Tag Archives: memories

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: My Mother and My Daughter

Mom and meMy mother would be 102 years old today, which speaks to a) how very old I am, and b) how uncommonly old she was when she and my father had me. I was born at the end of the Baby Boom, when most couples in their early-forties were done having children. Mom always worried that she would be too old to be a good mother to me, whatever that might have meant. She shouldn’t have worried. She was a wonderful mother — caring, involved, just intrusive enough to make me feel loved without being so intrusive that I felt smothered.

I’ve written about her before in this space, touching on her intellect, her curiosity, her love of the arts, her passion for travel, her warmth and humor and beauty and wisdom. We lost her far too early, to a cancer that today’s patients tolerate with relative ease. My father, who worshipped her and shared over fifty years of his life with her, couldn’t survive long without her. Within fifteen months of her death, he was gone, too.

I miss them both every day, and think about them constantly. I have thought for many years that I was too young to lose both parents.

Okay, this is about to get a little strange . . . .

I am not a religious person, and even if I were, my faith does not believe in heaven or an afterlife. Rather, my faith focuses on this life, on doing good deeds and living honorably in our time on this earth.

But since losing our older daughter, I have come to think about such things somewhat differently. I still don’t put stock in notions of heaven and hell. I do choose to believe, though, that even after the body dies, the spirit lives on. Alex was too brilliant a light for a simple illness, no matter how virulent and cruel, to extinguish. For that matter, so were my mother and father; so was my brother.

And so, I choose to believe that Alex is with her grandmother and grandfather now. That my mom and dad, and also my brother Bill, are taking care of her, helping a too-young soul cope with whatever place they are in. Alex never really knew her Gram. She only knew Grampsie as a toddler. She and Uncle Bubba were incredibly close. But they are all family, and they are together now, loving one another, comforting one another.

I choose to imagine my mother reveling in the company of this grandchild she only met as an infant, getting to know the intelligent, confident, funny, powerful, courageous young woman she became. I can hear them laughing together. I can imagine them speaking of books and art, travel and good food. They shared so many interests — they would have so much to discuss! I expect they would poke some fun at me. I know Alex would speak glowingly to her — to all of them — of her amazing younger sister, whom neither of my parents ever met.

This is how I choose to mark Mom’s birthday this year. The thought comforts me, even as it stings my eyes and blurs my vision.

Happy birthday, Mom. Take care of Alex for us. I love you.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: The Tyranny of Clocks and Calendars

Many years ago — more than a decade, which boggles my mind just a little — Nancy, Erin, and I went down to Monteverde, Costa Rica, to visit Alex, who was taking the first semester of her junior year in high school at the Cloud Forest School (offering us an early glimpse of the adventuresome nature and wanderlust that would define her too-brief life; she would later spend half of her university sophomore year in Berlin, and all of her junior year in Madrid.)

Our family in Monteverde, Costa Rica, November 2011.
Our family in Monteverde, Costa Rica, November 2011.

Our visit, which coincided with the (U.S.) Thanksgiving holiday, was fun and fascinating, despite near constant rain. We saw a ton of cool birds, ate amazing local foods, went on gorgeous hikes, and, of course, had great family time. We also spent one memorable morning doing a zip line tour of the rain forest. (Yes, I am slowly but surely closing in on today’s topic . . . .) It was a damp, warm day. Rain showers drifted through the area, but the air was still. The zip line course zig-zagged through an extensive, unbroken tract of rain forest.

The longest leg of the zip course was a full kilometer long, and when my turn came to take on that segment of the journey, I’ll admit to being just a little intimidated. That didn’t last long. I climbed into the harness, remembered the lessons we’d been given for slowing and braking, and allowed our guides to launch me.

Costa Rica RainforestWithin moments, I was gliding over lush rain forest, surrounded by a ghostly mist, utterly alone, and, it seemed, in a cocoon of sensation — birds called from the green below me, the air was redolent with the sweet scents of rain and earth and forest decay, mist cooled my face, the green of the damp foliage was so brilliant as to appear unreal. Time fell away. Yes, I was moving. But to this day, I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to float through that segment of the course. It could have been mere seconds. It could have been hours. It didn’t matter. For the purposes of that experience, time meant nothing to me. I had escaped the tyranny of clocks and calendars.

Yes, the tyranny of clocks and calendars.

Human existence has always been governed by the passage of time — the cycle of days, the changing of the seasons, the aging of our bodies. But clocks are relatively new to the human experience and the demand that we live our lives according to timetables, schedules, and deadlines is newer still. Leisure, I would argue, is our attempt to step away from segmented time, whether we are engaging in a favorite hobby, or traveling to some far off land for a vacation. People speak often of “losing track of time.” This can be offered as an excuse, a way to explain a deadline missed or a late arrival to an important meeting. But it can often also be said in a happier context. “I was so absorbed in what I was doing, I totally lost track of the time.” It’s a glorious feeling, one we seek to replicate whenever we can.

