long ride home

I just now finished an excellent online read of a mother who, accompanied by her two young daughters, pays a visit to her ailing father, who is likely drifting into the last, exhausted stages of his long life. It is a meditation on dying, and not so much on death, but how we introduce such a concept - and it's cacophony of complex emotions - to our children. Very thoughtful and wise.

It occurs to me midway that I share little with this woman, save perhaps that we were both raised in families that kept a tight lid on the topic of death, a subject which was never broached, a word that was never used, at least never aloud or in the presence of me, my brother or sister.

My first personal impression of loss came when, at the age of around four, I was suddenly sent away to live with an aunt and uncle in Seattle. My memories of that summer visit are vague and strange, and include my first glimpses of both false teeth (my aunt Aggie's) and a lightening storm, which I beheld, alone and breathless in the late hours of night, as spied through a thin part in the long, blue curtains that hung next to my bed. Both events were impressive, and seemed equally ominous.

As far as the idea of death itself goes, while no explanation was offered to me regarding my re-location (not to mention what had became of my parents, brother or sister), it soon became my silent presumption that my mother had "gone away", was in fact, gone. I had no innate concept of death, but of finality, yes.

So it was then with immense surprise that several weeks later - with equal abruptness - I was ushered back again to my family and home, which appeared to be miraculously intact. There was no pomp and circumstance to my reappearance, it appeared merely a simple matter of my aunt and uncle dropping in to say hi, and then driving away, leaving me behind to resume where I'd left off, once again with no explanation or even acknowledgment of what had been or now would be. What little I recall of the matter shuffles in a pale fog, as surely I must have too. Only too happy to bolt for the back door and out into the fields where I could quickly put the entire, very odd, experience behind me. I was never told why I was away (at least not for several years) and I never asked. A hair past forty-eight months of age, my mental vacancy regarding this seemed a clear demonstration that I had absorbed as much emotional confusion as I could manage.

Fast forward six years: my mother has divorced and remarried, this first time to a skinny man in a cowboy hat and boots, whom we join in his rural home outside Ferndale, Washington.Name is Don. Although countrified and in a slightly emaciated fashion, Don physically resembles a man not unlike my real father, in the style I would now have noted as the none-too-subtle signs of a heavy drinker.

The house is two stories of gray, asphalt tile, heated with a single downstairs wood-burning stove, and has two bedrooms upstairs, the smaller of which has no wallpaper (mine) and the larger of which has no closet (my sister's). Don and mom share a bedroom off the kitchen. A recent high school grad, my brother wastes no time in exciting the situation, pointing his Ford towards the promise of a big-paying job in the Montana oil fields.

We have one pastured cow (which is eventually butchered for meat having suddenly dropped dead) and Don's most prized possession, an Appaloosa mare. I have no recollection of him ever actually riding the creature, although I'm sure he also owned a saddle for it, which I had observed being stored in a small tack shed behind the main house, a untidy but revered location which was soon deemed to be the one space forbidden above all others to me.

It is a time when my afternoons after school are spent mainly alone - no other kid I know lives closer than several miles - with a lot of wandering in the woods. But I do have a dog, named Cindy, who over the course of our year's interment I have successfully raised from a puppy to a full-grown mutt. She is simple company, but faithfully so.

My mother's days appear equally uneventful, except for her frequent trips to the supermarket in town, and occasionally visits to a friend or acquaintance, also by car. On these occasions, largely out of a complete lack of other prospects, I generally tagged along, curled up in the back seat of my mom's black and white '55 Fairlane.

I don't recall knowing any of these people in particular, or even knowing anything about them, only that I usually kept outdoors during her stays, every so often in the company of an equally anonymous child who may or may not have been in my general age range. Either way, I was glad for the company, as was my mother, evidently.

It was to be one of these visits wherein I would be passed a first lesson of loss and death, and it would come to me on the long drive home, my mother at the wheel, me in the back seat, flattened down in my way against its cool vinyl seat covers. The ride home began with my mother cheerfully wishing her friend well, tucking herself and purse behind the steering wheel. The door closed, the engine revved, and we pulled away, Mom aiming one last smile over her shoulder to her friends on their front porch, slipping finally out of view. She drove, I starred \out the window, blankly observing cornfield after cow pasture that streamed past.

