Like Mr. Perlman said…

When I was a kid my parents gave me a little guitar one year for Christmas. It was a Trump classical guitar, made in Japan. Not an expensive one, but solid enough and…well…real. I didn’t learn to play it. As with most endeavors, when I couldn’t master it at once I lost interest. The same thing had happened with the accordion. I had accordion lessons until it came time to learn the black dots. Musical notation frightened me. I seemed to have a mental block against it. When the teacher, a gentleman in the neighborhood called Mr. Demerrit, told me that if I learned the notes by the next week I would receive a bag of chocolate, I stiffened up and my mind completely rebelled. I did want the chocolate, but the pressure caused me to blow a fuse. The day he was to return I told my parents I did not want to take lessons anymore. I was told that the chocolates would be forfeited. I felt the pinch, certainly, but I decided to pay that price to avoid failing at the notes. 

I played trumpet for a while in fourth or fifth grade. Everyone played something that year at Enatai Elementary — maybe it was mandatory — and an awful lof of us played trumpet. Mine was rented. I don’t recall how I got by without learning the notes. I only remember playing one song: ”España Waltzes”. We played it on stage in front of our classmates and their parents and our teachers and we nailed it. Perhaps I simply lexically mapped each note to the instrument without really learning what notes they were in the larger scheme of things. In any case, I didn’t continue any longer with trumpet than I had to.

Feeling the squeeze.

My sister, who had played piano since she was three or four, picked up the old guitar as a teen and taught herself to play it so she could accompany church-group sing-alongs in places where the tonnage of an upright piano would prohibit its inclusion, such as parks, or other people’s living rooms, or just about anywhere. She taught herself pretty quickly, so I thought I might have some luck, too. I remember watching her practicing out by the fence in the front yard, and feeling an absurd jealousy that music was being made on my guitar and I was not the one making it. Soon after, I signed up for lessons in downtown Bellevue from a man who asked me to bring examples of what I wanted to play. I showed up with my vinyl copy of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Trilogy album so he could hear “From the Beginning”. It’s been a long time and the man’s actual visage over time has slowly morphed in my memory into that of Alan Rickman, whom I see rolling his eyes and grousing that every punk kid came into his studio wanting to be a rock star. He started me out very slowly picking a series of repetitive notes and kept telling me to slow down, so that I would learn to alternate my index and middle fingers. While I did this, he sat three feet away and called his wife on the phone. I only went twice, I think.

I did eventually teach myself to play guitar. It happened over those long hours, those interminable hours, that I remember having to fill when I was in high school, say between getting out of school and dinner, or between dinner and bedtime. There was nothing but time, it seemed. I was not involved in any groups or activities. By high school I already thought of myself — and behaved — as a loner and nonjoiner. I had only a few friends. If they were busy with choir practice (Kip) or off smoking weed with the burnouts (another whose name shall remain nameless), I played my guitar. I came to regard the little classical guitar as a toy, so I saved up $100 and bought a Mateo from a store in Kirkland. It was not a good guitar, but it was acoustic and it sounded really cool.

But something was amiss here. I didn’t learn Beatles tunes or Joni Mitchell tunes or folk songs or any number of other popular kinds of music that would facilitate my joining in musically with groups of revelers. At that time I was not interested in anything that anyone else liked, and in particular I thought the music of the Beatles, minus the Magical Mystery Tour, was boring. I had also not yet discovered Joni’s soulful and brilliant lyrics, in which she sacrificed herself over and over again that others might know true and lasting love. I didn’t know from folk music. I was into progressive rock (“prog”), which included at its more accessible end Yes and ELP and the Alan Parsons Project and Pink Floyd, and at its more rarified end the indomitable Genesis (though they were starting to arc into the mainstream), Gentle Giant, Renaissance, Triumvirat and a number of really exquisite Italian bands led by Premiata Forneria Marconi and Banco del Mutuo Succorso.  It was the classical guitar strains of this genre that I tried to emulate, and I actually created quite a few really far-reaching epic original works that were both romantic in tone and convoluted in structure. Some music theory might have helped, but I found that just hammering away at stuff for days usually gave me something interesting at least. Some of these I could never play, because they existed only as symphonies in my head, and no one else could play them because I could not write them down. Some of them I can play still, on the old classical guitar, which is leaning up against the wall a few feet away from me right now. See, I finally realized I was never going to be really good at playing guitar, and it seemed silly to have two bad guitars around. I gave the Mateo away and kept the little classical. Over the years I had come to realize that the classical guitar, and this little one of mine in particular, has a sweet, honest, earthy sound that I just love. I can’t do much with it. But I picked out “Moon River” on it to sing to Mara when she was a baby and once in a while we all sing “When the Frost is on the Punkin’”, Ted Jacobs’ arrangement of James Whitcomb Riley’s poem. I can also play the beginning of a beautiful classical-style piece by Steve Hackett. 

Pushing 40 with original strings.

In college I became interested in Celtic music, what I called “diddly music”. It started when I began helping a guy named Eric work on and sail his sailboat — a 37-foot Tayana cutter – on Lake Union on Saturdays. Eric used to come into the Arco Mini-Mart where I worked and chuff about how much fun sailing on his boat was, and I would always say it sure sounded fun, and he would say you should come out sometime, I’m always looking for good crew. And I’d always say, yeah, I’ll do that sometime. And one day he told me to show up Saturday at such and such slip at such and such marina on Westlake. I did, and he and two other volunteers my age showed me the ropes (the “sheets” as ropes are called on a sailing vessel), and we would tack back and forth on Lake Union and sometimes even Lake Washington. He always had Fiona Ritchie’s “Thistle and Shamrock” playing belowdecks on the radio, and so I came to associate the jigs and reels with good times under sail. I rented a fiddle and took a single lesson from a very quiet, nervous woman in Wedgewood, and even though my interest in Celtic music cointinued to grow, and even though I came into possession of my grandfather’s violin for a time afterward, I never went back for more instruction from her. I don’t recall what excuse I made that time, but I’m sure that it just was too much work for the caterwauling and scraping that emanated from my efforts. At the time, I probably blamed her for being boring and failing to sufficiently inspire me.

There is a story of a middle-aged man who ran up to Itzhak Perlman after a performance and with a heart heavy with regret said that he had always wanted to play violin but that he had studied piano instead, and that hearing Mr. Perlman play that night had made that old desire rise in him again, but that at his age he feared it was now too late for him to start playing violin. Mr. Perlman said to him these words: “It’s never too late. But…there’s no time to lose.” I love that saying. It expresses both the assurance that however old you are, you can start now, today, and the urgency of not losing any more time to procrastination. I don’t know whether or not this really happened, but I am grateful to those who kept this anecdote in circulation long enough for me to hear it. It is something I could stand to say to myself every day, not just about learning to play musical instruments, but about many aspects of life. 

With this thought lodged in my cerebrum like shrapnel, the fantasy I have always had of myself as an old gent playing in a local contra dance band, or sitting in on a circle of bluegrass musicians at folk festivals, or contributing here and there in gatherings of family and friends when the music is up has been impossible to indulge in as a fantasy alone. The thought kept nagging at me that it was not too late to make that dream a reality. Itzhak said so.

But what should my instrument be? My long history of half-assed guitar playing made me uneager to begin formal guitar lessons again. I have so many bad habits there, and my old identity as a non-joiner is so wrapped up in the very feel of holding a guitar. And besides, everybody plays guitar. If the point is to find a pathway for me to abandon my aloofness and learn to join in with others through music, I reasoned, I would want to play an instrument that there was not already a surplus of. Too, I thought, the thing should be small and portable. Tuba and pipe-organ, not for me. I’ve always loved the sound of the clarinet, but unless I started hanging out with Klezmer musicians I couldn’t really see myself whipping it out at parties. I thought of retrying the violin, but I’m already getting creaky in middle age, and the affront to one’s neck in playing the fiddle seems completely untenable going into the muscularly problematic half of life.

At some point my ear picked up on the concertina, a.k.a. squeeze box. It’s a little thing with bellows for drawing and pressing air through internal reeds, and whose notes are regulated with buttons on either end. Ironically, it is very much like an accordion, only smaller and without the keyboard. I don’t know when it began, but I started noticing how sweet its reedy little sound was, and I began to love it. When I think of how I have always cherished the soulful clarinet, and even the little wail of the oboe, it occurs to me that I might just be, genetically speaking, a reed man.

No time to lose. My Italian-made 20-button C/G concertina.

