Root, Trunk, Branch, Leaf: Poems about Trees

Trees amaze me. Their shapes, size, leaves, colors for starters. Then there's all they do that supports life on earth, like make oxygen we need to live. Their underground communication networks, the beneficial phyto-somethings they emit. Truly a source of awe and wonder. 

I have fond memories of the trees of my childhood. I grew up outside Lewiston, Idaho, in a home surrounded by 8 acres or so of pasture, garden, and lawn dotted with lilacs, a big snowball bush, my mom's roses, and trees. The hawthorn protected a gate into the big pasture, the giant willow held a tire swing, the crabapple supported a hammock my middle brother brought back from one of his Latin American journeys, the honey locust the "Freehouse Treehouse" my brothers built for my younger sister and me. We'd haul a bag of books and snacks up the boards nailed to the tree to form a ladder and read for hours surrounded by the buzzing of bees drawn to the sweetness of the cream and yellow blossoms.

Later we lived in the Spokane Valley on a lot with sparse Ponderosa pines. Sparse was good, it turned out, when Firestorm '91 swept across the valley and got stopped just across the street from my parents' home. The fire was stopped there in part by the green space created by their lawn with trees far enough apart that the flames didn't jump the road and keep going, and by my dad getting on the roof with a hose and wetting it down repeatedly.

Since then I've lived with more Ponderosa pine than any other tree, I think. I'm now in a neighborhood with trees all around but can happily report I have no pine needles to rake. When we bought the house it had a couple of cherry plum trees, no doubt chosen by the developer 25 years ago for their dark red leaves, and a maple in a back corner. We've added a nectaplum (a newer hybrid of nectarine and plum), hazelnut, almond, and paper-white birch to add food, shade, and beauty to the landscape. The food hasn't appeared yet but it will someday. Trees teach patience.

I really appreciate trees when I'm on a long walk or bike ride on a hot day, and hot days are increasingly common in the Anthropocene epoch, with climate changes caused and accelerated by human actions. Our actions can include planting a tree, though, to add to the lungs of the planet. Tree cover makes a difference for shade, for habitat, for personal and community health and happiness. You can find out what kind of tree cover your hometown has in this Washington Post article. The Olympia-Lacey area has an estimated 36.8% tree cover, over 4% higher than the average in comparable cities, so yay for that!

I'm fortunate to live close to Squaxin Park in Olympia. I can take a lunchtime walk in a forest that isn't old-growth (over 160 years old as defined in western Washington, like the rain forest around Lake Quinault where I walked in February), but it's legacy forest. 

A legacy forest was lightly logged about a century ago; left undisturbed since then, it's had time to regenerate complex ecosystems. You might think of legacy forests as the old-growth forests of the future, or at least they will be if we don't log them again. (More on legacy forests)

A while back I went to a talk on trees given through Olympia Parks and Recreation. Julia Ratner, a member of Friends of Trees (a local group working to conserve forest lands), shared recordings she made of the electrical impulses of trees translated into musical tones with an Italian-made device called Plants Play. You can listen to a Sitka spruce left isolated by a clearcut and a cedar in an undisturbed forest at the Friends of Trees link. 

As I walk I hear squirrels scolding me, an insect buzzing past, leaves rustling, wind in the trees high above sometimes sounding almost like the ocean, my feet making a gentle pad-pad-pad sound on the trail, water trickling if it has rained recently (and this is in western Washington, so that's likely). I don't hear the communication of the trees but I know it's there.

I've told my family that when I've died I'd like my compost or ashes or what-have-you to be buried under a Susie Tree in a park or reforestation project somewhere. This will give them a place to visit, if they like, that does more for the world than a slab of stone that requires mining and transportation. It's also a nice callback to the first full-time executive director of what was then the Bicycle Alliance of Washington. Susie Stephens also came from Spokane and loved trees. After I became the executive director at what we later renamed Washington Bikes I learned a bit of her history from her mother, Nancy MacKerrow. "Tree Cemetery" by Wu Sheng captures this idea perfectly.

As with all my collections of poetry I've selected a few lines, not necessarily the opening ones. To read the complete poem follow the link.

"When I Am Among the Trees"
Mary Oliver

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

"Elegy for a Walnut Tree"
W.S. Merwin

and still when spring climbed toward summer

you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers

of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened


"Tree"
Jane Hirshfeld

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

"Trees" 
Howard Nemerov

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one's own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;

"Planting a Dogwood" 
Roy Scheele

For when we plant a tree, two trees take root:
the one that lifts its leaves into the air,
and the inverted one that cleaves the soil
to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace
and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf
in the eternal blackness of that sky.

"Crab Apple Trees"
Larry Schug

I’m tempted to say these trees belong to me,
take credit for blossoms that gather sunrise
like stained glass windows,
because eighteen springs ago
I dug holes for a couple of scrawny seedlings,

"The Bare Arms of Trees"
John Tagliabue

The bare arms of the trees are immovable, without the play of leaves,
     without the sound of wind;
I think of the unseen love and the unknown thoughts that exist
      between tree and tree,
As I pass these things in the evening, as I walk.

"Sequoia Sempervirens"
Tamara Madison

Some of these trees have survived
lightning strikes and forest fires
Some of these trees house creatures
of the forest floor in burned-out caves
at the base of their ruddy trunks

"Honey Locust"
Mary Oliver

Each white blossom
on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed-
a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower
holds a flask
of fragrance called heave, which is never sealed.
The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy
with gratitude. They are working like farmers. 

