The best years of my life were spent at Willamette University. Don’t get me wrong — I love my life and, except for period bouts of anxiety, am quite content. But no memories compare to those of my college years.

Kris and I joined a small group of other Willamette alumni for a fifteen year reunion last night. Bernie and Kristi were there, looking dapper, as were other classmates we see less often: Ginger, Anne, Shelley, Martin Taylor, for example. And, especially, Paul (and his charming Stanford-educated wife, Tammy), and Aaron and Tiffany.

It was wonderful to catch up with these friends. It’s fascinating to hear what everyone is doing now, and to see how they both have and have not changed. For me the highlight of the evening was a long chat with Tiffany Tarrant. Tiffany was one of the residents of Matthews Hall when I was RA. She, Dan Rathert, and I took astronomy together. We loved it. We had a lot of fun. We even formed a short-lived astronomy club and published an issue or two of a newsletter. We called each other star names. Tiffany was Nunki; Dan was Ras-Al-Ague; I was Altair. I once wrote a mock love poem for Tiffany in which I declared, “You are my spiral galaxy.”

Good times.

I would have liked to have seen more former classmates last night, but I’m happy for the time we were able to spend with those who made it.

Kris and I are back from our trip to San Francisco. We had fun, but it’s good to be home.

Day One
We left home at 7:15 on the morning of Thursday the 10th. Because I’ve always wanted to make a longish road trip, and because we thought it would be cheaper, and because we wanted greater freedom, we drove our own car. In a way, this was a challenge for me. I’m normally a speed-limit driver, but I surrendered this compulsion early on, and by the end of the trip I was a certified California driver. (“You don’t need to use your horn,” Kris told me this morning as we drove to meet Rhonda and Mike for breakfast. Oops.)

We stopped in Medford/Ashland for lunch (and to see the southern Oregon crime lab). After a way-too-long two-hour break, we hit the road again, crossing into California at 2:00. The amazing thing about crossing the border is that California immediately looks like California. It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. The afternoon drive was pleasant, though at one time I freaked out because I couldn’t see any hills — the land around us was flat and open. That’s unnatural. We also drove through a large swarm of moths just west of Sacramento. That was disconcerting. And messy.

We crossed the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco at about 7:15, twelve hours after we’d started. We’d made the 635 mile journey in about nine hours of driving time.

My first culture shock was the traffic. San Francisco drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians seem to view traffic laws as mere guidelines. And the drivers enforce their view of the guidelines with ample usage of their horns. San Francisco streets are filled with a cacophony of tooting horns. There are also no left-turn lanes. (“Three rights to make a left,” Andrew told me later in the trip.)

When we arrived at our hotel on Fisherman’s Wharf, I was perplexed to find that it would cost us $32/night to park. Yikes! I worried further about how much to tip the parking attendant. (My fretting over tips was a recurring theme on this trip.)

After a far-too-expensive mediocre dinner, we hit the sack, exhausted.

Day Two
Tiffany arrived on an early flight. The entire family gathered for a two-hour paid sight-seeing tour on a pseudo-trolley car. This was actually rather useful. The narrated drive around the city gave us a rough feel for where things were located. We headed up Columbus, into Chinatown, downtown to Union Square, up to Nob Hill, through the Presidio, and then across the Golden Gate Bridge. By doing this tour first, I was able to get a rough feel for the city’s geography, and we were able to plan our agenda as a group.

In the afternoon, the women shopped at Ghiradelli Square. I waited patiently. We also made our way to Lombard Street and walked down the “crookedest street in the world”. This is not a must-see attraction, although it’s easy enough to find and do.

Day Three
On Saturday we strolled up Columbus to Chinatown. We spent a couple hours looking at the shops, which were filled with all sorts of strange and wonderful things. Kris and I took a sort of perverse glee at the poultry shop: in the right-hand window were the fresh chickens, alive and clucking — down the hall was a boiling vat; in the left window we could watch the no-longer-alive chickens being butchered by an expert worker. It’s lucky I think chickens are dumb, or I might have wanted to rescue them.

We ate lunch at a dim sum restaurant. Dim sum is a sort of light meal. (It’s only for breakfast and lunch, not for dinner.) A waitress brings around various dishes — vegetable wontons, pork wontons, BBQ beef buns, hunks of chicken, balls of sticky rice, etc. — and the table selects those they’d like to share.

