The Incredible Journey: Chapters 8-10

Wherein I attempt to unravel the overlapping events of my life

The trouble with life is that so many things happen concurrently. I have three storylines interwoven: the search for community, my career in science, and our marriage. The story combines all threads at their nexus here. If I just plug in the next piece you will be horribly confused. So I have rewritten things to show the connectedness of it all. Some things will be familiar, but some are new. Warning: it’s long, but the punchline is at the end.

1972

I was 19, home from college, on a typical June night in Alexandria, Virginia, namely hot and humid, and sitting on my bed crying. A young man whom I had fancied might become my boyfriend had just told me that afternoon that he was engaged. I was miserable. I was convinced I would never have a boyfriend, let alone a husband. My brother, just across the hall, asked me what was wrong. I told him. 

And he said, “Just talk to God about it. Tell him what you want, and then please go to sleep.”

I was gobsmacked. This was my younger brother?

But I followed his advice. I told God what I would like in a husband. I shot him a prayer request that might as well have been a memorandum spelling out all the actionable items. He should be taller than me, have dark hair, be intelligent, have integrity, share my faith, and not be intimidated by my intelligence. I then graciously added a final clause to my audacious prayer, “And please, work on my faults while I am waiting so that I will be ready for him.”

God heard me. Too bad I didn’t add a timetable.

1979

One afternoon in early summer I was sitting on my bed, taking stock of my life. Things seemed to be OK, but there was still that matter of the non-existent boyfriend. I remembered my prayer long ago. How long was it? I was 26 now and I had prayed that prayer when I was 19.  Note: I had not prayed repeatedly or even thought about that prayer, but I had expectations that had not been met. I said to God something like, “Why is this taking so long? It has been 7 years!”

I distinctly heard “And it will be another 7 years.”

What?! I was not happy, to put it mildly!

Stuff happened…..

1983

I was received into the Church on April 3, 1983. Not long after, I flew to Connecticut to meet with the Abbess of Regina Laudis and ask her if I might be allowed to join the monastery. This was not a casual meeting. Mother Benedict Duss was a formidable woman. She had been a medical doctor before her call to religious life and part of the call was the singing of the Office in Latin, in the traditional way. She was with her order in France during the Nazi occupation and had to be kept hidden during that time. The day that Patton's American troops liberated her city, she saw them marching over the hill and into the town, and at that moment, she felt that she was supposed to found a new monastery in America. And so she and a few other sisters who followed her to the United States came to Bethlehem, Connecticut, and founded what would become the Abbey of Regina Laudis.

She was famous for asking women who wanted to join to first go and perform some arduous task. I was more than a little anxious about this meeting. But the sisters were very kind and showed me something of their way of life. Reverend Mother Duss insisted that every member have some professional competence before they joined. The nun that was my host was a potter. I met another who was an artist and another who had been an actress before joining. Her story had a lot of press because she was well known--Delores Hart.

The time for the meeting came. I knocked on her door.

"Benedicamus Domino," she said, the traditional Benedictine greeting, which means Let us bless the Lord.

I responded, "Deo gratias," or “Thanks be to God," and entered.

The Abbey was cloistered, which meant that the nuns lived separate from the world, in an enclosed area where no one outside of the community of nuns could enter. except for serious reasons. Benedictines in particular also practiced hospitality, meaning they would accept visitors. Those who visited were greeted by extern sisters, those who had special permission to work outside the cloister, handling the necessary business of the Abbey. All of the sisters I had met were extern sisters

But the Abbess was cloistered, so when I entered to see her she was behind a grill.

"Sit down, child. Tell me about your life."

So I began. I told her about the cult, my conversion, and my desire to enter religious life. I told her I was particularly drawn to the singing of the Office.

"How do you see your training fitting in with cloistered contemplative life?" she asked.

I was at a loss. I had never thought about science and religion together. How were they related? I had nothing to tell her. I was stuck because I was thinking about experiments and labs mixed with the Abbey. They did not have what it would take.

"Mother, I do not know."

"You must get your Ph.D." she said. This hit me like a command from God.

"Yes, Mother."

When I arrived at home. I checked which Universities still had applications open. The only one was the University of Washington, where I was already a research tech. I applied and was interviewed by three departments, Biochemistry, Genetics, and Zoology. I was invited by Gerold Schubiger in the Zoology department to start research with him that summer. He was doing research in an area I was interested in, so I started with him.

