2--Crossing Kingston Ferry

                                               

 

                                       

                                                                       a

Wayne, white man, footsore, relaxing and recovering on the observation deck of the Puyallup the day after his long workout, laughing and indicting his tender soles, recalling his lurch of fright at the sudden, explosive, departing whistle blast on his first ferry ride, to Port Ludlow on the old Black Ball Line in 1945, his mother calming him with hugs, seeking perspective as the boat pushed off for Kingston, its wake white but not very turbid, gazed eastward at his town, latitude 47.8 N, longitude 122.36 W, across tiderows of drying black-green seaweed and amber bulbs of kelp spread along the beach, and up asphalt city street escalators--Caspar, Daley, Bell, Main, Dayton, Maple, Alder, Walnut, Pine--to the tree-lined rim of the Bowl, the morning haze lifting, his memory delving, his fictive mind augmenting what had long ago been scanned and saved.

In the late '40s and early '50s the population of Edmonds was less than 2,000.  The town seemed to the old man capacious.  It was a place for children.  Pedestrians, cars, and houses alike had elbow-room.   Vacant lots dotted the Bowl, even on Front Street.  The Johnson twins could play catch in the middle of 4th for 15 minutes at a time before being interrupted by a car.  Sylvia and Patty  could run from backyards on one side to backyards on the other, playing hide-and-seek, without looking both ways before crossing.  Here and there were two-story Cape Cods or Craftsmen with dormers, but many residences were simple  composition-roofed, cedar-sided or -shaked bungalows or ramblers set back from the street and fronted by lawns and flower beds.  Most were 1,000-1,500 square feet with one bathroom, two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a dinette off the kitchen.  Having grown up during the deprivations of the Depression and come of age during the rationings of World War II, young marrieds like George and Margaret Adams were cautious with their spending and their reproducing.  Linoleum and area rugs covered their floors, formica their countertops.  Two children were the norm, one not unusual, three probably an accident.  Like the milk in quart glass bottles delivered to the door from an Alderwood Manor dairy by Wes Dawson, Edmonds was uniformly white, with little difference in status signified by the color of collar worn on the job.  The huge Gothic manorial estates of tree-dense Woodway Park bounding Edmonds to the south, built by such aristocrats as a Seattle land magnate, the president of Boeing, and the president of Pacific Northwest Bell, were a mile and a world apart from the unpretentious, pre-bourgeois mill town  losing its original economic engine and becoming a bedroom community where husband/father drove the family's only car to his job in Seattle while wife/mother kept house and minded the children.  Edmonds was quiet, orderly, safe, and clean.  Most of its people were loyal, hardworking, thrifty, disciplined, resilient, optimistic, complacent, conformist, insular, unsophisticated.  They valued family stability and independence.  There were neither many do-gooders nor many rogues or irreverents.  Warily, they were beginning to buy things like cars and appliances on the installment plan.  Cautiously, they were beginning to embrace consumerism.  They were skeptical of big government. They appreciated the G.I. Bill, FHA loans, and Social Security, but were otherwise uneasy about federal assistance.  They belonged to booster and service community organizations like the Elks, the Moose, the Lions, the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, the Rotary Club, Kiwanis.  They distrusted crusaders and muckrakers.  They were patriotic but not jingoistic.  They believed that the future was promising for them and even more so for their offspring.  They believed that a circumspect one-wage-earner family could own a modest house and car, put interested kids through a state college, build a cabin on a lake or an island, and save enough for retirement and funerals in their sixties.  Many had been taught in the three-story grade school (by  Frances Anderson, perhaps, a member of Edmonds High School's first graduating class in 1911, and after college a teacher in the still extant building erected in 1924, now a cultural and recreational center named in her honor, a stucco, many-windowed bastion overlooking the Sound on the hill at 7th between Dayton and Main), or in the striking Art Deco high school edifice at 4th and Daley, the old stories that made them American: America had been discovered by Europeans, settled by brave souls who conquered the wilderness and its inhabitants in quest of religious freedom and economic opportunity, wrenching themselves free from monarchies and autarchies, declaring their independence and enshrining the principles of liberty and democracy in a Constitution written by divinely-inspired Founding Fathers and Framers, advancing civilization westward in covered wagons, pursuing America's Manifest Destiny, fighting a Civil War to end slavery, winning World War I to make the world safe for democracy, benevolently granting women the right to vote, winning World War II to eradicate genocide and fascism, these additional truths--admonished formally in classrooms or in sermons and Sunday school lessons at Hughes Memorial Methodist Church, Holy Rosary Parish, the Edmonds Baptist Church, the  Church of the Open Bible, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, or inferred informally, through observation of daily life--surely self-evident: all citizens are equal and have equal opportunity, every vote makes a difference, racial segregation is in principle deplorable but in practice understandable, Japanese internment camps had been necessary evils, America fights only in self-defense or in defense of freedom, marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of society, divorce is almost always wrong, there is men's work and women's work, women need the protection and guidance of men, every girl can grow up to make a house a home, every boy can grow up to be President, every boy can be Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or a Horatio Alger hero, failures in life are owing to lack of character and will power, economic success can be achieved through ambition and self-reliance, small business is the key to a strong economy, socialism and communism are based on a misunderstanding of human nature, personal happiness can be achieved by practicing faith, hope, and charity and observing the Golden Rule. 

[Our old U.S. History lessons should have been subtitled "How The West Was Spun"!  At long last the old fictions are fading.  We're moving from the Old Testament to the New, from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day.  Charlotte]

[Honor the Indigenous People, yes, but it's wrong to cancel Columbus Day.  Columbus is the symbolic representative of the Europeans who came to this land and turned it into a prosperous democracy that--in spite of its flaws--has been and continues to be a beacon of hope to the oppressed throughout the world.  Monk]

[There is much to be said for both the old and the new fictions.   It's important to see both sides and to maintain civility in the process.   Gary]

[Or is a foolish civility the god hobblin' little minds?  Charlotte]

The town's business district--from 6th to Sunset, from Walnut to Bell--catered to basic needs and was as simple as the lives of its people.  There were three grocery stores on Main in the heart of town: Safeway, The Shopping Cart, and Edmonds Grocery and Market, which also offered delivery service for the barons in Woodway Park.  There were six gas stations--Flying A, Union, Chevron, Richfield, and Shell within a block and a half of each other on 5th, and Harry's Texaco on 3rd at Caspar--plus the Suburban Transportation System bus station at Yost's Auto Company for the increasing number of commuters.  There were four taverns--The Sail Inn ("and Stagger Out," the old man and his buddies used to say), the Edmonds, the Up and Up, and Engels'.  There were three family restaurants.  Brownie's Cafe and Bud's Cafe, both narrow rooms with eating space at a long counter and a half-dozen booths with formica tables, served no alcohol and featured ground sirloin, chicken-fried steak, pot roast, and meat loaf.  Tuson's Grill boasted a liquor license, had a bar as well as eight leatherette booths with plasticized-wood table tops, and specialized in T-bone, rib-eye, and top sirloin steaks.  There was Hoffer's, a malt shop with tabletop juke boxes, The Polar Bear, also a burger and ice cream joint, and Bienz's, a confectionary which sold comic books, soft drinks, ice cream, candy bars, gum, and all manner of penny candy. There were three clothing stores--Weller's for men, Toni's Apparel and Durbin's for women-- Kuzmoff's Shoe Repair, Crow Hardware, Reliable Hardware, the Edmonds Lumber Yard, Kurtz and Eckley Welding, Diesel Oil Sales, Sater and Ridenour Heating Oil, Eddy's Electric, Western Auto Supply, the National Bank of Commerce, Hubbard's Realty and Insurance, Swanson's Drug, Edmonds Dry Cleaners, Edmonds Flower Shop, Edmonds Bakery, the 5 And 10 Cent Store, and the Tribune-Review newspaper office.  There were two barbershops--Bill's and Frenchy's--and one beauty shop--M'Lady's.  There was a post office.  And there was the Princess Theater, showing each evening Hollywood double features preceded by a Looney Tunes cartoon and a newsreel and on Saturdays matinees for kids featuring cliffhanging serials and cowboy movies starring Roy Rogers or Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy. 

Other than movies, the town offered its residents little in the way of entertainment.  There was an Easter egg hunt for kids at the City Park, the old man occasionally managing to find a gold one, which could be traded in for a 50-cent piece.  On the Fourth of July a parade--featuring colorful floral floats with smiling teenage girls in bathing suits throwing Hershey's kisses to spectators, the American Legion drill team, the high school band playing "The Washington Post March" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever," towering on stilts a bearded Uncle Sam in blue top hat, red cutaway with white stars, and white pants, the town's fire engine, blowing its siren at intervals, the mayor riding in a horse-drawn buckboard, as well as sundry horseback riders, motorcycle riders, Model T drivers, and unicyclists--wound through town and finished at the City Park, where families congregated to picnic on fried chicken and watermelon and play multi-generational softball games, the old man and Zee and Monk always excited to show their stuff against the adults.  At dusk they wended their way back to the high school football field for a 30-minute fireworks display that screamed independence and nurtured unity.  In August there was the Old Settlers' picnic, again at the City Park, with wheelbarrow races, three-legged races, egg-toss contests, and prizes for the earliest settler present and the oldest and youngest persons present.  In September there was the Salmon Fishing Derby, drawing scores of participants and spectators who hung around the boathouses to scrutinize the catches, one of which, in 1948, good enough for third place, was a 12-pound hooknose netted by the old man after his father had reeled it to the boat.  And in December, at the intersection of 5th and Main, which was barren of fountain and trees, there was the lighting of the Christmas tree set in place by Fire Department volunteers, a 30-foot fir that drew attention away from telephone poles and electric wires, and the arrival of Santa in the city's one fire engine to throw cellophaned candy canes to the old man and 70 or 80 other diving, grasping, wrestling kids.  These seasonal events brought a spare but satisfying structure to the year.

There were no art galleries, playhouses, or concert venues.  The old man's great-uncle Enos had played trombone in the Edmonds Band in concerts at the Opera House on Dayton early in the century; his grandfather Bertrand had sung there in the Edmonds Choral Society.  Both groups ceased to exist during World War II, and the opera house became the Masonic Temple.  The women's Music and Arts Club held monthly meetings and arranged occasional field trips to exhibits and concerts in Seattle.  During the fall and winter, there were Friday night high school football and basketball games, heralded by the pep band's rousing after-school marches through town; in summer there were Sunday afternoon Town Team baseball games against opponents from villages in the Cascade foothills like Monroe, Sultan, or Granite Falls.  The consistent success of the football team under Coach Howard Howe (including an undefeated, unscored-upon season in 1949) induced a swelling of civic pride and nearly an idolatry on the part of the old man and Zee and Monk, who attended all of the games and as many practices as possible.  But, for the most part, in Deadmonds, as post-war teenagers took to calling it, people entertained themselves by listening to the radio, watching three television channels, working on hobbies, visiting family and friends, fishing, playing cards, going on picnics, attending church, attending club meetings.  Paternalist, ethnocentric, sexist, homophobic ("Excuse me, sir, can you tell me where I can find the Edmonds ferry?"  "Speaking!") it must surely have been, the old man realized.  The outward lives of most seemed to be as temperate as the cool, drizzly climate, but instances of avarice, boorish boosterism, small-mindedness, meanness of spirit, McCarthyism, and suspicion of new ideas would no doubt have been easy for someone less innocent to identify.  Alcoholism and infidelity certainly occurred.  The old man was aware that Monk's dad Phil, a house painter, bought three fifths of Old Crow every Saturday evening to see him through the Sunday closing of the Washington State Liquor Store.  He knew that Patty's mother Pauline had once left her husband for three months to live in Seattle with a Fuller Brush salesman who had knocked at her door.  Surely there had been, in the midst of a crowd, even at the hearth of a home, loneliness.  He thought of his mother.  He thought of his father.  There were more than mere traces of Winesburg, Spoon River, Grover's Corners, Gopher Prairie, and Zenith in the Bowl.  Year by year some ones married other ones and led, under cement gray skies admitting a certain slant of oppressive light but sometimes backlit to a pearly luminosity and on occasion bursting into blue, unexamined lives, or lives of quiet desperation, or lives of determined stoicism, most, nevertheless, some ones, any ones, no ones, absurdly, off again, on again, singing or dancing in the how pretty town, loving, creating, worshiping, celebrating, Sound, trees, clouds, rain.

[I loved the little town as much as anyone, but let's face it: the females were oppressed and repressed and everyone suffered, themselves included, from the toxic masculinity of the males.  Charlotte]

[I admit that I did suffer my share of concussions (fortunately, no reperconcussions, no CTE!) when I played football at Whitman, trying to be a warrior hero.  And I feared for my sons when they played football for EHS in the '80s.  But the game was so much fun!   We all reveled in the culturally approved sadomasochism, inflicting and incurring pain within a system of rules.  It felt good to smash somebody.  It did not feel good to be smashed in return, but we bore our pain proudly.  To live fully, you have to run some risks.  And I admit that I'm sometimes guilty of mansplaining.  I can be presumptive and aggressive and abrasive.  But that's why I succeed in the courtroom.  I ask you, when we remove the so-called toxic elements from masculinity, what is left that isn't the same as femininity?  Monk] 

[Monk, do you even hear yourself?  Charlotte]

[I never reveled in it.  I did not like either inflicting or incurring pain.  I endured it, because that's what guys did to achieve status in their tribes (in my case, the Maple Street All Stars and the males at EHS).  In that regard, I was oppressed.  Baseball and basketball, now, those I reveled in!  Gary]

[So Monk exults "Vive la différence!" and Char, no fair lady, demands "Why can't a man be like a woman?"  Solveig]

 

                                                b

"Things never are as bad as they seem, so dream, dream, dream," soothed The Pied Pipers in sweet harmony on the 45 record played in the jukebox at the closing of the Teen Canteen at the darkened Masonic Temple on the second Friday of November 1956 after the football team had beaten Arlington to clinch the Northwest League championship on the frozen dirt of the Edmonds field, temperature, incredibly, in the 20s, a clear night, big bright egg-shell moon in the north, a few stars discernible beyond the moon's glow and the power poles flooding the field with light, as the old man leaned against a wall, arms folded, watching the dancers glide to a stop on the waxed maple floor, Dickie Riddle executing a final dip with his smiling partner, Solveig Lerass.  The lights came up.  The old man had seen the two dance together several times during the evening.  Would Dickie be driving her home?  Apparently not.  Dickie thanked her and turned away toward Monk and Zee and the Johnson twins who formed an island in a current of kids saying their goodbyes as they flowed toward the exit.  Solveig went to get her coat from a wheeled rack at the back of the hall.  The old man followed, retrieved his own gray tweed topcoat, slipped it on, turned up the collar.

"Hi, Solveig," he said as she pulled a long woolen  navy blue scarf from a pocket of her navy blue coat and wrapped it around her neck.

"Oh, hi, Wayne," she said, moving toward the door.

She was his height, 5'10'', with broad shoulders, pale skin, auburn hair swept back to expose her forehead and ears, russet plastic combs constricting it behind her head before it fell lavishly in a broad mane halfway to her waist.  Long silvery lashes canopied her ice-blue eyes.  The old man had known Solveig since grade school.  Mrs. Hill had selected them to serve a month's term as host and hostess, sitting at a table in front and modeling good chewing habits, as their second grade class ate from their tin lunch boxes in the classroom.  They sang a duet, "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," in fourth grade music period.  Off and on he had seen her, said hi to her, at Bienz's, the Princess Theater, the beach.  She had ridden the truck to pick beans in Redmond the summer they were 12.  In eighth grade he had stumbled through one dance with her at a New Year's Eve party at Patty Warfield's.  In high school, a blended population of nearly 1,000 students from Edmonds and Esperance and Alderwood Manor grade schools, he spotted her only occasionally in a hallway.  They had been in no classes together until this, their senior year, when both were forced into a required course, Family Living, and both elected to take second-year French and Jack Foster's class, Cultural Heritage.  She and her parents had come to Edmonds from Ballard shortly after the war, living in a Craftsman with a basement full of pipes and sinks and shower heads at the corner of 6th and Walnut, her father a self-employed plumber whom his parents had once called to replace a rusted, leaking pipe at the back of their toilet in the house on Maple Street, but her family had moved, he had recently heard his mother telling his father, to a new house they had built in Talbot Park, a woodsy development north of Snake Road.  He had always found her attractive, doubted she saw him in the same light, and was hesitant to approach her, or any other girls for that matter.

Wrapped in his topcoat, sitting high in the brimming grandstand with Bobby Moore, a lithe, wiry baseball teammate who lived near Chase Lake in the Esperance area, he had been thrilled by the game.  Everyone was there: Mayor McGibbon, Police Chief Rassmussen, the Tusons, the Traftons, all the local businessmen and their wives, his parents, the parents and younger brothers and sisters of the players, a cluster of teachers, although not Foster, all drawn toward the light, sucked in by the gravity of the game, both teams undefeated, the staid little town baring its emotions, aching for a win.  This was where they had to be.  And on the field was where the old man should have been, in the light, the cheerleaders shaking their purple and gold pom-poms for him.  Having been cut as a sophomore, he no longer dreamed of playing football, but the phenomena of his waking moments were shot through with epiphenomenal images of himself as a basketball and baseball phenom, making a crossover step and dropping the ball just over the rim and through the net, soaring to grab a one-handed rebound, poking the ball away from a dribbler and dashing down court for a breakaway layup, ripping a fastball into the left-centerfield gap, hook-sliding into second for a double, diving to catch a sinking line drive in right field.  He had been so stirred by the playing of the national anthem that as the Tiger pep band hit "and the la-AND of the free-EE" he let drop from his mouth the wild cherry Lifesaver he had been sucking on and ground it with a desert boot into smithereens, no more sugar for him, he would purify his life and become a star.  His ears ached with the cold, his face became so numb that he could scarcely articulate speech, but the team, his buddies, exhaling  clouds of fog, played through it fearlessly, inspiring the old man at each snap of the ball, helmets clunking, shoulder pads thudding, on defense the shoving of blockers to the ground, the racing to the ball, the fierce gang-tackling, on offense the diving to the frozen earth to make open-field scissor-kick blocks, their bare lower legs getting scratched, scraped, ripped open, the bass drum thumping after big gains, the cheerleaders, pom-pommed hands on hips, high-kicking right-left-right, townspeople yelling, squirming, waving their arms, crying "Go, go, go!" and then, on the last play of the game, Edmonds leading 19-13, ball at their 40, the Arlington back, clever, agile Lee Peterson, whom the old man had played against in basketball as a junior, burst through the line on a quick opener, spurted past the linebackers, Dickie and Monk, and ran full-speed at Zee, the lone safety, Zee staying low and on the balls of his feet, waiting, reading, letting Peterson make his juke and then driving forward with short choppy steps, ramming his shoulder into Peterson's gut, wiring with his arms, and dumping him on his back as the gun sounded, a wave of purple storming off the bench to engulf him and hop-dance with their arms around him, some stotting like antelopes, the old man wobbling to his feet, his legs rigid with cold, cheering and thrusting a fist into the air, so proud of Zee, eyes briefly welling, then grabbing Bobby to give him a hug, purple and gold confetti showering down upon them, vowing to get up 20 minutes early Saturday morning and do pushups and jump rope before working his eight-hour shift as a boxboy at Safeway.   Deliriously, the crowd rushed onto the field to congratulate the players and Coach Howe, and  the old man and Bobby worked their way to the exit on 6th, then walked the three blocks to the just-opening Canteen, saying "Can't wait till basketball, baby," "Can't wait till baseball, baby," and hung up their coats and descended to the basement to play ping-pong and wait for the football players to show up after they had showered and dressed at the Field House.

When they heard Elvis's "Tutti Fruiti," they went back upstairs to find a throng, at least 20 of them football players in their navy blue letter jackets, chenille block bold-gold "E" sewn on the left breast, Ivy-League shirts, jeans or pastel peggers, and white bucks or desert boots, exuberantly mingling and glowing.  Bobby, a bopper, immediately asked Patty to dance, both bending at the knees and waist, 18 inches apart, buttocks projected backwards, arms bent at their sides for balance, up on the balls of their feet, tapping the right toes outward and in, tapping the left toes outward and in, alternating their feet rapidly and decisively, twisting their hips and shoulders, his white bucks and her brown and white saddles tapping in double time.  When the song changed to "Heartbreak Hotel," they moved together and clinched and swayed, then bopped again when it became "See You Later, Alligator," and the old man walked around, patting guys on the back, shaking Zee's hand ceremoniously, saying "From Maple Street All-Star to high school all-star!  Way to go, Z-man!"  When the song became  "Standin' on the Corner,"  he settled sardonically into a place along the wall and watched for a while.  As "Moonglow" began, Dickie, 6' 2,"  200 pounds, fearsome, fearless tight end and linebacker, smiled knowingly at Solveig and the two waded into the stream and held hands at arm's length, slowly circling clockwise, insinuatingly undulating their pelvises at each step as right-hand notes on a piano carried the lambent melody above the soft, steady beat of bass, guitar, and drums, then coming together as soaring strings superseded the piano, her left hand on his shoulder, his left hand wrapping over and bringing to his chest her right, working it, caressing it, staring into each other's eyes, gliding forward, hesitating in place, gliding backward, an emulation of the most haunting, sensuous dance the old man had ever seen, that of William Holden and Kim Novak in Picnic, which had played at the Princess during the summer.  When the song changed to "Allegheny Moon," he noticed Zee and Sylvia releasing each other, Zee walking over toward Jerry Johnson, Sylvia, in a long gray pleated skirt and a short-sleeve pink blouse, backing away from the center of the floor, and suddenly he found himself approaching her, saying "Sylvia, want to dance?'   "Sure," she said.   He led her out on the floor and held up his left hand as if signaling a right turn.  She smiled, raised her right arm, clasped his palm in hers, both placing their free hands in the middle of each other's back, maintaining a discreet distance between their bodies.  Beguiled by her softness, her lotioned hand, the layer of adipose tissue on her back, he labored in the box step that his mother had taught him, stepping ahead of the beat and onto her feet, saying "Sorry," turning, eddying, unable to go anywhere.  "The place looks great,"  he said.  "The streamers, the flowers."  Sylvia and Patty headed the decoration committee.  "Thanks.  Great game, tonight, huh?  Gary was our hero!"  Her dark eyes shone beneath her curled eyelashes.  "Yeah, he really was.  Can't wait to play those guys in basketball."  "Will our basketball team be as good as our football team?"  "I hope so, lots of the same guys playing."  "Plus you."  "Yeah, plus me."  As the song ended, Patti Page quavering "For me and for my one and only love," he yearned to dip Sylvia but didn't dare for fear of dropping her. They stopped dead.  "Well, thanks, Wayne, that was fun.  Maybe we'll have another dance later."  And she was off, heading toward Patty and Dickie and Monk.  The old man went downstairs, couldn't find a ping pong partner, came back up, leaned against the wall.