At a certain point - I have no grasp of how soon or later - and without so much as shifting in her around in her seat, my mother's voice announced: "Sonia called while I was inside. Called from home."

"Yeah? What?"

"She said Cindy was run over by a truck out in front of the house. She's dead." Just like that.

I squinted a short while in the direction of the back of her head while her words slowly took a legible form in my head, she now completely silent, and then turned back again to the scene outside the. whatever it might have been.

In the next instant came an explosion, a burst so huge and sudden it was like stick of dynamite had been lit and shoved inside my gut. I was literally all over the place-- up against the roof, on the floor, the seats, kicking, crying, screaming, shrieking, with every bit of strength in my lungs, lashing out with both arms, both feet, both hands like a giant, crazy cat caught in a spring trap. How I missed breaking a window I can't image. And this went on for miles, this rage, this fit of all fits, body parts continuing to fly in in every direction.

I was a human hand grenade, and she'd pulled the pin.

Mom, she was like a statue.

As astonished as I am know to recollect it, she didn't pull over, didn't reach out a hand, didn't so much as even glance in the rear-view mirror at as far as i could tell. Just sat there and stared ahead, gazing down the road as if it were an endless tunnel, never herself making as much as a single peep, or sigh.

The next thing is it's all over, and I'm laying sprawled flat across the rear floor, fingertip to toe, and I hear the sound of the gravel, popping under the car as we pull into our driveway. She parks, turns off the engine, steps out and closes the door behind her. I laid there for a while, all cried out, then pull myself back up into the back seat. I am still dazed, but beginning to move on, towards considering the practical matters of the event.

I buried Cindy out in the big pasture behind our house, under a tall fir. It seemed like a nice place. When I checked the following week I realized I hadn't buried her deeply enough, as coyotes or some other varmint had raided the grave site, dragging her remains off somewhere else, to eat, most likely.

But it didn't seem important to me by that time. I knew she was gone already, long gone, dead and gone. Gone forever.

All that remained was me, and a word that had once been her name.

paradigm shift

This is not pronounced "para-dig-em"...

In a most-beloved state of mind (3 VERY stiff screwdrivers) I have this to offer to my regular readers (1): Life is a jigsaw puzzle that is presented with 8-10 critical pieces missing.

Good luck figuring it out. You may come close, but...

some kid, calling...

Late summer, a simmery afternoon. A voice juts out, screaming in unmistakable child octaves. "Hey, Geff!" This time it's through the open rear window of my car as I cruise the last block to our house in south Tacoma. Kids in their yards, on their bikes. Running off, to something, to somewhere.

By the time it had reached my ears it was already a chorus, joined with a hundred echoes of a dozen other kids, calling out my name across my lifetime, hundreds of times - across a street, across a playground, a stream, down a hallway, down an empty street, up a tree, way over there. On the beach. It's what you do when you spot an old friend. Old, friend.

From there it was a short shot to my heart, and even before I had a chance to catch it it had already ripped it, slightly. All I could do was to be left sitting there, parked at the familair curb, sobbing a bit like an eight-year old kid would, mainly because it was an eight year who was crying, and it was me.

Now that I realized, I knew it wasn't really me they called for. If they had any news, any use for me at all, it would have been "Hey, Mister!".

Back, alone again. Locked away in a grownup life, with the face of a middle-age man, dressed for the role. But then suddenly aware it was not unthinkable that no little boy or girl might ever care to call out my name as I drove up the street - my first name - again.

Not "Hey, guy!", but the automatic exclamation that bursts out when seeing a familiar, regular friend.

Far off, somewhere deep, the eight year old in me had stirred, awakened, and thought, just for an instant, that someone had called out his name. To play?

When the nameless little boy or girl who owned that voice realized that they'd been mistaken, seen another person, caught a shadow, meant another name, they fell silent. Oh. Just a moment, mistaken.

Not today. They were calling someone else. Do they even know I'm still here?

You push it away and watch it become invisible again, as if it had been your own breath fogging a tiny spot on the window, almost forgotten.

Get up, Mister. Grab your work stuff and head in.

Time for supper, you know. That's what time it is.

The Bob T Collection

This is something that Bob T would have really appreciated knowing: http://www.chroniclebooks.com/Chronicle/excerpt/0811845389-e3.html .