An interesting side note that reveals the difficulty women have with science: When I was interviewed by the Genetics Department, the professor asked if I intended to marry. This was a thoroughly illegal question, and I could have taken him to court for his violation of my civil right not to be discriminated against in the workplace because of my sex or my plans to marry. I said I had no plan. I was not accepted there.

But as a first-year zoology grad student, I outscored their first-year grad students on the genetics department’s final exam. Gerold was delighted.

Gerold–what to say of Gerold? When I met him, he was an eccentric 50-year-old professor from Switzerland. He wore leather houseslippers in his office, which was untidy, but respectably so, and his hair was a good copy of Einstein’s. He had left Switzerland as a young man because he couldn’t stand the regimented life in Switzerland, where scientists have to fight through the ranks to get a lab, and everyone else works for the “Herr Doktor Professor.” Gerold didn’t want that. He had a pipe but I don’t remember him smoking. He held it in his hand to punctuate remarks, and chewed it when he was thinking,

He was very outspoken and was not shy about poking holes in faculty hot-air balloons. The story goes that at one exceptionally lengthy faculty meeting, he slid lower and lower in his chair until his eyes were at table level. 

He also had no patience for fools. One of the graduate students who entered the lab with me made the mistake of telling a story about his exploits over the summer on Mt Baker. 

Gerold had served in the Swiss Army Mountain Infantry. He knew mountains very well. We have many mountains in our area, and Gerold loved to go into the backcountry and ski up the mountains using fur coverings on his skis and then ski down them without the furs. 

Mt. Baker is a volcano tall enough to have glaciers. It can be hiked without using technical gear, but it is dangerous. Conditions can change rapidly.

This student told the story of how he and another student had decided to hike Mount Baker in their athletic shoes. They made it to the top and then decided to slide down the mountain on their bottoms. 

Gerold said, “You did vhat?”

The student continued, “Yes. It was going well until we fell into a crevasse. Fortunately, there was a ledge about 10 feet down, and some people also coming down the mountain saw us go in. My buddy broke his collarbone, but I was OK. It got pretty cold down there waiting for rescue, though.”

“Vhat vere you vearing?”  

“T-shirts and shorts.” answered the grad student cavalierly.

Gerold exploded. “You fools! You hafe to respect zhe mountains. Zhey are dangerous. Zhey can change at any time. And to slide down a crevasse!” He went back to his office, muttering about stupid students. 

Language sometimes became a problem, especially if the other speaker had an accent. We had a student from Georgia (U.S.A.) for a while. She had a thick Georgia drawl, sprinkled with Southern idioms. 

One day she came into the lab, saying, “I’m fix’in to send some faxes. Anyone else need it done?”

Gerold said, “Vhat? Is the fux machine broke?”

Another time I came back from a two-week vacation in Florida to visit my parents.

“How vhas your fisit? Did you hafe fun?”

I explained that I had spent the two weeks cleaning. My mother wanted her house to be spotless.

“Vhat? Is she Sviss?” he responded.

I joined the lab in the summertime, before other students arrived, and before I had any teaching duties. Gerold put me to work developing an assay for an idea of his. Gerold’s area of expertise was Drosophila developmental biology. Drosophila is a fruitfly, whose normal habitat is anywhere there is ripe fruit. They are especially fond of wineries. Why study the pesky things, though? It’s because a lot of genetics has been done using fruitflies. By now just about every gene in the Drosophila fruit fly has been mutated and mapped to their positions on Drosophila’s four chromosomes. They are multicellular animals with a complex life cycle and development. They are small and easy to keep and breed in large numbers. Their lifecycle is short, about two weeks, which means they can rapidly outbreed mice. And there is a special feature made specially by God for geneticists.

In the third larval stage, they have very large salivary glands because they are constantly eating and growing. To make all the enzymes they need, they make many copies of their chromosomes, but the chromosomes stay stuck together, aligned side by side as they are copied, so the genes are all arrayed in order. This results in banding patterns on the chromosome. When properly prepared, the banding patterns of the chromosomes are visible through a microscope. The location of a particular mutation can be identified (and mapped) by examining the bands and looking for changes. After 100 years of work, most of the Drosophila genome has been mutated and mapped on the salivary glands.

If you want to study how animal body plans develop (called pattern formation), and I did, Drosophila is a good way to go.

Gerold was interested in pattern formation also. His fame had been made working on the pre-patterns laid down in imaginal disks. Imaginal disks are small bits of tissue in the larva that have been set aside to make adult wings, antennae, legs and other cuticle structures. These bits of tissue do not look like the adult tissues they will make, they are still in an undifferentiated state. But they have already committed themselves to a particular fate. The question is how.