Well, it was decided. For years now, I have known that the concertina would be the instrument of my dotage. Small and portable, relatively few people play it so few bands or circles have one, it’s designed particularly for contras, squares and other folkdancing forms, and you can play it without contortions of the spinal column. A couple years ago, my friend Ed Z., who plays and teaches guitar professionally, found a 20-button Anglo concertina (C and G scale) in an antique shop and bought it on a whim. What he didn’t know, and I didn’t either, was that the concertina is not really intuitive to learn, especially an Anglo. Each button on an Anglo renders a different note when you pull (draw) than it does when you push (press), like a harmonica, so that you have to keep track of two sounds for each button and you have to know whether you’re coming or going. An English concertina (yes, the words “Anglo” and “English” both mean the same thing etymologically, but those are the words that have congealed around the two different types) plays the same note on draw and press. My friend Ed fiddled with it but could make no immediate headway and had more important things to do, so I bought it off him for what he paid for it, which was too much. 

As soon as it came into my ownership one of the reeds became dislodged, which left its corresponding button wheezingly mute while the reed itself, a small piece of metal with a slot in it partially covered with a spring of paper, rattled around inside the bellows. The only thing for it was to loosen the screws holding one of the wooden ends on and fish it out. Borrowing some advice and piano glue from my dad, I reaffixed the reed and put the box back together, but in the process of removing and replacing the end I compromised the leather seal, which causes it to leak air.

The next problem was finding a teacher. I learn best from humans, in person. There are no people advertising in Seattle that they will teach you how to play the concertina. I think this is because it would be madness to claim such a thing. I got a book right away, which in four pages explained everything and then gave a number of songs you could play with a 20-button Anglo. But without being able to read music, this was almost useless. What I needed was for someone to give me a lesson, show me how to play one tune — an interesting one, not “Good Night Ladies” — to get me started. It took years. Angela had a friend named Chris who plays concertina for contra dances, who declined to become my teacher but whom Angela pursuaded, as a birthday present to me, to come over to our house for an hour and “show me what she knows” over a cup of tea. Chris brought her concertina over, showed me how she holds the thing, taught me a practical way to play a G scale, played a few tunes, and gave me some pointers. Lastly she gave me two names I might call. It took me another year to get my courage up, but I finally called a man named Kevin whose number Chris had given me.

He didn’t want to teach me at first. For one thing, he doesn’t play a 20-button, he plays a 30-button. The 20-button concertina is very limited. Most Irish music, the kind Kevin plays and the kind I am likely to want to play along with, makes use of keys that require more notes than can be achieved with just the C and G scales. But he was sympathetic to my desire to learn. I sensed that there was an ethos at work here (as among smokers, who will never decline a request for a fag if a fellow smoker asks, unless it is their last), whereby Kevin felt obliged to advance the cause of concertina playing. He kept not hanging up, until he had agreed to meet with me and get me started with a couple of tunes that would be playable in C or G. For payment for an hour of instruction he joked that a sixer of beer would suffice, but when I pressed him he said “twenty bucks…a dollar a button”.

Obviously not Togy's "old favourite".

So last December I took my concertina to his house, where he had set up a couple chairs and a music stand. Kevin had taken the trouble to create written notes which he charmingly titled “Lesson 1″ and printed out for me, along with the musical notation for two tunes, “The Old Favourite” and “Sally Garden”. We hammered out “The Old Favourite”, I watching him play a measure on his box and then trying to copy him on my box. It was alarmingly difficult, and I felt a lot of stress, because he seemed to expect that I could just up and do this. But this actually brought my meager abilities into full and sharp focus, and even though I made many wrong notes, drawing when I should press and pressing when I should draw, or hitting the wrong button altogether, I actually stumbled through it with him. It felt to me like a disaster, but Kevin showed no exaspiration at all. It felt good to be a student again, to be completely over my head, asea in that foamy mix of ignorance and determination. Kevin did not show any doubt that I could succeed. Therefore I did not doubt myself. It was like being a very young kid again, learning to read. The thrill was intoxicating.

I had brought a small interview tape recorder and recorded Kevin playing the tune both slowly and at full speed, and left his house with my head spinning. I was so mentally exhausted that I left behind the clef illustration he had made me (he insisted that I would eventually have to read music). He emailed it to me.

Within two days, strange to tell, the tune began to feel itself in my fingers, and I was actually playing it all the way through. My concertina is not a good one. It is sturdy enough and its sound is sweet, but it’s difficult to play — you have to really manhandle it to get any smoke out of it — and mine is leaky to boot. Concertinas are expensive. There is not a surplus of cheap, good quality used boxes out there for sale. What you find available is either low quality or high cost, with little in between. My original promise to myself was that if I learned ten tunes reasonably well, I could go ahead and lay out for a decent beginner model, but Kevin is encouraging me to move up as soon as I can, decrying the maxim that “if you learn on a lousy instrument first you’ll be able to play anything” in favor of the practical truth that “if you have a better instrument you’ll be more likely to play it”. So I’m on the very cusp of buying a Rochelle 30-button Anglo, which was designed especially for spanking tyros like myself by a concertina maker who otherwise builds and repairs top-of-the-line boxes. To get into any kind of truly high-quality concertina, you’re looking at at least a thousand dollars. The Rochelle sells for several hundred, handy carrying case and tutorial included. My history with musical instruments gives me pause, but I feel committed to it this time.

I took a second lesson from Kevin last week and I’m now working on “Sally Garden”. It’s going well. I’m frankly astounded at what my brain and fingers have managed to accustom themselves to in a couple of months. And for the first time in my life, I’m reading the music. You know…those little black dots with the sticks and flags.

Gold plus three for Bill and Barb

At least four things happened on this day in 1957. In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a Marmota monax named Phil saw his shadow at 7:47 a.m, correctly sensing an extension of wintry weather that year. Eleanor Roosevelt used her newspaper column “My Day” to admonish the instigators of what she called “unfortunate incidents” related to the fact that President Eisenhower had gone personally to meet King Saud of Saudi Arabia at National Airport in Washington. In men’s college hoops, the Sooners prevailed over the visiting Texas Longhorns on their home court at Norman, Oklahoma, 71 to 59.

And at Sudbrook Methodist in Pikesville, Maryland, outside of Baltimore, 27-year-old Willard from the neighboring town of Reisterstown and 21-year-old local girl Barbara plighted their troth and began a life journey together that continues, I’m happy to say, to this very day.

The way they were. Cutting handsome figures and cake on the Big Day.

The church Mom grew up in and got married in as it looks today. It has recently closed its doors due to decline in membership.

They moved to Bellevue, Washington, a couple of years later, where they raised three children: Jenifer, Matthew and Benjamin; two dogs: Vicky and Lassie; and a number of cats. Along the way they have been the friends of many and continue to be a blessing to me and my own nuclear family and my friends. Which reminds me that my mom made a pea soup so good that even Kip would eat it, even though he allowed no other pea soup to pass his lips.

The venerable pair a few years ago. Still speaking to each other, as it happens.

More about Mom and Dad later. For right now, happy 53rd anniversary to two wonderful people.

The last of the penmen

When I was taught to read and write, I was also taught penmanship. I loved the word penmanship and love it still, even though my penmanship is a disgrace. The word presents mysteries the dictionary does not have answers for. Is the suffix -ship, so bracing and Old World, added to the title penman? Was there ever such a thing as a penman? Am I, to the degree that I value handwriting over the keyboard stroke, a penman? Or is the more interesting suffix -manship — as in brinkmanship — added to the simple root pen? Either way, it’s an august word.

My penmanship took a long time to fall apart. In the private Christian school I attended in first grade, we learned our letters in what we called “print” style, but abandoned that style as soon as we could master cursive, which was ”real” handwriting. Printing was for babies. I was surprised and dismayed later as I made my way through public school to find that a large number of my classmates wrote in print and not cursive. I thought it displayed ignorance. I didn’t even know how to write in print anymore. But sometime in my twenties I gradually switched over, when it became clear to me that I could write more legibly in print, and that there was apparently no shame in it. My print style looked awkward at first, and it took me a long time to work out what to do with rs and qs, but I had become thoroughly disillusioned with my cursive.

My friend Jeff — schooled one row over from me in the same classroom –  had a very tidy, unrushed, and accurate hand, even if it was a little starchy. His was a cursive that leaned forward but held its shape. There were not many mistakes and crossouts in his letters to me over the years, whereas I was always writing in a hurry and my letters and journals were full of blunders, not (only) of concept but of execution. I was sloppy. Am sloppy. “Word processing” hides this fact, and too, as a critic of Jack Kerouac once pointed out, typing is not the same as writing. My handwriting was upright and a little broader than Jeff’s, with more generous loops, but I would always get to thinking faster than I could write, so that my cursive would eventually start leaning further forward and becoming more clumsy, until it was like Dick Van Dyke tumbling into a room. 

