December 19, 2011
Matt, I’ve got something to show you. This warning from Costco. Let me read it. “Fresh Food Concepts is recalling Rojo’s Layer Dip because the guacamole might have Listeria Monocytogenes. Listeria is the leading call of deaths from food related bacteria.” How stupid is it to send a letter. By the time you read this you’re dead.
I know. I didn’t eat the dip.
I ate the stuff, I finished it. Wait, you knew what?
I got the phone call.
Phone call?
I didn’t tell you?
Tell me what?
That they called. I meant to. I told Sarah.
November 2, 2011
October 28, 2011
John didn’t wait for me this morning to ring his door bell. He strode right up to my car.
“Did you hear the helicopter? It flew over these fields this morning for almost two hours. They started at Pete’s house and covered he same territory we did. I thought you had something to do with it.”
“Didn’t hear a thing. I ate breakfast at 6 and went back to bed.”
“We won’t find out till next week why they were here. I don’t know if you know but our paper comes out only twice a week. I saw the pilot and two guys swooping back and forth above the telephone lines, right where we walked. They had to be looking for someone.”
“I wish they’d done that yesterday. I’m still pulling thorns out of my socks and clearing my throat of dust. So now what do we do? I was going to suggest we follow up on yesterday and walk the fields again.”
“If there was someone down there they would have seen him.”
And that’s how, heat and clockwork be damned, we ended up back at the water tower. I called Ken to check again on Pete’s last journal entry and it hadn’t changed. “He wrote he’s gonna test himself by walking to the water tower.” This time I parked not at the tower but below it and spied a distinct cairn trail. We followed the cairns back towards the mountains alternately talking ourselves in and out of believing they were Pete’s.
And, to repeat myself, that’s why this hunt is so aggravating. There are no declarative clues. Not a one. There is no right direction to go. Only theories, only sentences with question marks. Not to be too graphic but four months later we’re limited to nothing but guess work. No black spiral of birds, and nothing to smell. We have sight and that is it. I can’t even, in good faith, raise money to send Goose and his friend, John, down here. What would I tell them? Don’t look where I’ve looked even though he could have been five feet to my left or right. Go to the water tower because of a journal entry but disregard Sam’s advice about the scorching heat that week. Look for cairns in the desert because Pete has them in his yard, but ignore those in the nearby trailer park? Go north to the Test Site because a psychic told me to?
I didn’t expect to find Ken’s father when I decided to come here, but I’m very disappointed. As I said to Sam, “Other than happiness, I’ve never looked so hard for anything.”
The water tower from Pete’s neighborhood.
October 25, 2011
October 24, 2011
This seems like a nice place for all of us to work together. I’m posting photos of cairns because John Barnnard suggested that I look for them.That’s because outside of Peter’s house, on the perimeter, are cairns. Right now I’m about a half a mile above the water tower walking up a stream bed.
By the way I am posting from my phone using an application that works with WordPress so go easy on me. You know punctuation,literacy, all that stuff
May 4, 2011
“Matt, I had a physical today. I need a colonoscopy now, and every five years thanks to Peter, I’m gonna have that sleep study thing that you’ve been harping about, and I had a preliminary hearing test today.”
“Deaf?”
“They use a laptop. Is there anything that’s done without a computer nowadays? You put headphones on and hold a buzzer in your hand that you press every time you hear a sound.”
“Deaf?”
“The nurse ended the test before I pressed the button.”
“Deaf.”
March 29, 2011
“Adam told to write about the Ice Hotel and dipping into the frozen river with Marianne. He thinks I can develop a story that follows on one I’d already written about cold water swimming in Maine. Start there, weave into it last year’s obsession with White Pond, add a dash — am I mixing my metaphors? — of Québec City and voilà! the blog lives again. But I can’t because it’s so all about me. Mainecourse is full of what I see as my woe-is-me will I ever find happiness sob-stories. How do I write about stuff I’m doing without it being about stuff I’m doing?”
KO: “Write it in the third person.”
“You always say that. The third and I’m still me, I’d have to write in the sixth or seventh person.”
KO: “Breathe, Michael, breathe. First those stories aren’t as self centered as you think. Secondly, the third person gives you more freedom to play. You’ll have less obligation to stick to the truth.”
“Not that I do anyway.”
KO: “Not that you do anyway.”
Time passes and no new stories magically appear on this here blog so Adam offers less work: “Post a bowling photo and link it to the bowling movie — how hard does it have to be … ? Or do you fear the slippery slope of re-immersion & expectation … ?”
Bowling? Yeah, bowling. Compare our passion with Ralph Kramden’s and the “Hurricanes.” Maybe begin with Ralph yelling at Alice, “Hurry up with the eats, I’m going bowling,” because often at our table it’s something like, “Why’d we start dinner so late we’ve got to get bowling.”
“Pick an Oak,” was a toe dipper. Water’s warm. This next one could be a dive off Caroline’s pier, and if so, then I’d hope to have more than voyeurs. Here goes.
*****************************
In the depths of last summer’s humdrum, Matthew and friends chose Wednesday nights to meet at the “Drome,” the local candlepin (small bocce-like balls) alley down the street across from K-Mart and the only McDonalds in America to have gagged on its own grease and gone belly up. Why Wednesday? 1960s prices: A dollar a string and two bucks for a beer. Some nights Matt and his crowd commandeered multiple lanes, and he’d return home with stories of his high scores and near fistfights. I remembered my early competitive days bowling against my roommate, Jim McMahon, and later taking Matt and the foster kids to what was then called, “The Bowladrome.”