Perhaps I am more conscious now of the preciousness of time, the need to enjoy our hours, our days, our years. They are treasures, not to be frittered away carelessly, not to be spent only on things as trivial as work and Zoom calls and chores. Because they can be taken from us without warning. The Beatles had it wrong, I am sorry to say. Money can, in fact, buy us love. But it can’t buy us time.

The four of us used to go to the beach for a week each summer — the North Carolina coast near Wilmington. We would arrive on Saturday afternoon, do a massive grocery shop, claim our rooms in the house (often a fraught process for the girls . . . .), and then go our separate ways until dinner time. I would always head down to the shore and sit watching the surf and birds and the play of golden late-afternoon light on the water. And I would feel the tension draining from my body, being wicked away by the sand. The sweep hand on my watch would lose its power over me, to be replaced by the advance and retreat of the waves. And I would revel in the anticipation of the glorious week to come, during which our days would be measured solely by the ebb and flow of tides and the arc of the sun.

I get this a bit with my daily morning walks. I walk roughly the same track each day, and I know how long it takes me. Even if I stop to look at the occasional hawk or thrush, the duration of the walk doesn’t change very much. And so, I don’t worry about the time. For those few miles, my only task is to walk, and to let my mind go where it will. Some days I think about my daughters, others find me working through plot lines, and still others I spend obsessing over politics or some issue with a friend or family member. And every so often, my mind wanders in ways I can’t anticipate and can barely track.

My point, I suppose, is that we need to escape those temporal tyrants I mentioned earlier. Even if we can’t afford to go on a vacation — because of time constraints or financial ones — and even if we have to measure the breaks we take in minutes or, if we’re fortunate, hours, we can still set aside a small portion of our day to step away from datebooks and timestamps. It’s worth the effort. Just remember to put your Apple watch and cell phone somewhere you can’t see or hear them.

Have a great week, or enjoy a period of time of your own choosing . . . .

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: The Power of Dates, the Power of Memory

Alex Today is the 22nd of January. It’s been exactly three months since our older daughter passed away.

I didn’t used to care about the 22nd of any month (my apologies to those with a birthday on one 22nd or another — nothing personal). Now, I can’t help but notice every one.

I have a head for dates. Maybe it’s a byproduct of having been trained as a historian; I don’t know. Many, many years ago, on a June 5th in the 1980s, I think, my father told me that day was the anniversary of his first date with my mom. I have remembered this ever since, and on that day, I find myself thinking of them, of how cute they were together, of the different silly ways they expressed their love.

Some in our family have made things a little easier in the date-remembering regard. My grandmother on my father’s side, who adored my mother 99% of the time, died on my mom’s birthday. Coincidence? Perhaps. A final act of passive aggression from a mother-in-law? Also possible. And so maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that my mother died on the birthday of my brother’s wife, whom she adored. Yeah, that coincidence thing is looking a little less likely now, isn’t it . . . ?

I know — I’m bouncing all over in this post. I started off with a very somber remembrance of my lost, beloved daughter, and now I’m cracking wise about mothers-in-law. Grief and humor. To my mind, we can’t survive the former without the latter. And, the fact is, speaking as a creator, while death is often tragic, it can also be a wonderful source for cathartic humor. Have you ever seen the Chuckles-the-Clown funeral episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show? If not, do yourself a favor and watch it. Brilliant stuff.

As I said before, I have a mind for dates. But we also live in a society that remembers. December 7, 1941. November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001. Specific dates insinuate themselves into our lives, taking on significance in a variety of ways. Birthdays of family and friends, wedding anniversaries, days of loss, days of joy. I made the mistake once, when setting up my LinkedIn account, of choosing a date on which I began my writing career. I don’t know if it’s the right one. The site asked, I remembered the month and year, and so I threw in a day. Now, I get flooded with work anniversary notifications from LinkedIn on a date that has absolutely no significance for me.

At times, if, say, I’m on a highway and I see an accident by the side of the road, I can’t help but think that, for the people involved, this will forever after be “the day of the accident.” A weird way of thinking, I suppose. It’s my writer brain. There is a story there, a spiral leading to the crash, and then continuing beyond it into the aftermath. The accident might have been the result of random chance occurrences, but we are creatures of narrative, and it’s quite possible that in the minds of the accident victims, those random occurrences will, in hindsight, rightly or wrongly, be seen as a storyline of interconnected events.

