Advanced Technological Civilizations

If you have nothing better to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon, you might muse about where our technological civilization is ultimately going. And that thinking also configures the kinds of civilizations we are likely to meet out among the stars. Fortunately, you don’t have to speculate, because Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 proposed classifying advanced civilizations according to their access to and use of energy.

Energy is the basis of modern human civilization. Of course, we need safe ground, clean air and water, and available and nutritious food—and those are givens. But to live as we do in the First World today, we also need energy. And with sufficient energy, we can clear the ground, clean the air and water—and make fresh water from sea water—and grow more food or manufacture it from raw materials.

Previous human civilizations might not seem to have been as energy dependent as we are today, but their energy use is masked by a brutal fact. They did not depend on developed technologies that obtain and use energy from coal, oil, or natural gas, or build hydroelectric dams, nuclear reactors, solar panels, windmills, or any of the other resources we now take for granted. Instead, ancient civilizations depended on animal energy—mostly draught horses, oxen, and human slaves—to provide the work that we get from motors driven by those developed energy resources.

The ancient Egyptians and other “hydraulic empires” dipped water from the local river with counterbalances known as “shadufs,” where the differential driving the action was human muscle. The Romans developed the water wheel late in the game as a method of lifting water using the river’s own flow, and the torque from the axle could then also be used to turn grain mills and for other purposes. The ancients burned wood and charcoal for cooking and heating, and they burned lipids from waxes, animal fats, and vegetable oils to light their homes. They sometimes discovered surface deposits of coal and petroleum and used them for heating. They also burned animal and plant wastes, as well as peat deposits when found nearby. But the major source of motive and industrial power was still animal and human muscles.

On the Kardashev scale, a Type I civilization is able to access and use all of the energy and material resources of a planet. This would imply the capability for interplanetary if not interstellar travel, because it would make sense to preserve the livability of your home planet—making it a habitable safe haven, if not indeed a garden paradise—while you are tear apart a neighboring planet. Live on Earth and piecemeal the substance of Venus or Mars.

In this sense, our current First World civilization exists at about level 0.35. We extract coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium from easily accessed geologic strata. We harvest sunlight falling on a mere fraction of the planet’s surface. We have pretty well dammed and developed most of our major inland rivers, but we are only beginning to access the rivers of air that circulate in the atmosphere and have not yet touched the rivers of water found in the Earth’s oceans. We access geothermal energy when a nearby aquifer intersects with a surface hotspot, but we do not dig deeply enough to access the heat energy in the mantle and magma—and we prudently steer clear of most surface volcanos because we can’t yet predict and control their eruptions. We mine surface deposits of iron, nickel, copper, silver, gold, and other metals, but we do not have the technology to dig into the planet’s rich iron-nickel core.

We have not yet tried to access—nor are we capable of reaching—any of the nearby planets for their resources. We do, however, have our eyes on the 203-mile diameter asteroid named “Davida,” because it has metallic content—nickel, iron, and cobalt, plus resources of water, hydrogen, nitrogen, and ammonia—valued at $27 quintillion. Several other asteroids have similar metallic resources. If brought home from the Belt, they would either satisfy human needs for thousands of years—or instantly bankrupt every metal-mining operation on Earth and throw our global economy into such disruption that war and revolution would break out.

A Type II civilization makes use of the energy and material resources of an entire star system. Again, this would imply interstellar travel capability, because you don’t want to re-engineer or deconstruct the star that your home planet orbits while you are trying to live there. Your civilization migrates to a different star, or you go to work on a neighboring star. This level of energy use would also suggest that you have developed technologies to transmute atoms and molecules from one useful material to another—or to fabricate subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules out of pure energy.

We already have chemical technologies to transform near-neighbor molecules from one form to another. We make long-chain polymers—that is, plastics—from hydrocarbons, as well as processing one type of hydrocarbon to another during oil refining. We can change the nature of sugar and cellulose. And we make explosives out of various nitrogen compounds. But none of this capability yet reaches the submolecular or subatomic level.

