Sylvia Beach Revisited, At Last

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Thirty-or-so years ago my husband and I discovered a quaint hotel on the Oregon coast. We were so charmed that we agreed it would become a side trip on our annual pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Well, you know the old truism: “We plan; God laughs.” Turned out, our lives took us in another direction. 

It wasn’t until last month, fifteen years after my husband’s death, that I finally made that return visit to the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport. If you’re a lover of books and their writers, you may have heard of it. The hotel, located on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is named not for the sands below (Nye Beach) but for a bookstore owner. Sylvia Beach was an American expatriate who in Paris in 1919 opened her shop called “Shakespeare and Company.” Notable writers of the era, from Hemingway to James Joyce, hung out there.

The vintage hotel, named the New Cliff House when it was built in 1912, was renamed in the 1980s along with a literary themed renovation. Each of the twenty-one guest rooms is dedicated to a different author and decorated to complement the authors, their era, and their work. The Shakespeare room has an Elizabethan look, with canopied bed and a throne-like chair, while J.K. Rowling’s space has a more wizardly flair, right down to the stuffed owls. 

The hotel is not for everyone. “When you walk up our garden path to the front door, the old building will give you a big hug or spit you out, depending on what really matters to you,” writes co-owner Goody Cable on the hotel’s web page. No TVs, no internet, no elevators, no pool or spa, no phones. Cell phones (allowable in the privacy of one’s room) are banned from the best room in the house — a spacious top-floor library affording an ocean view that stretches north to the historic Yaquina Head lighthouse and endlessly west until water dissolves into sky. Guests are welcome to curl up in the library’s capacious easy chairs day or night. Last one to bed is asked to turn out the lights.

“Unplug, unwind, and sleep with your favorite author,” the website suggestively invites. That last was, um, problematic for my stay in the Oscar Wilde room — not to make light of Wilde’s unjust fate. One of London’s most celebrated playwrights, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1885 for “gross indecency.” He had a male lover. The cruel imprisonment destroyed Wilde’s health and his life. He died sick and impoverished at age forty-six.

The Oscar Wilde room: wallpaper you could live with. Or not.

Aware of that tragedy, I was a tad uncomfortable reserving the room. Still, the comfortably small room is ideal for a single person, has a large private deck, and is on the lower end of room rates. At the time of his death, Wilde was holed up in a dingy Paris hotel and supposedly said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” The wallpaper in his namesake room strives to live up to that legacy. The guest journal in the room suggests some visitors appreciate the garish paper, others not so much.

I intended to spend my time in quiet retreat, reading, writing, sinking into the hushed luxury of the library. There was ample opportunity for that. And more. Meals in the “Table of Contents” dining room are served family style. The food is excellent, the conversations engaging. You sit down for dinner with strangers, and leave (some two-and-a-half hours later) as friends. 

I had breakfast the first morning with a highway engineer whose wife was sleeping in. It gave me a chance to complain about various freeway ramps and he ruefully acknowledged, “We have a saying: everyone with a driver’s license is a highway engineer.” There were opportunities to commiserate — one table mate was determinedly moving forward after the death of her husband from Covid — and celebrate — our entire table hurrah’d a cheerful single woman enjoying her eightieth birthday. 

There was synchronicity. I was befriended by a pair of identical twin sisters, Lutheran PKs (preacher’s kids), as am I. (A Lutheran PK, not a twin; Sylvia Beach herself was a Presbyterian PK.) I played Trivial Pursuit with a couple of former reporters as we shared stories about the now gone glory days of newspapering. It’s a hotel that — if you choose — folds you into a community, something you’re not likely to experience at a Hilton.

When I made my reservation several months ago, I was thinking it would probably be my sayonara visit to Oregon’s coast. It’s a gorgeous drive but a thousand-plus-mile round trip without public transit options. Sylvia Beach reinvigorated me. I hope to return. 

And, oh, please keep that just between you and me, dear reader. I’ve given God more than enough to laugh about.

NOTE: Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was obviously unaware that a hotel would be named for her. She was well worthy of the honor as you can see for yourself if you watch this interview, made shortly before her death.

Memento Mori

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When the committee that organized my high school reunion announced that the sixtieth would be our last, it was like having an ice bucket challenge of mortality dumped on my head. 