Sometimes events become confused by perspective. I remember the day (and time) on which Alex informed us of her cancer diagnosis. But she actually needed a couple of days after that fateful conversation with her oncologist before she could tell Nancy and me. So the actual date of the diagnosis itself is not the day I remember. It doesn’t matter in any way. And yet, the dates themselves, and the very existence of that small gap, carries significance. It is a symptom of her fierce independence and her desire, even under those extraordinary circumstances, to protect us, to deliver this painful news with her composure intact, so that she could put on a brave face and thus cushion the blow a little.

Dates tell a story.

I have no greater point. Not really. I call these posts musings for a reason. It’s the 22nd, and this is what I’m pondering today.

I will close on a more positive note, however, and in doing so will echo my father. Of course I remember my wedding anniversary, and the anniversary of Nancy and my engagement. But I also recall, and always remark upon, the anniversary of our first date. Sort of. We had two first dates, as it happened. The first didn’t take. The second one, the one that counts, was February 24, 1989. Yes, there’s a story there as well. Another time, perhaps.

Have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: The Hypothetical Musings of a Hypothetical Stoner, Offered Hypothetically…

This will come as a surprise to none of you, but I was a stoner when I was in high school. And college. And for a good part of graduate school. I am fine with revealing this, because, while I am not a lawyer, I am pretty certain that the statute of limitations has long since run out on my youthful indiscretions. Although . . . . Okay, I checked and I’m good. Turns out being old is good for something.

Grateful Dead bearAs I say, if you know me, you probably don’t find this surprising. I have spoken and written about my love of the Grateful Dead, my experiences shivering outside on cold nights, in the dark of Providence, Rhode Island winters, waiting at the Providence Civic Center for Dead tickets to go on sale. People don’t do that unless they have already done damage to their prefrontal cortex. I could tell additional stories. It is possible that I (and select others) was (were) high during at least one musical performance that we gave while in college. I might remember playing Cat Stevens’s hit “Wild World” and literally watching my digital dexterity degrade over the course of the song.

I did other, stupider things while high as well. I don’t feel any great need to share them with you. I have been, for many years now, a respected figure in the realm of fantasy literature. I see no need to undermine that standing by telling you about the summer when I was a counselor at a sleep-away camp, and how a colleague and I, soaring (figuratively) at about 30,000 feet, were found by the camp’s owner raiding the main kitchen at about 10:00 at night. My friend, too high to engage with Mike, the aforementioned owner, went about making his sandwich, leaving it to me to try and keep us from getting fired. Mike asked what we had been up to that night. (We were both off duty for the night — in all seriousness, we would NEVER have been high while responsible for the well-being of our campers. We were young and stupid and careless, but not THAT stupid and definitely not THAT careless.) Before I could answer, I realized that Mike had turned his attention to my friend. I did the same. My friend was now trying to put mustard on his sandwich, but had forgotten to open the spout at the top. And he was squeezing the bottle really hard. Until the top literally blew off the bottle, skittered across the table, and fell onto the floor, leaving a deluge of yellow mustard pooling on what had been, I’m sure, a sandwich with great potential. I turned back to Mike, and managed to say with a straight face, “Not much. Just hanging out.”

It wasn’t all fun and silliness. Nearly forty years ago, I was cited for possession by a California state trooper. I won’t go into the details except to say the following: 1) I was with my brother, Jim, who was never a user; 2) I was completely unable to lie to the cop — my cheek started twitching at the mere thought of it, proving once and for all that I had no future in politics — and so I just admitted I was carrying. I also made sure the trooper knew that Jim didn’t smoke and had no idea I had any weed with me; 3) under California law, possession for personal use was equivalent to a traffic ticket. I paid a fine and that was it. Things would have been much worse for me in pretty much any other state; and 4) I got a great story out of it.

I mentioned up front that I smoked pot through only part of grad school. I stopped not long after I started dating Nancy, because she wasn’t really into it. That said, the last time I got high I did so with her, at a Dead concert she and I went to with friends who gave us the tickets as a wedding present. That was in June 1991.

Why am I sharing all of this with you? Well, it is possible, in theory, that I might have recently started getting high again. If this were the case, it would be something I was doing VERY infrequently. But it would also, in theory, be something I was enjoying, sort of like visiting an old haunt for the first time in years. If any of this were true, I might be able to tell you that today’s pot is NOTHING like the stuff I allegedly smoked as a youngster. It is WAY stronger. I mean wow! (Hypothetically speaking.) A person who had in fact started smoking again (just a very, very little bit) would know this from personal experience, from the hazed memories of what once was and from theoretical knowledge of what might now hypothetically be. Got that?

In any case, all of this might or might not be something I’ve been musing about recently. I hope you have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Checking In and Saying Thanks

It’s been a little over three weeks since Alex, our older daughter, lost her two and a half year battle with cancer. It feels like more. It feels like less.