Bob T, and his wife Fefee, were house parents at a group home where my wife and I worked at in the mid '70s, a hodgepodge of largely decent, but DSHS dependent kids ranging in disposition from dangerous to merely bored. Mainly, they were just teenagers, a condition which is cruel enough without imposed legal custody, but we did the best we could to remind them it was temporary confinement and for the most part, generously benevolent.

Back to Bob T, though: one of the duties of the houseparents on duty was to arrange entertainment, and while that budget was always a tight one, it occasionally meant the boys being treated to a night at the movies, selected by Bob T.

Bob T loved disaster movies, or for that matter any movie that dealt with something involving large, calamitous special effects, the more ridiculous and unlikely the better. Bob T himself was large, a reference I make with due reverence to that term, as it applies to the male human physique.

But as for movies, Bob T had been blessed with the '70's being a very good place to land if you were looking for bad action-disaster films. To name a few: The Towering Inferno, Airport, Airport 1975, The Poseiden Adventure (in the '70's an "adventure" is what you called it when you are trapped in an inverted, sinking cruise ship with Shelly Winters), The Hindenburg, Hurricane, City on Fire, Avalanche, Skyjacked. At some point George Kennedy became linked, either by karma or an overly-abitious press agent, to almost every one of these. But I digress...

The ultimate in this furious spate, without doubt, was Earthquake, a film which not only starred Charlton Heston (and Geroge Kenendy) , but also one that featured Sensurround, an overly-hyped soundtrack gimmick which employed a bevy of single-story speakers and was billed to be "So real, you'll FEEL it!").

Needless to say, Bob T had finally come into his own. As I recall, he was so excited he'd have payed for the entire boys home to see this film even if he'd had to pay out of his own pocket (which was not the case, then or ever).

Ok, now. Hoardes of people - normal people - flock to movies like this (and worse) and I have no problem with that. I personally have an extensive list (in writing, yet) of my favorite "bad" movies, and to a degree I simply resign it to personal taste and the trends of the times - so what.

But the thing with Bob T was, he would never admit to actually liking them. Not at all. No. Absolutely not. Bob T insisted that these films were "educational".

"Wouldn't YOU want to know what to do in a situation like that? Well, wouldn't you? You don't admit it, but I know you would." He was that kind of guy.

And more. Bob T was not only large in substance, but multi-dimensional as well, having worked at a variety of jobs that would have been impressive had it spanned a half-dozen men over their individual careers. A range which spanned the menial to the majestic, and beyond. He boasted of having been a window cleaner on the Sears Tower and with equal veracity insisted he had at one time also privately counseled deposed Heads of State. He worked, allegedly with a Top-Security Clearance, shredding documents at the Pentagon. lHe was a turnkey at an exclusive east coast facility that housed both the criminally insane and very famous (I know this to be a fact, as years later it was verified by a very impartial third party). He lived in an Ashram in India, and forsook it. Was an EMT, and saved the life of an over-dosed Govenor-who-shall-remain-nameless. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There were times I wished he was kidding, but knew he wasn't. Somehow, in some way, Bob T and George Kennedy had taken on similar roles, one in film and the other - however unlikely it seemed, and still does - in real life.

And the thing was, any one of these jobs you could look at Bob T and think "Yeah, I can see him doing that."

Eventually the key ingredient seemed to be that, to Bob T, the world was Black and White. Totally. Right or wrong. Sane or insane. Correct or in need of correction. His logic was as intangible, defensive, and stubborn as it was iron-clad.

At 6 feet and just under 400lbs, Bob T clearly intended no slight when he once looked over to me and observed, in obvious and utter sincerity, "I was slender once, just like you. I looked just like you, I had a frame like yours. But you'll gain, you'll see, just like me." And then the capper "Geff, by thirty-nine you'll weigh exactly as much as I do now." Had there not been such a tone of kindness in his voice, I might have challenged him on it. But the truth is, it still worries me.

A devout (and morbidly devoted) Mormon, Bob T showed no shame in proselytizing to his workmates or friends, and did so frequently, often sweetening up his hopes of conversion with a dinner invitation or afternoon picnic. Truly, the word duplicity could never be applied to Bob T, as his intentions were always as conspicuously transparent as the windshield in a new Pontiac. Cleaner, even.