They didn’t say why there’d be no more reunions. They didn’t have to. We needed only to observe the “memorial” posters — thumbnail photos of our fellow graduates who’d passed their final, final exam. There were more faces on the posters than living souls in the banquet room. Fewer than twenty percent of our class were still alive and adequately interested and/or able to attend. We survivors among the Class of ’62 should not feel too bad. Born just ahead of the Baby Boom, we “war babies” have already outlived the age expectancy for our generation.

The reunion was in September, a month that ushers in autumn. Poets love to use autumn as a metaphor for old age, preceding winter and death. Hymn writer Susan Palo Cherwien began cheerfully enough with “O blessed spring,” followed by a stanza about “summer heat of youthful years,” then getting to “When autumn cools and youth is cold …” and ultimately, “As winter comes, as winter must, we breathe our last, return to dust …”

The last summer roses and Christmas decoration at the cemetery

I’m writing this on November 2, “All Souls Day,” also known as “Day of the Dead.” This is the time of year when many traditions, dating at least back to ancient Celts, focus on death and those who’ve departed. The Celtic tradition of Samhain became All Hallow’s Eve after Pope Gregory III declared November 1 as All Saints Day in the eighth century. Our death-denying culture has commercialized it as Halloween, a time of macabre costumes and candy treats. Even that is quickly overcome by Christmas hysteria. A stubborn traditionalist, I visited the cemetery on this All Souls Day. As I lay the last roses of summer on my husband’s headstone, I noted a large candy cane with flying reindeer decorating a grave nearby.

As for my own demise, my attitude varies from Woody Allen’s oft-quoted philosophy: “I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” I have a healthy fear of death. I just want it to catch me unaware, suddenly. I’d like to avoid a lingering illness, disability or —dear God, please — senility. And wouldn’t we all?

Even when we outlive actuarial tables, it can be challenging to celebrate these “bonus” years if our bodies taunt, even torture us. Some folks thrive. Others endure loss after loss: mobility, independence, dignity. 

If autumn represents old age advancing toward death, then let my autumn be like today. This autumn day the leaves on my front yard maples turned a shimmering gold so exuberant you could almost hear them shouting an alleluia chorus. 

This day the prolific cherry tomato vine gave up its final, generous bounty before tonight’s killing frost. 

This day sunshine reflected on the river as it quietly flowed beneath a necklace of brilliant, shimmering diamonds. 

This day I received two pieces of news: the unexpected death of one friend and the full remission of cancer for another. 

May all my autumn years be as generous as this day. May I embrace the paradox of autumn, its extravagant celebration of life as a last hurrah and gateway to the mysterious inevitable.

Remember those “American Graffiti” teenagers? We’re seventy-eight

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“You have five months to lose twenty pounds and get your teeth whitened.”

That was my friend Sally after I told her I’d registered for my high school class reunion — sixtieth! As the date draws ever closer, I still haven’t followed her advice, including item three on her list: buy an underwire bra with power uplift. Solitary life following Covid lock-downs freed my girls to hang loose. We’ll never go back.

This will be my first reunion since the twentieth. That was a noisy, crowded cocktail party — the kind of event I like to avoid. Conversely, I enjoyed my late husband’s reunions. His small-town graduating class numbered fewer than a hundred; they got together for convivial, laid-back dinners. Everyone knew everyone, unlike my graduating class of some five hundred. 

My graduation photo

The Class of ’62 was comically and accurately depicted in the film “American Graffiti,” whose high school seniors were obsessed with rock ’n roll, cruisin’ and hormonal confusion. George Lucas, who wrote and directed the movie, also graduated in 1962, in Modesto, California. My high school was Woodrow Wilson, Tacoma, Washington. I travelled across the country the summer after I graduated and found that my fellow eighteen-year-olds were pretty much the same nationwide. I wonder, as we confront the deep polarization in our country now, if the Class of ’62 is still so homogenous.

No question these sixty years have been tumultuous, shaking our very foundations. We’ve weathered Vietnam and draft card burning, the fight for women’s rights and bra burning, racial protests and entire neighborhoods burning, and now our mother — Earth — burning. There’ve been assassinations, the technology revolution, 9-11, the longest war in American history, climate change, global shifts toward authoritarian governments, and a pandemic. Not even Lucas could’ve dreamed up such a sequence of events in one lifetime.

