Denver part 2

Where was I? OK. Friday morning. We left the stone cutter’s and headed back out 44th Avenue to Mt. Olivet Cemetery. 44th runs parallel to I-70m that we had seen backed up earlier and the traffic coming towards us was solid for two miles. At 11:30 in the morning!

Dad wanted to confirm his burial arrangements at Mt. Olivet. There is a large stone there with several Wood’s buried there. Mom and Dad have decided that they want to be buried there.

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It’s a little hard to see in the second photo but there is space for two names on the far end. How exactly to fit Mom and Dad’s names there is what we discussed with the stone cutter.

After Mt. Olivet, Dad wanted to see the Thaler house on Vrain. Patty is living there but has not been well so we only drove by. There are huge duplexes on both sides of that little house now! Who allowed that zoning variance?

Mom and Dad wanted to get together with Dad’s high school friend Ginger. (Urrk, can’t remember her last name!) After some negotiating, we agreed to pick her up at her house and go out to lunch. This is where Dad got the freeway exit right and I didn’t. We were a little early until the detour . . .

After a nice lunch and visit I asked Dad if we could drive by the house he grew up in. ‘Grandma Flynn’s house.’ He wasn’t wild about the idea but I persisted. It was pretty much right on the way back to the hotel, assuming we didn’t go on the freeway, which I didn’t want to do. It was around 3:30 by now on a Friday.

So we worked our way through Denver city streets until we came to the house on 1st Avenue. There was a parking space right across the street so I pulled in and told Mom and Dad I just wanted to take a good look and a couple of pictures. This I did but as I was getting ready to leave a woman and a boy came riding up on bicycles and she went up to the side of the house to put away her bike. I thought she might have seen me snooping around so I thought I would explain myself. She turned out to be thrilled that we had a connection to the house. She and her husband had lived there since 1993. She insisted that Dad come out of the car and invited us in to look around. I didn’t remember the inside at all but of course Dad did and so did Mom. They declined the invitation to go upstairs.

After many thanks we said goodbye and continued back to the hotel.

The next day we had no plans beyond going to Tim Flynn’s that evening. I looked up Lawson and found that it was only 35 minutes from our hotel. Lawson is where my great grandfather Thomas Bernard is buried. Mom and Dad declined the invitation to go there with me. I got going early and got to the cemetery around 8:30 am. It was considerably colder than Denver there at 8500 feet!

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It’s a pretty spot but I noticed the freeway noise (I-70) for the first time. Unrelenting.

I went on into Georgetown for a cup of hot chocolate and a muffin. The car helpfully told me the outside temperature was 36 degrees!

Back to the hotel for an afternoon of resting and watching football. At 5 we headed out for Tim’s. Tim had moved back into the house he grew up in and recently finished remodeling that he wanted to share with the family. Tim and Debbie hosted us, Patty Thaler, Jackie and her husband Dan and their sons Sean and Brian, Michelle and her husband Steve, Mary Helen and her daughter Melissa and her husband Silvio. We all toured the house and had a fine time sitting around chatting. Patty has a very serious lung problem so had a tank of oxygen with her at all times. We aren’t what I would call close to our Denver relatives but we always enjoy each other when we get together.

Jackie and Patty had invited us to join them Sunday morning at their church. I was ready to go but Dad nixed the idea in the morning. Actually, he nixed just about every idea Mom and I came up with for how to spend the day. Finally he agreed to go see a movie so we went to see ‘Sully’. After that we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We had lunch there first but when we finished at 3:30, Dad didn’t want to go into the museum. He was anxious to be at the airport. For a 9 pm flight.

OK, let’s go. Before heading to the airport, I did drive slowly through City Park, where the museum is located. On our way out we passed an imposing building that Dad said was Denver East High School and that he had attended there one summer for a class that St Francis didn’t have. Well, that’s cool!

From there I spotted the dome of the Capitol building so I drove down by there and then through the downtown area. I sort of half heartedly looked for Union Station but failed. I guess I was ready to go home too. Going to the airport, I drove through city streets again just to look around. The day was lovely but taking a walk was not in the cards.

