Interview with Cynthia Guthrie

Interview of Cynthia Guthrie by Karin Forno, Feb 23, 2021

Could you give us some general background about yourself and how you came to be at St. Mary’s?

I'm Cynthia Beach Guthrie. I'm an Army brat, and I married an Army brat and I brought up two Army brats. That means I've been a lifelong nomad. I've lived outside the United States for 18 years of my life. I've lived in eight foreign countries and 11 states.

I first found St. Mary's back in 1974, when Dick went to Korea for an unaccompanied tour, as military officers do, and I came here to live with my two children, Laura, age 6 & Park, age 5. I knew one or two families, but I’d never been here before. And as I have written in the book Life in Pacific Grove, I drove around the area and I saw this beautiful little red church. I walked in and heard the comforting words of Dwight Edwards and I was hooked.

I left in 1975, and Dick had never lived here at that point. We went everywhere, all those places, but I was amazed when I came back here in ‘97, that Dwight was still here. St. Mary’s has been my “spiritual” home all along. Dick finally met Dwight Edwards after almost 25 years and then he understood why I loved St. Mary’s & Dwight Edwards.

So many people have been brought to St. Mary's by Dwight.

I'm sure you've heard that. There's no doubt.

One of my questions for everybody is how, on a day-to-day basis, have you been affected by the pandemic?

This year Dick and I both turned 80. Dick is still writing his book on his year in Vietnam with B Company,1st/50th Inf Bn. I can’t go out. I have rheumatoid arthritis, so I'm on immunosuppressive drugs. I was very conscious of that. Dick had a hip replacement right at the beginning, in fact, we drove up to a hospital in Fremont and he was one of the last ones to have elective surgery before lockdown. For that first few weeks, I was mostly focused on Dick. And, you know, I had something meaningful to do because of that. But we've adapted. It goes up and down.

And I'm interested in that change. Has there been a pattern to the way you've felt during the pandemic? You know, from the beginning when we thought it was going to be relatively short, and then we kind of realized, well into 2020 or 2021? Since different things have happened in so many arenas during the pandemic, to change our circumstances, I wondered if you can trace how your feelings or experiences have changed during the pandemic.

That is a hard question. One of the things that threw me is we decided long ago with our two kids that we’d get together a few times a year. Our daughter lives in New York City with her family. She's a Legal Aid lawyer in Brooklyn and our son is a teacher up in northern California, and even though we're bicoastal, we've made a point of getting together more often than I would ever have hoped for.

We were all going to celebrate our two birthdays, our 80th birthdays this year. We rented a house up in Ashland, Oregon. We were all going to go there with all 11 of us in the same house, go see Shakespeare and other plays… and hike. I can't do much of that anymore. But they can.

That was all canceled. I'm used to changing all the time, but that was sad.

To quote from our Christmas letter, Guthrie Gazette December 2020:     

  “In 2020, we both turned 80 and our lives, as did yours, took a strange turn when the Coronavirus appeared on the scene!

We adapted, walked masked along the ocean, learned to live in our Zoom Room with a View while sheltering-in-place, attending CSUMB & exercise classes, church & coffee hour each Sunday, all virtually. Dick’s new “drugstore” hip was one of the last elective surgeries allowed before lock-down. Whew!

• In May, while on Zoom with Laura in NYC waiting for Park to come online, suddenly, he & his family, all masked, peered at us through the French doors yelling, “Happy 80th, Grandpa! Coming from Sebastopol, three hours away, they sneaked around the house, up the stairs to the back deck to surprise Dick. Then they pitched their tent in the back yard & we had a raucous socially distanced birthday celebration! At some point, we mused, half-jokingly, that the NY City Mice should rent a camper, drive across the USA and park in our front driveway while the CA Country Mice, once again, set up their tent in our backyard. 

• In late summer, our intrepid Laura and her two kiddos took up the challenge & drove 3000 miles in a gaudy and artistically painted camper van! There was a “chaos of cousins” between the front driveway and backyard of 1059 Wranglers Trail and in the surf along 17 Mile Drive for several days! It was beyond incredible!

• Stay safe until you get the vaccine and we’ll all be able to hug our beloveds this coming year, for real!”