"April Prayer"
Stuart Kestenbaum

Just before the green begins there is the hint of green
a blush of color, and the red buds thicken
the ends of the maple’s branches and everything
is poised before the start of a new world,
which is really the same world

"Tree Cemetery"
Wu Sheng

Plant a tree in place of a grave
Plant a patch of trees in place of a cemetery
Put a flowerbed around each tree
Lay the ashes of the deceased to rest by the stump

"What's Really at Stake"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I like pulling the tree-sweet air
into my lungs, like thinking of how
even now I, too, am becoming
more tree, as if my shadow side, too,
might soon grow moss. As if I, too,
might begin to grow roots right here

Goodbye, Mom

So strange, to feel sad and yet to find a bit of gladness at the same time.

Last Saturday I took Eldest Daughter Kate to Lewiston for a visit with Mom. We arrived at the midday meal time. The first thing that struck me as I walked in and looked across the room was how very much she resembled her own mother, my Grandma Humphrey, with her hair now snow white.

Mom slumped, birdlike or perhaps mouselike, at the dining room table, nibbling sporadically at half a roll smeared with jam. A full plate—chicken drumstick, roasted baby red potatoes, steamed orange and yellow carrots—had been pushed aside, as had small plastic glasses of water and pink lemonade.

As always, she brightened when we greeted her but didn’t really know who we were. We settled in, one on either side of her, resting our hands on her shoulders and talking gently. At one point she laughed merrily, sounding so much like her old self that I put my head down and cried.

Kate encouraged her to eat some of her other foods but Mom wasn’t interested. She finished the roll—a 40-minute task after we arrived plus who knows how long before we got there to eat the first half.

For some time Mom’s speech has been a garbled mix of English and Klingon (or perhaps something less guttural than Klingon). She’ll start a sentence with a few words of English and segue without a hiccup into a waterfall of speechlike sounds: all the intonations and accompanying facial expressions of a sentence and none of the meaning.

We’ve learned to respond to her tone of voice and non-verbal language for an interaction that seems to satisfy her. Amazing how far an “Oh, really?” or “I see what you mean” can carry a “conversation.”

She came across loud and clear with “Don’t push me!” as Kate and I tried to maneuver her from dining room chair to walker to upholstered chair in the main seating area. That made us laugh because she communicated quite clearly in that moment.

With the aide’s help we got there at last and nestled in, talking and giving her some loving human touch with pats and hugs. She told us quite a bit, most of it in words we couldn't understand.

But at one point she said "Jan," my older sister's name, very clearly in the middle of a sentence. We loved hearing that because Jan has been the one on the front lines with both Dad and Mom for at least a decade and it felt as if this still registered with Mom. She also said "Bill" a couple of times--my dad's name and we think she meant him, in whatever mash-up she was sharing.

At one point Kate, trying to reach Mom with who we were, leaned in and said, “This is your daughter, Barb—Barbara,” pointing to me, “and I’m her daughter, your granddaughter.”

Mom looked right at me and said quite clearly, “You have the world. Bless you! You’re mine.” I burst into tears. It felt so strange and wonderful to have her say something that made some kind of sense. When she said, “You have the world. Bless you!” I felt as if she were responding to Kate’s identification of herself as my daughter because all Mom’s life being a wife and mother meant more than anything to her. “You’re mine” meant she knew I was her daughter.

I don’t know if any of that is true. Life is what you make of it and that will be my truth for this visit.

We hugged and kissed Mom and told her we love her, then headed back to Spokane.

There I helped Kate move and did a thousand other things for the next 3 days: worked on presentations for the conference I was to attend later in the week, rode my bike officially and unofficially, went to meetings and events, smelled the lilacs in Manito Park, ate ice cream at The Scoop, spent time with friends, and drove back across the state to Grand Mound, near Olympia.

All of this hurly-burly explains why I didn’t look at personal email until late Tuesday night. That’s when I discovered that Sunday night Mom’s hip broke and she fell. She was in the hospital and failing fast.

Operating on a 92-year-old woman with dementia who’s on blood thinners and who doesn’t understand what’s happening didn’t make sense.

We were waiting for the end and she would spend the rest of her life—however long it lasted—in bed on pain medication. I felt angry that we treat our animals better than we treat humans when it comes to the end of life.

Wednesday morning my brother Don called, sobbing, to tell me she had died peacefully in her sleep during the night. I called my younger sister and couldn’t reach her so I had to leave a message. There’s no harder voice mail to leave in the world but who would want to learn this from an email rather than a human voice? I knew we’d start planning the service via email and she would see that; with 6 siblings we carry on a lot of family business that way.

I’m so sad. I’m sad that my parents didn’t have the old age they deserved. I’m sad that Dad lost his loving companion of so many years and had only her shell there with him. I’m sad that when he died just after Thanksgiving in 2012 we couldn’t tell her. She wouldn’t understand, if she did it would cause her pain, and then she would forget but have a lingering sadness, so why do that to her?

I’m sad that a woman who was a storyteller all her life and kept all the family memories in circulation had to lose her memory. I’m sad that the woman who made sure she never missed a birthday card to anyone couldn’t tell you how old she was or how many children she had. I’m sad that she suffered pain and had to go to the hospital.

And yet I’m glad. I’m so glad that Kate and I had that last sweet visit. I’m glad Mom laughed and that my laugh sounds a lot like hers. I’m glad we hugged her and kissed her and told her we love her. I’m glad Mom spoke so clearly and said something I can treasure. I’m glad that at the end she didn’t have to suffer long and she went to sleep.

My older sister Jan wrote a beautiful obituary that tells you more about her life.

Goodbye, Mom.