Gerold and another student named Rick Fehon had already determined that disk cells had distinct cell surface properties. Disk cells from the first thoracic segment when combined with second thoracic cells, could sort themselves out, first with first and second with second etc. They had different kinds of stickiness.

My job was to test whether embryos also had different kinds of stickiness. Short answer–they did.

The assay was time-consuming delicate work. We first had to dissect out imaginal disks of the type we wanted, separate them into single cells, and then label them. In the meantime, we had to dissect embryos out of their egg cases and prepare them for cell binding. Then we had to score where any cells attached on the embryos. One assay took all day. I had to repeat them many times.

I was lucky. The assay worked quickly and Gerold, Rick, and I were rewarded with a paper in the journal Nature. I also had a successful application for a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship of three years. A stellar first year. 

Indeed, the first year of graduate school was exhilarating. The seminars on all kinds of topics were fascinating, the other students were great, and I got to take a summer course in invertebrate zoology at Friday Harbor Labs in the San Juan Islands off of Washington State’s coast. 

It was a glorious summer. We had an Invertebrate Ball, a dance where we all came dressed as our favorite invertebrate, using only the things we could buy in the small town of Friday Harbor. My favorite costume was the guy who came with a small plastic boat strapped to his head. He was a barnacle.

We sat in classrooms and studied critters in labs. We went out trawling to see what we could find. We visited mud flats and rocky shores. It was so cool! I was doing marine biology.

On Friday evenings we rowed across the Harbor to the town. 

The last event of the class was a five-phylum cookout, where we were all supposed to eat five different animal phyla. All the diversity of fish is only one phylum, Chordata. All things with backbones are chordates. This includes us and most of the creatures people think of when they think of animals. Clams are another, Gastropoda. This phylum includes limpets, clams, scallops, snails, and even geoducks. Shrimp are a third phylum, Crustacea. This bad boy phylum includes crabs, shrimp, lobster, and all insects. We ended up eating cooked sea cucumber muscle for Echinodermata. These are sea urchins, sea squirts, squid, and octopus. The Japanese like sea urchin roe, but we didn’t have that. The remaining phyla are pretty much inedible. There are a wide variety of worms and strange little creatures that pop out of shells like barnacles. We ended up deciding that we had probably had a few parasites along with the thoroughly cooked fish.

I continued to visit the monastery while in graduate school, going up as often as I could. I loved it there. I tried to spend two weeks there, but couldn’t make it. My asthma got very bad and they sent me home. It should have been a warning to me, but I had my heart set on making this work.

Another warning, this time from the Holy Spirit, came one evening as the nuns and I were waiting on the deck for the Angelus, and to go into Vespers. I suddenly knew I would never live there. My heart broke. Oh no! This peaceful place, like beads of water nestled among the mosses, this holy place with a way of life fitted to take me to God, this haven of regeneration, of beauty, of the rhythm of the earth, this won’t be my home!

I usually traveled with an older woman when I went up to the monastery, to save on gas as well as for companionship. I will call her Sue. I got to know her and her family fairly well. She came up often because of earlier trauma that she had never healed from, the death of her first son. She seemed to find particular help from the priest who was in residence. She and her family were very involved at the monastery. Then her remaining son was killed in a car accident. I couldn’t imagine the pain.

At some time after, I got a phone call from her saying that she was being prevented from talking to the priest by one of the nuns. I don’t know the story of why that was. What I do know is that she asked me to place a call for her to the priest. I struggled over it. I knew it would get me in trouble if it was found out. Finally I agreed. This I should not have done, but I did. I placed the call.

“Mother, may I please speak to Father XXX?

“Are you calling for Sue?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“You should not have done this.”

Since I was still actively seeking entrance to their order, they saw my action as a betrayal of trust and obedience. They wrote a letter telling me I could no longer come up.

I was devastated. I wrote letters to everyone possible, including the Abbess, asking to be reinstated. This happened in the fall of 1984. I heard nothing from the Abbess for months and months. Finally, her letter came on Holy Thursday, 1985, with apologies from her secretary saying the letter had been lost and she had just found it.

Tossed out again. And the timing was significant.

I wept. I mourned. Why? I was invited to visit a counselor with another order. I tried that- it didn’t help and only confused me. I exchanged letters with a scientist in a third order. That also did not help. It was as if we were speaking different languages. In the meantime, I was supposed to be doing science.

