion for television and the opportunity to have a constant job doing quality work.

Despite this acclaim for television today, I remain somewhat embarrassed to discuss what I watch. Though I seem to be spending more time in front of the set, announcing this to others still seems like an admission of intellectual defeat, a negative stain on the quality of my lifestyle choices. I’m ashamed that I am watching any television at all, frankly, thinking that instead in my every off moment I should be reading Shakespeare or studying Torah.

Most of us would have a bit of disdain for someone who watches 10 hours of TV a day, so just where is the cut-off on the number of hours…two, three, even four, that is acceptable? At what amount do you go from just watching a bit of TV to becoming an intellectual twit who wastes his life away in front of the boob tube, as we use to call it in my home?

I can’t watch TV during the day, unless it is a sports show on the weekends. There’s just something about having the TV on when the sun is shining that inhibits me from turning on the set. If I’m not working, I go find a chore to do, and I have an endless number of them on my list. I’d feel creepy and weird turning on The View (which I’ve never seen) or a rerun of Mad Men.

Recently, in our regular rather large family gatherings (there are 14 in my immediate family now), I notice that we are often discussing our personal TV-watching. I admit that it’s fun to compare notes and, best of all, to hear about new discoveries of shows “that we should absolutely be watching.”

I readily take suggestions and give them a shot. But, like an all-you-can-eat buffet, if I’m not hooked after a couple of bites, I’m ready to move on. I tend to go more for the dramatic, well-written shows like Mad Men, Ozark or Better Call Saul. The only reality show I watch is Alone. Still, I’m a “half-watcher,” meaning that I always have my laptop open and on, and while a show is playing, I’m also reading the news or watching “Jack Nicklaus’s 50 Best Saves” or seeing how they make truck tires. I can watch a show and then have no idea what it was about.

There is only one show that I fully engage in: Fauda. If you don’t know this Netflix show, it’s about an undercover unit of the Israeli special forces engaged in battle with Hamas. While it is absolutely the most gripping show I’ve ever seen, the real reason I can’t have my laptop open is simple: subtitles, and fast ones at that.

TV has come a long way in my lifetime of watching. We started well, went through some sketchy years and now have some pretty decent dramas. I recently watched the first episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Beautifully written, funny and sentimental, Aunt Bee and Andy are still charming, and Opie steals your heart. Even with the 10,000 programs that have followed in its place, it’s still the best show on the boob tube.

words by Sheri Baer

Once upon a time, near a cozy little cottage by the sea, there was a garden where flowers bloomed impossibly bright, bountiful greenery stretched up to the sun and even the smallest, seemingly most insignificant weed felt nurtured and welcome. Carefully tending the patch of land was a woman steeped in the knowledge of wild edibles and medicinal plants, living in harmony with the birds, butterflies and ladybugs drawn to this teeming, vibrant space.

This may sound like the start of a fairytale, but it’s actually an apt description for the natural landscape created by Suzanne Elliott just north of Half Moon Bay. Twenty years ago, when she first moved into her 1940s-era El Granada home, the neglected front yard of the half-acre lot was strewn with car parts and debris. “I dug the whole thing up and transformed it into a garden,” she says. But not just any garden. Here, amid a mix of wild plants, garden herbs and planter beds, surrounded by fragrant lavender, chamomile buds and lemon verbena, Suzanne practices and shares the ancient art and science of herbalism. Under the brand “Woodsorrel,” she teaches classes and workshops and sells her own products, drawing on recipes and traditions forged centuries ago.

Floral Studded Salad

Flowers and herbs just make me happy! It’s hard not to want to use them for all the meals I serve. It’s so much fun to see the smiling faces of my guests when I present a colorful salad graced with vibrant edible flowers freshly plucked from the garden. Don’t limit their use to just salads—I sprinkle them over many dishes before serving. Fresh leaves of mint, basil and nasturtium can be torn or coarsely chopped and added to the mix for an extra punch of flavor!

Walking out on a guided tour through her garden, Suzanne gestures to the eye-popping visual opus of lush living things. “All of these plants are here for a reason,” she says. “There’s that saying by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘What is a weed? It’s a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.’ I think we’ve been brainwashed to think that having weeds in your garden is a horrible thing. Probably 85% of what’s in my garden has a purpose.”

Suzanne points to a patch of tufted tall green blades, bearing tiny glints of seeds. “See this tall grass?,” she asks. “This is called wild oat and this makes an amazing tea. It gets really sweet because of the starches, and it’s also really rich in minerals and calcium.” She leans down and picks a few long, skinny pods off another plant. “This is wild radish,” she notes. “This is where our radishes come from; you want to catch these seed pods when they’re really green and tender—they’re delicious.”

Wild mustard. Mallow. Yellow dock. What the eye disregards as weeds is revealed in a new light as Suzanne moves from one patch of greenery to another. “People tend to not gather wild foods because they don’t know where to begin,” she says. “I don’t separate weeds and garden plants; they’re all plants to me. They’re all part of the whole world of food and medicine.”

It’s a world that started intriguing Suzanne at an early age. Growing up in Pacifica with her parents and three siblings, she credits her mother with teaching her the practical skills that serve her to this day. “I remember learning everything—how to fold clothes, how to make the bed; she had me in the kitchen cutting things up and using a knife,” she says. “She didn’t coddle us. She was very loving but we had to learn how to stand on our own two feet and I had a lot of responsibility as a young person.”

Suzanne enjoyed cooking and took over making the family meals. While she was still in high school, she started working at Half Moon Bay Nursery, where she learned to pot plants, make cuttings and design arrangements like hanging moss baskets. Suzanne made a point of never turning down an assignment. “I would say, ‘Sure, I can do it!’ and that’s been my motto since I was a young person,” she says. “The nursery helped build a foundation when it came to planting and learning how to grow; I also got really interested in herbs while I was there.”

Baked Goods & Desserts

I love to experiment with unusual uses of herbs and edible flowers to create unique flavor combinations. Savory and sweet work well together. Try adding a tablespoon or two of finely minced herbs (such as thyme or rosemary) or flowers (such as rose geranium leaves or lavender flowers) to your favorite shortbread, sugar cookie, scone or cake recipe. For an extra special touch, press a fresh edible flower onto each cookie before baking or garnish a frosted cupcake or cake with colorful blossoms.

When Suzanne graduated high school in 1976, she received two life-changing books: one on Shiatsu massage and the other on herbs, Jeanne Rose’s Herbs and Things. Both resonated deeply with her—she went on to receive her certification in Shiatsu therapy and immersed herself in herbal knowledge, attending Heartwood College in Santa Cruz and studying with renowned experts like Michael Tierra and Rosemary Gladstar. “I thought I could be an herbalist who does intakes with people and helps them with their diets and ailments,” she says. “But I realized I would rather teach people how to be healthy. I really like to share what I know.”

Starting with a class on making herbal cosmetics, Suzanne expanded her offerings to include a variety of workshops and events, along with her signature eight-month course, “Herbal Ways for Women.” Held in a “living classroom” stretching from her own garden and a prolific green divide in her street to nearby coastside discoveries, she takes a hands-on approach, teaching students the art of foraging and how to use the abundant natural bounty around us. “I don’t just use wild plants—I also use garden plants and herbs in non-traditional ways that people don’t think about,” she says, “like rosemary, for instance; you can bake it into cookies, make it into a tea or put it in vinegar.”

To keep things intimate, Suzanne purposely limits “Herbal Ways for Women” to 10 students, with each month following a seasonal theme. Topics include wild foods cooking, a comprehensive study of medicinal plants, herb garden gastronomy, botanical skin care and herbal medicine making. “My approach is food first and then layer it with the use of herbs,” she notes. “We learn to make tonics, tea blends and medicinal tinctures. The beauty of herbal medicine is that each plant contains dozens of healing properties as opposed to a single action.”

Whether students are whipping up Wild Greens Frittata, Floral Studded Salad or Creamy Mallow Soup, Suzanne also aims to expose the taste buds to new experiences. “When you go to the store, everything is geared to a certain palate, whereas in the wild, things have stronger flavors. That’s because they’re in their natural state; they haven’t been changed or manipulated,” explains Suzanne. “We learn about plants by tasting them, smelling them and touching them. It really helps to expand your repertoire of flavors.”

Fresh Tips from Suzanne

Sample edible flowers: Viola, pansy, calendula, day lily, nasturtium, dandelion, lavender, scented geranium, geranium, borage, arugula, sweet violet and fragrant roses.

Sample herbs: Chives, society garlic, thyme, rosemary, basil, sage and mint.

Sample wild plants: Wild radish, wild mustard and fennel.

Note: Be sure your edible flowers have not been sprayed with pesticides. To wash: Fill a bowl with cold water and carefully swish the flowers in water so as not to bruise them. To dry: Take each flower at its base and gently shake off excess water.

In addition to teaching classes and workshops, Suzanne also fills her days concocting Woodsorrel herbal delicacies and handcrafted body and bath products. Tucked behind her cozy cottage is a shed-like structure she refers to as her herb room or apothecary. Folders and binders overflow with recipes and instructions, and shelves are stacked with dozens of glass canning jars, bottles and canisters. Homegrown rosemary and thyme are here, along with more exotic-sounding ingredients like wild mugwort and mallow root. “About half of these plants I gather wild,” she says. “I try to forage and grow as much as I can because it’s just better quality and it’s fun.”

Artfully packaging her wares, Suzanne sells to wholesale clients and at seasonal pop-up marketplaces she co-hosts with Half Moon Bay ceramic artist Catherine Henry. Herbal libations might include elderberry rose cordial, ginger vodka and figgy brandy. There’s triple rose moisture cream, wild mugwort oil and Turkish soothing bath salts. Any fruits that come her way transform into fanciful marmalades and jams. “I like to add different flavor elements,” Suzanne says. “For my apple jellies, I will use rose geranium or lemon verbena or sometimes lavender with rose hips and rose petals.”

Over rose geranium scone bites and steaming mugs of “Cottage Garden” tea blend sweetened with homegrown stevia, Suzanne talks about the rhythm of life as an herbalist. “I follow the seasons and every day I’m out there gathering something,” she says. “The whole experience of being out in nature is so healing. Herbalism is a lifestyle, really. I do it because I can’t not do it. It comes from a place deep inside of me.”

Suzanne acknowledges that maintaining a garden that welcomes the wild requires a lot of upkeep but the effort both fuels and feeds her. Looking out over the splashes of dandelion, Queen Anne’s lace and flowering tree mallow, she recognizes so many familiar friends, along with some surprising new ones. “I have a hand in it but nature plays a big part,” she reflects. “A lot of the plants that have grown here I’ve planted but many of them have just appeared—it’s kind of like a magic garden.”

Which seems apropos for this fairytale-like setting by the sea.