But Bob T could be persuasive, if need be. This was adroitly demonstrated (with no small degree of glee) with two of our then-closet friends, who worked at the same group home. They were about the same age as us and had long-before established themselves to be - and quite joyfully so - died-in-wool hippies, replete with tandem 3-foot ponytails, a log cabin, hobo-patched jeans and equally strong Buddhist leanings. Surprised was not the word to describe our reaction when they both suddenly dropped out of site for several weeks, only to reemerge and reveal they had both converted to being Latter Day Saints, under Bob Ts proud tutelage. Just like George Kennedy, landing that Jumbo jet in the last reel, and pardon me when I scream Christ O Mighty!

Bob T also had this thing for sugar.

That's a whole 'nother story...

child bride

First off, I'm trying hard not to go on and on about this. I'd just like to make a certain point, which I think bears mentioning, if not just for the fun of it. Especially for those of us at a certain age.

There's also going to be a lot of numbers flying around here, too (I actually needed to pull up my desktop calculator to help keep track). But it's worth it, I think.

OK, now. So. The first time I watched The Bride of Frankenstein was in 1962, on a local TV late-show, I being eight at the time.

Fast forward to 1998. I'm watching another film, Gods and Monsters, a mildly fictionalized account of the last years of James Whale, the man who directed The Bride of Frankenstein. Seems as though by 1957 Whale was regarded - by Hollywood standards and popular culture both - not only as something of a virtual dinosaur, but an extinct dinosaur as well. This despite the fact that in '57 only 22 years had passed since the BOF had uttered her first beguiling hiss.

Well, all this talk of Hollywood dinosaurs gets me to thinking. About time in general. What is "old" as compared to "new", and how that perspective changes so very rapidly with each generation. At jet speed, really.

Consider this: Bride of Frankenstein was 31 years old when I first saw it back in 1962.

If you went looking for a film today, in 2010, that was the same age now as BOF was to me then, you'd be looking at films released in 1979. To refresh your memory, here is short list of notables from '79: Alien, Kramer vs Kramer (it won the Oscar for Best Picture that year, in addition to four other Academy Awards), Apocalypse Now, Rocky II.

To keep this in perspective, Sigourney Weaver - does she seem like a fossil to you? Interesting to note also that when she made Alien, Weaver was 30 years old, only three years younger than Elsa Lanchester herself when she became The Monster's bride in 1935.

So, just to wrap up on this theme, how about this one: a teenager today sitting down to watch a DVD of Easy Rider (released in 1969) is the same as if - using my earlier comparison of me in 1962 - instead of Bride of Frankenstein I'd tuned in to watch The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino, released in 1921. That's a silent film, of course.

It's odd: That Bride, she looks prettier every time I see her.

And so young.

news clips: heroes

The word hero seems to get a lot of extra mileage these days - I'm not certain of what to make of it.

When I was quite young it seemed to be a term reserved almost exclusively for the likes of Audy Murphy, or Desmond Doss, the World War ll army medic who carried or dragged 75 wounded fellow soldiers back from the front lines and to safety, miraculously dodging hours of Japanese bullets and hand grenades. Doss himself refused to carry a weapon.

Nowadays it appears that occasionally even something as cozy as a fat donation to a local charity will win someone that same title. While I respect the privilege of folks in free country to dole out such distinctions as they personally see fit, I feel it's a bit overused. A devotion to one's community, for instance, while an important and admirable thing, does not necessarily qualify as heroic. My personal definition of a hero would be of one who displays courage or genuine bravery, and in in doing so violates his or her own safety in performing an act that will, or ultimately will, save lives.

I have never served in the armed forces, but I've met a hero or two, and photographed several, I'm honored to say. Many insisted they themselves were not heroes, however great their sacrifice or deeds. Instead they contend "I'm not a hero, but I have stood beside heroes", such is their humility.

It was a quiet Saturday morning and I'd been hanging out in the newspapers darkroom (as was my beat on that particular weekend), when I responding to a situation that the police scanner labeled as "a fully-involved structure fire". I gunned my engine and raced towards a small, dead-end street in South Tacoma so short I had a hard time spotting it in my Thomas Guide. Only few minutes later on this same trajectory, I would find myself standing beside some real-life heroes, one of which turned out to be the bravest person I'd even seen. He was only ten, and would forever remain so.