Finally one day, I had had enough. I was tired of paying for ineffective counseling and searching in all the wrong places. I was going to be an ordinary Catholic in a parish, without special affiliations or secret tickets to help me get to heaven. That seemed to be what God wanted. If God wanted me to read the liturgy of the hours every day or pray long hours, he would have to make a way. I could still be dedicated to him, to put him first. However, it would be by myself with no one to talk to (so lonely!) and no one I knew who was on the same journey. (Oops, drifting into self-pity.) But why did they do this! It seemed so petty! (That would be anger coming to call–go away!) I was giving up on the idea of a formal community I could join…for good.

What about the earlier prayer for a husband? Maybe that was the correct path. I could certainly engage in parish life, though at a reduced level. But Gerold expected me in the lab 10-12 hours a day. He said I needed to be married to science.

With all the seething, things were slower. Everything became an uphill grind. I was making little progress, bogged down with teaching and classes, and experiments that didn’t cooperate. I became depressed. 

I remember standing on the steps of a library and saying, “God, why do you have me studying science? How am I going to serve you by studying science?” I heard no answer. The answer would come much later.

I finished my classes and studied for my qualifying exam–one whole fall semester. The qualifying exam was a big deal. I was to be in a room with four professors, one from each of my areas of study. Cell biology, physiology, development, and invertebrate zoology. Just us, and a blackboard, and they could ask me any question they wanted.

I knew their areas of specialty and had taken courses with two of them. They were John Palka, Jim Truman, Barbara Wakimoto, and Gerold Schubiger. So I spent time thinking about what the likely questions they would ask might be. Some I guessed. 

The very first question was asked by John Palka. “Explain the basic equation for electrical potential across the cell membrane.” I grinned and turned to the blackboard. I thought he would ask that, so I had it memorized.

Things rapidly branched out from there. “What can you tell us about mitochondrial Eve?” What are prions?” “What do you know about sex determination?” “What is the difference between mitosis and meiosis?” My memory of the other questions is pretty hazy. But two things stand out. I was asked a lot of questions about evolution, which was not one of my areas of concentration. I even asked why, and was told, “Just answer the question.” I suspect now that it may have been because I was a known Christian, and they wanted to know if I had the right answers, that I wasn’t a creationist.

The other thing that stood out was the final question from Jim Truman. “How would you account for the evolution of hemimetabolous insects (like grasshoppers) and holometabolous insects (like butterflies)? Which came first?”

I had not read anything about this at all. So I made my best guess. “I would guess the hemimetabolous insects came first,” and I gave a reason too abstruse to bother with here.

After it was all over, and they voted to pass me, I asked Jim Truman what the answer was. He said, ”No one knows. There are theories one way or the other, but no one knows. I just wanted to know how you think.” It turns out he was already thinking about how the evolution of these two kinds of insects might have taken place. He published his new theory in the journal Nature in 1999.

I have more stories I could tell about personalities and events, but they would not begin to capture the long slog toward the dissertation.

1986

Time passed. My father was diagnosed with cancer. I returned from a trip to visit him. I was at home sitting on my bed, crying. Graduate school was a struggle, I had no friends, and… suddenly I remembered my “boyfriend” prayer, which of course I had forgotten until now. How long had it been? I had been 26 years old the last time, I remembered. Now I was 33. It had been 7 years!

I said, "All right God. Time’s up. It has been 7 years since the last time and if you don’t do something RIGHT NOW, I will become a nun!” Believe it or not, other people have talked to God this way and lived.  He must have been laughing at the great gag he was about to pull off.

Two or three seconds after my diatribe the phone rang, and on the other end was my future husband Pat. We had met once at a social event sponsored by a Catholic singles group. We didn’t know each other—he was just calling to see if I wanted to go on a ski trip with the singles group. He had no idea what he had triggered. We talked for hours. This was December 1986.

We went on our first date that weekend. (I didn’t tell Pat about the 14-year thing. That would have scared any man away.) We sat and talked until the restaurant closed. He fit all my criteria to a T. He was Catholic. I was a Catholic –I converted three years ago. This was the reason we met in the first place. It was a Catholic singles group. God took me up on my final clause in the “My future husband” memorandum of 14 years ago and prepared me.

But I did not jump to conclusions. He must check out in general–he must be of sound mind, good character, and intelligent. He should be tall, have dark hair, and be able to respect me and I had to respect him. Check. Most essentially–I had to love him and he had to love me. This was the tricky part.

