Alan Attie Photography

Samantha Crownover
Executive Director, Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society

Before my mom got very sick one June, she and my dad had planned an exciting Christmas gift for me: four weeks at a girls’ camp in Minocqua, Wisconsin the upcoming summer. Camp in the Northwoods was in my mom’s blood as her parents had owned a girls’ camp and she couldn’t wait to share the experience and its traditions with me. As summer approached, camp turned out to provide my dad and me respite from a fraught time at home, with relatives as care-givers, coming and going. I loved Red Pine Camp. It was everything my mom had promised and more.

I returned every summer for four years, often staying at camp for eight weeks. By this time, my mom had survived her illness, but would never be the same again. Now I was in my middle school prime and I was lost. But camp became my parents and my community. Summer 1983 came, I was one of the older girls, and even as I was untethered, I still felt that I belonged. At the end of the summer session, we all dressed for dinner and an awards ceremony. As the evening came to a close, we anticipated the announcement of the winner of Red Pine’s ultimate award: All Around Camper. It was the biggest, most glorious birchbark award, with hand-drawing and many colorful ribbons attached. No one could have been more surprised than me, when they called my name from the knotty-pine Rec Hall stage. How could I be worthy of this? It was at that moment, for the first time in many years, I stood tall and said to myself, “Others see something in me and now I can, too.” My fellow campers had conspired to show me what I could not identify in my fog of being: strength, enthusiasm, kindness, humor, patience, cooperation, loyalty, perseverance, a creative leader.

Over the course of the past forty years, I’ve been able to look back at that award, recall that moment in time, and affirm all of these things again and again. I have built a life and career of creative endeavors that sometimes seem unconventional. Yet my community continues to embrace and champion me for whom I am. In the end, even though a large part of my mom left us when I was very young, and as she passed away nearly twenty years ago, she still, somehow, set me on a path to rediscover my inner spirit, right when I needed it most, and upon which I rely every day.

Dick Dubeilzig
Professor Emeritus, School of Veterinary Medicine

I am a retired veterinary ocular pathologist at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UW-Madison. Early in my career I made the decision to build my profession around a specific organ – the eye. Though my choice of the eye was by chance, the study of this organ grew into a passion, and a deep interest in eyeballs has shaped my life story. 

I’m holding an eye from a blue whale. It arrived in the mail from a donor who had kept it for more than 30 years before contributing it to the collection of animal eyes maintained by The Comparative Ocular Pathology Laboratory of Wisconsin (COPLOW). Within this collection there are over 1,200 normal eye specimens that can be used to study comparative ocular anatomy or ocular evolution, which I find endlessly fascinating. And there are over 30,000 ocular specimens that advance study of the origins, effects, and progression of ocular diseases.

Studying the eye in all its variations across species is spectacularly satisfying, and the blue whale eye epitomizes my appreciation of animal diversity. In the whale eye, you can see features typical of a mammal; but it also has adaptations that enhance vision in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. As the largest eyeball in our collection, this strikingly beautiful, deeply indigo specimen is certainly remarkable – and is the one I’ve chosen to represent my abiding passion for eyes and the ongoing adventure that is exploring vision.

Jean Feraca
Poet, Journalist, Radio host

Epitaph for a Typewriter

I had to stand on a stool to fetch it from the bookcase where it’s been accumulating dust, propped up on the top shelf like one of those Sicilians buried upright in the Capuchin cemetery in Palermo. A drop of olive oil was all it took to restore its black luster and bring out the silver in those toothy keys.

“Show your teeth!” my father once exhorted when I was in the middle of a legal battle and starting to lose heart. Instantly, I thought of my typewriter. Those keys. Their bite.

My Royal portable typewriter was a gift from my Great Uncle Dominick when I was only five. So unlike the gold charms I had come to expect from a doting godfather, this gift was serious. It had weight, heft, substance, and even its own carrying case, which was also black. Not a little girl’s color.

Could my Uncle Dominick have known I would become a writer? Did he somehow intuit that I would fall in love with words and the pleasure of arranging and re-arranging them on a white page? Destiny was hiding under the hood of that little machine that only imagination could fire.

I rejoiced in the clatter of the keys, the ping that came at the end of every line, the ka-chunk of the lever moving the carriage forward. There was nothing about my typewriter that I didn’t understand. I could set the margins, fiddle with the touch control, change the ribbon, taking pride in that messy job that left ink on my hands and a red and black band flying back and forth from spool to spool.