Solveig, hands jammed in her coat pockets, navy blue earmuffs adorning her hair, stood outside next to one of the three unfluted Italian columns supporting the flat roof of the concrete porch of the building that had served many civic purposes since its construction in 1909: a basketball court for a girls' team, Frances Anderson its star; a stage for dramatic and musical productions, his grandfather and granduncle Enos playing there occasionally as members of the town's choral society and band; even at one time a small bowling alley; and now a hall for meetings and installations for the Masons, the Rainbows, and DeMolay.  Guys in customized Fords, Chevies, Mercs, and Studies were cruising up and down Dayton, racking their pipes on the way up, snapping them on the way down.  Kids were descending the stairs, hailing rides or walking briskly toward their cars parked on Dayton or 5th.  A long, dark green '56 Lincoln, with wide white walls and a Continental kit, a car that he didn't recognize, swooped to the curb in front of the Temple, and Solveig waved, skipped down to it, and jumped in.

The old man hunched his shoulders against the cold and walked the two blocks to his house on 4th, behind the Beeson Building.

[I loved, loved, loved the Canteen!  Our own little excitingly dark, soulful, sonorous world, communal and romantic.  Patty]

                                                                                      ***

"Well, I guess if we need a plumber to fix a leak in the future we don't call Kjell Lerass," his mother said to his father Saturday evening at dinner, a pot roast she had put to simmer all day in Lipton's packaged onion soup, his father lifting the lid occasionally and adding water as needed.  "WhiIe I was checking out June Trafton's groceries today she told me that Kjell and Leona have gone strictly commercial--installation for new businesses, houses, and apartment buildings only.  No more being called to replace leaking hot water heaters in the middle of the night for them!  They've opened a big demo store full of fixtures on 196th in Lynnwood near Ed's Market.  Leona runs the office, Kjell does the contracting, and they've hired three full-time plumbers to do the work.  So now they've got that big new house on the water in Talbot Park, a new Lincoln and a new Chrysler, they've joined the Everett Golf and Country Club, and they're going to send Solveig to Whitman next year.  Must be nice!" 

On Sunday afternoon the old man came downstairs dressed in a gray sweatshirt, gray tee shirt underneath, white gym shorts, and his new Converse, and asked to borrow his parents' '54 cream-of-tomato soup Studebaker Land Cruiser sedan.

"Why?" his mother said.

"Go play basketball with Zee.  Get a Green River after at Bienz's."

"It's three blocks to the gym.  You can't walk?"

"It's raining."

"It's misting!"

" And I'll be tired afterwards.  You're not going anywhere, are you?"

"Coach opening up the gym on a Sunday?" his father said.

"Yeah, sort of."

He parked the Studie at the Field House to avert suspicion from neighbors or faculty members who might happen to be driving by and jogged on the slickening sidewalks through mist to meet Zee, who was waiting, holding his rubber basketball, hair damp from his walk over, outside the west entrance to the gym.  Yes, there it was, where they had left it Friday after school, the tip of a piece of white string that they had tied to the crash bar on the inside of the door and fed at floor level through the narrow gap between the door and its latch-post.  The old man pinched the string and teased it out six inches, raised it to waist-level, and tugged. The crash bar clicked and released and Zee grabbed the edge of the door and pulled it open.  They were in!  Laughing, the old man untied the string and threw it into a garbage can while Zee dribbled onto the maple floor and started shooting.  The gym was old, dark, unheated, dank.  Burlington and Anacortes had intimidating bright new stand-alone gyms with roll-up bleachers, glass backboards, digital clocks and scoreboards, heated tile floors in the locker room, huge shower bays.  The Edmonds gym was an integral part of the aging Art Deco building, with access not only from the streets but from the first and third floor hallways.  It had wooden backboards, a single scoreboard and an analog clock that turned red in the last minute of a period, cold concrete floors in a dim subterranean locker room, one small shower bay.  The thump of Zee's dribbling echoed off the cream-colored concrete walls and the hard, built-in wooden bleachers that loomed within three feet of the sidelines, leaving just enough room for players' benches on one side and a string of bouncing cheerleaders on the other.  Zee's damp shoes squeaked and squealed as he cut and pivoted on the maple floor, freshly lacquered for the basketball season.  They didn't dare turn on the lights.  They had to make do with the gray light coming from a few windows high in the northeast corner. 

"I've always loved this place,"  the old man said as Zee flipped him the ball. 

"Me, too." 

The old man felt the enormity of tomorrow's first official practice.  He had been up early Saturday to do pushups and jump rope.  After work, before dinner, in the dark, he had run an Olympiad (uphill on Main to Olympic, north on Olympic to 196th, down 196th to Caspar, down Caspar to 7th, south on 7th past the football field , up the sudden hill between Bell and Main, lungs flaming, then coasting down Main to home).  All fall, after school, while Zee and the guys were practicing football, he had been shooting in the upstairs gym of the Field House when it rained or at Zee's outdoor court at the house on Dayton when it didn't.  He had to make the team, had to make the starting lineup.  His blood surged.  He felt quick.  He was soaring for rebounds.  They fed each other for layups.  He felt agile.  He was sweeping under the rim for left and right handed reverse hooks.  They fed each other for outside shots, Zee bending his knees, elbows at his sides, both hands on the ball, thumbs almost touching, launching the ball with backspin, extending, following through, his classic two-hand set, a proven zone-buster, a little short at first, hitting the front of the rim, he hadn't played in a while, then finding the range, like the second-team all-league guard he had been last year, legs, wrists, and eyes coordinating, starting to swish them, the net splashing backward, then the old man shooting his one-handers, right foot forward, weight on the balls of his feet, making more than he missed.  Next came jumpers, the old man's favorite shot, the one that felt most natural to him.  He would jab fake one way, cut the other, take Zee's pass in a two-foot jump-stop, gather, elevate, hitch slightly at the top of his jump for power as he extended the ball on the pads of the fingers of his right hand, the left just a guide, and release it with arch and backspin.  Or catch it, take two hard dribbles, and go up suddenly.  This was his shot.  If he didn't rush, he was every bit as accurate from 16 feet as Zee.  They rested a minute, sweat dripping down their noses even in the cold, soaking into their tee shirts, and drank from the fountain near the entrance to the locker room.  They played H-O-R-S-E, they played 21, Zee winning most often.  Finally, what they had been building up to, a game of 1-on-1 to 20 by one, winner's outs.  Zee beat him, as expected.  If the old man didn't come out tight on him, Zee would sink a two-hand set; if he did, Zee, who was quicker, would flash by him for a layup or, if the old man did manage to stay low and slide, cutting him off, Zee would keep his dribble alive, hesitate, juke, get him to raise up, then drive around him or crossover to his left before the old man could recover.  For his part, the old man was limited to the jump shot.  Zee was quick enough to contest the set shot and also drop step and slide to cut off the drive.  The old man lacked facility with the ball.  He had trouble keeping his dribble alive.  His instinct was to take two hard dribbles and pull up for a jump shot or make a jump stop, head fake, and step around for a push shot.  He was fairly good at that.  He forced  Zee back on his heels a couple of times, he coaxed him to jump prematurely a couple of times, once he even made a reverse pivot and spun by him to bank one in off the board ("That was nice!" Zee said), but usually Zee was able to stay on top of him and make him shoot a forced, pressured shot.  Zee won, 20-10.  Was he twice as good? 

They shook hands.

"Think we're ready, Z-man?"

"I think so."

"I hope so.  Big day tomorrow.  You need a ride home?'

"Nah.  Think I'll jog.  Work on my dribbling on the way."

The sky remained gray, but the mist had stopped.  The old man walked to the Studie, drove out Puget Sound Drive, and turned down Talbot Road.  He drove slowly, his the only car on the new blacktop road, swiveling his head as the road descended past gouged earth, uprooted tree stumps, and an idle bulldozer, eyeing the new houses on their half-acre lots, trying to read the lettering on mailboxes mounted on posts on both sides of the road, not knowing Solveig's address, not knowing what he would do if he found it, just wanting to know that he was on the street where she lived, but in a yard at the bottom of the slope, almost a half-mile into the Park, just before the road began to climb again, his breath quickening in embarrassed guilt and joy, he saw Solveig, in a yellow rain-slicker and black rubber boots, windrowing a heavy littering of umber leaves that had fallen onto the lawn from the two towering maple trees that had been left in place when the house was built.  The angular split-level house, with cedar shake roof, vertical clear cedar siding, and a wooden deck all along its perimeter, sat on a low bluff above the Sound and looked directly at Possession Point on Whidbey Island.  She lifted her head, she recognized him, he had to stop.  He swerved to her side of the road, put the Studie in neutral, rolled down his window. 

"Hi, Solveig."

"Wayne!  What are you doing out here?"  Carrying the bamboo rake, she walked over to the shoulder of the road.  He could see the ice-blue of her wide-set eyes.

"Oh, just driving around, killing time.  Been playing basketball with Gary and now I'm just waiting for tomorrow and the first team turnout."

"Nervous?"

"Very."

"Oh, I'm sure you'll do well."

"So this is your new place, huh?  I heard my parents talking about it the other day.  How do you like it?'

"It's a great house.  Everything new--I love it.  But I don't love the location.  I mean I love the view, but we're so far away from downtown Edmonds, and I really miss it.  I have to ride the bus to school, I have to have my dad take me to a game or a dance.  Before, I could just walk to everything.  And I don't really know anybody out here.  All my friends live in Edmonds.  Patty, Carolyn, Charlotte, Sylvia, Dickie, Dave.  I'm trying to talk my dad into buying me a car."

"Yeah, I need a car, too.  I'm going to get one right after the first of the year.  Been saving my money."

"From your job at Safeway?"

"Yeah.  How'd you know?"

"Oh, my mom said she saw you and your mom working in there when she was shopping one day."

"I saw you dancing to 'Moonglow' with Dickie at Canteen.  You guys were really good."

"Yeah?  Did you see Picnic last summer?  Somehow Dickie and I just flowed into that dance scene, or it just flowed out of us.  It was so much fun.  I liked that whole movie.  Reminded me of the 4th of July in Edmonds with the parade, the food, the games, all the little kids and the grandparents.  And when Millie said 'Go to him, Madge,' my heart just soared.  Do you like Kim Novak?  She was beautiful, wasn't she?"

"She was.  I Iiked the way she just slightly moved her jaw and lower lip to express emotion.   She keeps looking out of the corners of her eyes.  She's feeling very deeply but she  can't find the words, she's just not a words person, and that hurts her, her lack of language is her Achilles heel, she moves her eyes in panic, she longs to be known, she's more than a pretty face but can't think how to show it."

Solveig smiled and leaned on the rake.  "So what do you think of Miss Anderson's Family Living class and Marriage for Moderns?"

"Mm, pretty easy, pretty boring.  Compatibility, courtship, weddings, responsibilities, money management, home-making, house buying--don't we all learn these mostly by watching our parents?  "

"I actually like it.  I like the philosophy of partnership, the woman and the man equal but with different responsibilities, they're a paired unity, they grow together.  There's useful information about economics, financing and investments, things like that.   And of course we haven't gotten to the chapter on sex and reproduction yet!"

"Yeah, saving the best for last, I guess!  Anyway, I like Mrs. McAllister's French class better."

"Oh, I do, too.  I love her discussions of French culture--their cuisine, their couture, and so on.  I think I'm going to major in French in college.  I can see myself working as an interpreter or translator in some American embassy somewhere, or maybe writing for a fashion magazine."

"Really!  Well, I like writing and reciting the dialogues she has us do, and analyzing the grammar of sentences is just plain fun.  But I like Foster's Cultural Heritage class best of all.  So many interesting ideas come up in there."

"I really enjoyed The Great Religions By Which Men Live.  My family is Lutheran, although we only go out to the Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood on Christmas and Easter and Ash Wednesday, but it was fascinating to learn about the eastern religions.  Atman and Brahman and maya.  But throwing the Bible in the wastebasket to make a point?  I didn't really mind--I got it--but for some people that's going a little too far.  Patty was really fuming after class that day, and when I told my dad about it, he said the guy must be a communist."

"You know he was in the Marines in World War II?   He's no commie."

"No, I'm sure he isn't.  But there might be some people suspicious of him."

"To me he's the most interesting teacher at EHS.  He told me the other day that he was the stroke on the Harvard varsity crew when he went back to college after the war ended.  I'm going to write a feature on him for the Wireless."

The Studie, the old man realized, had been idling at least five minutes.  To stay any longer would be unseemly.  "Well, guess I'd better get the car back in case my parents need it.  Nice to talk to you, Solveig."

"You too, Wayne.  See you in class--I mean classes--tomorrow."

He put the car in first and followed Talbot Road to the top of the hill and out of the Park.  He looped back to Perrinville, with its one general store, then took Snake Road down to Edmonds, stopping at McKeever's Shell on 5th to get a dollar's worth of gas.

"So what's up, Wayne?" said Donnie Bailey, a classmate who worked there weekends, as he turned the crank on the pump and the numbers reset to zeroes. 

"Not much.  Just played a little basketball with Zee, then ran into Solveig Lerass and talked to her for a while."

                                                                                      ***

When, in the midst of one of their minutes-long open-mouthed kisses at the beach parking strip in the front seat of his midnight blue '49 Ford convertible with the fender skirts and the dual pipes, on a late gray Sunday afternoon, welcome winter darkness descending early, his left hand, inside her tan car coat but not the soft beige cashmere sweater he had given her for Christmas, alternately squeezing and caressing her substantial resilient breasts, the old man's already open eyes (after their first two dates, he had rejected the claustrophobic solipsism of Hollywood closed-eyes kisses, he wanted to see her fine lashes, her high forehead, the brown redness of her hair, the loosing of the hair from its combs, wanted the car's interior in his periphery, wanted a context) widened as a Great Northern freight train rumbled by and Solveig lowered her hand to the crotch of his pastel yellow peggers.  His hackles horripilating, he stiffened even more.  Smiling, Solveig pulled her head back and looked at him.  "'Manual manipulation,' the book says.  I can't get that out of my mind."  She unzipped his pants, slid her hand down and stroked him outside his tartan-plaid boxers.  He slid his hand down to the crotch of her black pedal pushers and rubbed with two fingers.  She went inside the fly of his boxers and gripped him in her fist, giggling as he leaked a bit into it.  He unzipped her and slid the two fingers inside the crotch of her damp white nylon panties and up into her slickness.  "No," she said.  "Stay outside and just stroke the clitoris."  He found something gristly and palpated.  She resumed the kiss--it seemed to be important to be kissing while manipulating--and rubbed his hardness faster as they panted into each other's slobbery faces until, with a gasp, keeping his fingers going on her, he released, then moaned as she continued manually to  urge more throbbing from him.  When he finally subsided, softened and diminished, she extracted her splashed hand from the inside of his soaked boxers and spread her legs wider as he leaned in to his manipulating, their mouths gaping, their tongues tickling each other, their teeth sometimes bumping clumsily, stroking, now tenderly, now aggressively, he had no idea what she preferred, he had no touch, he was almost getting bored, there might be people walking by, and then at last she thrust her pelvis forward and he skated his fingers up and down the little ridge while she murmured and writhed.

They hugged and rested their heads together for a moment.

"I think Family Living just became my favorite class," he said.

"And I think Marriage for Moderns just became my favorite book," she said.   "But, geez, I need to be home by 5:30.  Let's get you cleaned up."  Opening her pocketbook, which lay to her right on the bench seat, she extracted Kleenex from a packet and swabbed him, both laughing as she elicited a final series of shudders, mopped his boxers, mostly in vain, then slipped a fresh tissue inside her panties and dabbed around.  "We're going to have stains," she giggled.

Two weeks later Solveig called to invite him over to study for Foster's Cultural Heritage semester final.  "Come about 11:00," she said.  "My parents are going to Sunday brunch at the Everett Golf and Country Club, so it'll be quiet." 

He parked on the shoulder of the road in front of the walkway adjacent to the concrete driveway that led to a two-car garage.  The burled maple trees were bare, their rough bark showing all the way to their tops.  The dormant lawn was sallow.  She met him at the door wearing a nubby pink bathrobe.  Her broad feet, their toenails painted deep red, were bare. 

"Hiiiii," she said, tugging his right arm--his left clutched his  goldenrod Pee Chee, on the cover of which he had recently written with his black Papermate "Ah foun' mah three-oh ohn Bluebayee Hee-oh," and a paperback copy of Laughing Boy--and leading him over the bare oak floor toward a chocolate brown velour couch which was angled to provide a view of Whidbey.  "What a great house!" he said, tilting his head back in homage to the six skylights that made it astonishingly light inside even on this cloudy day, panning his eyes from north to south, the gleaming avocado refrigerator and stove and the white and avocado mosaic tiles of the countertops and of the kitchen bay window's deep sill, which held terra cotta pots of small green plants, the long birch dining table with eight matching chairs, the long oak console with multiple doors that surely accommodated a 24-inch television set and a turntable and a number of LP record albums, the built-in oak book shelf housing a complete set of The Encyclopedia Britannica, the blonde oak rocking chair, the trapezoid-shaped glass coffee table bearing a copy of Sunset Magazine, the gleaming black baby grand piano, a hallway that led to bathrooms and bedrooms, a stairway with oak spindle balusters that led to a daylight basement, and then out the western windows--nine panels, each 10 feet high and four feet wide, plus a sliding glass door--to an expansive patio that surrounded a tarp-covered kidney-shaped swimming pool, more lawn, and a concrete stairway with iron railings leading to the beach.  "What a great view!"

He set his materials on the coffee table and tossed his top coat over the back of the rocker.  They sat.  She snuggled up to him and kissed him.  "Are you ready for this?" she said, and stood and unbuttoned her robe.  Stunned by her audacity, he took her in as if she were a museum exhibit.  Three times now they had gotten each other off in the front seat of his car, playing blind man's bluff, but they had not yet seen each other naked.  She was so white, that whiter skin of hers than snow, except for the faint blush on her cheeks and forehead and her mauve nipples and her reddish-brown bush.  He was hardening.  He stood.  Her springy breasts filled his cupping hands, her wide belly felt taut.  He helped her shrug out of the robe, which she tossed to the end of the couch.  He ran his hands over her broad cool ass, he gripped it and squeezed.  She lifted his white tee shirt and ran her hands over his chest hair, still patchy, like a newly seeded lawn, and his stomach, softer than hers but less flabby than it used to be now that he had grown to 5' 11".  She undid his purple suede belt, unbuttoned his Lee jeans, pulled them down, pulled his white boxers down, he stood revealed, he was on display, he was embarrassed, like the first day of swimming lessons at the Everett YMCA when the instructor told him and Zee and Monk and the rest of the all-male class to undress, shower, and report to the pool naked, he was almost vertical, was he big enough, was he good enough, she dropped to her knees, took him, incredibly, into her mouth, tonguing, tugging, he grabbed her hair in his fists, how sweet was this, and then he shattered into a rag that she had previously pulled from the pocket of her robe.  When she was unable to coax any further shuddering from him, she wiped him off, set the rag on the floor, stretched out on the couch with her knees pulled up, and he leaned in to kiss her salty, slimy lips with their surprising whiff of sea brine, his upreaching hands working her breasts, and lap doggedly with his tongue until she was through convulsing and whimpering and he was on the verge of hardening again.  They stood up.  "Damn!" she said.  "A wet spot."  She grabbed the rag, dabbed at herself, scrubbed the wet spot, flipped the cushion over.  They hugged and kissed.  She invited him into her room to watch her dress.  The old man found her thrilling and precious.  He nearly swooned at the jut of a haunch, the uplift of a breast, as she reached for a hanger in her closet.  "Solveig," he said softly, cautiously, "should I try to get hold of some rubbers?"  "Yes," she said.

They were sitting at the dining room table studying, formulating possible essay questions (What esthetic qualities of Navajo life are revealed in the characters' speech and actions?  What do the songs, chants, and prayers reveal about Navajo beliefs?  What is the role of beauty in the Navajo culture?  Does the death of Slim Girl imply a tragic outcome for cross-cultural marriages?  Define the term hozoji.  Compare and contrast the principles of Taoism with the concept of hozoji.), Solveig wearing pink pedal pushers and a white blouse, a plate of krumkaka and glasses of lemonade before them, when her parents came home.  They looked sternly quizzically at Solveig. 

"Hi," Solveig said.  "How was brunch?  I invited Wayne over so we could study together.  Big final in Cultural Heritage this week."

"Brunch was fine," Leona Lerass said.  "You should have told us you were going to have company.  Hi, Wayne."

"You're right.  I'm sorry."

