"Now" and "Then"
You were right. The chainsaws have not stopped yet.
I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you.
They are taking down the pecan now. At least you are not here to see it go, but you will no doubt see its end.
It was the poplar they destroyed earlier. Now the hawks will have no home to come back to.
My tears are for our old friends and how their loss will impact you. And for the hawks who have lost their home today.
And for everything else.
One day, while in Kindergarten in Santa Venetia, during show-and-tell time, Jan, the girl who sat across from me at my table, brought in a souvenir from Disneyland- one of those caps with the huge feather that stuck out of it. She loved that thing and was happy to share it with us. She had brought it back from a family trip. It was special for her. The only time I had been to Disneyland was when I was too young to have any real memory of it. I was still in a stroller. I do think I remember eating this sweet watery stuff. I think it was one of the first times I had eaten watermelon. Anyway, here was a person who had just been there. I sort of liked that feather cap, too. Maybe I could get one if I ever went back to Disneyland. After show-and-tell, a guy named Robert took a pair of scissors we must have been using for some arts-and-crafts project and cut that feather into shreds. This upset Jan greatly, which upset me too.
The teacher must not have thought it was such a big deal. I do not remember her asking who had done it. It was just a bit more of a disruption than she wanted to deal with, or maybe she saw who had done it and decided not to press it just now. Well, I decided to do something about it. I kicked at him under the table. He made a big commotion about being attacked. No one else said a word. We were all sitting there like angels. The teacher evidently had had enough of Robert causing trouble that day, so she took him to the principal’s office.
Ten years in the future, Jan’s memory of this event would be the key to her knowing I was not just another high school jerk trying to pick her up. But that is another story. There is another girl who had my interest at that time. Gale. There were always girls I had little crushes on over the years, but she was the first, until much later, who had a pet name for me. It was “Boo Boo.” OK, no need to laugh. We were only 5. I think I had it bad for her. What did age matter? I knew when I was hung up on someone. I did not know why I was interested, just that I was.
Before I get too far along, nothing ever came of this other than being a playground “romance.” She may not have been as aware of the impact she had on me as I was of hers, but we will never know what might have been. After that school year ended, my family moved to San Rafael. Currently, Santa Venetia is part of San Rafael, and students can be bused between the two. Back then, we might as well have been moving to another country. I never saw her again, or Jan for that matter. Of course, sometimes you can never say “never.” In high school, I met up with Jan again, and a bit after that, I found out what had happened to Gale.
In my freshman math class, I sat behind a girl I met originally when I moved to San Rafael in the first grade. Her initial claim to fame for putting her in this writing is that I got in trouble once for helping her cheat on a make-up test of some kind. Laurie was nice, but not the best of students- in the third grade anyway. She had been out sick and had missed a test. She was scared, she wasn’t ready, and for some reason, I agreed to show her my already-graded test paper so she could check her answers. Yeah, right. Suddenly, she was a lot smarter than usual, and I was the one on the hook.
She was not quite devious enough to miss her usual amount on the test, so she would not raise suspicion. Plus, she was done and handed in her test way too fast. Needless to say, she was caught, and she quickly pointed out her accomplice. My teacher was shocked that I would do something like this. I promised to never do it again. It was the first time, and would not be the last, that I went out on a limb to help a lady in trouble. I never helped her again, though.
Back to high school math. Sitting across from Laurie was a girl named Jan. They seemed to be friends. People made friends quickly back then. All it took was seeing the same face a few times in different classes, and you had a friend for life. So, Laurie and Jan were friends, at least since two classes earlier. Of course, I had known Laurie long enough to have a history with her, and I knew that Jan was from somewhere else. She had not been in my school before- not Junior High anyway, but I knew there was something about her that seemed familiar. Then, she gave me the clue. Or maybe Laurie did, I do not remember. The clue was that she lived in Santa Venetia. The school district had just decided to allow Santa Venetia kids to go to San Rafael schools if they wanted to. Could there be another Jan my age from there?
That night, I went to my collection of school class pictures and found my kindergarten class. There she was. The next day, I mentioned to her that I thought she seemed familiar. I think she must have heard that one before. She thought I was trying a line on her. (Even back then, I could have done better than that.) No, I mean it, were you in John MacPhail School in 1959? She said she had been, but she still did not remember me. The next day, I brought in the class picture and pointed her out. She then recognized my picture and realized I was not just a bad pick-up artist. We really had gone to a different school together. In our remembering things about “then,” we remembered the feather incident. We have been friends ever since.
Catching up with Gale was not such a happy experience. In our reminiscences, I had asked Jan if she knew what had happened to a girl named Gale from our class. Jan told me that Gale was in an accident around second grade and had a pretty tough time for a while. She did not know where she was currently. I was to find out more about her when I was a junior.