A good-sized battery of Police, Fire and Rescue units had already converged at the scene, the street now cordoned off. A woman police officer stood poised in middle of the adjacent main arterial, directing traffic by hand, stopping or diverting traffic, so I parked down the street. Leaping out with my camera, I hoofed it in as close as I dared into to the area. My caution was needless - the scene was chaos, everyone too busy to notice, and too busy to care to notice.

What events that follow must now be only by my best recollection, as no records appear to survive of that fire in any official archive (procedure requires that they be kept for ten years only), despite my attempts at rooting out exact details. Reporters, other photographers and even the Fire Marshal himself who conducted the subsequent formal investigation, report that they recollect the incident only in the broadest strokes. Six Feared Dead in House Fire.

That I myself am certain it occurred in 1989 is purely because my own son was also ten years old at the time, a corresponding fact that was preeminent to me then, and is still.

What did happen was this: I aimed my camera and fired off shots of the house itself - no flames were showing, but smoke was funneling out of the roof and windows, puffs that took the shape of rusty mushroom clouds. Then something else - simultaneously - caught my eye, something happening back out in the middle of that cordoned-off street. I glanced back, but firefighters were rushing past me, back and forth to and from their rescue units and pumper trucks, faster than I could keep track of. I moved up closer yet and saw it the same instant he emerged: a firefighter stepped from the front porch, carrying what looked like a three or four year old child, his or her pajamas and face covered with soot. When he'd gotten far enough from the house, he placed his bundle down onto the grass. Shit. Then, behind me: again I spun around to the commotion I'd heard coming from the street moments before. Somebody, a woman maybe, screaming and crying.

Back over there an adjacent drama had been unfolding: traffic was at a standstill, with shocked and curious faces pouring in from every direction, both in cars and on foot. One driver of an older-model sedan (a woman) was stopped dead-center in the street, clearly having been forbidden to move any closer, and was reacting in hysterics to what she was seeing happening a few yards away. In the next moment the woman had leaned out her window, and now at her side next to the car, the traffic officer had taken her her hand to offer what little comfort she was able. She was looking past me as well, towards the nightmare-in-motion, spilling out across the house and small yard to my back.

The racket, radios and pumper trunks made it next-to impossible to decipher exactly what the woman driver was screaming, but pointing my longest lens towards her, it seemed to be this: "My children!", over and over. This was the mother, trapped outside the police barricade while smoke and fate unfurled. She cried out again, reaching almost her entire body out through her driver's side window, then suddenly pulled her hands back to her mouth, in terror of what she was seeing.

I craned my neck back at the house and recognized her alarm: another firefighter brought yet another child out of the house, and lowered it - limp - to the lawn.

I spun my eyes back and forth, from the street to the yard to the firefighters, then back to the street, not knowing where I should concentrate with my camera. I stood and took a last look back at the mother - trapped in a whirlpool of unimaginable panic - then opted to move again towards the house. I brushed the shoulder of a firefighter, took a startled step backward, and then understood the harbinger of her last screams. Three feet from me, cradled in the arms of a fireman moving in slow motion, was a boy, who appeared to be about ten years old. Used to framing and shooting in an instant and on pure instinct, I froze and watched. The blond haired boy was draped across the firefighters arms, his feet bare, wearing only a pair of white briefs. Eyes closed as if in sleep, his face - pale and white - was covered with thick soot except for smears where the firefighter had administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Looking on, the rescue attempt offered no clue as to success or failure. I remained still.

As news photographers, we're trained from our inception to capture not just telling and dramatic and moments, but the moment. It is most often the case that we chase them, but are alluded - they are too quick, too far, too fleeting.

But on this pale morning, at this scene, the moment hung motionless before me as of it were a finished painting, and I did not act. The firefighter neither had implored me not to shoot, nor did he so much as look up, or even in my direction. Standing outside the open doors of a rescue unit, I'm not sure he knew I standing right there next to them. He was working.

I raised my camera, and then lowered it. I had only one thought, and for me it was an unexpected reaction. A single word filled my mind, gave me pause: disrespectful.

The moment passed.

In doing so, things suddenly burst back to life in every direction, police and firefighters shouting, then running, myself running as well. When I returned to the newspaper later that morning I had many photos: the house, the smoke, the scene in the yard, even the frantic rush when two surviving infants were moved from the house to a waiting rescue vehicle. But the only pictures of heroes hiding in my camera were those of the firefighters, and police officers, and paramedics themselves, doing what they do.

Six Feared Dead in House Fire.