My Royal portable was a work horse. It carried me through all my term papers, two dissertations, every poem I ever wrote in Donald Hall’s creative writing class and thereafter. It went wherever I went: to camp, to college, to graduate school, to the hermitage at Holy Wisdom Monastery where I set it up on a rickety card table and banged out Bacchus at St. Benedict’s, one of my last poems. Buckled into its sturdy carrying case, I once took it on a plane to Aspen (“You’re not taking that, are you?”) and set it up on a hotel patio where two children gawked. “What’s that?” they asked their mother. “That’s what people used to write on,” she said.

The day finally came when the ‘a’ collapsed. I kept right on typing, using the ‘q’ instead. Then the roller started to slip, and two lines of type blurred into one. By that time, all the dingy repair shops in town had disappeared. I had to admit the end had come.

I could never make the transition to writing poetry on a computer. Prose, yes, but never poetry. I was too invested in the process that had evolved over the years, the I-Thou relationship that had made my typewriter into my best critic, dictating over countless revisions whatever changes needed to be made. Best of all, there were never any poltergeists in it. No ghostly hand behind the screen. No pop-ups, emails, pesky reminders, or flirty ads to interrupt and distract me from my focus.

Donald Hall used to talk about the body of the poem - the way it looked on the page, its musculature, its symmetry, the beauty inherent in its punctuation and line breaks. Without shape, the poem was nothing but inchoate ideas, mere scribbles and scratchings on a yellow page. The soul of the poem was in its body and the body was a palpable thing so long as it was me, my body, pounding the keys.

My typewriter: the only machine I could ever trust, the only machine I would ever love. When it died, my poetry died with it.

Marshall Flax
Orientation and Mobility Specialist for the Blind/Visually impaired

It was a typical May day in 2003 and I was a 50 year old man with a loving wife, a son in high school and a daughter in college when the surgeon brought me out of anesthesia and said, “You have cancer. What do you want to do?”  Just an hour or so earlier, I had been wheeled into the OR for a routine tonsillectomy. Over the previous months, my snoring had gotten quite loud and all the superficial attempts at relief had failed. The thought was that removing my tonsils might present fewer objects to flap in the breeze and make me a quieter bed partner. When I was finally fully awake in my hospital room, the look of concern on my wife’s face told me that this was serious. “We’re not going on the canoe trip, are we?” I asked, referring to the long-planned trip to the wilderness of northern Ontario scheduled for that summer. I was correct.

A few days later, we were hand-carrying my previous CT images to Radiation Oncology at the University of Wisconsin Hospital where we learned that the cancer had metastasized and I had Stage IV squamous cell carcinoma. There is no Stage V. I was scheduled for chemo and radiation, and the radiation was to be five days a week for seven weeks. In preparation for treatment, I was fitted for a mask to keep my head motionless and in exactly the same position for all 35 sessions. A sheet of thick plastic mesh was warmed and then pressed onto my upturned face where it quickly cooled and became rigid. I also got a tattoo – a pencil point-sized dark bluish dot in the middle of my collarbone. All of this so that I would be in exactly the same place when the beams were pointed at the tumors.

So each day, I would come in, and the nicest techs in the world would usher me into one of the linear accelerators where I would lie on a large padded table facing the ceiling, as they placed my mask on my face and snapped it down to the table. Long, straight lines of glowing red laser lights ran over my body and crossed somewhere near my throat making sure I was properly aligned. Then I’d hear the heavy thud of the door closing as the techs left the room, but the only things I could see were the ceiling and the machinery that was positioned to destroy the tumors as directed by the doctors and physicists. After a minute – maybe two – I’d hear the door open and my mask was unsnapped and removed. I could then get up and go on to the next event in my day. Even though I couldn’t feel the radiation when it was applied, as the treatments wore on, my throat became more and more inflamed. It was getting burned – and re-burned – and then burned some more – five days a week. Swallowing was horribly painful, making eating and drinking an awful ordeal. This routine was broken up by chemo every two weeks– infusions of Cisplatin that had me vomiting so intensely that I puked myself into a hernia. Over the course of the treatments I lost 20% of my body weight.

When treatment ended, I asked if I could keep the mask. Sure. No problem. I brought it home, put it on a shelf in our basement and didn’t look at it again until this photography project came up and I started thinking about the “things” in my life that were important to me. I see my mask as a thing that helped make me really miserable, and at the same time, a thing that helped save my life. It’s hard to believe what I went through – and what my family went through – but thanks to some good luck, the love and caring of my wife, Lisa, our children, our friends and UW Radiation Oncology and UW Family Medicine – I lived, and am mostly intact.