We have had celebrations of her life in New York City and in our little home town in Tennessee. Both were crowded and loud and fun. Both were filled with laughter and tears, music and good food, and lots and lots of remembrances of our brilliant, funny, beautiful child. (Yes, she was 28. Still, she will always be our child, our first baby, our darling little girl.) We have been overwhelmed by the love shown us by friends and family near and distant. By the generosity — spiritual, emotional, material — of so many. Cards, gifts, flowers, food, phone calls, and texts. And yes, comments by the hundreds on social media posts. We are humbled and grateful beyond words for every expression of support and sympathy. Thank you a thousand times.

At this point, the celebrations of her life are over. Guests from out of town have left. Erin has gone back home. Nancy is starting to work again, and I am gearing up to do the same. We are, I suppose, stepping back into “normal” life. Except there is nothing normal about it, and in ways that truly matter, in ways that will remain with us for the rest of our lives, it will never really be normal at all, ever again.

How do we navigate this path? I honestly don’t know. It’s a terrible cliché, but I guess we do so one day at a time, one moment at a time, one breath at a time. In and out. Take a step. And breathe again. Rinse, repeat.

It’s a good thought, I suppose. It feels inadequate to the task. Already, in just these few weeks, I have reached for my phone more times than I can count, intending to text Alex, or check for a text from her. I want desperately to hear her voice, to know once again the music of her laughter, to ask her questions about her work, or the new restaurant she’s tried out most recently, or the music she currently has on looped-play. And each time, reality kicks me in the gut.

I watch TV and am shocked by the number of times some character, on-screen or off, is said to have cancer. There is no escaping it. We hear news of a celebrity passing away — cancer again. News of lost children assaults us from all corners of the globe, wars claiming their collateral toll, gun violence here in the States stealing more innocent young lives. These tidings were always awful to hear, but they were abstract in some way. Anonymous. Not anymore. Children are lost. Parents grieve. We are members of a club no parent wants to join.

Alex’s death hit so many people so hard, and in one sense that was a product of her amazing personality, her magnetism. But I am wise enough to understand that there is far more to it than that. The outpouring of love and grief from her friends comes in part from the simple truth that, for many of them, she is the first of their contemporaries to die. Tragedy has breached their generational line far too soon, and they are shell-shocked. The outpouring of love and grief from our friends comes in part from the recognition that this is every parent’s nightmare. Losing one’s child is unthinkable, unimaginable, unendurable. It happens, of course. Too often, actually. That club has more members than we ever knew. Several have reached out to me to say so, and to offer support and guidance. But for so many, our loss is a terrifying echo of their deepest unspoken fear.

Another truth: After Alex’s diagnosis in March of 2021, I found myself imagining the worst all the time. I couldn’t stop myself. Therapy helped some, but not completely. I lived with the constant dread of this ending, with the unrelenting awareness of the odds against her, of the near inevitability of her decline. Unimaginable? Hardly.

These days, I’m often asked, “How are you doing?” I don’t know how to answer. My emotions are in constant flux. At times I feel okay, and I can see a way forward. Other times I feel numb. And still others I am as fragile as spring ice. One wrong step and I’ll shatter. This is normal, I know. Grief is not linear. It can’t be prescribed, and while breaking it down into stages might appear to clarify the maelstrom of feelings raging around me, the construct strikes me as artificial and less than helpful. I know better than to be seduced by those moments when I feel as though I have a handle on my loss. I sense that I will get there eventually, but I’m not there yet, and won’t be for a long time. I also know better than to panic when I feel out of control. That will pass as well.

The numbness, though — that bothers me. I want to feel. I want to weep for my child or laugh at a golden memory. I want to feel pain and love and loss and connection, because those keep my vision of Alex fresh and present. Numbness threatens oblivion. Numbness makes the loss seem complete, irretrievable — and that I don’t want. Not ever. Better to cry every day for the rest of my life than lose my hold on these emotions.

And so I stumble onward, trying to figure it all out, hurting and remembering and loving most of all. I don’t know when I will post again. Soon, I hope. I believe writing this has helped, and I am certain I will have more to write in the days, weeks, and months to come. Thank you for reading. Thank you for your sympathy and friendship, and also for your continued patience and respect of our privacy as we attempt to find our way.

Hug those you love.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings (On Tuesday): Feeling the Loss of Jimmy Buffett

Living And Dying In 3/4 Time, by Jimmy BuffettThe news of Jimmy Buffett’s death this past weekend, hit me surprisingly hard, and I am still trying to figure out why. Buffett, the “Roguish Bard of Island Escapism,” as the New York Times called him in an online obituary, was a strong musical presence in my life. I have been listening to his music for more than four decades, I own a bunch of his albums, and over the years I have learned to play many of his songs on my guitars (none of them is particularly difficult to master). But the truth is, if asked to name my top five or top ten or even top twenty-five favorite bands and musicians, he probably wouldn’t make it onto any of those lists. So why do I feel as though I’ve lost a friend?

