I'm blessed to live just a couple of blocks from Meldrum Bar Park along the Willamette River. It's a 30-minute circuit around the park, almost perfect. I ate the ham first as I strolled out of the trailer park where I share an old but neatly remodeled older mobile home with Angie, a former girlfriend who has morphed into a good friend. She's kind and our schedules are opposite, so we rarely get in each other's way, except for the narrow driveway, which constantly requires an annoying shuffling of cars. She's so considerate she usually moves mine when she leaves for work in the morning, me being the night owl who typically sleeps late. Most of the time I'm so far out of it that I don't even hear her getting ready, still the oldest of seven in my ability to sleep through a blow dryer, the sound of a running shower and a blender. Only rarely do I stir, and even then it's easy for me to fall back asleep. Another blessing: both my parents were plagued by insomnia, and my father had a terrible, undiagnosed case of sleep apnea. His snores would rouse zombies. He'd die 50 times a night, not breathing.
Sleep is much on my mind these days, for last week I read an internet article about the power of sleep and its ability to serve as a "delete button" for our brains. I found the article on Twitter, from a newsletter called "Fast Company."
Have you ever woken up from a good night’s rest and been able to think clearly and quickly? That’s because all the pruning and pathway-efficiency that took place overnight has left you with lots of room to take in and synthesize new information–in other words, to learn.
It turns out that the brain uses deep sleep to prune and cultivate, strengthening some connections while deleting others. It resets and heals. Sleep is a superpower in our lives. There isn't much in our mental or physical health, be it weight, stress, sexual performance, problem-solving or energy, that isn't improved by better sleep.
A walk to the river, I think, accomplishes some of the same replenishing and re-sorting. It quiets me. It allows me to sort out my thoughts.
As I turned into the park I ate from the chunk of crusty bread, sourdough, my mother's favorite. The sun felt good on my face and shoulders. I thought about an old Talking Heads song, "Take Me to the River."
"Take me to the river...and wash me down." There is something cleansing, spiritual, healing about a simple walk to the river. In "A River Runs Through It" Norman McLean says "I am surrounded by waters." I think we all are. The river of grace. The river of grief. The river of time. The waters define us, lead us, comfort us and mark our path. The afternoon sunlight gleaming on the slow-moving current speaks to our soul.
I spent a lot of time on the opposite bank of this river, literally, when I was a young man. In high school I converted to Christianity in the summer between my junior and senior years, at a Young Life Camp called Malibu located in the Straits of San Juan, some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world. Mountains rise up straight out of the water, forming fjords. Orcas hunt and frolic in the still, cold, deep waters.
I had my conversion experience on a July morning at the dock with a counselor named Rick O'Bill. We talked a long time and he extolled the virtues of a personal relationship with Jesus, what it meant, how it would give me strength, understanding and comfort. His testimony had a big appeal for a kid from a nightmare family, where anger and anxiety clouded every waking moment. I could be free. I could trust someone. It was a beautiful morning, the water still as glass. I prayed the prayer.
All through the rest of the summer and the warmer days of early fall I walked to a spot in Mary S. Young Park, along the west bank of the Willamette in West Linn, to pray earnest prayers and read from a Philips Translation of the New Testament I'd bought at the Malibu Canteen. The book had one of those thick paperboard covers with a red, white and blue design cross-hatched onto it. Fervently, faithfully, searchingly I read sitting on the sand in a sheltered thicket, beginning with the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life and ministry, then Acts and the Letters. Revelation only confused me.
All through that summer I prayed as I walked home on Willamette Drive, Highway 43. It was about a mile to home. I'm sure those who drove by, including members of my community and even acquaintances from school, must have thought I was mad, crazy, insane or possessed. I wasn't, just an impressionable boy/man-child in search of passion and purpose.
Religion didn't stick with me. Over the next few years I became increasingly angst-ridden over all the guilt I felt, normal urges I didn't understand, the pull of the world. It seemed easier for my friends to make compromises and accept God's graces without questioning their own purity and behavior. My most frequent critic in faith lived with a series of women, yet he felt free to question my actions and motives with the fervor of a brimstone preacher.
I didn't find any comfort in the church. People seemed full of false piety, judgmental, artificial. For a while I attended a "Charismatic" church and the antics of people. "speaking in tongues," "prophesying," actually scared me. How could you trust that? What was real and what was merely performance and posing? It wasn't comforting to me, I only felt guilty and miserable over being "a sinner."
In college I encountered science, my own budding sexuality, alcohol and girls, and religion faded for me. I became the seed sown among the thorns. Any practice of faith or spirituality has to be ultimately rewarding and restorative or it will inevitably lead to bitterness and regret. It has to feel sound and authentic, in the heart, or it will just hurt.