Holding Mom

A few weeks ago I got this email from my older sister, who has been on the front lines for my parents ever since they moved to Lewiston over a decade ago to live in housing appropriate to my mom's increasing dementia:

"Just thought I should share this sobering update. I have noticed lately that Mom seems thinner and she is often sleeping when we stop by. I checked with the nurse and she said that Mom is not eating much. Most of the time they have to feed her to get her to eat anything, although she does have days where she does a little better. The nurse said this is what to expect since she is in the end stage of the disease, and added that she would be surprised if Mom made it to summer. Of course she also expected Dad to go a good year before he did, so it is just a guess on her part. Still, the nurse got my attention. I always kind of thought their deaths would come in close proximity. I am sure that somewhere inside Mom's poor tangled self, she misses her lifelong companion and is ready to go."

Dad died late last November, having made it past his 95th birthday. We didn't tell Mom. After he spent some time in the hospital for hip surgery and pneumonia, when he came back she regarded him with suspicion and no longer seemed to retain that last bit of connection that had outlived the departure of almost everything else she ever knew, including the names of her children and how to speak English. (I dubbed her speechlike vocalizations "Klingon," a nickname that stuck among all the Star Trek fans I grew up with.) She can't retain or fully comprehend anything we say to her, and if she could, why give her even that passing moment of pain before the new information vaporized?

After Dad died we moved her into a smaller single room at the care facility and she began to retreat into herself even more. When I got my sister's email I laid plans to get to Lewiston for a visit. 

Not exactly for Mom, since she doesn't know who I am, although she brightens when she sees me. They're sort of for me--a fulfillment of a sense of duty to the mother who did such a good job for so many years even though that woman packed up her bags and left a bit at a time, years ago. They're definitely for my older sister, who has borne the brunt and who can skip a visit if I make one.

Over the past few years I've felt lucky that I usually got a good visit. "Good" meant that Mom was awake, seemed happy to see me, and might even occasionally get a phrase or sentence out in the midst of the Klingon. 

The last time I was down for a visit to see Dad a few days before he died, with my older daughter and her husband accompanying us, at the lunch table Mom brought out quite clearly, "Aren't we having fun!" with a pleased expression. We heartily agreed that yes, yes we were.

My visit this Monday is one I'll cherish. She looked at me a bit uncertainly when I arrived and said to her, "Hi, Mom, it's your daughter here to visit!"

She asked quite clearly, "Who am I?"

"You're Gladys Greene, and I'm your daughter," I said, squeezing in alongside her on the big upholstered chair she sat in facing the TV, where a very young Clint Eastwood confronted the judge in Hang 'Em High.

"Buh--" she began, looking at me and raising her eyebrows questioningly.

"Yes, I'm Barb," I answered, thinking that she really did seem to be trying to get my name out and had the right linguistic association.

She smiled and began telling me something in Klingon. Thanks to Second Daughter pointing out years ago that one could interact with her quite smoothly by simply ignoring the meaninglessness of the words and responding solely to tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language, I'm pretty fluent in our interactions. I smile, nod, provide verbal filler like, "Oh really!" or "I see" when she pauses, and generally go with the flow. 

As my friend Maggie said years ago about visiting her mother-in-law who had Alzheimer's, "You're going to a foreign country and observing the culture. It isn't your job to try to change them--you just use good manners, thank them, and then come back to your country when the visit is over."

Mom seemed worried about something. She went on at length in Klingon and then asked me something like, "How did you manage all those people?"

I said, "Oh, it went all right. It was fine." She didn't seem convinced. 

"When was this?" she asked.

"A couple of weeks ago--a while ago," I answered.

The phrase "a while ago" seemed to get stuck--she couldn't repeat it back and puzzled over it, and was still worried about whatever it was I'd done with all those people.

I leaned forward, put my arms around her, patted her back, and said, "It's all right. It will all be okay."

Immediately I felt her relax into my arms as her arms went around me in return. She gave a deep sigh, then another. I rocked her a bit, holding her and patting her back. She pulled back, looked at me, and said, "Thank you very, very much." I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around her again.

Victoria, a South African aide I hadn't met before, stopped by our chair and asked if I wanted her to take our picture--I was so glad she did.

We stayed like that for 20 minutes or more, mostly silent. Every once in a while she gave a little start--perhaps that falling sensation that gets you when you're falling asleep was happening--and I'd pat her back again and tell her it was all right. She would relax again. I got tears in my eyes more than once as we sat together, holding each other.

I realized how little loving touch she receives any more and how important that is. She is assisted, moved, bathed, and more by very nice aides, but they have to handle her in a very clinical fashion. With Dad gone there isn't anyone there every day to give her hand a squeeze or make eye contact and smile with something passing between them.

When it was time to leave I eased my arms out from around her, told her I needed to go, and kissed her on the forehead, telling her I love her. She yearned toward me--I could see it in her expression--and I stroked the side of her face. She sat with eyes closed, absorbing my touch.

I didn't want to go. It makes me smile just thinking of how contented we were, holding each other. It was the best visit ever.

Related Reading

• Parenting Up, Parenting Down, Parenting Across
• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me
• Don't Buy That Case of Stuff on Sale. I'm Serious.
• Mom Frmrnyis
• For My Dad, on His 94th Birthday

A Pause to Remember

Today on Twitter someone mentioned running across a picture of a friend from college that made her stop to remember someone who is gone now. I thanked her for that reminder to stop and think about the people we've lost.

That brought me back to the post I wrote about my friend Christianne Sharman, among other posts I've written about people who have touched my life and who are gone now.

In the past year three of my uncles died along with my dad. They were old, they had lived long and successful lives, but it still hurt to lose them.

I can still hear their voices and I hear Christianne, who had a wonderful voice.

I want to stop every so often to remember. For those of us who did a lot of growing up before the Internet we don't have a thousand gigabytes of sound and picture available just a click away. I have no recordings whatsoever of my uncles' voices. I have to rely on my memory and that will fade with time.

I do have a DVD of my dad thanks to brother Jim, who interviewed Dad for a story about his career as a World War II bomber pilot, but I haven't watched it since he died last November. I need to do that.