As I write this in the winter of 2023, I’m almost 20 years past my diagnosis date. My children are wonderful, caring adults now, and I love it when I notice them looking out for my health and safety – because I’ve survived to an age for that to be happening. My wife continues to be the rock of my life and we’ve almost doubled our time together as a married couple. And being a grandparent is more wonderful than I ever imagined.

This has been a great opportunity to reflect on a very difficult time in my life. The cliché about surviving a life-threatening event is that one becomes more appreciative of life and has more gratitude. I totally live that cliché. I realize that the presumed certainty of life – I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be a lot like today – is an illusion. For me, that veil was lifted. And that is a gift.

Hudson Freeze
Director, Sanford Children’s Health Research Center

In the summer of 1966, I boarded a train in Indiana heading for Yellowstone National Park to take on my first real science project. I would help study the bacteria that thrived in the scalding, Hades-ruled and fueled, subterranean empire of gushing hot springs. Thanks to my mentor, Dr. Tom Brock, this curiosity driven basic science project would set my professional life in perpetual motion. That water sample from Mushroom Spring traveled to Indiana with me and after a few weeks at 165 degrees F, Thermus aquaticus (Taq) emerged without any fanfare whatsoever. Just wait 20 years, keep the temperature high and DNA polymerase from Taq becomes the critical component of the Nobel Prize- winning polymerase chain reaction (PCR). That Hades escapee revolutionized biological and medical science by allowing us to copy and analyze the smallest bits of DNA, saving countless lives, and generating tens of billions of economic benefit around the world.

I’m holding a picture of Mushroom Spring taken in 2007 showing the exact spot where I took that spring water sample.

Well done, good and faithful Taq, well done!

David Gamm
Director, McPherson Eye Research Institute

My Uncle Fred was special. From my earliest memories, he physically towered over everyone and everything. He could throw heavy bales of hay and haul full buckets of water around the barn without breaking a sweat, and he would stand guard by the horses when my brother and I pet and fed them. It was obvious how much he cared for his horses, who in turn obeyed his gentle pats and array of verbal clicks and whistles. He was a giant man with a giant heart, and everyone felt safe around him. As I got older, I also became aware that he could not read, write, or do math. When I asked my mom why, she said that he had a learning disability that schools didn’t understand back in the 40s and 50s, and really still don’t. But it never mattered to us – Uncle Fred could do things no one else could, and the stuff he couldn’t do was boring anyway.

For the most part, he led a quiet life on the farm with my grandpa, a superhero in his own right who exuded positivity and kindness despite losing his wife to a drunk driver well before I was born. In fact, it never seemed to me like grandma was dead – rather, it felt like she was in a holding pattern somewhere waiting to give us hugs. I only learned how my grandma died when I asked my mom how Uncle Fred got the distinctive scar that ran down the left side of his face.

Among all of his unique gifts, Uncle Fred had one that garnered him attention outside farm and family. He was skilled at repairing old saddles. Sitting at his huge wooden workbench surrounded by every leatherworking tool imaginable, he painstakingly replaced every rivet and cracked, broken, or frayed piece of leather, sometimes taking a year or more to finish a project. Our typical routine after visiting the barn was to pretend to ride on the saddles or to do small leather crafts alongside him while he worked. When completed, the magnificently restored antique saddles often ended up as display pieces in the homes of their wealthy owners. The letters of thanks from his customers and the article celebrating his work from the local newspaper were sources of pride for all of us. Eventually, my mom and dad welcomed him into their own home, bringing along all of his tools and materials even though his ability to use them had waned.

Uncle Fred died in his 70s of Lewy body dementia, a process that was hard to watch but never diminished his stature. When he passed away, I asked my mom if I could have the metal sign that stood by the dirt road in front of the farm. It is an unassuming sign and not even the original one, which rusted long ago, but I couldn’t bear to think of it being discarded. I keep it on a shelf, thinking that someday I might hang it in a garage or cabin above a workbench, but for now I am happy knowing it is simply there.