Whether muddling, garnishing or infusing, use the flavors and colors from your garden to enhance and balance your summer cocktails. PUNCH photography director and food editor Paulette Phlipot spotlights delicious concoctions you can make at home or order from your favorite local establishments. And be sure to check out Paulette’s book picks for even more ways to bring your garden into your glass!

Vina Enoteca
vinaenoteca.com
Vina Enoteca is a full-service Italian restaurant and bar located at the Stanford Barn in Palo Alto. Bringing the rustic charm of Italy to Silicon Valley, Vina Enoteca currently has a range of offerings including outdoor dining, curbside pick-up, delivery, Zoom wine tastings and cocktails to go.

Pineapple Tommy’s Margarita

Created by: Vina Enoteca mixologist Massimo Stronati

A refreshing twist on a classic margarita using fresh ingredients and fresh basil.

Serves 1

1⁄2 oz lime juice

1⁄2 oz agave syrup

2-3 basil leaves

2 oz pineapple tequila*

Large ice cube

In a shaker, shake lime, syrup, pineapple tequila and two basil leaves. Strain and serve in a double old fashioned glass with a large clear ice cube. Garnish with a fresh basil leaf and pineapple.

*Pineapple Tequila

3 cups blanco tequila

1 fresh pineapple

Air-tight container, like a mason jar

Remove the skin and core the pineapple, cut it into chunks. Place the pieces into an airtight container like a mason jar and cover with tequila. Seal the container and place in the refrigerator for at least one week. For a hint of smoke, grill the pineapple prior to soaking. When ready to use, strain the tequila.

Barrelhouse
barrelhouseburlingame.com
Welcome to the Peninsula’s neighborhood bar! Located in Burlingame and specializing in craft cocktails, Barrelhouse boasts one of the largest selections of beer, wine and spirits you’ll find locally—with charcuterie and a carefully curated cocktail menu available for patio dining and to-go orders. 

El Jardin

Created by: Barrelhouse co-owner Juan Loredo

Serves 1

1 1⁄2 oz blanco tequila infused with
serrano pepper*

1 oz melon, cucumber,
cilantro purée/juice

3⁄4 oz agave

1⁄2 oz lime juice

1⁄2 oz  lemon juice

Ice

Add all ingredients into shaker and shake with ice. Double strain into glass filled with ice.

*Place 1⁄2 serrano peppers (including seeds) into a 750ml bottle of blanco tequila. Infuse for two days. Strain peppers and seeds.

Honeydew, Cucumber and Cilantro (puree/juice)

Save the rest for later.

2 1⁄2 lbs honeydew melon, cut into one-inch pieces

1 English cucumber, peeled and cut into pieces

1⁄3 cup (packed) cilantro

3 Tbl fresh lime juice

La Bodeguita Del Medio
labodeguita.com
Taking inspiration from the legendary original in Havana, La Bodeguita del Medio in Palo Alto offers neighborhood hospitality combined with a vibrant Cuban influence. Currently providing outdoor dining and a to-go menu based on the availability of fresh seafood, meat and local produce, La Bodeguita also offers cocktails, beer and wine for purchase with meals.

The Mojito

Variation created by: La Bodeguita del Medio co-owner Michael Ekwall

The classic Cuban cocktail… when made properly it is excellent and refreshing! Along with the daiquiri, this is probably the most famous cocktail from Cuba.

Serves 1

12 clean mint leaves (picked higher than a dog’s legs!); smaller stems are okay

1 tsp bar sugar

Add to a tall collins glass, gently muddle to release the essential mint oils, then add the following ingredients and gently remuddle to stir:

1 1⁄2 oz Bacardi Limon Rum (For a mojito with a bit more flavor kick, I like Plantation 3 Star Rum.)

1 oz Mojito Mix (This is a bar mix that we make daily with 1 part fresh lime juice and 2 parts fresh lemon juice.)*

3 oz sparkling water

Finish with crushed ice.

Hint: If you don’t have crushed ice at home, use a kitchen utensil to break down cubes in a bag.

*The classic Mojito uses only lime juice, but we taste-tested about 20 different recipes when we opened and our citrus mix was the clear preference.

Pink Martini

There are plenty of occasions that call for a fun, flirty pink drink, so here is a classic, reinvented with a dash of fruity strawberry gin.

Serves 1

2 1⁄2  fl oz Lola & Vera Strawberry Gin, or similar strawberry-forward, fruity pink gin

2 tsp dry vermouth

Lemon zest, to garnish

Ice cubes

Put a martini glass in the fridge to chill. Add all the ingredients to a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes, shake sharply and strain into the chilled glass. Garnish with a lemon zest and serve immediately.

Rosie Lea

Is it a classy cocktail? A refreshing sweetened tea? Or a fun drink perfect for an afternoon tea party? Yes, yes and yes.

Serves 4

4 fl oz Beefeater London Pink, or
similar strawberry-forward,
fruity pink gin

2 fl oz triple sec

11 fl oz cranberry juice

Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lime

4 lime slices, to garnish

Ice cubes

Add the gin, triple sec, cranberry and lime juices to a large clean teapot or a jug/pitcher filled with ice cubes. Stir well and pour into tea cups or tumblers, garnish each one with a slice of lime and serve.

Nasturtium Collins

Throughout summer and into the fall, nasturtiums grow out of control in the garden at Midnight Apothecary, so I feel no guilt about harvesting huge amounts to keep a semblance of order. They not only look glorious but they also taste wonderful. Both the leaves and flowers have a pepperiness that works particularly well with rum and tequila. We use Nasturtium Rum made with golden rum, not just for its flavor but also for the dramatic amber color you get once it is diluted against the yellow, orange and red flowers.

Serves 1

1⁄2 oz  Nasturtium Rum*

1 oz   Ginger Syrup**

1⁄2 oz  freshly squeezed lemon juice

4 oz  soda water

Ice cubes

*Nasturtium Rum

Many flowers look fantastic but taste insipid. However, nasturtiums are bold in appearance as well as flavor. The sweetness of the molasses or sugarcane juice in rum needs a punchy, spicy flavor to team up with, and the pepperiness of nasturtium is ideal.

Makes approximately 1⁄  pints

Enough nasturtium flowers (about 40) to fill the jar loosely

1 liter bottle of golden rum, 80 proof/40% ABV

1 quart wide-mouthed, sealable jar, sterilized

Sealable presentation bottle(s), sterilized

Gold rum is a good halfway house in terms of flavor and price, but if you are feeling flush, splash out on a good-quality rhum Agricole (agricultural rum) from Martinique. Made exclusively from sugarcane juice, it is almost clear and bursting with natural flavor.

Once your infusion is ready, a fresh nasturtium flower will look stunning in the finished cocktail and, if you eat the whole blossom, you’ll get the sweetness of the nectar alongside the spiciness of the pepper. The leaves are also deliciously peppery.

Pick over the nasturtium flowers and remove any wildlife. Pack the unwashed blossoms gently into the jar and pour the rum over the top, making sure the flowers are completely covered. Seal the jar, upend it gently a couple of times, and leave in a cool, dark place. The pepperiness takes a while to really work in this infusion, so check after seven days and wait a maximum of three weeks—certainly no longer.

Strain the infusion into a wide-mouthed pitcher, then funnel into the sterilized presentation bottle(s) and seal. Store in a cool, dark place and consume within six months.

**Ginger Syrup

This syrup will come in handy, not just for your cocktails, such as the Nasturtium Collins, but also for a variety of gastronomic delights like marinades, stir fries and desserts.

Makes approximately 1 pint

2 cups superfine (caster) sugar

2 cups water

2. oz fresh ginger, fairly thickly sliced

1 Tbl lemon juice or 80 proof/40% ABV vodka (optional)

Sealable presentation bottle(s), sterilized

Place the sugar and water in a nonreactive pan and slowly bring to a boil. Add the ginger and let simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and let the ginger steep for another 10 minutes.

Strain the syrup into a wide-mouthed pitcher and then funnel into the sterilized presentation bottle(s) and seal. Store in the refrigerator and consume within two weeks. A tablespoon of lemon juice or high-proof vodka added just after removing the pan from the heat will increase the shelf life of the syrup for up to a month

From Wild Cocktails from the Midnight Apothecary: 100 Recipes Using Home-Grown and Foraged Fruits, Herbs and Edible Flowers
By Lottie Muir • CICO Books, 2019

From Pink Gin: More than 30 Pink-Hued Cocktails
Ryland Peters & Small, 2020

An architectural gem on the Stanford University campus, Hanna House was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1936. Professor Paul Hanna and his wife Jean, both specialists in progressive, early childhood education and architecture enthusiasts, asked Wright to design an affordable home that would suit their growing family. Coming out of the Great Depression, Wright was pursuing a new vision for elegant, moderately-priced homes for the American middle class in a style that he called ‘Usonian’ (U.S. of North America). The Hanna House is considered an important example of Wright’s Usonian architecture, although, over time, the project grew well beyond ‘Middle American’ in size and expense. Wright patterned the layout for Hanna House entirely on the repeating hexagonal forms of a beehive, which led to the home’s nickname, “Honeycomb House.” Six-sided shapes and 120-degree angles are echoed in concrete patterns in the floor, custom furnishings, outdoor terraces and water features. As the first of Wright’s structures with no right angles, the Hanna-Honeycomb House has become widely recognized as an innovation in spatial planning and a turning point in Wright’s career. The unique design of this glass, redwood and brick home offered organic openness and flexibility, allowing for easy expansion and reorganization as the family’s needs changed over time. The Hannas occupied the home for 38 years and in 1975 donated the property to Stanford University. After sustaining significant damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, the house underwent a complex 10-year restoration process. Original drawings, photographs and documentation can be viewed at exhibits.stanford.edu/hanna-house-collection

No matter where life takes me, I’ll never forget where I started. Everytime I hear my name, Wooshi, I remember my humble beginnings as a stray, abandoned puppy in Wuxi, China. I used to hang out in the parking lot of this Cirque du Soleil-style theatre. That’s where I first saw Chris, the associate artistic director for the big show happening there. I went out of my way to catch his eye. I could tell that he noticed me, and I caught his attention the next day too. By the third day, Chris took time to rub my tummy and play with me. And before I knew it, he was scooping me up. “Trying to figure out what to do” is what he texted his husband, David, along with a photo of me. All it took was another hopeful puppy-eyed look, and Chris knew the answer. He moved from his fancy hotel to an Airbnb so I could stay with him. And with the help of a Chinese vet, he flew me back with him when he returned home to Half Moon Bay. Now I live at the beach with Chris, David and Blake, an 18-year-old rescue from Muttville. Everyone says it was destiny that Chris found me because I’m quite the performer. With zero training, I love to spin around and walk on my hind legs. I like to think that’s what drew me to the Wuxi circus—and my new life with my forever family on the Peninsula.