As just a slight tremor among all those earthquakes, Woodrow Wilson High School no longer exists by that name. Given our twenty-eighth President’s dubious record on issues such as racial equality, school district powers-that-be changed the name to Dr. Dolores Silas High School. She was the district’s first black woman administrator and also sat on the city council. We’re told students have shortened that to “SIHI,” which sounds like everyone’s taking a deep breath. Advisable.

I likely wouldn’t attend this reunion except that I promised Nick, one of the handful of classmates I’d kept in touch with. After the fifty-fifth reunion, Nick scolded me for missing — again! — and made me swear I’d be at the sixtieth. Last year Nick, the picture of health, keeled over and died of an apparent heart attack while running a weed-eater in his yard.

The reunion invitation was accompanied by a list of classmates who have died. I got out my yearbook and looked up the graduation photo for each name. Given our class size, there were many I didn’t remember. For those I did know, looking at their eighteen-year-old faces felt like they’d died way too young. By skipping all those reunions, I knew nothing about their lives after high school. I missed a lot of good stories. Everyone has at least one.

Catching up on those stories is reason enough to attend the reunion. That, and my promise to Nick.

Ah! The patina of age

Flushed With Success

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Seven a.m. My first thought as I awaken this perfect summer morning, a cool breeze gently lifting my eyelids, is of the clogged drains in my kitchen sink. No! I inwardly moan. I don’t want to think about plumbing issues first thing. I want to wake up with gratitude, with joyful expectations for the gift of a  new day.

But what can I expect when the last thing I encountered the previous night was a sink half full of backed-up, icky gray water, a sight as welcome as a slug in the garden but draining at nowhere near a slug’s pace. I’d spent the evening as YouTube instructed, dosing the drains with boiling water, baking soda and white vinegar. While the soda and vinegar combo created a satisfying froth, they did nothing to clear the blockage. 

It’s early, but with a twinge of hope I call The Plumber. The answering machine gives me his cell phone number “in case of an emergency.” One person’s emergency is another person’s mere inconvenience. I won’t call the cell phone because I want to be in good graces with The Plumber, because I want him to come THIS day, because it’s Friday and because I’m expecting a house guest this weekend.

Seven-thirty a.m. My dog and I head out for our morning walk, basking in 70 degree temperatures, knowing it will be in the 90s by this afternoon. The dog is basking, at least. My mind is going round and round, practicing words of entreaty for The Plumber. Stop it! I interrupt myself. And I scold: you should just be thankful you have pure, safe water that runs, even if it doesn’t drain. Think of all the people who don’t have the conveniences of kitchen, bathroom, laundry. And when you’re done with that, pay attention to the pastel blue sky, the floating clouds, the swaying trees, the sweet air, the bird songs, the river’s persistent flow … oh! that my drains would flow as freely as the river.

Eight-thirty-two a.m. I call again and a real live human answers. I explain my plight. “Okay, I’ll tell them,” she says, carefully making no promises. I babble some more. “Yup,” she says. “I’ll let ‘em know.” I envision The Plumber and his crew casually discussing triage over their morning coffee. Which of the callers have a bona fide emergency and which are merely inconvenienced?

My neighbor and his son happen by and chide me for not calling them first. The son would’ve freed the drains with a plunger (at this point the son makes plunging motions in the air) and would’ve saved me a lot of money. 

Eight-forty-five-ish. Plumber and helper arrive! They go to work as quickly and efficiently as an ambulance crew. While the assistant operates the electric rooter, The Plumber explains why plunging wouldn’t have been sufficient. In older houses like mine, he says, the pipes slowly deteriorate, the metal chipping off in flakes that need to be ground up with the rotating rooter head. As he lectures, he too is demonstrating with his hands so I can envision the chipping metal and rotating machinery. The eroding bits of metal and other gunk need to be forced through my pipes and carried away into the city sewer.

In his own home, The Plumber continues, once a month he fills his sinks with hot water, then pulls open the drains simultaneously to create a tsunami that will push accumulated debris onward to the ultimate destination, the city water treatment plant. Suddenly my mind is swirling as fast as the rooting device, only I’m moving backward, through decades, to The Big Flush! 

My late husband and I lived in a house twice as old and three times as big as my current home. Every once in a while, when the aged drains began to balk, he would announce, “It’s time for The Big Flush!” He’d fill all the sinks, stationing me downstairs, poised for action, with him upstairs at Command Central. When all was ready, he would yell, “FLUSH!” We’d run around opening sink drains and flushing toilets.