As with so much of the music I listen to, I was introduced to Jimmy Buffett’s songs by my oldest brother, Bill. This was long before Buffett’s fans came to be known as “Parrot-Heads.” It was before the song “Margaritaville,” Buffett’s biggest hit, had even been written or released. There was certainly not yet a chain of restaurants named for the song. Buffett had yet to become a bestselling author, or a musical icon, or a billionaire, all of which he achieved over the course of his career.

This was back in the early 1970s, when he was still a rather obscure country musician, albeit one with a terrific sense of humor and a unique sound. Bill played me songs from albums titled A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean and Living and Dying in 3/4 Time. Some of the songs were irreverent and funny (“Why Don’t We Get Drunk” and “The Great Filling Station Holdup”), others were memorably beautiful (“Come Monday” and “He Went To Paris”) and still others were just plain fun to listen to. Buffett’s studio musicians, whom he dubbed “The Coral Reefer Band,” were skilled and versatile, feeling equally at home with country, rock, reggae, and ballads.

So, yes, I enjoyed his music. But his loss means more to me than that. I mentioned earlier that I play several of his songs on guitar. I have for decades. I regularly performed some of them in college, when I played with my dear friends Alan Goldberg and Amy (Linenthal) Halliday. We played “Sugar Trade,” a song Buffett wrote with James Taylor, and “Wonder Why We Ever Go Home,” yet another beautiful ballad.

During one memorable night in the student pub, Bill came down from Boston to see us play and to perform a few songs with me. Bill was a skilled harmonica player and had a band of his own that performed regularly in New England. He and I played “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” a song I usually played during my solo set. Bill had prepared meticulously for our set; I hadn’t. I messed up my accompaniment to his harmonica solo in the middle of the song, getting the rhythm wrong and forcing him to adjust on the fly. He was gracious about it, but to this day I can’t listen to “Son of a Son” without cringing at the memory.

Jimmy Buffett’s music, more than that of most artists, touched me personally. I associate it with family, with friendship, with some of the most wonderful memories of my college days, with the comfort and joy I still draw from playing my guitars and singing — for myself, for Nancy, for our daughters.

And for some reason, I remember with incredible clarity an evening when Bill was playing Jimmy Buffett music not only for me, but also for my mom and dad on the stereo in their living room. He put on a song called “God’s Own Drunk,” a song originally written by Lord Buckley that Buffett covered brilliantly on Living and Dying in 3/4 Time. It is actually a story more than a song, and it is spoken over a slow country blues. It tells the tale of a man who, while guarding his brother’s moonshine still, partakes of some powerful booze and then encounters a bear, “a Kodiak-lookin’ fella about nineteen feet tall . . . .” I remember my father and particularly my mother getting such a kick out of the song, and Bill looking so pleased to have made them laugh.

As I say, Buffett was a musician and songwriter whom I enjoyed and respected, even though I was never a fanatic, never a Parrot-Head. His music has been a golden thread through my life for more years than I care to count. I’ll miss him.

Have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings (On Tuesday): Our Family Trip

As I write this, we are winging our way back home after a week and a half in the mountains of Colorado, west of Colorado Springs. Nancy and I rented a house in a little town called Florissant, just a couple of miles from Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. Our younger daughter, Erin, who lives in Denver, joined us for the first weekend and then went back home for work. Nancy and I spent several days alone in the house, going on long hikes each morning and chilling on the back patio of the house each afternoon. On Tuesday, our older daughter, Alex, flew from New York to Denver to spend a couple of days with her sister, and then on Thursday the two of them drove back to Florissant to spend a long weekend with us.

We had a marvelous trip. Our visits with the girls were lovely and fun, filled with laughter and good conversations despite the difficulties we face as a family right now. We watched a ton of Women’s World Cup soccer. Nancy and the girls worked on a puzzle that proved nearly impossible, and finished it our last night in the house. (No, I didn’t help. I rarely do puzzles. I’m colorblind, and jigsaw puzzles are a particular brand of hell for those of us with that affliction.) We read. We enjoyed the hot tub that came with the house. We enjoyed a couple of meals out. We enjoyed many a home-cooked meal (learning the hard way that cooking rice at 8,700 feet is VERY different from cooking it at sea level, or 2,000 feet, or even 5,000 feet).

The hikes Nancy and I took during our days alone were gorgeous. We did a couple in the National Monument, walking through mountain meadows and groves of aspen and lodgepole pine. We did one spectacular hike on what’s known as The Crags Trail, in Pike National Forest. The hike started at 9,500 feet altitude and ended at 10,500 feet, atop a rocky dome with a 360 degree view of the Rockies. And we did a couple of beautiful walks in Mueller State Park, part of the terrific Colorado State Parks system. All told, we walked 25-30 miles in four days — nothing extraordinary, but enough to make us feel that we had explored the area thoroughly. Along the way we saw birds and coyotes, a palette of wildflowers and tons of lovely, albeit hard to identify, alpine butterflies.