I was a school photographer and was in demand from time to time to photograph non-school events. One of those events was the installation of a new “Faith” in the Rainbow Girls. I had no idea then, and still do not know anything about any of that, but not knowing the event you are taking pictures of does not stop you from taking the pictures. Of course, as I found out, I could not view or take pictures of the event itself, but I could take pictures in the lobby of those involved before the event.
The “Faith” of this ceremony was that same Gale from kindergarten, who had called me by a pet name, and made me hate my parents for a short time for moving me away from her. She was almost as I remembered, just older. But there was something that I could tell was still not right about her, although it was hard to pinpoint. And she had no idea who I was. I think she briefly thought I was trying to pick her up, just as Jan had initially. But once I mentioned having been in her kindergarten class, she smiled at me and said she was very sorry, but she could not remember anything that far back. Her accident had been severe enough that she had never regained her memory of anything that preceded it. I told her I was sorry it had happened to her, and I was glad she was OK now, and I took pictures of her and her other Rainbow Girls. This time, at least, I was able to say goodbye, and, as it turned out, I never saw her again after that. On the bright side, I was paid to take the pictures- and I did not even have to process them. They were in color anyway, and I only knew how to do black-and-white. I wish I had a copy of one, though. It would allow her to have aged in my memory. To me, she will always be that 5-year-old girl in kindergarten who I chased on the playground and jungle gym, and who called me Boo Boo.
For my first through 12th-grade school career, we lived in a fairly nice area of San Rafael, on the edge of the Dominican area, but not really in it. The Dominican area refers to the neighborhoods closest to the Dominican Convent, back then anyway. I am not sure the convent is still active, but there is a college there now. This was a desirable area, but we were not quite in the nicer part. We were a bit on edge, down over a ridge from the hill that was on the border. If we had been a bit further up the hill, or anywhere in the sight of the convent area, it would have been obvious we were in the Dominican neighborhood. But we were too close to the commercial area of town. This was a plus for my mother, who had to walk where she had to go during the week when my father was not around to help with errands. And that was most of the time.
It was good for us too. Elementary school was only a 10-15 minute walk, depending on how slow you took it, or how many people tagged along in groups, slowing each other down. Most of them did not take the last little dip out of the hills like I did. Not that this was a real big deal. I knew some kids came from more financially stable families than I did. And I knew there were a few who were in far worse conditions.
There were those on bikes. Sometimes they would walk the bikes along with those of us who did not have them. Then there were car people. I could see the use of cars in bad weather, but these guys were always dropped off. Come to think of it, I do not remember getting rides even in bad weather. It must have happened at some point. But walking was what I did. No rides in the car for me. No bike for me. I did not even learn to ride a bike until 6th grade or so. And I did not have my own until I was old enough to get a job and buy a used one, which I still have.
Junior High was about 2.4 miles away. If it had been 2.5 miles, I would have been able to ride the bus. The cut-off point was about two houses farther down my street. Because of that, I had to either walk or walk. At the time, my father worked about a half-mile from the school, so I rode with him to work in the mornings, and then walked the rest of the way. I got to walk the entire distance home.
High school was easier since it was only two blocks away.
Walking to Elementary School was not always without incident. Some kids just would not adjust well to anyone who was not in their group or who was not quite like them in some way. For a while, it seemed I had a small group of hill kids after me. It was like they didn’t want me on their hill, not even to get to school and back. I could handle them just fine, but it did get old. Name-calling, pushing, and the typical things kids do to assert the feeling that they are better than someone else. Of course, this was much milder bullying than anything suffered by today’s kids.
At some point, this taunting spilled over onto the playground during recess. At this point, it had become a bit more physical. They would actually grab me from behind, and while one held my arms, the others would poke at me from the front, threatening to grab parts of me that I knew would hurt if grabbed. Of course, with odds like that, I was always going to lose except for this one time. One time, when one of them came up behind me and grabbed my arms, I fought back. It must have been before he got both arms, because I had a free arm, and caught the guy by surprise when I quickly jabbed my elbow down into his stomach. This must have been a total shock to him.
They never bothered me again.
Cecilia was one of the first friends I made on my own when I moved here.
I met her at a local bagel shop where she worked. After a few days, I got up the nerve to ask her out. She already had plans to marry. This news was a bit of a disappointment, but at the same time, I knew her, and that was just fine with me.
I had not really known her long when she invited me to her wedding. The night before the wedding, I had a dream that I arrived in Napa a bit early and went into a cafe near the church to kill some time. She came in and sat across from me. We had coffee and talked about the wedding. She started crying because, as she told me, her time here was to be so short. Then, I figured she just meant that she had to go get dressed for the ceremony.
The next day, when I arrived in Napa, I saw a couple of restaurants in sight of the church. I am not sure I found the one that might have matched the dream, but I thought about it as I sipped a cup of coffee, waiting until it was time to go to the wedding. Unlike the dream, Cecilia did not come in to visit with me. I am sure she had other things to worry about.
