The Woman

She was standing on the corner of the street with a small bouquet of fading flowers.  They were mostly the heads of the flowers and she was holding them loosely at her waist.  The other hand held a cigarette.  When I drove by I noticed her eyes had a distant look though she appeared to be surveying the four lanes of traffic in front of her.  She wore stretch pants and a dirty white blouse over an ample midriff – her greasy hair was pulled back and the glasses on her face listed low and to the right!

In my mind I could see her heading away from or toward a single room apartment on the second floor of a building close by.  The room no doubt had a stale sour smell of unwashed laundry beneath a recent layer of tobacco smoke.  There would be a man somewhere in the room – likely lying on the bed watching TV with an ash tray and a 16 ounce can of fortified malt liquor on a tray close at hand!  The man would be thin and withered looking, with stubble and few good teeth left!  She would likely introduce him as her fiancée when she had the occasion!  She could have had three children that she gave up for adoption, the first at the urging of her parents, and then the later ones at the urging of the state workers. 

She had likely already used up her food stamps allocation for the month and would be close to reaching the limit from the food pantry agency as well.  Sometime during the day she might see a cat or a dog and think that when she and her fiancée got married and found a better place to live she would have a pet of her own. 

As she faded in the rear view mirror she pushed up her glasses and continued to stare straight ahead, but the flowers held at her waist appeared briefly like a small brown and white bird caught in its first moment of flight!

                                                Mom

All that was left of mom after 103 years was a slightly off white trail of lumpy ash floating in a lazy line just off the stern of the boat.  The sky was, as usual – cloudy! Beside her was my aunt and uncle in equally lazy and somewhat affectionate line next to hers.  My aunt, I thought was slightly more bluish while my uncle was a bit greyer, but each of them still fought to maintain some kind of order in their final excursion together before they each sank out of sight just off the south jetty. My mom’s sister was 16 year younger than her.  She had maintained the marriage to my uncle, a World War II veteran through thick and thin, as they say, for almost 60 years.  Mom had been less lucky in life and had been through a few loves -- and though she had given birth to my brother and me – I don’t really think my dad was one of them.   My uncle died first!  After the somewhat bleak ceremony under a cloudy sky in a church in Astoria Oregon with not enough windows, my uncle was set in the oven and reduced to about a quart and a half of material that was later secured in my cousin’s safe.  Then, about a year later – his wife, my aunt, joined him.   She had been understandably devastated when my uncle had died, and I recall her appearing perplexed when a folded flag was handed to her by some Navy people in exchange for ‘my uncle’s Service’ at the end of his funeral ceremony.   ‘Perplexed’ as if she had handed a clerk her credit card – but she wasn’t really sure about the value of the goods she received back.  She then died, was similarly processed and was placed in an urn on the shelf next to my uncle!  I imagined them there in the dark, side by side – but still kind of regal in their respective urns!

My mom at 103 had outlived her five siblings even though she was the oldest.  With the first death, she had been saddened.  With the subsequent deaths she seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable as she had to return again and again to ‘celebrate’ the life of each of them.  After that, she kept saying, largely to herself – “why am I still here?”  An odd question since she had taken care of herself so fervently throughout her adult life; vegetables, jumping jacks, musicals, dozens of old Perry Como television specials videos, never an unkind word and so on.   She had been a tall woman and there are pictures of her that made her appear to be an early model or movie star.  In fact she had modeled once.  When I was a kid,  we  had two pages cut  from a Saturday Evening Post where she appeared in black and white adds, dressed in a frilly mid-length apron, standing in a ‘modern’ 40’s kitchen smiling and holding a very large potato triumphantly aloft in one hand.    The caption read: “Only Idaho potatoes will do in my kitchen!” Later unfortunately, those pages were lost to an unusually wet winter and a flooded basement.

At 103 and just a couple of months after my aunt died – mom was hospitalized with an infection that would be a fairly minor event in a younger person.  If fact, she could have been engorged with antibiotics as she had been several times in her last few years – but this time she said no.  She had already let us know that she wished to be cremated and her ashes released with her sister and brother in law.  I was secretly concerned there might be an overcrowding issue in my cousin’s safe – but she was accommodated and these couple of months later -- here I was watching the three of them drift  just off the boat’s stern in the presence of numerous barking sea lions while slipping silently and unceremoniously beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.  The woman who had decorated our house every Christmas, caught my snakes when they escaped in the basement, traveled thousands of miles in her later years, kept her chin up and her mind strong in her old age, was now reduced to a thin white streak.  And, I knew even If I was given a comb and a thousand years to try – I would never be able to sift up enough of her from the ocean floor to resemble herself again. On the ride back I listened to Country Joe and the Fish through my I-pod. The sun broke through briefly and the bark of the sea lions gave way to the sound of gulls near the dock.