They were going steady.  They were in love.  In the spacious, knotty-pine paneled basement rec room, on its black shag carpet, Whidbey in his peripheral view, she taught him to dance, again and again recuing "My Prayer" until he could go forward and back, slow-slow-quick-quick, and pivot and hold in place and lead her into an underarm turn and execute a final, graceful dip, and "Rock Around the Clock" until he could double-time tap right-left-right-left and twist his upper body in sync.  They went to Canteen on Fridays after home basketball games, mingling and replaying the action with Zee and Jimmie and Jerry and Monk and Bobby and Sylvia and Patty and Charlotte but dancing only with each other, and caravanned, after their final dip on "Dream," to Wilson's Drive-In  at 145th and Aurora to order burgers and shakes and fries from the carhops.  On Saturdays they went to movies at the Orpheum, the Paramount, or the Music Box in downtown Seattle.   Both felt pity and fury after Sayonara ("This would be a good movie for Cultural Heritage," Solveig said), both were inspired by The Spirit of St. Louis and Fear Strikes Out, the old man vowing to conquer his fear of failing at the plate as well as of being hit by a pitch, both dreamed of participating in dramatic dance scenes after Silk Stockings and The Benny Goodman Story (both melting, as always, at "Moonglow,"  their song, both jazzed by Gene Krupa's tom-tomming and kids jitterbugging to "Sing, Sing, Sing" in the aisles of Carnegie Hall), both moved by the tragic heroism of the Colonel and the Commander in The Bridge Over the River Kwai ("This would, too"), she admiring Kim Novak's triumph over weasely, conniving Frank Sinatra in Pal Joey, he beguiled again by that self-distancing, those twitching lips, the downcast eyes, the pouty drooping lower jaw, he could identify with that.  In mid-March, the drive-in theaters opened for the season, the Sno-King on the northern edge of Lynnwood on Highway 99 and the Aurora south of Wilson's.  They became regulars on Saturdays, except when she had her period, hooking the speaker to the driver's window but turning the volume off, climbing into the back seat in the dark when the cartoons began, eagerly undressing each other, dropping the clothes in a pile on the floor, he slipping on one of the Trojans that Bobby stole a package of every couple of weeks while stocking shelves at Swanson's Drug store and shared with him, pulling a scratchy wool plaid Pendleton blanket over themselves, cuddling, cocooning, then she stretching out on the seat for him or hoisting herself onto his lap and riding him.  They usually missed a few minutes of the first feature but then, his arm around her after reaching forward to turn on the volume, both still naked, lost themselves in the films, both teary at the end of A Farewell To Arms (he because of Frederic Henry's loss, she because of nature's injustice to Catherine Barkely), both locked in the cross-cutting tension, seeing the situation from both sides, of The Enemy Below, it seemed so real, both stunned by the eerie complexity of The Three Faces of Eve, the existence of multiple personalities a stunning revelation, so un-Edmonds-like, neither of them even knew of anyone who was seeing a psychiatrist, and by the shocking melodrama of Peyton Place, could Edmonds in any way be like that, true enough they knew of no important person that had ever come out of EHS and many classes limited themselves to facts or skills but Foster and McAllister presented ideas, math teachers taught inductive and deductive logic, and science teachers espoused the scientific method, kids had sex, certainly, hadn't they just minutes ago, and Sandy Ferlaak had become pregnant in her junior year and been required by district policy to leave school and receive home instruction, but were parents that controlling and puritanical, sex education was part of the curriculum for seniors, guys read Playboy, although not in front of their parents, and found it available not at Swanson's in Edmonds but at the new Pay'N'Save in Lynnwood, on weekends a few went to the woods or the beach and drank, certainly alcohol was a serious problem for some, Joe Hatch and Larry Russell had gotten drunk the night after Joe obtained his driver's license and were killed when Joe failed to negotiate a curve going down Maplewood Hill and his '51 Chevy Deluxe coupe with the windshield visor and fender skirts and dual pipes flew into a gulch and hit a tree, the Johnsons' dad spent his evenings at the Edmonds Tavern, Monk's dad hit the liquor store for a fifth of bourbon every day, and Ken Miller, the Safeway manager, the old man's mother had informed him, had once undergone aversion therapy at Schick Shadel in West Seattle, some of the guys surmised that classmate Dale Lippert, who helped Sylvia and Patty with the decorations for Canteen and Tolo and Senior Ball, and P.E. teacher Miss Rhonda James, who never wore makeup and who combed back her slick short hair into a DA, were "queer," but homosexuality was seldom a topic of discussion, and incest was never even a consideration, Patty's mother had left home for a while but they hadn't heard any other gossip about extramarital affairs, they were unaware of any evidence of spousal abuse or shady business deals or suicides, some people had more money than others, of course, Woodway Park was a world apart and business men and professionals were moving into north Edmonds and Talbot Park but were there really status differences, cultural differences, except for income wasn't everybody equal, was Edmonds stultifying, repressive, bourgeois or petite bourgeois (was there a difference?), was there anger among the teenagers, desperation to get out, did they want to rise above the town, none of their friends ever seemed to talk that way, or was that because they were too bourgeois Solveig wondered, the old man dreamed of becoming a reporter, starting first with the Seattle Times and commuting from Edmonds, and ultimately advancing to the New York Times, but thought of the move with a sense of apprehension not relief, Solveig wasn't sure yet what she wanted to be, translator or fashion writer, certain only that she did not want to be in the plumbing business, they would marry, on their honeymoon they would attend the Ashland Shakespearean Festival, in a niche in the granite bulkhead shoring up the bank on the west side of the train tracks, waves swashing ten feet below them, they decided on names for their three children, Samantha, after the luminous Grace Kelly character in High Society, for a girl, Oscar for the first boy, Max for the second. 

And every Tuesday and Friday through February there were basketball games.  He had finally made a varsity, after having been cut from the football team as a sophomore and apprenticing on the jayvee basketball and baseball teams in his sophomore and junior years.  In the three-day tryout period he had concentrated to his utmost during the monotonous drills, executing with precision the fundamentals of passing and shooting, miming Coach, pronating his wrists on the chest passes, exaggerating his follow-throughs, taking each part of each drill seriously.  He got his butt down, drop-stepped and slid.  He pivoted with passion.  He made 90% of the 25 free throws they shot daily.  In scrimmages he fought for loose balls, contested shots, blocked out, passed and cut crisply, ran the plays precisely, even soared over Monk to tip in a rebound  ("More lucky than good," he heard Coach say on the sideline to a couple of subs waiting to come in.)  He didn't take many shots--and missed most of those few--but he knew he was displaying good form, he was just rattled.  There was no question that Coach was going to keep the returning letter-winners--Monk the banger, Zee the scorer, Jimmie the slashing driver, Jerry the jumper--but who was the fifth senior going to be?  The old man, who was versatile if nothing else, or Stew Jenkins, a 6'3" stiff whose shots clanked and whom Coach had kept in the program for two years because of his height, or erratic Fred Morton, who would drive successfully to the hoop in a burst of speed one day and throw up blind hook shots another?  In the final scrimmage on day three, Stew shot a ball that missed the backboard and hit the end wall.  Fred, leading a fast break, threw a no-look pass out of bounds.  The old man, leading a fast break, jump-stopped at the free throw line as Stew came at him to defend, faked a shot, and dropped a perfect left-handed bounce pass to a cutting Zee, who laid it in.  Coach nodded.  Two minutes later, the old man, making one of his signature two-dribble drives, jump-stopped, head-faked, and stepped around Fred to sink a short push shot.  Coach smiled.  He was in.

But the team and the old man both struggled.  Now that he had achieved his lifelong dream of being a starter, he was unable to be a difference-maker.  The versatility of his mediocrity was all that he had going for him.  In Coach's double post offense, the old man could play either outside or inside with equal lack of effect.  As a post man, although undersized, he rebounded well because he fought to find gaps and was relentless in pursuing the ball, and if he set a screen for a guard and a defender ran into him, he could make his free throws.  He shot 81% for the season, which turned out to be a school record.  But with his back to the basket he was unable to make many post moves--few power drop steps, few running hooks, few turnaround jumpers--so his teammates usually ignored him and looked to find Monk inside instead.  As a guard, he passed well and screened well but was limited by his lack of a set shot and by his two-bounce dribble.  On defense, he held his own.  Inside, he banged, he fought to deny position, he contested shots without fouling, he blocked out.  Outside, he got his arm out to deny perimeter passes, if his man did get the ball he gave him a cushion so he could deny dribble penetration, conceding a few more set shots than he should but usually getting away with it.  Not that his teammates were much better.  Zee, who made first team All-Northwest League, averaged 18 points a game and led the conference in scoring, canning those two-hand sets or keeping his dribble alive long enough to find a little opening for a runner or a baby hook, and Jimmie, so quick, averaged 12 by knifing to the basket for layups, but the other players had little offensive game.  The old man averaged four for the season, most of those coming on free throws.  His one glory performance happened on a Friday in late December when the undefeated Marysville Tomahawks came to town.  The lead changed hands with every basket throughout the game, and the old man, possessed by the possibility of upsetting the league leaders, grabbed six rebounds in the fourth quarter, got fouled setting a screen with 15 seconds to go, swished both free throws on the 1-and-1, fought around his man to steal a pass at the other end, and threw the ball to the ceiling in celebration as his teammates rushed toward him to pound him on the back and Coach shook his fist and said "Attaboy, Wayne!"  The win moved Edmonds into third place in the eight-team league, and that was as high as they would go.  In January they slowly sank to sixth, out of contention for even the District Tournament, let alone State.  Still, he loved it all.  The practices, where Coach would put in the game plan against the scout team of second-stringers and they would convince themselves that they could win.  The team dinners at players' houses before home games, mothers offering platters of cubed steaks, trays of foil-wrapped baked potatoes, cartons of sour cream and margarine and jars of bacon bits, huge wooden bowls of green salad, bottles of French dressing, and baskets of doughy Parker House rolls from the Edmonds Bakery.  The bus rides to away games, 12 varsity players, 12 jayvee players, 10 cheerleaders, two managers, and two coaches crammed together, the girl-ogling, the joking, the razzing, the comradely bonding, the old man letting himself go, almost, briefly, dissolving into the whole, then, the old yellow bus wheezing its way up Highway 99, darkness falling, everyone becoming silent twenty minutes before their destination, feeling the game grow upon them, girding themselves, visualizing, preparing, usually in vain, not to let their teammates down.  And the crowds--at home, a gym full of Edmonds fans, with the brassy pep band blaring "Tiger Rag" and "Muskrat Ramble," away, a knot of parents and friends, including Solveig, who filled up the car her parents had bought her for Christmas, an aqua and cream '55 Bel Air hard-top convertible, with Sylvia and Patty and Charlotte and Carolyn.  The old man's parents  drove to every game, even to Anacortes, two-hours away, and proudly sat among the other parents.  His mother always wore something purple or gold--a blouse, a sweater, a skirt, a scarf.  They were not yellers, definitely not given to rising to their feet, but applauded all good plays, his no more enthusiastically than anyone else's, and exchanged nods and smiles with their equals.

Baseball was more successful but less enjoyable.  The team finished a respectable third, behind Everett and Marysville, and the old man played right field and batted .280, hitting mostly singles to center and left.  Only Jimmie at short and Bobby at third had higher averages.  Zee, the football and basketball star, was down around .200.  But the feeling just wasn't the same.  Fewer than a dozen parents and friends attended the afternoon games, most parents, like his mother, having to work, most friends busy with other after-school activities.  His father, able to adjust his schedule at Hopper Chevrolet, was the only parent who appeared at every home game.  Solveig came to the first two games, then decided that her time would be better spent doing homework.  And no one, parent or friend, attended the away games.  The spring weather was often miserable, with temperatures in the 40s and 50s, and rain squalls passing through.  The Edmonds infield was a clumpy clay strewn with rocks, which Coach required the players to rake into piles and throw to the sidelines before practices or games could begin; the outfield, clipped quack grass, was uneven, with little mounds and depressions that forced fielders to fight for balance when running down balls.  When they did catch one, the ball stung their nearly frozen hands so badly that tears came to their eyes.  At home in the last game of the season, in a battle for second place against Marysville, they lost.  Down one, the old man was on deck in the bottom of the seventh.  Jimmie had singled, Jerry had walked, and Bobby was up.  Suddenly, Principal Hill, scrawny and wrinkled now but a track star in his youth it was said, came rushing through the tennis courts and out to the field.  "Wayne, Wayne," he shouted, interrupting the old man's practice swings.  "I've just been informed that you have been nominated for a $500 journalism scholarship sponsored by the Everett Herald.  You have an interview in Seattle at the P-I with Emmett Watson tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.  Congratulations!  Now get a hit!"  Stunned, the old man said "Thanks" and watched as Bobby laid down a bunt and sacrificed Jimmie to third and Jerry  to second.  A base hit would score both, Jerry taking a big lead and getting a good jump with two out, and win the game.  He stepped into the batter's box.  Emmett Watson, sportswriter and columnist for the P-I, next to Georg Myers, sports editor and columnist for the Times, his favorite writer!  $500!   He stared at Greg Easterbrook, who didn't have much speed but had a wicked curveball.  The old man had waited on the curve in his first two at-bats and had singled to left and lined out sharply to short.  Principal Hill was standing behind the backstop.  "Rip one, Wayne!" he shouted.  The old man knew he would get a fastball on the first pitch, and he wanted it, wanted it so much that he excitedly pulled his head and missed it.  He knew he would get the curve next, and he stayed back waiting for it as a fastball sailed right down the middle.  "Come on, Wayne," shouted Zee and Bobby and his teammates.  Now he knew the curve, Easterbrook's out-pitch, was coming, and he waited on it and waited on it before finally flailing weakly, desperately late, and missing another fat fastball.   The Marysville players screamed their approval.  Principal Hill turned and walked away.  "Tough luck, Wayne," Jimmie said.  "Nice try," Bobby said.  "It happens, man," Zee said.  "Let's go shake hands with 'em, guys," Coach said.

The next morning he drove his Ford to 6th and Wall in Seattle, parked in front of the six-story P-I building topped by a 30-foot blue neon globe of the world visible for miles, an 18-foot-high eagle with upstretched wings perched atop it, and "It's in the P-I" in red letters rotating round it.  There were three other candidates from Snohomish County who waited with him on folding chairs placed in front of Watson's office door on the sixth floor.  They shook hands and identified themselves but were too nervously competitive to talk.  Watson came out.  "Gentlemen, I'm Emmett Watson," he said, as if they all didn't see his basset hound mug shot in the P-I every morning.  "I'll be interviewing you for the Everett Herald scholarship.  Which one of you is Wayne Adams?"

The old man raised his hand.

"Wayne, nice to meet you.  Let's start with you.  Come on in."

Watson motioned to the single guest chair in the room and swiveled his own desk chair away from his typewriter to face the old man, who was impressed by the view of Elliott Bay beyond the desk.  With such a view, who wouldn't be inspired to write?

"Tell me why you're interested in journalism," Watson asked. 

The old man sensed that Watson wanted him to reply that he had been called to the profession, that his mission was to find and report the truth, that he wanted to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, which his teacher Charles Sauvage had said was one of the noble purposes of journalism, but he was unable to do that.  He said that he was interested because he had had success in writing for the school paper, that he enjoyed finding different angles and various ways of putting pieces together into a coherent whole, and that he liked getting bylines.  Impassive Watson didn't smile, didn't frown.  The old man desperately wished that Watson could see the comments Sauvage had made in his string book about his feature on Jack Foster as a Harvard oarsman: "Good English, good organization, punchy writing, complete reporting, has central idea," "I've seen worse in the Times and P-I many times," "Professional quality," "You have a fine future in journalism."

"And what does your independent reading, your out-of-class reading, consist of? "

The old man said that in the last few months he had read "The Last Hurrah" in the Reader's Digest Condensed Books, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, and The Jungle, both on the recommendation of his journalism teacher, and that he was just getting started on The Grapes of Wrath.  Watson nodded and stood to shake his hand.

"Wayne, thank you for the interview.  You'll be hearing from the Everett Herald in a few days."

The winner, he heard in a few days, by way of a one-sentence note from Principal Hill delivered to him in Foster's class by a student messenger, was the kid from Everett High School.   Both embarrassed and relieved, the old man decided that he would not be joining the Fourth Estate.  He would be remaining among the commoners.

In May  he applied for admission to the UW, where he intended to major in English, not Journalism.  Tuition was $60 a quarter, the grade-point requirement for entrance 2.0.  His 3.0 would get him in; he would live at home and pay for tuition and books with the money he earned from his 40-hour per week job, procured for him by his father, pumping gas, polishing cars, cleaning toilets, and running errands at Hopper Chevrolet, and his Saturday work at Safeway.  Solveig, with her 3.9 (a B in Calculus), applied for admission to Whitman, where she would major in French and pledge a sorority, her expenses, some $6,000, paid for by her parents, although they insisted that she work during the summer by doing  most of the cleaning at home and going in to clean the plumbing store on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  For the Senior Prom, held in the school gym, they double-dated with Monk and Char, having dinner beforehand in Seattle at Canlis overlooking Lake Union, the old man ordering ground sirloin well-done and Solveig experimenting with frog's legs, which he found surprisingly mild when she shared a bite with him.  After the graduation ceremony, held in the school auditorium, they joined their exuberant classmates on a chartered Great Northern train for an all-night trip to Vancouver, B.C., moving from car to car, seat-hopping from friend to friend in the coaches, dancing to the music of a trio playing in the corner of a boxcar decorated in purple and gold for the occasion, munching on snacks in the dining car, then climbing into chartered buses bound for the Hotel Vancouver, where they breakfasted on the top floor in a restaurant with a panoramic view, dozing and chatting in rummy exhaustion on the way home, arriving in Edmonds just in time for the old man to work a Saturday afternoon shift at Safeway.   Accompanied by his father, the old man opened a checking account at the  National Bank of Commerce in its new building with the drive-through window at 3rd and Main, the bank manager, Ken Gustafson, an old family friend, stepping into an open teller's window to handle the transaction himself.  Depositing $100 and opting to sign his checks "Wayne Warren Adams," the old man felt himself for the first time to be an adult.  A few days later, Solveig went in with her father and opened an account for $500.

It was a summer of readying, of work, of fun, of love.  Every couple of weeks they would drive to the University Book Store on the Ave and browse for paperbacks.  The old man read The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, The Catcher in the Rye.  Solveig read, in English, Swann's Way, Madame Bovary, The Stranger.  They swapped books.  Solveig loved The Sun Also Rises for its festivals and its rituals, its Spanish mystique, and found the élan of Brett Ashley exhilarating, was moved by the way Santiago was at one with the sea and the marlin, his brother, but pained by the obviousness of the Christian symbolism, reveled in Holden's language but was dubious about his sentimental need to preserve purity and the past.  The old man was captivated by Proust's style, the long, looping sentences, was ambivalent toward Emma's romanticism and claustrophobia, empathized with Meursault's discovery of the indifference of the world.  On some of their dates, after he finished work and showered, with light even in August lingering late, they went to the Edmonds beach or to Richmond Beach, spread his stained car blanket on the sand, ate tuna fish sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies that Solveig had made, and took turns reading aloud as they worked their way through Hamlet (he warming to Hamlet's skepticism and hesitancy, she to Hamlet's eventual realization that the readiness is all), Antony and Cleopatra (both stirred by the intensity of the lovers' passion, she admiring, he mesmerized by, Cleopatra's infinite variety, thinking Solveig was a little bit like that) and the French portion of an interlinear translation of Les Jeux Sont Fait, spurring each other on to perform, giggling from time to time as they tried to outdo each other in nasality, gargled r's, rounded-lip u's, aspirated h's, and word liaisons, running ending consonants into beginning vowels with abandon in quest of speed and fluidity. 

One night a week the old man played league fast-pitch softball on the high school football field with his old baseball teammates.  Jerry, who had a devastating riseball, pitched, the old man caught.  He liked being in the center of the action rather than a satellite in the outfield, and he could spring from his crouch and release the ball so quickly that, despite not having a strong arm, he was able to throw out most would-be base stealers.  Jimmie played short, Bobby was at third, Zee at second, Monk at first.  One night Jimmie hit an other-worldly shot over the grandstand.  "Truly awesome," the old man said, wanting to get on his knees and bow.  Sometimes Solveig would come to the game with some of her girlfriends in her Bel Air and afterwards everyone would go to the Polar Bear for Cokes or milk shakes.  Occasionally, after work and dinner at home with his parents, he would drive out to Talbot Park and spend a couple of hours with Solveig and Kjell and Leona, eating popcorn or ice cream sundaes and watching Perry Mason ("The guilty party is always on the stand exactly 10 minutes before the program ends," Kjell said), Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, Wyatt Earp, Have Gun Will Travel, The Danny Thomas Show, The Perry Como Show, Candid Camera, on their mammoth 24-inch TV screen.  Maverick was his favorite, Bret so sly and wily, a trickster living by his wit and charm, holding a black belt in mental jiu jitsu, using his opponent's strength against him, his very life a game of poker.  The old man could only dream of making gambits, of being able to read people that well or of having the stomach to manipulate them as Bret did.  "How's work going, Wayne?" Kjell would say.  "Good, good," the old man would answer.  "We're selling lots of '57s.  I'm unloading a boxcar of new ones every week and then polishing them up."  "I know Solveig really likes her '56.  I got a great deal from Irv Hopper on that one.  Maverick would have been proud.  How's it going for your dad?"  "Oh, fine, fine.  He spends quite a bit of time on the showroom floor or at the used car lot out at the county line.  And his trio plays dance jobs most every weekend."

"He's so good," Leona said.  "I love those New Year's Eve dances he plays at the Legion Hall.  He'll jazz up a popular song but he doesn't get so abstract that you can't dance to it."

"Yeah, that's the art, that's the challenge that he enjoys," the old man said.

Every couple of weeks, the old man's mother would ask him to invite Solveig for dinner.  She would prepare pot roast with chunks of potatoes and carrots or meat loaf with mashed potatoes.  His parents loved Solveig.  His mother chatted away about people she saw while working at Safeway, houses that were for sale, gossip she picked up from the weekly meeting of the Sewing Circle.  His father said little but continuously beamed alertness in Solveig's presence.  Solveig always made it a point to ask him something about music.  On the 4th of July she drove down to Edmonds and joined the old man and his parents and grandparents and aunt and uncle for the parade and the picnic and the evening fireworks show while Kjell and Leona went to the Country Club for golf and dinner.

