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9 Among the Corn Fields Most of the worst things in my life never happened. —Mark Twain Let me backtrack a bit to fill in the picture at home. We were married on July 3, 1984, on Long Island Sound, in a garden ceremony on a cliff overlooking the water. Nothing could have been more propitious, except perhaps the date of July 4, which Paul had wanted, so that the whole country would forever celebrate our anniversary. Along with our public vows, Paul promised never to be right when we had arguments. Our daughter was born the following year at Stony Brook. You would think that a system as big as SUNY could negotiate a good price on elevators from some major manufacturer such as Otis. But no, the elevators for each of the separate buildings at Stony Brook had to be negotiated separately. And they generally came from small, unknown firms, and generally didn’t work. I went through a difficult labor, and because the elevators at Stony Brook Hospital were not working, as usual, I had to climb several flights of stairs to reach the delivery room! Things got better from there, and we welcomed Elise into our lives. I had expected to furnish a nursery from used furniture shops and garage sales, but Paul had won the Lasker Prize (considered a stepping-stone to the Nobel), and the honorarium provided funds for a lovely little nursery. What was life like? Well, busy. A journalist noted that Paul’s desk was piled high with journals and correspondence to review; the telephone rang unrelentingly, and queries from graduate students and the media were all facets of his hectic day. Paul thrived on this life. He enjoyed running his laboratory and serving on committees, local, national, and international. He liked jetting around the world to give talks, and he loved taking part 154 Chapter 9 in symposia. All of these things fed his creativity. But to get done the quiet contemplation that he liked to call “big science,” he worked in the lab at night. I never knew what to do about dinner since he never knew when he would find a stopping point and come home. I took care of all matters relating to our home life, because Paul did not do ordinary things well. For example, when I learned that he had left a certificate of deposit in the bank for months after it had matured, sitting there gaining no interest, well, I took charge of our investments. When I found that Paul was paying taxes on reimbursed travel expenses, I took over the taxes. When he called me from halfway between Urbana and Peoria to say that his car had stopped running, and it was because the engine had burned out for lack of oil, I took over car maintenance. What sane person goes for two years without putting oil in the car? It got so bad a friend could say, “She did everything for him and he didn’t notice anything. She would literally have to snatch worn or soiled clothes off him. He could care less.” When Paul was courting me he talked about the first-rate laboratory he wanted to build for NMR spectroscopy and imaging. When I said my marriage vows, one was unspoken—to help Paul with this dream. I continued my work on muscle physiology and worked hard to attract collaborators on projects involving NMR spectroscopy of living tissues, and to deliver on my promises. So I did studies of the effect of light on retinal energetics with Tom Ebrey, of temperature on phosphorus metabolites in red cells with John Willis, and of heat shock proteins with Howard Ducoff and uterine smooth muscle with Suzanne Trupin. I thought I could do all of these on the side, and help run the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, too, while really investing myself in muscle energetics . It didn’t work. The output was too low and didn’t have a consistent theme anyone could see. I tried telling people, especially promotion committees, that I was doing comparative tissue metabolism analogous to comparative physiology, but no one would buy it. I was never promoted to full professor. I am wiser now then I was when making those fateful decisions, but I would make most of the same ones anyway. I tried hard to make Elise feel that she, not our work, was the center of our world. She was upset when Paul left home for...

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