Luther Gette
Luther the Jet, National Hobo King

Yes we have a Bandana

This bandana, “Made in the USA,” is the classic style, like those worn by generations of hobos and tramps. I bought it around 1985, at a clothing store on National Ave. in South Milwaukee, near the Allen-Bradley plant, called “Irv, the Workingman’s Friend” – actually, I bought two pairs of boots from Irv and he threw in the bandana for free. I have worn it on many occasions, both formal and informal, including the occasion on August 12, 1995, when I was elected King of the Hobos at the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa. Ever since I bought it, I have always carried it on my freight trips across the country. One time, around 1992, I got out of Memphis, Tennessee. On the Frisco Road, on my way to a gathering at Armory, Mississippi. The only ride on the train, besides the engine, was in an old gondola which, though empty, was full of an acrid dust, probably from scrap metal. As soon as we got out of town, and the wind kicked up dust, I put on the bandana to keep the dust out of my nose. This worked OK, but by the time I got bounced off the train near Blue Springs, Mississippi, about 100 miles out, the top of my face, above the bandana, was totally black, while the bottom of my face was still white. Unaware of this, I walked into Blue Springs, where a frightened inhabitant called the sheriff. When this worthy caught up to me, I feared for the chain gang, but the sheriff merely drove me about ten miles over to Tupelo, where I was able to clean up at the truck stop, have a nice supper, sleep on a real bed, & hitch over to Armory the next day. So, this bandana is not only a priceless possession but also, it would seem, a lucky charm. I hope I never lose it!

Akihiro Ikeda
Professor of Medical Genetics

This pot represents the history of our family since we moved to the United States from Japan. In addition to my work in scientific research, I have a deep-seated passion for cooking which extends beyond just a hobby. It is also my daily job for my family. Cooking brings me a sense of serenity and joy that’s irreplaceable.

About 30 years ago, I was in search of a cooking utensil durable and reliable for my kitchen, and that’s when I bought this pot. I found it in a small kitchen supply store, a 30-minute drive away from Bar Harbor, Maine, where our first home was in the United States. It has been an everyday companion since then, accompanying us not just in our home kitchen but also on our adventurous camping trips. I’ve lost count of the dishes that this pot has helped me create, such as rice, curry, soup and stew, each one adding a new flavor to our family’s history.

At times, I look at this pot and become overwhelmed with emotion. It reminds me of our long journey in our new country, filled with both challenges and excitement. It has weathered the test of time, much like our family. The good news is that this pot is still as shiny and sturdy as the day I bought it despite years of heavy usage, continuing to assist me in the kitchen every day. It stands as a symbol of the resilient, long-lasting happiness that characterizes our family. Every meal it helps me prepare, adds another layer to our rich, shared history.

Catherine Jagoe
Poet, Essayist, Translator

This is my father’s compass. He was an avid mountaineer, and throughout my childhood in Britain he took us hiking every weekend. He planned our expeditions, unfolding one of the dozens of maps in the house, his blunt forefinger tracing the route. Out in the hills, when we weren’t sure of the way, he’d align the compass, setting a course. With him there, I never bothered to check the map. There was no need: he always knew which path we needed to take.

But he never taught me how to use a compass. He considered that masculine territory. I rue the fact that he didn’t hand on his navigations skills. I don’t always trust myself to read the map correctly on strange terrain. In the mountains, losing your way can mean death. I love hiking in wild places, and I don’t want to depend on someone else to show me the way.

In Spanish, the language I translate, the idiom perder el norte (literally, “to lose the north”) means to go astray in life; to become disoriented, to behave erratically, inappropriately, uncharacteristically; it can even mean to lose one’s mind. The saying can be applied to my dad, too. Warning signs: at 68, Dad, the family navigator, started getting lost in the night going to the bathroom. He kept losing his bearings in conversation, too. When he first started showing signs of dementia, we had no way of knowing where things were headed, but eventually the signs of Alzheimer’s became unmistakable.

Fourteen hard years later, my father died at home, early in the morning, singing about traveling into the unknown: Away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri. After his death, I cleaned out the roll-top desk that was his province. In it was his compass, which I instinctively slipped into my pocket and took back to America with me.

Not long after the funeral, on my first-ever trip to Wyoming, I drove across the Missouri, which Dad never got to see. I was to spend a month at an artists’ colony, and while there I was determined to go hiking in the foothills of the Bighorns. I was afraid of getting lost. Wave after wave of seemingly identical hills stretched before me on my first hike, and the map I had was patently inadequate. The danger of losing my way was very real and the consequences for doing so–in late November, with snow on the ground–serious, potentially fatal. Call me crazy, but I packed a bag of cornmeal and Dad’s compass; in my pocket was a small stone taken from his grave. At each fork in the track, I poured an arrow of yellow cornmeal on the ground, pointing back to the start. I tried not to think of Hansel and Gretel getting lost and possibly eaten. But my unorthodox method of way-finding worked, and I was able to go exploring multiple times, returning safely.

