St. Patrick’s Day Greetings from America, home to the world’s largest population of Irishmen and the original source of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. (little-known facts.) I took this picture while  on my 1986 visit to Cork, the most authentically Irish part of  Ireland. Still, it’s the Lakes of Killarney.

St. Patrick’s day this year I’ll begin a month-long trip to California to expedite a host of errands, and to quench the loneliness that I generally feel up here. If any Californians would like to get together, I’ll be available. I might even practice my flute for the community band.

Julie Lipkin

And in the midst of America’s huge population, there is only one Julie Lipkin. Only one, I tell you — one of my oldest friends, as I’ve known her since 1970. And I think you might see where this is going. This month she enters hospice care near her home in Chicago, a victim of cancer.

Julie was one of my dorm-mates at German House, a small dorm on the Davis campus of the University of California, where we revered her as “everybody’s Jewish Mother,” a source of unlimited smiles and treats.

Julie dreamed of becoming a doctor, yet that goal eluded her . . . .  at first.  So she took the road less traveled, which led her to medical studies in Milan ( at right) and Perugia, Italy, followed by internships in America.  I was lucky enough to visit her in both of these Italian cities where she also introduced me to my Swiss friend Gerda. And then Julie spent several decades in Chicago working as a healer while caring for a family.

My main memories of Julie have to do with our time in college, or with later gatherings of former college friends.One of my strongest Julie memories has to do with her German House birthday. In a dorm with friendships that tight, the story of one is the story of all, through our customs and traditions. So I can start with Randa and Janet, and it’s still about Julie, too.

Birthday Kidnapping Adventures

One of German House’s many proud traditions was the Birthday Kidnapping. So, for example, on my birthday, several of the young men kidnapped  me by lifting me over their shoulders, and carrying me into a bathroom, which actually had a bath tub. They filled the tub with water and threw me in.  Just to show there were no hard feelings they brought me a cake . . . . . made of foam rubber. It did have chocolate icing. And yes, that is Julie in the picture, supervising my cutting the rubber cake in the dorm lounge.

The Abduction of Janet

Two of Julie’s best friends were Randa (at left) and Janet. Randa went to study for her junior year in southern France, in a little town called “Pau.” Naturally we all missed her dearly. But Janet had a birthday coming up.  Hm . . .  The college idiots began to plan.

For Janet’s birthday kidnapping, we would sweep her off to Esparto, a tiny one-horse town just west of Davis. It was nothing more than a bend in a road that snaked its way through hundreds of orchards, and was therefore the butt of every city-guy’s jokes. There wasn’t an obvious bathtub there, not even by the road, but there was a phone booth – the tall green boxy kind that Superman used for changing into his uniform.  And there was a bar.  You know, I think Janet would have preferred being kidnapped to a bar with a few friends .  Shirley Temples all around!!  But that was not the plan.

We hatched the plot, kidnapped Janet  (shown at left), plopped her into a grocery cart, which we wheeled over to our car, wrapped her in a mask, drove her to Esparto, eschewed the bar, and popped her into the phone booth. However, the phone booth door did not open out, but folded in. So the only way we could keep her from escaping was to post somebody in front of the door, somebody who took care that she couldn’t escape through his legs, which would put her in the bar where they should have corralled her in the first place.

Then we waited. At that very moment, Randa was supposed to call Janet in the phone booth from Pau, France. It would be a “collect” call because nobody knew how to pay for an international call from a phone in France.

Well, as you might have predicted, the college idiots hadn’t correctly calculated the time zone difference. Janet waited and waited. Of course, we later found out that you couldn’t accept a “collect” call in a public phone booth, anyway.

One of us had had the presence of mind to make a back-up plan, which was for Randa to call the dorm directly.  When she did, a new plan was designed – which was for Randa to call the dorm again in two hours.

But wait a minute – Janet and the guards were still in Esparto, and nobody had a cell phone to tell them to come back. Someone had neglected to invent them, after all. Then we finally remembered the bar.  We called them and asked them to go outside and tell the young  man guarding the phone booth to bring everybody home.  where at least the cake and cookies were ready for Randa’s call.  And Janet was there, too.

Taking Julie Hostage

Okay, having suffered such an embarrassing failure with Janet, we decided to go all out with a more straightforward plan for Julie. Julie’s Parents were the “cool” kind, the kind that we all loved. No generation gap there. So we called them up in Southern California, and got them to drive up to a mall in Sacramento that had a restaurant, (Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour) where they would preside over a long table in Farrell’s banquet room that would be filled with food and ice cream and college idiots to welcome their daughter to her new age.  Sacramento was the nearest city to Davis (and not a podunk town like Esparto)

Having made a plan, we put it into action. We kidnapped Julie. We wrapped a mask around her face, drove out to Sacramento, and  circled round and round inside the mall’s parking lot, while we described the fictional landscape that we were driving through – the roads across cliffs, the dangerous streams and cascades, the herds of cattle, etc. etc.  We often had to swerve to avoid these obstacles.

Finally we got bored of circling the parking lot, so we pulled up at the restaurant and helped Julie, who was still masked, out of the car. We held her upper arms so she couldn’t get away and began marching her inside. Now, Julie was a sensible girl who had grown tired of this stupidity long before the rest of us had.

So when we entered the restaurant, she exclaimed, in a very loud voice, “Rape!” “Rape!” And we were whispering in her ears, “No Julie, It’s us! It’s not what you think!” Progress through the restaurant was slow and our faces turned red, though I think Julie’s didn’t. Luckily, since it was an ice cream restaurant, yelling kids were everywhere, which somewhat masked Julie’s calls. We entered the banquet room. Finally, somebody thought to remove her mask, and once she saw her smiling parents, all was forgiven and forgotten amidst the tears and hugs.

That’s Julie above. See what makes UC Davis so great?