My Morning Coffee Experience

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

I, like most of us, am a creature of habit and when those habits are disturbed I find myself unsettled.  The latest example of this is an unprecedented interruption in that most holy of personal activities – securing my morning cup of coffee.

I get my morning coffee at three locations depending upon the day of the week.  On Saturdays and Sundays, coffee is taken at our home in Humptulips County, the product of a ritual usually performed by me alone in our kitchen during the early morning hours while Helen is still sleeping and I am working in our library.  I go downstairs at the appointed hour (5:30 AM) and fire up our Nespresso machine, taking each step in a fixed sequence which leads to a morning mocha (raspberry, without excessive foam or whipped cream).  With the resulting mocha in hand, I reascend to the library and continue my morning’s work or my reading until such time as my wife gets up and has breakfast ready.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, coffee is courtesy of an independently owned coffee-house next  door to the club where I play racquetball.  Following completion of our racquetball games, my friend Dick and I go next door and alternate buying the morning’s coffee.  We enjoy arguing with one another about whose turn it is to buy, more for the fun of trying out some new form of inverted logic in support of a wholly unsustainable position about whose turn it is to buy rather than actually avoiding having to pay when it is one’s turn.  Dick and I have gone to the same location for several years and we never seem to tire of our ancient argument, even if those around us may well be tired of hearing it.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I get my morning cup of coffee by myself (Dick and I don’t play racquetball on those days) at a nearby Starbucks (in Seattle, the term “nearby Starbucks” is probably an oxymoron since they exist on every significant street corner).  On these mornings, I religiously leave my office at about 5:28 AM so that I can arrive at the Starbucks in the next block at 5:30 AM when they open.  Or, at least I did until this morning.

Last week, the morning barista at Starbucks told me that my usual location had new hours and they wouldn’t be opening until 6:00 AM due to a lack of an earlier morning customer base.  Since I see the same folks in line every morning and often have to wait my turn to be served, I found this announcement a bit surprising.  What was even more surprising was my reaction this morning when 5:28 rolled around.  I found myself determined to get my coffee “on time” despite the delayed opening of my usual haunt, and reviewing the Starbucks’ website to see when other nearby Starbucks locations were open.  When I found that two of them, both within a block, were already open, I quite happily forswore my usual location because the timing of my morning coffee fix was more important to me than the where of it.

And so it was that this morning I test drove another Starbucks location in the June rain which is a fixture of Seattle’s weather.  The coffee was the same, as was my usual snack, although I missed my usual chatter with my favorite barista, a young woman who is a near neighbor in my part of Humptulips County and who drives even farther than I do to work each day by a distance of about 5 miles.  She is pleasant in the low-key manner that is common to most Starbucks baristas, but I rather think that time and habit will prevail over our usual morning comparison of traffic eccentricities, since the mere thought of delaying my morning fix by an entire half hour is not welcoming.

Yesterday was a Monday and Dick and I went, as usual, to the independent coffee-house next to the club.  For a long time, this coffee-house was run by a crusty older fellow with whom we traded daily barbs.  Not everyone liked him, but we always did.  We enjoyed his directness and his ready willingness to boot out a customer whom he felt didn’t belong.  He recently sold out to a young couple who are “foodies” to such an extent that they are almost arrogant in their seeming worship of food as a cultural icon.  I haven’t really been comfortable with them since they are lazy about the most important element of my morning coffee ritual – service and conversation.

The truth is I don’t like the young woman who runs the place.  She simply isn’t my cup of tea, if such a cliché can be used about a coffee-house proprietress.  She is sassy without a sense of caring, and overbearing in her constant demand that she be admired, if not adored, for her foody creations.  I miss the crusty old gent that used to own the place, who could make a cup of coffee faster than anyone else I have ever seen.  For he made a cup of coffee at full quip, his unending commentary coming as hard and as fast as his hands moved in their performance of the coffee-making ritual.  And while his food wasn’t nearly as good as that now served by the young couple, its plainness was more appealing given the brusque, friendly, personal jibes with which it was served than that of delightful, foody creations delivered with an in-your-face sass about the essential excellence of the food and its creators.

In short, I am going to change my Monday, Wednesday, Friday coffee-house because I don’t like the people or their attitude.  Their conversation is wrong for me even though their times of operations remain unchanged and their food is good.  For they aren’t really serving coffee; they are, instead, serving a “Breakfast Experience”, and such an experience I would rather forego.

So here I am in a coffee dilemma, changing both of my normal locations for what seem at first glance to be different reasons: one because the old location no longer opens at the time it used to and because it isn’t within me to wait for another 30 minutes for my morning fix; one because the quality of the experience has changed for the worse, even though the food served is much better than it used to be.

So what’s all this about?  A barista at a prior coffee haunt of mine next door to a former office location used to opine that people really didn’t come for coffee, they came for the conversation.  I think he was right about that.  Given the time for reflection about this issue (now that I have been primed for thought through consumption of my morning’s cup), what seems true is this: Starbucks, being a chain, offers similar experiences store-by-store, such that any one location isn’t all that different from another even if the baristas vary a bit in personality (but not in age).  However, an independent coffee-house is dependent upon its personality to draw in its particular portion of the crowd of coffee drinkers that populate this city, and an unpleasing personality is a turn off.

I suppose I should be enchanted by all the foody creations produced by the young couple in which they take such evident pride, but the truth is that they and their creations turn me off.  I don’t need to be lectured about what I ought to like and why I ought to like it.  So, I leave the youngsters to those members of the coffee drinking society who wish for the experience to be a wholly upscale activity.  What I need from my morning cup of coffee is either (a) the same product served reliably, if blandly, from location to location, or (b) a great cup of unique coffee served by an idiosyncratic personality with whom I have a history of rough and tumble give and take.  Foodies just don’t fit the bill, for my morning coffee is an addiction best taken with a chaser of friendly guff or taken blandly without any chaser whatsoever.

As to my weekend ritual, I intend to not vary one iota from that which is working so well.  After all, on those days of the week I am in the company of one of the most idiosyncratic personalities I know from whom I have taken plenty of guff over the years.

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Laughter is the Best Memory

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

Now there was great Uncle Julius
And Aunt Annie Mueller
And Mary and Granddaddy Paul
And there was Hanna and Ella
And Alvin and Alec
He owned his own funeral hall

And there are more I remember
And more I could mention
Than words I could write in a song
But I feel them watching
And I see them laughing
And I hear them singing along

We’re all gonna be here forever
So Mama don’t you make such a stir
Just put down that camera
And come on and join up
The last of the family reserve

Lyle Lovett, The Last of the Family Reserve, Joshua Judges Ruth

My family’s memorial tradition is to recall all of the crazy things that someone did during his or her lifetime in order to laugh as much as possible in the face of grief. For example, when my father died my Uncle Orville and his daughter Ruth drove 300 miles to be with us the night following his death so that he could help soften the blow of our loss by telling stories about the weird, wonderful times he shared with my father. Somewhere in between tales of giant breakfasts fixed by two large men who had thrown everyone else out of the kitchen and the lighting of strings of fire crackers on many Fourths of July in the backyard of our old farmhouse on Boyer Street in Walla Walla, all of us – my mother, my sister, my two brothers, and I – rediscovered our ability to laugh and found the ability to begin coping.