I thought it was hilariously fun. I didn’t understand the mechanics, but it worked. As far as I knew, he was employing some kind of metaphysical incantation. I never knew how he knew what he knew. He had an uncanny genius for solving household problems, maybe the result of growing up on a farm.

Nine-thirty-two a.m. Plumber and helper have cleaned up and left. Drains are draining. I’m  reliving cherished memories of my problem-solving beloved. I learned so much from him, and — fifteen years after he’s gone — still I learn. I open my calendar, click on the date one month from today and type in a reminder: FLUSH!

shiny kitchen sink
Happiness is a well-drained sink

Roads Less Traveled By

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Coyote Falls in the foreground, Enloe Dam in the background

My late husband John could recite from memory Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” I too relish roads “less traveled by,” sometimes to my peril.

Just last week, I started off innocently enough. Destination: Coyote Falls on the Similkameen River, near the Canadian border, less than an hour’s drive from home. I planned to attend the traditional Native American salmon ceremony, when fish are invited to return to their spawning grounds. Tribes have been doing this for millennia, although these days the ceremony is pretty much symbolic with a soupçon of politics. Just above Coyote Falls, salmon are blocked from proceeding upriver by the defunct Enloe Dam. The dam hasn’t produced power in half-a-century. Indian tribes on both sides of the border and various environmental groups are campaigning to have it removed.

There’s a fine hiking trail on the other side of the river, but the ceremony was to be held on the road side. In my case the wrong road. The river flows through a deep canyon. High on the canyon wall, a two-lane, paved road snakes around multiple curves. I knew I’d have to turn onto a gravel road to reach the canyon bottom at some point, but I couldn’t remember where that turnoff was. I’d noticed a bright blue car in my rearview mirror and then, after one of the curves, that car had disappeared. By then I’d driven beyond the falls and dam and decided I must have missed the turn-off.

After a quick u-turn, I spotted a flash of blue making its way down a steep, winding gravel road. You don’t usually follow someone who’s behind you. That alone should have been a warning. Slowly, cautiously I proceeded downward, noting the “Primitive Road” warning sign that the county posts on back roads that are not maintained. This one should have had a skull and crossbones at the bottom.

By the time I realized I had no business on that road, it was too late. With barely a single lane, I clung to the canyon wall that brushed my car on the left, trying not to think about the sheer drop-off on my right. The ruts were troughs, littered with rocks and shards that threatened to high-center the car. Downward I crept in low gear, wishing I had a lower than low-low gear. I tried to calm myself by talking to John, pleading with his spirit to intervene, rescue me.

Finally, miraculously, halfway down the canyon, I reached a wide spot. The blue car had pulled off and parked, as did I. Thank you, John! I noticed the other driver, whom I didn’t know, had started walking downward and then stopped to wait for me. 

“I’m so sorry I took that road,” I said as I got out of my car. “Me, too,” he admitted. Turned out he was a tribal member from British Columbia. He asked where I was from. When I answered “Omak,” he asked, “You Colville?” Never before has anyone confused this blue-eyed blonde as Native. I was deeply flattered. I explained that I’ve lived for a long time along the Okanogan River, which is fed by the Similkameen. “I love the river and all its inhabitants,” I continued, as if I expected the cast of characters from “Wind in the Willows” to join us at any moment. 

Despite my lack of tribal bona fides, he treated me as the elder that I am, generously offering his arm to steady me as we scrambled downward. At this point, the road was pretty impassable even on foot. I gasped when we finally reached a large, flat area, where a dozen or more cars were parked.

“How did they get here?!” I exclaimed. That’s when we noticed the other road — the one MORE traveled by. We could have taken it had we gone up the canyon a little further.

I never did make it all the way down to the river but watched the ceremony from the bank above. The drum beat and chanting were inaudible above the roar of the falls. Still, I joined others in rhythmic clicking of rocks, calling to the salmon. Tribal biologists tell us that native fish returning to our river are pitifully few and far between. Eliminating the dam, one biologist said at a recent meeting, is “their only chance.”

I walked away from the river, wondering if my own chances of getting my car back up that road were equal to salmon butting heads against a concrete dam. But a combination of prayer, John’s encouragement, and front-wheel drive pulled me slowly, safely upward. Back on pavement, I was heading home when a coyote ran across the road ahead of me. I slowed and noticed that he stopped in the middle of an alfalfa field, turning back to watch me. In Native legend, the coyote is a trickster, a mischief-maker.

