My friend Budd, a retired doctor, has ordered an IWKYA for a Harvard Medical School student of his acquaintance. Budd feels the physician-patient relationship is so important it should be taught in medical school, and because Adele’s and my relationship with my cardiologist was so crucial to my recovery, our book should be compulsory reading for medical students. I can’t wait for the deluge of orders that results.
Speaking of IWKYA, Adele’s experience as my primary care giver was written up and presented at a meeting of the Mended Hearts chapter to which I belong. Our book was highly touted by the program director, and I received an email from a chapter member asking for a copy. I said, “Sure. Send $15 – $10 if you want to pick it up at my café and chat” – and did not hear from him again.
So that deluge may prove difficult to effectuate.
I did sell a couple copies of our café journal, one to another Mended Hearts member, who came by the cafe, and one to a fellow who works in heating/refrigeration and checked me out after buying his latte.
I find myself with an excess of copies due to some mis-communication over who-wanted-how-many from our second printing. So if you’re looking to buy, it is not too late.
In other news…
Yesterday, my sign and the graphic novel spread before me drew the interest of a young Chinese woman sitting at the table to my right, resulting in a delightful conversation.
She has been here a month and is in her junior year, studying “bio-information” at UC. (She was at the café because the library is closed on Sunday.) She is from Shen Zhen, which the Chinese government established as a “special economic zone” near Hong Kong to draw people from all across China into its orbit, so her friends, all second generation in that city, come from a diversity of backgrounds – though nothing like the diversity of Berkeley. (She has been especially taken with meeting Chinese-Americans, Chinese-French, and others of Chinese ancestery.)
Telling her about the books I had on the table led to many questions about my background and how I came to California. These are among my favorite stories, which I have told and re-told and re-re-told, but it was a kick telling them to someone who had no knowledge of “the draft” and had never heard of Beatniks or Hippies. (She wrote them down so she could look them up.) It was also disconcerting to hear, once she had worked out my age, that I was as old as her grandmothers.
The experience left me feeling pretty good. But when I got home, the featured story on MSNBC’s 11:00 news was “China sending lethal weapons to Russia” and, on CNN, “Covid virus may have leaked from a Chinese lab.” (The same stories led the news when I woke at 5:00 this morning.)
It’s not really a surprise, people getting along better than governments, or I may be drawing conclusions from too small a sample pool.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.