In the meantime we have memory, which is all we've ever had, and it needs to be cherished. The cave paintings of Lascaux may still be there but the full richness of what they stood for lived within the beings who painted them. The story of Gilgamesh meant so much more to real people listening to real storytellers than it can mean left to us on clay tablets. The repetition in The Odyssey is there because that aided the memories of those who performed it. We tell the same stories time after time at family gatherings because there's something about the way we hear it together that carves those memories deeper and deeper.

So here's to Uncle Russ, who looked so much like my dad, his older brother, and to his son Jerry Joe, who would have been my age had he not been hit by a driver in a pick-up truck while riding his bicycle--something that finds a haunting resonance for me now in my work in bicycle advocacy.

Here's to Uncle Wayne, with the hearty laugh, the knock-knock jokes, the loud Hawaiian shirts, and the ranch in northern California that we visited for family reunions. I still have a wooden winery box made by his company that I got as a kid on a tour of one of the wineries he supplied with shipping containers; it holds some of my sewing supplies and I think of him every time I use it. I remember his eternal patience when we rode in the motor home with him and Aunt Lorraine all the way from Lewiston, Idaho, to Cloverdale, California, for a visit, playing Elton John's Greatest Hits and singing "Crocodile Rock" at the top of our lungs. That's 855 miles of patience, mind you.

Here's to Uncle Bud, who had my birthday--or I suppose I had his birthday since he was born long before I was!--an architecture who designed many schools in California. He featured prominently in a story my mom told about challenging him to a race to see who could eat an ice cream cone fastest, during the Depression when an ice cream was a very rare treat. He chowed down only to find that she was still enjoying her cone in leisurely fashion when he finished first in short-lived triumph, and Grandma Humphrey made Mom hand over the rest of her ice cream cone in a lesson about selfishness as the older sister who should have known better.

And here's to my dad, who died Nov. 27, 2012, after a long life well-lived.

Pay attention to the people you love so you can hear them when they're gone.

Parenting Up, Parenting Down, Parenting Across

This year has brought many changes and transitions. In chronological order over the course of roughly six months: Second Daughter graduated from high school; I accepted a new job that meant leaving a job I'd held for 14-1/2 years; we moved across the state into a 500-square-foot borrowed condo, away from the town where Eldest Daughter lives with her husband; I took Second Daughter across the country to college less than a month after starting the new job, then turned around and spent a week at national bike conferences, then did another one-day trip for work; as I settled into the new (and very demanding, challenging, fulfilling, rewarding) job I realized I can't keep running the start-up Bike Style business I launched last year and started thinking about how to wind it down or hand it off; we got through a major fundraising event for the Bicycle Alliance and I traveled some more to meet more bike advocates and then visit my younger sister; and as we made plans to head back to Spokane for the Thanksgiving weekend we learned that after a fall, a broken hip, surgery, pneumonia, and a lung infection, my 95-year-old dad appears to be approaching the end of his days.

As I read the emails among  his six children about the issues and decisions I can see our upbringing at work and credit both Dad and Mom with raising us to be both pragmatic and compassionate.

That makes me think about my parenting, the kinds of adults my daughters will be when they face similar decisions in the (hopefully far distant) future, and where I stand right now as the filling in the sandwich.

My younger daughter chose a college 3,000 miles away to pursue her dreams in musical theater. Once she'd chosen that focus I knew she'd have to be far away to get close to the bright lights of Broadway. I'm okay with that--and I'm not just saying that.

The Buddha taught that attachment causes suffering. I don't want the kind of attachment to my children that does that--the kind in which you want them to be, do, or say certain things. (Think of the dad who considers his glory days as the high-school quarterback the high point of his life and pushes his son to play football and you'll get what I'm talking about.)

I know a few very attached moms who are what I call "smothers." (I might add that my daughters also use this term. They don't want one.)

The smothers cling to the sweet, dependent baby-years memories and miss recognizing that their children are growing up into amazing young adults. Those days are fond memories but if we focus too much on those we miss the wonders of the present moment.

If we've done our jobs well, our children are prepared to enter the world without holding our hands any more to cross the street. They start to make adult decisions with adult consequences. If we shelter them from those consequences we leave them unprepared for the day when we're not around to rush to the rescue.

I've been a free-range mom with free-range kids for years, with the goal of equipping my daughters with savvy and skills to negotiate life without my help. I've never been one of those attack helicopter moms who executes a strafing run on anyone who interferes with her precious darling's happiness. The latest term I learned from a magazine article is the "snowplow mom"--she removes all obstacles from Little Darling's path.  So how prepared can Little Darling be for the real world?

Maybe I feel this more acutely right now because I'm facing that day with my own parents. I'm not the first to point out the similarities between the care we provide our children and the care we provide our aging parents. I'm thinking about how their parenting prepared me to raise my daughters, and prepared me to cope with the changes they themselves face now too.

I still have some "parenting down" work. These days it primarily involves an electronic funds transfer with a touch of mothering, along the lines of, "You should get a winter coat. Here's some money because that's more cost-effective than shipping a coat from Seattle to New York." (As my best friend Betsy says, "It's great when your child's problem is one you can solve with a checkbook.")

I do a little "parenting across". That's how I think of what I do now with Eldest Daughter, who has just finished her first year of marriage. Right now she has to deal with her husband's recent surgery; I can't do much from a distance to be helpful but I can let her know I'm there if she needs to talk and tell her how happy the two of them look with each other.

And then there's "parenting up." When I visited my dad the day before Thanksgiving he was frail and weak. I wanted to give him a hug and tell him everything would get better the way I used to for my daughters. But that isn't true. I can give him the hug, but not the false reassurances.