There are four perfect seasons for reading a book; however, summer always seems to invite an extra pull to the pages. PUNCH asked the erudite staff at Kepler’s Books for their favorite picks—with Peninsula or regional ties—for kicking back on a hot summer day. Book buyers Aggie Zivaljevic and Caitlin Jordan, along with store manager Amanda Hall, share a few titles that are just the companions you’re looking for to take you away.

 

Boats on the Bay
By Jeanne Walker Harvey
Illustrated by Grady McFerrin

A Sausalito resident, Jeanne Walker Harvey has written a gorgeous Bay Area book about the different types of boats we have on our waters. It has stunning and original artwork with a color palette that is both striking and soothing. I am always in awe of people who can paint the world in different colors than what I see and have it feel truer than the original sight. The colors and lines that Grady McFerrin uses mirror the feeling of seeing these familiar, beautiful boats after a long absence. This book is a celebration of those beautiful aquatic vessels that make the San Francisco Bay Area the special place we love so much. Boats on the Bay, a 2018 Golden Poppy Award Winner for picture books, is a staple book for any Bay Area family and a perfect gift for those longing to come back.  
   — Caitlin Jordan

Dragon Hoops
By Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang has been a favorite of mine for a while now. There is nothing he has written that leaves me anything less than awestruck—Dragon Hoops is no exception. It’s an inspirational story of the men’s basketball team at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland. They were having a season that looked like they could finally make it to the California State Championships. Gene, a computer science teacher at the school, never had any interest in sports but he soon became deeply invested in the coaches and players, their stories and their chance at winning State. I gasped, cheered, cried and laughed throughout this book! I was so immersed in their journey and wished to never come up for air. The action-packed, history-packed literary graphic novel of local history is perfect for sports fans, anyone wanting an inspirational story or just any reader looking for a book to absorb them into the pages. — Caitlin Jordan

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth
By Daniel Mason

Daniel Mason hails from Palo Alto, and his previous novel, The Winter Soldier, is on my list of favorite books of all time. And now, I’m just as smitten with his latest book of short stories: A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth. What a wondrous collection, bursting with longtime and faraway yarns, richly woven with philosophical and scientific details. Although we find ourselves in the realm of historical fiction, every story resonates deeply with today’s reality; a mother fighting for her child suffering from asthma, a lonely telegraph operator in the midst of the Amazon jungle seeking connection, a bug collector desperately waiting for a letter from Charles Darwin. The title story portrays Arthur Bispo do Rosario, a schizophrenic man in an asylum, who makes art out of found objects. Similarly, writers are collectors of human lives, registering our short passage upon the earth, making us see how strong our connections are and how we’re all touched by love and loss. Reading this book is like opening a treasure chest, each of the nine short stories belongs in an imaginary museum of historical curiosities. — Aggie Zivaljevic

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
By Lulu Miller

The book was inspired by Lulu Miller’s personal journey to understand how to persist in the midst of chaos. This masterful book is impossible to classify; it’s part science, part biography/memoir, part psychological thriller, part self-help manual, interweaving personal and scientific elements in a dazzling way. It’s about David Starr Jordan, a founding president of Stanford University who devoted his life to studying fish, and how he recovered from losing his life’s work in the San Francisco 1906 earthquake. What Miller does is astonishing: She painstakingly makes a historical reconstruction of his life—from his enchanting boyhood full of curiosity, making maps of stars, collecting and classifying thousands of fish in his youth and becoming a taxonomist expert; to building the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory on the Monterey Peninsula during his Stanford tenure; to his involvement in covering up Jane Stanford’s mysterious death by strychnine poisoning and finally to being a supporter of eugenics in his old age. What connects all of these threads is Miller’s inquisitorial mind to understand Jordan’s childlike “shield of optimism” and what made him veer off the course. And yet, the most significant discovery she makes is about the invisible threads of human connection that keep us bound to each other—possibly the very secret of how to stay defiant and hopeful. — Aggie Zivaljevic

Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State
By Nick Neely

In Alta California, Nick Neely travels one step at a time as he ambitiously sets out, on foot, to walk the historic El Camino Real from San Diego to San Francisco. In retracing the 650-mile trek, Neely draws stark comparisons with California’s past and its current state of affairs. This is a truly unique and intimate portrait of the King’s Highway, filled with little-known histories and great attention to detail. — Amanda Hall

The Last Train to London
By Meg Waite Clayton

The book is based on a true historical figure, a Dutch woman named Geertruida Wijsmuller or Tante Truus (Auntie Truus), who saved the lives of more than 10,000 Jewish children at the outset of World War II. She organized children’s transports known as “Kindertransport” from Nazi Germany and Austria to the Netherlands, Great Britain and other countries who would take them. Palo Alto’s Meg Waite Clayton was inspired to place her book in pre-war Vienna after visiting an exhibit there with items from suitcases carried by children, including their toys, picture books and hairbrushes. She imagined mothers combing their children’s hair one last time before sending them to a great unknown, hoping they’d be safe. The other two central characters of this moving historical novel are teenage Jewish playwright Stephan and a mathematical prodigy Zofie-Helene who’s Christian, and what happens when their young friendship and love become forbidden. It’s even more poignant that this courageous woman who didn’t have children of her own became a savior of so many. — Aggie Zivaljevic

Photographer Frances Freyberg captured this Perfect Shot at Woodside’s Filoli Garden in spring 2019. With Filoli closed during the tulip season this year, Frances looked forward to Filoli’s daily Instagram updates showing off the latest blooms. “Now that Filoli is once again open to the public,” Frances says, “I’ve been enjoying the spectacular roses and the late peonies in person, and I look forward to watching the summer garden grow and change.”

Visit filoli.org for visiting hours and to reserve tickets. 

Image Courtesy of Frances Freyberg Photography / francesfreyberg.com

words by Sheri Baer

Settled down for an interview on opposing benches near Stanford’s Littlefield Center, there would seem to be few obvious distractions. Someone less attuned would only note two women pushing strollers nearby and the occasional buzz of groundskeeping in the distance. But for Robert “Bob” Siegel, there’s a whirl of activity happening in this seemingly quiet space. Mid-sentence, he halts to observe, “Look, there’s a swallowtail butterfly!” The conversation picks up again, and then another interjection: “That’s a scrub jay on that bush.” And while the intent of the chat is to learn more about Bob, there’s a secondary steady flow of insights. “That plant with the red flowers over there is a pomegranate,” he says, gesturing across the adjacent pathway. “Most people walk by and never even notice that there are pomegranates growing all over here.”

Bob clearly isn’t most people.

And while a naturalist talk is an unexpected side bonus, the agenda for this meet-up is to understand how a kid from South Florida goes on to earn five degrees, including a PhD and an MD, ultimately becoming a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University and a leading expert resource on viruses—most recently, COVID-19. But interwoven into that story are other overlapping interests including published nature photographer, photography teacher, docent and intrepid explorer of seven continents.

It’s all a bit overwhelming to process. “One thing leads to another,” Bob explains, with a shrug.

Looking back on his childhood in Florida, Bob views himself as a “generic product of the ’50s.” Out of his Leave it to Beaver-like beginnings, he gleaned a passion for science and nature. “In Florida, you went to school,” he says, “and then you spent the rest of your time outside.” Inspired by his father, a salesman in a camera shop, Bob developed a calling for photography, capturing images from the 1964 World’s Fair with an Instamatic camera. When it came time for college, Stanford University beckoned. “California was kind of the promised land, even for kids in Florida,” he reflects.

As a psychology major mostly by default (“At some point I looked at my transcript and I had more psychology than anything else.”), Bob discovered that he could take upper-division biology classes without the prerequisites. He followed a Stanford BA in psychology with an MA in education and then worked as a Stanford Human Biology teaching assistant and substitute high school teacher while he figured out what should come next. “It was sort of one step and one step and one step,” he says. “There was no grand plan and there still isn’t.”

However, there was one constant—biology kept piquing his interest. “It was a time when people were learning how to sequence DNA and when recombinant technology was first being utilized,” he recalls. “I got very excited, and I decided that I would pursue a PhD in molecular biology.”

Drawn to the outdoors, Bob declined Ivy League offers and followed his gut to the University of Colorado, where he reconnected with his future wife, Wendy Max, a former Stanford classmate also pursuing her PhD. In the process of completing his graduate studies, Bob found that he didn’t feel at home in the lab, so he applied to medical school, a decision that returned him to Stanford. “My first quarter of medical school, I was finishing up my dissertation and teaching chemistry at Stanford, and in the middle of the quarter, I flew out to Colorado to defend my thesis,” he recounts. “It was a very busy quarter.”

Bob didn’t start out with the intention to teach. “Teaching found me rather than me finding teaching,” is how he explains it, ticking off examples like being asked to take on a 270-student Biology of Cancer lecture class as a graduate student. “On the first day of class, there was a lot of noise and they were all talking to each other. I belted out, ‘CANCER!’ and there was silence in the room, and then I began citing statistics about cancer. I realized that you can have that many people paying attention to you—it was quite addictive.”

Thinking back, there are clearly flags marking Bob’s intended path, such as his habit of writing up syllabi “just for fun.” Intrigued by human virology, he proposed a class called Humans and Viruses, which he first taught in 1983—and still teaches to this day. “I think the best way to learn anything is to teach it,” he says. “When you teach it, you become hyper-aware.” Through his years in medical school (during which Bob and Wendy welcomed the first two of their three boys), he continued teaching and finally concluded that he had no desire to become a clinician. “I actually found that teaching was way more rewarding for me,” he says. And as for the arduous academic journey that led up to this decision?  “All the things that I did contributed to what I do now,” he responds.

“I tend to want to jump in epic places—it’s just this feeling of exuberance. I learned early that you want to kick your legs up because it makes you look like you’re higher.”

As a professor (teaching) of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford (in addition to other appointments), Bob’s responsibilities have spanned running the medical school’s pre-clinical infectious disease curriculum to teaching a course entitled, Measles, Sneezes & Things That Go Mumps in the Night.  For the Viruses in the News class he inaugurated in 2014, Bob’s focus is as timely as it gets—tracking and following major outbreaks from Ebola and Zika to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s not surprising that his phone is now ringing constantly. Whether it’s TV, radio or newspapers—the San Francisco Chronicle or CNN—Bob finds himself on speed dial for commentary and insights. He also produces a steady stream of opinion pieces, his takes or “rants” on what’s happening.

“In a bizarre way, it’s like I’ve been training for this my whole career,” he says. And while doctors, researchers and public health officials are being tapped for their particular expertise, Bob is also clear about the role he plays. “With the coronavirus, I consider myself to be a science educator,” he says, “and that’s what I focus on. A lot of times they’ll call me up not for a quote but to educate them about a certain topic—like antibody testing or contact tracing—and so I’ll actually teach a mini-class on the phone.”