 Amen, I thought!

Catching the Oregon Crud

Out here on the western slopes of the Cascades lives an evil and virulent force!  Microbe Fundamentalists!  Soul stealing, opportunistic, and invisible they continually scan the landscape for any biological weaknesses around them! 

In the beginning it is hardly noticeable.  You sense there is some amassing of troops and equipment around your borders – some early probes; distant lights in the night maybe; dim!  No real incursions – they know you are ready for that.  Someone may comment to you when you are on the phone that you sound terrible.  And you say, “I always sound like that on the phone!”  They rely on the element of surprise!

Sometimes there is a sneeze or two; dust, no doubt!  Then at night you realize you must be swallowing too much because your throat has a sort of worn out feel to it.  They are on the move!  They begin to set up supply lines.  In the morning the alarm clock rings much earlier than usual – it can’t be!  But in the early phase being upright on the ground and moving about is your friend, coffee is your friend, daylight is your friend.  It’s then they are most likely to hunker down for a short while!  They work to blend in to the environment. They sweet talk their way through your defensive lines, they are casually dressed, they smile and wave at the flagmen.  But their pockets are filled with rusty nails, tacks, weeds, seeds, and hooks.  They are foreigners – they have no visas for entry.  They are up to no good!

After a couple more days you notice that 10:00 p.m. seems to come around 6:00 p.m. and as you begin to build your rationale for going to bed that early, you make a mental list of actions that you will take to better care for yourself.  You will pledge to cut down on coffee, cut down on alcohol, drink more orange juice, and eat less junk food, exercise and so on!  At work – your mind begins to feel slippery.  Deadlines begin to lack the normal gravitas; sniffles do not dry in the usual time frame.  Beach heads have been established, bacteria Special Forces are digging foxholes into your sinuses.  It’s too late!

The predictable counter attacks of herbal teas, hot pepper concoctions, grandma’s elixirs, are laughable!  The invaders simply seize the convoys, quickly dispatch the escorts then turn the substances into a liquid; a green, then brown goo!  The goo is distilled into poison and moves like a high unpredictable tide carrying with it armored divisions with chainsaws and broken glass; a toxic glacier scrubbing the landscape free of any resistance.  Your lungs heave with it!  In the mountains of your brain – they have circled a strong rope that runs just behind your eyes, to your temples and around the back of your head!  They pull it tighter and tighter with old winches.  Soon, becoming horizontal to the ground is your friend! 

No one really hears or sees them leave!  The eventual ‘retreat’ is not a retreat!  Scorched and burned bare, they leave only because they have had their way with you.  Sure, there are a few freedom riders with white bandanas roaming around inside as if they had actually chased the hoards out!  But it is over only because the invaders decided it was over.  You are left dazed and feeling helpless!  Unfortunate – but predictable!  You are still three days away from the new contract with self on how you will develop new habits on how to appreciate life more because you have been spared! 

Easily ten days away from your next shot of Jack Daniels!

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Santa Claus 

It’s hard to remember when I quit believing in Santa Claus! 

I recall being somewhere around five or six years old and my brother and I would visit our dad in Tillamook Oregon.  Our father had the dubious honor of playing Santa Claus to a large group of somewhat culturally deprived coastal children who would march from the movie; ‘Tame the guns of Cimarron’ or some other cowboy saga, across the street into the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) meeting hall.  There –they would enter the ‘man cave’ of the mostly World War II veterans and suck in the elixir of stale tobacco smoke and spilled alcohol scents through their pre-pubescent noses.  They were giddy with hubris!

Our parents were divorced, which was largely unheard of in the heady months and years following our grand defeat of the German bastards and the Japs.  On TV, I grew to love ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and the simple white picket fences of his neighborhood, let alone the multitude of cowboy shows that erupted onto the black and white screen that graced our living room in Eugene in those same months and years.  My dad had a small portable television in his dank apartment in Tillamook – and I remember thinking that if our parents were ever to reunite – we would have two TV sets.  That would surely provide an opportunity to create envy among my friends – where pity of our family due to the divorce – seemed to have taken the place of their otherwise innocent preoccupations.

