Berkeley

Another place where significant things happened to me was Berkeley, California.  In the summer of 1948 my husband Christian Bay and I took turns driving my mother’s blue, Plymouth convertible from Pittsburgh PA to Berkeley, CA.  We had been married for nine months.  I was 23 years old, he was 27.  We rented a room with a screened porch in a big, brown, wooden house on Walnut St.  The owners were German Jewish refugees.  There was an adjoining garden in which the wife had planted lots of colorful flowers.  Every inch of soil yielded a flower.  She graciously told me I could pick as many as I wanted, which I did.  She also gave me “kitchen privileges” which I used every night.  I had a wonderful cookbook, Herbs For The Kitchen, by Inna Goodrich Mazza.  Italian food.  Every day I chose a different recipe, bought the ingredients, and enjoyed cooking it.  I used that cookbook for many decades, cooking for us and our friends in Norway and in the U.S.  

Every day we walked to the university where Christian was doing research for a learned paper (which he never wrote.) I was his Research Assistant.  Christian’s sister, Marie was in Berkeley at that time as well as several Norwegian friends.  I liked them all and formed a life-long bond with them.  On weekends we drove to SF with these friends and had dinner at inexpensive Chinese restaurants.  We were young and carefree.  One of the happiest periods of my life.

Many years later I returned to Berkeley alone and rented a charming little cottage overlooking Tilden Park.  27 Rosemont.  It had a big, bright,  blue door. It was surrounded by tall Eucalyptus trees and had a sun-drenched patio with a plum tree that blossomed every spring, and daffodils which I planted.  It also had a wood-burning fireplace which I used a lot in the rainy season.  I picked up fallen branches from the Eucalyptus trees to use as kindling.  I had a job as Departmental Secretary of the Scandinavian Dept. at the University.  I had a wonderful boss, Dr. Janzen, but very little pay.  I worked there for 3 years.  It was the first time in my life that I had to “stand on my own feet.” I had two devoted friends, Carol Anderson and Anne Taylor with her husband, Tom.  They lived far away in El Cerrito and were busy raising young children. I was very lonely and guilt ridden, in the end of May 1958.  Then one day my former husband, Christian Bay brought an acquaintance to dinner, Andrzej Brzeski, a visiting Polish economist.  That changed the course of my life. We made love passionately the first moment we found ourselves alone in the cottage.  André came to stay with me every Wednesday night and every weekend for 1 and 1/2 years, even though he had a wife and young daughter at home in Warsaw.  Because of the Secret Police who wanted to recruit him, he couldn’t return to Poland.  He eventually got a divorce in Reno and married me on Oct. 6, 1959.  

I am “Bipolar” and he had an extreme case of “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”  We came from entirely different countries, religions, and classes. It was a wild roller-coaster ride, but we were bonded from the first day, and lived together for almost 60 years.  

Several years after getting married we wanted a child.  Our child, not an adopted one.  The day when Dr. Hoag called up and told me I was pregnant was one of the happiest days of my life.  I had a very easy pregnancy and “natural childbirth.”  When Dr. Minkler said, “It’s a girl,” I heard André shouting, “Wonderful!”  No child was ever adored as we adored our little “Budgie,” as we called her.  When she was seven months old, André took a job at Wayne State University in Detroit, which caused me great distress because I didn’t want to move from Berkeley.  But we returned to CA one year later, and have lived in Davis ever since. 

Significant things also happened to me in San Francisco, namely my art classes.  I read about Ugo Adriano Graziotti, an Italian artist “whose work seemed to come from the hand of Leonardo,” according to the art editor of the SF Chronicle.  In 1955 I started studying with him at a little fly-by-night art school on Market Street, and later for five years in his own studio.  He was a master of every medium, making sculptures, paintings in oil and encaustic, life-drawings, etc.  He was fatherly as well as a devoted friend. He even talked to my mother about marrying me, but he had no steady income and swarms of adoring women.  Those classes in SF were the beginning of my career as an artist, eventually as an Exhibiting Artist.