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.

The Day The Music Died - Part One

So bye-bye, miss american pie. Drove my chevy to the levee, But the levee was dry. And them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye Singing, "this'll be the day that I die. "this'll be the day that I die." ~Don McLean "Amercan Pie" 

It was July 1996 and I was away in Ohio for "Union Summer" - a month long internship through the AFL-CIO - with my friend Meta. I was at the house of one of the SEIU organizers, taking a break from passing out flyers and knocking on doors of low-paid nursing home workers (trying to convince them that forming a Union was in their best interest), when Meta got the page and called me. 

This was pre-cell-phone days and I had given my parents Meta's pager so they would have some way to get ahold of me while I was gone from Milwaukee. You know, you always do that, give an emergency contact number, but you never think anyone will ever need to use it. Meta didn't say much when she called, just that "you need to call your family in Seattle, now" and I knew it couldn't be anything good. 

I got my mom first, but she was crying too hard to talk so she handed the phone over to Dave, my older brother, the responsible one who always took care of things. Well, he would have to take care of things now, a lot more than he ever expected to, at the age of twenty-seven. I heard him say something like the following: "There was an accident - on the hiking trip - Dad fell, and...he died Michele..." I don't know what came out of me, probably "oh my god" and some kind of protest "how could that be?!" and then crying. Someone brought me some toilet paper for the tears and probably sat next to me, touching my shoulder. I was mostly in shock, I'm sure, and just wanting someone to tell me what I was supposed to do next. 

Meta came to pick me up, and took me back to the dorms at Kent State where we were staying, and helped me make my flight arrangements. We had to drive all the way from Akron to the airport in Cleveland? Cincinnati? I don't remember exactly, but recall there was one of those dramatic mid-western thunderstorms on the long drive, that continued during my red-eye flight back to Seattle: ...as we travel across the map of this world and move through the crowded cabin or simply stare out the small window we are given, watch god play with the fluff of our lives: the weather outside like lasers or a child playing with matches illuminating the clouds and night-sky... 

This was right after the crash of TWA flight 800, initially thought to be a terrorist bombing, and so security was newly heightened at all U.S. airports. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800] Because of this, I wasn't met at the gate like I expected; instead Dave, my sister Stephanie and Dan Raymond (close friend of the family) met me at the security checkpoint, and I remember how strange that seemed at the time. 

The next part is a bit of a blur, with all kinds of decisions and arrangements to be made about the death certificate, mortuary services, transportation of the body, the "viewing" and funeral, most of it taken on by Dave, as I remember. A lot of it seemed to be happening in gray haze and slow motion, until the technicolor moment when his casket arrived. Kenna, my mother's college roommate, had driven the body all way from Omak, her town on the other side of the Cascade mountains, where his fall happened. She had also arranged for the casket - the most simple pine box with a beautiful carving of a bear, done by a local Native American wood-worker. My aunt, who flew in from L.A. with my poor shell-shocked grandfather (your children are supposed to outlive you, after all), commented on this: that it was a perfect symbol for my father, who was gruff and forbidding, but also beautiful and cuddly and majestic, in his own way. 

I remember being there when the van pulled up with his casket - I had been in high-stress mode in moments leading up to the viewing, with all the family and friends in town, and wanting to do right by him, trying to take some of the burden off Dave. When my father's body finally arrived, and they brought its heavy weight in to rest on casters among flowers and photos, it suddenly seemed all too real and I just broke, cried my first really hard cry, which was like lifting a burden I hadn't even realized I was carrying.