The one thing I took away from my religious experiences was a practice of profound contemplation and a need to get away, to be quiet, meditative, and seek solace in my surroundings. It's good to moved to awe and silence, this much I know. I still find comfort in the river. Eastern religions have more appeal to me but I don't practice a specific faith. Much of the time I'm content to light a candle, put on an eclectic shuffle of music on my headphones, close my eyes and breath deeply. It's not quite meditation, and it usually turns into a nap.
As I walked along I stepped out of the shade into the full light, and the warmth on my face, rare for Oregon in January, this taste of spring, lightened my mood and my energy. I passed the soccer field and some parked cars. There was a group of children playing on the swings and climbing structure. An old man in a ball cap watched them from a bench. A pretty girl with cinnamon-colored skin and beautiful dark curls sat next to him. She reminded me of Kourtney, my granddaughter, when she was little. One of the children, high on the climbing structure called out to him, "Hi Grandpa," the little boy said. Children want to test their independence and take risks, but they want to be noticed and watched over. I called out to the old man, "Those are two of the most glorious words in the English language," I said, "Hi Grandpa." The old man chuckled.
I find as I grow older I am more prone to talk to strangers, to call out a greeting or make a humorous observation. It's the search for connection, the willingness to be engaged. What's the harm, as long as you're not saying anything threatening or intrusive? It's a form of blessing. When I pass couples with a small child in the cart at a store I will say, "What a cute baby!" or "What a beautiful child!" and smile a broad, welcoming smile. I like to think that the blessing you say into a child's life resonates like ripples from a small rock thrown into a still river. A small flower of pride and recognition planted, a ray of sunlight shone upon a seedling. In some cases not, but the effort is sincere. I shared the old man's delight in his grandchildren, and for a moment we were a community.
A little further along the road turns south and I walked past the community garden, still gated and padlocked for winter. A flock of fat geese pecked and picked contentedly, feasting on the shoots and seeds, making a banquet out of last year's waste and detritus among the once neatly-tended rows. Padlocks mean nothing when you can fly.
The river bends at the south end of the park. Sunlight gleamed on the surface of the waters. My brother Roger is a fisherman, an avid one with over a hundred rods and reels and two boats. He's spent countless hours on the rivers of Northwest Oregon, the Clackamas, the Trask, the Columbia and Buoy 10, the easy pickings near Eagle Creek and the spillway at the Bonneville Dam during the fall salmon and steelhead run. He loves to fish, but I suspect also he derives great comfort from those early mornings on the river, both the stillness and beauty and the community of men he's become a part of. Some of his dearest and most meaningful friendships have grown out of an online community he belongs to, posting for years. The group shares their fishing triumphs but much more than that. A beloved member died this fall and their posts back and forth included ribald stories as well as genuine grief and loss. These men were there for him when our mother died. They are a true church.
I turned up the path between the children's golf course and the softball fields, heading toward home. To my left two middle-aged men were taking batting practice. I heard the solid thwock of a deep flyball to left and walked over to the grandstand to peel my boiled eggs and watch for a minute. The pitcher had a full head of gray hair. He wore a puffy blue windbreaker, kept missing low and inside. The batter, thick and muscular, wore glasses. Right-handed, with a big kick in his swing, a serious player swinging an expensive aluminum bat. He sent several flies out to the 300 mark in the open field, not bad for the first workout in cooler January air. It was about 55 degrees, I'd guess. The ball doesn't carry as far in those conditions, not like summer. He blasted another deep fly on a good launch angle.
I finished peeling one of the eggs and ate it. Another solid thwock! "That sound is a tonic to my winter-dulled ears," I said out loud to the man at the plate. He turned slightly but didn't look up. "Yep." he answered. I said, "Good job laying off those bad pitches." He smiled slightly and took his stance again, sent another one deep to left, a dead pull hitter.
I finished the other egg and left them, continuing up the hill along the 7th fairway of the pitch-and-putt and the south soccer field. I thought about sports and the large part they had played in much of my life. I'd been obsessive. For a long while, decades, softball into my 40s, golf in my 50s, it had filled a huge void in my life where most men placed family and careers. I trained 4-6 hours a day, hit off tees, did drills, lifted weights. I wrote journals, did affirmations, listened to subliminal tapes, playing 150 games a summer and then 150 rounds a year. For a time softball and then golf were my meditation and religion, deeply into the discipline of the body, the rhythms of the game.
I was a frustrated athlete. I was never able to let go and completely trust, playing with far too much anxiety and a deep fear of failure. I'd get monumentally angry over a pop-up or a sliced drive, alienate friends, abuse family members, enraged far beyond rationality or perspective. It was just a game, I knew, but my expectations and standards for myself were so sky-high it was completely impossible to enjoy it except in rare moments of perfection or serenity.