And I have pictures of it on my phone with all 11 of us except my son-in-law, he couldn't come, but that has sustained me.  But since then, of course, there's no connection with them. And I’m thinking that it would all be over by now.

Dick had his vaccinations and I got my first one in the old Santa Cruz drive-in movie theater. I'll get the second one on Saturday--for which I'm eternally grateful. But I’m aware that I don’t know when we’ll next see each other, and that's been one important thing in my life, as we've always managed to see each other. When she moved to New York, Laura said she would make a point of visiting. So, up until now. I have seen them at least four times every year. And that's not happening. So that's the main thing, when is it going to happen again? But I'm very lucky.

It's great that you guys are getting vaccinated.

Oh it is. Dick got all emotional.

He drove up to the VA in Palo Alto for his and he's going to come take a picture of me at the Drive-In on Saturday when I get my shot. As I say, “I got shot at the Santa Cruz movie theater”. I love that!

We’re definitely looking on the bright side. We feel fortunate about that.

How have you stayed involved with St. Mary's during the pandemic? I know you've been a regular at Zoom church. Is there anything besides that?

I'm so grateful for St. Mary's, I never realized how much I would be. One thing I hesitated about saying yes to, because I was uncertain of myself about it, was writing the Prayers of the People, but I did……

To have Zoom Church has been sustaining in other areas too. I've been a lector since I've been at St. Mary's and I can continue doing that. I did other things before. I stepped back from the Memorial Reception Committee.  I had one month a year and I always would do it with Carol Galanti and others. Dick and I have given testimonials during stewardship season about why we love St Mary's from our two different perspectives.

When Dwight celebrated his sixtieth year of ordination, he invited us to be involved, and that meant a lot to me.

And now I'm on the vestry. I've never been on a vestry. I had to think about that too. But St. Mary’s had been my spiritual home since I was thirty-four in ways I didn't really understand. But I understand now at 80, and I want to take care of St Mary's because it's taken care of me and my sisters in ways that I can’t totally articulate.

I'm curious as to what people are thinking and how you think St Mary's will be in the future, on the other side of the pandemic, as it were. Do you think the pandemic is going to change us permanently in any way? Or are we just going to go back to exactly the way it was before?

I don’t think any of us can get through this unchanged.

Of course, it's going to change us personally and it's going to change St. Mary's.

I'm not sure exactly how, but it should. We need this. That's the one thing I think this pandemic did. It shone a light on so much good and bad, or things that are not right, in our lives in America. So I'm sure there will be changes, but I don't know exactly what that will look like. I think there are some things that we've done better on Zoom, but we don't want to live on Zoom. I know that I live on Zoom right now so much that even good things I'd like to do, I sometimes don’t. I just can't look at my screen any longer. On vestry, one of the things that was asked was, are we a rowboat church or a sailboat church? That's from a book we’re reading. I think we’re trying to look at what other ways we can make St. Mary's be not just for our community, but also the broader community. We’re doing a lot of things already, so I don't really know. But we're thinking about it.

Can you talk about any of the specifics in terms of ways that you feel like you've been changed by the pandemic or when you've seen other people that were changing already?

I would like to bring my kids and grandkids on Zoom, to church. [laughs]

What specific changes do you see affecting people in general or in the church so that you think the pandemic is changing us or will change us?

Well, I'm not sure I have something to say about what I see now and how it will affect the church, except that I don't know how I'm going to reconcile the two coffee hours, for instance. At first I wasn't sure about Zoom coffee hour. I always go to coffee because I like coffee hours. I like to walk around and see people.

But in some ways I have to admit in the little breakout rooms on Zoom coffee hour, I've gotten to know even more people in a way that’s not necessarily deep, but to have some sense of them as people more than in-person coffee hours, but I don't want to stay on Zoom. I'm sure there's some way to get both of those things happening. I need to reach out. And then, I think somebody, maybe it was even Kristine said, there are some people that just don't like Zoom at all and they've just disappeared off the face of the earth, as far as I can tell.

And I'm wondering, will they come back? Will I see them again? I will be back in person when I can, but I'm not going to be the first one because of my immune suppressed condition. I want to see my daughter and her family, and I'm not risking anything for fear that I might get Covid from or give it to somebody else. I'll have to see, in the initial phases anyway.