The ability to make full use of a star’s resources would be most readily apparent when a civilization attempts to construct a Dyson sphere. Named for its inventor—or maybe “imaginator” or “conceptualizer” would be a better term—Freeman Dyson, this is a series of rings or a shell to enclose a star and create living space on its interior. The diameter would be the Earth’s orbit, so that the received sunlight would approximate that of a habitable planet. And the surface area would be many thousands or a million times the surface of the Earth. Since the mass of such a structure, even with the incredible tensile strength and thinness of some exotic material, would outweigh all the planets in a richly endowed system like ours, constructing such a sphere would require tearing apart several star systems. And you would have to perform some basic transmutation to create your wonder material for the shell system. These are technologies we can’t even begin to propose as yet.

Our astronomical instruments, such as the orbiting Kepler observatory, have discovered at least two stars whose brightness dips regularly to a shade of darkness that would not be the shadow of any credible planet. Absent another natural event we might observe or imagine—like the recent mass ejection in the star Betelgeuse, which dimmed its brightness for a while—these stars might be in the early stages of enclosure with a Dyson sphere. The recently launched James Watt Telescope, with its greater observing power in the near-infrared, would be a perfect eye to focus on these stars.

A Type III civilization makes use of the energy and material resources of an entire galaxy. Such engineers would use and dispose of stars in the way we build and fuel nuclear reactors. They might—if you want to let your imagination run wild—extract the singularity from their galaxy’s internal black hole and use it in their ping-pong games. Such people with such technologies would be as gods to us.

Kardashev never defined a Type IV civilization, but theorists claim such beings would make use of an entire universe. In that case we would already have met them, because they would have either colonized or destroyed our own galaxy, or our star system, or planet Earth in the process of exercising their powers. And a Type V civilization would have found a way to travel outside our universe and explore or make use of other universes—if such there be. But our small human imaginations cannot even consider, nor our theoretical physics encompass, such a situation … yet.

If there are civilizations at Type II and III levels, then they will be much more powerful than we are now or are likely to become in the near future. Meeting them would either be a wonderful opportunity or a civilization-ending catastrophe—likely the latter. If the meeting between European colonists armed with steel weapons, gunpowder, and other marks of superior technology and resources went badly for the native Americans, with their stone tools and not even the horse or the wheeled cart to carry them, imagine what it would mean to meet up with a civilization than can snuff out entire stars and galaxies.

If the James Webb Telescope ever sees a star or a galaxy suddenly go dark—but look twice and, please, check your data!—then it might be time for us to become afraid.

Choosing Sides

I don’t want to be a Cassandra or a conspiracy theorist, but I can see clearly. The political situation in this country has become more divided, more fraught, more frantic, more weaponized than it has been in a long time. Maybe not since the 1930s or the 1850s. And once people’s divisions along lines of their core values and beliefs become deep and unbridgeable, we lose the possibility of reconciliation through political compromise, through voting, through any exercise of good will. The questions become existential: for one side to survive, the other must be destroyed.

That way lies insurrection,¹ revolution, and civil war. It happened before in Russia in 1917, and dozens of times in smaller countries during the 20th century. It isn’t supposed to happen here, because we have the pressure-relief valve of a two-party system and the peaceful transition of power through the voting booth and assured elections every two and four years. Except that the last two general elections have been greeted with angry crowds on the Washington Mall, once in 2016 with angry Democrats proclaiming, “Not My President!” against Donald Trump’s election, and then again in 2020 with angry Republicans proclaiming, “Stop the Steal!” against Joe Biden’s election. Tens of thousands of people got up out of their armchairs, boarded busses, rode to the nation’s capital, and gathered shoulder-to-shoulder in bad weather to protest the election results. That’s enough of a crowd that anyone watching might think there was something wrong with the system.