We dated for two years. Most of our dates involved food. I gained twenty pounds. We had so much in common, I thought, and we never ceased to have things to talk about. There was a strong physical attraction also. But I kept having to push Pat into the next step. I asked to meet his parents after we had been dating for one and a half years. It had not occurred to him as something that should be done.

I was now about one year from finishing my Ph.D. It was time for me to begin looking for a postdoctoral position somewhere. There were three possibilities: Fred Hutchinson Research Institute in Seattle, Yale University, or Harvard. I asked Pat if he had anything to say about where I went. He said to do whatever was best for me. So I chose Harvard.

The summer of 1988 we struggled with the Question: Do we want to get married? Rephrase that: Does Pat want to get married? I knew I wanted Pat. Pat was slow to commit.

 In late August of 1988, he went on a three-week trip to Germany. He told me before he left that he would decide while he was gone.

While Pat was away, my father died. I flew down to help my mother with arrangements. Pat returned on September 9th and I was in Florida. What was to be three weeks of waiting for his decision was stretched to five when my mother got sick with an illness brought on by my father’s death. I remained with her until she was better. I then had to drive my father’s car, which he had left to me, up to Washington D.C. for his interment.  I had not seen Pat for five weeks, and he wouldn’t tell me his decision over the phone. 

I met Pat at Washington National Airport. He didn’t say anything about his decision. This was highly unfair! I was deep in grief and this on top of everything else was driving me crazy. He said he wanted to tell me in person. Well, here I was, and nothing! Nada! Nichts! I didn’t need whatever game Pat was playing. But he agreed to drive the car across the country with me, which kept us together and allowed him to think at the same time. I also plotted what I would do if he ever did propose.

My father was interred at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. It was a beautiful ceremony, complete with a black riderless horse with a boot turned backward in one of the stirrups, and a gun salute. I had already done most of my grieving the week before my father died—I didn’t know why. Then I had to take care of my mother and I understood why.

The day after the interment, Pat and I began our trip back to Seattle.

We traveled through Tennessee to Little Rock, Arkansas. Pat had planned the route. He had friends he wanted to visit in Arkansas, a place I had thought I would never be.

From Arkansas, we drove west to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Mexican food was amazing, but I was still brooding over my many wrongs. Was he going to make me wait all the way to Seattle before he told me what he had decided? I felt like a fool for not telling him to get lost. But I didn’t want to do that. I also discovered I was allergic to blue masa tortillas. I kept quiet and steamed. (I should probably check that memory with Pat!)

Next was the Grand Canyon. I always wanted to see it, so Pat incorporated a stop into our plans. The driving went on for hours. Pat asked me questions about how many kids I wanted, and we talked a little about our Myers-Briggs personality results. At the time I was INTJ, which described my major personality traits (introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging). Pat is INTJ also. Imagine that! 

We turned north at Flagstaff, Arizona, and got lunch in Tuba City.  Pat planned to stay on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, which he knew was gorgeous. We didn’t talk much after lunch. I suspected something was in the works. Pat drove like a man on a mission, totally focused, almost grim. We approached the canyon just as the sun was beginning to set. He swept me out to Bright Angel Point, which proved to be occupied by campers talking about how they had to pack their poop out of the canyon.

Pat said, “Let’s go somewhere else.” We walked back up Bright Angel Canyon, found a bench, and sat down. I goggled at the amazing beauty. It was nearly sunset. The view swept everything else out of my mind.

Then I heard Pat say, “Ann?”

“Yes,” I replied, still staring at the canyon in awe.

“Will you marry me?”

I was so surprised I said, “Yes!” without thinking. As he likes to say, he had achieved tactical surprise. It was VERY romantic.

So that’s how it happened. We were married on July 1, 1989, 18 years after the original prayer in college.

Here are the interwoven skeins.

Age 19 prayer memo Ann asking for a husband.

Age 26 in California: Ann to God: “What’s going on? It’s been 7 years!”
“It will be 7 more,” I hear from God (I think. This doesn’t happen often, so it’s hard to know.)

Age 30 I try to become a nun and fail. The Abbess tells me to study science.

Age 32 Ann to God: “Why do you have me studying science? How can I serve you studying science?

Age 33 Ann to God: “Time’s up, God. It’s been another 7 years. If you don’t do something right now I will become a nun!” The phone rings with my future husband on the line. 2.5 years later we were married. God obviously didn’t want me to be a nun.

We dated and I continued my research.

Age 36 We married and I got my Ph.D. in developmental biology the same year.

These three skeins continued to thread through my life, but the full pattern was not yet revealed.