for myself on this week's walking. Oregon was beautiful -- cloudy in the mornings but mostly sunny, clear, and NOT HUMID in the afternoons. It's the same here now; very pleasant for walking.
Oregon Roses
Today: Walked: 3 miles.
Yesterday (Friday): Walked: 1.5 miles.
Thursday 08/04: Walked: 3 miles.
Wednesday 08/03: Walked: 5.5 miles.
Tuesday 08/02: Walked: 2.5 miles.
I returned from Oregon with lots to write about -- a magnificent state, college visits, internet friendships, and a flight across our country -- but I also returned to the sad and horrifying news that a friend of ours had been killed in a bicycle collision with a truck a few days ago. He worked with my husband for several years when we first lived here, so he and his wife were among the people we have known the longest. He was an avid outdoorsman and he and my husband used to run together, back in the days when they were both training for marathons. (In fact, he had run Boston again this year.) Although we had largely lost touch with them as a couple and I haven't seen his wife for several years, I encountered him periodically when I was out walking and he was running or biking.
This man was unusually present -- right there, always with something to say, full of life and energy and commentary. I remember one conversation quite a few years ago in our back yard, when he had taken a water break from running and was reminiscing about our initiation into parenthood with twins. He and his wife had had their children several years before our first were born.
"I remember you guys," he practically cackled with glee. "You had white couches! Who has white couches? Only people without children, that's who. I love telling people about this, because when we came by after you had the kids there were poopy diapers on the living room floor. Poopy diapers and white couches! Your lives had completely fallen apart!"
"I'm sure we did not have poopy diapers on the living room floor," I said icily.
"How would you know?" He thought that this was uproarious. "You guys were complete zombies!"
He had clearly gotten a charge out of our fall from the grace of utter yuppiness into the chaos of parenthood and, as I told him, I was just so glad to know that he had shared this anecdote with other people. Over the years, he continued to offer good-natured and empathetic reflections and insights into the passage of the parenting years, some of them humorous, some tinged with sadness and frustration, some grounded in biases not shared by all.
The last long conversation we had was on our front porch -- another water break -- probably just about a year ago, as I was agonizing over the impending cost of college and analyzing decisions made by other friends to insist that their children attend less expensive schools than those that were their first chocies.
"Oh, that's such bull," he said, with characteristic bluntness. "What am I gonna do, tell my kid that she can't go to the school she's worked for so I can have a few thousand dollars more for retirement? How ridiculous. That's not what parenting is about."
"Well, that's pretty much what all the financial experts say," I ventured. "That we should be focusing on our retirement and not extending ourselves on college tuitions."
"It's all values," he responded. "How much does some extra retirement matter as stacked up against your kid's education? Really, it's just a few years. So you work a few years longer; so what?"
This was not, I hasten to add, a wealthy person. Comfortable, but no grand houses or vacation homes. And, as it turns out, he won't ever get to that retirement, comfortably cushioned or not. His life was far too short, expecially for someone who engaged in it as completely as he did. He enjoyed his family, took great pride in his children and their achievements as young adults, reveled in conversation on every topic, and loved to run and bike. I last saw him maybe a month ago, as I was walking around the lake and he and a friend passed on their bikes. He called out a "hello" and was gone. It was just an ordinary day and there was no reason for me to think, after more than 25 years, that I wouldn't run into him again sooner or later.
If I had, I would have told him about where I'd been this week and urge that he get out there. As it is, I'll just post this photo in memory of someone who had an expansive approach to life and to his adventures in the outdoors:
Columbia River Gorge
I've finished my walk; now I just have to get organized and out of here. But I wanted to leave with this photo, in which the three barns are just barely visible from the top of Sleeping Bear Dunes:
Walked: 2.5 miles.
Tomorrow my daughter and I are off to Oregon for the next stage in the college search. We'll be taking a look at Reed, Lewis & Clark, and Willamette:
A lot of people ask, "Why so far away?" I don't know what my daughter's ultimate decision will be but, as I see it, college is perhaps the one time in your life in which you are free to experiment with who and where you want to be. I didn't pay any attention when my uncle, who had gone to Standford, said "Look out west -- don't just repeat your high school experience!" or when a high school teacher from North Carolina said, "Why don't y'all take a look at Vanderbilt or Chapel Hill -- why are you so parochial in your outlook?" I still regret my obtuseness at seventeen.
Geographical proximity guarantees little. As one friend, whose daughter is also looking into schools in the Pacific Northwest, said, "My son was two hours from home and miserable for four years. If she's happy, then I'm happy -- and that's what phone calls and e-mails are for."
I have no idea what my daughter will make of this week. I had thought that she should apply to these schools and, if she were accepted, go out for a visit. But friends have told us that Reed is such a different kind of place that we should invest in the trip before making the application. She may decide that one of these colleges is the perfect match -- or she may get off the plane and say, "That's a little too far for a regular trip."
I'm not holding my breath either way. Two years ago, in October of his senior year, one of her brothers was set on a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. At the end of April, he sent a deposit to a big university in Chicago. A lot of water will flow under the bridge between this week and next May 1.
Walked today: 3.5 miles.
Some people have asked about my camera -- it's a Canon S30 PowerShot. Of course they don't make it anymore but, for comparison's sake: it has a 7.1-21.3 mm zoom lens, f-stops 1.28-4.9, 3.2 mega pixels. Nothing fancy, a decent beginner's digital camera -- slow, with some macro capacity. To the extent that my images have any real shaprness of focus or intensity of color, they have been manipulated a bit via Paint Shop Pro. Paint Shop Pro is also responsible for my ability to fool around with shapes and colors (see the Spider Web coming up in the near future). Since I'm just learning my way around the camera and Paint Shop Pro, I'm not in a big hurry to upgrade.
It's funny -- I'm a pretty uncoordinated and nonmechanical person. I couldn't sew curtains or even recognize a component of a car's engine to save my life. But I have loved my cameras and my darkrooms even since I got my first Kodak Brownie for my ninth birthday. Here's more of one reason why:
Northern Michigan Barn
Who doesn't love a great barn? I don't know; maybe they aren't as intriguing to everyone else as they are to me. Growing up in the country, I was probably always aware of the hulking barns that loomed far larger than the modest farmhouses they supported. Playing in a barn, with its lofts, stalls, and myriad doors, was a lot more fun than playing in a barren school gym. When we were kids, my brother and I used to climb the outside ladder of a nearby silo and hang out over the countryside -- an activity of which our parents were probably unaware.
Most barns offer some individual expression of ownership -- a small cupola, an unusual weathervane or door, an Amish Hex sign, or a Mail Pouch Tobocco advertisement -- while the occasional barn is an impressive work of structural art. The eastern half of America today is littered with barns in various states of disrepair and collapse, but occasionally you'll find one that continues to be the object of someone's imagination, love and care:
Northern Michigan Farm