Civil wars tend to have losers on both sides. But eventually one side, one set of values, one point of view comes out on top. And it doesn’t always represent the most reasoned, nuanced, equitable, and charitable version of that mindset going into the conflict. Instead, it tends to represent an absolute validation of the most exaggerated, most hard-line, almost caricatured, version of those values. If you think “Elections have consequences—we won, you lost—get over it” was harsh language in 2010, imagine the rejoinder to people complaining in the aftermath of a civil war. Such validation usually comes with a bullet to the back of the head.

If revolution² and civil war come to this country over our current political divisions, the players about three steps into it won’t be the players who come out of it. The current cast—Biden and company in the current administration, Pelosi and Schumer in control of Congress on the Left; Trump, DeSantis, Abbott, and whoever else is vying for the Oval Office in 2024, and McConnell and McCarthy in the minority in Congress on the Right—won’t be the major players. They will be like Alexander Kerensky and the other liberal democrats who brought about the tsar’s abdication in the March 1917 revolution in Russia: igniters, not finishers.

Fighting the war, maneuvering forces, dodging and weaving, building and breaking coalitions, taking chances, winning and losing will all devolve to the truly hard men, to the Lenins, Troskys, and Stalins among the Bolsheviks in late 1917 and on into the civil war that followed. They will be the people not afraid of spilling blood and executing prisoners. They will be opportunists and warlords who can see that, once the peaceful, democratic structure of a republic is fractured, then the political and economic situation is wide open and available to whatever you can make of it and take from it. What comes out may not be anyone’s dream of utopia—or even a stable society.

We have not seen any of these potential “hard men” anywhere on the current political stage. They will only emerge once the system is broken beyond repair. In the same way, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were virtual unknowns on the Russian political scene or in the Duma; they were a mere splinter of an exiled revolutionary group until the liberal democrats brought down the monarchy.

I do not want a revolution or a civil war in this country. That is not a solution. It would be like overturning the chessboard rather than playing out the game. But the game of politics, played under normal rules, always involves compromise. One side proposes a program—perhaps even involving extreme measures—then the other side counters, and they meet somewhere in the middle. Everyone gets something; no one is completely satisfied. That is the way a nation’s political thinking and moral feeling move forward, by compromise and the promise of living with the results of negotiation.

Revolutionaries are radicals. To them, compromise equals failure. They want the whole program, root and bough, brought forth in a single convulsive act. And if the opposition remains unconvinced, they will go to war and begin killing in order to achieve their goals. Radicals are by definition unreasonable people. They will achieve their purpose, by any means necessary, or die trying. They really embrace a death cult.

As someone who tries to live in the middle,³ I can usually make peace and live comfortably in the midst of either the Right’s or the Left’s mindset. I believe in obeying the law and minding my own business. But I see around me—not on a personal level, but in the various opposing parties and their captive media—a different feeling. Positions in this country have become solidified, uncompromising, existential, do or die, victory or death. We are becoming like the old European order or a Third World country, ready to ignite.

Under these circumstances, no one can expect a reasonable outcome. The resolution of a civil war will be a brutalized state. The winning side will feel no compulsion to consider the mindset and political feelings of the losers. The only options for the losing side will be total capitulation, exile, or death. We’ve seen this result before, and the damaging effects live on to the third generation.

I only hope that, when we come out the other side of whatever convulsion is coming, we have a country I can live in.

1. For real—not the velvet-rope walk-on at the Capitol building, led by a guy in face paint and a buffalo hat, that we saw on January 6. A real insurrection would bring automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. Think of Trotsky taking the cruiser Aurora to attack the Winter Palace during the October Revolution of 1917. Real insurrections are earnest and tend to be bloody.

2. Radical members of the Left in this country have been talking revolution and political mayhem since I was in college. They sang songs about it (the Beatles’ “You Say You Want a Revolution” and John Lennon’s “Imagine”) and called for it publicly (Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and outright action by the Weather Underground and Symbionese Liberation Army). Now that these elderly radicals and their progressive children have achieved control of urban centers on both coasts and at least two branches of the federal government—but apparently lost control of the third—they seem to be working toward the “orchestrated crisis” and economic and cultural collapse that will bring on a Marxist-style revolution. And how insane is that?