In the afternoon, we kids walked down to Union Square. Kris and Tiff shopped for shoes. I waited patiently.

We also found time to stop at City Lights, a notable San Francisco bookstore. It sucked. It’s just a run-of-the-mill bookstore now with run-of-the-mill surly bookstore employees. (Is this a requirement for bookstore workers? Even Powell’s has this problem.)

Day Four
On Sunday we drove to Golden Gate Park so that Kris’ mother could see the carousel and the bison paddock. Then, on a whim, we stopped to explore the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood (map), once a center of Sixties counterculture. It’s now a center of pretentious wannabe counterculture. Still, Haight is lined by dozens of vintage clothing shops. The women had fun shopping these. I waited patiently.

I found a potentially great bookstore called Forever After books, but it was marred by an awful user experience. “You can’t bring that ice cream in here,” the guy behind the counter told me. Fine. I can understand that. I stood outside and finished my ice cream, looking at the books in the window. But when I went inside and wanted to actually examine some of these books, the guy told me I couldn’t. When I wanted to examine some plastic-wrapped pocket books just inside the door, he came from behind the counter and hovered over me while I looked. “Can I open this to see what it’s like inside?” I asked regarding one book. I could not. What the hell? Fine. I won’t buy it then. (I’ve never been in a shop that wouldn’t let you open a plastic-wrapped book or comic. It’s absurd.) Signs were hung all around the shop declaring that customers were not allowed to do this and were not allowed to do that. There were several books I wanted there, but ultimately I decided I would not give my business to a place that treated its customers with such contempt. Kris’ father later pointed out that given the nature of its clientele — the riff-raff we saw along Haight — most of the store’s policies were understandable. Maybe so. But I still think it’s a poor idea to treat all of your customers as if they were crap.

Day Five
On Monday we said good-bye to Kris’ family and drove north to Berkeley. Michael Rawdon had recommended a store called Comic Relief, and I wanted to check it out. I paid for half-an-hour of parking and entered the store. I knew right away that I was in trouble. There was little hope of me getting out of the store in thirty minutes. And while I’d done well on my budget until this point, I knew that the store was going to strip me of a lot of money. I was right on both counts.

Comic Relief is a shop devoted to the sort of comics I buy: bound volumes collecting several issues at once. The store contains thousands of these books, as well as a wide selection of graphic novels and, to my delight, comic strip compilations. (More than anything, I’ve come to love collecting comic strips.) I didn’t score anything particularly rare, but I picked up some fun stuff. “I’m glad this shop isn’t in Portland,” I told Kris. “I’d be broke.” Comic Relief was awesome.

We then drove to Novato (thirty minutes north of San Francisco). Andrew Parker, a good friend from grade school, had offered to put us up for a couple of days. His wife Joann prepared a fine meal for us, although I was heckled for my picky eating habits. (Which most of you are already familiar with.) We ate cheese and bread and crackers and lasagna and consumed a lot of wine. The conversation was great fun as we learned about Joann’s life in Texas, and about what these two do for a living.

Day Six
Andrew and Joann indulged us on Tuesday, driving us back into the city so that we could catch a couple of attractions we’d missed before. In particular, I wanted to see the Cartoon Art Museum. I’m glad we went, as this was one of the highlights of the trip for me. We also indulged Kris by paying an exorbitant fee to walk through an exhibition of artifacts from Titanic. The display was neat, no question, but not worth the price. Also, I was offended by the many blatant grammar and punctuation problems in the signage.

We wanted to take our hosts out for a nice dinner, but instead we returned home where Joann prepared a delicious cheese fondue. Yum. (Thanks, Joann and Andrew — we owe you a nice meal the next time you’re in Portland.)

“It was less dumb than I thought.” – Kris’ review of the Cartoon Art Museum

Day Seven
We said goodbye to the Parkers and drove north on 101. We stopped in Santa Rosa to attend the Charles M. Schulz Museum. This was disappointing. The exhibits aren’t awful, but they are rather dull. I was hoping for a more comprehensive history of Peanuts and an exploration of how it fits into the context of comic strip history. Instead we got an exhibit on Woodstock and an exhibit on the kite-eating tree. Lame. The museum is new, though, and there’s room for future improvement.