“Yeah, you thought you had me back there at Coyote Falls,” I said. “But all you did was teach me a lesson. From here on, I’ll be taking the roads more traveled by.”

A Feast for Homeless People: If you barbecue, will they come?

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There’s nothing that’ll inspire a dog to break his verbal leash like the smell of meat on a barbecue.

“Tawny! Come! COME!” I yelled. It was futile. My dog flew from the trail we were walking. He dashed a hundred or so yards across the park toward fragrant smoke arising from a barbecue grill. I chased after him, mentally rehearsing the profound apologies I would utter to the guy at the grill. By the time I got there, the chef was ready for me, waving a hotdog on the end of his fork. 

“Is it okay to give it to him?” he asked eagerly. 

“Only a small part,” I answered. “He has a delicate digestive system.”

The barbecuer, clean-cut, middle-aged, was by now petting and scratching Tawny as I surveyed the picnic area: two tables covered with all the right stuff from pickles to potato chips, but no one else around. The grill was loaded with hotdogs, chicken, ribs. A package of hamburger waited its turn. I wondered if he was preparing the feast for the high school baseball team practicing at the far end of the park.

“Who’re you cooking for?” I asked.

“Homeless people,” he said, looking me directly in the eye as he offered a paper plate with a chicken thigh, drenched in barbecue sauce.

I declined the plate but said, “My name’s Mary,” as I sat down at one of the tables. I needed to learn more. “Brandon,” he responded. 

“We have something in common,” I tried as a conversation starter. “I cook for the homeless shelter in Okanogan a couple times a week when it’s open in winter.” He was neither interested nor impressed. 

Our conversation took off in other directions, mostly odd and circuitous. At one point Brandon insisted we switch places because the barbecue smoke was blowing in my face. Ultimately I learned that he’d been released from jail that morning. He’d spent a couple hundred bucks on the picnic fare. I saw no vehicle nearby and wondered how he carted all that food — plus charcoal briquets — from the grocery store, a half-mile away on the other side of the river.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Wherever I am.” Okayyyyy.

“How are homeless people going to know you have all this food for them?”

“It worked last year.”

By this time Brandon was indeed getting worried that people weren’t showing up. I accepted the chicken thigh.

“Got any napkins?” as I licked my sauce-covered fingers. That’s the one item Brandon hadn’t thought of. He raced off to the porta potties around the corner in search of paper towels, but came back empty-handed. I wiped my fingers on the back of the paper plate, which he then took from me and neatly tossed into the garbage can. He started filling a grocery bag with a jar of pickles, an orange, the package of hamburger meat — a doggy bag, so to speak, for me to take home. I demurred; he pleaded.

“I don’t want to waste this!” he said, waving his arm at the cornucopia of food.

“Look. You can take all the stuff you haven’t opened yet to the food bank — the pickles, the potato chips, the can of cashew nuts …”

“Naw. I’ve been drinking. I don’t drink and drive,” he said solemnly. I hadn’t smelled alcohol (who could with all the barbecue aroma?) but noted a case of beer on the other table.

“Where are you going to sleep tonight?” He shrugged in a way that said it wasn’t an issue.

As I stood to leave, we compromised. I accepted an orange and a rib for Tawny — to eat later. In a sense, I brought Brandon home with me, too. He was on my mind all that evening. I remembered the many times I’ve witnessed how kind and generous people who are homeless can be with each other. I’m not suggesting that privation leads to saintliness. Yet there’s that basic human need for community, for connection. We meet that need by sharing. 

The next day I checked the picnic area. It was cleaned up. No sign of Brandon or his feast — other than one dried-up chicken thigh forgotten on the barbecue. Wherever Brandon is, I guess he’s home.

Everybody’s Business

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  • Imagine a water bottle that measures your hydration level as you sip.
  • Imagine cell phone batteries that recharge off your body heat.
  • Imagine an ear piece that projects a hologram so you can read a book or watch a movie hands-free.

If you’re seventeen, these are the kinds of technological wonders you can dream up. They’re the kinds of things I was invited to invest in (virtually) during Business Week. Every year high school juniors from our two neighboring towns (Okanogan and Omak, WA) are excused from their regular class schedule for five days to sample what’s ahead for them in the realm of free enterprise. 