3. When I take those little online tests of political views, or try to find myself on one of those four-quadrant charts (representing, for example, the extremes of Left versus Right politics on the horizontal axis, and Authoritarian versus Libertarian principles on the vertical), I’m always about three points out of a hundred to right of center along the middle baseline. I am more fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and tend to see the need for both authority and liberty at work in society—or so I have been for the past forty years. But those distinctions are fast becoming obsolete. The trend now is all one way or nothing, up to one corner or down to the other. For example, I now hear it said that one cannot be socially liberal without embracing the rising taxation and resulting government spending needed to achieve progressive programs. The middle ground is sliding away under my feet.

Roe v. Nothing

The Human Condition:

Roe v. Nothing – September 11, 2022

Since the Supreme Court in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling this June overturned the long-standing precedent in Roe v. Wade (1973), which found a Constitutional protection for a woman’s right to an abortion and was reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the political discourse in these United States has gone ballistic. But most interesting, not to say heartening, is a recent vote in Kansas that rejected an amendment to that state’s constitution providing a blanket ban on abortion.

First of all, let me say that I don’t “have a dog in this fight.” I never could become pregnant myself or need an abortion. I have never risked making, nor have I made, anybody pregnant so that they might need an abortion. I am long past the stage where anyone in my family or near affinity can become pregnant and need an abortion. And I have no firm religious or moral conviction about the sanctity of life or the sin of taking it. I am as close as you can come to a dispassionate political observer.

People die all the time. Pregnancies end all the time, through mishap or bodily rejection. I would hope that every child carried to term will be wanted and be born into a family or familial situation that shows him or her love, support, and care. Every human being needs such an underpinning to reach their full potential. And I am enough aware of the death all around us that I would favor ending a pregnancy while the fetus lacks viability rather than carrying it to term and abandoning it to the cold, or to an overcrowded and undersupported system of public charity.

I am a firm believer in evolution. This is how we get the splendid diversity and vitality of life on this planet. And life is beautiful. But evolution is a harsh mistress. Over the four billion years or so since the first bacteria and blue-green algae awoke on Earth, evolution has created and destroyed more species than have been alive in my lifetime.¹ The very notion of a species is its fitness for or adaptability to a particular environment, and the environment is always changing. You can believe in perfect forms and God-created species if you live in a static and unchanging world. But the real universe is in a constant state of transition.

Evolution has no respect for individuals, either. Zero, none. Being part of a successful species—such as, so far, H. sapiens—is no guarantee of your personal survival. The incidence of random mutations and the accompanying loss of viability, which sometimes arises generations after the first single nucleotide polymorphism enters the genome, can take down any individual, regardless of his or her talents, other and more promising predispositions, or future contributions. In the evolutionary framework, individual members of a species, individual human beings, are only important as carriers of the genetic code from past to future. As people, we matter not at all.

So … death is all around us. The elimination of a potential life, because the mother is either unwilling or unable to commit to the love, support, and care that a child needs, should not be a great moral dilemma. There are two views on abortion. One is that the child is just a “clump of cells,” almost an invading foreign body like a tumor, at least until it is viable outside the womb. The other is that a fetus is a human being, with all the rights and privileges adhering thereto, from the instant of conception. I am sympathetic to neither view. The reality, for both the mother and the unborn child, is somewhere in the middle.

But I also would agree with Macbeth that if it were to be done, then it was best done quickly. Aside from complications that might arise late in pregnancy, a potential mother should decide what she wants to do, make a hard decision, and take the step earlier in the pregnancy rather than later. I think most people who are not staunch right-to-life advocates would agree that an abortion is best done in the first trimester. The first six weeks, as some state laws would allow, is too early, because a pregnancy might not become noticed and allow time for arrangements in that period. But also, staunch right-to-choice advocates who say that no infringement is acceptable, from the moment of conception right up to the moment of birth—and maybe a few minutes after—are also playing a legal strategy of absolutism, as if allowing the smallest exception arguably brings down the whole structure. And I am absolute about nothing in this discussion.