In the afternoon, we departed the highway to drive through the redwoods on a scenic byway. We stopped at one point to take a short jaunt through the trees, marveling at the mass of one fallen specimen. It was ginormous.

We stopped for the evening in Arcata, which was a mistake. The town is home of Humboldt State University, and this was apparently the week that new students arrived in town. We managed to snag one of the last hotel rooms, then drove off to look for someplace to eat. Downtown Arcata might be considered quaint, with its old buildings and its central square, except for the loud and scraggly young adults who had gathered to tell stories about their summer. There was also a greater beggar density here then there had been in San Francisco (and the density in San Francisco was staggering).

We ate at Jambalaya, which had decent food but terrible service.

Day Eight
We got a slow start on Thursday, which made me cranky. After breakfast, we stopped north of Arcata for an hour-long hike through the forest. Unfortunately, there’d been a recent bear siting: a black bear and her two cubs were known to be in the area. Now, I may not have mentioned this before, but I’m terribly afraid of bears. I know it’s irrational, but I’m certain that I’m going to die by mauling. The entire time we were hiking, I was petrified we’d be attacked. It didn’t make for a nice jaunt in the woods.

I was even crankier when, by two o’clock, we’d only travelled one hundred miles. But then things turned around. I entered some sort of mystical driving “zone” and for four hours cruised up the Oregon Coast, grooving to techno tunes while Kris read a book. At six, we found ourselves in Florence on the Central Oregon coast. “Where are we going to stay tonight?” asked Kris. “I don’t know,” I said, and just then we noticed a sign that pointed toward Eugene. We were both starving, and decided Eugene offered the best hope of a good meal, so we cut east.

We made excellent time for fifteen minutes before our journey was brought to a halt. We found ourselves in a long line of semi-trucks and RVs and other big vehicles. A minivan had flipped ahead and was blocking both lanes of traffic. We turned around and found another highway that headed north, snaking through the hills to Junction City, which is just north of Eugene. We couldn’t find a decent place to eat in Junction City, and I didn’t want to go south to Eugene, so we drove north, desperate for food. Finally we stopped at a Wendy’s in Albany. We were willing to eat anything at this point.

“It’s nine o’clock,” I told Kris. “We might as well drive all the way home.” And so we did.

Conclusion
We had a fun trip, but it’s good to be home. I regret not seeing more of San Francisco. We didn’t do the Alcatraz tour. We didn’t head south to see Michael or to meet Ramit. We didn’t do a lot of things.

But I guess that means there’s a reason to go back!

My father would have turned 61 today. In memory, here’s a piece that my Aunt Virginia posted at her site a few weeks ago: her memories of growing up with Dad.

July 31, 1945
Hospital stays in that day were much longer than now, so I suppose the date is actually around August 10, 1945. 

We tiptoed around the house, everything had to be quiet.  My mom tied a hankie around my nose so I wouldn’t breathe out any germs.  I quietly approached the bedroom and under the window was a basket, and in the basket was a tiny new baby.  It was a brother.  I looked at him, but I dare not touch him, I might give him some germs that were on my hands.  He was so tiny and looked so sweet, how I longed to touch him, but that must wait. 

As he grew older (at about 9 months) his crib was kept in the living room.  He learned that by standing up and pulling on the edge of the crib and wiggling back and forth, that he could make the crib move, and that is just what he did, from one end of the living room to the other.  The only problem, at one end of the room there was a wood stove.  I always worried that he would run into the stove and get hurt but he never did. 

As he grew older he would follow me whereever I went.  I loved my little brother and played with him by the hour.  We made mud pies  (without germs. of course) and we made roads in the dirt with his roadgrader and dump truck, my big brother helped us and we built a road from the house to the woods which was over a quarter of a mile away (I’ll probably get some feedback on this) but we drug the hoe behind us to scrape the ground wide enough for our trucks.  There was a cowpath most of the way so it wasn’t too hard. It went through the barnyard, down the lane, through the woods and over to a patch of timber which my father was having someone log it.  The big firs were on the ground and there were little houses to be made under the limbs that were held up by their branches.  There were logs (little short limbs we would cut with an ax) and bring them up to the house to be put in the log pond that my older brother had dug and filled with water.  We played for hours. 