After the pandemic hiatus, Business Week returned this year. I was happy to again be invited to help as a judge and “investor.” During a brief training session for judges, facilitator Chris Loftis had me nearly in tears as he described what this year’s students had missed during pandemic isolation.

“These kids have lost something,” he concluded. “We’re going to give it back to them.” The “we” is our local community. While school district sponsorship is essential, professional educators are largely absent. Pretty much all the adults are volunteers. Many are giving up a full week of work; others are retirees willing to revisit the world of work. Area businesses throw in financial support to cover the $14,000 cost. 

Students are sorted into “companies” to dream up product lines, assign corporate responsibilities, determine quality standards and work ethics, and develop marketing strategies. Sounds kind of dull, frankly, but a computer program makes it more like a game. Based on the kids’ decisions, the computer churns out two years worth of various reports like sales volumes, profit and loss, and stock value. Just as in real life, the reports produce cheers and/or teeth-gnashing. By the end of the week, the kids are excited to show off their work for a spirited IPO (initial public offering). The students aren’t graded individually, but they’re rewarded as corporate teams with stock sales. All play money, of course.

I’m not necessarily a cheerleader for capitalism, but it’s the system we live and work under. Within our system there’s space for kindness and community building — if we so choose. Business Week does. The kids experience teaming up with otherwise rivals. Ordinarily the two schools are each other’s No. 1 athletic opponent. Here, students are purposely mixed — about a dozen in each company. Some years ago one of my grandsons who participated in Business Week concluded with surprise that kids from the other school had some pretty acceptable qualities after all.

Every student has a place and a role. Inclusion and participation are highly valued and required. As we judges visited the companies, we were introduced to each student by name and their individual responsibility within the company. At week’s end, every student receives a certificate awarding a college credit — something pretty amazing for a lot of these rural kids who never consider the possibility of college.

Despite pandemic disruption, teens’ resilience was vividly on display. They’d put behind them not only Covid isolation, but inevitable setbacks from the week’s taste of business life.

“Life is more than dollars and cents,” teaches Loftis. “Life is about failure … and then you get back up.”

Getting back up was part of the week’s adventure for several companies. “509 Electronics” got into trouble with the public after marketing a low-quality product, explained their CEO. After the company decided against a recall, the public (via computer program) raised a fuss. The company apologized, offered a recall and changed its manufacturer. The lesson, said the CEO: “Don’t rely on people you don’t know.”

As a consumer of a certain age, I was smitten by another company, but as a potential investor, not so  much. “Design, Love, Virtue” had chosen to target elderly consumers. They’d done admirable research into their market audience, coming up with a simple-to-use flip phone that promised a crisp speaker, easy-to-read screen and (hallelujah!) ultra-responsive tech support. They acknowledged making “hard decisions” along the way, opting for strategies that would benefit the environment, their customers and employees. Their product was so popular, they ran out. “You never want to do that,” a fellow judge muttered out of their hearing. Flooded with back orders, they watched their stock tank. Undaunted, they were promising skeptical investors a rosy comeback. I sympathetically put in a few bucks — no more than I could afford to lose.

Business Week got its start in the 1970s as a residential summer program — something like cheerleader or basketball camp — at Central Washington University (then state college). The residential program has since spread to college and university campuses in eleven states plus Poland and Italy. Yet only a handful of school districts make it available on a local basis to all students. While the residential programs offer full scholarships, it’s still unlikely that very many of our local kids could afford a week off from summer jobs to attend. Or would even feel motivated.

 One reason the in-school program is less than popular with educators, I’m told, is that teachers are under pressure to prepare students for standardized tests. Giving up a full week away from “teaching to the test” is asking too much.

I don’t know if our students’ test scores are remarkably above or below the norm. I could research it, I suppose. But I’m satisfied with what I saw kids take away from Business Week — a few of life’s lessons that can’t be measured on any test other than life itself.

You Know You’re Old When You’ve Outlived the Trees You Planted

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The chainsaw massacre was about to begin when the normally docile young woman intervened. Later, she described the episode during our Zoom call. For years she and her roommate had been ideal tenants, quiet, tidy, paying their rent on time. But when she spotted the crew preparing to remove a stately tree in front of their house, she vehemently protested to her landlord. A conference with arborist, crew and others ensued. The tree survived. Neighbors quietly praised her intervention, admitting they’d been reluctant to get involved. 