On Saturday nights, they went to a drive-in.  On Tuesdays, clocking out for his one-hour lunch break, instead of going home, the old man would hurry out to Talbot where Solveig, who was cleaning house while her parents tended to business at the store, would greet him in her bathrobe for a quickie, then send him back to work with a sandwich of peanut butter and lingonberry jam, a moveable feast to munch on the way.  On Sundays, they might lob a tennis ball back and forth at the high school courts in their swimming suits, Solveig's an orange one-piece that resonated with her auburn hair and her faintly bronzing summer skin, then go back to Solveig's to swim in her pool or drive out to Martha Lake to spend the afternoon with classmates.  The girls would tuck their hair into white bathing caps and they would all swim out to the raft, dive off the board or jump from the 10-foot tower, then swim back in, dry off, the girls freeing and shaking out their hair, go to their cars for money, buy Coke or Dad's Root Beer and hot dogs at the concession stand, and loll on the grass in the sun and talk about college.  Zee was going to play basketball and study electrical engineering at the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma on a combination academic-athletic scholarship, Charlotte and Sylvia planned to room together in a dorm at the U, Charlotte going into Pre-Med, Sylvia majoring in Art, Monk was headed to Whitman for football and Pre-Law, Dave had a full scholarship to study theology and philosophy at Whitworth in Spokane, Carolyn would attend Reed in Portland and study classics.  Only the old man was going to live at home, only he was going to become a teacher.  And after the talk and the eating and drinking and some frisbee throwing, late in the afternoon, smoldering, the old man and Solveig usually waded out into the lake to the west away from the raft and the plungers and screamers to a spot where two drooping weeping willows obscured them from shoreside observers, walked in up to their chins, spread their feet and dug them into the soft muddy lake bottom, establishing a solid base against the chop of the waves created by gentle gusts of wind, stared deeply into the wild blue yonder and, his right hand working from behind, her left working from in front, achieved shivering climaxes, for the old man, laved by the water, loved by and loving this girl, mind unmoored and adrift in the sky, an almost atonement.

Shortly after Labor Day, Solveig filled her Bel Air with suitcases and books and toiletries and left for Whitman, trailed by her parents, who were going to help her get settled, in the Lincoln.  The night before she left, she and the old man went to the Sno-King to see April Love.  The old man ached.  He cherished her, he clung to her, but she was so excited by tomorrow that the sex was one-way. 

"You know," she said as he rolled down the window and put the speaker back on its hook after the movie ended, "you kind of remind me of Pat Boone, your cheekbones, your Bryll-Cremed hair parted on the left and combed back from your forehead, your ears at half-flap, your teeth nice in a smile but not perfectly even, your politeness, your wholesomeness, although you have brown eyes instead of blue and you've got those deep dimples that cave in like sinkholes when you smile, and when the state patrolman cited you for negligent driving, gunning it and passing all those cars  on Edmonds Way last month, you got off with a $10 fine because the judge knew your dad and your grandparents, just like the cop who caved in to peer pressure and decided to ignore Pat Boone's driving without a license."

"But I can't sing."

"You sang a duet with me in Mrs. Wagner's class."

"Proves my point!  Should we drive down to Wilson's?"

"I'd like to, but I really think I should get home, double-check my packing, and get some sleep."

At her door, under the bright porch light, he kept holding her. 

Finally she kissed him and said, "Wayne, I love you.  I'll call and I'll write.  Maybe you can come over for a sorority party later on.  And I'll be home for Thanksgiving.  Good luck with your classes!"  And she pulled away and went inside.

She called two weeks later.

"Wayne, I love my classes!  I'm taking French 201 and modern French literature and Poly Sci 100, plus golf for P.E. because my parents say I need to learn the game.  My French lit prof, Simon Weiner, is a cool, suave guy.  Very intellectual.  I've already had a couple of conferences with him.  We've started with Celine's Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit, then we're going on to Sartre's La Nausée and Camus' L'Étranger--guess I have a head start because I've already read it in English--Beckett's En Attendant Godot and Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie.  The campus here is very nice, small--you can walk across it in five minutes--woodsy, lots of colonial architecture.  And so far the sun has shone every day--no morning low clouds that last half the afternoon!  Did you know that Walla Walla means 'place of many waters'?  It's kind of nice to feel yourself existing in the territory of the Nez Perce.  In ninth-grade Washington State history class I learned to admire them and Chief Joseph for their courage and resiliency.  They seemed so noble, they really had a sense of who they were.  Going through rush was a blast.  I pledged Alpha Phi because I really hit it off with most of the girls.  My roommate, Joan Davis from Spokane, is very sweet.   And so many parties!  The Greeks are so active socially, it's a whirlwind.  I make sure I get my reading done, though.  I intend to graduate Phi Beta Kappa.  I finished Céline in five days and I've got a notebook full of quotes.  'A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.'  Ditto for a woman, I say.  Weiner quotes Camus: 'The first philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.'  Well, suicide is not on my agenda, ergo....It's not that I fear the dreams of death, like Hamlet, it's that I want to experience as much of life and learn as much about myself as I can.  'J'espere devinir moi-mème avant de mourir.'  Another quote: 'When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.'  I mean, I love Edmonds and I love you, our relationship is great and could never rot, but I'm glad I'm having these new experiences now, and I can feel myself growing.  Another quote: 'You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.'  Weiner says that these shadows are illusions, like those in the 'Allegory of the Cave,' and that we must explore the reality of now.  Later in life, perhaps, I will want to remember things past and come to terms with my origins, but for now I want to find out what's outside the cave.  And I plan to write my first paper on this one:  'Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere,' in which I will contrast the angst felt by the analytical narrator, Bardamu, who is kind of 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought' throughout his nightmarish 'journey,' with the sense of wholeness and beauty felt by the intuitive Navajos in Laughing Boy. Of the two fictions, the latter seems truer to me than the former. How are things with you?" 

"Go-OOd," he said, fighting for breath as his lungs spasmed.  "We-ENT down to the U to register last week.  My English Department adviser steered me into English 101, Econ 200, Astronomy 100, French 201, and Classics 100--Latin and Greek in Current Use, a vocabulary-building course."

"Oh, that'll be useful."

"Yeah.  And then I'm required to take ROTC, so I chose Army, and a PE class, so I chose golf just like you so we can play at the Country Club next summer."

"Great!"

"We start classes on the last Monday of September.  I'll be so glad to be done with waxing cars and cleaning toilets at Hopper's.  And my Tuesday lunch breaks aren't nearly as much fun as they used to be."

"I hope not!"

"I miss you."

"I miss you, too.  Only two months and I'll be home for Thanksgiving."

"Ri-IGHT."

"Wayne, sorry, but I have to go now.  I need to get some reading done, and then after dinner I'm going to walk downtown with some of the girls to see a movie."

"Which one?"

"Love in the Afternoon, with Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn.  It's set in beautiful Pehrhee.  I'd love to spend my junior year abroad, at the Sorbonne.  I love you!"

"I lo-OVe you, too."

When school started, the old man drove his Chevy every morning through Lake City to the still-settling gravelled Montlake parking lot next to the landfill dotted with smudge pots burning off the methane rising from the decaying garbage dumped by the dozens of huge trucks that came and went all day and ascended stairs and pathways to the upper campus, a 15-minute hustle to a pressure-filled excitement of new ideas, new possibilities.  Was he good enough?  Did he belong?  "Money is just numbers in bank books," said his Econ professor, Henry Buechel, in an early lecture.  How could that be?  Did it not have to be backed by something?  The astronomy lab was a labyrinth.  He could not fathom how to plot azimuths and declensions in the celestial sphere and turned in each week a hodge-podge of wild guesses and hopes.  The astronomy professor, Carl Jacobsen, marked all of his work "C"--a more than generous evaluation, the old man felt.  "You should have used 'celui' instead of 'l'on,' said his French professor, Lurline Simpson, after an assignment to invent an anecdote and recite it to the class.  "What's your major, Mr. Adams?"  "English."  "It should be French."  "An excellent paper, Mr. Adams," commented his English professor Marvin Brown on 'Angels in Bitches' Clothing: Greene's Women,' the old man's paper on The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.  The vocabulary class, conducted by a TA, James Robinson, was both easy and stimulating.  The old man excelled at memorizing roots and affixes and in making morphological cuts in words and eagerly applied his gained knowledge, as in Brown's class with the Lovelace poem, "A-mar-antha," un-fading-flower, Solveig sweet and fair, too, he thought, in a certain slant of light her hair blooming purplish-red.  The ROTC class, focusing on military history, was of no interest to him, but he looked forward to the physical competitiveness of the weekly drill sessions in the Armory, the marching in sync, the crisp pivoting, the precise shouldering and lowering of arms, the smooth sliding of the bolt for inspection.  The PE class, conducted on the 9-hole golf course south of Husky Stadium and covering the fundamentals of the swing, various types of shots, putting, and USGA rules, was joy.  Even though he sliced an occasional drive or chunked a fairway shot, he was developing a feel for the game and deriving immense satisfaction when he made clean contact, his hopes for playing with Solveig next summer soaring with the flight of the ball.  When he had a break between classes, he would go to the Husky Union Building to drink coffee and study.  He seldom encountered any of his EHS classmates who lived on campus--waving once in the Quad to Roger Van Dyke and once on the steps of Denny Hall to Sylvia--but occasionally would find at the HUB another commuting high school classmate, Bobby Moore or Annette Bergstrom or Mick Younger, and sit down to smoke a proffered Winston, or a Marlboro from a flip-top box, and audit their complaints about commutes and classes.  He ate the sack lunches that his mother made for him--a tuna sandwich, an apple, a banana, three chocolate chip cookies--in the Suzallo Library while reading back issues of the Saturday Review of Literature, which he had happened upon one day as he browsed in the Periodical Room and which introduced him to a fascinating array of critical voices and approaches, models whose thinking he began to appropriate and imitate.

In mid-October, Solveig wrote to him on Alpha Phi stationery.  "Wayne, dear.  I've been so busy.  The parties here are amazing!  There's just so much playing and studying to do!  I see Monk at a party now and then.  He's always a mass of bruises from playing football.  I hope your classes are going well.  I was sorry to hear about the astronomy.  I can't empathize with the difficulty you're having in labs, because I'm not taking any science courses right now (although I'll have to sooner or later, and astronomy seems like a good option, given that the Russians have launched Sputnik and it looks like we're going to be in a race for space) but I can and do sympathize.  Beuchel may be right about money.  When I told Simon Weiner about that, he pointed out that not only money but our whole social contract and all of our personal relationships depend on trust, faith, belief.   They're all a kind of fiction.  Remember Hamlet: 'Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.'  As long as we agree that the numbers have meaning, or that we share basic values, or that you are who you purport to be, all is well.  But when we begin to doubt, things fall apart.  Simon is struggling right now with trust in his wife.  They have been married for seven years and have two young kids.  It's not that she has been unfaithful but that she purported to be interested in his career and in the academic world.  She was going to go on to get a PhD in history, and now she seems indifferent to that.  She seems satisfied to be a mother and housewife.  Simon says he is struggling with his authenticity.  He has experienced the dread, the nausea.  What does he truly want to do?  What kind of life does he truly want to lead?  Whom does he truly want to be with?  He talks a lot about Sartre, whom we've just finished reading, and says that because humans have free will they are condemned to choose, to create themselves perpetually.  But if we have free will, how can we be forced to choose?  Is that a valid paradox?  Anyway, I really liked the title of your paper on Graham Greene, and your French prof is correct: you should be majoring in French, you have a great ear for it, and it would open up many doors for you besides teaching.  I'm glad you're enjoying the golf.  I am, too, actually.  Although I can't seem to develop much of a backswing, I'm getting pretty good at putting.  It would be fun to play a round (pun intended) with you!   Love you, Solveig."

The old man replied.  "Dear Solveig.  I've been busy, too.  Besides studying, I spend a couple of hours every day in the library reading periodicals and sort of teaching myself literary criticism.  I work Saturdays at Safeway, of course, for my spending money.  I started playing Wednesday nights in the District 15 recreational basketball league with guys like Jimmie and Jerry Johnson .  My game is coming along.  I'm taking more shots, driving to the hoop more.  I'm gaining confidence.  I hit for 20 points last week--I almost think of myself as a scorer, a go-to guy, now!   Went to the Princess to see Designing Women last Friday night with Mick and Annette.  I thought it was pretty good.  The way the protagonists, Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall, were able to work out their differences seemed pretty believable to me.  Mick had a six-pack of Oly in his car, so we all drove down to the beach and tucked ourselves into those rocks where you and I like to 'sconce' ourselves to drink it.  I could barely even finish one--too bitter!  I think Mick and Annette are about to become a couple--they seemed pretty cozy there in the rocks!  My classes are fine.  I've resigned myself to a C in Astronomy, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to get A's in all the others.  Sounds like your French lit prof is really opening up to you.  You're on a first-name basis with him now?  You have a lot of conferences with him?  How did you come out on your Céline paper?  I miss you.  Can't wait to see you, hold you, at Thanksgiving.  I love you.  Wayne."

"Hi, Wayne.  Wow, I never thought Mick and Annette would be a couple, even though they were in the choir together at EHS and were in a skit at Vodvil.  I'm so glad to hear that you're becoming a scorer--I know how important that is to you.  I saw Designing Women with some of the girls, too, but I wasn't quite convinced that a woman of her taste and sophistication could settle down with a sportswriter.  There's plenty of beer available here at the Greek keg parties, believe me, but I don't care much for it either.  I prefer Lancer's  Rosé, which is also always available along with Thunderbird and Ripple.  I've been known to get a little tipsy on Lancer's!  Simon Weiner has talked about the subtleties of the burgundies and bordeauxs he gets at the local liquor store.  I'd like to try some of those one day.  Weiner loved my paper on Céline.  He had never read Laughing Boy, but he's aware of the concept of hozoji, of the beauty of living in harmony with the whole, and he says I did a good job with the contrast and he liked the way that I could empathize with the Navajos and yet provide a sympathetic analysis of Bardamu's angst.  I drop in to see him in his office now and then just because he's such a fascinating guy to talk to.  He's 35.  He's Jewish, but an atheist.  He seems so open and vulnerable, and he knows so much about France.  He spent a year there, backpacking, riding the trains, staying in student hostels, before he started graduate school at Yale.  I think you'd like him.  He's kind and gentle, like you.  He's very much an existentialist.  He fears getting his identity from others, and you're like him in that way.  You resist religion, too.  My Lutheranism may be fading, and I'm certainly no evangelist, but I believe in wholeness and oneness and the immortality of the soul.  We live in beauty, I believe, and I try to live in harmony, in tune, with that.  I want to greet each day awe-inspired, open to new experience.  Weiner says he must resist the world, face up to himself and to the dread of being responsible for everything he does.  To do otherwise is to live in bad faith.  From this there is no exit.  You're like that with the way you constantly schedule yourself and challenge yourself.  You're a perfectionist.  I am more accepting of what is, of adapting to, of enjoying, of exploiting (in a good way!) life.  I'm more exuberant.  Must go now, Wayne.  Dinner time at Alpha Phi.  Thanks for writing.  See you at Thanksgiving.  Love, Solveig." 

"Dear Solveig.  You know, you may be right about my being an existentialist.  During my library time I've been reading up on Sartre as well, and I definitely do believe that existence precedes essence.  Now that I think about it, it has always struck me that life is absurd, and I agree that we are condemned--by ourselves, absurdly enough--to find a way to believe and act as though it were not.  I've always felt that we are responsible for creating ourselves.  We are free.  It is up to us to decide what to make of our memories, our experiences, our inherited traits.  Ironically, though, you are freer than I am.  I am controlled by my resistance to being controlled.  You bounce off limits with a smile on your face.  I need to shape events. You are free to accept them as they happen.   I am an inward person, yet other-dependent.  I am validated only when others recognize me.  You are an outward person, yet independent.  At ease in exploring the web of your reality, you nonchalantly validate yourself.  God, I miss you!  There's so much to talk about at Thanksgiving.  We need to find a time and place where we can be totally alone, for so many reasons!  I love you.  Wayne." 

"Wayne, here's a plan.  I'm cutting classes and leaving for Edmonds on Wednesday morning.  My parents will be closing the shop early because of Thanksgiving, so we can't meet at my house.  Let's meet at the Edmonds beach at 4:30.  I'll be coming straight from Walla Walla.  Sound okay?  Solveig."

"Sounds great!  Can't wait!"

On Wednesday, heart racing with hope, muscles aching with dread, the old man drove to the U in rain, knowing that rain at sea level meant snow at Snoqualmie Pass and worried that the accumulation might be enough to delay Solveig.  Kjell had placed a box containing a pair of new chains in the trunk of her Bel Air before she left for Whitman, but did she even know how to put them on?   The rain soaked his bare head, his car coat (his notebook tucked inside it and pinned against his sweater by his left elbow), his jeans, and his desert boots as he hurried up the hill to Denny Hall.  

Shrugging out of his dripping coat as he entered the classroom--Madame Simpson required all to be seated and silent with notebooks open even before the bell rang--and obeying Madame's blackboard direction, he wrote five original sentences using le subjonctif présent, having read the assigned chapter at home the night before.

"Il faut qu'il sois patient,"  "Il espère qu'elle tienne sa promesse,"   "Il lui offre un cadeau pour qu'elle sois heureuse," "Il a peur qu'elle ne l'aime pas,"  "Il faut que nous choisissons."

Madame requested each student to read two sentences aloud.

At his turn the old man struggled for breath.

"Monsieur Adams, je vous attend!" Madame said.

"Il faut qu'IL sois PAtient," the old man read.  "Il FAUT que nous choiSISSons."

"Et un autre sans 'il faut'?"

"Il a peur qu'elle ne l'AIME pas."

"Merci, Monsieur Adams!"

At the end of the period, he decided that he was done for the day.  If Solveig could cut classes, he could too.  He went to the HUB cafeteria, drew a mug of coffee from a vat, tonged a maple bar onto a plate, paid for them, and joined Mick and Annette at their table. 

"Solveig coming home for Thanksgiving?" blonde Annette asked, exhaling smoke from nostrils and mouth.

"Yeah.  I'm seeing her tonight."

"Nice!" Mick said.  "Cigarette?"

"Sure.  I'll buy a pack next week and pay you back."

"Don't worry about it.  You and Solveig getting together for dinner tomorrow?"

"No, she'll be with her family and I'll be with my parents and grandparents and aunt and uncle.  But we'll have all day together on Friday for Christmas shopping and lunch and what not, and Saturday my mom's going to invite her for dinner.  You guys?"

"We'll get together on the weekend.  We're not ready to mingle with each other's families quite yet."

It was too early to go home.  The rain had stopped.  Maybe the Pass wouldn't be so bad?  He descended the hill to the parking lot and drove west on 45th to Highway 99, then north to the Peutz Golf Driving Range.  He borrowed a house driver and hit a large bucket, the balls splashing into puddles a couple of hundred yards from the tee.  He was not a long hitter but, with the instruction and practice he got in class, he was gradually becoming more consistent, eliminating upper body tension, shortening his backswing, finding a workable tempo and rhythm that allowed him to keep his head still and swing smoothly around his spine, meeting the ball with club face relatively square.  His hip turn was too cautious to produce power, but his beginner's banana slice was gone.  He found joy in arcing ball after ball, imagining the looks of pleased surprise on the faces of Kjell and Leona and Solveig at EG&C on a sunny Sunday next summer.

Home alone, his mother working a busy pre-holiday shift at Safeway and his father on showroom duty at Hopper's, he passed the afternoon distractedly reading "The Dead" for his English class, Solveig fantasies frequently forcing him to double back and review a paragraph.  Solveig in her Bel Air, hands viced to the steering wheel at ten and two, intently plowing through mountain slush that scraped against the undercarriage, tensely entering the curves that traced the way through the silvery forest, to get to Edmonds, to get to him, Solveig pulling up to the beach, discarding her navy blue coat, her navy blue scarf, running to his Ford through a fury of wind, shoving the passenger backrest forward, giggling, jumping into the back, pulling her black ski sweater with its embossed flurry of snowflakes over her head, her silky hair, her henna hair, her chestnut hair loosening from its combs, tresses confessing, as he climbed over his seat to embrace her, look into her ice blue eyes, unhook her bra, meet her fierce kiss with his own, their mouths each seeking to inhale the other, then drop down to suck her nipples erect in the cold.

At 4:00 he slipped on his coat and went to his car, which he always parked in the vacant lot behind the Tribune building.  In the glove compartment were a half-dozen condoms which had been resting there for more than two months and a slender white box holding a sterling silver chain bracelet, which he had purchased for $25 at Bly's Jewelry on Main.

He drove down Dayton, crossed the tracks, and parked on the gravelly clay a few yards before sand began.  There were no other cars, no other people, in sight.  They were gathering at home, laying fires, watching the news, women were stuffing turkeys with stale bread, preparing light meals, Campbell's soup, canned peaches, cottage cheese, sliced tomatoes, everyone saving room for tomorrow's feast.  The drab day had lost almost all of what little light it had been able to offer.  There was no hint of a sunset, not even an amber tinge in the clouds that comprised the horizon.  It began to drizzle.  Sporadic gusts of wind rocked the car.

He was alone in pitch darkness at 4:45 when Solveig's headlights washed over him. She parked a few discrete yards away, came to his car in her navy coat and scarf, and settled into the passenger seat next to the door.

"Hi, Wayne!"

"Solveig!  You made it!"

"I did!"

"How was the pass?  Was it terrible?  Was it icy?"

"Actually, it wasn't bad.  It had stopped snowing about an hour before I got to Snoqualmie, and then the snowplows had gone through before me, so I just had to pay attention and drive at a sensible pace.  It wasn't quite a routine trip, but it wasn't an odyssey, either.   I'd have been pretty much on time if I hadn't stopped at the bakery in North Bend to reward myself with a cup of coffee and a jelly doughnut!"