My father can no longer teach me way-finding, but the need to ramble and roam–that much, at least, he handed down. In unknown territory, I take his compass, which I wear around my neck the way he did, on its army-green cord. I feel its reassuring weight on my sternum, about the level of my heart.

Christina Kendziorski
Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics

Much of my early years were spent roaming the streets on the south side of Chicago with my grandmother, a sensitive, loving, and simple woman who understood little about the world in which she lived. When my grandmother was just six years old, her own mother had been shot and killed in a speakeasy. I’ve often thought that the trauma must have stunted my grandmother’s intellectual and emotional development as she approached most of her life as any young child would, with wonder, awe, and apprehension. 

Of course, having a kid in a grown-up’s body as a companion and caretaker was great fun. I remember our weekly routine pretty well. My mother would drop me off on a Sunday and remind us of the rules: do not walk under long viaducts, do not talk to strangers (especially those under viaducts), do not watch too much TV, eat something healthy, and so on. As soon as she left, so too did our memory of any such rules. We’d stay up late watching whatever I wanted on TV, then get up early, drink Sanka, eat raw ground beef (my favorite), and head out on the town. I didn’t realize that we had dangerously little money, but I have many memories of being at a grocery store with a cart full of groceries and a bill that we couldn’t pay. What would two six-year-olds do in such a situation? Keep the stuff that tasted best, which meant we came home with plenty of cookies, cakes, candies, Sanka, and beef, and not much else.

One day, while walking past a shop that seemed very fancy to me, I admired a Raggedy Ann blanket in the window, and I asked my grandmother if we could buy it. Instead of explaining that we needed to save our money for food, or rent, or emergencies, she walked in and asked how much it was. I remember being shocked at the number, and was ready to leave when my grandmother asked if we could pay a few dollars every week. The clerk explained that, indeed, they had a layaway policy, and we signed up. I remember the walks to that store, week after week, when we’d pay a few more dollars until the day finally arrived when we took the blanket home. To me, the blanket symbolizes the love and adoration my grandmother had for me, the irreverence she had for rules, and the wondrous place the world is when viewed through the eyes of a child. 

Andrea Mason
Professor of Kinesiology

My dad was a phenomenal athlete. He intuitively knew how to move his body so that he could hit a ball with great force, land a curling rock on the bullseye or stop a hockey puck as it flew toward him at lightning speed. This was a pretty amazing achievement for a man who was about 5’11” and weighed 240 lbs. His nickname (which all the men in our small town had) was Tubby.

In his younger days, he played hockey professionally, was a star hitter on his baseball team and won countless curling bonspiels with his brothers. But, as he grew older, he turned his attention to a slower sport – golf. With no lessons or training, he excelled at that sport too. He got out on the course as often as he could and brought me along when I was available. I loved the times that I was able to play golf with my dad. I always wanted to prove to him that I had inherited some of his gift for movement. Seeing the delight on his face when either one of us hit a great shot is one of my fondest memories.

When he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, my parents had to sell their house and most of their items very quickly so that they could move into an apartment closer to hospitals and clinics. His disease progressed very quickly and he did not live very long after his diagnosis. ALS was a particularly cruel disease for someone like my father. He was a person who had an unusual gift for movement – and that gift was completely stolen from him.

When my dad passed away, I inherited his clubs. They are one of the few special items of his that I own. They have travelled with me across the country twice. My dad was not a collector and did not hold on to “things.” I also inherited that characteristic from him. Despite my delight in decluttering, I cannot bring myself to part with the clubs. They are a visual reminder of a wonderful athlete and a great father. Seeing them brings a smile to my face.

Gillian McLellan
Veterinary Ophthalmologist and Vision Scientist

This tattered and yellowing copy of “The Albatross book of Verse”, is a 1977 reprint of a collection of English and American poetry first published in 1933. It is one of the very few things I have ever stolen – the other petty thefts mostly (mis)taken through absent mindedness, in contrast to my conscious “liberation” of this book from the English Department supplies cupboard at Carluke High School. The school I attended has long since been demolished (due to its shoddy 1970s construction rather than any chain of events triggered by my pilfering) and I finally feel comfortable in admitting to this uncharacteristically criminal act.