We spent an awful lot of time on penmanship, given what it’s come to, which I’m about to give an example of.

*  *  *  *

It is tempting to imagine that the public library is a haven for books and the champion of the printed word. By “books” I mean in this case things printed on paper, and by “the printed word” I mean type or handwriting or other markings set down on paper.

But it would be a mistake so to imagine. I refer you to exhibit A, a pop-up text pane that popped up online recently when I hovered over the little icon of the cell phone, which puzzled me.

 

Exhibit A: Whose side is the library on, anyway?

 

I was perusing the Seattle Public Library’s catalog for — wait for it! — a book on bookbinding, and when I got to the entry giving details for the book, there was this little icon of a cell phone next to it. Wondering what that was, I hovered over it, and well… you see what I saw. I was being encouraged to text this information to myself rather than bother to write it down. I grabbed a screenshot of it and I submit it to you for your slack-jawed dumbfounding.

Of course, it would be unseemly for me to o’erplay my alarum at reading a tip from my local library suggesting that using a pencil and paper would be so hideously inefficient that the idea is dismissed with rhetorical humor. After all, I was using their ONLINE catalog. I wasn’t flipping through a card catalog in a wooden cabinet*. And look, I’m writing and publishing my blog virtually, instead of on paper. You can’t get around the fact that the easiest way, and sometimes the only way, to do many things these days is electronically, and I doubt that libraries are chartered to do things the hardest possible way (many government organizations actually do have such mandates, but I don’t think libraries are among them).

*  *  *  *

When I saw above note, it reminded me that libraries since the dawn of time have been chiefly concerned with preserving, at the very least, information and records, that is to say data, and in the best cases knowledge itself, for future access. The medium of storage, transfer and access is a secondary concern, I would venture to argue. (It should be noted here that a Library of Congress archivist once told venerable Seattle newspaperman Knute Berger that the best method for preserving written information is terra cotta — as in clay pots — because the technology will never get obsolete and it has been proven to be very effective against the ravages of weather, fire, and flood, as well as mischievous people with short arms).

But I confess I am still a little surprised to see this. A little. Don’t the love and appreciation of the vast and long-a-building body of scientific and cultural knowledge that one assumes thumps in the breast of every librarian sort of go hand in hand with a love and appreciation for the medium that has been the go-to medium for so much of the time that we humans have been submitting that knowledge for preservation? Or am I really confusing librarians with book preservationists? As more and more space is given over to tables with Internet-enabled computers on them and less and less space is devoted to books and other printed items, I begin to wonder in what way the library would continue to be a library if a day finally comes when people only go there to get online and download information to their i-Berries, and a certain breed of smartypants finds it a titillating bit of trivia that the etymological root of the word library means “book”. And then they’ll have to explain that “libraries used to have books in them, that’s why…you see…oh never mind.”

Is my life really such a thing of milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds that to reach for a writing implement — a pen is never further than an arm’s length away from me and often as close as my coat pocket — is counterproductive? Is productivity the measure of everything? (Hint: my answer to that question has only two letters in it.) And have we given any thought to what may be happening to portions of our brains that are no longer being exercised because we no longer write anything by hand longer than a grocery list? And do we really want to be dependent on our phone service provider for every little snippet of info we want to write down and remember? Or is it that memory itself is no longer a value for our species, because everything is theoretically “retrievable” from some database, even our own notes to ourselves? None of these are rhetorical questions (well, just the one). I read an article recently suggesting that in the future, like tomorrow, memory and specifically the ability to recall knowledge will be less important as a job skill than focus, the ability to see through and filter data to find what is relevant and useful. Everything you could commit to memory, I guess, would be obsolete as soon as you did so, and access to the ever-changing relevant data is assumed to be guaranteed.

Even ten years ago, I would not have known what kind of world to imagine where the phrase “send yourself a text message” would make sense. I prefer not to text myself, thanks. I would sooner drop little notes into terra cotta pots.

*In downtown Seattle, the old wooden cabinets with thousands of cards in them were replaced by a computer-based system, I believe, even before our new post-space-age library was built, all except those at the very tippy top floor in the Seattle section — where librarian Carol Lo recently demonstrated to me their beautifully antiquated usefulness in finding local newspaper articles on hundreds of topics indexed by hand over the last hundred and some years. Most of that information is not electronically catalogued, so if there’s a fire in the SPL much of that history will be history.

High, wide and handsome

Note: Might as well put the kettle on. I reckon you’ll be settin’ a while with this one.

“Lord my shepherd help me pray
Though I left my heart to stray
Though I left my heart untrue
I can follow
I do
I do”

– Hem

There are two young men named George whom I will never forget. I say young men because that is the way I remember them — youthful and energetic and with the whole world open before them, as they are pictured here — though they are now both much older than I was when I knew them, and I felt very old at the time. When I was turning twenty-nine and came to F– Ranch, they were both just nineteen. George P., whom I recently tracked down and heard from by email, says he is “a middle-aged dad” now. I have completely lost the other one, George T., whom we called Geo.

The end of a good day. Wranger George P. and Kernal. Click for larger.

I’m pretty sure I would not be alive today if it were not for George and Geo. In the cheerless middle of a cold winter night in the last century, these two friends practically carried me out of the dilapidated house we lived in and sped me to the ER of the nearest hospital. Turns out it was a good thing they did that, but I love them for other reasons.

George was from up north in the state and had spent his childhood summers as a camper at the ranch. When I arrived in March of 1991, he had already been at the ranch a few weeks working full time. There wasn’t much going on in the winter, but there were cows and sheep to be cared for in addition to all the horses, and there were repairs to make around the ranch’s 4200 acres — gates and fences, for instance. George was helping Arden, who had retired from dairy farming to work as the ranch’s farm manager. Come spring and summer we would be very busy putting kids on horses, taking out trails, and leading horsemanship classes, and in late summer and fall we’d also be making hay (really making hay, like mowing it, “bining” it, and stacking it in barns).

Always ready with a smile. George trudging back from chores on a winter morning. Click for larger.

Arden relied on George because George was reliable in that showing-up-no-matter-the-hour-or-the-weather kind of way, and in that tell-him-once-and-he’ll-get-it-done kind of way, the kind of reliability that an old dairyman found hard to come by in young men in the twilight of the twentieth century. But I relied on George every day in another way; I relied on his phlegmatic calm, his kind and generous nature, his willingness to share every good and bad experience and then laugh about it at the end of the day while we rubbed neatsfoot oil into our boots to keep them from cracking and drying out. He was quick to laugh, but there was a kind of sadness to him, I thought right away; it seemed as though George was hunkered down on the ranch because he didn’t know quite what else to do in life. His work history had been in restaurant kitchens, and in addition to all the other work he did he was sharing cooking duties in the ranchhouse at the time I arrived. He was a good cook, a natural, and he liked making and serving food. However, he was too valuable as a horseman to be in the kitchen during the summer onslaught, and there were others who would take up the culinary tasks during that time.

Looking back from the present, I see I had so much unidentified anger deep inside me then, and even though I willingly did the hard work and obeyed the rules as best I could, I remember always feeling that I was about to burst. Uncle Bill seemed to embody everything I felt it important to rebel against, and yet I also felt it was my duty not to spread bad attitude. George was the one who heard me grumble under my breath, or read the particular shape of the steam coming out of my ears after Bill would pass by barking some complaint, and he would find a way to make me laugh, or he’d just say “Come on, let’s run the horses out.” Playing guitars with George on the dangerously collapsing front porch of “the men’s house” at the end of the day — well, I think that might have saved my soul.

George T. ("Geo") on a rare break in the bustle. Click for larger.

Geo arrived a few weeks after I did. Geo was from Cardwell, Montana. At that time in his life he was experiencing a difficulty relating to authority. His relationship with his father he described as hostile. I seem to recall talk of punches having been thrown. I’m pretty sure Geo had done a couple years in the military (is that possible at so young an age?), which had done him wonders, but he did not want to go back to Montana. A pastor he knew who occasionally volunteered at the ranch and whom we called Pastor Willie had suggested he give the ranch a whirl.

That was a happy day for us, because the Ranch needed a personality like Geo’s. Geo was comic in bearing and buoyant in spirit. Despite being from a small town in Montana, he had urban hip-hop tastes. He had a habit of striking up what he called “beatbox” or “bebox” by using his mouth to imitate a heavy, sputtering rap beat. Very quickly, every member of the ranch began asking him to stop doing this, but he would only grin the big friendly grin you see on his face here and shout, as a d.j. would, “Hit it! Hit it! Hit it!” He had an infectious laugh — hell, just looking at him smiling makes me laugh even now. He was indomitable. You couldn’t squelch his life-loving energy.