It wasn’t until three or four months later when Uncle Orville died himself that I came to understand the true worth of the gift he gave to us that night. For it was only at his death that we learned he had been suffering from very painful bone marrow cancer when he paid his visit, having first sworn his daughter-chauffeur to secrecy about the fact of his illness before setting out on the journey.

And so it is that the memory of that evening of laughing in the face of death is as important to me as my memories of the lives that both men lived. The lesson I learned and took to heart that evening was simple: death is as much a part of a life as the living of it, and the only means to deal with death is through laughter and fond remembrance of those lost.

Laughter should always be the essential ingredient of remembrance. There is nothing sorrier than remembrance which dwells solely on the details of a death and ignores the truths and foibles of a life well-lived. However my death may occur, I don’t wish to be remembered for the manner of its occurrence, since its means will have been imposed upon me and will not be something I willed or desired. To remember only the drinking of the wine is to forget the long growth and careful culturing of the vines which bore the grapes, the sweetness of the grapes themselves on the day they were picked, and the subsequent toil of harvesting the grapes and distilling the wine. One might as well remember the shape of the bottle in which the wine came, as to focus solely upon how it tasted.

This brings me to my friend and client, Charlie Murtagh, a man who knew how to laugh.

Charlie was a friend before he was my client, and our friendship was always the primary element in our relationship. Charlie was a modest, decent man with an oversized sense of humor. He worked at life, as only the finest do. After a career selling insurance which did not fulfill him and a failed marriage which disappointed him, Charlie decided to open his own pizza parlor. His first attempt was in a city, and it was an unqualified success. In fact, it became two pizza parlors which threatened to grow into more.

As much of a success as it was, Charlie found a chain of pizza parlors unfulfilling. And so it was that he let his ex-wife take the potential chain and he moved to a nearby, small town in Humptulips County where he opened a single establishment. She subsequently lost the chain, and he subsequently found his true calling. Living alone with his dog and running a pizza parlor for his neighbors and the occasional traveler was what Charlie was destined to do. For above all else, Charlie was an Irish raconteur and the pizza parlor simultaneously allowed him a living, a podium for his stories, and the means of becoming beloved by his community.

As a client, Charlie was never a source of a living for me as his legal needs were small. Whether or not my partners ever knew it, I represented Charlie more for the laughs than for the money. On average, once a month during Charlie’s time as a pizza parlor owner and after I would receive a small blue envelope containing a single sheet of equally small blue notepaper on which would be written some inanity or other that had occurred to Charlie and which he simply had to put down in print for the sheer joy of having his say.

For example, one such, sent after he sold the pizza parlor, began:

“This may be out of your area of expertise but perhaps you can point me in the right direction. Incidentally if you are muttering to yourself the old son of a bitch has time on his hands so he is going to be bothering me with his harebrained schemes weekly, you are correct.”

And he wasn’t kidding! The blue envelopes became an expected event, bringing the joy of anticipation upon arriving unopened (as I insisted they do) on my desk. And, when they didn’t come for some reason, we would drive to the pizza parlor for dinner in order to prime the pump for more. After his retirement, we primed the pump by inviting him to drive his battered old pickup to the farm for dinner.

It is only as I write this, that I finally notice a pattern of our either paying him for dinner or providing him with dinner. The old rascal! His stories drew in my entire family; he truly earned his living as a raconteur.

Charlie was equally a friend of my son Peter. When Peter was small, he and I used to visit Charlie at the unopened pizza parlor on Saturday mornings while Charlie was making dough or sauce, grating cheese, or chopping ingredients. He used to make me wait in the dining area while he took Peter into the kitchen to teach him how to make small, individual sized pizzas that were for Peter’s consumption. Since Charlie was no more than a child at heart, Peter and Charlie became fast friends.

Pizza was an art form for Charlie and, he claimed, invented by the Irish. Once he demonstrated for me (after first making carefully certain that no one else was watching) the addition of the secret ingredient for which his sauce was known by pouring an entire bottle of cheap red plonk into a large vat of simmering sauce. After he sold the pizza parlor, I complained to him that the pizza was no longer as good as it was when Charlie had owned it. It wasn’t only the stories that were missing, as Charlie himself subsequently noted to me:

“You are correct. I casually watched them make the dough and the sauce several times. They have changed the recipes.

“Did you overlook the fresh garlic?” “Didn’t you see me put in the powdered stuff? Same thing, garlic is garlic.”

“Isn’t that more water than I used to put in?” “Yeah the dough rolls out easier that way.”

For all of Charlie’s casualness and for all of the wildness of his stories, he was, at heart, a perfectionist who took pride in whatever he did, including the making of some of the finest pizza it was ever my privilege to enjoy.

Charlie became a fixture in his small town of choice. When he owned the pizza parlor he would invite one local elementary school class a month to come enjoy pizza for free on a Friday afternoon. After he sold the pizza parlor, he would go to the school and read stories to the children, animatedly acting out all of the parts rather than being content to merely read the words. Knowing Charlie, he undoubtedly started this process with the promotion his business chiefly in mind, but, by the time he gave his last classroom performance, it would have been solely out of his gratitude for the privilege of having lived his life in the small town which became his domain and due to his love for its inhabitants, young and old. For Charlie lived his life according to the advice of his fellow Irishman, Brendan Behan: “All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.”

Charlie died suddenly one weekday morning, alone in his apartment with his dog. He collapsed while shaving and died instantly. I was gobsmacked upon learning of his death, since, by that time, my world had been full of Charlie for over twenty years.

While I dreaded going to Charlie’s memorial service, it became a thing of wonder. It had been promoted as a chance to come and remember Charlie. Since I intensely dislike public speaking and knew that I had no choice other than to go to Charlie’s service and publicly remember my friend, I was in agony – until I remembered the small blue envelopes containing the small blue notepaper. I had saved them all.

On the morning of the service, I arrived early at my office, found Charlie’s file and began to read. And then I began to laugh aloud. I created a document containing Charlie’s more memorable quotes (those that I thought I could judiciously speak aloud without censorship at a public memorial service).

Much of the town turned out in an old hall and listened as a minister said a few words. The service was not intended to be religious as Charlie had long abhorred the trappings of religion. Several preceded me at the microphone, as I waited my turn. When the time came for me to rise and speak, I tremblingly told his assembled friends and family that while I didn’t have the words to express my recollections of Charlie, I had something better – Charlie’s words. After explaining about blue envelopes, I began to read his words aloud. At some point the reading became a telling – Charlie’s voice overrode mine and Charlie told his stories for the final time.