It’s certainly different and Zoom has its positives and negatives. It's such a great way to connect with people when you can't otherwise connect. But it's a very inhuman sort of connection. We don't normally show up at meetings with all these faces right in front of us. We’re not used to looking at 20 people in the eye. So a lot of people have struggled with it positively and negatively. And we all have kind of our threshold for, OK, this is too much.

Exactly. To some degree, that's why I bought the book for the church book group but I didn't end up going to the book group because it was at 7:00 at night and by 7:00 at night, I’m tired. But I thought, I'm going to try it because I said it out loud. Kristine (I’m joking now) said, “how do you create a discipline? If you say it out loud, maybe that will help if you wanted to do something for Lent”.

And so I bought the book. I held it up and I thought, OK, I said it out loud.

But I find that at this stage of my life, if I were to go somewhere at seven pm in person, I would go to the theater.

But it's partly because I'm 80. Somehow being somewhere in person and doing those kinds of things at night is something I'm still perfectly happy to do. But to go on Zoom and then have to talk--I don't know whether I'm going to do that.

What habits or practices have been the most important to you with getting through the pandemic?

I have to say one of the most important things is going to St. Mary's church service on Sunday.  If I'm not there, it must be because I'm sick, because that's really been important.

And Dick and I have always off and on watched the sunset every night. I just need to be outside, I need to look out at this wonderful world.

We get calls from my kids and grandkids. My grandkids are five teenagers, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. Some are in New York running around in snow in Central Park and the ones in Sebastopol are in the ocean, and almost near us, for which I'm really grateful. I feel terrible for my grandkids. But they're so resilient and their parents are great. Our son Park’s family live close enough and have turned into Californians. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for “tuning in” with them. We don't force them, but we touch base quite a bit. Laura mentioned trying to figure out a way to get here this summer. Luckily for her, her husband's parents live in California, too. So that helps.

How have you dealt with the uncertainty? You know, at the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed people were saying, well, life is always uncertain. And yes, life is always uncertain. But right now it's been really uncertain. So how have you dealt with the uncertainty that might be getting a little bit better now?

There are all the things that happened in this year besides the pandemic.

You asked me how I'm coping. Do I feel better? I feel better now because I'm aware that nothing will be perfect. But I worry about a diminished sense of decency in our country . . .  I am not political, I’m from a family where my parents didn't even vote because they were military who are protectors of the whole Nation and because that was that era. I've never been political as we moved with the military. But I have just been stunned over this last four years. And it has to do with decency and character and honor more than it has anything to do with politics.

The pandemic is mixed up with some of that. I feel that we have a way forward, but I'm still deeply troubled. It troubles me that the pandemic was handled so badly, that did not have to happen.  I have Texas family. Health has become political. And that's too bad. I'm hoping that we can put some of that behind us as we move forward from the pandemic. But I'm not certain.

I do take hope in a vaccine. Our son is a teacher, he was able to get the first vaccine when he was in a board meeting and the next school district over called and said they had 15 extra doses left over, so they said the 15 oldest personnel in the school could have them, so Park called us, just to tell us, while driving up to get the vaccination .

Three out of the four of us have gotten the vaccine. So I'm hopeful. I want to see my grandchildren again. When they were here and they were on the back deck, my kids gave us one of those heaters that you put outside a restaurant & put it on our back deck.  So when Laura came with her two, she was able to sit out there in the cold damp mornings. They were all vigilant & smart because they never came in without their masks and I totally forgot that I had to see them at a distance.

They were bundled up a little bit and I had a ruana or a quilt over me… and that's the last hug I've had by mistake. I went and put the quilt around them as they cringed away from me. I think that I just forgot. One time my son came down here by himself to do something with me, he was masked and I was masked and he was outside. We turned our heads & hugged. So I remember those two or three hugs and I don't want to have to remember hugs anymore. I want to just have them, just give them and be thankful for them. That's what I'm hoping for, that will sustain me going forward.

Would you say that in this time your relationship with God or spiritual things has changed in any way? And if so, how?

I'm not very good at talking about that, I'll be honest. I guess I'm enough of an inarticulate Episcopalian.

But I will say God helped me through the people I've known, the church that I love. Now, the liturgy, as we moved around, that's the one thing that sustained me--that no matter where I went in the world, I could go into the Anglican Church somewhere and there was some familiarity.