At thirteen, I had not yet experienced romantic love but I was drawn to the poetry of John Donne, who bid “good-morrow” to my waking soul and thus can be blamed for my dalliance with petty crime. Having worked my way through a bunch of long-dead English guys within this anthology, I was surprised to find poems written by Robert Burns (incorrectly lumped in the 19th Century section: Burns died in the late 18thCentury). These works were easy and familiar to me, some I already knew by heart, to recite or sing, thanks to the annual “Burns Federation” competitions held in primary schools throughout Scotland. For pupils in England, I am sure these verses presented as much of a struggle as Chaucer, but most working class Scottish kids like me would be familiar with much of the Lowland Scots used by Burns. Paradoxically, this familiarity led to my childish assumption that Burns’ poems were coarse and “less than” other classic works of his era.

Robert Burns was, and remains, a cultural icon in Scotland and earned his place in the anthology. People all over the world link arms at midnight on New Year’s Eve to sing along to his “Auld Lang Syne” even if they have no idea what the words mean, or even what the words are. Though prone to romanticism (Burns was a bit of “rake” by all accounts) and overly fond of exclamation marks, he was complicated and multi-faceted. In his works you will find environmentalism, human rights, love in all stages and stations of life… as well as the bloody tales of various unfortunate fights with the English (a gory history held close by Scottish Nationalists to this day). Down the years I have thought of Burns’ words many times as I have had the good fortune to crisscross the planet. In the jungle of Chiapas, Mexico in the 1990s, I heard echoes of a line that concludes Burns’ poem, “To A Mouse.” In his words:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
          On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
          I guess an’ fear! 

In my (admittedly sketchy) understanding of the Spanish translation from the words of a (very elderly) indigenous Lacandones elder, this was more succinctly put: “The past is dust, the future is the wind.” Both entreat us to be fully present in the now.

For the teenage me, Burns’ inclusion in this anthology lent credibility to his work and, importantly, lent credibility to my community. This pilfered paperback gave me a sense that my voice and the voices that surrounded me in my daily life were “worthy”. All of this is a circuitous way for me to say that this little book is the reason I sound the way I do, nearly 40 years after leaving my village in Scotland. I don’t doubt that my personal and professional life as an academic in the USA could have been a lot harder without an accent that has given me license to be my true self. I am truly privileged that I have not had to code-switch to the extent of some of my friends and colleagues. I sound like my mum and my late grannie, connected across many generations by a language central to our culture. And that is good.

Jan Miernowski
Professor of French

Presence of absence

This is a summer hat. It belongs to the piano teacher of my father-in-law, Leszek Filipczyński. The piano teacher forgot his hat after a music lesson, when my father-in-law was just a teenager in Łódź, a multiethnic and industrial town about sixty miles West from Warsaw, Poland. The piano teacher never came back to claim his hat.

Why did he forget it? Maybe he was absentminded. Or maybe he was worried. The summer was very hot. It was late August 1939. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland and the World War II started. In a matter of days, the German army entered Łódź from the West. A week later, Stalin attacked Poland from the East.

My country ceased to exist. My father-in-law’s home city was integrated into the Third Reich. Pretty soon, the Nazi occupiers imposed their rules over Poland, Łódź, and my father-in-law’s high school as well. Secondary education was permitted only for German students. Polish students, considered educated and hence dangerous, were sent to a concentration camp. Jewish students, because Jewish, were locked in a ghetto along with the entire Jewish population of the city and its vicinity. From there, all Jews were sent to a death camp.

My father-in-law hid the fact that he was a high schooler and, instead in a concentration camp, spent the years of German occupation working at a metal shop. He loved music very much. He grew to be a professor of physics, a pioneer of ultrasounds in medicine, and a fine jazz pianist.

His piano teacher was Jewish. My father-in-law never knew what happened to his teacher. He may have been killed early on, in the Chełmno death camp, where the Nazi experimented gassing Jews with exhaust fumes in specially adapted vans. He may have been subjected to forced labor in the ghetto and gassed almost at the end of the war, in Auschwitz, along with all the Jews from Łódź.

My father-in-law kept the hat for his entire life. He never wore that hat, he just kept it. When he passed away, my wife, Ewa, and I took the hat to our house. When we die, probably one of our children will take the hat. Not to use it, just to keep it. For us, this hat is the presence of the absence of Jews in our country, Poland.

Kalpana Prakhash
Visual artist, Teacher, Videographer

I’ve lived with this piece of wood for 35 years now.