Memories of Charlie continue to comfort me. Before writing this piece, I read again several of his saved letters and, once again, Charlie came vibrantly alive – if only in my heart. Charlie’s laughter is clear as a bell in this early morning hours in which I write, and mingles with mine in the quiet of my library.

I am warmed anew by his ongoing friendship and the gaiety of our combined laughter.

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Old Dogs, New Tricks, and Swallows

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

Oh now, goodness knows you might have done better
But then, Heaven knows you might have done worse
If you lit up the occasional candle
You’re allowed the occasional curse

Jesse Winchester, “All of Your Stories”, Third Down, 110 To Go

I spent the weekend in a remote portion of Humptulips County, the central mountainous part that is neither Eastern nor Western Washington and which serves as the dividing line between two completely different ecosystems and cultures. I was staying at a resort while in attendance at a firm meeting to discuss the future of the business law practice group of which I am part – a future in which I will play no role due to my impending retirement at year’s end.

As a result, I spent the weekend battling my personal demon. I have long been a partner in law firms in Seattle, with my first partnership dating to 1974. In my time as a partner, I have been heavily involved in all facets of the firms of which I was a part, both as a practicing lawyer with a significant book of business and as a heavily engaged participant in firm administration. I have managed two firms and served in a senior management position in a third, as well as continuously participating as a member of a wide variety of public boards which give back to this community in significant ways. In other words, I have always practiced law and participated in community life at full throttle, enjoying both my interaction with clients, partners, and fellow workers for the community’s health and happiness, all the while coping with the many challenges that face practicing lawyers and the communities within which they work.

I thoroughly enjoyed this experience and have no regrets. I had fun. I believe I gave as much to my profession, to my community and to my clients as I received in return, and I cannot think of summing up a career in any better way.

However, this weekend was quite different. While I had some minimal input into matters due to a series of conversations with others over the weeks prior to the meeting, I was not involved much in the actual meeting and spoke not at all in any public way. This was by deliberate choice for I felt that since we were meeting to discuss the future, those who will own that future should be given free rein to speak and those of us who represent the past ought to keep quiet, except to provide whatever occasional guidance we might be requested to offer on the perennially repetitious issues that plague the daily practice of law, decade-upon-decade.

Because these issues are ever-present and continuously debated year-after-year, staying silent in their presence wasn’t as difficult as I first imagined. In fact, I listened to some of the discussions with a great deal of internal amusement, remembering earlier versions of the same tussle populated by other participants than those present and in other rooms than the one in which I was physically located. Many of my former colleagues were with me over the course of the weekend’s meeting, unseen and unheard by anyone other than myself. Within their echoes lies my present firm’s future.

What has all of this to do with battling demons? My personal curse has always been to become as heavily involved as possible in anything I have ever tried. As my mother and father constantly preached to me while I was growing up: “Whatever you do, however important it is or it isn’t, do it the best way you know how and put your back into it.” I have been guided by this mantra my entire life, and, as a consequence, I found it a real battle to disengage from the meeting’s planning efforts as I had promised myself I would.

By the end of the first day’s meeting, I was tired and had a vision of myself as an old warhorse trying as hard as he might not to answer the bugle call to battle one last time. I don’t really think I understood that cliché very well at an emotional level until last weekend. It was only through constant self-reminders that the future under discussion was not mine that I was able to see how to apply my parent’s mantra. My highest and best use was staying silent while the owners of that future fought their way through to a vision. It was a hard, internally fought, self-defined battle for me to remain silent except when called upon for an opinion or comment, but I managed it in the end.

But the battle wasn’t yet over until the following morning. It was the setting in which we found ourselves that provided the basis for resolving the battle. At the back of the hotel is a deep ravine with the Chehalis River flowing through it, a ravine bordered by woods and paths. Amid those woods early on the morning of the second day (a morning which I had to myself, as the others were fast asleep recovering from the previous evening’s gaiety), I found a wooden viewing stand built upon the very edge of the ravine from which I could watch the river and the life that surrounds and depends upon it. It was there that I began to realize that this world I was viewing was very similar to the world to which I am moving as my professional life winds down. I was reminded by that view that my new world is one in which I will be free to do what I want to do when I want to do it, not what my parents, my partners, my colleagues or my clients want me to do at times of their choosing. In other words, I will finally have the freedom to be the sole governor my own days, a freedom I haven’t had since I took my first full-time job at age 13.

It was swallows flying over the ravine and along its slopes that ultimately let me see the solution to the demon haunting me in the meetings. As swallows do, they alternately dipped, soared and flew in short bursts of their wings looking for food, providing both entertainment and a metaphor for a free life cheerfully lived. And in their song was the call to a sort of freedom that I came to realize I was enthusiastically anticipating.

The kinds of things I have imagined doing next year are reminiscent of the swallow’s erratic flight. Since I have no wish to disappear from the world, I will continue board service (perhaps including a private board to the list with a company I am now talking to) and may take on a few related tasks. My real wish is to begin doing the things I have always intended to do but haven’t yet done due to the lack of energy I suffer after coming home from a full day: learning to play the guitar (I have the guitar and instruction materials in hand and practice has begun, albeit fitfully); writing the novel I have always planned (I have the outline finished and the first chapter written); making our land more of a working farm and helping Helen maintain it (I don’t have the requisite blisters yet, but I know where to find them); and walking the borders of our land to watch all of the forms of life that share it with my present stewardship (the stand in our entryway already contains all of the walking sticks necessary for the purpose).

In other words, I am ready and only await the event. And, after this weekend and the lesson taught by the swallows, the path forward is clear.

Swallows will continue to point my way. Our swallows (barn swallows, as opposed to whatever breed that was on the mountain with their white striped wings) always accompany me in the Summer months when I am cutting grass with the big tractor, dipping and swooping in front of each passage along the edge of the uncut portion of the fields while seeking the insects that inevitably rise in response of the tractor’s roar and thump.

Who knows what I will truly accomplish in this next passage. It will depend, as it always has, upon me and upon the will that drives me. With any luck and with a modicum of effort (and an occasional reminder from the swallows), I may yet put the lie to the old saw that old dogs cannot learn new tricks.

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Spring Songs

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

It is a beautiful day here in Humptulips County, the kind that causes young men to sing aloud and makes old men wish they still could. Birdsong is omnipresent, the birds, young and old, knowing no inhibitions about singing lustfully under a mostly blue sky. If it were Summer instead of Spring, there would be the profound undertone of insect buzz necessary to create a symphonic sound. Spring days like this are more akin to an acoustic instrumental piece played by a skilled quartet than a symphony played by a full orchestra with woodwinds and brass.