Geo, Rebecca and Joanna vaulting on horseback, another ranch visitor handing up the kitten for the finale. I think I was gone by this time. Photo used by permission of Chris Alcott. Click for larger.

One thing I especially valued about Geo was that no matter how much he thought something “sucked”, and there were many things about the way the ranch was managed that quickly found themselves on this list for Geo, he seemed determined to make the best of it. I remember seeing him frown — the frown was always temporary, he just couldn’t be like that for long, and while he frowned you could see him struggling with what he considered unfair or outrageous. His heart was good. And he didn’t want to use his fists. Pretty soon, he’d be laughing again.

And he did amazingly well with the parts of the ranch that did not suck, like being with the campers. I escaped counselor duty all but one week of that summer because I was needed as stablemaster, and George was often assisting Arden with farm chores. But Geo served as a counselor for the most difficult age-group of boys, the back-talking, limit-testing preteens; you’d see them pile out of their parents’ cars on Sunday afternoon all full of beans, ready to cut loose and raise hell, but in less than a day they’d be marching in step behind Geo like ducklings, loudly repeating the boot-camp cadences he had taught them. And when they stepped out of line, he sat on them, but he laughed with them too and it was all a great time. They knew he liked them, and they loved being around him. By the end of the week, their lives were different.

Built at the beginning of the War Between the States, a.k.a. the Civil War. We called it "the Mill". Click for larger, but watch your step on the porch.

We worked side by side every day. During the busy summer season, the day started before sunup with the drive in to the ranch house. We saddled up the few horses we’d kept in the night before for this purpose and rode them out to look for the rest of the herd in whichever pasture we’d run them out into the previous evening. Bringing the herd in was exhilarating. A herd on the move is a terrifying, beautiful thing. Being part of that motion is like riding some great raging river. We broke fast after round up, then we taught lessons in the ring and rode trails all day. I was the least experienced rider, so was not often needed as an instructor. Some days I stood in the stables, talking to the horses and making lead ropes out of old hay twines.

At the end of the day, a few of us would mount up, call for the dogs, and run the horses back out to pasture for the night, what we called “round-out”, chasing them through Ring pasture so they wouldn’t stop and eat the good grass there, and on into Lake or Thoroughbred pasture. We cracked little whips and shouted to keep them going, and the collies nipped at their heels and barked. When we’d herded the last pony through the gate, there was the pleasure of the five minutes or so riding back in the evening sun toward the stable, and toward dinner and maybe a shower. It was the best time of day. We never rushed back. The round-out crew was different every day, but very often it was George or Geo and myself and one or two of the older campers. In my memory I see us all riding back through Ring at a walk, with the evening sun turning the green grass gold.

One of the campers in the stable with Decapa, or maybe that's Julie. The ranch house is visible in the background. Photo courtesy of Amber MacPherson. Click for larger.

As stable master, I also recruited a few souls to scoop the stables with me before they could go in to dinner. I’d hook the spreader up to the PTO (power-take-off) of one of the tractors and drive it into the stable, and after we’d loaded it up with poop I’d drive it out into one of the pastures, usually Lower Barn, and spread it. The spreader was a wagon with a kind of conveyor belt that pulled the manure back into a spinning mechanism that flung it out into the fields to serve as fertilizer. You controlled the flinger with a lever, and if you let it spin too fast you’d have horseshit all over your back in no time. Manure was greenest and wettest in the spring, when the horses were eating the new grass. Because of the proteins in the grass, this was also the time when the horses shed their ragged winter coats and their flanks started to shine and they fattened up. I enjoyed flinging the manure. The noise of the tractor meant I didn’t have to listen to anybody, and at the end of the day that was nice. I just drove around, looking back every once in a while to see the clumps of dung arcing beautifully against the setting sun.

Teaching classes in the ring. Photo used by permission of Mary McDowell Heidorn, standing center. Click for larger.

After spreading manure, there were flakes of hay to toss to the round-up/round-out horses in the paddock and whatever sheep or cattle might be in the barn that night. Most nights there were also hayrides, barn-dances, or worship services, depending on the day of the week. We returned exhausted to the Mill, as we called our house, played a little guitar or treated our boots before collapsing into bed in rooms where ornate wallpaper put up a century before was pealing, and got up before sunrise to do it all again. On Saturday mornings we had cattle round-up and a chuckwagon breakfast, which meant we had to get up even earlier. Through the fall and winter, the workdays were shorter but the work itself — fixing fence in the biting cold wind and snow — was more demanding. More often we worked alone then. In late summer Arden taught me to drive the tractor along steep hills so we could stay ahead of the haying while the weather was good. Or I’d hook up the brush hog to the PTO and spend days chopping back blackberries that were encroaching on pastures and hayfields. George and Geo were often using other tractors to set out those big round rolls of hay, especially in winter when there was no more grass for the animals. Arden did all the other things we younger men had no clue about, like taking the spring rams and calves to market. He came and went like a ghost, always smiling and crooning hymns. I liked those days, too, but I was always glad to get back to the ranchhouse, where a cup of coffee and some quiet conversation awaited, and maybe some cake, too. 

It wasnt’ that the work was hard and physical. That was the best part. We ate like hogs and slept like unmined diamonds. What was difficult to endure was the endless speechifying by the owner about how this wasn’t good enough and how that had been the wrong thing to do. And every complaint and edict was backed by a scripture reference — some parable ingeniously interpreted — so there was no arguing. There was a constant wearing down of one’s spirit, of one’s good intentions. The staff, in response to this subtle but constant abuse from above, closed ranks to support one another, which was the true miracle of that place.

Weekend visitors to the ranch heading out on a trail. Photo used by permission of Chris Alcott, who is in the foreground at left riding what looks to be Sundae. Click for larger.

Geo left the ranch late in the year; just couldn’t take the insanity of being carped at incessantly by a man who was never satisfied, never gave praise and always criticized, pressured and wheedled. We all missed him terribly, even perhaps Bill, who was not happy about how Geo departed and expressed “disappointment” in the young man. Bill needed to keep a stock of people to villify and use as examples, and Geo’s hotheaded departure was convenient that way. The young women of the ranch, especially Rebecca and Joanna, the two who had grown up there and were homeschooled and more intelligent and better educated than any people under eighteen I had ever met, were constantly rolling their eyes when Geo first arrived; his beatbox noisiness and puppy-dog energy offended some sense of culture they had imagined for themselves by reading Austen and the Brontës. But when he left, the place had a hole in it. I think he went back to Montana for a few months, but it didn’t work out, and we soon heard that if Bill would allow it, Geo wanted to return after Christmas. After a speech in which he gloated about Geo having learned a lesson, Bill told us he was allowing Geo to return at the New Year. We rejoiced.

Though older, I was like both Georges. Like George P., I struggled with an inner restlessness, and like Geo, I had inside me a truculent resister against authority. I had almost quit and gone home after two weeks, having seen how things were there, but even in that short time I had developed a loyalty to the hardworking folks who would be left with even more to do if I left. Perhaps — no, certainly, I ascribed more importance to my own presence there than was due. The ranch was constantly attracting more volunteers who wanted to have a part of that beautiful life on the land with horses. But I stayed and I began, for the first time in my life, dealing with the contradictions, working out my salvation with fear and trembling. Like George. Like Geo. And my body began to come awake to the fact that I was a creature of earth, an awareness that has not ceased to tug at me for a single day since then.

A moment to unwind. Geo, George and Jonathan, the youngest member of the family that was living on the ranch at the time. Click for larger.

Meanwhile my heart began to implode, literally. I contracted acute pericarditis, no one every found out how. Bill discouraged doctor visits because they were an outlay of money that to him expressed the opposite of faith in God. (Yes, I know, these are the machinations that go on in a cult. And in some very real respects that’s what the ranch was. But I must be as charitable to Bill as truthful memory will allow. He was not amassing money and driving around in Porches and having ten wives. He was earnestly trying to communicate the gospel of Jesus, and give children a safe place to develop a sense of belonging and achievement in the process.) Insanely, I went along with the “have faith and it will go away” policy, as I was not fond of hospitals myself and at that time still had that young man’s sense of indestructability. But the sac around my heart had filled with fluid over the preceding weeks and I was approaching the point where I could not breathe without pain — it felt like someone was harpooning me from behind every time I inhaled.