The recipient of numerous awards, including Stanford’s highest teaching honor, the Walter J. Gores Award, Bob extends his teaching philosophy to every subject he tackles. “A lot of people confuse teaching and lecturing,” he points out. “My goal as a teacher is not to just be a distributor of knowledge because you can go on Wikipedia. My role has to be something more—it has to be to inspire students, to explain it in a way that they couldn’t get anywhere else.”

Over time, Bob’s passion for teaching enveloped his other interests—his fascination with biology resulted in docent training and leading tours at Año Nuevo State Park and Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, his zeal for travel translated into leading educational programs on six continents and his love of photography and the outdoors led to a popular Photographing Nature course. “You need to be able to see the big picture and the little picture and to see all different things,” Bob tells his students. “You need those lenses in your mind. What you bring to photography, what you bring to observation, is this whole set of skills of how and where to look.”

Bob has trained his powers of observation through countless adventures and NGO work. His travel logs comprise everything from doing fieldwork on malaria and HIV in Papua New Guinea and East Africa to scuba diving with hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos, sand boarding in Chile’s Atacama Desert and photographing long-nosed proboscis monkeys in Malaysia.

“My goal every time I do a tour at Año Nuevo or Jasper Ridge is to get applause at the end. That means that people appreciate what happened—that they’re taking away more than just a pile of facts.”

Having photographed all but three of 44 orders of birds, Bob was set to head off on sabbatical in spring 2020, which included plans to check New Caladonia’s kagu and New Zealand’s kiwi off his list. The COVID-19 outbreak sidelined his travels. Tracking the developments in Wuhan, he published an opinion piece in late January warning of the potential health threat and the critical need to stop the outbreak in Asia. “This wasn’t on everybody’s radar screen,” he says, “but the virus wonks knew that there were deadly diseases lurking out there.”

Sitting on the bench by Stanford’s Littlefield Center, Bob feels the familiar buzz of his cell phone. He glances down at the screen and murmurs a mental note to return a call to a local reporter. His attention pulled for a moment, he glances over to a nearby structure. “Right on the side of that building,” he says, gesturing, “I often see these crazy creatures called slime molds.” And although no explanation is needed by now, he clarifies, “People rarely notice slime molds because they don’t have a slime mold lens.

I’ve had many teachers in my life. From kindergarten to my last class at Stanford Business School, there must have been a hundred. Friends often discuss their favorite high school or college teachers, but most of the instructors who taught me then are a blur to me.

Those I do remember are my elementary school teachers. With the exception of Mr. Walker who taught PE, they were all women. They were a kind and gentle lot, all with good intentions, all with long tenures, all with good teeth and solid shoes.

My school was Wolflin Elementary in Amarillo, Texas, named for Charles Wolflin, a dairy farmer who in the 1920s laid down wide brick streets, planted thousands of Siberian elms and constructed hundreds of large, stately homes on his 640 acres of pasture. We lived on the same street as the school in one of those stately homes, and from age six on, I could—and did—walk the two-thirds of a mile to and from school straight down the broken sidewalk, looking both ways before crossing the streets.

My first teacher—and the teacher who most impacted me—was Miss Hooper, who had rich black hair, white luminous skin and lips covered in bright red lipstick. She was tall and lanky and pretty to me, though she never married, instead caring for her elderly mother. There were two classes in each grade, about 28 students in each, and it was my good fortune to have gotten Miss Hooper since my brother Danny had her five years before me.

Our classroom had desks with two children per, one on each side of some drawers in which to store our schools items. We had permanent seats, unless you were too disruptive or too befuddled and then you were moved accordingly. I was a pensive student and, indeed, the report card that my dad saved to be rediscovered only five years ago, said in the comments, “Sloane is a quiet child and should try to speak more often.”

Miss Hooper was gentle and helpful and rarely cross with us. When I needed help on, say, a writing assignment, she would bend far down to my small body and with her sharp pencil, help me, for example, make a proper “q.” She smelled of cleanliness, wore no fingernail polish and always was formally dressed. She inspired me to want to learn, to be curious about things and to do a job all the way through to the end. I spent my days trying to emulate her, and her habits and actions were ones that I took as my own. We stayed in touch for most of her life, and if I ever loved a teacher, it was Miss Hooper.

I had Mrs. Fabian for second grade, a plump, squatty woman with auburn hair and a warm, kind smile. She favored me and I was always assigned a seat up front. I think I was less quiet since I had a grade of school under my belt. Still, I was a good student, and by then I could read well and do multiplication in my head.

It was Mrs. Fabian who helped launch my publishing career. I borrowed mimeograph sheets from her and at home wrote and designed “The Second Grade News.” She would run them off for me and then I had a half-dozen kids go around their neighborhood and sell them for a nickel each. I got three cents and they got two.

On November 22 of my second grade year, shortly after we had come in from lunch recess, Mr. Willoughby, our principal, called for all the teachers to come to the auditorium. Mrs. Fabian told us to be good and left. When she returned, she had dark glasses on and was crying. She shared the news that our president had died and together we recited the Pledge of Allegiance. We didn’t truly understand the significance of what had happened other than we were dismissed early that day. Still, I can remember everything about that moment: the handkerchief clutched tightly within her hand, the gold and red wool suit she was wearing and the sad tone in her voice.

In third grade, I was lucky to have Mrs. Taylor, a stalwart woman with dark hair and a stern disposition. She wasn’t mean, but she looked like she could be. She wore uncomfortable-looking shoes and always seemed to have a sweater on, even when it was hot outside. The best thing about her class, however, was that I met the love of my life there (at least for the next few years), a pretty, sweet girl named Susan Standefer. She had shoulder-length bouncy hair, often with a hairclip across the top and wore cute tennis shoes to class. When I asked her if I could kiss her, she told me she’d have to ask her mother first. We are close friends to this day.

I remember each Wolflin teacher with great acuity. I can perfectly hear their voices, remember their faces and see their laughs and gestures. Though they made modest money and held little prestige, they molded me in far deeper ways than the well-known, highly-paid professors I had later on, and their impact has lasted me a lifetime.

Anthony Barnosky’s phone rang out of the blue one day in 2012 when he was out running with his dog—it turned out to be
an unanticipated call from
Jerry Brown.

The former California state governor wanted to speak to the scientist about the recent paper he and his wife Elizabeth Hadly had published in Nature, alongside 20 other scientists. The paper warned that humans were pushing the global climate to a perilous environmental tipping point. Governor Brown wanted to know why scientists had not been shouting this news from the rooftops.

“And I said, ‘Well, I thought we were,’” Tony chuckles, recollecting his first interaction with the then-governor. “And he said, ‘What? No. I’m a politician, I know how to get things done and a lot of this is news to me.’”

Governor Brown went on to help Tony and Liz distribute a statement (signed by 1,400 scientists from 60 countries) summarizing the tipping point premise and potential solutions to national and world leaders. For the scientist pair, their collaboration with the Brown administration showcased the power that public outreach has to amplify scientific research.

“It made me want to do more than go out and study fossils,” reflects Tony.

Today, Tony and Liz are using their scientific and advocacy skills to lead Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (JRBP), teaming up as the Preserve’s executive director and faculty director. Situated in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, just five miles from Stanford’s campus, the 1,200-acre space is a hub for scientific research and teaching, a remarkable university/local community collaboration and a case study for environmental conservation.

“Jasper Ridge has a long tradition of research and teaching,” explains Liz. “Our first student project or study came out in the 1800s, but we also have a very rich legacy of community outreach.”

The pristine meadows of Jasper Ridge are steeped in ecological significance. Even before the land was designated as a biological preserve in 1973, Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven found their famous evidence for coevolution here through their studies of butterfly-plant interactions. Hal Mooney experimented on the Preserve’s rich abundance of native plants and solidified the principles of vegetative resource allocation.

“It’s really daunting to think about the giants who have come before us,” Liz says.

While Liz and Tony do not obsess over the personal legacy they will leave at Jasper Ridge, they do constantly think about how to maximize Jasper Ridge’s potential as a living laboratory. To them, Jasper Ridge represents an ideal location to study the Anthropocene, the current geologic epoch. Unlike any period of geologic history, human impact is driving the climate and environmental changes appearing in the geologic record.

“Everywhere in the world is now being impacted by people,” Tony says. “The planet is changing so fast in so many ways driven by humans, that no longer can we just assume that we can keep managing nature the same old way that we always have. To keep nature healthy in the future, we do have to manage it, but we really have to understand how this overprint of rapid change is making the whole world different.”

Liz points to the Searsville Reservoir coring project as an example of how to use Jasper Ridge to characterize human impact on the environment. Because the Searsville Dam has blocked the flow of San Francisquito Creek since 1892, the 10 meters of sediment accumulated at the bottom of the reservoir contains evidence from nearly the entire history of human industrialization in the region. Liz explains that the cores obtained from the sediment can spark all manner of studies: analyzing environmental DNA, tracking chemical runoffs, monitoring invasive species and so much more.

“That sediment—that is amazing,” she says. Liz thinks they may eventually use the site to define the precise moment when the Anthropocene epoch began. “The detail on this core is just the most amazing core you’ve ever seen,” she adds, with near-breathless excitement. “It’s probably one of the best in the world that we know about.”

Jasper Ridge is also a part of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network, which is a group of 22 major land stewards—from Big Creek Lumber to the Sempervirens Fund—working together to develop a regional plan to sustain the native ecosystems throughout the Peninsula.

“These are groups that have very diverse missions and are now working together,” Tony says. “It turns out there are a lot of things in common that people will get together on.”

The combination of research and outreach is what drew Liz and Tony to Jasper Ridge in the first place. Prior to Jasper Ridge, the two built their careers analyzing changing ecosystems based on the geologic records of North America’s Rocky Mountains. They noticed first-hand how the growing human population was influencing the environment, which led to public policy projects like the one prompting Jerry Brown’s phone call. Through Jasper Ridge, they saw a chance to experiment with the policy ideas they championed in a relatively small, semi-controlled space.

“The opportunity to study the environment intensely is much more tractable in our backyard than it is in Yellowstone,” Liz says. “I find a lot of parallels and a lot of power in Jasper Ridge.”

To protect vital research projects and conserve the historic land, Jasper Ridge welcomes the public through docent-led educational tours only—with an estimated 8,000 visits a year. Liz and Tony are proud of the learning opportunities Jasper Ridge provides to local schools, including free tours and teacher training workshops. Additionally, of the 60 yearly research projects in progress at Jasper Ridge, Liz estimates that half are run by faculty from other institutions.