But in all of this, I do agree with the Dobbs decision, that Roe and its affirming cases were wrongly decided. The Constitution is a compact among the states to form a federal union for certain purposes, like defense of the country as a whole, policies on international trade, and rules for interstate commerce. It was never meant to establish a national government like that or France or Russia, where all polities and programs come out of Paris or Moscow. The states in the 1790s had different populations, originating in different parts of Europe, with different interests and values. Many of the states still do—for instance, talk to an Iowan about the corn market and then talk to a New Yorker. It is not unexpected to find people in different states, with different religious histories and backgrounds, disagreeing about something so debatable as conception, life, and abortion.

To pull an absolute right to abortion out of the notions of individual privacy in the First, Third, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment, or base it on equal protection in the Fourteenth Amendment, is a tricky deal. To use those notions to discover a right that is not otherwise spelled out in the text opens a trapdoor to all kinds of loose play. For instance, nowhere in the Constitution does it guarantee a right to life.² This is why the police officer guilty of killing George Floyd could be tried and convicted in Minnesota state court for murder but could only be convicted in federal court for violating Floyd’s civil rights. The Constitution leaves crimes like murder, rape, robbery, and so on to the states to legislate and judge. Imagine if a majority of conservative, pro-life justices were to find a right to life in those same intimations of a right to privacy. Both sides can play that game.

And so, although I think abortion ought to be a potential mother’s choice, within the limits described above—because I am not an absolutist about nearly anything—I still think the rules governing abortion, along with those about murder, rape, robbery, and other moral concerns regarding interpersonal transactions, should be established and voted on at a local level. In this country, that local sphere is the individual state. And if a person finds that they cannot live under the laws of the state where they reside and find those of another state more to their liking, they should be free to move.

But, as I said, I don’t have a dog in this fight. So what is my opinion worth?

1. Except maybe for beetles. There are a lot of species of beetles and other insects that we haven’t even discovered yet. I think it was Charles Darwin who said that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

2. That whole “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” thing is in the Declaration of Independence, which is aspirational and reflects the founders’ early values but does not prescribe any particular set of laws.

In Memory of Irene

A school picture

Note: Tomorrow, September 5, will be the fifth anniversary of my wife’s death. In her memory, here is the article, titled “The Best Life,” that I created for her celebration of life in 2017 and posted that year on our 41st wedding anniversary. I think it still reflects the best of her.

Irene Mary Moran (1940-2017) was born in San Francisco on 23rd Avenue, just north of Taraval Street, in a house her parents John and Delia Moran had owned since before the Great Depression. The neighborhood and the parish of St. Cecelia Church defined her early life and remained her spiritual home for more than sixty years.

The street she lived on brought friendships that Irene treasured throughout her life. It was also a steep street with smooth sidewalks that invited Irene and her friends to do crazy runs on their metal roller skates down toward Taraval, with only a sharp turn into the last driveway on the block—risking a fall and scraped knees or worse—as the way to stop from shooting out into busy traffic. Irene always said she got up the courage to do this after a breakfast that included a Cherry Coke.

When her beloved father died in 1948 of a heart attack, Irene’s life changed drastically. As a young man, John Moran had been a long-distance runner, had been wounded twice in World War I, and came to America from England to become a member of the U.S. Customs Service. Her mother Delia Carty had been born in Ireland, came to America in 1919, and worked for ten years as a domestic before meeting John in San Francisco in the late 1920s. John’s death put Delia, Irene, and her brother Desi in difficult circumstances. While the rest of the country was enjoying the rebound from World War II and then the economic growth of the 1950s, Delia received a modest inheritance and had to work as a school secretary. For Irene and Desi, these years were a continuation of the hardships of the Depression and the war years, and it made Irene careful about money for the rest of her life.