I don't have the daily responsibilities now; my older sister takes care of the ER visits, the paperwork, the decisions. (I had those back when they lived in Spokane but they've been in Lewiston for over a decade now.) The resemblance to parenting is clear, but without the bright future we envision for our children.

Dad is very deaf now so we write him notes, to which he responds with a smile or a word or two. Mom's vascular dementia makes her impossible to communicate with, although she did say clearly, "We're having fun!" in telling us a long story in what I refer to as her Klingon speech.

Thus I can't tell either of them what good parents they were. They didn't smother. They expected us to do our chores, study hard, get a job. They wanted us to fall in love. (Not everything worked out every time on that front, mind you, but the fact that all six of their children persevered and ultimately found a lasting love stands as a testament to the example set by their 68-year marriage.)

I can tell them I love them as they face the final passage. I can't do the hard work for them. But that's not what parents do.

For My Dad, on His 94th Birthday

The day my dad was born—November 3, 1917—was the day the first engagement involving U.S. forces in Europe took place near the Rhine-Marne Canal in France during World War I. This seems appropriate, somehow, for my World War II bomber pilot dad, who was to take part in some incredibly pivotal battles that he never talked about to me and who may well have flown over that same canal, since he flew in the European theater.

I really only learned about the significance of my dad’s war activities when my brother Jim got him to talk to a video camera a few years ago as part of an oral history project. The final edited version places Dad’s actions in context with a historian’s perspective, and left me in awe of his accomplishments and those of his fellow members of the Greatest Generation. My sister Jan put together an amazing scrapbook and did research about his unit, but none of this was anything Dad ever really told us about. “I did my duty,” was all he said when asked.

I had known a bit, sure, thanks to Mom. That it was mostly college kids who made it into Officer Candidate School and that my dad, who had only completed high school, studied on the bus all the way there while the college boys drank and whooped it up, and he passed the entrance exam. That he became a pilot because one day, slogging along in infantry training, he looked up at the planes flying overhead and thought that looked like a much better place to be than down on the ground. That he flew so many missions that Mom knew when he left on the one that, statistically speaking, was “the one he wouldn’t come back from” (but he did). That he lost a tail gunner. That he landed a plane with the engine shot off. (And took a picture of the plane afterwards.)

My favorite story was about the time he smuggled my mom (shhh, don’t tell the Pentagon) aboard one day disguised as a member of the crew when they were testing some kind of secret equipment back in the U.S. (I don’t know what—maybe radar?) and she got to find out what it was like to ride inside a B-24 (or maybe a B-17 “Flying Fortress,” since that’s what he trained in).

Mom wrote an amazing letter describing it, complete with him slapping her hand gently as they walked out to the plane—her trying to walk like a man in the jumpsuit and heavy equipment—and saying, “The pilot and the co-pilot do not hold hands!” (Back then, children, people wrote by hand, with pens, on paper, and if you were my mom you first wrote a draft copy to compose the letter and kept that for your children to marvel over decades later. Good luck with my emails and blog posts.)

One day I asked Dad why he didn’t become an airline pilot when he came home. I thought that sounded like a romantic job, an exciting job, unlike his mysterious work in management at Potlatch Forests Incorporated (“PFI,” for those of us who grew up as Potlatch kids in Lewiston, Idaho). He looked at me and said dryly, “I didn’t want to be a bus driver.”

So he came home a captain and went back to the mill, where he had worked since high school. He worked his way up, he took Dale Carnegie courses, he rose through the ranks, and he ended up managing the Lewiston mill and having some kind of oversight of a bunch of little mills sprinkled around North Idaho. His career with Potlatch is the reason I’ve been to places like Headquarters, Jaype, Pierce, and a bunch of little towns you’ve never heard of, some of which may no longer exist, and walked in the St. Maries Paul Bunyan Days parade as a little kid. I got to ride on the last log drive on the Clearwater River thanks to Dad’s job, on the wanigan (cook boat)—possibly the last major whitewater log drive in the United States, according to one history.

I learned that the smell of sawdust—and the not-so-pleasant smell of the adjacent pulp mill—meant the livelihoods of half the town, or so it seemed.

I learned (although not firsthand—just through listening when the men came back at the end of the day to the hunting camp we went to near Salmon each year) that you only shoot when you know for sure what you’re aiming at, you make sure you shoot to kill, you put a wounded animal out of its misery, and if you shoot it, you pack it out. (And—not that I’ll ever use this knowledge—that when you hang and gut a deer, you want to be careful not to perforate the bowel.)

I learned the rules of gun safety: Treat all guns in the house as if they are loaded (although you never put one away loaded) and never, ever point one at another human being in “fun.”

I would have learned to fish, but he made me clean the first one I ever caught and the squishy guts put an end to my trout-fishing career.

He started jogging sometime shortly after I was born as a “late in life” baby (he turned 45 three days before my birthday), thanks to Dr. Ken Cooper’s book Aerobics. He ran on the track around our barn that had been created for my brothers’ motorcycle riding antics until one night when he stepped on a porcupine in the near-darkness. That day I learned some new words as he pulled the quills out. He switched to running in place indoors, counting his steps silently to himself until near the end when you’d hear him call out the last few numbers as he finished, soaked with sweat.

I remember him startling younger sister Julie and I any number of times by honking the horn if we passed in front of the car while getting ready to load up and go somewhere—particularly if we were all dressed up in our finery for a big night out at the Elks Club, where he was a member and was once named “Elk of the Year” for the state of Idaho thanks to leading the drive to build the new club.

At the Elks Club he’d say, “Mrs. Greene?” and lead my mom to the dance floor, where they waltzed and did the foxtrot to whatever combo was playing covers of Charlie Rich songs and big band-era music.