It’s one of the few objects I brought with me when I moved to the US, a precious piece of India I would not leave behind. Amaresh, my best friend, gave it to me when we were together in art school. He had found it in the ruins of an old house and had thought of me right away. “Isn’t it amazing what termites have been able to create?” he had asked, and we’d laughed. There is nothing in the world that is solid and immutable. 

Amaresh passed away a year ago in India. I did not get to see his face and say goodbye. 

“What’s behind possession? An empty grasp,” he’d always say. “Objects only tie you down! Ahm Brahmasmi,* remember?! So then why are you tying that essential to mere things?” he’d ask. But this piece of wood was as precious then as it is now that he has passed on. Twenty-six years ago, when I prepared to leave India for good, I had recognized that the objects we carry over a chasm embody the ache of final partings we cannot bear to look at. Such objects are anchors that tether us to what sustains our spirit.

*Ahm Brahmasmi : I am the Essence. Ahm – I, or a sense of self; Brahmasmi – the ultimate reality, the Supreme Self.
It’s a phrase that represents the core of Vedic philosophy which suggests that awareness is the ultimate reality. Reality cannot be found in the material world but in a supreme awareness that reveals the reality underlying and unifying all phenomena.

Nader Sheibani
Professor, Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences

I have been inspired by poems from Iranian poets, which have shaped our culture over the years. I am always deeply touched by many of these poems, and I feel they have had a strong impact on the person I have become. Although my dad had no formal education, he always cited these poems to me at a very young age, asking me what they meant to me. At the time, I thought he wanted to test how much I was learning in school. However, as I grew older, I realized that he was trying to teach me the life lessons that were important to him and shaped who he was. I still remember two of the ones he used to regularly cite: one was that you can only learn how to be a good person if you are capable of giving, and those who feel they are above others will miss out on life privileges; like the higher part of the land that never gets access to floating water.

مردانگی آموز اگر قابل فیضی

هرگز نخورد آب زمینی که بلند است

The other is related to a story of a king who was returning from war and was very dirty and stopped at a barber shop to get a haircut. The barber did not know who he was but was disturbed by the king’s look and appearance. The barber was hesitant to give him full attention and cutting his hair. When the king returned to his palace, he ordered his people to bring the barber to the palace. The king reminded the barber how he treated the king when he visited his shop. The king told him you cannot simply judge people based on their appearance because everyone has his own standing and status depending on where they come from.

آیا استاد سلمانی سری را سر سری متراش 

که هرکس در دیار خود سری دارد و سامانی

The object shown here is a poem related to our culture that highly values visitors and guests alike that come to our home. I had seen these poems on some stoneware that I purchased during one of my visits to the city of Mashhad (Northeast of Iran). One time I was visiting Tehran University to give a talk and they told me that they have a person that writes in classical Farsi using pens shaped from bamboo and ink, and they would be happy to ask him to write something for me. I asked for the poems shown in the picture here. The first two lines from top translate to: Do not feel a stranger when you are in my home. The place that I have, which is not worthy of you, belongs to you. The second two lines translate to: My house lights up from the presence of my guest. My home is a lantern, the guest is the candle, and I am the butterfly that circles around the light (appreciating the presence of the guest).

There are many poems like these, which are guiding us to be better human beings. What is most amazing is that these poems are hundreds of years old, but their lessons are timeless.

Monroe Trout
Physician, Lawyer, Art collector

I first came upon Winston Churchill in 1939, when he was the only person who was protecting the rest of the world from the Nazis. I could hear him on the long-range radio broadcasts from England. I liked what he was saying and what he was doing. As a result, I became a great admirer of him. And then I started collecting. I didn’t have much money so I couldn’t buy a lot of stuff, but I started collecting small things about him. I still have a newspaper article from The Daily Pennsylvanian, which was the daily newspaper produced by the University of Pennsylvania.

I admired him so much that at the end of my career, I owned probably the finest collection of Churchill stuff in the United States. I had the only sculpture that was ever made of Churchill’s hand, by the famous sculptor Oscar Nemon. I got to know Nemon’s daughter, and I bought a lot of things from her, including this sculpture of Churchill’s head. At one point in time, I owned perhaps the most important painting that Churchill himself ever did, which was of the beach at Walmer. It was basically two paintings in one, with a cannon overlooking the beach; but on the beach below are figures of Churchill himself, his wife, and his three daughters. Churchill was a great historian, and he knew that Caesar had landed on the beach at Walmer.

I admire his bullheadedness. He knew history, and he used history to give his speeches. Nobody else wanted the job because they knew it was too tough, but he took it upon himself, and you know what happened. He offers so many lessons for today, it’s unbelievable – but the problem is that not too many people follow him.

