The night comes so quiet
and it's close on the heels of the day
This is my summer night, completely wacko, it's-too-damn-hot, "What is this, Phoenix in Seattle?", what's-on-my-mind diary. I always think I love the heat until it hits about 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the Puget Sound and the humidity increases and increases, as it sucks the lovely moisture from the fresh water of the lakes around here and pulls droplets of absolutely saturated salt water into the atmosphere and we add heat and we get something that doesn't even closely resemble the Pacific Northwest.
(Apologies to Dead Heads everywhere)
Damn, it was 108 degrees in Hillsboro, Oregon of all places yesterday. This is my fried circuits, heat-infected, sun stroked brain melting it's way to the topic of my diary tonight. As soon as the temperature drops, I'll be better, I promise.
Right outside the lazy gate of winter's summer home
wondering where the nuthatch winters
Wings a mile long just carried the bird away
Hillsboro, Oregon is a suburb outside of Portland, just west of Beaverton, Oregon where I attended high school in the 1970's. And guess what? My thirty year high school reunion is next Saturday. Do I go or do I stay now? I have yet to return to one of these events, though I knew a lot of people then and in that place and I liked them well enough. My graduating class was large - somewhere around 550 - and surprisingly, it appears that a great deal of them will attend this event next Saturday.
but the heart has its beaches
its homeland and thoughts of its own
Help me decide. It's a tough one and a decision I need to make soon as I have to send in my response and the nice, fat little $60 fee that I can't afford to the reunion company that runs things. Funny how times have changed and we have to outsource even the events of our lives. I shouldn't bitch about this for two reasons - one, I had no compunction catering out my most recent failed wedding in 1998, when I thought I had the money to do so, and I really have nothing against a well-organized event. Two, one of my classmates actually either runs or works for the company doing the reunion event, so it's not to hard to see how they were hired. A little classmate nepotism (can I call it that?) is okay.
Sometimes we live no
particular way but our own
Blather, I know. But I've been putting off this decision ever since I found out about the reunion several months ago. Thirty years is a long time to return to a place and time that you haven't revisited. There has been only one friend that I've kept any kind of contact with since high school, and she was my best friend. We've traveled different routes over the years. We both went to the same college for four years after high school - Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She met a guy that we went to college with and she married him. Life is a circle and the world is small. My first husband knew her husband as a classmate in high school, so it was inevitable that we all kind of walked together socially for several years as we had our kids. Her husband's dad was my ex's high school history teacher. My ex-husband and my best friend shared the same birthday, along with my husband's aunt, who happens to attend the same Presbyterian church along with my best friend and her mom and they've all sung in the same church choir for decades now. This is the ordinary, but incredible, nexus of life.
Sometimes we visit your country
and live in your home
Our lives diverged when I divorced and moved to Seattle in 1992. I've stayed in touch off and on - more off than on. She's has always been the better friend, because I'm just not a very good friend. I've had the great fortune of having several friends who stay in touch with me even though I'm absolutely terrible at letter writing, horrible on the phone for very long, and since I work with email all day at work, my personal email has become like the phone - sometimes I just don't answer it. Bad, bad exme. Nonetheless, I've always, always valued her friendship more than she'll know, because it's just one of those things and she's just one of those wonderful people. She has always been my cheerleader, sometimes to my deep chagrin. Oh, the stories she's told my daughters about the days and nights I used to stay up playing pinochle in the dorm with my card playing buddies, when I should have been studying, or the tales of my writing 20 page essays in one day and night that were meant to be research papers covering an entire semester. Such stories were a little tough to defend when I tried to enforce good studying habits with my own children. I call her up out of the blue and there has really been no time that has passed at all. I'm certain that it was just yesterday when we talked and I know that she feels the same way.
Sometimes the songs that we hear
are just songs of our own
Those bits and pieces of life. Her dad, Bob, rescued me from a Grateful Dead concert once upon a time. Funny story when I think back on it now. Scary story from my vantage point as a parent with teenage children. I'd gone to the concert in Portland with a group of people, none of whom I knew; pretty naïve I was at the time, and excited about being invited. There was pre-concert partying in Portland before hand and I ingested several brownies that I had no idea (truly!) were filled with hash. At nineteen, I had never even smoked a cigarette or ever gotten drunk. Other things were floating around (I had no idea at the time that this was only a precursor to my drug-filled future. Just kidding, NSA, DEA), and by the time we got to the concert, I was a pretty sick puppy. About an hour into it, I just simply exited the auditorium, I don't even think I told my date I was leaving, and he certainly wasn't in a state to care. I think the auditorium was the Paramount, and I don't even remember the year, maybe 1978?