And I don't think that God discriminates; he loves my Jewish grandchildren as much as he does the other ones, I think he puts his arms around them. He puts his arm around all of us. Arms around all of it. No matter who we are or what we have. So I'm glad to be in a place where I can hear that. I think a couple of priests over the years saying this, including Kristine, for sure, has allowed me to remain a Christian though many things pushed me away from it. But I'm in now. I'm in. You're not pushing me away.

That’s great. Well, hopefully you got to at least read Bishop Curry’s book. (Love is the Way).

Yes. I haven't finished it, but I've gotten through most of it. I see it echoed everywhere. Love is the only way. That's the only way you can deal with hate.

What about this time has surprised you the most either in a good way or bad way?

Well, I think I've said before, the thing that surprised me the most is that in some ways I've been able to have deeper conversations in church. And even in some of my other classes. With people that I can look at and not look at the back of their heads. On Zoom I'm looking at their faces and so I think I said when I wrote the Prayers of the People in the beginning of October, late September, I think I said:

“When we gather on Sundays and Zoom in on our lovely little red church, remember, just because it's virtual or online does not mean it's not real.” I believe that on one level. But I'm tired of that. I'm not surprised that it can't sustain us forever. I'm also surprised that I stay in the house this long. I didn't know ahead of time about the lockdown, how long it would be.

I think a lot for a lot of us, especially if we're able to start getting vaccinated, we start thinking, oh, I might be able to do X, Y and Z and we almost don't want to still because we've gotten comfortable staying inside and not doing anything. We’re kind of tired of shifting gears. We’re tired of staying in, but we're afraid to move forward and go out.

I think that's exactly right. I think a lot of times when you first do it, you’re a little worried about it: “I haven't done this in a while”. But once you step out, it's all right.

With the vaccinations, I've got to figure out what it is I can do, that's a little bit more. But I still feel there's some at our age who think, until there are a lot more people that are vaccinated, I'm not going to go out and live like I did before. One of the activities coming up is the one-year anniversary of Dick’s hip replacement. We have to go up to Menlo Park.

That would be my big outing.

Maybe go to a good restaurant we used to go to, maybe to have curbside pick-up. We’d get lunch there and then go eat it. That would be a big deal.

Has anything about the pandemic been positive for you?

I think probably some of the things that I've already said. I was amazed how I can keep certain connections online on Zoom. And I mean, I always I always knew about the things that I'm grateful for; I have always known my children are amazing. But I have reinforced my view of that. I always knew they were wonderful, but they're my superheroes and I feel very lucky to be reinforced in my view of them.

So is there anything you'd like to say about the pandemic, the church, your life that you haven't had a chance to say?

I have realized we are now in the first pandemic since the "Spanish flu epidemic of 1918."...and then remembered that Dick's grandfather died in that one...a sobering thought to me... and a tragedy that completely changed the course of Dick's family.

Dick's grandfather William Leo Guthrie, a US Army officer died at age 42 in the 1918 flu epidemic of the last century. Dick's father was nine years old, the eldest of six children. Hard times for sure.

It was an important event in Dick's family even if it wasn't spoken about much as far as I can tell...but I did "take it on board"...Dick's grandfather's death... for sure in my view of the pandemic now.

I'm just so grateful to be age 80 at this point. I've done a lot of things I haven't talked about, but I taught English as a second language around the world, I’ve done theater, I've done all these things, I'm 80 and we're here. When I came in 1974, I had no idea this would be my home one day. I'm grateful I found a home I still own. I was stunned when Kristine said, “you're one of the people who’s been here a while”. I don't ever think of myself as that; I’m always the newcomer.

I have an old brick fireplace that my grandkids have slept in front of. That's the only part of the house that’s the same from the remodel. We had it blessed by St Mary's priests in 2000. They came and we had a house blessing for the first house that was ever ours.

My grandkids have slept in front of the fireplace. And their parents, when they lived here for one year when they were five, six years old, slept in front of it. The other day my son also said what he loves is these great oak trees in the back yard. And now his kids have been climbing a tree, the same tree he climbed when he was five. These are people, my kids, who went to 10 different schools, who lived all over the world and never stayed in a place for more than 2-21/2 years, but they can say that about their kids climbing the same tree. And I'm very grateful.