The weather was great the entire week. Cool clear mornings, warm afternoons that were punctuated each day with dramatic thunderstorms, and cool nights. One evening, we watched a storm roll up the valley straight toward our house, forks of lightning dancing along ridge lines and illuminating the sky. Another day we had a hail-storm that dumped enough pea-sized pieces of ice on the patio to allow me to make a “snowball” or two.

As I say, things continue to be tough in our little world, and we don’t anticipate them getting much better, at least not anytime soon. But we still share a ton of love. We still know how to laugh and enjoy one another. And we can still appreciate the beauty and light of nature, of companionship, of family.

I return home feeling full, renewed, joyful and also bittersweet. Under the circumstances, I could hardly ask for more.

I wish you a wonderful week. Reach out to the people you love. Hold them near. Don’t wait to tell them how you feel about them.Our daughters Nancy atop the Crags View from the Crags Nancy and me Mountain view

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: Thunderstorm Memories

As I write this, a storm is moving in. The sky has turned an angry shade of purple-gray, and thunder rumbles frequently, close enough to reach me through windows closed against the oppressive heat, but far enough away that the house doesn’t yet tremble with each clash. The rising wind and first huge raindrops cool the air — welcome relief. Lightning flickers, and I hunger for the sweet, clean scent of ozone and fresh rain. I leave my computer to step outside for a few moments.

As a small child, I was frightened by thunder. I suppose most kids are. My father would come into my room during nighttime storms and sit with me, both of us counting the intervals between lightning flashes and thunder’s response. With his help, I overcame my fear and grew to love thunderstorms as much as he did. A gift. One among so many, more than I could possibly count.

Afternoon storms were a staple of Mid-Atlantic summers, reprieves from the hot and hazies of my native New York. We thought those days brutal, scorching. Little did we know what the future would hold for a climate-altered world. But I remember — as a boy and then a teen — going outside onto our front steps to watch storms roll in, much as I did just now. If my brother Jim was around, he would join me, and we would scan the sky, watching for forks of lightning, savoring the caress of splattered rain.

Years later, he and I would have a different sort of thunderstorm experience, in a cirque above tree line in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. We had planned a hiking trip into the backcountry, biting off far, far more than we could chew. Our first day of hiking was too strenuous for both of us — miles of steady, steep uphill walking, both of us carrying forty-plus pounds of gear on our backs. In the middle of the afternoon, storms rolled in, the Sierra Nevada sky churning. We had no choice but to take shelter, though by that point we were surrounded by low, stunted pines, huge boulders, snowfields, and little else. We got soaked, decided to make camp there so we could dry out. But as night fell, more storms moved in, and one of the cells settled directly over our campsite. Roars of thunder followed right on the heels of brilliant flares of lightning. And we huddled in a tent — one of those old ones, held up by metal poles. Frankly, we were fortunate to survive the night. We woke up to fog, fresh snow, and temperatures way less than half what they’d been when we left our car the previous morning.

Nancy grew up on a dairy just outside of Boise, Idaho, and we still go back to the Boise area to visit her dad, her brothers, and our nieces and nephews. That part of Idaho is essentially sagebrush desert reclaimed through irrigation, and though mountain ranges loom in the distance, much of the landscape between Boise and the Snake River is flat. So when thunderstorms move through the area, there is nothing to mute the sound or block one’s view. Miles from where one stands, daggers of lightning stab the terrain. And thirty or forty seconds might pass before thunder growls in reply, an afterthought, surprisingly clear and loud.

Shortly before Nancy and I left California to move to Tennessee, we paid one last visit to Yosemite National Park, one of our favorite places. It was a gorgeous early summer day, and though we’d made a point of going in the middle of the week, the park was still unbelievably crowded, as it usually is. We spent a little time in Yosemite Valley, but the crowds were worst there, so we passed most of the day in the higher elevations around Tuolumne Meadows, an area of dramatic mountain vistas, deep evergreen forests, and rolling alpine meadows. As is the theme of this post, a series of thunderstorms rampaged through the park that day, bringing high winds, pelting rain, and a fusillade of grape-sized hail that I feared would shatter the windshield of my old Toyota Corolla. I didn’t have much experience with hail at that point in my life, and in the middle of the storm, curious and foolish, I opened the car door (we were parked at a viewpoint) and stuck my hand out. The little buggers hurt, and when I said “Ow!” Nancy looked at me as if I was the dumbest guy on the planet and just said, “Well, yeah.”