Even the Spring rain – and there has been plenty of that – has a different sound than the rains of Winter. Spring raindrops hit the ground with soft splashes that promise warmth and growth rather than cold and gloom. Standing outside, under cover, I can hear the gentle plashing of each raindrop as it falls onto the pavement from the eaves, the tinkling sound not drowned out by fierce winds as it is other times of year. Spring rain is a lullaby softly and sweetly promising good things. It is a nurturing rain, and the grass is greener for it and full of dandelions where it borders our lane.

But there is no rain today for the skies are blue. Since something other than a driving percussion line is needed on a bright blue day, the wind’s occasional soughing in the pines serves as bassline to birdsong’s melody. Today’s winds are zephyrs, just uneven enough to lend to an otherwise classical presentation a somewhat jazzy undertone. Their disciplined unexpectedness leaves the listener in constant anticipation of when the winds might next be heard and felt. Windsong is never overpowering on a day such as this, serving, instead, only as a gentle reminder of the latent power of the elemental forces that have chosen to honor its peacefulness.

Flowers are scattered about the farm and serve as visual grace notes to Spring’s song cycle. Daffodils, azaleas, rhododendrons and the odd forsythia have allowed themselves to be seen. Hardy dandelions are in their prime. While the flowers cannot be heard, Spring could not exist without their presence for they are the day’s true audience. I am merely an eavesdropper in the wings who found his way into the symphony hall without payment.

Riotous melody rules on this fine Spring day with a muted, subtle accompaniment that can best be discerned and appreciated by enjoyment of a morning cup of Irish breakfast tea with milk and sugar on our front porch. The acoustics here in the wings are fine indeed, as Spring’s soaring melodies cannot but sweeten the heart with promise.

 

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A Remembrance of Jay

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

While writing my previous piece about my friend Bob Weiss, I realized that I knew another person who, I have been told, won a Silver Star.  His name is Jay McLean.  I then remembered that I had recently seen Jay’s picture on a fiftieth high school reunion Facebook site that one of my classmates posted.  I went there to be certain of my recollection, and there was Jay standing in a group of three, all gowned and crowned for graduation in a photograph that must have been taken well in anticipation of the event since it was in the yearbook passed out to us prior to our actual graduation ceremonies.

I first met Jay in junior high school when my family moved from its first home to its second in the small town where I grew up.  I didn’t much like the new house since it was far from the homes of the friends with whom I had gone to grade school.  I knew no one in the neighborhood since they had all gone to “foreign” grade schools of which I knew nothing.  I met Jay shortly before or after I entered the seventh grade at the junior high school we shared, and we quickly discovered we lived only a couple of blocks apart.  Suddenly I had a friend in the neighborhood.

We stayed close throughout junior high and were friends throughout high school, even if our friendship had cooled somewhat by the time of our high school graduation.  We had much in common, mostly because we were both love struck with girls that didn’t know we existed and we had not the means, intelligence or gumption to make them aware of it.  Instead we both mooned over our respective girls from afar and shared our common “pain” with one another.  In short, in the never ending war of the sexes that begins about this time of life, we were both clueless and inept.  This gave us a bond of sorts.

To describe Jay in this way, without more, is to deny him justice.  Jay was a superb trumpet player, very good looking in a dark way, and a very good student.  Both of us graduated from the same University on the same day, although by that time we saw little of one another.  I probably last saw Jay in either the Summer of 1963 or 1964, since I would have been resident in the town in which we grew up during those far-off Summers following high school graduation.  I can well imagine that I must have had a hamburger with him at the local drive-in at some point during those Summers.

I haven’t seen him since.

The reason I haven’t seen Jay is because he died in 1980 in Mobile, Alabama due to cancer, a severe illness once described to me by a mutual acquaintance as “full-body cancer”.  In the time between our last meeting and his death, Jay had been drafted and served in the army in Vietnam during the war that defined my generation.  I was not present at his death, although I now know that several of my classmates were.  I wish I had been.

Seeing Jay’s yearbook picture caused me to begin an Internet search to see what I could learn about his life.  To my complete surprise, I could only find the year and cause of his death and the fact that he is buried in my home town in the same cemetery where my parents and his now lie.  Further research brought to light that all of his immediate family – father, mother and brother – are also dead.

You need to know a bit more about Jay.  He was a Staff Sergeant in the army, had some form of unfortunate interaction with Agent Orange while on duty, and may have won a Silver Star for bravery by crawling into a crater left when an armored vehicle was blown up by enemy fire, searching for wounded while dirt and debris were still raining down.  I say “may have” because the only source I have for this information is another classmate who remembers Jay telling him the story of the medal.

When I went back on line to find a list of Silver Star recipients from the Vietnam War, not only could I not find any such list, I found, instead, websites that stoutly maintain no such lists exist.  I found Bob’s name, but I couldn’t find Jay’s.  I don’t mean to imply by this that I doubt Jay’s story.  To the contrary, Jay did not exaggerate or lie.  But I was profoundly shocked to discover that in addition to this generation of soldiers being generally ignored by most of us upon their return home, the valor they displayed is still ignored years after the nation finally began making efforts to acknowledge their service.

These facts led me to suspect that I would not find Jay on the Vietnam Wall.  This proved to be the case.  After all, Jay died in 1980 and I have no firm knowledge whether the aggressive cancer that killed him was due to his interaction with Agent Orange.  If one cannot link his service in Vietnam with a service related death, then Jay doesn’t belong on the Wall.  However, since it is well within the realm of possibility that the cancer that killed him was initiated by the chemical warfare the United States was guilty of employing in Vietnam, perhaps his name should be found there.

It was then that I realized a deep sense of loss as I wondered who, besides me and my equally aging classmates, might reflect upon Jay’s service and valor now that his entire family is gone, and how many other classmates even know the story of his Silver Star.  There must be others knowledgeable about Jay’s life: friends and colleagues from his subsequent career; fellow servicemen; casual acquaintances and other acquaintances of a too-short life, all of whom are unknown and unknowable to me.  Here is a man who may have given his life as the result of a foreign war who has no one to remember his valor in the absence of a bronze plaque or a published list of honored servicemen; here is a man lonely in his death.

Jay simply doesn’t exist within the virtual space known as the Internet for he died prior to its gestation as a publicly available information source.  He also is absent from the usual physical forms of remembrance, for the simple reason that the time of his death and the time of his service do not coincide.  This last statement assumes, of course, that the cancer that killed him was caused by his exposure to Agent Orange, and his life on line is so sketchy that I was not able to find his obituary.

I feel singularly unqualified to be the one to remember Jay in writing because I never knew the man Jay became and was not privileged to hear from him the stories of his adult life.  My only knowledge of his adulthood is of his service and death, not of his life.