Soon he was old enough to enjoy the Bobsey Twins (books) and I read to him by the hour.  We were together almost everywhere.  I remember one time we were staying at my aunts house and we found a tame chicken. We played with it and dressed it until the poor thing died. Of course we had to have a funeral.  My cousin (who is a preacher today) preached his first funeral sermon that day and after the burial and so much mourning. We decided to play funeral.  We took turns being the dead one and the only thing we could find for a casket was the bathtub. So first one of us and then the other would take turns being dead while they other would solomly and mournfully sing “Jingle Bells”  (the only reason I know this is because my aunt told it many times in my hearing) 

For many years while we were growing up we would stay with my aunt for a couple weeks. We would look forward to this vacation with anticipation. We turned summersalts and cartwheels on the lawn in the evenings. One evening as he was teasing me I went running around the house to get away from him and straight into my boyfriend who had arrived and was talking to my dad at that moment.  (Pop still teases me about that, the problem is, I didn’t know he was comming and was caught in my playclothes, not dressed up at all) 

As we grew older Steve and I would talk together about our plans and dreams for the future.  I got married at 16 and Steve worked for my husband peeling cascara bark during one summer. He went away to school and we sold his VW for him. He wrote, I wrote.  He just loved my first baby and would carry her around when ever he could.  He was a great tease and of course would tease my little girls till it was a fright.  He would tell them he would put them on the roof of the house if they wouldn’t be good. Of course they loved him dearly in spite of all the teasing, there was no one like uncle Steve. 

Time goes on, he fell in love with a pretty young lady and was married, had his own children and they grew up.  The day came when he told me he had cancer and of course after a long hard battle he was gone, and all I have today are memories, but, Steve…

“I’ll Always Remember”

Happy birthday, Dad.

When I was a boy, the neighborhood kids roamed the countryside seemingly at will, and from an early age. Perhaps our parents were watching, but we never noticed. We were six miles from town, traipsing over farmland in rural Oregon. No harm could come to us except that of our own devising. And we did devise ways to hurt ourselves: dirt clod fights, near drownings, accidents with horses, etc. When our parents wanted us home, they would phone around the neighborhood, or, if that failed, they would stand outside and shout: “TOH-rey! DAY-vid! SHAW-un! JEH-uf!” and we would make our way home. (Shawn used to have extended shouted conversations with his mother, from half a mile away; that was pretty funny.)

Often we met the other kids at the Big Tree (which was, alas, cut down last summer), where once we found a stash of porn mags. Sometimes we rode our bikes the mile down to Charlie’s Market to buy Wacky Packs and Bottle Caps and taffy and Dr. Pepper. We romped through the filbert orchard, where we raced our bikes down rows of trees, scaring ourselves with stories of Homer Knopp’s shotgun (which he kept loaded with rock salt to shoot kids). We rode our bikes back to Grandpa’s Woods.

My grandparents lived a quarter-mile from us. Behind their house grew a stand of oak and pine and fir, a thicket we called Grandpa’s Woods. We spent a lot of time in Grandpa’s Woods. We built forts. We played hide-and-seek. We played in Sputnik, the rusting hulk of a car left behind by Uncle Stan and Aunt Virginia. There were often other miscellaneous pieces of farm equipment in the woods with which to play: plows and implements and tools of all sorts.

For a long time, Grandpa kept his cows in the woods. There was a lane that led from Grandpa’s barn, back past a small field, and into the trees. The front half of the woods was thick with all sorts of trees, but dominated by towering oaks. The back half of the land had fewer trees, and was generally open, covered with grass and weeds and blackberry brambles. Grandpa’s cows grazed in this grassy area. To keep them contained, Grandpa had an electric fence. We used to play games trying to see who could hold the fence the longest (despite the shocking pulses), what objects we could use to touch the fence without being shocked, or how quickly we could crawl under the fence. Being boys, we considered a mark of honor to urinate on the fence.

