Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 3 Ginger Mascarpone

One year, my mom was to give a keynote at the Annual Meeting and Science Innovation Exposition of the AAAS—that’s the American Association for the Advancement of Science—in Baltimore. The annual meeting is a science circus, delivering the full panoply, from the anatomy of ancient ammonoids, to policy or politics, all the way to the swift retreat—that’s the redshift or z—of the remotest objects in the cosmos. The meeting is part celebration and part public outreach, bringing together the makers—the Stephen Jay Goulds and the John Holdrens and the Ginger Mascarpones—and the moochers—the journalists and teachers and the science-loving public. For most of a week every winter, there are meetings and lectures and demonstrations, some targeted for AAAS officialdom, some for educated nonspecialists, and some for laypeople and children.

Our own home was its own circus. My mother’s professional colleagues from around the globe were frequent overnight guests. In my pajamas, I shared cereal with many Nobelists-in-the-making, also in their pjs. Even more frequent were visitors for whom my mother cooked dinners and planned parties, where conversation ranged from lymphocytes to mast cells—in other words, all immunology, all the time. Not true. Not true. My father had his own non-overlapping cast of computer scientists, mathematicians, and artists, and he always drove the conversation into political territory.

While himself not a child of the Great Depression, he says he is an honorary member of the Association for Adult Children of Children of the Depression. He speaks as if he'd lived through it—its days of six cents per pound ground beef, and people too poor to buy it—so deeply ingrained in him are his own long-gone parents’ own experiences. He would fit right in among the card-carrying Communists of the 1930s if they were still around.

While other kids were taking winter breaks in Bermuda, he took me on a tour of Works Progress Administration projects from the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, to the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. We didn’t need a holiday to go see Camp David; that was done one Saturday before I was ten. When we all went west in my eleventh summer, be sure we saw the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood, and heard Isador Stein’s lectures and those of the tour guides, too, on the wonders of the WPA. In fact, I was so conditioned to the presence of that agency that it wasn’t until the Great Recession hit, and we needed it again, that I learned it had been shuttered. So much for the conventional wisdom that all government agencies live forever.

We were not skiers, so it was easy to find time one Presidents’ Week break to chill in the Deep South. Not only were we dragged through the cities of Civil Rights Era fame, but we also made a pilgrimage to Hale County, Alabama, site of James Agee’s poetic prose and Walker Evans’s photographs of sharecropper poverty, courtesy of that other Depression stalwart, the Farm Securities Administration. On the West Coast trip, driving from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, we detoured off the spectacular Pacific Coast Highway in San Luis Obispo County to visit Nipomo, where Dorothea Lange, working for the selfsame agency, took her iconic photo, and we must have been the only visitors in years. My mother, whose political conversation was limited to issues of fairness in medicine, made up a narrative about that picture. “Rani. That woman could be Sikh, don’t you think? One of her children must be sick, too. I’ll bet she’s waiting to see a doctor. She looks worried. She has no money to pay, but what’s she going to do? She can barely feed them on what her husband makes picking peas. Look at their clothes, Rani. What does that make you think?” We had a cheap, framed reproduction of Migrant Mother hanging in a hallway at home. All of which is to say that my father has the conscience of a liberal and he imprinted me and my sister with it like so many ducklings.

By the time of that AAAS meeting, I could be counted on not to throw a tantrum or make a scene, and on a good day my parents would say they were even a little bit optimistic that I would not grow up to be a beggar or a criminal, so they said they would take a chance and bring me along to see my mother perform before an adulatory crowd. The Vice President, Al Gore, was speaking the same day. My parents thought it would be enriching for me, they said, if I heard him too, and thus I got a day off from school and spent it with a bunch of grown-ups, many of whom I had already met at home. I thought it was no big deal.