It strikes me that his death, the lack of knowledge of what he did during the war and the manner of his dying proves what I have always believed: the Vietnam War was the perfect mug’s game. It was a purposeless (unless you believe in the domino theory and the Tooth Fairy) war fought, as all wars inevitably are, by old men besotted with power and dreams of domination who employ young men as their weapon of choice.  And the one precious gift our many dead from that war gave to us – the hard-won lesson that you do not send young men or women to fight for no good reason in a part of the world where we have no real national interests at stake despite the spewings of politicians to the contrary – we tossed away lightly upon our entry into Iraq looking for the mythical “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

While I have no hesitation in stating this as my personal conclusion about the Vietnam War, I have some hesitation about including it in this piece because I have no idea how Jay viewed the war and do not wish to dishonor his memory should he have held a contrary view.   However, my view is relevant to my reason for writing this piece: why, given all of the significant waste and societal damage done to our culture by the Vietnam War, do we continue to suffer losses from that war by allowing someone like Jay to pass into history unnoticed and unremembered?  For even if I lack facts or if some of the things I believe are incorrect, I have faith that his death was a direct outcome of his military service even if the war ended 8 years before the time he left us.

I hope someone will take the time to record their memories of Jay as an adult and I hope they will share it with me since I am unable to hear it from him.  The only story I can tell about Jay with any confidence is of his teenaged years.  And while he had nothing whatever to be ashamed of from this period and he achieved much in the small world of our junior high and high schools, these were small stages and the things I knew of him then were not the essence of the man he became.  These small things must have played some formative role in forging the courageous young man that crawled into that shell crater, but they lack the heft needed to understand how he could have  made such a difficult choice at such a terrible time.  That is a story about Jay that I would like to know about rather than imagine.

Of course, Jay is not alone in his isolation.  There are still thousands of soldiers from the wars of the last century who are listed as missing in action.  Other veterans have undoubtedly died after wars have ended as the result of wounds, illnesses or emotional disorders suffered on the battlefield.  When the bronze plaques are forged and the medal lists are written, these men and women are left off  because they did not die in battle.  I should have known this, but I did not.  It took a glance at Jay’s picture in a fifty-year-old yearbook to show me another of those curiosities that exist all too often in the course of a human life: patently obvious facts are frequently hidden from our view by the kind of cataracts fed by inattention and lack of focus.

It can be well argued that all of us will die and be eventually forgotten no matter what our position in society or our achievements in life, even those few who manage to last for eons by evolving into creatures of stone or bronze.  But to do so in Jay’s case is to fail to recognize that some give so much more of themselves than others during the course of their mortality, and that those who do so deserve to be remembered and honored well beyond the lifetimes of those of us who do not.

Posted in Our Place in the Firmament, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | Comments Off on A Remembrance of Jay

Conversations With Bob

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

My dear friend, partner and mentor, Bob Weiss, turns 89 tomorrow, an age at which most folks are content to rest and contemplate their past. However, whatever activities Bob may engage in tomorrow, looking backward will not likely be chief among them. I last spoke to Bob this past Sunday when he called to request that I give him advice about action he was contemplating on a matter involving his cooperative. On his birthday, he will more likely be thinking of this matter or planning one of his various literary projects than looking backward over a life well lived.

It wasn’t until the end of our call that the subject of Bob’s impending birthday arose. He told me that he didn’t need anything in the way of physical gifts. When I suggested that a nice smile sent his way would be a perfect birthday gift, he agreed and then added, after a thoughtful pause, that a nice breakfast with friends wouldn’t be amiss either. Despite the fact that we were speaking over a distance of almost 300 miles, his smile regarding the latter notion was palpably evident in his voice.

This response is typical of Bob, for he values personal relationships and getting together far above physical things. I believe that he has always found more substance in thoughtful exchange than he ever did in things wrapped in glittery paper and tied with ribbon. I can recall many such moments, from picnics and concerts on the grounds of Reed College with Bob and many of his other friends to a pivotal, private moment many years ago on a flight to Calgary while on a business trip together. The nugget at the heart of each of these remembrances is that of meaningful conversation, sometimes solemn and considered in nature but more frequently cheerful and merry.

For, above all, Bob is a creature formed from curiosity. He is curious about many things and more often than not our more interesting conversations begin with Bob, in response to some remark I thought of as a throwaway, saying something to the effect of: “What do you mean by that?” This response is never offered as a challenge; it is, rather, always an expression of genuine interest. For he is never content with shallow conversation, and would always rather know what lies behind a thought, no matter how callow or ill-formed. And because of his gentle inquiry, our conversation then begins to take flight, for I must extemporize about what I meant while simultaneously contemplating the consequences or effects of the comment that began the conversation.

I have known Bob for almost 40 of my 42 years as a practicing attorney. I was introduced to him as a young associate by a former partner of mine who was a student, with Bob, at the University of Chicago Law School. As my practice evolved, it was Bob I found myself increasingly drawn to and, eventually, I changed firms and proudly became his law partner. Even though we are not technically partners now since he is no longer a member of the bar, we remain partners in spirit. For Bob is still the person I call when I have an especially difficult legal issue to work through, since his careful questioning and thoughtful input always help to bring about a workable solution. Depending upon the topic, one of us is the flint and the other the steel and our conversation inevitably strikes the spark of resolution. When I mentally re-examine these conversations, I rarely find a singular moment of inspiration attributable to either of us, but see, instead, a process of resolution resulting from the interaction of compatible, companionable minds.

The pivotal, in-flight conversation noted above did have to do with Bob’s past, as well as my own. The flight in question was our first together as law partners, and I was well aware that Bob won the silver star in World War II at the Battle of Mortain in Normandy, but had no idea how. I was also acutely conscious of my own military non-history which I have written of elsewhere on the blog and won’t repeat here. Up to this moment I had always respected Bob as a lawyer, but I had no idea how he, a wounded veteran, might react to an upstart young man who had taken it upon himself to sue the government in the midst of the Vietnam War. I decided that I needed to face the issue head on and, given that our seats were adjacent to one another for the next few hours, it seemed a good time to deal with the matter.

So, I told Bob of my history and asked, pointedly, if my history was of concern to him (as it had been to other lawyers of Bob’s generation). His response was a laconic “no”, followed, after a slight pause, with a statement that given the nature of the Vietnam War he thought my actions had been perfectly appropriate. Having worked up enough of a head of steam to broach the issue only to find it was a matter of no concern, I used my remaining energy to ask Bob how he won the Silver Star at Mortain. He replied that he had been at Mortain, the Germans had counterattacked and surrounded his unit, he had been a forward artillery observer and had the only working radio on the hill on which they were isolated, and that for 6 days and nights he had called in artillery fire to keep the Germans at bay. The Panzer Division which had surrounded them was never able to take the hill.

That was the entire conversation, and it lasted at least 30 seconds. When I asked if there was more, he replied: “no”.

As I got to know Bob better, it became clear that there was a lot more about his time on that hill in Mortain that continued to affect him. As a consequence of my curiosity about what had really happened, my curiosity about what it was really like to be a soldier in battle, and my increasing belief that the story was one Bob should tell both for the sake of the emotions he had so obviously kept bottled up for so many years and for posterity, I became not Bob’s muse, but his nag. As I kept asking for more information, I would get another little morsel of information that would make me want to beg for more.