“There are many different kinds of attractive qualities for teaching at Jasper Ridge that include more than just the fundamentals about ecology and evolution,” adds Liz. “We appeal to artists, we have writing classes, photography classes and even plays out there; we have had people from Stanford’s School of Earth and civil engineering projects.”

Beyond her work at Jasper Ridge, Liz returns to Wyoming every year to advance other research. Her studies of pack rats in a Yellowstone cave was the basis for both her master’s and PhD projects and her lab is filled with specimens from that field site.

This cave also happens to be the site where Liz first met Tony.

“I was working at the time in a cave in Colorado and she was working in this cave in Yellowstone,” recalls Tony. “We were probably two of four people in the world who were excavating ancient pack rat middens to see how the mammal communities had changed through time.”

After bonding over a shared fascination for rodent waste piles, Liz invited Tony to visit her Yellowstone cave. The two married in 1990, first taking positions at UC Berkeley, followed by work at Montana State University. The couple moved back to the Bay Area in 1998 with Liz becoming an assistant professor in the Stanford Biology department and Tony returning to a Berkeley professorship. In 2016, they joined Jasper Ridge’s leadership team together, hoping to guide JRBP’s contributions on a local, regional and global scale.   

Balancing the research, community outreach and conservation elements of the Preserve is challenging—but Liz and Tony cherish the value of this protected, unspoiled space in heavily-developed Silicon Valley.

“There’s been this incredible foundation of science and teaching and outreach built here already—how do we take that to the next level?” ponders Tony. “I think all the things that we’re trying to do right now are to understand the Jasper Ridge system and use that as a way to model how we can manage nature into the future.”

explore the ridge

After ABOUT, it’s the second button on the Jasper Ridge website: VISIT THE PRESERVE. Through the efforts of over 100 active docents, Jasper Ridge invites the community to experience the Preserve’s geologic, topographic and biotic diversity—along with some truly fabulous views. Docent-led educational tours run from October through May.

Trained to “teach on the trail” through a rigorous class taught during the academic year, JRBP docents represent a mix of Stanford students and community members. Each docent class (up to 24) is carefully curated to reflect a range of backgrounds and interests. “We don’t want the class to be all ecologists or environmental scientists,” advises Jorge Ramos, JRBP’s associate director for environmental education. “We choose students and community members who are bringing something unique—we want you to bring your creativity and express it in your own way.”

In addition to leading tours (assigned by areas of interest), docents also contribute to research projects, volunteering to help with bird surveys, wildlife camera monitoring and collecting botanical specimens. “Some of the long-term bird studies are done by volunteers who are in their 70s,” notes Liz. “So this is a really deep, long connection we have to the surrounding area.”

John Working of Palo Alto dates his involvement to the docent class of 1981. “My early interest in Jasper Ridge came as a member of Boy Scout Troop 51, which was a troop for children of professors living on campus,” John recalls. “I had some camping experience out there including…” he says, with a bemused smile, “some wonderful cases of poison oak.” 

For John, becoming a Jasper Ridge docent felt like a natural fit. “I had always been a wanderer of the countryside as had my parents,” he says. “My whole family was just steeped in identifying the natural environment—trees, flowers, birds and mammals.”

As a longtime JRBP supporter and patron, John led docent tours for nearly four decades and continues to participate in Zoom meetings and updates. “Being able to talk about the special biology that is there is just a delight,” he says. “I don’t know of a place that I’ve held in higher regard than Jasper Ridge; it reaches out to the community in a way that nothing else does.”

Tucked at the back of a Menlo Park neighborhood, at the edge of San Francisquito Creek, begins a tree-shaded barrier wall extending a long block. Multiple gated entry points—all emblazoned with the large italic monogram A A—catch the eye, inviting further interest. What’s hiding back there? Is it a private estate? Peering over the top, curiosity mounts given that while some structures look distinctively Spanish Colonial, there is a mish-mash of other styles including an old wooden barn.

This is one of the most distinctive and historic collections of buildings on the Peninsula—the Allied Arts Guild, home to artisans, shops and stunning gardens for over 90 years now. How did it come to be, and what secrets does it hold?

From Spanish land grant to guild for artists

What is now the Allied Arts Guild, located at 75 Arbor Road, initially belonged to the 32,000-plus-acre tract called the Rancho de Las Pulgas, which was awarded to Don Jose Dario Arguello by the Spanish Governor of California in 1795.

The Peninsula landmark traces its current history back to 1929, when wealthy art patrons Delight and Garfield Merner purchased 3.5 acres of what had been Murray Farm. They worked with renowned architect Gardner Dailey and artist Pedro de Lemos to create their vision of an arts guild that would house workplaces for artists, support folk art and encourage the crafting of everyday items.

The original Murray barn and sheds were preserved and proved useful in the construction of the rest of the buildings, many of Spanish Colonial design, accented by wrought iron work and red roof tiles. The main building used the framework of the old Murray farmhouse with the archway still in place today.

Inspired by famous sites the couple had visited in Spain, the gardens were designed and named in the Spanish manner: The Court of Abundance, The Garden of Delight and Cervantes Court, which has an inner courtyard featuring a mural of Cervantes dedicating Don Quixote to his patron, Count de Lemos.

The tiles and objects of art used to decorate the walls were sourced from Spain, Tunis and Morocco. Famed female artist Maxine Albro (also noted for her Coit Tower murals) and the de Lemos family created the decorative mosaics and frescoes.

In 1932, the Merners invited women from the Palo Alto Auxiliary to serve lunch at the Guild to benefit Stanford’s Hospital for Convalescent Children (now Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford), and in 1935, the couple retired from active Guild engagement, ceding the running of the complex to the Auxiliary.

Visit by a famous American photographer

Shortly after the Guild opened, 29-year-old Ansel Adams became its photographer of record and captured the first interior and exterior photographs. According to Alan McGee, a photographer who exhibits at the Portola Art Gallery located at the Guild, Adams’ photographic career was well underway at that point—having found a sponsor, Albert Bender, established friendships with Paul Strand and Georgia O’Keefe and created a widely acclaimed masterpiece, Monolith – The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite 1927. Although Adams had a 60-print show at the Smithsonian scheduled for that year, he struggled to support himself on print sales of his photographs alone, so he also accepted commercial work.

Adams’ Guild assignment entailed photographing architecture and art activities and producing a folio of Allied Arts Guild prints. “The folio, entitled Twelve Camera Studies of the Allied Arts Guild, was produced using the then state-of-the-art halftone process,” explains McGee. “The folio images were produced from plates made from Adams’ negatives by the Allied Arts Guild Print Shop, which was located in what is now the Portola Art Gallery.”

Of note: In 2010, McGee and fellow photographer Graham Creasey embarked on a “re-photography project” using the same vantage points and lighting conditions as those used by Adams. The result is Allied Arts Guild – Past and Present, a booklet which is available for purchase at the Portola Art Gallery.

The Guild from mid-20^th century to now

Following its inception in 1932, “having lunch at the Guild” became an established local tradition for Menlo Park and nearby residents. Served by members of the Palo Alto Auxiliary, the dining experience included the opportunity to buy favorite recipes printed on little blue note cards. In 2005, volunteer members created and published Tastes, Tales and Traditions, an Allied Arts Guild cookbook, which is still available in print.

After lunch, visitors enjoyed strolling through the gardens and perusing the Guild’s many shops, including The Traditional Shop, overseen by the Woodside-Atherton Auxiliary, now called the Allied Arts Guild Auxiliary.

“We sold a lot of Waterford crystal, old Imari pieces, lamps, silver and jewelry,” recalls Menlo Park resident Louise DeDera, who has been a member of the Auxiliary since 1973. “At Christmas, people looked forward to hearing, ‘The tree is up!’ This meant that an 11-foot tree from Oregon was up and decorated in the shop. Boxes full of ornaments circled the tree, and customers were given baskets to fill with their purchases.”

The Allied Arts Guild complex is now owned and operated by the Allied Arts Guild Auxiliary with the purpose of raising funds for children receiving medical care at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital through donations made to Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. The Guild’s lunch tradition endures at Cafe Wisteria, a venue managed by event director Tiana Wong, who took over in 2018. Serving contemporary American food, the restaurant’s customary lunch schedule is Monday through Saturday from 11AM to 3PM.

In her role as event director, Tiana oversees weddings, memorials and other gatherings at the Guild. “Weddings come from everywhere, even the UK and China,” she says, confirming that some years ago an elephant played a featured role at one ceremony.

No visit to the Allied Arts is complete without visiting the shops on the property. The selection includes pottery, leather work, an art gallery, layette boutique, couture women’s wear, floral shop, Italian jewelry and textiles for upholstery and window treatments.

The Traditional Shop is now called the Artisan Shop—staffed entirely by volunteers with all profits donated to Lucile Packard. The Artisan Shop is housed in the historic Milono Building, designed by Germano Milono and cited in 1953 by the American Institute of Architects as one of the best designs in the Bay Area. While its exterior echoes the exterior of the barn, its style is decidedly contemporary.

The Allied Arts mainstay is Thomas Kieninger, who is the second Kieninger to make and repair furniture at The Barn Woodshop, taking over the business from his father, Albert. The woodworking barn has been in business for 90 years in the same location—the original barn that was built in 1885—an enduring reminder of the Guild’s deep, historic roots.

While closed during the spring due to the shelter-in-place mandate, the Allied Arts Guild’s normal operating hours are Monday through Saturday from 10AM to 5PM.

Walking through San Mateo’s Central Park, it’s difficult to miss the bamboo fences that surround the Japanese Tea Garden, a quaint area tucked away in the back of the park. After World War II, the city of San Mateo sought to develop stronger ties with the Japanese community and established one of the United States’ first sister city relationships with Toyonaka in 1963. A gift from Toyonaka, the garden was installed in 1966, designed by Nagao Sakurai, the chief gardener for the Imperial Palace of Tokyo and the designer of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Sakurai closely collaborated with the San Mateo Gardeners Association, which at the time was made up of many Japanese Americans in the community. Visitors to this peaceful haven will find a pagoda statue installed at the park’s opening, a traditional gazebo (azumaya) and a teahouse (chashitsu). There’s also a diverse range of foliage, including Japanese maples, bonsai plants and cherry trees (best viewed in late winter or early spring to catch the cherry blossoms in bloom). Koi fish in the large pond in the middle of the gardens are fed every day during the summer at 11AM and 3PM. To get the best view of the feeding, stand on the bridge. The garden’s usual hours are 10AM to 4PM Monday through Friday and 11AM to 4PM on weekends. It is most easily accessed through the Laurel Street entrance, and admission is free. Call 650.522.7400 or check cityofsanmateo.org/3319/Central-Park-Japanese-Garden for current access updates.