He slid over to her side and wrapped his arms around her.  She giggled.  He kissed her, mouth closing over her closed lips.  He ran a hand across her coat-protected breasts.  She gripped it.

"Wayne, let's talk."

"Okay, but before we do, let me give you something."

He opened the glove compartment to reveal the necklace box and the condom he had placed conspicuously beside it.

"No, first let's talk."

"OoKAY, what aBOUT?"

"About you and me."

"U-Us?"

"No, you and me.  Wayne, you were the first love of my life, and you are very dear to me.  I will always care about you.  But things change, relationships metamorphose.  Edmonds is nice but there's just so much more world out there.  I feel like I can be at home, as long as there are people around, pretty much anywhere.  I don't want to be tied down right now.  I want to explore, seek new experiences, new relationships."

"AaRE you seeing WEIner?"

"No, not really.  We've taken a couple of drives through the wheat fields to get away from town and talk."

"And mAKE love?"

"No.  We just parked and kissed and he held me a little bit.  Simon wants me, but I don't really want him.  I was flattered by his attention at first, and I like him as a teacher, but I don't feel the connection that you and I had.  He's almost twice my age!  He thinks he's being authentic in pursuing me, but I think the nausea he's been experiencing is not so much existential as it is just temporary love-sickness.  And I certainly don't want to break up a home.  I'm going to end it with him, too, as soon as I get back to Whitman."

"So we're ENDed?"

"Oh, Wayne, I'm so sorry, but I'm sure this is best for both of us."  She kissed him quickly on the cheek.  "Mes parents m'attend à la maison.  Il faut que j'y aille maintenant.  Au revoir, mon cher ami.  Vous etes très précieux."

She stepped out of the Ford, into the rain falling faintly, and in faintly falling rain she walked away.  In beauty.  It was finished.

[Merci, mon ami.  I love what you have done with me and with our teenage romance, skewing an ordinary small-town girl as Cleopatra, part Siren, part Jezebel, and the two of us as vanada/adavan/navada/davana, obsessively book-loving young lovers.  Revisionist history at its fictional best!  Although I certainly had Kim Novak  and William Holden in mind at the Canteen--and possibly Dickie did too--we didn't even come close to emulating them.  We just did our teenage version of the foxtrot that we were taught in eighth-grade gym class.  It's true that you and I practiced our French together, but I recall reading only three other books that summer. Your hand, not mine, was the first to drop below the belt (although I did not demur!), and I was fully dressed when you arrived for our test-prep session, which began promptly after my welcoming  hug and kiss.  Oral sex was not on our agenda, not even as an amuse bouche, then or ever.  At drive-ins we did revert to the back seat and bring ourselves to a boil under the cover of a blanket, but by mutual agreement we never risked intercourse.  While you snapped to attention, Bobby's purloined condoms remained at parade rest in the glove box.  The Martha Lake experience in the shroud of the weeping willows was real but happened only once.  Exploring the shoreline as our friends packed up and headed home, we serendipitously found an affordance, but neither of us ever suggested wandering that way again!  So were the quickies--for you.  You would go off within a minute.  I needed more time than was available before you had to clock back in at Hopper's.  I had two conferences, and no car rides, with Simon Weiner.  I did not betray you.  I just dared more real world than you did.  Solveig]

 

                                                                                      c

"Mom, Dad, this is Wayne."

"Hi," hi," "hi," "hi," the three said, smiling and shaking hands.

They were at the Baker house on 45th, a charcoal gray, cedar-sided bungalow with a five-step porch, a westward-facing deck, and a basement.  Diane hung the old man's tan, belted raincoat and her black car coat in the guest closet.  Her petite mother, Evelyn, wore a green and pink floral print dress, hosiery, and two-inch heels.  Her shoulder-length brown hair, turning inward at the bottom like Rosemary Clooney's, had spent some time in rollers.  Her deep brown eyes were the prototype of Diane's.  Her crew-cut husband, Chet, a six-footer, wore a white Arrow shirt with an open wing collar, a gray and white sleeveless argyle sweater, black wool slacks, and black wingtip shoes.  The old man wore tan pleated cotton pants, a dark brown crewneck sweater with a checked button-down shirt underneath, and desert boots. 

"Sit down, Wayne, dinner's almost ready," Evelyn said.

He crossed the chocolate-and-beige braided area rug that covered part of the oak floor and sat on the Danish modern couch--dark walnut arms, blue fabric cushions--with Diane, who was wearing a mock-ribbed white twisted tweed "poor boy" sweater, low cut black hipster pants, and black rounded-toe  low-heeled shoes.

"So you're an English teacher," Chet said.  "I imagine when people hear that they say 'Uh-oh, better watch my grammar'?"

"You are so right," the old man said.  "People seem to remember mostly bad experiences in English class--rote memorization of grammar 'rules,' essays returned riddled by a red pen."

"But your classes aren't like that?"

"No, they aren't," Diane said.  "Wayne teaches students to be creative and to think incisively."

"Try to, anyway.  I like teaching close reading of texts.  The interanimation of words.  But it doesn't always go the way I want it to.  One day I'm Mr. Chips, the next I'm Mr. Peepers.  I'm still refining my approach."

"Me, too," said Diane.  "But that ITIP class has helped a lot.  I'm much better organized now.  When the girls come into the locker room to change they check the chalkboard to see what the activity is going to be and who's assigned to get out the equipment, what the day's warm up exercises are and who leads them.  After warm ups I'll give some instruction--in basketball, for example, it might be dribbling or pivoting or shooting form--we'll drill for a bit, guided practice, then we'll form teams and play games for half an hour, with me supervising and commenting occasionally.  Most girls are okay with P.E. but even the ones who hate it kind of grudgingly accept its value when you keep reminding them of what they can get out of it, what I've taught them to call the five Cs: conditioning, calorie-burning, coordination, competence, and competition.  Daddy, have you got some wine for us?"

"Of course.  I've got an Inglenook Cask cabernet from one of our trips to Napa Valley.  It should be ready.  I've had it breathing."

He went to a teak sideboard-hutch in the dining room, where the teak table had already been set, extracted four bulbous burgundy glasses, and poured.

The old man held his glass by its base and swirled the wine, as Diane had taught him to do.  Chet smiled.  They all nosed in to their glasses, sniffed sharply, contemplated, then took a sip and sucked air over the wine before swallowing it.  They furrowed brows while recontemplating.

"Mmm," the old man said.  "Good."

"Mint?  Tea?" Chet said.

"It's certainly not jammy or plummy," Evelyn said.

"What do you think, Wayne?" Diane asked.

The old man reflected.  "Green olive?"

"Yes!" Evelyn said.  "I get that."

"I do, too," Chet said.

"So let's eat," Evelyn said.  "Diane, help me get things to the table."

They grabbed pot-holders and set out a leg of lamb dotted with chunks of garlic and needles of rosemary tucked into little knife cuts, sautéed red potatoes sprinkled with thyme, crisp slim asparagus spears topped with melted butter and freshly grated Parmesan cheese, and a salad of mixed greens tossed in lemon-scented olive oil.  

"Smells wonderful," the old man said.  He had never eaten any of those items before.  Usually he went out for a pepperoni pizza or a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake.  If he ate in, he would open a can of chili and make a tuna sandwich or fry four bacon slices to a crisp, set them aside, fry three eggs sunnyside up in the grease, and lay out two slices of Wonder bread to swab the runny yolk remains with after downing the bacon and eggs.  His mother used to cook a pot roast for Sunday dinner or bake a piece of salmon and serve it with lemon wedges, but during the week they ate waffles, or hamburger steak with baked potatoes, or chipped beef on toast with Cedargreen frozen peas, accompanied by a salad of cottage cheese and canned peaches or pears dashed with paprika for flair.

Chet sat at one end of the rectangular table and used a long carving knife to lay out clean overlapping slices of lamb alongside the roast. 

They filled their plates.  But what was this?  Evelyn and Chet extending hands from left and right?  He and Diane grasped them, completing the circle.  He bowed his head in imitation of the others.

"Dear heavenly Father," Chet said.  Dread descended upon the old man.  What was he getting himself into?  In the old man's experience, no one--not his parents, not his friends' parents, not even his grandparents--had ever prayed aloud before a meal.  Aside from his prayer for forgiveness at the Billy Graham Crusade, the old man had beseeched God only three times, each in desperate silence.  The first occurred when he was seven and arrived home after attending a Seattle Rainier baseball game with his Aunt Mabel and Uncle Ned, to discover that he had left behind the mitt that he had carried along in hope of catching a foul ball.  He prayed to get it back but his mother's phone call to the stadium's lost and found office was fruitless.  In recompense, his father drove him the next Saturday to Warshal's Sporting Goods in Seattle and paid for a new Rawlings--an upgrade that was a perfect answer to his prayer.  The second occurred when he was eight and his mother lay in bed in the house at 10th and Maple, writhing in stomach pain.  He prayed that she wouldn't die, and she didn't.  His father phoned Dr. Hope, wondering if he could  make a house call.  Dr. Hope came, diagnosed the problem, and instructed the old man's father to drive her to Everett General Hospital, where her appendix was removed.  The third occurred on a cold Saturday morning in November when he was nine.  Zee was away with his family and Monk had chores to do, so the old man wandered down to the high school field to fantasize about playing there one day and to rummage through the grandstand, still littered with confetti and purple and gold crepe paper from the previous night's game, in search of dropped coins or other treasure.  As he entered the grounds from the 6th Avenue side, he encountered three cigarette-smoking 15-year-olds cutting through the field on their way to see if there was any action at the beach.  He prayed that they wouldn't kill him, and they didn't--they merely pointed their cigarettes and made vague gestures at him, laughing as they passed by.

"We are so happy and grateful to be wrapped in Your loving arms," Chet said.  "We thank you for saving our souls.  We pray that we may read the signs and follow your guidance every day.  We pray for those who are less fortunate than we.  We recognize that we are so very blessed materially and spiritually.  We pray for the safety of our Marines in Viet Nam.  We pray for an improvement in race relations in our country.  We ask that You bless our time together this evening and that You bless this food to our bodies' needs.  In Jesus' name we pray"--and here all, even the old man, who was shocked to find his lips moving, said "Amen."

Though unnerved by the rite itself, the old man found the words of the prayer unobjectionable.  But he was, as always, puzzled by what factors might determine whether God would bestow His grace.  Was praying for others actually praying for oneself?  Was it, disguised in nudging and wheedling, an arrogant attempt to usurp divine power?  How did prayer relate to God's plan?  And he wondered about the mechanics of any such bestowal.  He was not comforted by the notion that God works in mysterious ways.  God could, conceivably, bring manna from heaven or multiply an existing supply of loaves and fishes, a Berlin airlift without the planes.  These would be material transactions that transcended but did not overturn the laws of physics, well within the power of One who could create an entire material universe.  But how did God enter the minds and hearts of humans to effect change, hardening some, softening others?  What transactive mechanism could possibly be involved?  God could conceivably save the lives of Marines and make it possible for them to succeed in their missions by altering the trajectories of the bullets and other explosives employed against them, but how could He effect an improvement in race relations?  How could He affect emotion or perception?  Could he telepathically and painlessly, unbeknown to the recipients, modify cell structure and neural connections?  How could He bless an evening?  Could He telepathically release serotonins and endorphins, drugging people to feel good about the way they were spending their time?  How could He bless food to bodies' needs?  Wouldn't that happen automatically, autonomically, anyway?  Or could He  augment the digestive process telepathically by formulaically adding or subtracting  enzymes, the way iron tablets were best absorbed when taken with Vitamin C? 

"So, Wayne, what led you to become a teacher?" Chet asked as they began to eat.

"Probably the example of Jack Foster at Edmonds High.  He's a Harvard graduate who always dresses Ivy League style with button-down shirts, bow ties that he knots himself, and slacks with the belt buckle in the back.  He was the first intellectual I ever met.  Many of my other teachers were intelligent and knowledgeable about their subjects, but he was the only one who attempted to introduce his students to the life of the mind.  In his class, which was a mixture of comparative religion and cultural anthropology, he showed us how to ask questions and how to test the validity of the answers.  He taught us always to look behind the mask or the veil."

"Did you study Christianity in that class, Wayne?" said Evelyn.  "Christianity looks behind the veil, too, you know."

"Yes, it does," the old man said.  "Actually, all religions do.  We read The Great Religions By Which Men Live in that class, covering Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, and Shintoism.  I found the book interesting, and the reason for that I realize now is that it was slanted in favor of an intellectual approach to each religion.  In Hinduism, for example, seeking enlightenment--the unification of Atman with Brahman--through meditation rather than through ritual.  Or in Buddhism, preferring Hinayana, the smaller vehicle, which sees Buddha as a man, to Mahayana, the larger vehicle, which sees Buddha as a god.  Considering nirvana to be a state of mind, a freeing of the soul from the bonds of earthly illusion, rather than a literal place."

"So, more philosophy and less religion?" Chet asked.  "What do you think the authors of the book would make of the Hare Krishnas popping up all over Seattle these days in their robes, chanting, dancing, shaking tambourines? Evelyn and I encountered a group of them last week when we went down to the Pike Place Market to pick up some fresh sockeye and a bouquet of chrysanthemums."

"I'm guessing they'd be condescending," Diane said.  "They'd praise the enthusiasm and energy but hint that such an emotional approach is quite shallow.  They would imply it's an undemanding way to try to harmonize the self with Krishna and achieve Krishna consciousness."

"That sounds about right," the old man said.  "They would slight the emotional approach and extol the philosophical."

"You know, Wayne," Evelyn said.  "The Book of Romans is very philosophical.  It's a deep text that practically begs for a close reading.  Next month Chet and I are inviting friends for a weekly study of it to be led by a math professor from Seattle Pacific College.  We'd love to have you and Diane join us."

"That's a possibility," the old man said.  Was his wince visible?  "I'll check my schedule."

"There's more wine," Chet said.

"And more lamb," Evelyn added.

"Don't leave me out on the wine," Diane said.

"And I'll take a bit more of each," the old man said.  "Everything is really good.  To tell the truth, I've never had lamb before.  It's like roast beef with more flavor.  Grainier, gamier.  And"--lifting a leaf on his fork--"what's this aromatic thing in the salad?  I really like it."

"That's rocket," Chet said.  "We grow it in our backyard garden.  Got the idea from The Unprejudiced Palate, a book by an English professor at the U named Angelo Pellegrini.  You know him?"

"I know of him.  But I've never had a class from him."

"He seems very wise.  I like his thoughts on cooking and gardening.  On teaching, too.  'A teacher affects eternity,' he says.  "I guess you'd call him a humanist.  I don't think he'd be sold on that ITIP program.  Maybe a bit too mechanical for him.  Isn't the original meaning of 'education' to 'lead out" or 'call forth' or something like that?  Doesn't it imply that teachers have been specially called to light the way to understanding?  Wisdom?" 

"Well," said Diane, "Pellegrini's probably teaching only a couple of sections a day to about 20 goal-directed young adults who have been schooled in how to be students for at least a dozen years by some hard-working teachers.  Let him go into a high school or junior high class of 35 and see how he does without some kind of mechanical or structural framework."

"Oh, I agree on the need for structure and discipline.  Fundamentals, goal-setting, all of that.  In English class, learning to write clear sentences and present logical arguments in organized essays.  In P.E., developing specific skills.  But somewhere along the way, in order for it to be truly meaningful, don't you have to touch the soul?  Don't the students have to feel turned on?  Having gotten their attention, how do you turn them on?  How do Timothy Leary or Billy Graham or your man Jack Foster, Wayne, make it work?  What is the source of their charisma?  Isn't that the $64 question?"

"That is the $64 question.  Diane and I have talked about that."

"Rhetoric!" Diane said.

"Yeah, I look at it in terms of rhetoric.  The ITIP class helps to get you through the day.  Sheer survival in the classroom is paramount.  Having experienced a chaotic first year of teaching, I would never gainsay that.  But to go beyond survival, you need to use all of your rhetorical resources, all of the means of persuasion that Aristotle identified as logos, the appeal to reason, pathos, the appeal to the emotions, and  ethos, the appeal to the character or virtue, broadly interpreted, of the teacher."

"I try to appeal to reason by reminding my girls of the 5 C's," Diane said. "I appeal  to emotion by giving a lot of positive feedback, praising them and cheering them on as they go through the drills or the games.  And I try to be a model to follow by executing the skills gracefully, being enthusiastic, showing vitality, showing I care about them, getting them to care that I care, or on the other hand raising an eyebrow or frowning or staring into their eyes--to the point now that they're not using the excuse that they forgot their shorts or their gym shoes or they need to sit out because of menstrual cramps." 

" And I try to win them over, persuade them in the broadest sense of that term, by challenging their critical faculties, responding warmly to their insights, paying judicious respect to comments that I think are off the mark, and by engaging them in various kinds of word play--tactical rhetorical devices within a broader rhetorical pedagogical strategy." 

"For example?"

"For example, when the bell rings they know, Pavlovianly, to check the chalkboard for the opening exercise, which usually has to do with rhetoric, grammar, or usage.  There'll be a definition and a model to imitate.  Things that, in order to become a more perceptive reader or more effective writer, it's helpful to recognize and occasionally employ--balanced sentences, for example, or oxymorons--and things that should be avoided, at least according to the lexicologist Henry Fowler, whose traditional, prescriptive approach to usage I respect.  Things like split infinitives and dangling modifiers.  While I take roll and kid around with them a little bit, they're writing their imitations.  Then I take a couple of minutes to discuss the virtues or vices of the matter in question and call on some to read their creation to the class.  'I think I'll go east of the mountains,' spoke Ann,' somebody came up with for a Tom Swifty, and for ambiguous language illustrated in the form of a bar joke, somebody wrote 'An ambiguity with an urgent need walks into a bar and promptly goes to the bathroom in the hallway.'"

Evelyn laughed.  "Sounds like fun!  I think I'd be persuaded to get involved in a class like that."

"And then you go on to the lesson or topic for the day?" Chet asked.

"Right.  These little attention-getters are a mini-lesson in stuff that I think is worth knowing, but the day's main objective is also written on the board.  At first I thought that kind of thing was so corny and so limiting--'Objective: To understand how 'Jabberwocky' conveys meaning through seemingly meaningless language'--but now I see that it really does clarify for students what you're doing and sell them--I used to despise that commercial kind of language, but now I use it unashamedly--on its value.  Kids used to wander into class and say 'What are we going to do today?'  Now they have an idea from the outset.  None of this is a panacea, but the distractions are definitely fewer and the tone of the whole operation feels better." 

"So then you and the class would read and analyze the poem?"

"Yeah, I'd hand out dittoed copies and read the poem out loud, talk a little about portmanteaus, and then begin a line-by-line exploration of the text, keeping the kids involved by calling on various ones to provide their interpretations as we go along, helping to make connections between their comments and summarizing from time to time.  We're doing a much better job of staying on task."

"That's enough shop talk," Diane said, grabbing plates.  "Mom, let's clear the table."

"You two feel like playing some poker?" Chet asked.  "It's kind of our favorite game."

The old man looked at Diane, who nodded yes.  "Okay," he said.  He played occasionally in games hosted by male faculty members, imagining himself to be Maverick or the Cincinnati Kid as he had once imagined being Roy Tucker, enjoying the jokes, the beer, and the snacks laid out on countertops, on average losing a little more than he won, betting when he had a strong hand, too often staying one card longer than he should have when he had a weak hand, seldom bluffing, seldom able to read a bluff.

Diane covered the teak with a plain white cloth, clean though stained at places by coffee and chocolate from previous games that Chet and Evelyn had played with friends.  Chet produced a worn deck of Bicycle cards that were bent in the middle from much previous shuffling and doled out to each a dollar's worth of chips denominated as penny-nickel-dime.  The old man leaned forward, wiggled his wallet out of his back pocket, and extracted a dollar bill, Diane plucked one from her pocketbook on the sideboard, and Evelyn brought two from the master bedroom.  Diane won the cut for deal and shuffled five times, each a crisp, tight rippling, flared them high with an underhand motion, a school of fish leaping, and let them drop to the table in a controlled splash, a pretty performance.

"Five card stud," she said.  "Three raise limit.  Joker's good with aces, straights, and flushes."

With an ace showing and another in the hole, his pulse accelerating, the Old Man bet a penny.  Chet, with a jack, and Evelyn, with a deuce, called.

Diane turned over her five and said, "I'm out.  A penny saved is a penny earned."

She dealt Evelyn a king, the old man a four, and Chet a nine.  The old man bet another penny, Chet called, and Evelyn said, "I'll raise it one."

"What are you so proud of, Mom?" said Diane.  Was she giving the old man a tip?

"They'll have to pay to find out."

"I'll call," the old man said.

"I'm in," Chet said.

Diane dealt Evelyn a nine, the old man a king, Chet a queen.

The old man looked at Evelyn, who widened her eyes and smiled at him.  He looked at Chet, who studied him impassively.  The old man looked at his hole card again, trying to fake a tell. 

"I'll check to the raise," he said. 

"Check," Chet said.

"Three cents," said Evelyn exuberantly.

"No prohibition on check-raises?" the old man asked.

Chet continued to stare at him.  "No, I guess we forgot to establish that."

"Then let's make it a nickel," the old man said.

Chet held off for a moment, then set a red chip in the center of the pot.

"I call," said Evelyn.

"Last card," Diane said, and dealt Evelyn a ten, the old man a nine, Chet the joker.

"Bet you don't check this time," Evelyn said.

"No," the old man said with a smile.  Evelyn no doubt had her kings.  Could Chet have that straight?  "Let's make it a dime."

"And up a dime," Chet said quickly.  Too quickly.  Too aggressively.  An intimidator's bluff. 

"Too rich for my blood," Evelyn said.