As my internal organs began to be increasingly restricted by the accumulation of water around my heart and lungs, I failed to see that I was in what the Germans quaintly call Lebensgefahr — “life-danger”. And Ohio’s deep bitter winter cold, to which I was unaccustomed, seemed to increase the pain. Hearing of the trouble, my parents begged me to get me to a doctor. I did, once, and got some Erithromyacin for the swelling, and assumed it would take care of itself. But it got worse, and the breath I was able to draw became shorter and shorter and more painful with each day, even as I convinced myself that it would be okay, until I woke up one night when the cold was bone-breaking and the heat had gone out in the house and found myself rasping and shivering in my sleeping bag. I suddenly realized that something was dangerously wrong. I called out for George, noting even in my delirium how nifty it was that I only had to shout one name, and both of my housemates came running into my room.

The hospital was thirty miles away by twisty country roads. The boys helped me dress and loaded me gingerly, like a live torpedo, into the back of the Subaru, where I lay in fetal position feeling every bump and dip on the way. I believe George was driving. Calm. Assured. Fast. Since I did not die, Bill was able to claim later that this trip had been unnecessary, though I know and they knew that I might have stepped out with His Grimness (the Reaper) that very night had they dawdled. But I did not die. That was not the Plan. I still believed very much in a Plan back then. Nowadays I struggle with the idea of a Plan. Here’s what I remember, though: it never occurred to me at the time that I would not live, not even a month later when the symptoms returned and the cardiologist I was visiting took one look at me and called an ambulance and I was again hospitalized with acute pericarditis. I still remember lying in the ICU, knowing that everything would be alright. I knew that I was loved. For some reason, that made me feel invincible.

The bad ones always survive. I know this photo was taken after my hospitalization because I had never been able to grow a beard until after being on prednizone. I don't recall the name of the woman in the picture, but we could not have survived the days without the help of our weekend volunteers. Click for larger.

Like I said, I love George and Geo for reasons other than saving my life. It was because we were all there together during one of the most bizarre chapters in any of our lives, when we were young, strong and optimistic. It is difficult to talk about my ranch experience with people who were not there, because in many ways it doesn’t make any sense. People do what they have to do, and everyone’s journey has its own dark turns that seem inexplicable to others. The entire time I was at the ranch I wondered if I was staying because I was too afraid to leave, and through all the years since then I’ve wondered if I left because I was too afraid to stay.

Maybe we all wonder that, because the ranch had such great potential and to have been a part of it for any time at all was to breathe in that vision of an outdoor life with good people close by. Geo appears in pictures that were taken at the ranch the next year, but no one knows what became of him after that. I’ve just located George again after all these years, and this very day he wrote me that he left the ranch about six months after I did, but went back years later with a wife and young family and was helping to run the place as program manager for several years. He says he left only after Bill decided to quit paying the staff, (“After all, it’s more of a ministry than a job,” Bill reasoned), because he had a family to feed. George returned to the hospitality industry, where his efforts were appreciated, and is now managing a Bob Evans restaurant. Like me, he has gone where his journey has led him. But I know he wakes up from dreams in which he’s bringing the herd in, standing in the stirrups at a full gallop. I know he wakes up remembering the smell of spearment stems just broken by the hooves of running horses.  

NOTE: This is one of a series — or rather a cluster — of posts that I am writing about my experiences at the ranch, not in any particular order. The first one was Shooting Emma.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Benham Gallery on First Avenue has closed after 22 years. I only had a “passing” connection to it, never even went in unless it might have been on one of the First Thursday Art Walks two decades ago. However, the loss of any gallery along one’s route is a nasty hit, given the likelihood that what will replace it in that space will be something less inspiring and even simply less visually interesting. This has got me thinking of other galleries, gone and not gone, on my commute.

Ouch. See ya online.

I pass several art galleries every morning on my way down from the bus stop on Third Avenue to my workplace on Western Avenue. The first one is the Patricia Rovzar Gallery on the southwest corner of Second and University. The large windows of this location are put to good use. From the sidewalk I have as good a view of a rotating portfolio of artists’ works as if my daily route took me through the halls of the Seattle Art Museum, which is across the street but does not have fine art hanging in its windows. My favorite artist in the Rovzar gallery is Jerri Lisk, an Idaho artist who paints in acrylic on aluminum.

"Oakley Doakley" by Jerri Lisk. Image used by permission of the artist.

She paints landscapes that are true in a simple way like the observations of children and often include the white trunks of aspens or birches or oaks and blue shadows that suggest a kind of cool underlying the warm sunlight. I don’t often feel strongly about the plastic arts, but I often pause at one of the windows when Jerri Lisk’s paintings are hanging and just fill my soul up. I did it this morning. If that gallery ever closes I will surely perish.

My soul is enlarged. The Rovzar Gallery across University Street from SAM.

The other two are the Benham Gallery and, right nextdoor, the R. E. Welch Gallery. Until the closing of the Benham, which was a gallery established specifically to showcase photography, these two narrow-fronted galleries were sandwiched between Ancient Grounds on the north side and the Cherry Street Coffee House (not on Cherry Street, obviously – it’s a branch location) on the south side, so that they formed a strange, doughty little rampart of storefronts that offered either coffee or art or both. The two fine art galleries dealt only in art, but Ancient Grounds serves espresso amid a shop full of First Nations tribal artifacts, art and curios, and Cherry Street, like many coffee houses, displays art by local artists on its walls.

I have always appreciated this dense little reach of my walkamute, where the windows are full of interesting people, art and crafts to view and reflect upon as I pass by, and where the smells of coffee and tea waft out onto the sidewalks. The retreat of the Benham Gallery from this cluster is like a direct hit scored by the anonymous, non-malevolent economic forces that lurk behind all such closings. I don’t imagine the gallery’s closing will negatively affect Cherry Street Coffee, but with a sudden gaping hole now between Ancient Grounds and R. E. Welch, I think it would be good time to visit them if you haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Goodbye Mr. Sugar, wherever you are.

On my homeward route, I go up Spring Street. There used to be a tiny gallery on the northeast corner of First and Spring called Isis on First, the only good thing about a tragically ugly concrete building there.  The gallery is gone now and I can’t even find an online presence for it, which is sad, because I wanted to mention an artist whose name I think was Edward Sugar, although I cannot find anything on him either.

My recollection is that Sugar is a First Nations painter, though I don’t recall why I think that; maybe there was some info in the window. His art was very bright and…I want to say splashy and imprecise, but that doesn’t really sound very appealing. One of his paintings that hung in the window of Isis last year was of an owl on a tree limb with a moon behind, but it was not “photographic” in style, nor was it abstract. I don’t know anything about styles or schools of painting, so I don’t know what to call it, but the technique was the heaping of large swirls of colorful paint with a palette knife. You could see it was an owl, by its shape and posture and the size of its eyes. The rest was all strokes of color swirling every which way, and the moon was just a whirlpool of yellow and white paint. It looked as much like a painting of paint as it did a painting of an owl. Anyway, I liked it a lot.  

Late blue daylight

I was going to save this post for a lean week later on, but Marni was eager to see this photo on the blog, and I admit that this post is merely an excuse to display the photo, so I’m posting it now.  

One of my favorite things, photographically, is that moment in a day when it is not yet dark but lights have begun to come on in homes and businesses, and there is a rich blueness to the whole atmosphere even though the sky may actually be cloudy. I remember a photo in an issue of National Geographic — or perhaps my brain fuses several photos into a single visual memory — of some rural general store out in Wyoming or one of the Dakotas with a warm yellow glow in its windows and the blueness of evening all around it. I suppose, now that I think about it, that I have seen many hundreds of images like that in my life. Farmhouses at dusk. Such images always mesmerize me and make me instantly want to be at that place. There is something in me wired to respond to that collection of cool blue dark and warm yellow light.  

The magical hour for lamplit architectural photography.

Last weekend after our tryst with Marni at Island Books on Mercer Island, we all walked over to Starbucks on SE 27th Street. For several reasons (overroasted beans/burnt flavor being one and the operational tendencies of large corporations being the other) I’m not a fan of Starbucks and don’t patronize them if there is a smaller alternative nearby, so it chagrins me that I’m doing even backhanded advertising for the behemoth of beans. Nevertheless, I love this building. What drew my eye when we walked up was the hefty exposed beams and the lovely wood exterior “ceiling”, and the fact that the building is in the form of a shed with its tallest wall facing south to capture the precious northwest daylight through the tall windows beyond the fireplace. And, yes, the fireplace, which can be enjoyed both inside and outside.  