We got to the Avis place at 4:45, dropped off the car with no hassle, got through ticketing and security and to the gate by 6:30. Once on the plane, there was a delay for reasons never explained. We left about 20 minutes late. Arrived SFO 11:15, got back to pick up Mom and Dad with the car at midnight, got to Santa Clara about 12:40, turned right around and headed home in my car, arrived in Pacifica at 1:30 and couldn’t sleep. Urrr. Ibuprofen to the rescue. Attained sleep about 2:30 but had to get up at 6 for an 8 am call at Davies which lasted until 2 am.

But that’s another story.

the Denver trip

I went to Denver last weekend with Mom & Dad. We had been planning it for several months but it kept getting pushed back. They didn’t want to wait so long that the weather turned crappy and I kept having work conflicts. Anyway, about three weeks ago Mom & I sat down and hammered it out. We ended up booking through Priceline.com about which more later.

They bought the tickets and paid for the hotel room and I paid for the rental car. I think they want to reimburse me for the car but I will resist.

The trip actually was OK overall, but there were difficulties with practical issues.I did a pretty good job of slowing down my expectations of what Dad can do. Spending 4 solid days with him gave me a new appreciation of what Mom has to deal with. He’s just enough on the ball to surprise you once in a while but more often he’s just not quick enough to do what he wants to do. And I can see he wants to do all the things he’s always done.

Especially traveling around Denver, his home town. He knows the streets but not necessarily the best way to get around. I ended up using the GPS in my phone most of the time but one time he was right and I was wrong and I gave him full credit. At all times I tried to treat his directions with respect.

Traveling is tiring under the best of circumstances and even though it didn’t seem like we did much, he was worn down. Sunday night at the airport going home, Mom told me (out of his presence) he said to her, ‘Never again!’ That makes me sad as he has always been a great traveler.

The weirdness started Wednesday night. I went down to Santa Clara for the night. Mom and I had agreed when we did the booking that we would fly out of SFO instead of San Jose because there were more and cheaper flights. Oh you fools! Well, that meant we had to get from Santa Clara to the airport and back during a time when everyone in the local family was working. I decided to drive Mom and Dad each way and just use long term parking. Expensive, but simpler.

When I got to Santa Clara, Mom was concerned that they hadn’t been abler to check in for the flight so I went straight to the computer. There I found to my horror that the airline we had chosen, Frontier, charged for baggage on a sliding scale. The closer you got to the gate, the more it cost. Not only that, they charged for carry-ons! This discovery was after we all had packed in small bags for our 4 day trip. It was actually cheaper to check the bags than to pay the fee for carry-ons.

Then it turns out that if you want to sit together, you have to pay extra to get a seat assignment. What??!! I had to do the same thing on the flight back so that added almost $200 to our trip costs.

We got up the next morning and got to the airport in good order. Got on the plane, got to Denver pretty much by the numbers.

Our plane landed at 3:20 (I kept notes for all of this). At 4 pm, after thrashing around with different carrels, our luggage came out. Then we got on the shuttle to the Avis rental place. Arrived there at 4:30 to find a line of perhaps 50 people to rent cars. I got to the head of the line at 5:20 and showed the clerk the timer on my phone. He said, yeah that’s about right. then he hammered me with all the stupid extras that I never want; tried to upsell me to a larger car. Jeez, just give me the goddamn car, would ya?

At 6pm we were driving out of the lot. We never did get lunch. I spotted a Denny’s on the way to the hotel and we went there (6:30 pm).

I realized after I got home that I had paid Priceline ahead of time for the rental so when I returned the car I had evidently agreed to a $30/day loss damage waiver so there was another $100 I hadn’t counted on. Priceline, Frontier and Avis – you can all piss off. Never again.

Well. it’s only money. The hotel was fine (Holiday Inn Express). Friday morning we ate breakfast late, marveled at the stopped traffic on the freeway at 9:30 am, and headed along surface streets to the stone cutters. That was the main goal of the trip and it was perfect.

I’m going to finish this story later.

Jeremy speaks

Jeremy sent me an email today and asked me to put this up on the blog. Here it is:

I’m having a tough day. It sounds disingenuous to say that I’m thinking about Zach today — I think of him every day, and I know lots of other people who love him do as well — but this week has been especially difficult.