The old man hesitated, looked at Diane pursing her lips tensely, then said "I raise it another dime."

"And up one more," Chet said, "for the final raise."

He isn't Lancy, the old man thought.  He doesn't have it.  "Call.  Aces.  You have the straight?"

Chet nodded, shrugged, and turned over an eight.  "I got lucky," he said, sweeping in the chips.

"Wow!" Diane said.  "What a start.  That was intense.  What are you going to play, Mom?  No peek?"

"You guessed her, Chester--pun intended.  Let's just relax after that last hand."

Evelyn dealt round seven cards, face down, to each  player.  The old man's head pounded.  He had been conned, in front of his girl friend, at the hand of his girl friend's father, by a bluffed bluff.  The patriarchy was secure.  For the next two hours he tried to fight back, immediately dropping out if he had nothing, uncharacteristically bluffing if he showed something that could possibly be construed as strength, winning a few hands but losing many more than that, sipping coffee and commending Evelyn on her rich raspberry cheesecake.  Chet had stacks of chips in front of him--over two dollars in all.  Diane and Evelyn had less.  A single blue chip lay before the old man.

"Well, time to go," said Diane as Chet paid her a rounded-off 75 cents, Evelyn 50 cents, and the old man a dime.

"This has been fun," the old man said, shaking hands.  "A wonderful dinner.  So nice to meet you.  Thank you so much for inviting me."

"Thanks for coming," Chet said.

"It's been a pleasure for us, too," Evelyn said. 

Diane kissed each parent on the cheek.  "Bye, Mom, bye Dad."

Rather than go straight to Diane's apartment, which she shared with her friend Louise, they drove through steady rain to the old man's place.  It was understood that they would have sex.

"I had a good time tonight," the old man said.  "The wine, the food, the conversation, the game.   I like your parents."

"They like you, too."

"But...."

"Well, yeah."

They excitedly undressed each other in his bedroom and flung back the bed covers.  Diane reveled in touching and being touched, in having her surfaces stimulated by his manual and lingual manipulations till she climaxed, but she would not allow him to ejaculate inside her.  Brief penetration was permitted, semission was not.  Once inside her vagina he had to extract himself in time for her to squeeze him off with a washcloth while both shook with laughter at the absurdity of his gland finale.

[Diane actually let you enter her?  That doesn't sound like my sister!  Linda]

"I don't want to get pregnant," she had said on their fifth date, when both were letting their hands roam all over each other.

"What about the Pill?"

"I don't think it's safe yet.  They say it can cause blood clots and breast cancer."

"What if I used a condom?"

She sighed.  "Wayne, I just think it's wrong to have intercourse before marriage.  It might be a technicality, but I don't think God would approve."

He sighed in turn and removed his hands from her body.

"But that doesn't mean we can't do other stuff," she said.  "God wants us to enjoy our bodies and get closer to each other."

After half an hour in bed, he drove Diane, windshield wipers flapping at high speed, to her apartment.  At the door  he said, "You know, I was kind of taken aback when your dad said grace before dinner."  Rainwater was tinkling through the aluminum downspout that drained the overhang protecting the entry and gurgling into a flowerbed.

"I sort of sensed that.  When we joined hands you maintained the lightest touch possible.  I felt like I had to squeeze a bit to keep you from slipping away."

"Yeah, I've never been part of saying grace before.  To me it just seemed unnatural, odd."

"To me it just seems natural, normal."

"And will you pray tonight?"

"Of course.  I need to feel right with God before I sleep."

"Do you actually go down on your knees at the side of the bed?"

"I actually do, yes," she smiled.

"And pray out loud?"

"Sure.  In 'Thessalonians' Paul says to 'pray without ceasing' but I confess that I haven't been able to accomplish that.  So I do the best I can to stay prayed up by saying many short silent prayers during the day and always praying aloud in the morning when I get up and again at bedtime."

"Fascinating."

"Is it really?  It fascinates me that you don't.  Communicating with God is paramount to me." 

"But how does it work?  There are different types of prayers, right?  Expressions of adoration and thanksgiving, requests for forgiveness, and petitions for help?  Most are mixtures of these elements, but generally the emphasis is on petitions for help.  Would you agree with that?"

"Let's put it like this: petitions for help are probably the most frequent, but expressions of adoration and thanksgiving and requests for forgiveness are the most important.  It's about first establishing a relationship with God and then admitting your human weakness, your need for help or guidance, and trusting in Him to provide it.  Let go, and let God."

"But what determines what God will do?  Take a zero-sum situation in which two people are praying for opposite results.  A gardener's praying for rain and a baseball player is praying for sunshine.  Or one person is praying for team A to win its game against team B while the other prays for B to defeat A.  Or both are praying to get the same job or promotion.  How does God decide which to favor?  Or how, in situations that are not zero-sum, as for example when one prays for the survival of a cancer-stricken friend, or when one prays for the success of a relationship, does God decide whether or not to honor the request?  Does the relative strength of one's faith in and love of God matter?  Is the more fervent believer more likely to be rewarded more often?  Does seniority matter?  Is the long-term believer, having stood the test of time, more likely to be rewarded than the new believer?  Or is the new believer more likely to be rewarded as an incentive to continue with regular prayer?  Does frequency matter?  Can one's prayer be rejected because one is too needy or too greedy and asks too often?  Or, on the other hand, does the squeaky wheel get the most grease?  Does the relative 'goodness' of the believer matter?  Is the believer who has a heart full of love for humanity and a high ratio of good deeds to sinful ones more likely to be rewarded?  Does the extent of the 'miracle-working' manipulation of the laws of nature that would be required to answer the prayer matter?  That is, is it more difficult for God to make the sun stand still or to part the Red Sea than to bring in a few clouds for rain or whisk them away for sunshine?  Or are all actions equally easily doable for an omnipotent God?  Or does it depend on the absolute need of the believer for the prayer to be answered?  That is, does the believer sometimes think that the prayer needs to be answered when, seen from God’s omniscient viewpoint, it actually does not, either because some other positive development is going to supersede it or because granting it would cause unfair harm to others?  Does God have a formula that enables Him to weigh the various positive and negative factors relevant to any given prayer to determine whether or not He bestows His grace?  Physicists have shown that mathematics underlies the universe.  Is that also true for the 'laws' of prayer?"

"The answer to all your questions is 'I don't know.'  You've obviously given this a lot of thought.  Way too much thought, I'd say.  I'm kind of skeptical of so much skepticism.  Is it possible you just have a problem with subordination?  God's ways are inscrutable.  Wisdom is the fear of God.  And faith can move mountains.  To me it's simple: I am, therefore I pray."

She smiled. 

"Are you aware that you just stood Descartes on his head?"

"Actually, yes, I am.  I took an Intro to Philosophy course at the U as one of my electives. But when it comes to wisdom, I get more out of Bible study.  Which begs the question: shall we do 'Romans' with my parents and their group?"

He did not want to join any group of believers in anything.  He did not want to be owned.  "Yeah, let's do it," he said.  "And thank you for a lovely evening--the dinner, the wine, the poker, the conversation.  And the sex."

"Especially the sex," she said.

Both laughing, they couldn't avoid banging their teeth together as they kissed good night, he placing a hand on her breast, she playfully nudging his crotch with a knee.

"Hare Krishna," he said over his shoulder as he ran through the rain towards his car.

"Rama, Rama," she replied.

At home in bed, lying atop a drying trace of semen that had escaped the wash cloth, he re-read the last few pages of Franny, in which, over dinner, she tells Lane, her date, who is more interested in his entrée of frog legs than in the idea that is consuming her, that consistent repetition of the Jesus Prayer, even on the part of one without faith, releases a power that synchronizes the words with the prayer's heartbeats, resulting willy-nilly in praying without ceasing and producing ultimately a purified outlook, a new conception of life, and an ability to see God.  Though the old man was fearful of expanded consciousness, whether mystically or psychedelically induced, he could not resist an experiment. Struggling for courage, his heart on the verge of fibrillating, he mouthed it three times silently then leaped aloud into "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me" at least a dozen more before stopping to evaluate the effect.  Mercifully, there wasn't one.  He could cling to his self-consciousness.  He was intact, pure, uncompromised.  No LSD, no LJC for him.  Had he seen God, he would have come undone.  But the soft, juicy sound of "mercy," its quality unstrained, lingered in his mind's ear.  "Mercy."  "Merci."  See here.  He went to the living room, retrieved a Cannonball Adderley LP from the raw-cedar record cabinet he had picked up at Underhill's  unfinished furniture store, opened the lid on his portable hi-fi, and dropped the needle on "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy."  Bobbing his head, rocking his shoulders, he sang "DUH-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH" on the repetitions of the chorus.  He played the five-minute tune a second time, again vocalizing the rhythm, and on the third intoned "LORD Je-sus Christ please have mer-cy on ME-EE."  He felt the tune viscerally, its strolling blues rhythm leading to the potent punctuation of the chorus.  He could visualize the better dancers at the Canteen adapting their two-step to it, but in the few awkward shuffle steps he essayed he had no difficulty in knowing dancer from dance.

Back in bed, lights out, the chorus continued to reverberate in his brain.  As his pulse gradually slowed, just before he slipped into sleep, it was possible, he thought, saying the prayer again, that brain and heart had synced.  But they told him no tale.

[Wayne, no offense, now, but your insincerity, your lack of authenticity, your fear, your closed-offness, your hermeticality, ironically enough, prevented (and still prevent?) the occurrence of the spiritual alchemy typified by Hermes Trismegistus, or Hermes the cunning thief, or the Jesus Prayer.  Dave]

[Dave's right, Wayne.  You only pretended to let go.  Sylvia]

["Mercifully, there wasn't one."?  Rather a sloppy use of "mercifully" as a sentence modifier, given that you do not believe there can be such a thing as cosmic mercy.  Solveig]

[Wayne, I trust that your account of how you employed ITIP's opening gambit of the Anticipatory Set is an intentional fiction, a bit of poetic license not to be taken literally, for the requisite truth is that the teaching of any particular rhetorical device like hyperbole or stylistic concern like ambiguity would take the better part of a class period and involve much explanation, discussion, guided practice, and feedback.  You are just trying to indicate that (a) you found ITIP useful at times and (b) you covered a lot of rhetorical and grammatical terminology, right?  Kind of a humble brag without the humble? ☺ Stu]

 

                                                                                      d

In the late summer of that year they lived in the house on Grandview that looked to the west past other cedar-sided ramblers toward a sliver of the Sound that was mostly hidden by the dense branches of the many firs and hemlocks.  Diane was pregnant.  They were crazy with excitement.  "Isn't  it splendid, darling, " she said, "my morning sickness?  Such a blessing from God after three years of trying.  Didn't we have a lovely time conceiving?  Isn't it grand when I'm on top and you've wrapped your legs around me and I glide?  Everything we do seems so simple and holy."  She was seeing it all ahead, like the moves in a chess game.  "Oh, darling, I will be good for you, won't I, because we're not going to have a strange life after all.  We're going to have babies and I will quit teaching and be a stay-at-home mom until they start school.  There isn't any me, darling.  It's God and the baby and you and my parents and sister and our friends and your parents.  I am one with the universe, darling, this lovely web of being that is suffused with the presence of God.  I believe that all sorts of wonderful things will happen to us.  To everything there is a season, and God has a grand plan.  And today we will hoe the garden and stake the pea vines and pick cherry tomatoes and basil and nasturtium blossoms for salad for lunch, and after we will make love and I will nap and in the evening we will go to Ray's Boathouse in Ballard for the poached salmon with Bill and Charlene."  And they had a fine time, asking  the waiter if he had caught tonight's salmon from the Boathouse deck with rod and reel before it could swim through the Locks and thrash upstream to spawn, and laughing, whenever Diane suddenly flinched and gasped, about young Paul or Pauline practicing reverse pivots against the walls of her womb.  "Oh, that was a big one, darling."  The dill and capers on the salmon and the butter and oak in the chardonnay were lovely.  When the waiter was clearing the table, Diane and Charlene walked to the bathroom and the old man and Bill went out on the deck to look at the sun, which was gold-vermilion in its dying.  The girls finally came back.  "Oh, darling, I'm sorry we took so long, but I've had some silly spotting."  Everything turned over inside of him.  "I've got it stopped now, though, darling.  I won't be any more trouble.   We'll go home and I'll put my feet up and rest, and in the morning I'll see Dr. Hope."

In the morning, things began to go badly.  Dr. Hope assessed the spotting, which had continued, and monitored the faintness of the fetal heart tones and ordered Diane to stay in bed.  And Chet and Evelyn came to visit and brought flaky Napoleons from Larsen's Bakery in Ballard and prayed with her.  And Linda and her boyfriend Daniel came to visit and brought Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  And George and Margaret came to visit and brought Marian McPartland's  "West Side Story" album.  And the women from her golf group came to visit and brought her a dozen orange Titleists.  "Oh, darling, I'm trying to be a good girl.  It's so hard to lie still.  I want to play golf and go to church and shop for groceries and work in the garden with you and go for walks and make love.  If only we could hurry time, darling.  But I pray for God's grace."  She listened to McPartland's "Somewhere (There's A Place For Us)" and read some Lewis and napped and tried to keep the blood in.  He rubbed her feet and fluffed her pillows and played cribbage with her, the board running crosswise on her lap.  He made a pot of Earl Grey tea and she put on her mad hat, the red and green Tartan tam that she wore for golf, and they drank the tea together.  "Oh, darling, the lavender is so lovely.  Just what I needed.  Thank you."  And he made clam linguini for dinner, their little rambler becoming pungent with the odor of the smashed garlic cloves that he sautéed for the sauce. 

And then three nights later it went very badly.  She was cramping and moaning and gushing.  He called Dr. Hope, who came quickly wearing a long coat and slippers and hurried up the sidewalk in the porch light, carrying his black bag.  "She's apparently having a miscarriage," the old man said, and Dr. Hope frowned at him offendedly.  "We shall see."  But when he pulled back the bedclothes there were puddles of blood and traces of tissue and they knew it was over.

"I'm sorry I'm not any good at this, darling.  We always wanted three children, and I thought I would have them very easily.  But it took us so many years to conceive and then I couldn't hold on to this one." 

"We can still have three children.  There is plenty of time.  Isn't that so, Doctor?"

"Yes."

"You have been very brave, and we will start over again in another month."

In September they returned to teaching school, and in the winter the old man coached basketball, and in February Diane conceived again, and in April she miscarried again, and when she miscarried a third time a year later, Diane went on the pill and they quit trying.

"There is a reason for our failure, darling.  It is not by accident.  I have prayed on it and prayed on it.  We have nothing to be ashamed of.  We would be good parents, but that is not the role God has planned for us.  He wants us to devote ourselves to teaching and to our students.  Don't be so disappointed, darling.  We can still have a grand life."

And then the teaching got better.  They grew into their jobs.  Diane, with her ingenuous and unshakeable belief in a purpose-driven life, enrolled and shone in night classes for a year to become a certified physical trainer and developed and led a coed conditioning program for the Meadowdale P.E. department, sweetly, relentlessly, resiliently petitioning building and District administrators to erect an annex to the gym and fully stock it with free weights and other apparatus, then encouraging and assisting athletes, female and male, to develop independent training programs as she supervised the weight room after school, not for the money, though she was paid modestly, but for the pleasure, joy, she took in seeing young people build their bodies and achieve their God-given athletic potential.  Summers the old man studied tragedy and comedy and rhetoric, Aristotle and Longinus and Kenneth Burke, rhetoric becoming more and more the prism and heuristic by means of which he viewed and analyzed the realms of pedagogy and performance, his delight astonishing and profound, thinking  grammar the fount and rhetoric the flourish, technical analysis and conscious imitation of such as Hemingway and Faulkner and Salinger and Joyce being Hall marks, the English teacher an embodiment, avatar, of an Emersonian mythical self-reliant man who mought could welcome and esteem all comers, the college bound and the likely dropout, the denizen of the Woodway Park estate and the Highway 99 one-bedroom apartment, the jock, the cheerleader, the nerd, the brainiac, the gung-ho, the stoner, the loner, the alienated, and who urged them to employ all of the available means of persuasion, not alone logos, ratiocination, rumination, intellection, and noesis in sentences enthymemic and ipso factic, sublime provender for the leanhungry mind, but also pathos, subliminal empathy and sympathy knife-piercing the heart, and both imbued, flushed, with ethos, a winsome style attesting to, vouching for, the character of the sentence maker. 

He began to feel at home, nidified, in the classroom and on the court, teaching Literary Classics and Poetry and Expository Writing and Creative Writing and Freshman English and individual offensive and defensive skills and team offensive and defensive concepts, arriving an hour before school for tutorials, drill sessions, with Doh Song Cho and Vu Tran and Rosario Esposito, who were trusting and patient and steadfast, who with terrific determination and tenacity repetitively produced the short clauses that he asked them to write, noun phrase and modifiers plus verb phrase and modifiers, and sorted out tenses and verb-subject agreement in that stubborn and optimistic fortitude of and with and by which they lived, memorizing spelling rules and shrugging their shoulders and smiling resolutely in the face of anarchy as he explained how "ghoti" could spell "fish," and lagging after practice half an hour with Jodi or Stacy or Sheila to help her get more wrist, backspin, in her free throws like Bill Sharman or quicken her spin move like Earl "The Pearl" or refine her drop step and skyhook like Kareem.

Summarily, dear but restive reader, let us press ahead, all engines full, with this condensed, Digested one might say, given his "literary" background, version of his pretty unremarkable biography.  In the '60s our hero (and we use the term loosely, swashbuckling derring-do an occasional hit but mostly miss quality of his chromosomal makeup), graduated from college and, Phi Beta Kappa key in hand, as it were (you must have noticed by now his ostentatious modesty in all but his prose style), secured a job as a high school teacher, legally evaded military service (drafted after the Berlin Wall went up, he bent over and spread his cheeks, was classified 1A, pondered the intriguing possibility of attending the Monterey Language School after basic training, weighed against it the forced Musketeering  gregariousness of barracks life, then sought and received an occupational deferment, teachers at the time being in short supply), had no quarrel with those who turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, although none of those choices held any personal appeal for him, marched once (his hair by this time having begun to Beatle) in blue button-down poplin shirt and desert boots on I-5 across the Ship Canal Bridge with a battalion of Jesus-haired or Afroed Vietnam War protestors wearing tie-dyed tee shirts and sandals, brandishing peace signs, and chanting "Hell, no, we won't go!" (but, never one given to prolonged shouting from high-raised roof beams, once was enough), met and courted (yes, reader, we see you lifting a dubious eyebrow at a word whose use would make our hero wince, owing to its medieval overtones, its infantilizing chivalric romanticism, its gendered rigidity, but, be that as it may, we're just going to have to insist on it, because that is pretty much what he did, opening doors for her, walking on the traffic side of her, pedestaling her) Diane, married her in the red-brick Tudorish-Gothic Wallingford Congregational Church, graying Pastor Swedberg, in a ceremony-planning cum counseling session with the betrothed, having noted that the groom-to-be had only once in the year of their going together attended a Sunday service with his prospective bride, asking if he had any faith in the Lord at all, and receiving in reply that he had made one at the Billy Graham Crusade for Christ in 1951, had read the Bible cover to cover, had joined Diane and Chet and Evelyn and their friends for line-by-line exegesis of Romans and both Corinthians, often engaged with Diane in spontaneous, free-form catechism (usually, he did not add, after they had done all they could to satisfy themselves within the sexual protocol Diane had established), and that, though he could not profess a faith, he might be classified, if that would help, as a congenial agnostic (not volunteering  his belief that Diane had, in the unconscious, Darwinian, sense, calculated the odds of his being a catch and had bet him across the board, figuring him a lock, if not to win, then certainly to place or show). 

Can we move this along, please?  Why the specious ventriloquism?  We can see your lips move, you know, and you're creeping us out.  Can you tamp down the artifice for a minute and tell it like it was, clearly and directly?  Let's just do a simple Q and A, okay?

Certainly.  Whom the reader loveth, he--I mean they-- chasteneth.  But I can't guarantee that I won't conclude our little hand-in-hand skate by suddenly flinging myself into a double Salchow with high hopes of sticking the landing on the outside edge.

Enough already!  When did the old man and Diane marry?

August 1966.

Where did they honeymoon?

San Francisco.  Jack Tar Hotel, 15th floor, looking out at Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, Alcatraz.  Amazed to find phone extension in bathroom.  Modern technology!  Saw Giants beat Phillies at Candlestick.  Juan Marichal vs. Robin Roberts.  McCovey homered.  Cable cars.  Cliff House.  Seal Rock.   Telegraph Hill.  Golden Gate Park.  Stimson beach.  Yadda, yadda.  Hole-in-wall bistro between burlesque theaters in Tenderloin.  First encounter with steak tartare.  Gag reflex in play when waiter broke raw egg over molded mound of roseate sirloin.  Girded own loins and waded in.  Délicieux.  Moist meaty mouthfuls  zesty with ground peppercorns, minced onion, briny capers.

And Diane?

Steak Diane, flambéed tableside.

How was the sex? 

Spring-training-like.  Excitedly working on skills.  Experimenting with warm up drills, lineups, positions, equipment.  Catcher's diaphragm shortened pitcher's delivery and inhibited catcher's framing of pitch.  Played doubleheader every day, though not all games went nine innings.  Worked out (and in) some kinks.  Broke camp, headed north, optimistic about prospects.

Did they have terms of endearment for each other?  Dear, darling, lover, sweetie, honey, sugar, baby?

No.

Why not?

He, pathological aversion to cute, corny, trite, sentimental.  She, because he didn't.

He didn't fear naked expression of emotion, making himself vulnerable?

That too.

She was teaching at Meadowdale, he at Edmonds when they married?

Yes.  In '69 he transferred to new Maplewood High School south of Westgate to become assistant basketball coach.  When girls' basketball born in 1972, offspring of Title IX, he won job of head coach.  No one else applied.

When did they move to the house on Grandview?

March 1972.