In the receiving line after the ceremony, she introduced me to her friends as her soul mate, or the one she would have had one last fling with before getting married, or the one she would have married if she had not met her husband first. I am not sure I would have been satisfied to be just a last fling.
This is getting way too sad to write about now, even after more than 30 years.
Cecilia and her husband were building a life together. Part of it included me, for a while. I helped them put in their kiwi orchard. They invited me to dinners on many special occasions, and sometimes just because I was a friend. We went to Halloween celebrations downtown when it was still just a local party. We went tubing and on bike rides. We watched football. We talked.
She was beyond happy when I found someone she could tell made me happy. She did not know my entire story, but she knew that I had been hurt by things in my past, and she could see that I was truly happy now. But now that I was in a new relationship, we went through a time when we did not see each other as frequently as before.
Cecilia was teaching horse riding and trying to finish school so she could become a veterinarian. And she had a part-time job at a local tack-and-western-wear shop. Judy and I ran into her near that shop downtown one afternoon. Cecilia told us she planned to get together with us soon, just in case something happened and we never saw each other again. As it turned out, we never did see her again.
Cecilia was killed by a drunk driver a short time later. Up to that point, I had never bothered to wear my seat belt in any vehicle I was in. That changed after what happened to Cecilia. She had been transporting two students home after a horse riding lesson and had made sure they both had their seat belts fastened. A vehicle driven by a drunk driver went into her car, head-on. She had not bothered to secure her own seat belt, even though it was a rule with her that her passengers must be belted in. There is no guarantee she would have made it if she had worn her seat belt, but she would at least have had a chance. Her two passengers got out with only minor cuts and bruises.
Thinking about the dream, and her feeling that something might happen before we saw each other again, well, what can I say? Sometimes life is very sad. And sometimes it almost seems that we know in advance that certain things might happen, like my feeling that I had to get past that car going to Big Bear. Now the dream about Cecilia’s time here being short, and her own feeling that something might happen before we saw her again. Like so many other things.
Hello Cecilia. I will always remember you.
I have very odd dreams at times. After Cecilia died, I had a few dreams that involved her. I would dream I was visiting her house. Her husband would be there, but Cecilia would not. I had no sense in those dreams that she had died. She just was not around.
Then, once, she interrupted a dream I had been having about my days back in college. I was about to leave Mulford Hall, the main Forestry building at U.C. Berkeley, when there she was, walking up the stairs and opening the main doors as I was headed out. I did a double-take in the dream. Suddenly, I was very aware of things: where I was, who she was. None of it jibed in my head, since I knew two things. If I were really in Berkeley, she should not be there because I did not know her back then. And the big kicker was that I knew she had died.
Sometimes things in dreams do not jibe, and you just go on knowing that it is only a dream, if you even know that. This time, it occurred to me that this must be a dream. When I realized that, the building, the outside world- it all faded into nothingness. But Cecilia was still there and still coming towards me.
There I was, stammering, ‘why are you here, how are you here, are you really here?’ She came up face to face with me, grabbed my arms just below my shoulders, and said forcefully, ‘I want you to know that I am OK. There is something I have wanted to do for you.’ And then, without saying anything else that I remember anyway, she pulled me towards her. We were already about as close as we could be, but she pulled me closer, and then we merged together. What followed was warmth, tingling, swirling flashes of light, a feeling of floating, of being me, of being her, of being us together. Then it was over.
Whether there is anything to the belief some have in an afterlife, who knows? If there is no afterlife, then this was just a very beautiful dream about a deceased friend. If there is an afterlife, maybe she really came to me to tell me that she was OK. One thing, though, before this, I had been having trouble with grieving her loss. And dealing with her loss became easier after this experience, dream or otherwise. I have had no further dreams of her of any kind.
Assuming there is no afterlife, maybe the way this works is that at some point, your subconscious mind literally merges the known memories and feelings for a deceased person into your own mind. Maybe this dream represented that merger. I can accept that from a scientific viewpoint. But part of me still wants to believe that it was really Cecilia who visited me that night.
And that she is OK.
A few weeks ago, I got my first-ever parking ticket. It was actually the first ticket of any kind I have gotten the entire time I have been driving. This was traumatic to some extent. My perfect record was gone.
This includes a couple of years when I was driving professionally, first as a messenger/delivery driver in San Francisco, where all the other drivers had speeding and parking tickets eating into their profits. I took it slow and was careful where I parked. I made decent money and did not have to pay any back in fines or higher insurance premiums. This job was followed by brief stints as a cab driver and a blood lab courier. All with no tickets.
The closest I ever got to a ticket was down around Monterey as I was heading to a delivery. I had misjudged a “dip” at the end of a driveway and was going a bit too fast. Hitting the dip must have cracked one of my headlights. It was not quite dark yet, but my lights were on. I had not really noticed the problem yet.