Ashley, Rosalie and I were fortunate to travel to Michigan to celebrate my mother’s 65th birthday and my grandfather’s 90th. It was a nice (and too short) weekend spent in many places with many people familiar to Zach and filled with memories of him. Late in the day Sunday, as the festivities at camp wound down, I walked to the Outback by myself. Dad wrote a few days ago about how my relationship with Zach deepened in our teenage years and included a picture of the two of us standing by Stony Lake. After much discussion, I’ve figured out that the picture was taken in August of 2001 (the telltale sign is that ridiculous James Hetfield-style goatee I had at the time, which I remember trying to bleach that summer and sported for a few weeks as a freshman at college before cutting it off. Don’t act like you never made any bad grooming decisions at 18.)

Back to the Outback. I signed on to be a counselor in that particular teen camp program in the summer of 2002 after two successful years in the youth camp program. Zach made plans that summer to do a venture out trip at Storer that summer, but they fell through for some reason (possibly he wasn’t old enough to qualify for the trip??) so becoming an Outbacker was the fallback option. It was there that we truly grew close, bonded by the sharing of the program’s tremendous experience. He would return to the Outback the following summer, which would prove to be the final one at Storer for both of us. Last Sunday, I went out there alone thinking it would be a perfect time of reflection on my relationship with Zach and how much I miss him. It was weird…I sat in the fire circle, surrounded by the empty spaces where the hogans used to be, and all I could think about was my own experience at camp…the campers, the counselors, the trips, the laughs, the tears. After 15 minutes or so, I started the walk back to Ashley and Rosalie, feeling guilty because I didn’t spend the time intensely thinking of Zach. Am I moving on?

Fast-forward to Tuesday morning. I’m back at work at the fire station, and the first call of the day is a pedestrian struck by a vehicle. I’ll spare the gory details, but the only thing our crew could do for the victim was cover him with a sheet while police shut down Moreland Avenue for an investigation. It was way too familiar, right down to the pattern of the damage to the front of the pickup truck that hit him. This is the third time since Zach was killed that I’ve responded to a person struck by a vehicle, and it’s not getting easier. I keep my head down and work through it — I love my job, and emergencies don’t stop so I can recover from a personal tragedy. But I’ve spent the 24-odd hours since seeing that particular dead body in a state of numbness.

****

I remember a random conversation with Zach from one of the last times he came to visit us in Georgia. A song by The Airborne Toxic Event was playing on the radio, and he got really excited about the fact that the band name was a reference to a Don Delillo novel.
I brushed it off at the time, because I’d never heard of Don Delillo. Looking back, it’s one of many signs of how well-read and intelligent he was that I kind of ignored because we were too busy watching football or figuring out ways to integrate booze into cooking. It’s something I feel rather ashamed of.

Here’s a song and video that makes me think of him, not only in the lyrics but the words of singer Mikel Jollett on their inspiration:

“I feel very tied to this place and very resistant to its cliches. The SNL skit on Californians is funny and I wonder sometimes if that’s what the rest of the world thinks of us: dithering, spoiled people obsessed with their appearance. I understand it because most of what California exports (besides food) is the culture of white people who moved to Hollywood to get into films and yes many of those people are dithering, spoiled and obsessed with their appearance. But outside of maybe 10 square miles in the heart of Los Angeles, you don’t find many people like that here.”

By the way, if anyone has the time and skills to re-cut that video with scenes from the NorCal, that would be awesome.

Zach loved the state he grew up in, as did I. We talked a lot about how fortunate we were to grow up in Grass Valley; how that realization grew more and more stark as we built our adult lives in southern cities that we didn’t like.

TATE has become one of my favorite bands. I try to read more, to understand the world from an advanced perspective the way Zach did. I still have no idea who the hell Don Delillo is. But nothing makes me think of him and cry like these songs.

“i’ll write your name in stars across the sky/ And we’ll meet somewhere someday and I’ll ask you why…”

Sarah’s quartet

I went to Sarahs’ quartet concert last Friday night. I had spoken to her a couple of times about it beforehand but hadn’t made any big promises about coming. She indicated the program was daunting and implied they weren’t ready for performance.

None of that really registered to me. I go to her concerts when I can and don’t worry about what’s on the program. In my mind it’s not about what they are playing, I’m just supporting my daughter.