How much did they pay for it?

$30,000.  Had dual income of $16,000, counting stipends for supervising activities.  Withdrew  $6,000 from savings to make twenty-five per cent down payment, with monthly payments of $95 at five per cent interest.

This was to be a halfway house on their journey from apartment in Lynnwood to home ownership in the Bowl?

Yes.

In the '70s, did they become Pete Seeger's suburbanites, barbequing behind a six-foot high cedar plank fence, mowing and trimming and thatching a well-fertilized thick green lawn, tending to flower beds, raising vegetables, DIYing all kinds of home improvement projects?

Yes.

Did they become John Updike suburbanites, joining "sets," coupling and recoupling?

No.

They were never tempted to stray?

They were.

They resisted?

Essentially, yes.

Did they sniff cocaine, puff marijuana?

No.

Did they drink?

Yes.  Savored wine daily.

Did they take up running?

Yes.

Did they take up disco dancing?

Yes.

Did they take note of Earth Day?

Yes.  Both acknowledged importance of being caretakers, stewards, of earth.

Did they therefore reduce their consumption of carbon and pesticides?

No.  Tried not to litter, though.

Did they read The Greening of America?

She, no.  He, yes.

His take?

Consciousness III fearful retreat from reality of verifiable material, Darwinian character of life to fiction of innocent, technology-free man in harmony with nature, self, and other selves, all paradoxically so equally powerless yet fully empowered that very concept of power rendered meaningless.

When did Diane stop inserting her diaphragm? 

After move to Grandview. 

It took them three years to become pregnant?

Yes.  But would not have put it like that.  Diane became pregnant, "they" did not.

To what did they attribute their difficulty?

She, God's plan.  He, timing.  Statistically unusual, but not impossible, number of ejaculations occurring before ovulation. 

Why did they want children?

She, fulfillment of God's commandment to be fruitful, multiply, bring salvageable souls to life.  He, to prove he could do it, be creator.  Both, atavistic evolutionary urge to perpetuate selves.  Force driving through green fuse.  Also, sentimental love of children for their own sakes, their sweet vulnerabilities, their adaptabilities, their exponentially increasing capabilities, their multiple metamorphoses, their maturing competencies.

Isn't sentimental love actually subsumed by the atavistic evolutionary urge?  That is, we don't value sentimental love in and of itself, we value it because it motivates us to spread our genes?

He would accept quibble.

And even though he believed that the universe is godless and without meaning or purpose, he never questioned the value of creating a child?  Of bringing it into the world to experience the mesmerizing, exhilarating  kaleidoscope of daily phenomena, the rush of consciousness, become addicted to it, and then cease?  Be and then not be?  Or of bringing it into the world to experience pain upon pain, a sea of troubles, and then die without recompense?  Why?

(a) Aforesaid atavistic urge to perpetuate self.  (b) Altruistic wish to enable another to experience rush of consciousness.

What about the pain?

Regrettable.  Worth it.

Isn't altruism also subsumed under atavistic urge?  Belief in it leads us to spread our genes?

He would accept quibble.

After the seeming finality of the miscarriages, the "sign," how did each respond?

She, with loving acceptance of God's will, determination to follow His plan.  He, with myriad of efforts, still ongoing, to be doer, creator, order-imposer. 

Did both, despite their disappointment, continue to crave the rush of consciousness?

Yes.

Did fealty of family and friends sustain them?

Yes.  With family, holiday, birthday and anniversary gatherings, picnics, poker games, Husky and Seattle Supersonic games.  Dancing at Merry Max on Highway 99 to music of George Adams trio, piano, clarinet, drums, George's solos mash up of Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Errol Garner, rapid light-fingered right hand arpeggios and trills punctuated by striding left hand chords.  "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "Crazy Rhythm," other jazz standards reimagined, transmogrified, yet danceable, fox trot, jitter, swing.  Son's turnings, dippings adrenalized as heart soared with filial pride.  With friends, colleagues, parties, discotheques, movies, golf outings to Spokane, Bend, OR, weekend getaways to Portland, Port Townsend, WA, Vancouver, BC.

She enjoyed these more than he?

Yes.

He enjoyed them but was never happier than when they went home to be alone together?

Yes.

Once home and settled in, she was ready to go do something else?

Yes.

Did they ever watch together the Rock Hudson-Jennifer Jones version of A Farewell to Arms?

Yes.  1976, "ABC Saturday Night Movie," on new 24-inch Zenith color TV in living room at Grandview.

Her reaction?

"Good Lord, that Catherine Barkley is so sappy.  What a cipher!  I mean, get a life, woman!  'I'm good.  I do what you want.  There isn't any me.  I'm you.  You're my religion.  You're all I've got.  I can't stand to see so many people.  I feel very lonely among other people.  Don't you like it better when we are alone?  There's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them.  I don't take any interest in anything else anymore.'  It's great that they're in love, the long row across the lake, the walks in the snow, the drinks in the bars, the fine cathedral in the mist, the sighting of foxes, the two wrapped together in his cape are all very romantic and moving but so limiting.  Love should expand her life, not contract it."

His?

Chagrin.  Had already seen it in 1957 at drive-in with first girl friend, sated, filled-up, complete, both naked, wrapped in blanket, co-dependent, self-sufficient, everyone else, rest of world, out there, irrelevant to him.  Infantilism of long-held fantasy exposed.

Did both nevertheless have tears in their eyes as Frederic Henry walked out into the rain?

Yes.

They began to travel?

Yes.  At first, summer jaunts along western and eastern U.S. seaboards.  Heartland of little interest.  Spring break getaways to Zihuatanejo, Jamaica, Santa Fe, Palm Springs, Myrtle Beach.  Later, backpacking trips to western Europe.  Visited Europe Through the Back Door, Rick Steves's original store on 4th Avenue, where Polar Bear used to be.  Watched videos, bought bags, guidebooks, phrasebooks.

Did he prepare to speak French in France?

Yes.  Read Swann's Way and Inspector Maigret novels out loud in original.

How did that work out?

Screwed courage to sticking point, struck up "conversations" with garcons, concierges, conducteurs, inspecteurs, flâneurs.  With terrific determination and tenacity repeatedly produced short interrogative clauses ending in s'il vous plais: Qu'est c'est..., Ou est..., Disez-moi..., A quelle heure..., Avez-vous..., Combien d'argent..., Répetez..., Parlez-lentement....  Felt engaged, worldly.  Diane proud of him.

When did they move to the condo?

1985.  Bored with yard work.  Affluent enough for view spot in Bowl.  Looked at offerings all over town for months, settled on upper unit in just-constructed  four-plex at 5th and SeaMont.  Crown molding, wainscoting, oak floors and cabinets, wet bar, gleaming white paint, 1300 square feet, sweeping view from every room, walking distance to shops, restaurants, library, athletic club, beach.  $150,000 with mortgage of $90,000 after applying proceeds from sale of house on Grandview.  Clinked glasses of Heitz Cellars 1974 Martha's Vineyard minty cabernet with Bill and Charlene after lugging upstairs boxes and pieces of furniture crammed into rented U-Haul.

Their feelings?

We're home.

Were they or any friends or relatives ever touched by the Aids epidemic?

No. 

Did developing theories of plate tectonics and quantum mechanics affect their imaginations?

She, no.  He, yes.  Age and protean quality of earth, subatomic indeterminacy, wackiness, astounding revelations buttressing gut feeling that life accidental, incidental.

Were they concerned about global warming?

Yes.

Did they do anything to combat it?

No.

Were they early adopters of new technology?

Not vanguard.  Second wave.  Walkman, VCR, CD player.  First computer, IBM PC, 1989.  Cell phones, 2000.  iPads, 2008.  Apple watch (he) 2016.

Did he ever have a perm?

No.

Did she?

No.  Kept hair short.  Bangs.  Used curling iron on sides.  Back of neck, increasingly creased, visible.

Did he at one time wear Izod polos and chinos and penny loafers?

Yes.

Did she at one time wear Flashdance leg warmers and off-shoulder shirts?

Yes.

When did their parents die?

Margaret, 1975, lung cancer.  Chet, 1988, brain aneurism.  Evelyn, 1995, stroke.  George, 1999, pneumonia.

When did the two retire?

1995.

Their ages?

She, 52.  He, 55.

Why retire at such a young age?

Because they could.  Pensions fully vested.  IRAs and TSAs, enhanced by small inheritances, built up.  Been there, done that.  Same ol', same 'ol.  Enough enough.  Time for change.  Pass mantle of responsibility.  Immerse selves in realm of ludic.  Create, recreate.

They began to winter in Arizona?

Yes.  Rented condo in retirement community in Mesa.  Shoulderless city of 450,000 stretching across wide desert ringed by bare brown mountains.  Far from madding clouds.  To them, exotic.  Stuccoed, tile-roofed dwellings in variations of beige, cream, laid out around golf course, softball field, dog run, tennis courts, pickleball courts, exercise rooms, meeting rooms, swimming pools, spas, wood shop, ceramics room, ballroom.  Sun at dawn small round scoop of orange sherbet, at noon huge blinding silver-yellow effulgence dominating sky, at dusk shrinking lemon orb turning wisps of cirrus charcoal, candy apple red.  Yards xeriscaped in shards of granite.  Angular boulders here, there, for contrast.  Occasional dry streambed of medium-sized rocks running from house to sidewalk.  Cacti everywhere.  Hulking saguaros with creamy blossoms, multi-stalked ocotillos, orange flowers hanging like pennants, prolific prickly pears growing paddles out of paddles topped by yellow, rose, chalices, stumpy, chesty barrels, gnarly cholla, lanky organ pipe, one piece telescoping out of piece beneath it, ground-hugging hedgehog, green agave leaved like artichoke, fecundly bulbous mammalaria.  Color leaping from shrubs and bushes in yards and roadway medians.   Brazen burnt-orange blossoms on Mexican bird of paradise.   Claret, salmon-colored, blooms on crepe-papery bougainvillea, garnet spears on hibiscus, cerise brushes on fairy duster, blood-orange flags on cape honeysuckle, lavender frostings on sage, hot-yellow, deep gold-vermilion buttons on lantana, white, crimson, peppermint-pink clusters on oleander, cock's comb stems on red yucca, blonde spike on towering phallic century plant, mottled sea-foam green bark on palo verde, mesquite, egg-yolk pom-poms on sweet acacia, lacquered-lavender fronds on jacarandas, orange, blonde, hot-lemon globes of fruit ornamenting hunched dwarf citrus trees.  Birds everywhere.  Striped Gila woodpeckers rat-tat-tatting streetlight pole, quail, antennae on qui vive, racewalking across granite to Diane's bird feeder, turkey vultures riding updrafts, crimson cardinals perching on drooping limbs of sissou tree, curved-bill thrashers shrilly whistling two note "Hey, you!," drab doves dumbly moaning, road runners scampering, cactus wrens, grackles, marshalling, hummingbirds hovering, nectar-sipping.   On occasion, other wildlife: coyotes prowling, lizards skittering, long-eared jackrabbits hopping, javelinas rooting, bobcats parading. 

Dial it back, now.  You're chewing the scenery again.

Sorry.

In Arizona they immersed themselves in the realm of the ludic?

Yes.  She, women's golf club, tennis club.  Played one or other every morning but Sunday.   Church on Sunday morning.  Took tennis lessons, reached 3.5 level.  Weekly competitive match against teams from other retirement communities.  Ponytail canasta or mahjong in afternoons or evenings.  Many new friends.  Walks, coffees, lunches, Bible study.  He, several softball teams, men's golf club, tennis club.  Played one or other every morning but Sunday.  Played golf alone at dawn on Sunday.  Course quiet.  Lush fairways greenly beckoning.  Run of place.  Took tennis lessons, reached 3.5 level.  Weekly competitive matches.   Together won mixed doubles tournaments twice.  Softball doubleheaders thrice weekly.  Outfielder.  High-average, low-power, hitter.  Speedy runner.  Annual tournaments, AAA level, Tucson, Yuma, Palm Springs, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Mesquite, St. George.  Many championships.  Many new acquaintances.  Post-game beers. 

They were active socially?

Yes.  Dinner parties, potlucks, barbeques, drinks on patios, team socials, community pancake breakfasts, hamburger feeds, dances.

Diane liked to entertain?

Yes.

He?

Not.

Diane liked to be entertained?

Yes.

He?

For  hour, two.

He never happier than when party over?

Yes.

What were their friends and acquaintances like?

Mostly white, retired, conservative, Protestant, church-going, middle-to-upper-middle class, military careerists, office workers, tradesmen, craftsmen, policemen, firemen, farmers, self-employed business persons, teachers, accountants, ministers, nurses, sprinkling of doctors, lawyers, engineers.  Had paid dues, followed rules, kept noses clean, worked, saved, honored flag.  Little sympathy for those who did not do same.  Oblivious of or antipathetic to notion of systemic inequality.

Where were they from?

Midwest, Rockies, Northwest, British Columbia, Alberta.

Is "Minnesota nice" a real thing?

Quite possibly.  Many from Minnesota (also Canada) unfailingly polite, considerate, generous, loath to pry or disagree, loath to foist political or religious opinions on others.

Their feelings upon returning to the Bowl each spring?

Mixed.  Both loved ludiculous near certainty of sun, cerulean skies, flooding of light, warmth.  Loved desert terrain, extensive vistas, aridity.  Back in Bowl, found looming dark evergreen trees, veiled skies, moist chill air oppressive.  Gradually attuned selves to lush verdancy, bracing briskness of true home--place where, when you go there, you feel taken in.

Why does he no longer winter in Arizona?

To preserve illusion of idyllic, ludic life with Diane.  Also, could not face endless round of social activities without her as buffer, interface.

When did Diane die?

April 12, 2009.  Traffic accident, head-on collision, intersection of Highway 99-205th.  Drunk driver ran left-turn lane red light, hit Diane coming through.  Call at 9:45.  Grabbed keys.  Shaking.  Left Celtics-Lakers playing on TV, left lights on, rushed to Stevens Hospital.  Shaking.  Diane unconscious in ICU.  On ventilator.  Nurse attending, monitoring.   Skull fractured, face lacerated, swaddled.  Dying.

"Oh, darling," he heard her not say, "I'm so sorry I must leave you.  We had such a lovely study of 'Revelation' tonight at Rhoda's house on the lake, raindrops bouncing off the water in light reflecting from the windows, God's bounty of beauty, and lifting each other up in our shared awe at God's merciful plan for justice and retribution.  We took turns explaining how God has worked in our lives.  I said He has given me you, darling, my precious helpmate, and given both of us rewarding careers and lovely lives in the Bowl and romantic escapes to Arizona, blessing upon blessing, with the ultimate blessing, of course, atonement through salvation in Christ, darling.   And the chamomile tea and the lemon bars were lovely and brought us such a feeling of communion.  And at the end we prayed for the salvation of the ignorant and recalcitrant, that they would see the light, and we were all thinking of you, darling, and for safe travels home."

He did not say anything.  He was always embarrassed by the words awe, retribution, blessing, atonement, salvation, communion.  They were gratuitous and desperate and untenable, fictive  abstractions drawn from discrete temporary adhesions of pulsing quanta named Diane, George, Margaret.  You never got away to anything.  You were ruled by entropy.  Shakily he kissed her cooling forehead and touched her cooling cheek.

"But, darling, didn't I make you a good wife?  Didn't we have a fine life together?  You do understand about Norm, don't you, as I understand about Hazel?  Things change, darling, but marriage is forever.  There are days when you hate love as much as you love it.  Love is in the gut, the bones.  It doesn't look away from the bad things.  It isn't perfect, it can be sad and lonely, but we never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  We almost completed each other, darling, and our life together happened for a reason, as my death is happening now for a reason, everything works out fairly, darling, and I am not afraid, the real me is not broken, and there will be heaven enough and no end of time, and it will be grand."

[The Hemingway and Salinger seem close to the mark.  Bravo!  The Faulkner, however, is forced, overdone.  You've crammed a slew of his prose tics into two paragraphs.  You've made it parody, not pastiche.  I do like the speed of the Q and A, though.  Would that more of your self-indulgent stylistic excursions moved along like that!  Sylvia]

[The Faulkner could be improved, but its presence is appropriate.  As Faulkner created a Yoknapatawpha County, so Wayne is creating a how pretty town.  Solveig]

[Wayne, just as I used to enjoy a Rich Little impression, so I enjoy your use of pastiche (and also many of the other allusions--name-droppings, as it were--drawn from the literary tributaries that feed your stream of consciousness).   It's fun for its own sake.  But I must say, in addition to providing you yet another opportunity to play the versatile virtuoso, I think it's a way of tiptoeing around some pretty powerful emotions.  Tempus fugit.  When will you drop the masks and directly confront yourself?  Dave]

[Dave, it's all there.  He has indirectly presented his direct confrontation with himself.  Yes, Wayne likes to show off, and that may be a flaw.  But unlike Rich Little's, which don't go beyond themselves, Wayne's imitations of rhythm, intonation, and diction are liberating and generative.  Assuming another's voice loosens his emotional costiveness; going undercover, he uncovers himself.  They who have ears to hear, let them hear.  Liz Ann]

[Liz Ann, I love that you rise in defense of your rhetoric mentor, but I think that your loyalty to him clouds your judgment.  In going undercover, he hides from himself.  In his prologue, he says his intention is to make his apology, rehearse his back story, but the mechanism of other voices allows, even induces, him to skew rather than true.  He needs to speak as himself, for himself.   Dave]

[Does Wayne have multiple personalities?  Are we seeing here four faces of Adams?  No.  On the other hand, are we getting all the information we need?  Do we fully understand the Wayne-Diane relationship?  No.  And my guess is, lacking Liz Ann's miracle ears, we never will.  Solveig]

[So ironic that Daniel and I, not Diane, Roman goddess of fertility and childbirth, were the epitome of fecundity, producing three children in four years!  Not sure I would attribute it to God's plan but glad the kids were there for you to enjoy and relate to, taking them over the years to the playground and the big climbing rock at the City Park, to movies at the Lynn-Twin, to Sonics games, and to Starbucks for frappucinos.  Linda]

 

                                                e

Because she walked in beauty that his scaled eyes could not see, because the glorious universe was ever expanding from the original outburst of God's love, because she was suffused with God's grace which continuously flowed through her like the neutrinos he talked about, because she was part of the divine plan that had first been made manifest in the Garden of Eden, because her story grew out of the stories of Adam and Noah and Moses and Jesus and Peter and Paul, that she walked on the earth because they once did, that they had ascended to heaven and she, an eternally new creation since that magical summer evening in Seattle with Billy Graham, would one day join them there, that God had a special plan for her, of which he had been for so long the most important part and which she could find signs of daily  by being open to its working in her and seeking insight through prayer and Bible study, by being able to say, from "Genesis" through "Revelation," "This happened and I am part of it, at one with it, I fit in, I matter, it makes sense, I need not fear death, need not even fear making a mess of this life," knowing that God would test her but never send her more than she could bear, and aching to share her eschatology with a soul mate who would acknowledge that he had a soul, one morning in church she turned and introduced herself to broad-shouldered, bearded Norm standing in sport jacket and tie alone in the row behind her at the one-minute greeting of neighbors following the opening hymns and preceding the sermon, sensed him lighting up as her own pulse accelerated at their handshake, learned her five things about him (divorced, two young kids, liked sports, restored old cars, was an electrician) as he learned his five about her (married, no kids, liked sports, gardened, taught P.E.), turned and smiled and touched his hand again after the benediction, sat beside him the following Sunday, asked if he were stopping for coffee in the foyer where thermoses had been placed atop folding tables, halved a sugar doughnut with a plastic knife on a napkin and shared it with him, rubbing fingers together to rid them of granules when she finished, dabbing her mouth with the napkin and offering it to him, who employed it on his smiling lips and then pocketed it, wondering if he found inspiring Pastor Miles's comment that  the Bible has often been used as a manuscript for conformity and  not often enough as a manifesto of creativity, that the name of Jesus should conger creativity, beauty, imagination, and wonder instead of rules, laws, conformity, and judgment, skin prickling when he said yes, replying when he asked why she was unaccompanied by her husband that he said religion was not for him, that she still held out hope because as a boy he had been saved by Billy Graham, that she had been hurt when he had read at her request Surprised By Joy yet eluded through sophistry springing from willful stubbornness all fine nets and stratagems of belief, refusing to be repelled by the tinniness of non-belief, denying the pure joy beyond mere happiness and pleasure, beyond words at all, of word becoming flesh and God becoming man, resisting the compulsion to enter the blessed depths of divine mercy, afraid of being thought a poached egg, no doubt, yet she loved him and would not give up on him, she had to go home now, he would be expecting her, but would he care to go for a walk sometime and talk about the transformative power of God's love, and the next Sunday agreeing to ride with Norm to Richmond Beach Park after church the following Sunday while he was running a 10K 40 miles away in Monroe, thinking of course as she slid into the oxidizing blue '76 Datsun B210 coupe, mandated by alimony and child support, noting with a twinge the skateboards and bag of Nalley's potato chips in the back seat but bearing her barrenness dutifully, excitement growing as Norm drove southward to the beach through sun dapplings in forested Woodway Park, borne forward on the waves of Christian rock, a Steven Curtis Chapman tape, glory unfolding in an assertive, confident, unambiguous beat, parking in the paved lot and walking through dunes, sand getting into her flats and clinging to her pantyhose, to a shoreline firmed by a receding tide, meandering north for a ways and then south for a ways amid tots throwing bread to ecstatically flapping seagulls, kite flyers tugging at strings, Frisbee sailers creating lovely parabolas, clam diggers, sand castle builders, readers and sunbathers stretched out on blankets, picnickers munching, beside the placid Sound, before the dark blue-green Olympics splotched with snow, taking deep breaths, knowing Norm knew it didn't just happen, this order, this beauty, this world and no other except heaven where conditions were just right for life, for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world could be clearly seen by the things that were made, His eternal power and Godhead so obvious, there could be no excuse, waving an arm from horizon to horizon, saying all around us are holiness and grace, freely given for the taking, new doors of perception mystically opening to the unhardened heart, the unlocked mind, retreating to sit on a thick bleached log gritty with sand, her soul, his too, trembling before God, both declaring that they felt God's blessing, that each had been made and would be forever a new creation, her heart leaping again when he took her hand, a prayer of thanksgiving riding her pulse, involuntarily swallowing as he leaned in to, very lightly, very quickly, kiss her lips, a thundering in her ears blurring her perception, an oozing at her fork perplexing her joy, they should get back, Norm was to take the kids to Green Lake for boarding, mind still swirling as she leaned against his car to pour sand from her shoes, brush it from her feet, listening quietly to Steven Chapman as they returned through the forest, squeezing his hand and saying thank you, it was wonderful, have fun with your kids, see you next week when he pulled up beside her Honda, welcoming him home after the race, how was it, hugging him when, trying not to beam, he confessed to a personal best 39:40, relieved not to get the advance she had been expecting, he too full of himself to reach out, she so very full also, glowing with memories of Norm and the beach, wonderously at one with what was.

