Spent this Memorial Day weekend in Portland with my brother John, his girlfriend Emmie and a cast of family characters who I love. What a gift.
John and Emmie are going to be living in Mexico for six months next year and then John is going to be selling his home and doing whatever they decide to do. Lots of changes coming.
His home has been the place to go for weddings, memorials, big meetings, reunions. It is a Steiner home, if you know what that is, built by the man who designed and built Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. It is an impressive log home, idiosyncratic, with a bridge over the living room, wonderful rooms and fittings. It overlooks the Sandy River in Troutdale, Oregon. It has been a labor of love for John and his wife Pat who died almost three years ago.
On summer mornings, I will be joined by Tardog, Lucy, his sister, my dog and any other random people and dogs and walk from the house down the massive lawn to the river. I love this ritual. It is as much a part of summer mornings at John and Pat’s house as drinking beer late into the evening with John as he smoked his Chesterfields or Marlboros or dope.
On the beach, the dogs would swim (sometimes I would too) and the dogs would roam and bark and play in the driftwood and chase the geese and ducks and then in the midst of the chaos, Tardog would drift away to the local restaurant, the Tippy Canoe, where they would feed and pet him, or sometimes Tar would float with random folks down the river, washing up in strange home with strangers who would call John and Pat and ask that they pick up their wandering dog.
It was and is an idyll. The memories of those summer mornings light up my head. We’d swim in the afternoons and in the evening walk down and watch as the setting sun lit up the canyon wall across the river and then just touched the tips of the trees high on top. And then, the lights go out.
Change is always around us in one way or another. You never step in the same river twice. It morphs it flows, we get old, we die and lives spring up from our ashes and go on. There is no stopping it.
I’m okay with that and even if I wasn’t, that wouldn’t change the outcome one bit. It must be hard, though, to forever regret and mourn every loss. Perpetual mourning means never looking forward, never swallowing the reality of what we’ve lost, and realizing what we might still hold on to. And what we hold onto is ourselves; our selves in the world, changing, morphing, flowing like the river. Grab a hold of that if you can.
This is not some wacky zen dream. It is the way to navigate our lives, keeping what’s precious held inside. We become the rock in the river ourselves.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 