The Day The Music Died - Part Three

"Let's go fishing in the morning
just like we've always done
you can come inside and wake me up
we'll pack and leave by dawn
we will pack and leave by dawn...
and the truck will climb up slowly
and we'll see how far we've gone
and the hills will stretch before us
they are rolling on and on
they are rolling on and on
and the fish will watch our boat
with envy and with fear
because we will live forever
and our days are slow and dear
and our days are slow and dear"
~"Fishing in the Morning" by Dar Williams

After the funeral, we went up to Lake View Cemetery right next to Volunteer Park, a place so beautiful and pristine it's like a country club for dead people. I'm still not sure how we got him in and wonder what some of old money Seattle might think of having this ex-hippy, Catholic Worker House founder in their midst - a man who I think still subscribed to a Socialist newspaper at the time of his death, despite being a home and small business owner.

Dad's old friend Larry Shoup, who he and my mother met in Ethiopia during the Peace Corps (where they went shortly after their wedding in 1966), gave a graveside Eulogy. It was yet another incredible speech that revealed more aspects of his life. They regularly went on backpacking trips in the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains, and their "week-long hiking adventures were always one long conversation about all that was going on" in their lives, their families and the world.

Larry choked up and finished with:
"I want to end by discussing another of Paul's endearing attributes, his hopeful nature. Paul loved to fish, and was always optimistic about catching another big one. This hope was manifested in his fishing nickname - 'Last Cast Hirning.' So when it was time to go, he always wanted to make one last cast of his line, and then another, and another, solemnly promising each time that this was his 'last cast.' Sometimes he would indeed catch one and an enduring scene in my mind's eye is a vision of Paul reeling in a fish with the excitement that was his trademark. One has to have hope to do anything, and Paul's high level of hope, his optimism, was always an inspiration and a lesson for me."

We walked back for the wake, and my friends gathered around me in the front yard of my childhood house like mother hens, clucking and handing me beer after beer. Heidi had flown up from San Franscico, which meant the world to me and I've probably never thanked her properly for it. At one point, she and I snuck down the alley to have a clandestine cigarette, like we were thirteen again.

I remember my uncles, my mother's sweet brothers up from Portland, OR, befuddled in their grief like the rest of us, and helpless to do more than strong-armed carry in cases of Henry Weinhard's, for fortification of the mourners (one woman said it was becoming "too much of an Irish wake" for her, as she departed).

I also remember faces from communal masses of long ago at "Round Table" (an adjunct household to Pacem in Terris), tear-streaked talking about how it was the end of an era, so much seemed lost somehow now...something like that, I wish I had a been a little more sober to have taken it all in, but I guess it's pretty understandable that I needed to numb out. I don't remember how the evening ended, I just remember how empty the house seemed without him, and how I knew that it would never feel full with his presence again.

And what was the rest? Afterwards, when people gradually stopped dropping by the house with their casseroles and condolences, I prepared to go back to some kind of life in Milwaukee. But all I wanted was to remain in Seattle among all that was familiar, and with my family in that cocoon of hurt.

Before I left, I had my long hair chopped off, as if in some sign of grief, but really it was something I'd been wanting to do for a long time. I was pretty much immediately sorry, and I'm sure it wasn't easy for David, who I had started dating in June before I left for "Union Summer." Even though I told him about it ahead of time, what he must have thought when he picked me up at the Chicago airport - poor guy was only just getting to know this long-haired chick and there I showed up looking like Ralph Macchio (see the "Post Script" post).

I felt so strange coming back to Milwaukee like that - I had planned to return after the internship finished and pick back up with house painting and working my cafe job and desultorily reading academic stuff to prepare for second year of grad school. When I got back into town, I wasn't due at either job yet, and so David and I went camping in Kettle Moraine State Park, among the gently rolling hills of rural Wisconsin.

After setting up the tent, we went to the beach and I walked into the slightly fishy water of the small lake, despite a sky that threatened thundershowers and lightening. I dunked my shorn head under, and hoped - for something, anything less painful to happen next.