It reminded me of something I read shortly after the downtown Seattle REI building opened, comparing it and some other building. The point was that the architects REI contracted had created a building that suited and seemed to be in harmony with the space it occupied — not only the space on its block but also the space in its city and the space in its region, the Pacific Northwest. It was open and woodsy and it capitalized on daylight and elevated spaces. In other words it was a lot like us. The other building, whose identity I now forget, was just some swanky modern box dumped among its neighboring buildings without any relation to or consideration of its neighborhood, a reflection of the cookie-cutter mindset of the boardmembers of the multinational corporation whose outlet it was.  

As we approached this sturdy lean-to of a coffee shack, I wondered out loud if it was the work of the same architectural firm that had done the REI store. It turns out that’s not the case. REI’s Seattle store was designed by Mithun. This Starbucks was designed by MulvannyG2 Architecture of Bellevue. It opened in October 2004. Still, it looks to me that the same ethos was at work in both cases, and it’s one I applaud. Ironic that a company that has pretty much conquered the world with with the cookie-cutter approach would be the instigators of such a worthy and quintessentially local design. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio… 

We spent a half-hour inside (Darby had to wait outside but she could see us through the big windows), during which time the light of day started to fade, and as we left I turned around and saw this. Part of me said, you don’t need a photo of a Starbucks, and another part of me said, what an amazing thing it is to live on this planet at this hour of the day. 

 

Island treasure

“There’s an independent bookstore
The last one that remains
All the others you might look for
Have been eaten by the chains
They soldier on…”

– Al Stewart

Mercer Island, a.k.a. the Rock, is an island in Lake Washington, once fully and still remarkably covered with tall Douglas firs, that has quick access to both Seattle and the east side of the lake (the Eastside) thanks to the fact that Interstate 90 runs right through it, connecting it with both shores. Most of the thousands of people who travel across the island every day never experience any part of it beyond the ivy that dribbles down over the grey freeway walls as they blast along on their commutes from the Eastside to Seattle and from Seattle to the Eastside.

Not that there’s much reason for non-residents to use the off-ramps. Mercer Island is what the Eastside used to be — a “bedroom community” to Seattle. The island has enough room for one small city, which has lately developed a ten-story skyline of thoughtfully executed apartments and condos, and a few thousand postwar residential homes (I guess it’s getting late enough in America that I should specify post-World War II homes — what realtors call “midcenturies”). There is no industry, just residences and the kinds of businesses that serve them — dry cleaners, restaurants, dentists, Starbuckses, teriyaki joints, nail salons, realty and law offices, a Hollywood Video store (now closed up — done in by Netflix and TiVo), a bridal and tux shop. I haven’t had a reason to set foot on the Rock since the last time I visited my friend Rich’s dad’s house, which is up the hill from the city somewhere in that somnolent and sylvan suburb.

That said, and oddly enough, my local independent neighborhood bookstore, Island Books, is nestled in this community. It has been my neighborhood bookstore for several months, even though it is not in the neighborhood I live in and even though I had never visited it until yesterday. Why this is is, my friend Marni is a bookseller there. She’s a bookseller in an honest-to-gosh mom-n-pop book store.

Marni is one of the many souls I failed to keep in touch with after Angela and I were married. I’ve known her since high school (Kip inducted her into our tiny crèche — she “got” our sense of humor). For years we knew she was working at Madison Park Books — which, alack!, went the way bookstores and even video stores tend to go, id est, away – but we didn’t keep much in touch. I ran into her a few years ago with Mara and learned that she was now at Island Books. She started sending Mara wonderful hardbound picture books for Christmas, which she herself admitted was sort of unexpected and over the top, but she couldn’t help it. The thing about booksellers like Marni is, they actually view their job, in its best realization, as shepherding new books to the people who should be owning them. A bookseller who loves books but dislikes people is not this kind of bookseller, and you won’t find any of those at Island Books, I’ll warrant. Marni likes people. She likes getting to know people in the ways that make them who they are. When books come into the store, she sees not only titles, but the faces of people she knows who MUST HAVE THIS BOOK. If those people don’t happen to be customers of Island Books, she finds other ways, such as birthdays and holidays, to get their books to them.

This is one sure way to make a customer out of Matt. Earlier this year, after Marni and I connected on Facebook (yeah, Facebook, is there a problem?) and after she started reading and commenting on this blog, and after an intertwining conversation arose about the Bullitt family’s old fireplace on Squak Mountain and the importance of supporting local independent bookstores, and especially after Louis, another reader of this blog and partaker in that very conversation, tracked down Marni through Island Books and ordered me a book on the Bullitt family of King Broadcasting fame and had them send it to me, all on the huggermugger, I decided that Island Books was my bookstore. Marni also was the one who recommended (and would have bought for me and sent to me if I’d let her) the book Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford, which I still intend to blog about someday.

Awash in northern light. Mara behind the counter with her new friend, Marni, and Roger, the boss of her.

Mara astool with Darby, Marni and book hunter extraordinaire Cindy.

Yesterday we used the occasion of the arrival of a biography of William Randolph Hearst (The Chief by David Nasaw), which I had ordered from Marni earlier in the week, as an excuse to cross the lake and finally visit the store. It was Marni’s day off, but she met us there with her dog, a beautiful and soulful russety Golden Retriever named Darby, and introduced us to her Island Books’ coworkers Cindy, who handled the search for the Bullitt book Louis bought me and found it in Tennessee or thereabouts; Lori, who was reigning benignly over the children’s department; and Roger, who co-owns the store with his wife Nancy (Roger took over the store in 1991 but it’s been here since 1973). We were welcomed as warmly as if we were family. Despite a rush that engulfed the store during our visit, Roger spoke with me at length about his experience with education and private schools, and also about why a book like Kin Platt’s Sinbad and Me, a favorite among a certain contingent of about my vintage, would go out of print and never be reprinted again, and about certain actions I as a concerned citizen of readerdom might take to nudge the book back into print (who knew you could DO stuff?).   

Island Books is the only bookstore on the island, to my knowledge, and it’s an insular treasure. I hope the burghers of Mercer Island realize what they have there. It’s been a rough year for retail in general, and with the slim margins that booksellers must operate in even in the best of times (“the publisher prints the price right on the book,” says Marni, “so you can’t raise the price, you can only lower it”) this bookshop lives ever on the brink of extinction. Nevertheless, the atmosphere inside the store betrays no hint of economic anxiety or bitterness over the injustices of the publishing industry (Amazon gets a big break, yo, because they can buy each title by the zillions). The store is in a little strip mall and has a rather narrow front, but is marvelously lit by northern windowlight — the best bookish kind — all along its length. Sturdy old armchairs find themselves right behind you when you want to sit and thumb through some treasure you’ve discovered, and the place is all of unpainted wood shelves that Roger makes himself as though they were chicken coops and his books were prize hens.

And just about the time you are getting toward the back of the long space and realizing that the store is a LOT larger than it looks from the front, you come to the children’s section, which bends around behind the neighboring storefront and occupies almost as much space again as the rest of the store. Every picture book is “face out”, which from the perspective of a book is like being in paradise. People can see you when you’re face out. They can be lured by your title and by the engaging artwork on your cover. Face out is the only way to display picture books. From across the room, ten yards away from this wall of Caldecott winners, old favorites and new releases, I saw the cover of Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder, a book that had been a magical favorite of mine when I was a child. We bought it for Mara. (Full disclosure: we bought it for me.)

There’s also a playhouse that kids can climb into, which we expected Mara to be all over, but after one trip through that she was less interested in the playhouse or any of the books than in Darby, whom Marni let Mara walk around the store on her leash, and in Marni herself, whom Mara today came to regard as her own friend.

There is apparently a lot more that goes into being a bookseller than one might imagine at first. I think it involves a little spellcasting. Marni is one of the best, and to my lights, Island Books is an establishment worthy of her magic.  

NOTE: The blogger at Surrounded By Water: A Mercer Island Blog, who might disagree with me about the island’s worthiness as a place to visit, has written an informative article on Island Books that does not suffer from solipsism.

Happy bistro to you

There’s a little craftsman house on 42nd Avenue in the Madison Park nieghborhood that looks like many of the other craftsman bungalows on the street except that there is a wooden sign out in front of it that says Madison Park Cafe. Nestled among its quiet residential neighbors just around the corner from the chic Madison Street business district, the Madison Park Cafe is a French-style bistro that serves simple, tasty, legendary cuisine. It has been in business for 29 years. Angela and I went there once or twice before Mara was born but there is always a longish wait for the few tables crammed into the two rooms that used to be the front rooms of the house, and ever since we became parents we become hungry precipitously, without warning, so putting our name on a list isn’t usually an option. We suddenly look at each other and say “I’m starving, what’s the quickest way to get food in front of ourselves?”

