A Moment to Remember

My friends at work got together and did the most wonderful thing: they chipped in and made a donation on Mom's behalf to the Cat Adoption Team. They are making a cage plaque in her honor and it will be in display soon...I'll get pictures as soon as it is ready.

Still gathering photos and written pieces for Mom's Memorial Scrapbook, and I wanted to share the following from cousin Paul, as it has moved me to tears countless times already.

Thank you, Paul.

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If you took away the trips to Cooper Mountain when we were kids – the long Saturdays at Jeanne and Bill's spent running on forest trails and catching snakes all day, then sitting around a campfire at night watching the grown-ups play guitars and sing – I would not be who I am today. I would not have the same reservoir of gratitude for the simple things that allows me to face life’s trials with patience and understanding. In so many ways, it was a magical place and time. Only in retrospect do I really appreciate and understand how much my Aunt and Uncle had to do with it. I can see now how they never got in the way of our adventures. They made it easy. Their love and humor and steady presence as a tandem was a given. And somehow they seemed to personify the timeless, peaceful nature of that little cottage on the hilltop and the evolving A-frame house being built weekend to weekend, summer to summer, far away from what the world was becoming and now is.

To this day, I cling mightily to those memories, to the spirit of Jeanne and Bill's.

We would eagerly climb into our crusty station wagon early Saturday morning, John and I using our jackets to hide big jars with holes in the lid, anticipating the snakes we’d sneak home later in the trunk. We’d pass through the tunnel from downtown Portland towards Beaverton where the city was quickly replaced by tall trees on either side of the highway like the parting of a giant green sea, our Dad the caffeine-powered Moses leading us to the Promised Land. We’d watch the houses dissolve away into acres of country grass and blackberry bushes lining long roads with numbers in the two hundreds instead of 16th Avenue where we lived. We’d turn off the main drag and start winding up narrow two-lane roads through old-growth forest, then open fields and farms. The old graying barns were wonderful, especially the last one we’d see on our left opposite their bumpy, dirt driveway, a majestic structure in an auburn clearing which, if we were lucky, had an eagle or hawk perched at the apex.

And then, after bouncing up through the dust clouds and rows of rusting old trucks, we’d come to a gravelly stop on level ground with Jeanne and Bill and Jed standing on that little patio waving us in, the emissaries of Cooper Mountain.

I remember Jeanne's laugh and her penchant for the kind of slapstick humor that all kids love. She enjoyed having us around. She seemed to think that we were OK. And she didn't mind us running around her property like we owned the place. She would lean down to hug me and her long hair would seem to drape around me like a cocoon. She often wore thick, knitted sweaters which made her hugs even more cozy and then she’d say something funny to make me smile and send me on my way. Later on, she’d reintroduce us kids to the many cats that seemed to be everywhere because we’d forget their names – although somehow I never seemed to forget Moriarity and Blue-Cat. We never feared a reprimand from Aunt Jeanne. Her voice was soothing and playful and genuine. I can see now a similarity in all my mother’s sisters: a maternal instinct and confident resolve that wraps you up and makes you feel loved and protected. And like her husband, she possessed a quick wit that never assumed a lesser intellect from her audience. There is no better evidence to support Jeanne’s nurturing impact than her own child, Jedediah. I only wish we had grown up more together because Jed was the perfect reflection of his deeply unique parents from day one. I can’t remember him without that quirky sense of humor and appreciation for things mystical and fantastic. Jed was an only-child, relatively secluded with two very un-mainstream parents. It would be easy to think that he’d dig his heels in when four hyperactive cousins came piling out of a station wagon to run rampant all over his turf. But he never did. He was the coolest cousin in the world. And he still is.

Uncle Bill was always up to something – hammering, sawing, sketching out plans on the kitchen table with my father nodding in agreement. His tall, lanky, deceptively strong frame would fill the screened-doorway to that tiny kitchen where he’d enter from the adjacent garage through that mini-corridor with wood chips clinging to his wavy hair. His constant uniform: a dusty red and black plaid shirt tucked into faded jeans that wrinkled around his knees, then bunched up at his ankles over scuffed up work boots. His glasses would somehow come to rest at the tip of his angular nose and his breast pocket was always filled tightly with mangled notepads, pens, and for a long time, cigarettes. His weathered features and giant hands made him seem to me like a Brian Froud drawing come to life - appropriately so, given the myriad stacks of science fiction and fantasy books that seemed to emerge from every corner of that happily untidy house like ancient ruins. Years later, Uncle Bill would give me an amazing gift for Christmas which I still have and hope to display in my own home one day (when I can afford one): three framed lithographs of paintings by my favorite artist, Frank Frazetta. It was there at Jeanne and Bill’s that I first saw Frazetta’s art on the covers of Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs which I occasionally excavated from the paperback ziggurats in that tiny living room. Initially, I would just stare at the covers but eventually Uncle Bill would tell me about not just the artists who painted the covers but about the authors who wrote the books. So as I got older I would spend less time catching snakes and more time huddling in a dusty corner reading E.R.B. or J.R.R. Tolkien or Isaac Asimov or one of the hundreds of National Geographic magazines stacked in the cramped rooms upstairs which always held the additional promise of a hidden Playboy somewhere.

Jeanne and Bill created for themselves – and were gracious enough to share with us – a mystical environment where antique wood-carved gargoyles stood watch over Heavy Metal magazines and stacks of RC Cola. They had the vision and the belief in themselves and each other to secure their place on a hill in a forest, mostly isolated from (and untainted by) the modern comforts of city life – to attempt to build from the ground up the home of their dreams.

In a roundabout way, they have made it easier for us to believe in our own crazy dreams.

I hope that Jeanne knows this, her spirit now freed from the limits of this life. I hope she is now surrounded with warmth and color and sound like I remember on those Saturdays, the tall yellow grass and the green pine trees glowing in the early sun, the grasshoppers and butterflies and rusted cars, that fresh mountain air – the sounds of family, of children alive with wonder, of adults building, laughing, singing, planning and celebrating life. I hope she is at peace – and ready to receive her man when that time comes to be the tandem once again that stood strong for so long on that Mountain.