It’s not that I expect it to be terrible, just the opposite. I know Sarah has the highest standards and the people in her quartet are all quality players. (Actually I don’t know if it fair to refer to it as ‘her’ quartet. She plays first violin but I believe it is a cooperative venture.)

So the program was all about David Ryther’s transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for string quartet. ‘The Sound and the Fury’ The first piece was a Debussy quartet that was nice but rather dark. I remember thinking that with the Stravinsky on the second half, it was already a pretty heavy program.

At intermission, David and Omid brought out some percussion stuff including a kick drum! Oddly, although I had heard the Rite of Spring a couple of times live and had at least one recording of it, I didn’t feel like I had familiarity with it.

In fact, it was like hearing it for the first time. And in the back of my head, I must have retained the feeling I got from Sarah that they were not completely secure with it. The combination had me on the edge of my seat and they ripped it up. Just grabbed it by the throat and ran with it. It was awesome! Omid on the kick drum! David on the tam tam!

For all that, my main reaction was not to the music per se. I kept thinking about how all the people in the quartet were friends with Zach. My feeling of pride in Sarah got all tied up with that and I choked up a couple of times. It wasn’t until afterwards when I saw Lynn Oakley that I really lost it. Lynn was Sarah’s first teacher back when Sarah was 4 years old. She taught Zach too, for many years.

Not many know, outside the Villa circle, that Zach was a really good violinist. He started, like Sarah, at a very young age. He played with Villa Sinfonia many times and went on at least one tour with them. I believe he had perfect pitch. I also believe that the violin came to symbolize his mother and he refused to play any more after he was about 14. I always hoped he would come back to it later in life.

Afterward the concert I held Sarah and said, somewhat hopefully, into her ear. ‘Didn’t I cry at your concerts before?’ She said, ‘Not as much.’

Clark

Zach’s middle name is Clark. It’s the name of his maternal grandfather, Clark Ewing.

Clark Ewing ran a YMCA camp in Jackson, Michigan for many years. Actually, it is at Stony Lake near Napoleon. Both Jeremy and Zach spent almost every summer there as youths but more importantly, they were counselors there as teenagers. Clark’s influence spread throughout the whole world of YMCA camping so there are many people who were improved by him but for Zach he was Grandpa Clark too. He learned at the feet of the master.

I’m told that when the news of Zach’s death was given to Clark, he was silent for about a minute then he said, “Zach is gone and what he would have accomplished will not happen so the rest of us need to pick up the slack for Zach.”

I’ve been thinking of Clark today because next week is his 90th birthday and I wrote him a card. There’ll be a party amongst the Ewings and others in Michigan. I can’t be there so I thought it would be nice to give him a shout out in this space as well.

Happy Birthday Clark! You are a giant among men.

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Jeremy and Zach

Writing the last post started me thinking more about Jeremy and Zach together. I was originally thinking about the photo from Michigan along with the North Carolina one. I was a little surprised to find that it dated from 2002 because I the process got me thinking about our trip to London in 2000.

Neither boy was very happy about being in London where we spent way too much time going to museums. They were troopers, though, and didn’t complain much. They took solace in each other, I think. My enduring memory is of the two of them walking down the street ramming shoulders into each other. I don’t have any pictures of that but I do have this one:

At the end of the two weeks in London, Jeremy got on a plane for Michigan and his senior year in high school while the rest of us went back to California.

a special bond

While looking for the picture of Rosalie on my phone yesterday, I came across this one. It had no title or other indication of when and where it was taken. I emailed Jeremy and he filled me in.

He said: ‘Picture was taken in the Shining Rock Wilderness in NC. Zach and I went up to the mountains to go rafting, visit Greg McKee and some of our haunts in the Brevard area. September 2012.’

I sense some pain in Jeremy’s response. He and Zach had a special bond as brothers. Now there is a special kind of pain to think about times past with Zach. While they did all the usual things brothers do growing up, I don’t think I really recognized the special bond they had until I saw this picture, taken on the shore of Stony Lake in 2002:

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Jeremy was almost 19 and Zach was 13. It was the first indication to me of the adult relationship they had developed. As with the North Carolina picture, they are relaxed and happy to be in each others presence.