“This was so unlike me,” she told her Zoom audience. The chat box filled with congratulatory notes and emoji applause. My emotions were mixed. Trees tend to live a long time and deservedly so, for all the benefits they offer. Yet just like us, trees have a life cycle, an inevitable end.

 I once was that young woman, what the cynical call a “tree hugger.” A love for trees is still deeply rooted in my heart. No pun there; a simple truth. I also know — even without seeing this particular  tree — that its reprieve is temporary. The USDA says urban trees tend to live only twenty-eight years at most — about twenty percent of a normal tree life span. Their congested environment makes them susceptible to pests, disease, inadequate care, inappropriate placement, improper planting, asphalt generated heat, etc., etc.

Living where I do, in a rural, desert-like shrub steppe environment, I’ve been a rabid defender of trees. While I was still editing the local newspaper, the city superintendent knew me well enough to call in advance whenever a tree had to be removed from the public domain. He’d explain the detection of disease and consequent threat to human health should the tree keel over on its own or topple in a windstorm. 

My town boasts a luxurious canopy of green, none of it native, and has been officially declared a “Tree City U.S.A.” by the Arbor Day Foundation. This small urban forest is a legacy of pioneer women, who a century or more ago planted the first deciduous trees, hauling water in buckets to nurture them in this arid country. More recently, volunteers tore up sidewalks to provide irrigation for trees along Main Street.

I’ve planted my share of trees over the years. I remember how eager I was the day we planted red maples in the front yard — anxious for them to grow and give luxurious shade. What I hadn’t figured on was that I’d be aging right along with those trees.

Once, my husband and I made an impulse buy in support of a newly established nursery. We brought home the tiny pine and scouted the yard for a place to plant it. While I looked around for available open space in the lawn, my wiser husband looked upward. He nixed my first choice because eventually the tree would get tangled in wires. Pines generally live at least fifty and often hundreds of years. This one gave us three beautiful decades before it became mortally diseased. 

Even as I mourned, I marveled at the skill of the sawyer who limb by limb denuded the tree and finally sawed off the naked trunk. He was, I hate to admit, graceful.

“I make it look easy, don’t I,” he boasted with a grin. I witnessed the deafening process as tree limbs and trunk were chopped into chips that would become mulch that would eventually fade back into Mother Earth. All is temporary, yet circular.

My diseased pine on his way back to Mother Earth

A question of location

On By Mary KochIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“How did she end up there?!” (Read the word “there” with a tone of disbelief and possible disdain.) The question — more of an exclamation — was relayed to me by a friend. He was recounting a conversation he’d had with a long-ago mutual acquaintance who, when informed of my whereabouts after all these years, posed the very question I ask myself frequently.

The average American relocates about a dozen times over their life span. At some point do they, like me at age 77, wonder if this is the last stop. If so, how did I end up here (a tone of disbelief? disdain? delight?).

“Here” in my case is Omak, Washington, a gritty small town that wrestled itself into existence a little more than a century ago, smack-dab in the middle of a shrubsteppe valley — the Okanogan — where natives thrived for at least ten thousand years. Romance brought me here more than forty years ago — love for a man and our mutual love for small-town newspapers. My expectations were clear. We’d have fun running a newspaper until retirement, when we’d move to somewhere more, uh, civilized. Then karma happened, and here I am. Still.

The why-here question arises this gloomy morning with no glint of sun, with dingy snowbanks likely in place until June’s 100-plus temperatures, with memories of the many choices I’ve made in a lifetime. What about those roads not taken? Where else might I be now? Just then, an eagle soars past at eye level, scanning the river for fish, disrupting the ducks that have been quietly meditating just a few yards from my back door. 

The river is why I’m here. Not a raging, white-water river nor a large channel with ships and barges. Just a pleasant, hard-working stream, remnant of the Pleistocene-era glacial movement that shaped this valley’s cragged walls. The Okanogan River waters crops and wildlife, nurtures fish and fowl, and entertains folks who float aboard inflatable vessels on a hot summer’s day. 

The eagle having lifted my spirits upon her mighty wing span, I turn to breakfast — a few strips of beefsteak over toast. I eat meat only occasionally. These slices of steak originated from an animal raised on friends’ ranch, up-valley, where cattle really do live out their days beneath blue skies, never see a feedlot and are humanely butchered. The toast is artisan bread, baked locally, sold at the Okanogan Farm Stand, where I also buy local organic produce and eggs.