I saw a police vehicle approaching in the oncoming traffic. He did a U-turn after passing by and pulled me over to inform me I had a bad headlight. He must have been able to tell it had just happened, and clearly, I had not intended to disregard vehicle codes even though my truck was in pretty rough shape otherwise. He gave me a fix-it ticket. Those don’t count unless you ignore them. And I did not ignore this one.
I could not ignore the parking ticket either.
I really had thought I had plenty of time on my meter. Some of these LCD display meters are evidently a bit touchy. Although it looked like I had 42 minutes on the meter, it turned out to be more like 12. I will never actually know, though. What I do know is that I took my time in Peet’s that day, never thinking that I would be in any way late getting back to my car.
When I left to continue my errands, there it was under my wiper to greet me.
I am not saying that this ticket in any way informed my desire to get rid of this car. That was totally a coincidence. It just worked out that way.
My car was a nearly 10-year-old Prius. It was doing fine as far as anything I knew, anyway. But with a hybrid and its multitude of electronics and computers, how would I really know? The truth is, it was starting to make me nervous.
You always hate to hear noises you cannot understand. Some of the noises, I had even asked about. I was told to ignore it; it is not important. I could still hear this noise, though. It can’t be good if you still hear the noise, whether or not you are told to ignore it.
A Prius makes some noises that are totally different from any other car, and that’s normal. It is the additional ones or the lack of the normal ones that you have to worry about. It was not just about the noises, though.
At ten years old, things start needing replacement that can add up to a bit of money. This is a bit more disconcerting when you are dealing with a car that is more complex in its basic engineering than a typical non-hybrid car. Plus, they have all the other stuff to worry about that a normal car has. It is a double whammy. No way to win, especially when mechanics tell you that the noise you wanted him to check is nothing to worry about. Does he know any more than I do? Really? It is not his car. He will not have to pay for the repair, no matter what the noise turns out to be.
The tires were pretty much done, also. And I never liked them, so anything I found to replace them would have been even more expensive than they were. And with my luck, a few months after buying a new set of tires, that noise I was trying to ignore would turn into something catastrophic. Or I would just decide to buy a new car anyway. Then the new owner of my trade-in would have a tired older hybrid with great, low-mileage tires and a few other fixes. But it would still be making that noise no one else cared about.
You can see the dilemma I faced. I had to replace it before it got beyond repair.
I bought the new Prius on Saturday. I drove by the dealer’s used car lot the following Monday morning, and there was my old Prius right out in the most prominent spot in the lot. I have to say, it looked pretty good. It was clean and polished. The fogged-over headlight covers had been cleaned up. I could not tell if they had replaced the cracked fog light. Both the cracked fog light and the foggy headlight lens were known defects in some 2004 Prius cars. The problem with mine was that they did not go bad, even though the dealer would still have had to fix them. I wondered about the various noises and whether the mechanics had realized they could easily make them go away, so the new owner would not ask about them. Maybe it was not really such a tired old Prius after all. I was tempted to stop in to visit, at least to see the asking price. But I had already passed the entrance. On the way back would be better. Maybe I could find the entrance in time, going the other way.
I guess there must be quite a market for used hybrids. A few hours after seeing it on the lot, on the return trip, it was already gone.
If the new owner of my old car is out there, I hope that your new/used Prius serves you as well as it did me. And I hope that the noise I was worried about was as minor as they told me it was.
It was really not such a bad car.
I was divorced, had no job, and was living on fumes of my new bank account. One more forestry job awaited me. This one was in Placerville. Scott, my crew leader the summer before, up at Big Bear Lake, would be my crew chief again. I was not really into any of this anymore. But I had to work. I had to do something to get my mind off of what had become my life. Instead of determining what had killed the trees as we had the previous summer, this job was all about finding out why trees do better in some areas than in others. The part of this I never liked was selecting the healthiest tree in the area to cut down for closer study.
The competition to get forestry jobs must have been stiffer than I knew. We had an OK crew. We worked pretty well together, as a rule. But when my Forest Service boss came up to see us in the field, suddenly no one would do what I suggested. Nothing says trouble to your supervisor faster than if the people you are in charge of refuse to do what you request in this sort of fieldwork. They had never had trouble when I was doing this before. And when they had their turn for this part, I never questioned their decisions.
This, I would find out much later, was a calculated attack on me, designed to ensure that they would get a job next year, at my expense. It worked. The next year, I re-applied for this job and was turned down. Scott thought it seemed fishy to him that I wouldn’t be rehired. He spoke to the other crew members, and they admitted to setting me up to look bad in front of my boss. My boss reconsidered after Scott spoke with him about it, and they later called to offer me the job if I still wanted it. I turned him down. My forestry career was done. But it was good to know that Scott, who had left me to almost die on a hillside in San Bernardino, had gone to bat for me.