Eventually, Bob decided to write a book about his experiences at Mortain – not to shut me up and get me out of his hair, but because he became convinced that it was a story worthy of being told. That book – Fire Mission – can still be purchased on Amazon. At least it could have been until last Friday when I purchased the last four copies they then had available to give to other friends of mine as gifts in honor of Bob’s 89th birthday.

So, tomorrow morning, I will celebrate Bob’s birthday by giving one copy of the book to each of Bill, Dick and Ralph – all veterans themselves: one a West Point graduate and Colonel during the Vietnam era and after; one a captain in a Nike Missile unit in the late 1950’s; and, one a sailor in World War II in the Pacific.

I will then have one remaining copy unspoken for if any of my vast readership cares to receive it.

Bob and I continue to converse and will do so as long as we possibly can. While in the process of writing this piece, Bob sent me an email about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing jailhouse strip searches of people arrested for the most minor of crimes, wondering “what kind of a mind decided the strip search case?” I won’t bore you with my responsive ruminations about why people might be willing to sacrifice personal liberties for security and what inevitably results. I mention them only because I expect Bob to respond and for this conversation, too, to play itself out in our time-honored fashion.

Perhaps Bob’s proudest moments was being honored in 2007 by being made a Chevalier in the French National Order of the Legion of honor. Helen and I were privileged to be at the presentation of the medal in Portland and I was very proud of my friend. And later that year, when Helen and I were in Paris armed with a letter from Bob authorizing us to acquire a lapel pin version of the medal on his behalf, we went looking at the location Bob suggested, we found nothing there that even vaguely resembled the kind of shop that would have such a medal. However, we persevered and eventually found not one, but two, such shops virtually side-by-side, and we purchased a lapel pin for Bob after discovering the authorization letter to be wholly unnecessary. So every time Helen and I are privileged to see Bob wearing the medal (something that doesn’t happen very often, since he doesn’t feel comfortable wearing it for fear he is showing off), we enjoy fond recollections of Bob’s ceremony and of our time in Paris.

So, Bob, please consider this piece as my smile directed at you in recognition of your birthday. I hereby skip the glitter and the ribbon, and I offer this to you in its place. And, if I could, I would be with you in Portland tomorrow morning for that breakfast. But, since I cannot be there, I will drink a mocha and eat a muffin in your honor in Seattle instead.

Of course I would have had the muffin and the mocha tomorrow whether or not it was your birthday, but – and please trust me on this – tomorrow they will be consumed on behalf of your continued vitality and our ongoing conversation about life.

 

Posted in Friendship, Our Place in the Firmament | 5 Comments

The Anti-Intellectualism of “No, You Cannot”

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

I know a lot of fancy dancers,
people who can glide you on a floor,
They move so smooth but have no answers.
When you ask “Why’d you come here for?”
“I don’t know” “Why?”

Cat Stevens, Hard Headed Woman

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.

Brendan Behan

As I listened over the last three days to the delayed audio stream of the US Supreme Court arguments in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act cases, I was struck once again by a singular failure inherent in many so-called “intellectuals”: while they seem able to criticize with facility, they seem utterly unable to create.

I am uncertain why this is.  It seems to me that this form of intellectualism arises either because tearing things apart eruditely is so much easier and so much more immediately impressive to other self-identified intellectuals suffering from the same malady, or because of a constitutional lack of courage which prevents someone from attempting the creative process due to its inherent and significant risk of failure. Or, perhaps, both are at work and inextricably intertwined.

The practice of law is replete with this kind of failure, partly because lawyers are trained to spot issues and, therefore, to be risk averse.  And, since lawyers usually come from that sector of humanity that has anointed itself as “intellectual,” they believe that the parsing of issues, when taken as an activity in and of itself, is a singularly striking demonstration of intellectual acuity for which they should always be roundly applauded.  This type of failure most often appears in the practice of law when clients ask us whether some proposed activity is legally permissible.  Often, the lawyerly response to this request is a suggestion that the activity under examination is full of identifiable risks and therefore to be avoided, or that the desired activity simply cannot be done at all in the manner in which the client seeks to engage in it.  When the latter conclusion is reached and the lawyer comes to a full stop without more, it becomes apparent that the notion of taking the additional step of actually telling the client how they might legitimately engage in the desired activity is one that is beyond the grasp of many lawyers.

This problem first came to my attention several years ago when a former partner suggested to me, late one evening just as I was leaving for my extended commute to the farm, that I took far more chances than any other lawyer he knew.  As I drove home I fumed over this remark, concluding that my partner must be accusing me of some form of malpractice.  The next morning I eagerly awaited his arrival, and when he finally went into his office I was close behind under a full head of steam as demonstrated by my shutting his door with some considerable emphasis.  I began the conversation aggressively by asking him if he was accusing me of malpractice.  He was genuinely astonished at this suggestion and responded: “No, that’s not the point.  You tell people what to do.  Nobody else does that.”

I, in turn, was rendered speechless.  It had simply never occurred to me in my angered ruminations over the previous evening’s conversation that this was what he had been trying to say.  And, these many years later, I am still astonished when I consider the statement, for it seems to me that the essence of service (and ours is a service profession) is assisting others in the achievement of their goals.  Relentless negativity toward specific proposals is of no utility whatsoever to an aspiring client. 

The health care arguments reminded me again of this moment of discovery.  Appellate court argument is a rarefied world unto itself, especially when engaged in at the highest court in the land over what may well be the most hotly debated subject of concern in the last fifty years.  Whatever the layman may think, appellate court argument is not about making a scholarly argument to a politely listening panel of judges who are willing to be persuaded to your point of view.  Rather, it is more like a rugby scrum in which the lawyer, as the proponent of some particular proposition or other, more often resembles the ball than an active participant in the game.  The most significant difference between appellate argument and rugby is that the judges are far more likely to want to carry their own ideas over the goal line than those expressed by the lawyer. 

In such an atmosphere, the appellate lawyer’s best opportunity to be effective comes from the kind of questions that judges love to impale them upon; the times when the appellate lawyer is asked to present a unifying justification for their point of view that will permit the court to reach the conclusion the lawyer is seeking.  When offered in the context of an issue as sizzlingly hot as health care, these sorts of questions are disguised opportunities for the lawyer to be highly creative by offering the court a profound, justifying intellectual equation that will subsequently prove to be the quintessence of the court’s final ruling on the matter at hand. 

These opportunities, when offered, are no doubt frequently accompanied by a Cheshire Cat-like smile on the face of the propounding judge; a smile steeped in anticipation of the presumed meal of annihilation to come.