Still, I have an appetite for the world beyond. I open the Feb. 7, 2022, issue of “The New Yorker” magazine as I cut into my breakfast. And there, on page 28, in an essay by the esteemed John McPhee, I’m right back here, in the Okanogan. (Spoiler alert: I plan to give away McPhee’s punch line. If you want to read his version first, go here and scroll to “Citrus, Booze, and Ah Bing.”) An Easterner and aficionado of fruit (he wrote the book “Oranges” among many), McPhee and his wife were touring Washington state in 1982, hungering for cherries. He exults that “the Okanogan Valley is the Oxford and Cambridge of the Bing cherry.”

He describes crossing the North Cascade Mountains on famed Highway 20 with nary a comment about that breathtaking route. His description upon descending into the Okanogan: “Dessicated. Lovely. Irrigated green. Trees punctuated with deep-red dots.”

He didn’t stop at the newspaper office, which was just as well. We were probably busy and would’ve given the famous author short shrift unless he had local news to report. Turned out he did. He’d been given directions to an orchard owned and operated by “a knowledgeable married couple who will prefer to remain nameless.”

Too bad. In small-town newspapers, the rule is, “Names are news.” McPhee tells of arriving at the orchard, finding an abundance of cherries along with “shouting, angry shouting, more shouting, and the married owners appeared, on the apron of their barn, in a fistfight.”

Forty years later, the Okanogan cannot claim to be more civilized, but we are exotic enough to make it into the pages of “The New Yorker.” Could be, that’s why I’m here.

Winter ice turns the Okanogan River into a jigsaw puzzle

The Emoji Explosion: Do we understand each other any better?

On By Mary KochIn Uncategorized3 Comments

To emoji or not to emoji? Just asking the question tags me as — without apology — old.

“When I encounter someone who doesn’t use emojis, I immediately sense they are either significantly older than me, or it is work and I have to be extremely professional,” says a Gen-X public relations specialist in an online article about the meaning of emojis. (Never mind that she hasn’t mastered personal pronouns. She has emojis.)

I confess to both her accusations: I’m “significantly older” and, I hope, professional. Having earned my living for decades by stringing words together, I’ve long considered emojis to be interlopers. The English language already has more words than any other — an estimated 170,000 in current use. For most of us, our working vocabulary is a tiny percentage of available words — around twenty thousand, or up to thirty-five thousand for the most erudite. 

From Chaucer to Shakespeare (the latter required only about thirty thousand words), through the centuries, writers and poets have painted glorious images with mere words. Why throw emojis into the mix? Just imagine “To be or not to be …” followed by a frowning, quizzical orb. 

My resistance began with emojis’ predecessors: emoticons — rearranged punctuation marks. I figured if I couldn’t make it clear that I was being humorous, contorted punctuation wasn’t going to help. Kinda like having to explain a joke. : )

Emojis supposedly save time and add feeling. With just one or two you quickly express a panoply of, well, emotion. Nearly a quarter of all global Tweets contain at least one emoji. Nine hundred million are sent daily on Facebook Messenger — with no accompanying text! The Oxford English Dictionary chose the emoji “Face With Tears of Joy” as the word of the year for 2015. That one alone has been used more than two billion times.

Emoji use exploded (the emoji for “exploded” is a brilliant red-orange-yellow starburst) after they became universally available in 2010. Initially, engineers proposed 625 emojis to Unicode, the international consortium that sets standards for computer languages. As of last year, 3,633 emojis were approved with more to come all the time: most recently a pregnant man! (An exclamation point suffices. I really don’t want to see a pregnant man.)

What’s it say to you?

Because of their universal use, emojis might give us a clue as to how humanity is feeling. Last March, “Loudly Crying,” outpaced “Tears of Joy” as the No. 1 emoji used globally. Makes sense amidst the pandemic, but here’s the problem. There isn’t universal agreement on the meaning of emojis. The loudly crying face “may convey inconsolable grief but also other intense feelings, such as uncontrollable laughter, pride or overwhelming joy,” says Emojipedia.

Emoji interpretations vary widely between generations. A millennial who texts “Sorry I’m late” and gets a smiley response will feel forgiven. Gen-X is more nuanced, ironic. That same smile is understood as snarky, not at all forgiving. 

I can only suggest what I’ve heard young parents advise their language-learning tots: “Use your words.”