Part of the reason I gave up on forestry was that I had had it with the lifestyle and job uncertainty. I would spend all “off-season” trying to convince a potential employer that I was done with forestry, so please hire me. Then I would have to dump that and go to a forestry job if they called me. I also disliked the politics of the job, having such an impact on whether you worked or not. Add in the remote areas you would have to work in, where you would have to work near people who seem friendly until they are up against you for the same limited job opportunities. It just stopped being fun, if it ever had been fun.
My last summer forestry job in Placerville was about healing myself. I took a step towards that by telling myself I was not to blame for what happened to my marriage. I took a giant leap backward by agreeing to go on a date with a friend of a friend of a co-worker. I had been told this friend was not involved with anyone. This turned out to be false. I was told she was looking for a nice guy. Evidently, that was not true either.
I asked her out to dinner. She accepted the invitation. We talked. We ate. We laughed. I felt better after my past few months, in which I felt I was slowly dying inside. Back at her place to say goodnight, she moved in to kiss me. And it was not just a friendly kiss on the cheek. Not that it was an all-out passionate lip lock, but I do not kiss like that unless it has the potential to be serious. Putting it with what we had said about spending more time together, I got the idea she wanted to spend more time with me.
Evidently, that was the last thing on her mind. After a week of not returning my calls, the mutual friend filled me in. She was just using me to make her boyfriend pay more attention to her. She had not really wanted to go out with me, but did so in order not disappoint me. That is always a real boost there. Just what I needed to hear after my marriage and how it had died.
Hey, just say no. The rejection upfront can be tough, but not as much as being rejected after you think there is potential for something in the future. And knock off the kissing unless you mean it the way it seems. Was it payback for the dinner? I would rather not be paid back that way. If payback is needed, I take cash or checks with a photo ID. As you can gather, I never had a chance to tell this woman how I felt about our very brief dating adventure. Anyway, what was I thinking? I clearly could not be ready for anything like this yet. I found out a bit later that she had done a similar thing to Scott. But Scott, being more of a player than I, got a bit more involved than I did. He was just what she was looking for to make her boyfriend jealous.
Overall, it was a calmer summer than the previous one. No near-death plane or car trips. No ring-loss or wife-loss experiences. If you don’t include my co-worker stabbing me in the back, or my brief return to dating, it was pretty boring.
As my summer job as a forest pathologist neared its end, one of our sites required us to descend a loose mix of dirt and rocks to our designated dead tree. It was the sort of place you cannot really walk down. You just get down on one leg, put the other out in front of you, and slide. This was a plot that took a long time to get to. We all did our individual jobs, like the well-oiled, loosely organized machine we had become by then. Later, as we were nearing our base camp at the end of the day, I noticed my wedding ring was gone. I checked to make sure I had not lost it in the jeep. I checked all my pockets. I asked if anyone had seen it anywhere. I then accepted that it had been pulled off my finger earlier as I slid down the hill, and it was gone. There was absolutely no chance of getting it back. When I called my wife later that night, I told her about the ring. I thought she would be upset. She was not. She said we would talk about it when I got back home. Not that we would replace it. We would talk about it.
Just after that, we had a short holiday. My in-laws had invited me to a Giant-Dodger baseball game. It was a nice diversion. Of course, the Giants lost. On the way back up to Big Bear, the summer had one more try at killing me.
I was heading up into the mountains and found myself behind the same slow driver for quite a while. I decided that if I did not get around him, I would spend the rest of my life looking at his brake lights. I had a chance to get around him and took it. Passing was difficult due to heavy traffic coming back to the valley after the holiday. Within a couple of minutes, after I passed, I rounded a corner, and there was a long straight-away. The downhill lane was moving, but very slowly, with rare spaces between. And, I noticed a car out in the uphill lane, passing a bunch of them on the straight section, heading right toward me.
I slowed down and got as far onto the shoulder as I could, aware of the chance the driver I had passed could plow into me as I attempted to avoid the downhill passer hitting me head-on.
Somehow, the passing downhill driver managed to force his way into the downhill traffic. He appeared terrified.
I pulled back into the uphill lane after he went by.
A mile or so further up the hill, I realized that the car I had passed earlier wasn’t behind me. A bit further up, I saw an ambulance responding downhill with lights and sirens. The downhill traffic was bumper-to-bumper, but my lane was clear. He used that. It made me wonder what had happened.
This return trip after the baseball weekend turned out to be one more close call in a seemingly never-ending list of close calls during this initial forestry job.
Maybe the summer had been trying to tell me something.
The drive home at the end of the job was uneventful.
And somehow, my wife, our friend (her co-worker), and I went to dinner shortly after I got home. The dinner was fine. I had stories. They had stories. How was it that he was there again (still)? I was beginning to feel like I should try to call a friend to get a date. Not for him, but for me. How is that for foreshadowing?