Babette Wainwright
Artist

Growing up in Haiti, I always woke up to the toc-toc of the gayak mortar and pestle, and the pungent aroma of pounded herbs wafting into my bedroom. As a child, my favorite place was in the kitchen with the cook who gave me little treats to savor. She would gather all the herbs into the pilon and set it on the floor before me as I sat on her tichez pay, a small homemade straw chair. I would happily pound away, enjoying the rhythm until the herbs reached a nice paste, perfect for marinating. All the while, our cook was telling me stories of her childhood in the mountains, and sharing the secrets of using the pilon to prepare magical dishes that have the power to reach someone’s heart. She would hand me tidbits from the pot, a chicken foot, or a gizzard, and while I savored my treat, she would pour a little sauce into her palm, lick it, smack her lips to study the flavor, and then ask me if I thought the sauce needed to be ranje: some salt, maybe? More thyme? A little more lime juice?

During a recent visit to Norway, I offered to cook a meal for my friend and her family, and found myself helpless, unable to prepare a simple Haitian court bouillon de poisson for the cod we had caught in the fjord that morning. I had the herbs, but not the pilon. Ellen had to go in search of one – a tough endeavor above the Arctic Circle, where I don’t believe they have a word for spice in their lexicon. Eventually, in an Asian store an hour away, Ellen found a heavy stone mortar and pestle. I was able to rescue my fish, but preparing it was not as magical as it would have been with my own wooden pilon. In the end, after moments of anxiety, I did manage to prepare two memorable meals for Ellen’s Norwegian family, all along feeling like the stranded Babette in Babette’s Feast.

David Walsh
Attorney

My father was the most influential person in my life. It was fortuitous that he came to Madison, Wisconsin where he and my mother raised their family. Dad was a world class amateur boxer, having won over 100 fights, including twice winning the National Golden Gloves Championship. He was the coach and a participant fighter at the age of 19 for the St. Thomas College boxing team in the early 1930s. He brought the St. Thomas boxing team to Madison to fight the then national champion Wisconsin Badger boxing team. To everyone’s surprise, his team tied the Badgers and the newspaper stories described his victory over the Badger’s best boxer as a “lesson” the crowd realized was delivered by a “master fighter.” The next day, the University of Wisconsin Athletic Director offered Dad the Wisconsin coaching job. He accepted on the condition that he be allowed to attend the Law School, which he graduated from 5 years later.

The rest is history: Dad’s teams won 7 National Championships, he coached 35 individual National Champions, he coached the 1948 Olympic team and the National Championship trophy was named after him. He retired at the young age of 45 because his law practice required he cut back on coaching.

Thirteen years later, I graduated from Harvard Law School, returned to Madison and joined him in the practice of law. We worked together for 30 years. It was a wonderful experience. We worked hard but I was working with a father I loved and respected. Dad believed it wasn't about the money but rather, as he often commented, it was about helping people. Dad was a public celebrity. His success as a coach was known by all but more important, he was also a respected and revered attorney, recognized as an excellent lawyer but even more as a person whose word was good and could be trusted with most everything. I have always considered myself fortunate to have a father who was a loving and supportive parent but also that he was a role model on how to practice law, to treat people, and to be ready at all times to take on that “additional case/responsibility” to “do good.”

His most important trait, which I deeply valued, was that he was humble, appreciative of everyone that had helped him. He never talked about himself as if he had done anything special or worthy of particular accolades. He was named to every Hall of Fame of every activity he participated in including the St. Thomas Hall of Fame, the inaugural University of Wisconsin Hall of Fame and the State of Wisconsin and Madison Halls of Fame – yet I do not recall him ever mentioning it to anyone. And, like so many other humble veterans, he never suggested he did anything special when he volunteered for the Marines, and as a Lieutenant landed in the first wave at Okinawa.

My father passed in 2001 at the age of 91; my mother passed at the age of 99 in 2002. Shortly before mother passed, she gave me this picture of my father preparing for one of his last amateur fights, indeed, it may even have been the bout with the University of Wisconsin. It is special to me because it provides a perspective on that part of his early life which, obviously, I was not aware of. He is so young in the photo, but he had already accomplished so much, including national championships. He seems so focused but confident. It reminds me of his demeanor under pressure. It proves what I always thought, he was driven but calm and he was ready for whatever life would bring him. It is a special picture of a man that would have the greatest influence on my life.