Worth the wait.

For quick brunch (we’re serious brunchdogs — we live for eggs and French toast at noon), we eat at home or speed up the freeway to Leena’s in Shoreline, a Greek family diner where they know us and seat us quickly and the food is always delicious, arrives quickly, and is fairly priced. But a few days ago we did things a little differently. It was Angela’s birthday.  

Those whose birthday follows directly behind that of the Lamb of God, even the Ancient of Days, get a raw deal. Everybody’s all about celebrating the virgin birth, that lowly but blessed event of yore, and a birthday coming just days later inevitably becomes something of a postlude. At worst, a footnote. You can’t compete with the Baby Jesus, so you’ll never be the main event. It’s a life of getting one present that’s supposed to go for both Christmas and your birthday. For a child it’s the worst possible fate. For a grownup, it’s still a bummer. Birthdays are supposed to be a time when it’s all about you, when you’re IT.

So making a birthday in the lee of Christmas seem special requires a little extra energy. Mara and I were up to the task. We got up before Angela and prepared tea for her and made a birthday card with crayons and pony stickers. Mara wrote the letters of TO MOMMY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOVE MARA by herself, though I had to write several of the letters first so she could copy them into the card. We brought up the helium balloon we had hidden downstairs the day before, and cued up John McCutcheon’s birthday song “Cut the Cake” — track 13 from his Water from Another Time album. After morning festivities and presenting of her gifts (a craft project from Mara and tickets to a production of Meet Me in St. Louis at Issaquah’s Village Theatre) we headed over to Madison Park and treated her to a brunch at the cafe.

Birthday brunch bliss.

Angela and I both ordered the spinach baked eggs (set before us in geothermally hot individual casserole dishes) and Mara had a pancake and eggs over medium, what she calls “yolky eggs”. The coffee was tasty and strong. The ambience is wonderful even on an icky day, but on this day of bright blue sky and low winter sun it was bright and festive. The wait was about a half hour, during which we stood just inside the door and glared at the people dining a few feet away. There were only two waiters — ours was the perfect balance of friendly and efficient. She did forget to bring the raspberry scone to start us out but the food came pretty quickly and so it worked out fine. We had coffee cake with our meals anyway. By the by, we recommend the coffeecake, and all the rest of it, too.

After breakfast we wandered into a few of the retail shops along Madison, then spent some time in the new playground at the center of the community. It had been quite a while since Mara had gotten to exhaust herself running and climbing outside. Then we came home and Mara and I made Angela a cake. Angela told us she felt sufficiently fêted, and it was great to see such a big smile on her face all during her special day.

Sweet loop

Northeast Park Road is a small looping residential extension of Twenty-First Northeast, where the winding double track of Ravenna Boulevard puts paid to Twenty First as a named entity. Every Christmas, this little neighborhood of two dozen very nice old tudor houses becomes transformed into a wonderland of colored lights and decorations and calls itself Candy Cane Lane. I suppose there is a Candy Cane Lane in every large city, but this one has apparently been “in residence” since the 1940s.

It has been one of our holiday traditions since Mara’s second Christmas to visit Candy Cane Lane. The first year, if I recall correctly, we merely joined the caravan of automobiles driving down the one-car-wide street one night when we happened to see it on our way home from Christmas shopping. As soon as it’s dark, Ravenna Boulevard jams up with cars trying to turn into Candy Cane Lane or exit from the other end of Candy Cane Lane. For the last three years, however, we have made a point to park the car and walk through. 

In front of our favorite house in the Lane.

Candy Cane Lane is not the most incredible light show in Seattle. Certainly there are individual houses that fairly pulse with colored wattage in every neighborhood, and there are other rows and streets that, simply by accident, contain a greater absolute number of houses done up in blazing electric yulefire. There’s a house just a block away from us that has more lights on it than any single house in Candy Cane Lane, and over on Maple Leaf there’s a house whose yard is jam packed with colored lights in different grouped areas — food lights such as chilis and tomatoes, Halloween lights such as skeletons and pumpkins, Christmas lights of course, ocean lights such as shells and fish, Jewish lights such as menorahs  — and which is topped by a large star of Bethlehem attached to a scaffold on the roof. Celebrants may wander into the yard and investigate all the different areas, and there is a donation box posted on the walkway.

What makes Candy Cane Lane unique is that every single house in the loop joins in. There may be a neighborhood covenant for all I know that mandates participation, but at a minimum there are signs — one in each yard — that express the equivalent of the word “Peace” in languages from around the world (one sign read “Suhl” and had “Afghan” written underneath, though I believe that this is simply an Arabic word).  But most houses also have either some yard decorations, some strings of lights along the roof, a display in the windows, front pillars wrapped in broad red ribbon to look like candy canes, or all of these. One of our favorites has old-time wooden toys in its front window, and another has a white-bearded nutcracker riding a rocking horse. In the traffic circle, a large circular hedge is fitted with a revolving row of figures — one year it was drummers; this year it was ice skaters.

Mara has an uncanny memory. As we passed the last house, which had a large train on the porch, she commented that it was different, that last year this house had had a tea set out on the porch. After she mentioned this I recalled that, yes, we had let her walk up the steps of this house last year for a closer look at the large dolls sitting at kid sized tables and chairs. 

Obviously some years it snows, some years it’s clear, and some years it’s wet. Tonight it was raining, but a tradition is a tradition. 

Shooting Emma

Note and Warning: This post contains a graphic description of a life ending and may be an uncomfortable read. I considered changing all the names here in case anyone might be hurt by this story, but instead decided to report it as truthfully as I am able and with an emphasis on my own experience, which nevertheless is only one person’s and told through the haze of nearly twenty years. For the photos in this post (don’t worry, the images are of other moments) I am indebted to Amber MacPherson, who was a camper at the Ranch before, during and after my sojourn there, and who, besides having turned out to be a photographer with a creative eye, had good horse-sense at the time and was a genuine asset on a roundup. 

Maybe it was breakfast-time, I can no longer recall, but at some point early in the day, before the horses and ponies had been saddled up for their day of well-intended abuse at the hands of Ohio’s youth, “Uncle” Bill approached me as I crossed the ranch house lawn and drew me aside to talk out of the hearing of the young campers. I tried to stay as far away from Uncle Bill, who was not my uncle, as my volunteer work on his 4400-acre F– Ranch would allow. It was uncommon, however, for him to approach in hushed tones; usually his complaints and pronouncements, however manipulative they may have seemed to me, were uttered plainly and openly. It signified something unusual.

It was Emma, he told me. Sometime during the night or that morning she had tried to push her way through the closed gate between Lake and Ring pastures, among the bent metal bars and the mesh of wire. She had gotten one of her hind legs caught and it was broken. Perhaps she had fallen on it. ”She’s still tangled,” he said, and when he said this I turned my head instantly to cast my vision over the lawn I was standing on, over the near paddock next to the greyed barn, over the deep and mostly treeless valley of Ring Pasture to its far ridge, where I could see a pony-sized speck of stillness standing at the gate to Lake Pasture.

Ring Pasture. Photo courtesy of Amber MacPherson.

We would have to put her down, Uncle Bill said. He didn’t want the young campers, who were attending a horsemanship clinic at the Ranch that weekend, to even know about this turn of events lest they be upset by it, so he wanted me to divert the morning’s trails, which usually would be led through Ring Pasture, through Thoroughbred and Lower Barn instead. For lack of an applicant over the age of 20 that year, Bill had appointed me stablemaster, so it was my job to make sure things went smoothly in the stables and on the trails.

It was one of the rare moments that Bill and I were able to find any level on which to connect and meet. We disagreed about almost everything, but his furrowed brow and look of disquiet told me he felt this loss deeply, and what’s more, he knew that as a sensitive (he might correctly have thought “mollycoddled and entitled”) West Coast yuppie who had only learned to ride a handful of months ago, I would be crushed by the loss of one of my charges.

“We’ll wait until the campers are at lunch downstairs,” he said, looking at the ground. “I”ve asked Don to bring one of his guns. You don’t have to be there if you don’t want to.”

I hadn’t taken my eyes off of the little brown speck half a mile away. I stood on the grass between the ranch house and the barn, with the red cowboy neckerchief that Bill required all the staff to wear fluttering under my chin, my misshapen straw hat bent low in front over my eyes, which were always bothered by the brightness of the Ohio sky. What would F– Ranch be like without Emma?