As I listened to the audio replays of the health care arguments, I was struck repeatedly by how often the lawyers under interrogation failed to meet these opportunities either by responding that they had no such justifying equation or by being reduced to a form of blitheringly idiotic, almost incomprehensible response that would not have proven persuasive to a 6-year-old, much less a meat-eating Supreme Court Justice.  I was equally struck by how often the propounding Justice seemed eagerly poised for his or her impending meal of hapless counsel. 

Both of these images appear to me to be from the same coin of ineffectual intellectualism – one heads and one tails.  The lawyers knew they were being lightly broiled and basked in the sauce of the Justice’s choosing.  The Justices were all too often eagerly poised to demonstrate anew their own unique form of wit and wisdom in the only way they know – by means of the intellectual dismantling of haphazard counsel unable to avoid the offered skewer.

In fairness to the lawyers involved in the health care case, none of them were truly made a meal for they exist at a sufficient level of expertise to avoid being consumed to the last jot and tittle.  There were, however, more than a few close moments.  When the Supreme Court engages in the described behavior, the Court and the participants can be excused.  After all, their job is to parse the arguments and find what is or isn’t permissible in law or under our constitution, and this kind of rending and tearing is how that result is best achieved.  One could only wish that the participants didn’t seem to enjoy their own wit so voraciously and contentedly.  I strongly suspect that had there been a cocktail hour for all participants, lawyers and Justices alike, behind the scenes after all the arguments had concluded, there would have been many a smug remark about the quality of the show they had collectively put on for the listening public.

But, I digress.  From my point of view, the sort of erudite rendering and tearing which is unaccompanied by a proposed alternative solution to the matter under consideration is, all too often, nothing more than a form of elitist, anti-intellectualism.  It is easy to poke holes in another’s argument; it is far more difficult to ponder the sources and reasons about why a particular problem might exist and frequently frightening to be the one proposing a solution. The trick to taking any action is to see the “problem” at hand as an “opportunity” to move forward, and those who can do no more than criticize any solution others propose without the offer of an alternative proposal lack the ability to make this transition. 

When, instead, you have a team of people focused upon finding a solution to a problem working in an atmosphere which encourages suggestions no matter how wild-eyed they might seem at the time offered, the resulting energy is palpable and mutually infusive. While there may be a leader in these situations whose ideas predominate, it is often true that no single person can claim credit for the germ of the final, successful idea that resolves the problem.  This is because this form of intellectual creation elevates everyone, and even the criticisms of a proposed solution that eventually proves to be ineffectual become the source of new ideas that lead to refined solutions that actually work.

This is one of those pieces where I just needed to say what I feel is important.  I have no illusions that I can change someone who is inherently not a risk taker into someone who is, although I do know non-risk takers who have moved significantly along the continuum toward risk taking from the point where they began.  When such movement occurs, it is usually because someone the non-risk taker respects offers them encouragement and honest evaluations of their thoughts when they display a tendency to back-slide.  

When the time comes that I have said all I have to say to clients as their lawyer and am done with the practice of law, I only hope that I will be remembered as someone who encouraged them in their endeavors.  My clients have given me a great deal of enjoyment by engaging in their many plans and schemes and offering me the opportunity to help them solve their own particular puzzles, and for that I thank them. 

If I have any regrets about the practice of law, it is that my former partner – and his many kindred spirits – will never likely know this kind of pleasure.

Posted in 'Tis a Puzzlement, Civics | Comments Off on The Anti-Intellectualism of “No, You Cannot”

An Aqueous World

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

Take a walk down a river road
Take it in the morning light
I promise by the end of the day
Things are gonna be alright
Take a walk down a river road
Let the pain just disappear
It’s a great big world
I’m glad that you’re here

Jimmy LaFave, River Road

When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labor to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labors to nothing. For what is water, children, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or color of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? Every Fenman secretly concedes this; every Fenman suffers now and then the illusion that the land he walks over is not there, is floating … And every Fen-child, who is given picture-books to read in which the sun bounces over mountain tops and the road of life winds through heaps of green cushions, and is taught nursery rhymes in which persons go up and down hills, is apt to demand of his elders: Why are the Fens flat?

 Graham Swift, Waterland

Yesterday, we took a drive down through the river valley that lies at the heart of Humptulips County. Deep down this is an alluvial land, a land formed first by the forces of nature, then scoured clean by titanic glaciers, and now thoroughly and continuously washed by rain, rivers and tide. This, like the Fens of Britain, is one of those parts of the world where land and water embrace one another with rare passion; where their coupling produces a sort of fragile beauty that can only be seen on a trip down a river road.

The river is high but not currently at flood stage, yet water lies everywhere throughout the valley, the product of seemingly endless days of snow, rain and wet and an almost complete lack of sunshine. At times, the river’s course was ill-defined, the lack of definition created by a variety of temporary lakes and fens which might have been pools fed by the river, or not, depending upon their proximity to the river bed, or, perhaps, were nothing more than hollows and low points in the valley bottom incongruously submerged beneath an extremely high water table. These are the places which are simultaneously land and not-land, which seesaw in a rhythm coupled to that of our seasons. In one such temporary lake, Helen spotted a cormorant and we wondered if it knew that only pumpkins and other crops, not fish, typically inhabit this particular spot for a majority of the year.

And just as land and water seem to change places in our county with facility, the horizon can often shift and lower to a point underneath the surrounding hilltops on days such as yesterday. Yesterday’s horizon was one such: a serrated horizon confused by trailing spumes of water vapor which were either fog emanating from the forests below in order to serve as ropes anchoring the clouds in place, or recently birthed cloudlets hovering slightly above the forests while still tied to their progenitors by vapory umbilical chords, impishly pretending to be smoke from forest fires that couldn’t possibly burn in such weather.

This totality – water commingled with the land and coupled with a variable, aqueous horizon – made yesterday’s trip through the valley a trip through a water world. The impression of water was so profound, that we found ourselves wondering, before our arrival, whether the road across the valley to one of our favorite lunch spots might be impassable. We quickly realized, however, that we would have heard if the river had been in flood and the road impassable, and that the very fact that the land was covered only by a patchwork of water and fen, instead of a turgid grey sea, was proof that the road would prove passable – as it did.

And so it was that our usually humble river valley was turned into a place of majesty and mystery, a magic land through which an ordinary drive became a wondrous adventure. The river valley is just as often a place of green moods, a place of seemingly sempiternal Spring where peace is a constant state of mind. But not yesterday. Yesterday, the valley’s mood was that of a glowering troll awaiting an unwary traveler to stop and become its lunch; yesterday was a trip through Tolkien’s Mirkwood on the way to the Lonely Mountain; yesterday was a voyage with Huck and Jim down the Mississippi on a raft to an uncertain future.

This morning as I write in the safety of my library, I do so under a sky from which large snowflakes are steadily falling. In the last half hour the ground has become covered and, on this day which is exactly four days prior to the official advent of Spring, it is once again Winter in Humptulips County. Once again, water, this time in its solid state, predominates and covers the earth. The snowfall shows no present sign of stopping, but certainly by noon, in this time of seasonal between, the day will have evolved into something less wintry and more Spring-like.