The “Elk of the Year” plaque hung in the basement near the pool table, where all of his kids learned to play and where we learned what a wily pool shark he was. “Rrrrrrack ‘em up!” he’d call out with delight after once again sinking the eight ball while half our balls sat forlornly on the table.

He taught us to play gin rummy and pinochle, too, and usually won, although I’m pretty sure he was secretly delighted when we mastered enough of the strategy of the game to take a hand or a game.

I learned many folksy sayings from my dad, whose parents hailed from the hills of North Carolina. “Whatever smokes your drawers” was a favorite when he was happy to leave a choice up to us, and I still remember the smile I got one day when he said that in the kitchen and I jumped up to hold myself suspended in a sitting position over the kitchen sink, saying, “Tsssssss.”

And in recent years, I’ve learned that he will answer with infinite patience as my mom asks a dozen times in a row when it will be time for dinner, or where they live now. Her dementia has left him without the full companionship of the woman he has been married to for 67 years or so. Fortunately he can turn down his hearing aid and miss some of her many laps around a short track, as I put it. And fortunately, one of the things that remains steadfast in Mom’s memory is that he’s her husband and she married the right guy, who happens to be a terrific dancer.

Thanks, Dad, and happy birthday.

Related Reading

• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me
• Friday the 13th, or, Why Some People Need to Lose a Driver's License
• Mom Frmrnyis
• For Someone Who's Supposed to Be So Smart...Ways in Which I Am Stupid

Rage, rage against the dying of the light: Phrases not to use in my obituary

Get real. People die. Do it all the time. Right now, this very minute.

But usually not in the obituaries, nosirree bob. What happens there, according to my hometown paper, is that people:

• Pass away, sometimes peacefully/ at home/ with family at one’s side/ following a courageous X-year battle with [disease name here]
• Go to be with our Lord, or with our Lord and Savior (in our town, at least since I started paying attention, no one has gone to Paradise, attained moksha or nirvana or samadhi, or moved on to any other non-Christian afterlife destination)
• Enter into rest
• (or, more dramatically and definitively) Pass into eternal rest
• (with more detail about how they qualified for the rest) Peacefully are set free and enter into an eternal rest
• (in fiestier mode) Fight [disease name here] successfully for X years but finally succumb

Today was an exception to the general DER (Death Euphemism Rule). Four people actually up and died, according to their obituaries. (For a much more entertaining short list of euphemisms with a lot more down-home flavor, see this page.)

Writing obituaries is an art, as observed by a writer for the Washington Post. There’s even a study about the obituary from which I learned that obituary publishing site Legacy.com is one of the 100 most visited on the Web. Who knew?

I read the obituaries every so often. Not just to find out whether I’m listed so I can get on with my day, as Benjamin Franklin once observed.

Sometimes I mean to scan the page quickly, but something catches my eye: someone dies quite young, or at an extremely advanced age, or has the same last name as someone I know, or has an especially appealing twinkle in the eye in whatever photo the survivors chose.

Sometimes I read every last one in a kind of silent homage to the lives they led, whether they were World War II veterans like my dad (still alive at 92), a woman who spent most of her life in Catholic orders, or a good ol’ boy who loved hunting, fishing and hanging out with his buddies (they may even name a favorite tavern where he’ll be missed, in this type).

Life companions, remarriages, children and grandchildren and stepchildren, work lives and military service—an entire life captured in a couple of hundred words.

Families pay for the obituaries I’m reading and presumably provide the information. I like it best when it feels like a truly well-rounded view of the person, not just the shiny outer shell. If I get a sense that the person loved to laugh, formed lasting friendships and left behind a family that will miss him or her, that tells me more about a life well lived than honors and awards.

What makes it harder right now is that I have a friend who is dying. When that obituary appears, it is one that will make people say, "Oh, so young!" and "I didn't even know she was sick."

I'm close enough to have visited her in these days of winding down, but so many people would be on a "short" list for phone calls that I may not know she has died until I read it in the paper.

That gives this section more weight every day, and I know that no matter how wonderfully it's written her obituary will not capture all her strength, grace and beauty. I don't think she would opt for the euphemism, but that's not my call.

As for me, I suppose that thanks to my time as an elected official I might rate an actual article, not a paid piece that my family has to come up with while they’re still grieving (I assume—you’d miss me, right?). But that would focus on the externals of public service, not on whether I was a decent mom to my kids and stepchildren, a friend you could rely on, a generally good person, kind, or a great cook J.

When I first started blogging I stumbled across a timeline site, Dipity. I started building my life chronology, although I also noted in a blog post that life isn’t just chronology.

It will do as well as anything for that official business of what/when/where, so can my obit (written many, many years from now, I hope) say a little more about the why and the who? And you can just say that I died. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
Mary Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

Friday the 13th, Or, Why Some People Need to Lose a Driver’s License

Two things happened today, one lucky and one unlucky.

Lucky: My older sister sent an email to the family distribution list to announce that finally—FINALLY—my dad will no longer be endangering the pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, small pets, landscaping and signposts of Lewiston, Idaho. That is to say, she’s going to sell his car and he won’t drive any more.

Last week Dad turned 92. For years his hearing has been going, his eyesight has been getting worse, and his interest in following all those “suggestions” planted along his route (like, say, STOP, or 35 mph, or SLOW—School Zone) has been decreasing while the terror threat level has been increasing.

Some of his cognitive abilities have probably faded a bit, too, since he can’t tell you much about whatever little incidents are behind the numerous scrapes, dings and dents in his gold Honda station wagon. (Ever since my parents moved to Lewiston in 2001, I’ve told any friends planning to visit the town to flee for their lives if they see a car matching this description headed their way.)