The Ranch was a chaotic place, and you were always rushing around trying to gather up all your horses and ponies and get them saddled, and when a trail came back into the stable you got the riders off and put new ones on and sent them out again. You needed every single critter. I didn’t want to find myself saying “where’s Emma?” and not being able to remember because she had simply disappeared, had ceased to show up at her little spot on the rail in the stable. I felt that watching Don shoot one of my ponies was almost more than I could bear, but it would be worse to have to forever imagine it, to not have that moment of closure and finality.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

The thing about Emma was I didn’t like her. She was the pony I liked least of all. I don’t know if anyone actually liked her, although I and a generation of young campers respected her. She was a cute little pony that didn’t care much about the agendas of humans. Most ponies were that way, I found. Their short legs and general compactness enabled them to dig in and resist. They were like furry boulders. Emma was the worst of them. On a trail, with a child on her back who either was terrified to have an animal underneath them or was reveling in the delusion of communion with the animal world, she would stop suddenly and lower her head, jerking the reins loose from her rider’s hands, and eat grass. All of the horses did this whenever they thought they could get away with it, or if the trail had to stop for some reason, such as the opening of a gate between pastures. But Emma excelled at bringing the sweetest kids to tears. Other ponies had other vexing habits. Joshua and Velvet would actually hide in the ravine when we rounded the horses up in the morning to bring them into the stable. Emma was just stubborn and ornery.

All morning as we worked our horses in the ring I could look across Ring Pasture to the gate atop the opposite hill and see Emma — a small immobile dot – standing and waiting, probably in a lot of pain I thought, but standing nonetheless. It seemed absurd.

At lunchtime I set out on foot down through the deep bowl of Ring Pasture and up the other side. I wanted the short journey alone in order to pray and prepare myself for watching death, and because I knew I needed to cry. I also wanted a few minutes with Emma before the posse showed up. For once I was grateful for the stupid, feckless company of the collie dogs, which formed the satellites of a busy little solar system of which my legs, heavier each step up the far hill, were the center. I saw the station wagon circling around Ring Pasture at the front of a little comet of dust, heard the crunch of gravel under the wheels. Old Arden, who as  farm manager singlehandedly saw to the needs of maybe sixty head of cattle and as many sheep, followed a ways behind on a tractor, on whose front forks he had laid a large piece of plywood.

Co-wrangler Rebecca on Holly, a larger pony whom I never knew. Emma was about the size of the littler ponies in the background. Photo courtesy of Amber MacPherson.

I had come to the ranch having no experience with horses or with the hard decisions and actions that a life on the land necessitates. Actually, I did have one childhood memory of being on a large horse in a covered ring. My older sister Jeni was on a horse in front of me, and we were in a line of horses, all with children of varying ages and varying abilities on their backs. I was young, inexperienced and terrified. We were all supposed to keep our horses standing still in the line and, one by one, when the instructor told us to, we were to induce our mount to walk forward around the perimeter of the ring and stop and join the line again along the opposite wall. Each rider complied. When it was my sister’s turn she moved off around the wall so that I was now at the head of the initial line. While the instructor followed beside Jeni and her horse, giving praise, criticism and encouragement, my own horse decided there was no reason to wait behind. It knew where it would be asked to go, and so it went. I froze in terror on its back as the gentle creature plodded around the edge of the ring, the huge muscles rippling beneath my legs. When Jeni had joined the back of the other line and the instructor turned around and found me already more than halfway around, she yelled at me, asking the kind of rhetorical questions that are pointless to ask frightened children, such as what I thought I was doing, and whether or not I had heard the instructions, and had she asked me to go yet. At that point I cried and the memory goes dark. I’m sure I embarrassed my sister.

It was perhaps that memory of being humiliated and (as I experienced it) terrorized at the hooves of a creature I had been led to believe would be my friend that made my gorge rise one day when Emma was pulling similar stunts underneath a little boy who had come to F– Ranch for the weekend with his school or church group or scout troup. We were in one of the lesson rings that give Ring Pasture its name, an oval in the grass with a fence around it. I had earned several certificates that supposedly qualified me to teach the first levels of Western saddle. I had my charges all lined up and was moving them through the basics of starting and stopping at a walk, but Emma wouldn’t go. The little boy could not make Emma go. I told him to use his heels to kick her sides if she would not respond to the clucking sound. Children do not like to kick ponies, or any animals, but this fellow gave Emma a gentle nudge with his heels, insufficient in Emma’s case to rouse her from her daydream. I told him “harder!”, and he was unable, and Emma stood still until the boy began to cry.

I am about to paint for you — in the very next paragraph — what I consider to be my worst moment as a human being. If you know me and believe that you can reference an instance when I behaved badlier, please let me know in private.

My head was boiling. I’d had enough of crying kids and stubborn ponies. Instead of sympathising and giving the kid a break, which would have been, in effect, forgiving myself for my own failure to control my horse all those years before, I repeated history. I ran over and shouted at the kid to get off of Emma. He dismounted directly (Emma was only two and a half or three feet high at her shoulder). I sat down on her and raised my feet off the ground and started kicking the heels of my boots into her sides. She started off smartly at a quick trot, no doubt alarmed at this strange behavior, but I pushed at her and yelled until she broke into a choppy little canter. Because I was the stablemaster all the horses knew me, my voice, my smell, my walk, and because of this familiarity they were able to trust me, but this behavior on my part was a breach of the contract. Some of the kids sat in quiet horror in their saddles, rightly perceiving that a terrible anger was at work in this place. Others nervously laughed. I can only imagine how ridiculous I looked, like an angry man beating on a tricycle. Emma tried to break the canter and slow down to a trot several times but I forced her on, kicking her thick sides until she had circled the ring at a run.

I got off and handed the reins back to the boy, who looked doubtful that this exposition would be of much help to him. If I had hoped to prove to him that Emma would go if you made her go, what I actually achieved was to shame him. Emma stood sweating and breathing hard. It was not worth her time to be angry at me, or even to figure out what my problem was.

She stood now enveloped in a calm. She could not walk or lie down, her cannon snapped and twisted and held on only by skin. She stood without a sign of pain. I petted her neck and looked into her eyes, brown and unfathomable, for the last time. Maybe even the first time. She was an old pony and had had as good a life as a pony can have. She was my least favorite, but I was struck by how any death, the loss of any life at all, must be such a grief to God as I envision God. In that moment the ten inches between our faces might as well have been the entire universe of space because each of us dies alone, apart from all other created beings.

I find death unacceptable. At these moments, some deep part of me resists belief in a resurrection and fears that this is all there is, this fragile life — mine and this pony’s — and that the only immortality we can hope for is to be remembered, whether ill or well. This is my most disbelieving and wayward self. But it is as real a part of me as the me that rises each day with a prayer on my lips. In fact, more real in a way. Because I pray for my own benefit, most often. If I know or am known by God it is not through any right doing or thinking or believing. If entry to heaven were guaranteed by the keeping of ten simple commandments, I would break them still. Or one commandment, I could not keep it. If my soul’s salvation were dependent on any action or restraint or effort of my own will, then were I surely hellbound. No, I never loved God or man or beast because I was told I had to. I cannot obey. I cannot do as I am told. I have only loved, and loved late at that, because the world is lovable. And it is only grace that has made me able to see this.

I could not help Bill and Arden and Lew, an old cowboy who had come for the weekend to teach advanced riding classes, and Don drag Emma quickly — roughly, it seemed to me – away from the corner she stood in to the board, on which she fell and lay still. They were not bad men, but they were not sentimental about ponies. Having grown up hunting game and dealing with instances of irreparable harm to livestock they regarded Emma as just an animal, which is what she was. And it was not they who had sworn at her and kicked her with all their might. It was I who had done those things. They were here to do her the service of freeing her from the mortal coil, because that was the job at hand.  

I hope that ponies turned out for the last time continue to move through our world just like this morning mist over Upper Barn Pasture. Photo courtesy of Amber MacPherson.

Still, I could not watch Don pull the trigger. I looked over my right shoulder, back over Ring Pasture toward the west. The shot pushed in on my eardrums, loud but with no echo — the report just rode the breeze away into the sky.

I looked then. I needed to see that she was dead. I acknowledge that my presence there was mostly for selfish reasons, some of which I may never be aware of. Emma did not need me for anything. She quivered after a moment or two, and then convulsed, her hooves clattering for a second on the board, and then lay still, and blood poured out dark and thick from the hole in her forehead. I could see in her glassy eyes that she was instantly gone, returned to nature, ungathered, turned loose into the flow, into the greater.

I walked back thanking God for the gift of life, vowing not for the first time and not for the last that I would never again waste any moment of my own.