We were providing transportation that night. We dropped him off at his apartment. And, by dropping off, you might get the idea that we drove up, left the motor running as he got out, and we waited just long enough to see him go upstairs before we drove off to our own apartment. Normally, that might have been the way it should have gone. But not this time. He and my wife got out. (Huh?) They both stopped just close enough to the front of our car that I could not see above their shoulders. And then they hugged each other. It looked like a very close, long hug. I could only guess as to whether there had been more to it.
She later claimed it was just a friendly hug, thanking him for all the time he had kept her company over the summer when I had been gone. Well, I had seen my share of friendly hugs, and this was about the friendliest hug I had ever seen her do to anyone other than me. I tried to let it go. She was right. He had helped her through the summer. I knew how lonely it had been for me. It had to be worse for her, still being around things that reminded her of me. I wish I had had someone to keep me from thinking about her. I hope this does not sound too bitter. At the time, I knew nothing for sure, but I was beginning to wonder how much comfort from a friend might be too much.
Other things seemed to be clues, if I had the eyes to see them, or the heart to accept them.
At home, I noticed that all the pictures of me were put away. I asked her about that, and she said the only way to deal with me being gone was for her to convince herself that I was not around anymore, as in dead. I think she even used those words. She had to think of it as if I had died. And there had been numerous times I could have died if she really wanted to know those stories. It was just too hard for her to be reminded of me every time she went through the house; maybe on her way to see him, or be picked up by him.
I was completely the opposite. I wish I had had more pictures of her with me. Oh well. Everyone deals with stress differently. Some spend hours gazing longingly at photos. Some have affairs while their spouse’s pictures stay in a drawer. And, I guess she is right. If I had been having an affair, the last thing I would have wanted to see, or to be seen by my affair partner, would be a snapshot or two of my wife.
Of course, this was not as simple as it seemed on the outside. It is never simple. I know this caused her a lot of stress in the end because she came down with a case of mono. All of that is still in the future, though. I was back, and we seemed to be getting along just fine. I was happy, and I thought she was, too. She acted happy, anyway.
Then he invited us to go see a friend of his up east of Sacramento who had been building a log house. There was also a site in the area that my wife was interested in for her master’s research project. Her project had to do with the effect of smoke on retarding the growth of certain fungi. The graduate student she worked with on this project was to become an important figure in her future. The site was in a recently burned area that she wanted to survey.
We met her friend up there, and were introduced to the cabin builder. This turned out to be the most uncomfortable and worst weekend of my life up to that point. Exactly how it all came up, I am not sure. But early on, I realized my wife knew too much about the house and the area to have just been seeing it for the first time as I was. And, I was left alone a bit too much. Our host must have mentioned something about this to me, like how good a sport I was to come up with them. Maybe he thought that they had already told me they were together. This weekend, I finally became aware of how being friendly can become too much.
After we had gone to bed, I mentioned our host’s surprise at seeing me along on this trip. That was the start of officially marking the end of our relationship.
I remember being up most of the night talking to her about what had gone on over the summer. It had all started innocently enough, for her anyway. They had gone to the beach just to do something as friends might do. I never went to any event anywhere with any woman, or even a friend who was not a woman, either of the two summers I was away during my marriage, but that is just me. The only place I went socially that summer was to a baseball game with her parents. And they had probably known about everything at that point.
But he and she went quite a few places, it seemed. Early on, they had talked about couples in general and us in particular, and then one thing led to another. She suddenly admitted to him that she had never enjoyed the more physical aspects of marriage, not at all. Not even one time. She did not even know that she was supposed to enjoy it. I guess, one thing led to more things, and suddenly, he was telling, and or showing her how to fix that. How is that for beating around the bush? This is a family-friendly blog after all.
In theory, at this point, she was still intending to be with me. The problem was that I was not him. She was not able to put what she now felt with him into the context of feeling it with me. She claimed that she still wanted to try. I told her the only way it would work was for her to stop having any physical relationship with him. If she wanted to make it work with me, it would mean I was the only physical contact. Is that not a totally understanding attitude? I was not even sure it was a good idea for us to remain friends with him at that point, but I never brought that up.
She claimed she wanted to try to get past this, but she could not. Or she did not want to do it. ‘Can’t a person love more than one person?’ she would ask me. Sure, you can. Love is limitless. But the physical expression of it is another thing, at least for me. That would have to be limited. This is one part of our relationship that I would not share with someone else. We spoke of divorce, but it was too soon to decide yet if it would come to that.
It was decided sooner than I ever would have believed. I think that a quick divorce had always been the plan. She was just giving me time to adjust to the idea. Divorce was the only solution after all. We made the initial arrangements and started splitting up the household “things.” We duplicated what we both needed. We packed it all up. I got my own apartment and moved out. We told our parents. We told our friends. It was one last project we did together, as flawlessly as all of the others.