My sister has been dealing with this for years, bless her heart. Even after she worked with Dad’s doctor and had a meeting with him and Dad that included some tearful moments and the clear statement that his driving days were over, Dad went right back to the dementia facility where he lives with Mom (who has vascular dementia, which I’ve written about here and here) and tried to load her in the car and take her for a visit to his younger brother. Luckily the on-the-ball staff at Guardian Angel knew about the situation and handled it with great creativity (lured him back in, snagged the keys, disconnected the car’s battery, and called my sister. Way to think on your feet, people!).

Now the car is physically gone so that won’t happen again, and Dad seems to have accepted it. I feel great certainty that lives have been saved (and I know for 110% certain that property damage will go down).

The email from my sister arrived this morning, providing an appropriate context for….

Unlucky: I was almost hit by a car today. Driven by an old man with gray hair who couldn’t quite meet my eyes at first after we both stopped, shaken. A man who made me think of my father.

Backing up, here’s what happened:

Leaving a great potluck we had at work and lugging a small laundry basket with my Crockpot, the remains of a batch of African Yam Peanut Soup (vegan AND gluten-free—I’ll post the recipe one of these days), the coffee travel mug I won as a door prize, and my backpack with cell phone, laptop etc., I looked both ways before stepping into the crosswalk.

This crosswalk is one of several on Spokane Falls Boulevard, a four-lane street that runs through the heart of the WSU Spokane campus. We’re looking forward to the new Martin Luther King Jr. Way that will help route some of the traffic to the south edge of campus and off this particular road, to help calm the traffic. As you might imagine, I’m looking forward to that even more eagerly after today.

As you enter from either direction, road signs tell you that you’re coming into a campus. Westbound on SF Boulevard, though, drivers have a tendency to slingshot around a curve as the street crosses over the Spokane River. They come shooting into the heart of campus, passing one crosswalk about a half-block before reaching the one I was using.

There’s a median we like to call the “Island of Refuge” in the middle of the road. I crossed the eastbound lanes successfully, paused at the median and looked to my right. I saw cars and trucks up the street with plenty of room to stop, paused, and took a step.

Over the years we’ve all learned to be a little bit bold in asserting our rights as pedestrians on this stretch. It’s like taming wild animals: make eye contact, speak in a soothing voice, but show them who’s the alpha.

I took another step as I looked to my right again, just to be sure we all agreed I had the legal right of way.

A compact car was bearing down on me without slowing a bit, doing at least 35mph in this 25mph campus zone.

The driver and I both realized this at the same moment. I heard the brakes screeching and the smell of burning rubber filled the air as I leaped back toward the median. The car was about three or four feet away by the time I started my backward move—close enough that I could have fallen forward and hit the hood with my hand, had I not been trying desperately to avoid any physical contact whatsoever.

When the car came to a stop—smack dab on top of the crosswalk I had entered—we both just stopped. I stood there, looking at the driver, who had his head down and didn’t seem to want eye contact. He finally rolled the window down, looked at me and said, “Sorry. I guess I was daydreaming.”

“Okay, well, this is a campus zone,” I said, not knowing exactly what to say. (Screaming “You stupid a-hole” isn’t really my style. I can hear all of you saying that, though, and I don’t disagree.)

He rolled the window up and pulled away, revealing a rear tail light held in by tape that demonstrates he’s been in at least one impact accident already.

I looked to my right again. Every other driver was frozen at the wheel, probably thinking they were going to witness a body flying into the air and hoping it wouldn’t make them late to some important meeting. I crossed the rest of the street, took a few steps, then realized I needed to stop.

I set my laundry basket down, bent over and propped myself up with my hands on my knees, breathing rapidly and realizing that I was shaking all over with a fine tremor—adrenalin rush. Two coworkers stopped and helped me out by carrying the basket to my building and giving me an arm to lean on while I walked, feeling pretty shaky all the way.

The man who almost hit me today may have kids somewhere wondering if it’s time to take away Dad’s keys. I have an answer for them. And I know we were just incredibly lucky that my dad didn’t hit or kill someone while he was still driving.

Have you talked with your aging parents about how you’ll all know when it’s time for them to stop driving? Have you thought about your signals for yourself?

3 Things My Mother Taught Me

My mother turns 88 today—September 13, 2009. Born in 1921, she grew up through the Depression, taught school, married a dashing World War II bomber pilot and hometown boy, raised six kids, had a brief stint as “Mother Trucker” working with my dad in a truck dispatching office after his retirement from a lifetime working for Potlatch, had some seasons as a snowbird heading to Death Valley with Dad and going on an Alaskan cruise—and got dementia.

Now everything from her long life is gone, except for her love for my father.

The number of her children and our names and faces: Gone. When I visit, my father does a good job of saying hello in a way that reintroduces who we are and how we fit into her life. She always smiles her best hostess-y smile when we arrive, but it’s clear that she doesn’t really recognize us.

Her actual age and what has and hasn’t happened already in her life: Gone. Sometimes she refers to her mother , dead in 1986, as still living. Sometimes she talks about whether or not she and Dad should have children since they haven’t had any yet. Sometimes she’s living in Spokane, although they’re in Lewiston. Sometimes she lives in the big house they used to own outside Lewiston, instead of in the dementia unit at Guardian Angels.

What she just said and where a normal conversation would go next: Gone. I like to describe it as running a lot of laps around a very short track. (I've written a bit before about what this is like. This means I'm repeating myself. This is of some concern.)

Her looping would be familiar to anyone who has spent some time with a dementia patient. As soon as she finishes a sentence—if she does, and if she uses English rather than throwing in a few Klingon words created by the strokes that cause her dementia—she might pick up that thread of thought and start all over again. And again. And again.

Fortunately, the thing she repeats more than anything is how much she loves my father and how well-suited they have been for each other through nearly 65 years of marriage. She repeats things about how they met or things they did together, and often gets those right: “He was always such a good dancer,” with an arch look and a smile.