Irene was educated at St. Cecelia School, Mercy High School, and Lone Mountain College, where she studied history. After graduation, she worked for a while at Western Greyhound as a typist. She also had jobs during school as a sales clerk, usually at Macy’s downtown; so Irene rode the Muni streetcars on a daily basis. These work experiences—which were all that seemed to be available to a woman, even with a college education, who didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse—convinced Irene she needed a better course. She studied library science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she took her master’s degree. This was her first time living and working in the East Bay, outside of San Francisco, and she would sometimes joke that she had moved “overseas.”

Right out of library school, Irene got a job cataloguing rare books and manuscripts at The Bancroft Library—where capitalizing “the” was a point of honor. Although she may not have realized it at the time, the Bancroft was the best place for her. It was and remains one of the most respected history libraries in the world, building on the collection of Gold Rush historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who documented the development of California, the West, and Mexico and Central America after he arrived in San Francisco in 1852. Irene developed a great pride in the institution, made many lasting friendships in the library, and had deep respect for its Director of the time, James D. Hart.

With a permanent job and newfound freedom, Irene bought her first car—the first in her family—in 1965. It was a baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle, and she loved it. Irene was a self-taught driver and immediately took the car on a long, solo trip to northern Arizona. There she encountered her first patch of black ice, spun into a rock wall, and learned about getting her car repaired as an out-of-towner. She later took other trips in the VW with her mother to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. She kept that car for more than ten years and then only sold it to the son of a friend.

Irene stayed at the Bancroft for 27 years, rising to the position of Head of Public Services. There she was responsible for staffing the Reading Room and preparing the quarterly exhibits of donations to its special collections for the interest of the library’s Friends organization and the many scholars who use its amazing resources. At the end of her career, as the Bancroft and similar special-purpose libraries all across the nation put the catalogues of their unique collections online, Irene learned the new skill of computer coding and access. Working at the Bancroft in a position of authority made Irene the confident, capable woman she was.

She was always ready to help visiting scholars in their particular searches. During the mid-1970s she worked with the author Elinor Richey in developing reference materials, photographs, and drawings for Elinor’s next history project, The Ultimate Victorians of the Continental Side of San Francisco Bay. The volume was being published, like Elinor’s other works, at Howell-North Books in Berkeley. Elinor kept telling Irene, who was a tall woman at five foot eleven, about this tall young editor she was working with at Howell-North. And Irene’s response would be “Yes, yes, Elinor. But about this picture …”

An early Christmas together

I was the tall young editor, and Elinor would tell me about this tall librarian she was working with at the Bancroft. And my response would be “Yes, yes, Elinor. But about this sentence …” I did go into the library once to retrieve some photos, and met a tall and beautiful librarian with long blonde hair. I recognized Irene from her name badge, but the only words we exchanged was her asking me to use a pencil instead of my fountain pen in filling out an order form. In a rare book and manuscript library, ink was forbidden because a scholar taking notes might accidentally mark a precious resource. Those were the only words we spoke for more than a year. But I remembered the name Irene Moran.

We finally met formally, as in a date, in 1975 at the publishing party for Elinor’s book, which was held at the Oakland Museum of California. We liked each other enough to go to dinner afterwards. From there, we continued dating and got married a year later. Because friends of Irene’s in Berkeley had just been married by this smart, young woman judge on the circuit in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, we took our vows at the courthouse in Martinez on October 15.

In preparation for living together, we had been looking at housing in the area and focused on the Gateview condominium complex in Albany. It was an easy commute to Irene’s job on campus and had good bus and BART connections for my then-current job at the Kaiser Center in Oakland. We signed the mortgage papers while we were still single and planned to move in right after the wedding. Because we were the first occupants of that condo unit, we had the balcony enclosed and hardwood floors installed—work that needed some time to prepare. It was a beautiful location, with views of the trees on Albany Hill from one side and down the shoreline to the Bay Bridge and San Francisco on the other. The price was more than anyone in either of our families had ever paid for a complete house, and we always thought we would eventually move out to a home in the Berkeley Hills. But over the years of looking and not finding, and coming back to our condo where the sun was shining and the views were inviting, we always decided to stay. We remained at Gateview for 41 years.

