I entered in the third grade, in the fall of 1958, so I had 10 years of a Shipley education. My two older sisters were there when I arrived.

The heart of my experience was a rigorous education and the knowledge that there were no limits on what I could question or what I could learn. At the time, I didn’t recognize it, but looking back from this distance I can see how often young women of my generation were not challenged intellectually. We were [at Shipley]. As for what I studied: I avoided science (which I regret now); I liked math and exploring literature was something of a passion with me. It gave me a reason to write, and I loved to write.

My older sisters had gone to Ivy League schools. I wanted to do something very different. A family friend had gone to Stanford, as had my “big sister” at Shipley. I visited her in the spring of my junior year. As I flew over hills east of San Francisco Bay, I looked down on the grass below. Its keen, damp emerald tones made an indelible impression. This vision of the Bay area grabbed me even before Stanford University made its own claim.

One begins examining career alternatives as an adolescent, and as an adolescent I was impressed with journalism for its aura of rebelliousness. It was a way to take the high and mighty down a peg and (for a cliché) to speak truth to power. That attraction hasn’t lessened, just as the number of pompous, secretive people who abuse power hasn’t lessened. But the best journalism is far more nuanced. It doesn’t just call out abuse, idiocy, and hypocrisy. Like good literature, it also examines the complexity of human motivation in good times and bad. Now I love it for that, too.

Shipley taught me how to establish facts, verify them and use them in my analysis of situations, and it taught me not to be shy about asking questions. That was enough.

While my love of the profession began while working on, and editing, The Stanford Daily, my first professional journalism jobs were at The Bergen Record and at The Washington Post. The 1970s were a very heady time to be at The Post. In the early 1980s, I had our two sons while working there. In 1984, my husband was in the running for a foreign assignment; when he got the job as the next New York Times correspondent in Moscow, it made sense for me to leave The Post and go to Russia. But I bitterly resented the insistence of the top editor at The New York Times that he had to approve where I could work if we went there. The flip side of that was his willingness to let me write for The Times as a part-time stringer. In 1986, I got a press credential and covered the historic developments of the Gorbachev era for The Times. It was a very exciting assignment. I learned serviceable Russian, interviewed Jews refused exit visas and major Soviet dissidents who were emerging from years in prison or exile. Among them was Andrei Sakharov. I wrote about an imprisoned woman poet who, while in jail, carved her new verse on a bar of soap – all she had to write on – and memorized it before washing it away. I wrote about an old Russian princess emerging from years of anonymity, and about the widow of an early communist executed by Stalin. And I had a front-row seat on the explosion at Chernobyl, the greatest civilian nuclear catastrophe before Fukushima. It threw radioactive poison over hundreds of square miles and forced a mass evacuation, overwhelming a government desperate to show that nothing could overwhelm it. In sum, in our time there we got a chance to witness and write about the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. My work there paved the way for full-time employment at The Times.

I was the United Nations bureau chief for The Times for a riveting nine months in 2003, starting the job as the Iraq war was just a few weeks away. I covered the efforts of some nations, like Chile and Mexico, to thwart our government’s desire to present an illusion of broad worldwide support for the campaign, and got to cover hardball politics in an environment of silks, fine food and red carpets.

That’s like asking “Which child is your favorite?” I am proudest of work that forces people to question their preconceptions. I like making them understand the human nuances of a situation when facts and ideas would otherwise be reduced to simplistic slogans. The New York Times magazine piece I did on the five-year anniversary of Chernobyl is a source of pride, as is a series of pieces I did for The Post in 1981, a multi-part series of articles on a Washington lawyer named Tamara Wall, who was sent to Siberia from Germany before World War II as part of an odd historic corner of the Holocaust. Those I turned into a book, Flight From Sorrow, which was published in 1984 just before my younger son was born.

Covering environmental issues has forced me to regret my lackadaisical attitude toward science when I was at Shipley. I began covering environmental issues at the end of 2003, when we moved to Washington because my husband had just been made The Times bureau chief. Things in the environmental world were crucially important as the threat of climate change was widely recognized, and doing many stories—about logging, about endangered species, about energy and power plants—has made me realize how profoundly most things are related to the increasing vagaries of the Earth’s climate.

There are too many to isolate one or two. Various encounters have reminded me of people’s need or desire to hide facts—or hide from them. I know too well people’s desire to see opponents not just as adversaries, but as feckless incompetents or inhuman villains. Things are usually more complicated. And I am constantly astounded by so many people’s core humanity, like the people who give out-of-town reporters covering Hurricane Katrina a place to sleep.

Most things I can say sound cribbed from an inspirational book about illness. The basics for me were the importance of great medicine, a great family, and great friends. When you come close to losing your life or your cognitive self, you can’t help but look at work differently. Setting priorities —a job neurologists say is part of “executive brain function,” which is centered in the area where my injury occurred—became more crucial. I want to work on the most important things, not just the most accessible ones. Once, my energy and stamina were a source of pride; now I have much less of both. I must use them wisely to do the most important tasks the best way I can.

All along—from my birth to parents with great values, to my marriage to a wonderful man and the gift of two great boys, to my chance to do good journalism for great newspapers—have had many blessings. Properly embracing what’s been given to me, I believe, means offering someone else a chance to embrace their own opportunities. One of the greatest gifts to come my way was my Shipley education. A couple of years back I had the idea of encouraging classmates in the Class of 1968 to make a new version of our education possible for young women. 

As we set about fundraising, we found our lives were a wonderful microcosm of the shifting cultural currents we lived though. Sadly, I just learned that we recently lost a classmate whose days were spent passing on the magic that life had given her. The life of Grace Larson is the best possible explanation of what prompts our scholarships. Shipley gave us Grace. All her life, Grace, as a teacher and as a friend, gave herself to others. Shipley was the original base of our community. Now we are making a contribution to the communities being built there now. Before her death, Grace joined 30 or more of us in this endeavor. What’s important about continuing a relationship with The Shipley School? That’s how to stay in touch with the new worlds emerging there. Like other institutions, Shipley is not perfect, but it is always a wellspring of community, of learning how to think, and of absorbing lasting values. Besides, we can get to know these girls a little. There is so much they can teach us.