If she has to forget everything else and repeat just one essential element of her life ad infinitum, at least it is love.

This essay is my birthday present to her, although I don’t know if she can still sustain enough cognitive continuity to read much.

How sad that makes me, when she turned me into an incredibly fast, retentive reader with her teaching skill. She posted names of things on flash cards all over our house so that I learned to see words as entire and intact units, rather than painful constructs of sounded-out syllables. This makes me a good proofreader because I know at some subconscious level that the shape of the word is wrong, even before I can tell you where the typo is.

The best gifts she gave me, though, were lessons in how to lead my life. Because of her, I have these qualities:

I’m a feminist. She told me stories about my grandmother—to be told here another day—to illustrate why I should be able to take care of myself as an independent woman before I married. Admittedly, she did assume I would marry and have children. Her wish for all her children was that we have a marriage as happy as hers (we all got there eventually).

I believe in service to my community. Long before I ever heard of the notion of privilege or paying it forward, my mom gave me both those concepts. She told me how lucky I was, to grow up in a home with two parents who loved each other, plenty to eat, never any fear of losing the roof over our heads, a college education.

More important, she told me there are lots of people who don’t have all those things and because of that, they may not be able to do and be everything they want in this world. So I need to use the gifts I’m given and whatever talent I have to contribute, because I can and because some doors will open for me that may not open for others.

I try to be kind, and I look for the good things that abound. Kindness is underrated in this world. My mother was kind and she taught me empathy.

If we saw someone who had any kind of problem that made life more difficult—say, someone with a disability, or someone who was morbidly obese—Mom said something like, “Oh, life must be so difficult for them. Think what it’s like just to try to go see a movie” (or whatever seemed relevant).

This wasn’t said in a patronizing way—it was said to help us put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

My mother was almost always cheerful, too, and I have her sunny optimism most of the time. My dear and sometimes brooding husband knows I’m his Sally Sunshine. (Every marriage should have one.)

Thanks to Mom, for me the glass isn’t half-empty, it’s half-full, or maybe you need a glass that’s a different size, or we’ll get something to drink later instead of right now. The lines “We’ll just make the best of it” and “Things will turn out all right in the end” can carry you through many of the bumps in life’s road.

These were good lessons. Thank you, Mom.

For Someone Who’s Supposed to Be So Smart… Ways in Which I’m Stupid

My father has a way with words. Now, he’d be the first to tell you that with my mother around, he doesn’t get much chance to talk. “She talks enough for the both of us,” I heard more than once. And yes, Mom could at times serve as the prototype for Chatty Cathy.

Dad didn’t talk at length, the way she did. So when he spoke, his pronouncements carried more weight. Sometimes we almost jumped when he spoke because it was unexpected, another country heard from.

And of course, he was DAD. I grew up at the time when “Wait ‘til your father gets home” had serious meaning, and you’d really, really rather suffer Mom’s discipline than Dad’s. (Although her line, “I’m so disappointed in you,” did carry a stinging power. I want to know how to sink that same emotional hook deep into the guts of my two daughters so I can tug on it when I need to.)

Some of Dad’s memorable pronouncements fall into the category of folksy sayings, like “Whatever smokes your drawers.”

Another line of his—possibly reserved for me personally among his six children: “For someone who’s supposed to be so smart, you don’t have much horse sense.”

This pronouncement was not without merit, I have to admit.

One summer I had the use of Middle Older Brother’s Datsun pick-up while he traveled for work. Somehow the whole idea of adding oil to the engine had never been made clear to me. The engine seized up once and for all on I-90 as I merrily zoomed eastward to go hang out at Lake Coeur d’Alene.

A passing semi-truck driver gave me a lift (this was in pre-cell-phone days, of course) and I called my parents for rescue. The engine was toast. This was the kind of episode that might induce the unfavorable comparison to four-legged hay burners.

I’m a little better at routine vehicle fluids now (although Sweet Husband takes care of it for me, I do know it’s supposed to happen and I had my car serviced regularly before he was on the scene). There are still some ways in which I lack horse sense though:

• Leaving valuables in plain sight on the front seat. I believe most people are honest, and so far no one has broken into the car to take anything. Someday I will be wrong about this.
• Being quite sure that even when the fuel indicator is on the red line, I have enough fuel to get to the next available gas station. So far, this has been true. Good thing I mostly commute by bike or bus.
• Doing “one more thing” before leaving for something: Work, a meeting, a date, a doctor’s appointment for one of the girls. I know-know-KNOW that when I squeeze in one more e-mail response or chore I make us all late. I know that. But surely there’s time for just one more thing?
• Believing against all evidence of the past that the regular consumption of giant snickerdoodles (only ones baked perfectly so they’re still bendy in the middle, of course) has no effect on my weight.
• Thinking that since there’s plenty of time before the project is due, I don’t need to start now. (Love the adrenaline arising from artificially induced deadline pressure through procrastination--and there are always a lot of things on the list that do have to happen before the deadline for this item.)
• Failing to write down things that family members tell me about appointments and tasks, despite the fact that I do this faithfully at work and for all volunteer efforts. I have notebooks stretching back over 5 years, a simple system of stick-ums to flag items for follow-up, and a fairly systematic use of Outlook calendar and tasks to move things along. Family items, not so much, & thus I forget plans and projects that involve my loved ones.

Looking at this list, I notice a continued carelessness toward vehicles (possibly scarred by that little Datsun episode). Definitely a disregard for the passage of time as measured by standard devices, which after all are made by humans and have little to do with the actual workings of the universe. Perhaps a certain childlike belief in magical thinking.

It’s not that I lack horse sense, Dad—it’s that I believe in fairies. I do believe, I do believe, I do I do I do.