A major influence in Irene’s life as a young girl was her cousin Kathleen, who was some years older. Kathleen had served in the Marine Corps and eventually managed an office in Philadelphia. She showed Irene that a strong and independent woman could be successful in the world. In 1981, in the midst of plans for moving with her fifteen-year-old son Gary to California, Kathleen died suddenly of a thrombosis. Irene decided that she wanted Gary to come out west anyway and that we would make a home for him. Gary stayed with us until he graduated from high school and joined the Air Force. Irene and I never had children of our own; so Gary and his wife Jessica and son Shane have since become our family.

Although Irene loved the Bancroft, it was always, well … work. In the mid-1980s we were watching the Alex Haley television special Roots. One of Haley’s ancestors—“Chicken George,” a slave who was also an entrepreneur raising fighting cocks—declared his intention to save his money and “buy his freedom.” That notion reverberated with Irene. She then and there decided to save her money and buy her own freedom—or be in position to take advantage of the university’s occasional retirement buyout packages. She was finally able to retire in 1991.

Irene always loved to travel. During her early years, she took a solo trip around South America including Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Machu Picchu. And she went camping in Mexico and hiking in the Rockies with friends. She also flew to Ireland several times to visit the farm where her mother grew up, and which was then in the keeping of an aunt. After she retired, Irene and I traveled to London twice, to Italy twice, to Paris, and to Amsterdam. When I was working and unable to join her, she booked travels with lady friends to Brussels, Greece, and Eastern Europe.

Her newfound free time enabled Irene to volunteer in the causes to which she felt closest. Her brother Desi had suffered a severe mental illness all his life, and that inspired Irene to join the East Bay chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. Over the past twenty years, she has worked as treasurer and office manager and coordinated the mailing of the chapter’s bimonthly newsletter. Early in her retirement, she also volunteered at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, joining the Monday Day Crew. There for fifteen years she and others handled the rough physical work of herding sick and injured elephant seals and California sea lions, mixing fish mash and intubating animals that could not feed themselves, and cleaning the pens. It was vigorous outdoor work, and Irene loved it.

Irene also had twenty-plus years of serving as a volunteer usher at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. And she served two terms on the Gateview Homeowners Association Board of Directors, both during difficult times for the association.

At the Richmond Art Center

Her mother Delia died in 2004 at the age of 102, and we always thought Irene would live as long. In her final years, Delia suffered short-term memory loss: she could recall people from her life on 23rd Avenue from fifty years in the past but couldn’t remember what she had for breakfast. This might have worried anyone else, but Delia remained a cheerful person with a gracious disposition. This gave me hope that there can be peace and acceptance under all of life’s conditions.

Irene battled depression for most of her life and alcohol in her later years. She hit “rock bottom” in the year her mother died, and then she decided to do something for herself. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous and took up their program with a will. She embraced its Zen-like demand for self-examination and self-honesty, as well as the AA tradition of service to others. She became a backbone of her home chapter, picking up and driving people to meetings and to their other appointments. Although Irene broke from the Catholic Church at a young age, she found peace in the AA concept of a higher power, or supreme spirit, and she began meditating.

Irene and I took our last trip together in the fall of 2012, to Arizona to visit the natural wonders and Native American heritage of the Southwest. This trip echoed one we had taken early in our relationship to the canyon lands of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Shortly after our trip, Irene suffered a heart attack and had a stent installed. This showed her that, in addition to her depression and alcohol, she had to work on getting exercise and eating right. She rose to this challenge as she had to the others. Irene was a brave, purposeful, dedicated woman.

Despite her efforts, her last couple of years were a time of failing health and diminished capacity. Earlier this year, she began experiencing headaches, nausea, and leg pains, which a neurologist diagnosed as an arterial inflammation, or vasculitis. On the morning after Labor Day, Irene succumbed to complications from this disease and the powerful steroid used to treat it.

Those who loved Irene knew her wonderful qualities. She lived the best of lives—strong, alert, interested, and purposeful. She was my wife, my love, my lady, and my best friend.

Irene’s favorite passages from Desiderata—

“Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

“And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.”