Our job was to be Santa’s helpers!  It would start in the back room of the VFW hall where everything in the room was painted white.  This included the bathroom door and door handle. The door itself closed and opened reluctantly and noisily and would stay closed only because of the paint layers in the door jamb; the handle itself had long since become inoperable.  The room was cold.  The book shelves; the middle shelf was the only one that had any books – and they were hard-bound editions of something or other – whose spacing forced the wall into a perpetual frozen toothless grin.  Santa himself would slump on the chair during the break when the movies were playing across the street.  He would strip to his t-shirt and suspenders from his waist up, with his quite ample midriff poked slightly down between his legs.  Rid of his white wig, his hair was short and slicked back with a part in the middle, his white pancake-flat beard would rest on his chest, the leather boot facades of the Santa Suit would lay like small lifeless heaps over his brown wingtips and his face held a vacant stare.  He smoked cigarettes and always had a drink nearby.  Santa had sort of let himself go since the war.  Our job was to huddle nearby and wait with him until the next movie let out then we would help put him back together and go into the dark hall where we handed out bags that contained toys and candy to the line of children gathering there.  Being Santa’s helpers was not a huge job.

It seems like the weather in Tillamook was always lousy when we visited.  The incessant rain; the dimness of the light made everything appear in shades of brown and gray.   Once, during a particularly high flood – the river chose the main highway that connected Vancouver B.C. to Tijuana to deliver rapids as it diverted through Tillamook! 

Back in Eugene and during an ensuing conversation, my brother’s friend Dale, who was two years older than me, once winked at my brother when he said “You know Santa doesn’t really bring all those presents don’t you?” 

My brother and I looked at each other briefly!  “Are you sure?”  My brother said!

Logging

The sound of logging close by is first, the sound of two feral cats with claws extended and an amplified guttural rage emanating from somewhere deep and primitive. Second, the slow cracking sound announcing something mighty has surrendered – and the third sound is the unmistakable heavy percussion of weight as the tree is unceremoniously heaved to the earth. 

The blood is carried down on the wind and is not an unpleasant, but is a somewhat acrid scent, sweet sawdust; fresh ‘tree meat’ often blended with a moss-earth musk layer. 

When you live out here – time is framed by these events; years of soft winds, silence – passing deer, many summers and winters left alone.  Yet the end of a stand of Douglas Fir trees, like an important death in the family, rips the silence and momentarily dominates the tranquil landscape with an urgent but loving request to stay close to the trail for awhile!

The Preacher

His face, of course – was white!  He must have received some help from his wife!  At least, someone got him up and into his day and told him he was one of the special few – seemed like the job for a wife to me!  But, there he was – staring at some sort of teleprompter above the lens on his side, reciting one of the biblical references to the Old Testament or James II – or Jacob I, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the proboscis of the prophesies (I obviously just didn’t know).

It was 4:30 a.m. and I was queued up for channel surfing, but had gotten myself hung up on this sweaty lipped preacher on channel 72.  Not sure why I stayed with him, but something about his hair that appeared to be greased and obedient – though the front ‘wave’ arched down, maybe a quarter inch or so into a curl so perfect I was expecting one of those professional surfers to come screaming out across his somewhat reticent brow – before it would likely disappear behind his ear with fists raised and pumping with testosterone lit success.  That didn’t happen – though if it had – it would have been the perfect moment for it! 

His eyes were intense and bulging, amplified by his grey sport coat and wide dark tie that pushed folds of skin upward into that sea of movement below his chin.  His words poured into the television speakers with such lovely and thick resonance that I briefly thought about buying something from him – though he had not yet appeared to be selling anything!

He spiced his morning offerings with words like ‘bliss’ and ‘comfort’ and he also  crooned ‘Jesus’ as an adjective and then a pronoun, and then an object of the preposition (or something like that) – it was all pretty straight forward really.  I tried to imagine his audience.  I was thinking there must be a few thousand dark-haired middle aged women who planned their mornings around him.  They would likely have their hair in some sort of rotund shape with a cloth over the top and with the interior dark, wet perhaps warm, surely sticky – and with a curler or two to ensure the appearance of the unlikelihood of any interest in casual sex once the hair was released into the daylight!

The men (if there were any) would likely be sitting in their shorts, in their favorite chair - their faces grim – but holding fast in the promise that the preacher offered the best chance that the world might soon right itself again and they (the men) would carry the lantern out front of sacred spiritual battalions – where there was darkness and danger and chivalry and any females around would look to them for guidance and comfort – and of course, casual sex! 

The preacher looked up from time to time -- solemn in his commentary – though his words held the promise of redemption (not sure what that even is).  I knew he was but one of numerous television preachers who stood solid in their early morning sharing of the ‘good news’ who also stood ready to collect your troubled insomnias and redirect them to the appropriate donation tent if you would just hold on for the directions on how to do that. 

 I imagined that a delicious section the true audience would continue to produce many years of lucrative appreciation for these early rising beacons – while I, with one click of the TV remote would again transport myself into the land of Rocky and the Power Rangers – vulnerable to the Devil’s work of course – but really none the wiser for it!