My sports career was another failed religion, a different type of discipline and complete immersion. I've always been a fanatic, a fierce believer. As I walked up the path I felt the yearning of those old habits. Maybe I could play one more season or a few more seasons, do it differently, have more perspective, clean off the clubs, buy a nice fielder's glove and work oil into the leather until it felt like a part of my hand. Physically, I could do it. But there's a cost to every choice you make. I have to measure mine in terms of lost walks to the river, decisions not easily made.
At the top of the hill the path narrows between two fences, one to the rundown mobile home park where I live, the other to a crowded, cluttered, sprawling apartment complex. The apartments have little patios and nearly all of them are littered with junk. I found a brochure lying on the ground and I picked it up. "Fairway Village," it said. Even the sketchiest of apartments have fancy names. With my last wife we lived in a 30-unit building called The French Chateau, a drab place with little connection to the romance of French wine country. We called it The French Ghetto.
The brochure was unremarkable, but I considered whether it was a sign from the universe. Apartments are much on my mind right now as I would like to have my own "clean, well-lighted place" ( a Hemingway reference, what he said was necessary to write), somewhere with privacy and a sense of home, with room enough in the kitchen to dance. Fairway Village, named for its proximity to a pasture-like 9-hole par-3 golf course, is neither clean or well-lighted. The scrubby lawns are littered with broken trikes, the parking lot is a wasteland of oil stains and car parts.
I decided that some things you find are not a sign, just a piece of litter on the walkway.
Even so, the housing search is very much with me these days. Portland is an impossible market. Vacant apartments are snatched up quickly. The average price of a stick-built home has passed $450,000. A studio apartment rents for $900 a month, with water, sewer and garbage on the side. Move-in costs often exceed $2000.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Lanie, the wisp of a girl who works at the convenience store, about the age of my oldest granddaughter. She and her boyfriend are losing their place. clinging to the hope of buying an RV. Their story moved me. I wrote her a brief note, saying I had been homeless a couple of times but now was experiencing some great blessings in my work and situation. I included three twenties and said I hoped the little bit of money was an encouragement for them.
On the river in those high school years I learned that Jesus said to do your charity in secret for a reward in heaven, so already I've blown that. I felt it was important to tell the whole story.
I called yesterday about a few studios but most were already rented. One had no oven in the kitchen, just a sink, a tiny counter top and a 2-burner cook top, as drab and depressing as Fairway Village.
With all this in mind I drove by a mobile home dealer to look, thinking it might be better to buy a place, pay for space rent and at least own something. I could live in a bigger place with new appliances and carpet, no neighbors above or below me or sharing a common wall, annoying each other with the sounds of dancing or lovemaking or fights or angry 2 a.m. rock and roll.
I made my way through the paperwork and promised to return today with a deposit, but in the evening I stopped by the office here at the trailer park. The officers from the park board told me the last two vacancies had already been taken. I called three other parks I found online but they too said there was no room at the inn. The mobile home purchase may have been an ill-conceived plan.
I'm still weighing that out. In spite of my hunger for my own space and privacy I might be better served to remain here. The rent is cheap and Angie is probably one of the nicest and most genuine people I've ever known, an absolute peach of a roommate. We can both use the money we save to pay off debts, which will only improve my credit rating and opportunity to purchase a home later. Sometimes I make the biggest decisions in the rashest of ways.
In my Twitter news feed last night there was a report out of Pullman, Washington about a young man who'd felt compelled to make the ultimate rash decision. Tyler Hilinski, the new starting quarterback for the Washington State Cougars, was found dead in his apartment, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, a suicide.
Details are scant, but Hilinski was by most accounts a friendly, out-going, energetic and talented young man with a bright future. It isn't yet clear what kind of guilt or isolation or despair that drove him to end his life. He was a good-looking young man and supremely gifted, a backup quarterback as a sophomore who'd led the Cougs to a big comeback victory over Boise State in overtime last September, slated to be the starter this year.
We've all felt the grip of despair, the awful pull of a struggle that seeps into our bones and threatens to pull us under like a hidden current. Sometimes we look out at the river and feel no answers, only hopelessness. We need someone or something to pull us away from the shore. The dark, deep part of the waters play a siren song. Part of us aches to simply surrender.
I finished my walk with the sun again on my aging face, content to have the warmth and the reflection even if I'd achieved no answers. Sometimes a walk to the river is a walk along your own river of time. Today is cold and wet, so I'll take my meditation inside, probably under a blanket. It will no doubt turn into a nap.
1 comment:
Thanks, Dale. Another in a long line of great reads by you. Helps me to understand more about you and your life. Hope all is going well with you. One of these days we should meet at a Ducks game.
Post a Comment