If the period after The Accident was “In the Rough,” I can term the next period one of smoothing out. It meant gathering together what I had been able to accomplish, learning more about the difficulties ahead, and particularly solving the practical problems of living alone, except for one cat, and the occasional daughter.

In the four months before the accident, I had studied Modern Hebrew. After I and the rest of our committee had finished writing the proposal to the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation for an AIDS/HIV prevention grant, and while we were waiting to hear, we talked about what each of us wanted to do next, given that we were both committed to, and identified with, AIDS/HIV prevention in Utah. Such commitment would mean that we would be unable to obtain jobs in Utah outside of AIDS/HIV prevention. I thought that I wanted to study languages to do research in religion, or religion and psychology. So I enrolled in/sat in on a first-year course in Hebrew at the University of Utah, taught by Yael Maschler, who had just graduated from the University of Michigan Linguistics Program. She also was an Israeli teacher of Hebrew, Ulpan style. One of my classmates was Margaret Toscano, a woman struggling to bring about a fresh understanding of women in the LDS Church. Margaret and I, of a similar age, had similar goals - to research and teach in the field defined by the biblical time period and the Mediterranean region.