Robert Siegel, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, also teaches a nature photography course. “I usually walk up at the Stanford Dish several times per week, at least in the pre-pandemic era. I take along a camera in case I see anything new or interesting.” Robert captured this Perfect Shot of a coyote late one afternoon: “He was clearly scrutinizing me as much as I was watching him.” To see more of Robert’s images, visit

web.stanford.edu/~siegelr/photo

My given name is Lucy but I like to think of myself as Harry, as in the fabulous escape artist Harry Houdini. I’m not delusional. I know I’m actually a 60-pound black lab, but Harry’s daring escapades inspire me every day. I live in Atherton with Jim, Annie, Lily, Lindsey and Connor and you’ll usually find me hanging out in my backyard. I love to eat grass but my family always chastises me when I start nibbling away. However, I caught a lucky break earlier this year. For some reason, the gardener stopped coming, and the grass grew and grew. When I began munching on the long, tasty blades, instead of, “Stop it, Lucy!” the only comment I heard was, “Look, she’s earning her keep.” The biggest attraction for me in the backyard is the… gate! I’m constantly keeping watch and every now and then, it accidentally gets left open. That’s when I channel my role model Harry and the real adventures begin. I stealthily slip out, look for the first friendly person I see walking by and follow them. One time I even jumped in a neighbor’s swimming pool and ran through their house! However, I’ve yet to perfect my escape act. For some reason, I keep getting ratted out, and I suspect it’s those tags jangling around my neck. One glance, and like magic, I’m suddenly on my way back home again. My family is ever so grateful to see me. They even reward my getaway routine with a nice walk… back to where I’ve just been. It’s probably just a coincidence that they always leave a bottle of wine and a thank you note behind in the mailbox.

words by Sheri Baer

At any given point in time, she might have caught your eye in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Using her propped up knees like a desk, she scribbles away in a Moleskine notebook, occasionally glancing up to see another toy boat being launched into the Grand Bassin duck pond. Or perhaps you saw her at Stanford campus, ensconced at a red outdoor table by Tressider Union, filtering out college student chatter as she thoughtfully jots down notes. Four Seasons Silicon Valley is another favorite spot. Near the fireplace in Quattro restaurant, she taps away on her laptop, pausing now and then to sip a cup of coffee.

“I write in all sorts of places in normal times,” says New York Times bestselling novelist Meg Waite Clayton. “I write in cafes, and I love to write in the sunshine out at Stanford.” In recent months, there’s a major caveat, of course: “Most of my time is now spent in my office.”

Meg is referring to a light-strewn converted bedroom in Palo Alto’s Community Center neighborhood, with views out to a back garden. Surrounded by stacks of books, family photos and personal memorabilia (ranging from a stuffed psychedelic armadillo to a 1993 marathon medal), she plies her trade at a much-beloved French reproduction cherrywood desk she bought in 1987. “I’m a very loyal person,” she acknowledges. “I’m still on my first husband after 37 years and I’m also still on my first car—a little Mercedes convertible that was vintage even when I bought it in 1985.”

In Meg’s line of sight is a corkboard peppered with dozens of 3×5 note cards—pink, green, blue and white—each bearing a scene or a chapter, her “card outline” of the novel she’s currently working on. A few months back, in a personal ceremony akin to Buckingham Palace’s Changing of the Guard,  Meg enacted the “swapping of the corkboard.” Pulling out every push pin (and corresponding card) with relish, she officially ushered out her last novel to make room for her new one. This ritual has now produced seven Meg Waite Clayton titles: The Language of Light, The Wednesday Sisters, The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Daughters, The Race for Paris, Beautiful Exiles and The Last Train to London.

Although the protagonists of Meg’s books vary—from an immigrant female Supreme Court nominee to women journalists during World War II—her passion is the general/historical fiction genre, with a very clear, defined focus. “I write about strong women who don’t always know that they’re strong; I think of them as the women who have paved the way for all of us,” she says. “Women have done so much in the last 100 years that has not been appropriately recognized and applauded and so those are the stories that I am interested in exploring.”

Published in September 2019, The Last Train to London, the book that just came down off Meg’s corkboard, is already an international bestseller being translated into 18 languages. Based on the Kindertransport rescue of 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe, at the novel’s heart is Geertruida “Truus” Wijsmuller, a Dutch-woman and real-life hero determined to save as many young lives as possible.

The story of the Kindertransport first caught Meg’s attention back in 2006, when her son Nick conducted interviews with Kindertransport survivors for a Palo Alto Children’s Theatre project. “I was very daunted by this story for a long time,” Meg reflects. “I thought it was a Jewish story that needed a Jewish writer to tell it and I grew up Roman Catholic. It wasn’t until I found Truus, who’s Christian, that I imagined that it would be my story to tell. I feel like I’m doing it for Truus and I’m so happy to have it out there and have it so well received.”

Having the confidence to tell a story, to fully deploy her talent, represents Meg’s own journey in character development. Born in Washington, D.C., Meg moved frequently with her family growing up, so books became her constant companions. Inspired by works like A Wrinkle in Time and To Kill a Mockingbird, she recalls telling her eighth grade boyfriend that she wanted to be a novelist. “And then you start getting all that real-world input and you see that nobody actually gets to be a novelist,” she says, “and so you let go of that dream and you do other things.”

In Meg’s case, that meant earning bachelor’s degrees in history and psychology, followed by a law degree, from the University of Michigan. Looking back, she realizes that her courses of study laid the perfect foundation for that inner-novelist waiting to come out. “History is what people have done and psychology is why they do it, and I’m not sure that there’s better training for a writer than those two disciplines,” she explains. Meg embraced the adrenaline rush of a legal career, but the seven years she spent practicing law didn’t fully satisfy her. “I think the art of putting together a merger agreement is not unlike the art of putting together a novel in terms of the logic that has to flow through it,” she says, “but I knew I didn’t want to die and have my gravestone say, ‘She wrote a great indenture.’”

As the chapters in Meg’s own life unfolded with moves to Los Angeles, Baltimore and Nashville, critical supporting characters were introduced—her husband, Everett “Mac” McCord Clayton, and two sons, Chris and Nick. It was while Meg was pregnant with Nick that her story arc took a shift. “I imagined becoming a writer again, and I only did that because my husband made me admit that it was something I wanted to do. He said, ‘How are you going to know if you can do it or not if you don’t give it a try?’”

Meg knew he was right. “In the crazy things you do in life,” she says, “I decided the time to start writing was when I had a two-year-old and a newborn.”

She trained herself to write “in the spaces.” After dropping her older son at preschool, Meg would glance to the back seat. “If my younger son had fallen asleep, I would pull out my manuscript and work at the steering wheel in my car.” A handful of tokens translated into writing time at Chuck E. Cheese’s, and once the school years started, she adopted a discipline she still maintains: “I write from 8AM to 2PM. That’s where it comes from; I’d drop the kids off, and then I would sit down and write—until 2PM or until 2,000 words.”

Meg completed her first novel in 1996 and then “sat back and waited to be on The New York Times Bestseller List.” That’s when she learned that writing and publishing are two very different things. “The novel didn’t sell the first time,” she says, recalling the staggering letdown. “Everybody I know who has been successful writing has a story—and that story is always how long they kept having to go at it before they got any traction.”

In 2002, Meg moved to the Bay Area with her family, and they settled into their Palo Alto home. Her first novel, The Language of Light, finally landed on the right desk and was published in 2003. For her second book, Meg found inspiration in her own aspirations, her long-standing friendships and the stimulating Peninsula culture surrounding her. “I draw on a lot of the environment here to feed my well that I write from,” she says. “One of the things I absolutely love is the density of smart, accomplished women here.”

Palo Alto’s Pardee Park. University Avenue. Stanford Hospital. Kepler’s Books. Local references abound in Meg’s second novel, but the actual genesis story is a tribute to her own writing fortitude. “I started writing The Wednesday Sisters in my journal on a day when I thought I would never write again, one of those days where you’d rather be scrubbing other people’s toilets than actually writing,” she reminisces. A fleeting image caught Meg’s eye—a woman wearing a red Stanford baseball hat with a blond braid out the back—triggering an idea that would evolve into a New York Times and USA Today Bestseller and one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Books.

Set in Palo Alto in the late 1960s, The Wednesday Sisters captures the powerful friendship that intertwines the lives of five young mothers who form a writer’s group in the second wave of the Women’s Movement. Read the book after talking with Meg and you’ll hear a familiar voice in the characters of Frankie, Linda, Kath, Ally and Brett.

“I would probably say that there is a little bit of me in some way in every one of the characters I write,” Meg reflects. “You can only write from emotion. You can only write from inside yourself.” In fact, Meg finds that aspect of writing the most liberating, especially given her Irish Catholic ‘good girl’ upbringing. “I can explore those bits of me that aren’t the prettiest bits of me from the anonymity of it being some character and not me,” she says. “That’s part of the reason I really love fiction.”

Meg shares her love of fiction with like-minded neighbors in a Palo Alto book club that dates back to 2004. Meg was writing The Wednesday Sisters at the time, and the new group adopted the name to register the club for a Kepler’s Books discount. “It’s just an amazing way to get to know each other,” Meg says. “Getting together over books opens up discussion because you can talk about yourself but around the topic of the book.” Clearly an advocate, Meg’s website megwaiteclayton.com offers book club guidance and insights, along with personalized tips for aspiring writers.

Following a rigorous fall 2019 touring schedule for The Last Train to London, Meg adapted to making “virtual” appearances in recent months, leaving more time for writing. Her film agent is currently shopping Meg’s The Last Train to London screenplay, and Meg’s eighth novel (she’ll only say it’s a story of great heroism set in World War II Europe) is due January 2 for publication in early 2022. And yes, she’s ready with other ideas lined up behind it.

Although Meg Waite Clayton’s name is typically preceded by the description “international bestselling novelist,” she remains modest about her achievements and name recognition. “I’m not Steven King and I’m not Margaret Atwood yet,” she says. “I’m very cognizant of that, which is why I try to focus on the writing itself. I love the writing and I feel honored and lucky to be publishing, but it is the writing that sustains me.”

I’m not sure I actually enjoy planting things. I think it is more that I enjoy the satisfaction of having planted things. Dirty hands, an aching back and tired knees are far less enjoyable than—after everything is planted and the area cleaned—gazing out at the beautiful green symmetry of freshly potted annuals, neatly in their places, their roots enmeshed in new soil, a water sprinkling soon to happen.

When I came to the Peninsula to go to Stanford, it didn’t take me long to realize that there are two seasons here: fall and spring. We have no true winter here, though the beginning and ending calendar dates do come and go. There is no snow, no icy roads, no freezing days. The most we can hope for is a good rainstorm, perhaps a bit of hail and nighttime temperatures in the upper 30s.

As for the other half of the year, we only get a few hot summer days. Indeed, whenever I try to have an outdoor summer dinner, everyone wants to move inside, the temperature quickly dipping into the cool 60s as the sun goes down.