There have been lots of other storms of course. When we reached Tennessee, we realized that thunderstorms are different in the Southeast. Some spring and summer nights, the sky flashes continuously for hours at a time, and thunder claps are so frequent they overlap to form an unceasing grumble. I’ve never experienced this anywhere else. It’s one of my favorite things about living here.

The storm that began as I started writing this has continued. Rain still falls, the sky glimmers and thunder echoes across the hollow in which we live. But the hummingbirds are feeding again, so maybe they sense fairer skies heading this way.

I wish you a week of cooling rains, dramatic skies, and fair winds.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: Reflections on College Graduation Weekend

This weekend, Nancy, as acting president of the university here, is presiding over her second, and last, college graduation. In July, a new president (or Vice Chancellor, as the president here is known) will take over, and Nancy will begin transitioning back to normal life. I look forward to her having more time, to her sleeping better, to her not carrying the weight of the world — or at least this entire little college town — on her shoulders.

But as we go to one graduation event after another — her as the Big Kahuna, me as her Arm Candy — I have been thinking back on my own college graduation, which took place nearly four decades (!) ago. I have incredibly fond memories of my college years, and of that weekend in particular, and yet I also remember my final days at Brown as deeply bittersweet. I find myself regarding this year’s crop of graduates with a blend of envy and sympathy.

Envy because they are all so young — no cholesterol medications or morning muscle aches or worries about the latest IRA statements from beleaguered brokerage houses for them! It’s a cliché, but it’s true: They have their whole lives ahead of them. They can go anywhere, do anything. Or at least they think they can, which is really the part that matters.

The sympathy, though — that’s where my thoughts have settled today. Because while I reject entirely the notion that “these are the best years of their lives,” I do acknowledge that they are saying goodbye to a unique and glorious interlude in their lives.

There is lots of debate in education circles these days about the necessity of a four-year, liberal arts education. Many believe — perhaps with some justification — that the traditional college experience isn’t for everyone, and that by trying to force every 18-year-old onto that path we do a disservice to many. On the other hand, I reject the notion that liberal arts education per se is impractical, that it doesn’t prepare young adults for “the real world.” Quite the contrary. A liberal arts education teaches us to analyze, to question, to write, and to read critically. Put another way, it teaches us to think. Has there ever been a time in our history when we are more in need of an intellectually engaged, critically thinking populace?

For four years, we encourage our young people to dive into knowledge, to dabble in lots of disciplines and learn broadly, or to immerse themselves in one discipline that fascinates them, building expertise that they can draw upon throughout their lives. Ideally, most students will do both. Where — where — is the harm in taking four years out of a long life and devoting it to scholarship, to exercising the mind?

Of course, the four-year residential college experience is about far more than what happens in the classroom and the library carrel. It is a time of community, a time when kids build lifelong friendships. It is also a time of frivolity, of excess, of varying degrees of debauchery. Living in a college town, it’s sometimes hard to remind myself that I was no better at that age, no less self-involved, no less debauched. And I certainly understand those who would say, looking at the totality of higher education, that students need more practical education and less of the “Animal House.”

And yet . . . .

We spend the bulk of our lives, from the time we leave college, to the time we are finally able to retire (if we ever are), running at eighty miles per hour — getting a job, getting a promotion, building a career (or two, or three), perhaps building a life with someone, paying a mortgage or rent, perhaps having kids, perhaps paying for all the things kids need and want and do and getting our kids through a college experience of their own, saving for retirement, caring for our parents as they slide into their elder years, etc., etc., etc.

Most of us would probably love to hit the pause button in the middle of all that, maybe at the age of 40 or even 50, and go to college THEN. Four years of learning, of allowing our minds to roam and expand and explore. Four years of hanging out and getting high and listening to music and meeting new people, of going to parties and sleeping late and setting our own schedules. Youth, as the saying goes, is wasted on the young . . . .

My point, though, is this: There is no way most of us can take time out from our lives and do the college thing midstream. (If you can, more power to you! Go for it!) And so I would ask if it’s really such a bad idea to offer that experience to our young adults as they prepare for their life journey. Sure, overindulgence in college life is a thing. It has been for a long, long time. But there is value in the intellectual journey offered by higher education. I still draw upon my education on a daily basis — not merely the stuff I learned, but, far more importantly, the analytical and heuristic skills I honed. There is certainly value in the interpersonal connections that come with the residential college experience. I am 38 years removed from my college graduation, and most of my best friends in the world are still the people with whom I went to Brown.

I understand that all I have written thus far comes from a place of privilege. I went to college because my parents could afford to send me to college. My kids went to college because Nancy and I could afford to send them. The price of higher education is prohibitive for too many students, and too many of those who do matriculate are saddled with unconscionable levels of debt upon graduating. And, of course, the economic burdens of higher education fall disproportionately on people of color.