Sometimes we ride on your horses
Sometimes we walk alone
Out on the sidewalk, blurry with nausea and a little bit of terror, I had the presence of mind to dig deep and find change for the pay phone. I stumbled down the block to the local Safeway (through a very purple haze of folks looking for tickets on the outside of the auditorium) and I suddenly realized that I couldn't call my mom. You're at a what? Grateful Dead? Hash? Concert? Hah.
I called Bob. He came right downtown and picked me up and drove me all the way back to Salem in his little red Toyota Corona, an hour's drive from Portland (at least at the speed that Bob drove). He even stopped at a McDonald's on the way down and bought me a Big Mac, because he suspected I needed food in my stomach and that it would help soak up whatever it was that I was suffering from. Bob never said a word about this episode to either my friend or to my mother. Ever. We talked golf and politics all the way down to Salem - these topics were about the only thing I could possibly have had a conversation with him easily that night, given the awkward circumstances. He knew this, I realize now. His name was Bob and he was truly the nicest man on the earth.
There comes a redeemer
and he slowly too fades away
He was a short, small man. If he was five feet tall, plus a couple of inches, I would have been surprised. But Bob's true size in stature and heart, in my eyes, and on that night, grew to the proportions of a giant. Looking back now, these thirty-some years later, I'm not certain why I called Bob on that night, except that there was something kind and thoughtful about him that I always sensed instinctively. Our previous interactions over the years had simply been of daughter's best friend to best friend's father - you know, be as nice as possible to other people's parents, but keep your distance. Bob was the soul of discretion and completely non-judgmental that night. When you are a teenager, you rarely come across those elements of demeanor in a parent. Bob's wife was then, and is now, exactly the same type of person - two of the absolute nicest people one would ever meet in life.
Right outside this lazy summer home
you don't have time to call your soul a critic, no
I played golf a few times with Bob, in Hillsboro in fact, and he was always a supporter of my junior golfing career when I was young. There, I brought up Hillsboro again. I mentioned I had heat fried brain circuitry, didn't I? Over the course of four years in college, my best friend and I and my mom and her parents would often get together for a dinner in a restaurant in Salem, as we alternated trips to and from college on the Portland and Salem I-5 corridor. My Grateful Dead "trip" was never mentioned - I just wanted to repeat that again. Listen, how many people do you know who would not be tempted to bring up their act as rescuer to the best friend of their daughter, at least once more, even teasingly?
and the seeds that were silent
all burst into bloom and decay
Bob died ten years ago from a long and tragic battle with Parkinson's disease. I thought of Bob a lot this past week. He touched my life in what was really a small way, but a very big way because of its lasting impact on me as to how a parent should, in some circumstances, react when another parent's child calls for help. I, in my turn, have acted out Bob's role many times with the children of other parents - if the situation calls for a little grace. Sometimes that discretionary, nonjudgmental approach is the best way to handle the situation with a really confused and scared pseudo-adult/child.
I thought of Bob this past week and I called my Congressmen and Congresswomen on the stem cell bill. This is just one of the many reasons I support stem cell research. There are so many other reasons to do so and I have some tragic, likely inherited genetics in my own family that would benefit greatly from successful research in this area.
Wake now, discover that you
are the song that the morning brings
However, this past week I thought of Bob and that is why I made my calls to Congress. I guess I may go to my high school reunion after all. There's something I need to do - I need to tell my friend how much her dad meant to me. I'll think of what we might be able to do for future Bobs once we get the right party in Congress and in the Administration.
When it's time for my mind to fail, it's kind of funny, but I know that there's one phone number that I'll never forget - the home phone number of my best friend.
In Memorium, Robert J. Patterson, 1919-1996.
Wake up to find out
that you are the eyes of the world
but the heart has its seasons
its evenings and songs of its own.