Twice a year, I change the annuals that give our landscaping some color and movement.

In front, we have two rather large gray pots on either side of our front door. And nearby is our annuals planting bed that is 20 feet long and three feet wide. The pots get little sun and so they require shade annuals. And the planting area is more difficult because half of it is mostly in the shade and the other half takes a good deal of afternoon sun.

In the fall, I have come to understand the brilliance of cyclamens. White ones. I almost exclusively use white flowering plants, though rich purple ones have rather recently caught my eye. In the past, I didn’t use cyclamens, since you can only get them in four-inch containers and not in the more economical six-packs, but they bloom and they last. And if I am lucky, I will happen upon them at Costco where they are about half their non-Costco price.

The front pots each get three of them and the planting area needs exactly 36. In the backyard, we have three medium gray pots, two larger ones and one still larger again. Each of the medium ones gets one cyclamen, the next size gets two and the bigger one, three. There is also another planting bed for some annuals, and I put in another five or six there. If you add it all up, I need around 60 of them.

For spring, I have again tried to simplify my planting. In front, I’m trying African impatiens in the planting area, since they are colorful and do better in the heat than regular impatiens. For the two pots in front and all the pots in back, I plant white impatiens. But there have been fungus issues with them the last few years and it’s not uncommon for them to crumble into nothingness about halfway through the season and then I am scrambling to find some to replace those lost.

Each season, when the day comes and it is time to plant, I gather the plants and a bag of fertilizer. Then I first attend to the tedious chore of pulling out all of the past annuals, their roots now firmly in the soil and begging to stay planted. I pull each one out and preserve as much soil as possible. Then I mix in a bit of fertilizer before starting to place the new plants. It is slow, tiring work, my jeans dirty, my fingernails encrusted with mud and my back hurting. But I go at it and eventually it all gets done. Then I throw away all the plastic pots, broom sweep the areas and water everything.

Finally, after coming inside to relax for a while, I go back outside and view my work. And seeing everything so happily in its place, a few flowers taking shape, the rows so neat and the pots so handsome, I smile with a bit of pride and self-worth, enjoying the beauty of the annuals, though pleased that we have but two times a year to rotate them and not four.

In the early 1880s, Leland and Jane Stanford were actively making plans for a new mansion they were going to build on their 8,900-acre estate in Santa Clara County known as ‘Palo Alto.’ They hired Rudolph Ulrich, a noted 19^th-century landscape gardener, to design the grounds, which included a 30,000-square-foot plot of land set aside for an elaborate, formally laid-out collection of desert and subtropical plants. Between 1881 and 1883, thanks to Leland Stanford’s offer to provide unlimited access to labor and boxcars, Ulrich collected specimens from the Sonoran desert—saguaros, barrel cacti, opuntia and yucca—and planted the “Arizona Garden,” adjacent to the intended building site. But in 1884, when Leland Stanford Jr. died unexpectedly of typhoid fever, Leland and Jane Stanford scrapped the plans for their new country house, deciding to build a university in their son’s memory instead. Today, the Arizona Garden is one of the only vestiges of the grand estate the Stanfords had originally envisioned. When Stanford University opened in 1891, the Arizona Garden became a popular destination, and students considered it a favorite “courting” spot and place to bring dates. Maintained regularly until the 1920s, the Arizona Garden later fell into decades of neglect. Starting in 1997, restoration efforts brought the garden back to life, and now over 500 species of succulents and cacti can be found here, of which 10 to 15% are considered Arizona Garden originals. Located on the south side of the Stanford Mausoleum, off of Quarry Road, this hidden enclave welcomes Stanford visitors with its vibrant colors, bristling textures and rock-lined meandering paths.

Life can deal out some tough cards. That was certainly my case. Although I have some light perception, I was born about 90% blind in Tijuana, Mexico. I was living in a holding facility there and would get bullied by the other dogs. (My ears still look a bit funny because they used to get nipped at.) I tried hard to keep my spirits up, and sure enough, I found my way to where I was meant to be. Andrea was looking for a dog and every time she checked on PetFinder, she’d see my face. She was initially nervous about taking care of a special needs dog but here’s what’s really awesome… Andrea works at Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Palo Alto. She knows the blind or visually impaired can do anything a sighted person can do, just differently—and that gave her the confidence to have me flown up to the Bay Area. Now I live with Andrea, Tim, Denise and Amy and our amazing rescue pet family that includes two other dogs, a rabbit, two desert leopard tortoises and a leopard gecko. My favorite thing is chasing my jingle ball in the yard, and if I can’t find it, Andrea is happy to fetch it and toss it for me again. Every morning, I get to go to work with Andrea, and she says I’m the perfect office dog. You’ll usually find me near her desk, but I get lifted up onto a lot of laps, too. I never bark or whine, and I’ve heard Andrea’s co-workers refer to me as “inspiring.” I do have one embarrassing confession: It’s hard to stay awake during business meetings! Sometimes, I fall asleep… and snore!

From the time Frances Freyberg was in kindergarten, she wanted to be an explorer.

“I was leading ‘expeditions’ across Willow Oaks Park, around the duck pond by the Menlo Park Library or along the dry creek bed of San Francisquito Creek,” she recalls.

Explorer she’s become, having traveled across six continents with cameras in hand. The result is thousands of images of people and landscapes, some of which can be seen at any given time at the Portola Art Gallery in Menlo Park.

“My goal as a photographer has always been to encourage a greater appreciation for our planet and its people,” she says. My hope is that my images will motivate and influence personal journeys for other people.”

Frances’ photographic journey began during her senior year at Brown University, where students were able to cross-register for classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. She chose a photography class. “The irony is that I had to drop it because it was taking away too much time from my required classes to complete my major in biology at Brown,” she says.

While she dabbled in photography after college, Frances didn’t begin to pursue it seriously until 2008 when she took a year off to travel around the world. “My goal was to learn and experience as much as I could, and to use my own photographs and writing to inspire others to do the same,” she says. “While traveling, I built an extensive weblog with weekly photos, as well as historical and cultural information, about the places I visited.”

When Frances returned to the Bay Area, several art mentors and friends encouraged her to exhibit her photographs, and she participated in Silicon Valley
Open Studios in 2009. In 2010, she became a member of Portola Art Gallery at the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, where she will
be showcased as an upcoming featured artist.

Through 2016, Frances continued traveling and exhibiting while beginning to explore event, portrait and assignment photography for a number of local non-profits and publications. That changed when her son Dylan was born four years ago. “I found my photographic energy focused on documenting his growth—and my new and cherished role as a mother,” she says. “Now certain friends—who love Dylan dearly—are nudging me to return to other subject matters, in addition to the many photos I continue to take of him.”

Most of Frances’s recently exhibited photos have been of local explorations—hikes, gardens and solo day-trip adventures to places like Big Sur, Point Reyes and Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe.

Frances is also thinking of tackling a bigger project focused on her extensive library of images from around the world. “The more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve been struck by not only the beautiful contrasts that make a place and its people unique, but also the surprising visual similarities in landscape, architecture, design and culture that bind us together and make the world feel smaller,” she observes.

Frances recalls walking through a souq (market) in Damascus, Syria, and how a young boy caught her eye. He was selling cups that looked identical to ones she had used previously in Uruguay. “At that moment, in a land so different and far from home, I felt a sudden and unexpected sense of belonging—not just to Syria, but also to Uruguay,” she says. “I’ve since experienced that same bond between very disparate locations. For example, the domes of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Tallinn, Estonia, or the brilliantly green, sheep-dotted hills of Ireland and New Zealand, both overlooking the sea.”

By highlighting visual similarities through her photography, Frances seeks to inspire a greater sense of compassion and connection: “In today’s world, our attention is often directed to our differences in a negative and polarizing way. When we can find some common ground with people of different backgrounds or cultures, it becomes easier to appreciate those differences in a life-giving way.”

As a photographic explorer, many of the trips Frances has taken to different countries—Egypt, China, Austria, Peru, to cite a few—have been inspired by photographs she’s seen—the ancient pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, the jungles of the Amazon. “I’d feel a strong pull to see these places in person,” she says. “I always try to take my own photo of the view that inspired my trip, but I’ve never been 100% happy with the image I get. However, the experience has always exceeded my expectations, and I’ve always walked away with another photo that I want to share with others.”

Frances hopes that her photographs can help educate people about the world and interest them in the surrounding natural beauty. “Of course, a photograph could never convey the entirety of an experience, a location or a culture,” she says. “But if my photographs inspire others to explore and learn, or to simply pause and reflect, I consider that success. And it’s a joy when people see my photographs and are inspired to take a trip to see a place for themselves.”

Her photographic journeys now sometimes include her son Dylan—and she’s looking forward to those increasing. “We read a book called The Last King of Angkor Wat and I told him that I visited that temple complex in the past and will take him there one day if he’d like,” she says. “We went recently to the Water Temple on Cañada Road, and when he saw it, his first question was, ‘Where are all the vines?’ When I explained that there are many different temples, and not all have vines and tree roots growing over them, he promptly exclaimed, ‘But I want to go to Angkor Wat!’”

As Frances has expanded her photographic pursuits beyond travel, the resulting photographs have been displayed on the walls of local organizations and institutions. These include Mission Hospice in San Mateo, where she is the communications director, and also Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

“It’s a very humbling experience to be told that an image I’ve shared brought someone peace during a time of uncertainty or fear,” she says. “I’ve taken photos of patients and families at the VA hospice so that they have something special to remind them of their final weeks together. I know how much I value the good photos that I have with my family and friends, and I feel honored to be able to provide that for others.”

Frances says she’s benefited greatly over the years from the encouragement of artists and photographers along with friends and even childhood teachers growing up in Menlo Park. The best compliment she has ever received? She responds without hesitation: “‘When I look at your photograph of Purisima Creek Redwoods, I see God.’ That will inspire me for many years to come.”

visual adventures
francesfreyberg.com
wheresfrances.blogspot.com

Congruent with the setting sun, the Air Force Station’s large radome encloses a 44-foot telemetry dish receiving signals from aircraft. However, the dome received special attention from Jennifer Townhill, a professional photographer from Los Altos, who captured this Perfect Shot while dining with her family on the deck outside Sam’s Chowder House in Half Moon Bay. “Luckily, I had my camera ready for the capture when I noticed the vivid red sky,” she says. “I particularly like this one because of the symmetry between the sun and the Pillar Point Tracking Station above Mavericks.” 

Courtesy of Jennifer Townhill Photography / townhillphotography.com

words by Silas Valentino

The drummer and bassist are in suits but their collars are relaxed with no ties. The fiddler is in khakis, the lead guitarist wears blue jeans while one of the co-singers dons a chic pair of pale knee-high suede boots. The other singer is still in his blue scrubs.

