User Profile

Born in Hollywood, CA USA 1949 to a gringa mom, Doris, and an older Mexican papa, Salvador. Living now with husband Paul Woolery, aka Pablo, and that same fabulous mom, who is now 86; Salvador died in 2005 at 97. Two daughters, Lara and Heather, two sons-in-law, Vince and Vern, 5 grandkids, Devin, Zachary, Nicholas, Tiata and Olivia, 14 down to 4 years old, respectively, as of 2008. Two brothers, Denny (aka Alonzo Garbanzo, and go seek him out on YouTube.com, where he has almost 30 truly excellent [and many funny] music videos; and Tony. Many in-laws, many outlaws (Pablo and I still close friends with just about all our many myriad ex's...most were at our wedding). Momma Doris played the harp beautifully all her life, at least for about 72 years, but her hands' arthritis now has sent her back to playing piano by ear, and singing in VOCI, the community choir here in lovely Hood River, Oregon where she and Pablo and I share a great mountain lodge-y large cabin between the two volcanos, Mount Adams and Mount Hood, overlooking the vast orchards of this applepearcherry valley. I work as a family doctor in a migrant and community health center, something I've done most of my life since 1980. I also work, more now than at that clinic, as the medical director of our region's nonprofit hospice agency, and I became a certified specialist in that arcane though also down-home work a few years ago. I also do health care reform stuff, an endless task to be sure, made ever more ineffable by our crazy American culture and systems. I'm a poet, mostly unpublished, and a wannabe nonfiction writer with 4 books up my sleeve; let's see if they ever materialize. Dogs are my touchstone, music my lodestone. I had a great 12-year-long progressive Catholic education in a high school in Hollywood, where we would cherish rare sightings of Steve McQueen or Fabian from the Senior Lawn at lunch. I went to Occidental College for 2 years as a world literature/philosophy double major, then dropped out of college for 6 years, during which I worked in a poverty program for barrio and ghetto kids and also lived off the grid in the rural Canary Islands for a year. Finished college at the University of Santa Cruz, walking to school amidst redwoods and dairy cows, with seals cavorting in the surf a long way downhill. Was a General Sciences major, ignited by the natural world by then. Four awful years in med school at the University of Southern California, an exhilarating if strange internship year in East LA, then my doctory career launched in California's Great Central Valley amid workers in the Gallo grape fields. Met my husband Pablo while both of us were gypsy-caravaning, each in our mini-campers, on the Santiam Pass in central Oregon. We courted for a week, following one another through such places as the Debris Trail, the Painted Hills, the Blue Basin, Prairie City, and the Strawberry Mountains. The rest...is history.

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