It’s kind of not my place to represent the relationship between Jeremy and Zach so I will stop here. I just wanted to share these pictures.

priceless

Last Monday was Labor Day and as I was in Alameda for a haircut I stopped into the Labor Day picnic there afterwards. The Rosie the Riveter Museum had a table there with stuff to buy. I remembered hearing that Rosalie had gone there in July. I hadn’t heard or seen about any souvenirs so I bought a small ‘We Can Do It!’ shopping bag and a refrigerator magnet and sent them to Rosalie.

Also in the back of my mind was a comment that Ashley had posted on FB to the effect that Rosalie noticed there were no women in the pharmacy and wondered why.

It all became priceless when she sent me this picture:

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loss

My sister wrote me an email today with a quote in it from a book she’s been reading. She said it made her think of me ‘and others close to me that have lost loved ones’.

She stood quite still. Late people do not altogether leave us, she thought; they are still with us in memories such as that, wherever we are, no matter what time of day it was or how we were feeling, they were there, still shining the light of their love upon us.

— Alexander McCall Smith in The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

I believe my sister is without guile. She loves me and I love her unconditionally. So it troubled me that this quote does not move me. It has troubled me that most of my family does not seem to be affected by the death of Zach. This of course is grossly unfair. They did not see me weeping, as I did a few minutes ago, alone in my apartment. How do I know they do not grieve similarly? And what right do I have to determine how they, or anyone else, grieves Zach?

Well I wanted to write a response that is respectful of her feelings yet also representative of mine so I thought of the Ursula LeGuin book The Lathe of Heaven. It has quotes at the beginning of each chapter that have to do with time and permanence. Actually it was this book that began my interest in Chinese philosophy, in particular the writing of Chuang Tzu.

Sadly, no quotes seemed appropriate for my goal. Thumbing through the book, however, I remembered the story of the man who dreamed changes in the world. He has a wife he loves but loses her in the dream changes. At the end he finds her again and when I read that I started crying.

It’s a book I’ve kept in my library for years through many winnowings, partly through sentiment because of the introduction it provided to what is now my core philosophy. It’s a good book, not a great one. Arguably it’s a sentimental ending.

So why cry over the ending? It made me think of the last time I cried like that. A couple of weeks ago, the promo track for the Broadway show ‘Jersey Boys’ came up on my MP3 player in the car. It has snippets of the hits from the ’60s by the Four Seasons. Good, not great, I suppose, would apply as well. But there I was, driving on the freeway, crying my eyes out.

Zach had no connection that I know about to either the book or the tunes. I wasn’t thinking of Zach before I started crying. Thus the mystery of grief.

To go back to Teresa’s quote, I do not have any feelings of Zach watching over me. Indeed, one of the confusing things about the last couple of months has been a lack of feeling of Zach as presence. I’ve set aside his phone and ipad and given up on converting his texts. With one exception I haven’t read in his journals for quite a while now. I suppose you could call my arrangement on my dresser a kind of a shrine. (See the post ‘reaction’ at http://thezachproject.us/index.php/2016/07/20/reaction/ for a picture.) I do look at that every day and sometimes I just can’t connect to the idea of Zach as a living person. It puzzles me and perhaps that is contributing to my depressed state.

Here is a bit of Chuang Tzu via Thomas Merton’s ‘The Way of Chuang Tzu’:

“The Master came at the right time
Into the world. When his time was up,
He left it again.
He who awaits his time, who submits
When his work is done,
In his life there is no room
For sorrow and rejoicing.
Here is how the ancients said all this
In four words:
‘God cuts the thread.’

“We have seen a fire of sticks
Burn out. The fire now
Burns in some other place. Where?
Who knows? These brands are burnt out.”

Rosalie

After getting all excited writing and feeling pretty tired at 10:30 last night, I went to bed without taking my usual sleeping pill (generic Benadryl OTC). 3 am came and I woke up and that was it. I was tossing and turning until I gave up about 15 minutes ago (6 am).

But partly what I was thinking about was the lovely post Ashley did on Facebook about Jeremy’s birthday. I thought this photo represented Jeremy at his happiest: walking into the forest with his daughter.

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This, on the other hand, is a vision of this girl at age 25! Try to ignore the foot in the foreground. She looks so sophisticated here! Thinking deep thoughts no doubt. Shades of things to come!

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