At this point, I started hearing things that friends or family had seen or wondered about. My old forestry camp roommate had seen my wife on the back of a motorcycle with some guy while I was gone, on more than one occasion. And my father had tried to call our apartment to check in with her and see if she was OK, but hadn’t gotten through for a while. Then, when he did, he was sure that he heard a guy in the background. Anyway, no one understood how the perfect couple could break up. What could I tell them? I was not really sure at that point myself. Why hadn’t she told me? Why was it so easy to tell someone else details of the most private portions of our lives and how she felt, when she could not tell me?
We saw each other a few times right after I moved. It got too hard for both of us, though. There was just too much baggage to act like we could go on as friends, knowing what had happened. Then she got sick, so I barely saw her after that.
By the following April, actually on April Fool’s Day, I received notice that our divorce was final. I remember actually getting the humor in that. Sometime in June, she sent me a copy of the invitation to her wedding, which had already taken place. I am not sure I really would have wanted to see the invitation if I had had a choice, but that is what she did. She sent that, with a couple of lines saying that she wanted me to know, but did not want me to find out from anyone else first. I doubt I even knew anyone else at that point who would have told me if they had known.
It is funny that one excuse for her having done what she did was that she felt trapped by being married. I guess marriage itself was not the real problem. It was that her marriage had been to me.
One note, I didn’t have a helmet for my ride.
Like all high school kids, I seemed to do a few things at times that would have made my mother nuts if she’d known what I was planning. One of those things was that I was secretly planning to do a bike ride to Point Reyes. I know she would not have approved because of the numerous times we had driven the route that I would take for the ride.
When I was younger, we would travel the route, seeing numerous bikes being ridden up over narrow switchback roads and steep hills. Since she was in the passenger seat and a non-driver, everything seemed so close to her as we passed the riders. It made her very nervous. Since then, knowing more of how my father drove and since I drive myself, I can understand a bit more why she was nervous. But, as much as my parents talked about those riders being nuts, I was thinking about doing that someday. When I decided to try it, I knew I could not just ride out and conquer the two separate hill climbs I would have to make. I had to find a local hill for practice rides.
Remember the hill up behind my house that, at one time, had a NIKE base? That was one steep hill. I figured if I could get to the top of that, I would have no trouble climbing the hills to get to Point Reyes. After school, at least three days a week, I would attempt to climb as high as I could on this hill. At first, I could hardly get up even a short distance. But every time I tried, I got a bit higher. Eventually, I could make it up with no problem. Some of my distance training was riding across town to see my girlfriend. Other times, I would just ride.
One ride for distance was to start out on San Pedro Rd from San Rafael, out past China Camp (famous for having parts of the African Queen and other movies filmed there), and ride the loop through Santa Venetia, to Terra Linda, and then back over the hill to San Rafael again. I rode that route several times and felt I was ready. Now, all I had to do was decide on a time to do the ride.
I think the ride happened early in the summer, after my girlfriend had left for a summer language training class at UC Santa Cruz. The perfect day for the ride came on a Saturday. There was high fog, a standard part of the summer in the Bay Area. There was very little wind and very cool temperatures. It was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment thing. I left. I figured I would go as far as I could. If I had to turn back, I would just turn back. I do not think I mentioned to anyone that I was going to do this ride. I did not even take any water or snacks. There were no cell phones then, but I doubt I would have had one if they had existed. I was on my own.
I headed west out of town, and before too long, I was through San Anselmo, then Fairfax. Just past Fairfax was White’s Hill. I felt fine. Of course, it had been only a gentle sloping rise up to now. Then it got steep fast. And slow. But I made it. I could not turn back now, so I rode on to Woodacre, the little spot barely on the map, where one of my aunts lived earlier. Now, would I go directly to Bolinas and then Point Reyes, or do the second climb and end up at Nicasio, then go along the reservoir?
I chose the second climb. This had more switchbacks and was pretty steep. This section really made my mother nervous when we encountered bike riders on it. I was lucky. There was not much traffic up here today. I made it to the top. Now it was a mostly flat run through Nicasio, and then along the road around the lake and to the dam, past places we used to stop to fish when I was younger. Then I rode on to Point Reyes Station. I was halfway, and I felt like I could ride forever. I did not even stop to rest. I probably should have, but I felt too good to stop and get off the bike. I just rode around a bit and then turned around for the return trip.
For the ride home, I decided to take the route that would bring me through Samuel P. Taylor Park and eventually back to the Woodacre turnoff at San Geronimo. Samuel P Taylor Park had been a picnic spot for my family as long as I could remember. It was fun being out there on a bike, by myself. The trip back was pretty calm, mostly downhill. At the bottom of White’s Hill again, I started the long, flat, straight run back to San Rafael. Then, all of a sudden, one of my derailleur cables broke, limiting me to only two gears. I am very lucky that it happened when it did. If I had been climbing, or if I had needed to climb when it happened, I would have been stuck. And no one would have had a clue where I was. When I got back, I stopped at the A & W Root Beer in San Rafael and had a root beer float. It was the best thing I ever tasted.