I also understand that the cost of higher education has spiraled beyond what many believe is reasonable. When one year of college, including tuition, books, room, and meals, costs $50,000 or $60,000, something is out of whack. Sending a child to a four-year college shouldn’t set a family back nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

But the answer to this is not to turn our backs on higher education. Rather we need to put a liberal arts education within reach of all families and all students, regardless of economic status. This means that institutions of higher learning need to find ways to cut costs and control their spending. And it means we need to reconsider public policy with respect to higher education. We think nothing of giving tax breaks to multinational corporations for, well, just about everything. Why shouldn’t we make college tuition affordable for all. We could do it through tax credits (not just deductions). We have the means; we simply need the will, the political courage, the understanding that education has value, not just for individuals, but for society itself, and for the entire economy.

That’s where my thoughts are this weekend, as the university in our little town sends another cohort of graduates out into a demanding world.

I hope you have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: Missing a Missing Friend

We lived in Australia for a year back in the mid 2000s, when our daughters were in primary school. Alex, the older one, turned 11 while we were there. Erin turned 7. Both girls were already swimming competitively here at home when we went Down Under, and so we found a swim league that was affiliated with the university where Nancy was taking her sabbatical.

Early on in our time with the league we were befriended by a family who volunteered to help run the weekly swim practices, and who had a daughter who swam with our girls. Graham and Dianna — Di — were friendly, funny, and so incredibly welcoming to us. Laura, their only child, was a couple of years older than Alex, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. She loved our kids and she was great with them.

The first place we lived that year in Australia was near the university and near the school the girls attended, but our lease there was only for about half our stay, and we were set to move after the Christmas holiday. At our last swim event before the break, I was chatting with Graham, and he asked me what we had in mind for our holiday.

“Well, we’ll be traveling a bit, and then we need to move to a new place.”

“Oh, where are you moving to?”

“Up the coast a bit to Woonona.”

“Really? We live in Woonona. What’s the address?”

I told him, and he laughed. “That’s right around the corner from us.”

When we became neighbors, Alex and Laura began to spend a ton of time together, and their friendship brought our families even closer. Like me, Graham was an avid photographer, and also a guitar player. In fact, he lent me his guitar for the rest of our stay. We had meals with them, we went on day trips, we still went to swim of course. Graham and I became close friends. Near the end of our stay in Australia, we all went to the Warrumbungles, a mountain wilderness in New South Wales, north and west of Woonona. It was beautiful, and our two families had a marvelous week together, hiking, sightseeing, cooking, hanging out in the evenings.

Graham and DiGraham was incredibly generous, kind, whip-smart, fierce in his devotion to Di and Laura, and one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. He and Di were both school teachers, both utterly devoted to education, to serving their schools and communities. They were active in their unions. They were political. They loved nature, loved good food and good drink. They were, in short, a lot like us. We knew that we wanted to maintain our friendship after our return to the States. And we did. The following summer Graham, Di, and Laura came to the States for their winter holiday (Southern Hemisphere and all that) and stayed with us for several days. Another great visit. We had tons of fun, but Graham and I also spent a good deal of time talking. He had just lost his father, something I went through a decade earlier. I can honestly say that even though we were now living literally half a world apart, our friendship had only deepened.

We chatted via Skype regularly, we messaged via social media all the time. We compared notes every time one of us updated his collection of camera equipment. When we lost my brother Bill, in the summer of 2017, he of course offered his love and support.

Only a few months later, Laura sent me a message that devastated all of us. Earlier that day, Graham had died suddenly. A heart attack. Totally unexpected. A thunderbolt. I felt like I had lost another brother. To this day, I miss him all the time. The loss remains raw and painful all these years later.

Graham would have been 63 this past Saturday. Yes, on April 1, and don’t think he didn’t make the most of having been born on April Fools’ Day.

We visited Di and Laura and Laura’s partner, Brad, in 2019, while we were in Australia to see Erin, who had taken a semester there. We had a fabulous visit — conversation, laughter, great meals, a couple of hikes. There was nothing maudlin about our time together. But Graham hovered over everything we did.

It is the most painful of clichés that we don’t know what life has in store for us or the people we love. With my brother’s death, and with the planning for his memorial, which occurred only a couple of weeks before Graham died, I had been out of touch with Graham for a little while when he passed. My fault entirely, although he would have understood. But I have thought about him a lot recently because the second book in my upcoming series is set in Australia, and it is dedicated to Graham, as well as to Di and Laura. And I have long wished for one more chance to chat with Graham, to share something funny or tell him about a recent photo shoot. So instead, I am going to take some time today to reach out to other friends, people I haven’t spoken or written to in a little while, people I miss.

Because we never know.

Have a wonderful week.