 

                                                                                      f

Because he questioned the privileged place of tragedy among genres in that graduate summer seminar in Parrington Hall, because in his paper on  A View From the Bridge that he read in mid-quarter to the class he argued against viewing that or any other tragedy as a secular substitute for religion, against Max Scheler's assertion that the tragic is an essential element of the universe itself, an observable property, a glimmering which surrounds certain events, a specific feature of the world's makeup, and maintained that, to the contrary, the tragic is overlayed, not observed, imposed, not discovered, that the alleged glimmering is a fiction, a mirage that disappears when examined at the atomic level, that order becoming disorder is entropy, not tragedy, save that we label it so, and that Eddie, a common man, was a tragic hero who in seeking to do good by his lights instead did evil, resulting in the scarring of four other lives and his own death, as worthy in his blind self-deception, a flaw that was fatal but not fated, of that honorific as procrastinating Hamlet or ambitious Macbeth or rash Romeo and Juliet, and then against a second Scheler assertion that there is no tragedy without transcendence, the hero exceeding the bounds of ordinary human experience, in his blind greatness wreaking havoc, in his downfall expiating his guilt, in the end ennobled, purging us of pity and fear and elevating us to a new, awed understanding of the possibilities of human grandeur and failure, affirming our worth in a way that comedy, with its merely happy ending, never can, maintaining rather that we and our tragic heroes live and die in ambiguity and indeterminacy and uncertainty, our worth unquantifiable, transcendence therefore not a conclusive induction but an axiom imposed by critical fiat, Oedipus Rex and King Lear no more authentic exemplars of humanity than Molly Bloom or Falstaff, neither the tragic nor the comic to be found glimmering in the fabric of the universe, neither form more exalting than the other, whether paradise be lost but partially regained somehow through suffering or paradise be regained through the Bergsonian overcoming of stupidity and rigidity, his an egalitarian stance, and because Professor Frank Jones commended his sturdy refusal to accept whatever the transcendence boys were hearkening after, his tablemate Hazel suggested that they discuss his views further over a bite of lunch at Abby's and, he aflush with seminar success, they walked across 15th to the Ave and faced each other in a booth of burgundy leatherette over BLTs and coffee, she frequently sweeping, her wedding diamond sparkling in the act, her unsprayed long glossy black hair to one side or the other from its middle part, the animation of her chewing and talking impelling it to fall every few seconds over brown eyes goggled by big round black horn rims, asking is the paradox of tragedy, the fearful sense of rightness and the pitying sense of wrongness, the ambiguity, really a reason to dismiss transcendence, on the contrary, doesn't the ambiguity show forth, an observable epiphany, a glimmering we can see in the actions of the daring and suffering hero, aren't we lifted to an awareness of a new level of complexity and richness that provides no answers but is for that very reason a kind of triumph, a tragic greatness, whereas it doesn't even make sense to speak of comic greatness, Molly Bloom may be the life force full of affirmations, Falstaff may be large as life, but Oedipus and Lear are far more magnificent, surely entropy, change, disintegration, is part of the warp and woof of the universe, available for all to see, it doesn't require a special tragic vision, it is tragic, the tragic inheres in our glorious Promethean quest for a knowledge which can never be quite enough for us, in our damnable Adamic eating of that fruit, tragic transcendence is not to be confused with transcendentalism, it isn't a mystical unity with the Oversoul, it isn't spiritualism, it certainly isn't the comic transformation wrought by salvation and resurrection, it is not independent of the material universe, it is not a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence, it is not a state of being at all but a brief, piercing recognition of our paradoxical embodiment of power and frailty, grinning in the pleasure of combat, enjoying herself and her self, but it seems, he said, floundering in the flood of her passion, flopping his Beatle bangs with a shake of his head, so pretentious, so self-aggrandizing, so needy, to conclude that the ambiguity of a paradox reveals a higher truth instead of an inconclusive mystery, why does everyone yearn to take something positive from tragic ambiguity instead of accepting it as a revelation of our ignorance, but remember, she said,  pretentious in its original sense means simply putting forth, asserting, maintaining, nothing wrong with that, and I pretend that a paradox is a positive, a higher truth, thesis and antithesis leading to a more enlightened Hegelian synthesis, tragedy reveals that mankind is a wonder in its potential for daring and suffering, are you so self-hating that you cannot see the glimmer, cannot admit your need for tragic epiphany, and lunch after class once a week became a regular occurrence for them, he wallowing in her volubility, she intrigued, stimulated by his half-baked contrarianism, then walking back across 15th to the upper campus lot where each parked by permit, she was working on her PhD and would start her dissertation in the fall, her husband was a Boeing engineer, they lived in Madison Park, they skied Crystal Mountain together, attended Husky football games, and they would halt at her car, lean against it, the first week he took her hand when saying goodbye, the next he bent forward to kiss her drily on the lips, the third she kissed moistly back, and at their last halting in the fourth he slipped a hand under her untucked blouse and squeezed a pendulous braless breast, both sighing, the quarter at an end, their poignant parting in pity and fear not tragic.

[I sensed that Diane was in turmoil at one point, a certain impatience, a certain desperation, an unaccountable welling of the eyes that she quickly willed away, but she would never speak of it and I knew better than to ask.  Linda]

[I think this is the part where we discreetly look away.   Solveig]

 

                                                                                      g

In 2019 the population of the 0.852-square-mile Bowl was just under 3,000, hundreds of tourists, mostly white with a smattering of Asians and a sprinkling of African Americans, swelling that number from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. daily. There were other recognized boroughs within the widely-expanded city limits--Westgate and Firdale to the south, Perrinville to the north, 5 Corners at the eastern end of Main Street, and the International District along Highway 99--but the Bowl was Manhattan, minus the skyscrapers, the glamour, the chic, the hustle, the muscle, the wealth, the poverty, the homelessness, the fetid garbage, the grime, the crime.  Gerified and gentrified, the Bowl seemed to the old man congested, dense.  Although the odd skateboarder jolted over its uneven sidewalks, it was a place for adults, 95 percent of whom had high school diplomas, 47 percent bachelor's degrees.  Fifty-five was the median age, and there were as many people over 70 as there were under 20.  Pedestrians and cars competed for space.  Dozens of two- and three-level condos and townhouses with names like The Commodore, The Mariner, The Ebb Tide, the Reefs, SeaGate, Seascape, and Avalon palisaded the original business district.  The median price of a dwelling in the Bowl approached $700,000.  Currently, a 2,000 square foot condo with two bedrooms and two baths and a partial seamountain view on Walnut between 5th and 6th was listed at a million, as was an 1,800 square foot townhouse with three bedrooms, two baths, and "territorial" views on the corner of 7th and Daley next to Civic Field.  Eighty-year-old modest ramblers continued to exist--especially north of Bell between 6th and 3rd and in the hollow between 6th and 7th  and Dayton and Walnut--but throughout the Bowl--especially along Sunset and 2nd north of Main and in the hills from 7th to 9th--countless original structures had been remodeled and upgraded or demolished and altogether reconceived.  No muscular McMansions, no tracts of themed structures, no "developments," nothing Tudor or Georgian or Spanish, nothing a-contextual, nothing faux, just functional, cantilevered glassy split-levels or multi-levels with decks and patios surrounded by hydrangeas, junipers, rhododendrons, and azaleas.  Most of the rebuilds were 2,500-4,500 square feet with multiple bathrooms and bedrooms, an entertainment room and a vast open space combining a great room, a dining room, and a kitchen with an islanded workspace.  Wood laminate or dense carpeting covered the floors, marble the countertops.  Ones and zeroes flowed through the walls.  Rooms were WiFied, appliances were smart.  Electronic devices abounded.  Security and climate-control systems could be accessed by device from anywhere in the world.  High definition TV content, with hundreds of options, could be streamed as well as delivered by cable or satellite.  Though less white (79 per cent Caucasian) than it had been, the population was hardly diverse but--officially at least--it believed it should be.  Doubtless there remained many tribal loyalists as well as closeted racists, sexists, and homophobes, but the City Council had created a Diversity Commission to promote an environment that "accepted, celebrated, and appreciated diversity in a wide array of forms"-- ethnic heritage, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, and age--although the cost-of-housing barrier muted and mooted the racial and age aspects of the diversity issue.  More pretentious, firmly bourgeois, the Bowl had become a hybrid bedroom-retirement community whose economic engine was tourism and whose arboreal, industrial origins were a matter of  interest only to aging locals looking for their roots at the Museum or to the odd pedestrian, in need of an excuse to rest in her-more-often-than-his rambling among the plethora of shops and cafes, whose eye might have been caught by one of the historical plaques affixed to various buildings around town.  It remained orderly, safe, and clean.  There were no gangs or drug pushers, no panhandlers, no visibly homeless persons, no abandoned shopping carts. The town's center, however, was no longer quiet.  Coming upon the clot of cars and people circling the fountain at 5th and Main, one who had resided in the Bowl in 1945 experienced the sort of disorientation that a 2019 Bowl resident might experience when first coming upon Times Square.  Its people were loyal, hardworking, disciplined, resilient, optimistic, but less modest, complacent, conformist, paternalistic, insular, and unsophisticated. Its residents were less skeptical of big government than they had been.  They valued family stability, although half of the adults over 35 had been divorced.  They were not looking for handouts.  They were generous to charities.  They distrusted crusaders and muckrakers but were paying more heed to advocates of political correctness, as it was called by many, or to human rights, as it was called by a gradually increasing number.  They were beginning to mull over the notion of white privilege and entitlement.  They were beginning to wonder about the existence of implicit bias and systemic racism and sexism.  They were beginning to discuss means of  honoring the legacy of the Coast Salish indigenous peoples who had gathered berries and basket materials from the creeks and marshes and harvested fish from the bountiful bay itself thousands of years before.  A few were even beginning to entertain the possibility of making reparations for slavery and for what they regarded as America's disproportionate contribution to climate change.  Many were worried about the direction of the nation's economy.  They were concerned with job loss, outsourcing of manufacturing, unconscionable rewards for CEOs and venture capitalists.  Though more affluent than the generations that preceded them, they suspected that the future might be less promising for their offspring.  They assumed that a family needed dual wage-earners in order to maintain a quality house and two cars, qualify for the loans necessary to put qualified kids through college, buy a time-share condo for use as a beach or mountain getaway and possibly a boat to moor at the Edmonds marina and, with the help of a financial planner, invest enough in 401 (K)s and other instruments to provide for retirement in their sixties and funerals in their eighties.  They also assumed that both partners in a marriage would want to work for personal fulfillment.  They had not been taught in the shining three-story grade school on the hill; it had closed in 1972.  If they had grown up in the Bowl, which was more and more unlikely, they had learned at Olympic View Elementary, a mile to the northeast, or Westgate Elementary, a mile to the southeast, and at the merged Edmonds-Maplewood High School on 212th and 76th, the new stories that made them American: America had been invaded, not discovered, by colonizing Europeans who exploited its native inhabitants and expropriated their lands, settled by hardy, acquisitive souls with a myriad of motives, some noble, some mean, governed by white males under a Constitution written by elitists leery of true democracy, expanded in territory and influence by a relentless westward movement and an imperialistic policy of Manifest Destiny but managing to retain a modicum of integrity by winning the Civil War (which it fought for both economic and altruistic reasons) and passing the 14th Amendment, aiding the cause of democracy by helping its allies win World War I, at long last freeing women to vote, and striking a blow against genocide and fascism by helping its allies win World War II, these additional truths, admonished formally in classrooms, tangentially implied in outlier sermons and Sunday school lessons for a declining number of attendees, or inferred informally, through observation of daily life: all citizens are equal and should have but do not have equal opportunity, every vote matters, racial segregation and discrimination are deplorable in principle and in practice, de facto racial segregation and discrimination are much more common and insidious than hitherto recognized, Japanese internment camps were abominable, inexcusable, America often fights to make the world safe for capitalism and the American economy, governmental restraint of capitalism is the key to a just and equitable economy, all persons--cisgender. transgender, bisexual, transsexual, gay, lesbian--should be proud of their sexuality and deserve the right to marry and raise children with any person of their choice, parental leave and childcare subsidies should be part of the social contract, living together outside of marriage is a respectable option for all persons, divorce is often beneficial for all parties concerned, all persons are autonomous, all can make a house a home, all can grow up to be President or a Marine Corps general or a CEO, all can be a pink-collared nurse, a cosmetologist, a legal secretary, failures and successes in life are often a matter not of will power but of  chance because one is either lucky or not in inheriting the "right" kind of genes and in being provided with an environment in which the expression of those genes can flourish, lasting happiness can be attained through self-discovery and self-expression and by working toward social justice, if one is lucky enough through nature and nurture to be able to realize that.

The town's teeming business district--from 6th to the beach, from Howell to Bell--catered less to the needs and more to the profusion of wants of its people and its visitors.  There were no grocery stores on Main.  Safeway, The Shopping Cart (which later became Thriftway), and the Edmonds Grocery and Market had closed decades ago, Safeway relocating for a few years in the area that was to become Salish Crossing.  The grocery in the strip mall at 5th and Howell, originally an A&P, then Petosa's, had become Ace Hardware.  Shoppers seeking to stock pantries and refrigerators had to drive up Edmonds Way to the QFC at Westgate or up Maplewood Hill to Haggen's at 76th. There were no gas stations in the Bowl--commuters had to pump their own gas at the Kwik and Clean at Westgate or the Texaco on 196th and Olympic View Drive--nor was there a bus station, although county buses did come into the downtown area and the Sounder commuter train connecting Everett and Seattle stopped twice a day.  But there was almost everything else for the body and the psyche.  There were dozens of restaurants, with a variety of cuisines and ambiences, scattered throughout the Bowl.  One could grab a simple maple bar or bear claw at the Edmonds Bakery or, a half-block away at 4th and Main, munch on Salt and Iron's small plate offerings of bone marrow, grilled fennel and octopus, speck, seared pork belly, and chevre and honey gorgonzola dulce.   Alcoholic beverages were readily available.  Engels' Tavern continued to exist as Engels' Pub, the Up and Up had become the '50s-style bopNburger, and the Sail Inn had upscaled into Rory's Bar and Grill, featuring 23 craft beers.  There were two craft breweries, a distillery, a wine bar, a wine shop, a wine-storage facility for oenophiles who lacked micro-climate-controlled space at home, and nearly every restaurant offered an intriguing wine and beer list.  There was a cheesemonger.  There was an ice cream parlor, a frozen yogurt shop, a gelato shop.  There were several women's clothing boutiques, including Sound Styles, Whim Sea,  Rebekah's, C'est la Vie, Rogue, and Saetia.  There was a footware store and several jewelry stores.  One needed the digits of three hands to count the number of hair and nail salons.  Eyelash extensions and eyebrow microblading were available at the Vanity Lash Lounge and Lashes by Louie.  One's physique could be recontoured, and one's unwanted hair removed, at the PUR Skin Clinic.  There were all manner of places, such as Innate Radiance, Innate Health, to assist in achieving, or maintaining, wellness--spas, massage therapy parlors, yoga studios, Pilates studios.  Oxygen therapy was available at Ohana Hyperbarics.  There was a naturopathic dermatologist and a naturopathic health center and a vitamins and herbs store.  There was a model and talent agency, a counseling center and a chiropractic therapy clinic.  One inclined to look could find here and there a psychic, an astrologer, or a holistic healer offering to help with spiritual exploration.  There was an animal dermatologist, an animal hospital, and a place to buy natural pet-food. There were home decor stores, a kitchenware store, a toy store, a rocks and minerals store. There were two travel stores: The Savvy Traveler and Rick Steves's Europe Through the Back Door.  There was a store that sold new books, but the one that sold used books was holding a closeout sale and was due to be replaced by a sushi bar.  There was a print shop, a dry cleaner, a consignment store, an optometrist, an audiologist, a pharmacy, a mortuary, a construction company, a place that sold flooring, a machine center, an auto repair shop.  There was Christopher Framing and Gallery, Aria Studio and Gallery, Christina's, Art Gallery North, Zinc, the Cascade Art Museum, and Cole Gallery.  There were several art studios and jewelry workshops, and the Papery and the Art Spot offered art supplies.  The Edmonds Theater featured recently-released movies. There were eight banks and multiple lawyers' offices, real estate offices, insurance offices, and offices for financial planners and tax consultants.  The town was brighter, more beckoning, the old gem getting regular polishing from business and municipal leaders who did so want it to be loved.  In the central business section, public walkways and business interiors had been made wheelchair accessible.  At 5th and Main, seven towering pin oaks provided an arboretum of shade in the spring and summer, feuille morte pangs of beauty in the fall.  Volunteers cleaned the beach and the streets, bright red, blue, or green umbrellas could be borrowed from streetside bins to fend off rain showers, and a new public restroom was available on 5th north of the fountain.  Murals, officially sanctioned and commissioned graffiti painted by sublimating Kilroys seeking to express their version of the beach town's zeitgeist, were scattered throughout the business district: an impressionistic sunset with a white sailboat adrift in a sea of orange, blue, and black streaks reflected through striated wisps of cirrus clouds, Bunyanesque lumberjacks superimposed on a clearcut hillside, an anthropomorphic leviathan ferry boat swallowing cars as the whale might have Jonah, a pathos-laden rendering of a rusting, peeling tugboat, a shaken-snowglobe flurry of huge wet snowflakes falling on bundled-up winter visitors to the fishing pier, a glimpse through wispy leafless alders of a white-blue Sea with a low bank of light clouds clinging to it beneath a butterscotch sky, a surrealistic Main Street scene juxtaposing a contemporary SUV parked in front of the Edmonds Theater behind a '40s woody station wagon with continental kit parked in front of a 5 and 10 cent store.  From early spring to late fall stuffed flower baskets, dazzling densities of purple, orange and red blossoms, hung from street poles.  At every corner, concrete planters overflowed with an eclectic mixture of dense green shrubs and brightly blooming annuals.  At night, lights strung from fascia boards fostered a festive feeling.

The town offered its residents much more than movies for entertainment.  The community no longer rallied around high school sports, but the Edmonds Boys' and Girls' Club and the Edmonds Youth Club provided a multitude of organized activities for kids of all ages and genders.  Although the Old Settlers' Picnic was now attended only by a tottering few, the 4th of July Parade, minus the softball games, still drew large crowds, as did the lighting of the Christmas tree.  But there were so many more community events, blends of commerce, entertainment, and culture, that drew people out of their condos and hillside homes.  There was the Waterfront Festival with its rides and games, the Scarecrow Fest with imaginative effigies scattered all over town, the Haunted Museum, the Trick-or-Treating Event with hundreds of joyful identity thieves--from Frozen Princesses to male transvestites--clotting the streets in a crush of  colorful costumes, the Edmonds Jazz Connection Festival, the Classic Car Show, Heritage Day.  There were pétanque tournaments at Civic Field.  Every three weeks there was a Thursday evening Art Walk among galleries luring patrons with wine, appetizers, and music. Throughout the year the Driftwood Theater on Main above 9th offered plays featuring local amateur actors.  The refurbished old high school building at 4th and Daley was now the Edmonds Center for the Arts, its balconied auditorium providing a home for the local Cascade Symphony and a venue for traveling jazz, pop, and folk artists.  During the summer there were Sunday afternoon concerts in the City Park and lunchtime performances by live music groups at Old Milltown's Hazel Miller Plaza.  There was the Saturday Summer Market, scores of canopied booths on a blocked-off section from 6th and Bell to 5th and Main, featuring local artisanal food products--humanely raised beef, chicken, and pork, free-range eggs, organic produce, troll-caught fish, gluten-free baked goods--and handicrafts.  Hundreds of shoppers questing an authenticity and purity and community not to be found in supermarkets, or even Trader Joe's in Lynnwood or Whole Foods further out in Alderwood, happily Alphonsed and Gastoned  each other while traipsing and snacking and filling their reusable bags, street musicians--here a bluegrass band, there a flautist--further elevating their moods.  Biggest of all were the annual Edmonds Arts Festival at the Anderson Center and the Taste of Edmonds at Civic Field, three-day-weekend affairs to which out-of-towners descended by the thousands.

Emerson transcendently declared that every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.  John Muir, when he gazed upon El Capitan, sensed the presence of a spirit with which he could become one, as did Thoreau when he mused upon Walden Pond.  The old man, beholding the Bowl poignantly mid-way as the ferry shuddered back to Edmonds from Kingston, looking down and up all the streets, all the days, cherishing both what he saw and remembered, seeing no green light, sensing no spirit, no oversoul, no Platonic realm of fixed perfection, thought instead of bouncing, swerving, transmigrating atoms, hooking up, breaking apart, a ceaseless, mindless, accidental process of creation and destruction which not even the fittest, most adamantine, could survive, himself, his town, this world, this universe in flux, Sea, trees, clouds, rain.

 [I think I need to see this grave new world.  Solveig]