This isn’t an ordinary band and this isn’t an ordinary gig.

Following a routine workday, the six members converged at 5PM in a sound studio called Sophie’s Place on the ground floor of the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. This on-camera show will soon appear in rooms throughout the hospital to broadcast a little rock ‘n’ roll to the patients on the floors above. Some might recognize a few faces in the band as the very same pediatricians and surgeons who have been helping them recover.

Similar to The Beatles returning to Liverpool or The Grateful Dead popping up in Menlo Park, the Midnight Rounds are about to play a hometown concert unlike any other. The band of nurses, doctors, educators and one full-time musician are stage regulars at the ol’ Pioneer Saloon in Woodside and Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company in San Carlos. But today’s performance hits particularly close to home. They’re playing exclusively for their patients.

“I just hope I’m better with surgical tools than I am with these,” Yasser El-Sayed jokes, with his drumsticks in hand. He’s a specialist in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Obstetrics as well as a professor at Stanford’s medical school but in this setting, he’s the keeper of time and the chief of beat.

“Your medical title gets you nothing here,” says bassist James Wall, who’s an MD and pediatric general surgeon at the children’s hospital when he’s on the floors upstairs.

Furthering the point, Matias Bruzoni, the band’s co-founder
and a fellow MD and pediatric surgeon, acknowledges how doctors can sometimes seem intimidating to people.

“But music and sports bring everyone to the same level,” he says, before calling out the first song to practice before the cameras start to digitally roll. It’s the contemporary bluegrass favorite “Wagon Wheel” and the band has it locked down.

Just before they start, James conveys a simple reminder to his bandmates. “Stupid phones and pagers are off, right?” he calls out to resounding nods. They lock eyes, silently bow to the count-in beat and soon the studio and hospital are elevated in timeless melody.

The group performs covers of mostly rock classics that often have a touch of country twang, thanks to Jonathan Palma’s bow strokes on the violin. Jonathan, the youngest band member, has a newborn at home and is both an MD as well as the medical director for Lucile Packard’s clinical informatics program. He’s played the violin since his teenage years and his current instrument used to belong to his grandfather, who nicknamed it “Frenchie.”

Lead guitarist and the band’s resident musicologist David Scheibner is the only member not in medicine (he jokes that he’s an “ND” as in “non doctor”) but he offers his crucial musical understanding to the group, helping with instrument tunings and sometimes explaining the organs within a song from a musician’s point of view. David is a career musician, writing and producing music for television shows such as Entertainment Tonight and The Bachelor/Bachelorette series. He’s written songs for Disneyland and has performed with the Green River Band.

“But I reached the pinnacle right here,” he says, surrounded by the Midnight Rounds.

Their song book has grown to 50 cuts ranging from Fleetwood Mac, the folkie standard “Dixie” and most recently, “Walk of Life” by the Dire Straits. The band aims to include new songs for every gig and since they’ll play almost monthly, the Midnight Rounds have their practice cut out for them.

Since they approach music from a unique background, the band is known for innovative covers that blend unsuspecting songs into one. They were fiddling around with “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes and realized the chord progression blurs well with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)” by the Eurythmics. During their performance in Sophie’s Place, their rendition of “Lodi” by Creedence Clearwater Revival soon delicately morphs into “Sloop John B” by The Beach Boys before ending back where it began. It’s a warm surprise to the ears, made even more impressive considering that these folks are more trained for surgery than surgically fusing rock melodies together.

Although it’s a band of leaders without a front person, the Midnight Rounds agree that the lead belongs to the vocal harmonies between Matias and Raji Koppolu, a nurse practitioner at the children’s hospital when she’s not singing, playing acoustic guitar or keeping rhythm with a tambourine by her side. Raji and Matias harmoniously blend their voices together to elevate the garage rock ensemble into a performing act that can play banquet halls and holiday parties alike.

Since the band is run democratically, any member can suggest a song to perform as long as it fits within the vocal range of the singers.

“When I joined the band, if I had to learn another Simon and Garfunkel song…” Yasser says, warmly razzing his bandmates. “And look at what we’re playing now—you got out of your comfort zone.”

Since joining the band a few years ago, the drummer has successfully lobbied for a few songs to join the repertoire, such as “The Boys of Summer” by Don Henley. “Three years in the band and I got two songs in,” Yasser says with a grin.

Matias blushes. “I’m guilty! I know I’m hard to please with song choices. Singing while playing is already hard and my range is limited. But those were good picks,” he tells the drummer, affectionately nicknamed “The Professor” for his work at the medical school. “And in another three years, you’ll get two more!”

When Raji and Matias founded the band in the summer of 2009, Raji was part of the pediatric fellowship program at Stanford and like most bands, they came together over a shared love of music. (Unlike most bands, they were in scrubs or doctors’ coats.)

Raji sang in an acapella group while in college and Matias, who is Argentinian, used to play weekly bar gigs while attending medical school in Buenos Aires. They began with a James Taylor cover and were soon performing yearly at the hospital’s annual holiday party.

The Midnight Rounds casually grew in numbers over the years as colleagues with musical backgrounds asked to play along. James used to focus on music in high school but tapered off in his 20s when his attention switched to medicine. “It was in there and needed to come out,” he says, of the bass.

The band practices at James’s home in Woodside where they expanded from the garage into the guest house after adding Yasser on the drums. Years ago, when Yasser was a resident, his first paycheck went to purchasing his original drum set. He also coined the band’s name, playing off the late-night doctor routine and how the band sometimes practices well into the evening.

The band plays quarterly at the Pioneer Saloon in Woodside and are favorites for retirement or work parties. It’s an outlet for a group of people who have challenging day jobs and are most in need of a late-night expression to blow off steam.

“It’s a way to decompress,” James says. “We deal with some serious stuff here and music is a way to step away from that.”

And as Yasser points out, being in the band doesn’t stop once they step off stage and return to their practices. The Midnight Rounds last long into the following day.

“We operate together and will be in the OR together on cases,” he says. “It’s an interesting thing for us and it’s a connection to our practice. In some ways this coordination outside of medicine really feeds into how we work together at the hospital.”

Over the past few years, with more time unoccupied and available, I’ve started doing a fair amount of walking. As someone who prefers the comfort of consistency, instead of exploring new routes and places, I tend to walk the same path over and over again. I walk not to explore outwardly, only inwardly.

Walking is cathartic; I hear, smell, see, embrace nature, but mostly it gives me a chance to think, or, when I so desire, to not think. I prefer to walk late in the day, when darkness is creeping in on me, and if it is raining and cold, that is better still. I like the dark because within it I feel more invisible, more within myself. The solitude does me good and brings me peace. Being exposed to the elements is beneficial; bad weather calms my brain and eliminates its need for stimulation.

I drive a short distance from my home since I don’t want to walk through my neighborhood to start off, as running into friendly neighbors where I have lived for many years means discussions of children or the weather or of a new home going up that no one likes. I drive about six blocks and park on the side of the street. I pull out my earbuds that I keep in the glove box, run the cable under my sweatshirt and plug them into my phone. I find my SIRIUS XM app and turn on the Sinatra channel, the perfect music to accompany my walks.

As I said, I value consistency and pattern as opposed to exploration and adventure. It’s certainly not something to be proud about, but neither is my desire to be alone at home as opposed to attending a large party. That’s all part of being an introvert. I walk many blocks to and around Burgess Park, which is less a park really, when I think about it, than a home to many Menlo Park places: the library, the city services center, the police department, a soccer field, a Little League field, some tennis courts, a swimming center and more. But it is a good place to walk around and I can do so unfettered and without running into anyone I know.

From there, I track backward until I hit Oak Grove Avenue. One of my favorite things about going north on Oak Grove used to be that one side of the street remained in its natural state, with dirt and broken tree limbs and leaves—lots of leaves in the fall. I liked walking along there as if I were in the countryside, kicking up the brown debris and hearing the rustle of the leaves. But now they are paving it, reminding me of the Joni Mitchell song about paving paradise.

My path takes me down Oak Grove to the most beautiful little church and grounds: Church of the Nativity. Though I have not been inside, it is a sweet, small white church with a gleaming tall steeple. I read that it was constructed in 1872 and was moved on log rollers twice before arriving at its current location in 1877. On the grounds is a home—I suppose for the pastor—that is similar in style to the homes in the neighborhood where I grew up, and there is a bubbling fountain and brick walkways. I long ago decided that if I were a Christian, I would be a Catholic, specifically for the churches. Walking into giant European cathedrals—with their towering heights, slight echoes and gleaming stained-glass windows—always makes me think that there must be a God to inspire such brilliance, especially when I consider that they were built long before modern machinery.

So I walk around the little church and stop and watch the fountain as the water splashes and sprays. There is a nice bench there where I sometimes sit and think. Sometimes there is a mass (I guess that’s what it is) and people come and go from the church. I try to stay out of their way. Then I start heading back, formerly through the leaves and dust, circling around a bit—depending on my schedule—before heading back to my car.

I’m always refreshed and can take a good, deep breath after my walk. I slide my earbuds out from under my sweatshirt and roll them up and place them back in the glove box. Someone once said that golf is a good walk spoiled. Though I love golf, I would agree. On my walks I can let my imagination go, my heart wander and my brain relax, and I never have to wonder if I can find my lost golf ball

Incongruously perched on a pedestal behind Burlingame’s Apple Store and next to Pet Food Express is a small, white, dome-shaped cupola. What is this ornamental structure and why does it reside in the middle of a parking lot? In 1914, prominent architect Charles Peter Weeks (San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins hotel, Redwood City’s Fox Theatre) designed a city hall building worthy of the community’s pride and ambitions. The two-story red brick structure was located on Park Road, crowned with the white cupola. Today, only the cupola stands in its original location—due to the activism of local residents to save it. By the late 1960s, Burlingame had plans to build the new, modern structure that serves as city hall today. A 1970 community effort to try to preserve the old city hall, or at least repurpose it, was strongly supported by famed Burlingame architect and city planning commissioner Col. E. L. Norberg (Burlingame Public Library, San Mateo High School). Although unsuccessful in saving the building, the community salvaged the cupola (restored by the Burlingame Historical Society in 2012), as well as a large painting, Living in Burlingame is a Special Privilege, that now resides in the Burlingame main library’s reference room. Concern for loss of Burlingame’s and Hillsborough’s tangible history led to the formation of the Burlingame Historical Society in 1975. The non-profit, all-volunteer organization has an archive of over 200,000 items, as well as a museum inside the historic Burlingame Avenue Railroad Station. Some of the Society’s first donations were items saved from City Hall—its key, light fixtures, doors and plaster reliefs help to connect Burlingame’s present with its past. For more information, visit burlingamehistory.org