And while we complain at times about all of the water that surrounds and falls upon us in its various, endless forms, those of us resident in Humptulips County know that the greenness which nurtures our souls is nurtured, in turn, by water in its multitudinous forms, and no matter what we may say about all of that water to those of you who are so unfortunate as not to live here, we always bless its presence. For we know that it is far more than the Nothing Mr. Swift postulates; for as mead was to the ancients, water, in its manifold forms, is our stuff of life.

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On Coming Home

Posted on March 13, 2012 by C. (Gaius) Charles

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me.

 Joss Whedon, Firefly Theme Song

It has been a bit over a month since I came home, crossing the mountains from big sky to the towering green trees of western Washington.  I returned to a place of connections, of closeness, moving from a sort of lack of ownership to a prevailing sense of once again belonging.  The land I remember has changed – roads once lined with trees are now housing subdivisions, some roads go further than they once did – but yet, it’s still familiar.  The landmarks I once knew and counted on still (mostly) remain.  All the same, I have found it necessary to reorient, to rediscover, to reinvent my understanding of this place, to find new routes from point to point, new places to fall in love with.  I am closer to my family – still separated by some distance, but much more reachable now – and hang out with the people I once knew and spent an abundant amount of time with.

Yet there is still some sense of loss in this homecoming; while I felt disconnected in the deserts, as if I were too far away from everything that mattered, I still developed a sense of (perhaps grudging) belonging.  I moved to eastern Washington for the job, to gain experience and a better understanding of what I needed to make my work personally satisfying.  My life there allowed me to awaken to things I hadn’t known before, both about myself and about the world we live in.

Though it is Montana that we traditionally christen with the moniker of “Big Sky Country”, in reality, that line begins dropping out of the Cascade range into the eastern side of the state.  The point where you recognize this is different for each Cascade pass in Washington – for White Pass, there’s a moment where the firs disappear to be replaced by rock walls and winding rivers, for Snoqualmie Pass, there is simply an abrupt transition from firs to meadows and farmland.  Regardless, the effect is the same: the cloistered sense of travel prevalent in many places in western Washington is quite abruptly ripped open, the sky revealed as if to say “here I am!”, expanses of scenery opening themselves to you in ways rarely enjoyed elsewhere.  There is a unique connection here, not to land, not to place, but to what lies above us.  What I know I will miss is not the barren openness of Washington’s desert, but the lines of trees planted to create windbreaks that change color all at once in fall against a backdrop of soaring blue, the mists rolling in across the Columbia in the morning to obscure the land and shroud it in invitation.  I will miss fall more than any other season there, except for the moment in spring where the brown bleakness explodes with greens – blink and you’ll miss it (and I frequently, unfortunately, missed it).

It is not that I felt forced there or was isolated from others or had no friends – I had a personal choice to make when I was offered the job.  What I hadn’t thought too deeply about was what that would do to my sense of community, my mental connections to the green that has surrounded me for most of my life.  I missed it – it wasn’t there, and a part of me needed it.  It explained why holidays and other trips west always made me feel more at home, particularly so when family was involved.  When I realized that my connection to the work wasn’t as strong as it had been in the first months of the job, I began to search at home for alternatives.

It was interesting to me that my definition of “home” never wavered – I never really considered the desert “home”.  I called it “home”, but it was not the same sense as it is amongst the trees.  Now that I am home, really home, Whedon is right – take away everything else, and the sky is the one thing that remains in memory of my time east.

~ C. (Gaius) Charles

Posted in Our Place in the Firmament | 1 Comment

The Songs of Mystery

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Gavin Stevens

Our farm is once again blessed with the music of chorus frogs.  They came out of hibernation late this year no doubt due to Humptulips County’s persistently cold weather, but they are back and singing with abandon.  Last night they were accompanied by heavy rainfall, blessing the darkness with a symphonic collaboration – the singing of the frogs and the percussion of the rain.

We moved to the farm from the city twenty-some years ago for reasons of family: Helen had her parents to take care of and the move took us closer to them, and Peter needed a place to play where his hearing didn’t put him at risk.  Both of those reasons are no longer applicable to our continued stay at the farm since Helen’s parents are now gone and Peter is at large in the world, but I can no longer imagine leaving.  For our farm is so much closer to life’s true mysteries than was our old urban home with its marvellous overlook of the city and its residents.

Nights at the farm are of the essence of mystery.  There is no urban light spill to mask infinity, and the stars shine with abandon when the clouds allow.  Constellations reign in the farm’s night sky, and are available for viewing at any time of year.  The stars beckon to us by means of sirens’ songs audible to the imagination if not the ear.  They sing come-hither songs: songs of voyaging and exploration; songs of wonders beyond ken; songs that pull upon humanity’s imagination and spirit.

Perhaps star song is the most clearly heard in Winter when the air is crystalline pure and its icy breath is redolent of the freezing depths of space.  I often step out to our porch on a Winter’s night and simply scan the sky for a few minutes, wondering at the meaning of light that has travelled from a faraway past to grace the moment and speculating about the meaning of infinity.   It is in Winter that I most appreciate the grace of my existence, as the profound depth of the skies provides a visual rendering of the scale of its inherent improbability.

But my favorite nighttimes are those of late Spring and Summer, when evening shadows lengthen slowly and finally knit themselves into darkness.  There is something greatly soothing about such an evening, especially on those nights with enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay.  For it is then that the mystery of life surrounds the watcher with enchantment, as each living thing seeks the night’s salvation in its own particular way and the music of other lives separates itself from humanity’s din.

From the front porch of our house with its views across the fields, joy is in the stretching of shadows against the grassy canvas.  It is as if everything capable of producing a shadow desires to display its essence and commingle it with that of night.  As shadows interweave and the crickets awake, the resulting nighttime blooms into a mystery of sound and imagination.  As the night pulses to the cricket’s song, I can sit bewitched for hours in the rocking chair on our front porch, content with an approximation of the appreciation and understanding of magic that our ancestors once enjoyed .

From our rear patio, contentment comes from watching Helen’s flowers dip and sway in evening’s breezes, petals bending to, or slowly closing against, the night.  Insects are in physical evidence, each behaving in a manner evidencing some unfathomable purpose whose sole goal must surely be to sustain life.  It is from here that I can best enjoy birdsong as a counterpoint to night’s rising, for the tree-filled hillside behind our house is a roosting spot for many varieties of birds.  Once the night has fully descended and silenced them with sleep, their songs are replaced by the more subtle, tuneful rustlings of the larger, flightless animals.

There is surely music in the night if only we will take the time to listen.  And sometimes on a cloud shrouded evening such as the last, the music comes not from the stars but from the earth.  Regardless of its source, it is the music of wonder and mystery and the stuff of life.

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