One year, on my birthday, Jeff and I took Sean and Cory Brown back to Grandpa’s woods. For some reason, we had a hatchet. The winter had been harsh, and several trees had fallen. One had been arrested mid-fall, and lay at maybe a thirty degree angle to the ground. The Brown twins climbed the tree and started hacking at it, trying to cut off the top. “Let me try,” I said, and I climbed past them. I was a little nervous to be so high above the ground (twenty feet? thirty?). I was happily hacking away when the trunk snapped and suddenly I was in free fall. I hadn’t anticipated that sitting on the wrong side of the cut might be dangerous. Fortunately, the trunk fell away from me, and my fall was slowed by a thick growth of branches all around me. When I hit the ground with a thud, Jeff rushed to my side. “Are you okay?” he asked. I wasn’t sure at first, once I realized I was in one piece, I proclaimed: “That was fun!”

When we were older, we played “life-size D&D”, a game we made up as we went along, the rules of which were relatively fluid. (This is years before we were aware of the concept of live-action roleplaying.) We played with Jeremy Martin and Torey Lam. (And maybe Dave — Dave did you ever play with us?). We would run around with stout limbs as swords and axes. If we were magicians we would carry pine cones or oak puffs and throw them at our targets as we shouted, “Magic missile! Magic missile!” (Similar to this but without costumes, and with far fewer people.) Even in those formative years, priests were valued party members, capable of restoring our dwindling health.

Eventually I cast aside my youthful ways. I no longer went back to Grandpa’s woods to play. When I was in high school and college, I’d sometimes walk back there to be alone, to think, to write. It also became a fun place to take girls I was dating, a fun place to make out. (For some reason, they never thought it was as fun as I did.)

The last time I was back in Grandpa’s Woods was for a photography class. The land isn’t in our family anymore, but I felt no compunction about trespassing to make some pictures. While I was working, somebody came along on a four-wheeler and stared at me for a while. I waved, but the watcher did not wave back. Soon after, several new signs appeared announcing “private property — keep out”. Somebody new may own the woods, but they do not own my memories.

I was in first grade the first time I can remember anyone asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Throughout the year, our parents had come to class to give presentations on their careers. One dad was a fireman. One mom played violin. My mother brought in a food dryer and dried pineapple. Ironically (in retrospect), the presentation I remember most was from a man who worked at the paper mill in Oregon City. He passed around a jar of raw pulp as he described how paper was made. He gave us each a ream to take home.

At the end of the school year, Mrs. Onion asked, “Now that you’ve seen what parents do all day, what do you want to do when you grow up?”

I knew instantly: “I want to be an astronaut.”

For one thing, Steve Austin had been an astronaut. Though his mission had ended in disaster, he did have a bionic arms and legs to show for it. Also, Mr. Spock was an astronaut.

Mostly, I wanted to live on the moon.

Throughout my childhood, I was obsessed with living in space. Every year, my teachers told me, “When you grow up, people will live on the moon,” and I believed them. I wanted to live on a space station orbiting the Earth. I wanted to visit Mars.

I devoured science fiction of all sorts, but especially that which portrayed humans living in futuristic societies. The Jetsons weren’t a comedy to me, but an idyllic vision of what might be. Isaac Asimov’s “Lucky Starr” books were keen not because of the mysteries and the robots, but because they posited a society in which people lived on Venus and Mars and the moons of Jupiter. (Not to mention the asteroid pirates — boy! how I wished I could be an asteroid pirate!)

As I grew older, reality dealt harsh blow after harsh blow to my dreams of living in space. The rapid astronautical advances of my youth gave way to a relative stagnation of space-related progress. Still, I kept the dream alive by watching and reading whatever stories I could find that involved people living in space: The Black Hole, Outland, Alien. (All three of which are horror films to one degree or another.)

In time, my dreams of living in space faded. There were no more moon landings. The Challenger exploded. Gradually I became aware that my peers were actively hostile to the idea of a space program. (I remember one extended argument with some friends about the value and necessity of space exploration; they believed that NASA should be axed completely.)

Now that I’m nearing forty, my youthful dreams seem fanciful. I’d dearly love for the space program to expand beyond shuttle missions and space station stays, but it’s unlikely that we’ll put people on the moon again in the next twenty years, let alone on Mars. I continue to consume stories of space colonization (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful Mars series), but I recognize that our world has become too inwardly focused to dream big anymore. We’re too busy fighting wars. We’re too busy arguing over who should get how much money. We’re too busy consuming. As a society, we have no vision of the future, no vision at all, let alone a vision that includes space travel.

Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, it’s my dream one day to live on the moon.