My favorite piece of clothing was a track jacket made by the North Face. I’m not sure why I liked it so much. It was little garish with bright orange zippers and burgundy and gray fabric. I bought it at Hoarding Marmot in Anchorage, the last thing I bought there. And I bought it a little too small and shed enough weight so that it fit well. Anyway, I lost it. I couldn’t believe it. This felt like the ultimate senior moment. I went back to a couple restaurants to ask if they had lost and found. No go.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I see my jacket on a guy walking down our street with a dog and friend. It’s raining pretty hard, but I run to catch up to him. It’s awkward, but I told him I lost a jacket exactly like the one he was wearing. He took it off immediately and said it had been at the restaurant he worked at for months and finally he just took it.
I felt bad, because it was raining.
But later I realized I had gone to that very restaurant looking for it and had been told they didn’t have it.
I washed the jacket and began to happily wear it. But the jacket didn’t feel the same.
I would have washed it twice, my wife said, adding, “To tell you the truth I never really liked that jacket.”
I stopped wearing it. And that restaurant, one of our favorite neighborhood hangouts: we haven’t been back.
We haven’t seen many pelicans yet this year. I read that they are “cold, emaciated, and starved” in high numbers down in California. Very disheartening.
I have tumor on my thyroid. I’m conscious of it, but the biopsy came back benign, and so far I choose to pretend it’s not there. Every six months I see the specialist. He’s up in Hillsboro, two and half hours north. This time he emphasizes how large it is and tells me that one of the premier thyroid guys believes tumors of this size must always be excised. Then, he relates an anecdote about one of his patients who had one this size who chose to have it removed, then found that the biopsy had been a false negative. In other words it had been cancerous after all.
What is preventing you from having it removed?
Well, I said, you haven’t explicitly advised me to do so.
I know, he says, but what’s your objection?
I don’t want to be committed to taking a prescribed drug every day for the rest of my life.
How many do you take now?
None.
Oh, he said, once you get used to it, it’s not a big deal.
I didn’t say it. But it seemed to me that once the floodgates open it’s just the beginning of the end. Anyway, I forestalled the excision decision or six months.
The thyroid doctor is three hours from home, is only five minutes from my friends', two of my best and oldest friends, the Schonhofens, live. They’ve been struggling with the recent losses of Margaret’s sister Jane and brother David in separate random health events. My intention was to lighten the mood.
We got to talking about Mike’s obsession with screwdrivers. Even he can’t really estimate how many he owns. Surely hundreds. Somewhere less than a thousand. Feeling picked on, Mike leads me to the refrigerator where he opens a drawer of old school 35 mm camera film. There are perhaps thirty rolls in there, the familiar old Kodak gold boxes with black print, the green and white Fuji boxes, more obscure boxes I didn’t recognize.
These, Mike says, have been in here for over thirty years. Much laughter, now at Margaret’s expense.
Not fair! says Margaret. You wouldn’t let me use them!
This dates back to a driving trip through Europe where Mike wouldn’t stop the car for photographs. (I realize this trip occurred before I met them, which if they had really been saving the film that long, was closer to fifty years ago, not thirty.)
Mike countered that he couldn’t stop the car for photos because he had bought a pair of skis in Austria, Kneissl White Stars, and they didn’t fit in the car so they drove around Europe with the skis extending out the window, stopping only for the night when the skis could be safely stashed indoors.
Mike went over to the counter and found a photo that I had printed after David died. It was taken at Crystal Mountain after a long day of skiing in January 1979. The photos is very dark, enshadowed, taken in the parking lot after a great day. Mike is holding his skis in the air, as if in triumph, David, more retsrained, holds his skis at his side. These are those very skis from Austria, Mike said, then sighed gently, David loved those Kneissls.
Mike and David and I never skied together again after that day. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if David ever skied again after that. A series of accidents rendered him quite hobbled. But that day, yeah, that day we were kings.
Driving southward on I-5 heading back home after visiting the Schonhofens. A car swerved from the right lane absolutely blindly into my lane. I could only avoid it by also swerving–also blindly–into the left lane. Miraculously, there was no car in the left lane. But I didn’t know that when I swerved. This occurred in three or four seconds and takes just three lines to tell you, but I was much shaken.
It takes two and a half hours to drive from our home on the coast to Portland and sometimes when we go to the airport it’s more convenient to take the shuttle. There is only one. It’s utterly reliable and not exorbitantly expensive. However, the driver is a complete sociopath. He harangues his customers, threatens to throw people off the van if he doesn’t like their opinions, and in general is a complete asshole. We sit in the backrow, put on headphones, and don’t engage. When I picked up my wife at the van stop last week from her recent work travels she told me that the driver had been his normal obnoxious self. My wife said that when this sweet little old lady got off the van she said to him, very quietly, “You are piece of crap.” We found this deliriously funny.
On the solstice we saw a perfect line of a dozen pelicans heading north. They glide in perfect synchrony, just inches off the surface of the ocean. A beautiful sight.
Yeah, I have to have this tumor taken out.
Still haven’t been back to that restaurant.