I challenged myself to a close to 50-mile ride with hills and made it without stopping, with no support, and with no water. And I could not tell anyone I had done it. I have driven the same route since then. I still see riders around the lake. But now, they rode in groups. They had water bottles that I did not even know existed back then. They have helmets. And they have a ride up the hills to the lake before they get on their bikes. I did not see any bikes along the route I had taken, except those on a flatbed trailer. It was interesting that it is still a popular destination, but also interesting that no one I saw, anyway, made the trip the way I did.
If I had grown up in this current time instead of the ’60s, maybe my life would have become more centered on riding. But when I was doing this, even though there had been interest in youth fitness since the days of President Kennedy, bike riding had not yet taken off. At least with the people I knew. I had no role models who thought it was anything exciting. They just rode bikes across town until they could drive, and then, for the most part, the bikes were forgotten. My bike (a close to 10-year-old Raleigh Grand Prix at the time) was way too heavy for any serious riding, even by the standards of that day. Now, it is a classic, but still a heavy classic. I saw one almost exactly like it at an antique show a few years ago. I was almost tempted to buy it just to have one on hand if I needed spare parts.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
It has been a year and two months now since you died.
Sometimes in a dream, you come to me to explain that the doctors were wrong, and you did not really die. I can almost believe that, in the dream. Your doctors were not infallible, and they did miss a thing or two about your illness over the years.
And I know in the dream, as much as I want to believe that you, it is not true.
There are still moments- for a split second before I open my eyes in the morning, I forget the new reality. Then the memory of your passing returns to me. Earlier this would be sudden and jarring- a tough reminder.
At least now, that part is getting easier.
And there are still times I wake and hear you breathing, and then realize it is my breathing that I hear. Getting used to your absence takes time, having woken next to you for 36 years.
And as I promised you the last time we spoke, in the brief moment when you were lucid, I will be OK. I know grieving is a process that could go on for many years, and quite possibly for the rest of my life. I miss you every day. That will never change.
Recently, I started getting out of the house again, just to walk through our old neighborhood as we used to before you got so sick.
It was odd at first to walk by myself on the same routes we used to walk together, hand in hand. Seeing the same old houses and even a few of the same cars in the streets we used to see. Even the fire hydrant that came close to kneecapping me while walking with you. Then, I leaned on you to keep from going to the ground in pain. This time, I thought of you holding me up then, as I leaned against that fire hydrant to remove a pebble from my shoe.
We went through so much together in those 36 years.
It is still hard to fully understand that you are gone.
Maybe that is because, as I walk by myself now, I feel you with me. And whether it is my walks or shopping for groceries. Or talking to friends over coffee when the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown allows a brief time with them… I know you are still with me.
And, as long as I know you are with me, I can never really be alone.
It is a rare Sunday visit to Peet’s, a coffee shop in the town where I live. Only one of the regulars that I have become used to seeing on my more common weekday morning visits is here. I have known of Peet’s since my college days, in a much earlier life.
Then I could not really afford to be a regular. Now I make it a point to treat myself, whether or not I can really justify the extra cost of coffee out. Sometimes it is not just about the coffee. This has become a place to unwind and find respite. And I know I am a regular because the baristas know my name and what I usually order, and at times, they have it ready for me before I get to the counter to pay.
This is the first time I have tried to write a post for this or any of my other blogs out in the elements away from my normal haunts. This certainly is not my normal writing environment. I am typing on my Smartphone, something I have not tried much before. It is pretty easy with my BlackBerry 10. It completes words for me, whether I type the correct keys or not. And that has become an important feature on this phone since a neurological ailment has left me with a slight tremor.
Writing has become more important in my life in recent months. It is partly therapy. It is partly a feeling of needing to create something someone else may want to read. But it is not what I thought I would be doing at this stage of my life.
I have had people comment on the other blogs I write. Those are about specific topics, and it was good to find out that my other blogs have audiences for their unique topics. But this one is personal. This is just me writing what I have done in my life, or about the people who have touched my life. A friend recently told me I was a good writer. She herself is a writer and a pretty good one. Her opinion is important to me.
Lots of things used to keep me awake at night. Some of those things still keep me awake now. But now writing has become something that keeps me awake as well. What to write. How to write those things I think of. Reworking things I have already written. At times, I wish I could get up and actually write when I wake up at two in the morning. It might help calm down my thoughts. Sleep eventually overtakes me. Maybe someday I will dream of a solution for the things I am trying to work out. It used to happen when I was still working.
Memory is the Key