But this latest entry is not going to be about Candlepins and little balls, this one, or the upcoming one which I hope materializes, is about big balls, chainsaws, and ice.
*****************************
“Hey, Matt, I need an editor. Your mom’s gone and I have to have someone tell me I’m not embarrassing myself before I embarrass myself. I’d like to keep it in the family and you’re a writer. Will you read my latest attempt to get the blog rolling?”
“Sure, I’d like that.”
(Thought bubble : You’d like that? What, no, “Is this punishment for living in the same house with you?”)
Matt reads this while I burn an omelet with cheese, veggies and beans. I hear a snort and a laugh which I take as good signs. Then he looks up from his computer, “I like the way you say you’re going to write something and then you don’t.”
“Or that I act like I’m going to write about bowling but don’t? Or is it more like saying I’ll finish a job like the bathroom and then don’t?”
“ And, I’d take out the pick-an-oak sentence.”
“You mean I can’t publicly pressure people to help out here like they did in the old days?”
January 31, 2011
Matt’s back is to me as I enter the kitchen. He’s emptying the dishwasher and the sounds of our odd collection of plates banging into one another partly masks my entry from the hallway.
“Hey Matt”
He jumps but not high enough.
“WHAT,” he answers
“Marianne is taking me to a puppet show tonight in Boston.”
“Why not drive into a tree right now?”
“No, no. It’s an adult puppet show presented by socialists and anarchists.”
“Pick an oak.”
June 21, 2009
(For Jack Stewart Kibbe, 8 October 1929 – 5 June, 2009)
This isn’t one of Michael’s pithy, one paragraph obits, sorry. And it seems almost cruel, I’ll grant, to wake the blog from its cryogenic sleep to post of yet another death, but my father was a longtime (though silent) fan. He died at 79 a few Fridays ago, on my birthday (make that nearer 79.6575 – he was an engineer, after all … ). While a private man, I think he’d graciously accept this post and the regard of people he knew of only by association, through this site.
His was a rich and varied, well-lived life. The only son of a Fish & Wildlife fish cultuary, Jack was born in Deadwood, South Dakota, and lived with his parents, Ted & Myrtle across the upper midwest and later Albuquerque. As a young man he toyed with becoming a marine biologist but pursued engineering; after serving in Korea as a B29 mechanic, he finally got his engineering degree at UNM in Albuquerque (during which time he met & married my mother) and went to Venezuela still a young man to play with big toys – maintaining ore trains for U.S. Steel’s Orinoco Mining Company – and to explore a wild, young country. His wife, Betty, intrepidly brought the 5-month-old me from Albuquerque by herself to join him there, and 15 months later came a second son, Doug.
He freely shared this great adventure with us, in whom he instilled his fierce honor and abundant curiosity. He outfitted an army-surplus Willys jeep with a hard top for cargo and long-range gas tanks and we made expeditions grand and small. Both he and Betty were licensed to pilot a single-engine plane they co-owned with another couple, in which we flew to Angel Falls and remote fishing holes, landing many times on mere dirt strips or even open fields. Generating uncountable sweet stories, we stayed there 20+ years, during which time he took charge of building the world’s first non-polluting, natural gas, iron-ore-reducing plant.
He put me through Harvard, Doug through Embry-Riddle Aeronautical and into the Air Force, followed our careers and life-choices assiduously. He worked long and hard and with gusto, and retired in Albuquerque (kind of without meaning to) before 55. Traveled with Betty from there to many places, such as here for our wedding, to Moscow and the Pacific Line Islands, and plenty of places in between; before health issues reduced his roaming radius, but even then he spent most of his days out and about when he could.
The last 15 years or so they enjoyed a rambling adobe (once owned by Opus’ creator, Berkeley Breathed) in the western foothills of the Sandias, where Jack ate his breakfast every day in sight of the mountains and the hummingbirds. That house was full of his tinkerings, from tables built of picture frames, hand tools made from parts of other tools, and various a vista plumbing and wiring projects – just cutting to the chase, working within his diminishing physical limits using the undiminished mental creativity of a natural-born engineer. An inveterate planner, he even laid out in a seven-page letter every detail of what to do after his death — 9 years before it occurred; not least amongst what he left us.
From youth to death, the world fascinated him. Beside his chair were many books on insects and birds, elsewhere on marine life – he’d snorkeled many of the world’s oceans in their extensive travels. Binoculars and a telescope were everywhere, from windowsills to gloveboxes, be it for wildlife or weather, hot air balloons in the valley or fighter jets at the airport. He knew how stuff worked, or worked on finding out. He probably even knew more at a cell-tissue-level about his maladies than he let on to us …
His wasn’t an easy death, but he accepted it unflinchingly, having first set foot on that long, slow slope many years before we knew he’d begun. Perhaps even he was taken by surprise at the end by the swiftness, but we take that as a mercy. By a gift of grace we were given to be there, made the most of it; were open and generous with each other, released him with clarity and love. Goodbye, dad, and godspeed. Thank you for the gifts of my life and of your self. I immensely love you.
March 10, 2009
Lew’s photos from our night at the Acton Jazz Cafe.
username: Mark
password :Blofish
February 13, 2009
Last night our neighbors joined us for dinner. Mom was busy drinking Spanish wine leftover from the previous night’s guest but here she is last March.