Incredibly, there were eight children in that house that early morning, with parents away. Five were declared dead at the scene, as it is referred, the event being a tragedy of scope shocking enough that it appeared in papers across the country.

As the day drew on, the next wallop came when the events of that morning were re-constructed and it was learned that the ten-year-old boy had, in fact, been the first child out of the house, uninjured. Calling upward to his brothers and sisters in the second story and unable to stir any of them to flee, he chose to re-enter the burning home to rescue them.

I once recounted this experience to a classroom of high school journalism students, exactly as I've outlined it here, then asked them what they'd do. The to explain to me what they thought would be the right thing do, and then to justify their reasons. Perhaps predictably, the majority of them indicated they would have acted just as I had, at they very least insisting that sparing the family the pain of that (uncaptured) image was the more noble deed.

Then I provided them with the wrinkle, the real wrinkle. It was a final twist that reporters did not learn until the next day, when fire crews were sweeping up, and had conducted a thorough search of the home. In it they discovered a fire alarm hanging from the ceiling, but one whose batteries had sometime earlier been removed, leaving it useless.

That dramatic or shocking photos have a way of driving home a message was not lost on me, of all people. A photo of this weight could (and does) wake up its onlookers, perhaps hundreds, prompting them to rise out of their chairs and check their own fire alarms, averting possible similar tragedies.

Except that was not a photo I'd taken.

As a follow-up to the story several months later, I accompanied a reporter to a nursing facility where the ten year old boy in question still lingered, unconscious, suspended by tubes and artificial airways that could furnish him a heart rate, but not a life. In a few weeks that too would vanish.

So. A newsroom can be a peculiar place, often at odds with the same conventions of the society towhich it also claims stewardship. An environment both extroverted and insular, it is one of generosity, but just as easily one where otherwise cruel and self-serving acts are praised and even rewarded. Humility, pity and remorse exist so at their own risk. But flourish, nonetheless.

It is at this difficult bridge - between the facts, the hard-headed and the hard-of-heart - that this story finally arrives. There is no correct answer lurking here, at least not by my own estimation.

My personal conclusion is, as decision makers, we are deeply flawed, which allows us only the most human of choices. I will also add this: that the older I get, the easier I am persuaded to believe that old aphorism that speaks to our flaws as being some of our most redeeming and compelling features.

There is also that rare and amazing force, built of bravery and self-sacrifice, the spark of which may indeed exist in all of us, but more in some, and in a rare few, infinitely so.

From it rushes forth our heroes, tall and small, and we are honored to have seen them. If only for a moment, even stolen.

chances of survival

I received an email last week from Judy, an old friend that I've known since my high school days, and the email was blank except for one sentence:

Are you at work today?

There is only one other word on the whole page, but perhaps it is all I require for a clue as to her waiting message.

Subject: Matt.

Seeing his name, my mind had a completely automatic reaction: He is dead.

To be honest, while I had not seen Matt's face for perhaps 35 years, not heard of him for nearly as long, he was a friend not to be forgotten. Always cheerful, jubilant and easy-going, simply put, Matt was one of the nicest people I had ever known. Never had a harsh word to share against anybody, and had a smile for everybody. For reasons that will soon become clear, I never expected him living long enough to celebrate his 20th birthday.

Matt was the only kid in our high school that I personally knew to be regularly shooting drugs, which in 1971 was a minor distinction in itself, though a sad and dangerous one. By this time our bunch were onto a wide variety of drugs, mainly pot and psychedelics, but because Matt had offered me a setup to sample some real "junk", I also knew he was doing heroin, who knows what else. Cocaine had yet to arrive on the local scene.

I dialed Judy and she reported her latest news, and yes, it was about Matt.

But first will come a story of my own, also about Matt. It's a story which would seem to underline his fate from a young age, and those slim chances of him surviving to adulthood that I've already mentioned, smile or no smile.

Picture a Friday night, early winter, and one Matt and I had spent mostly walking around town, just the two of us. Hoping for news of a party somewhere, or at the very least somebody willing to share a joint or maybe a few beers, we'd struck out. Most of the town, it seemed, had packed into the Sedro-Woolley High School gym for that weeks big wrestling match, a bout that Matt's older brother was competing in. On our travels, we passed the gym and paused briefly, gazing in at the tint of the yellow gym lights and hollering crowd, but moved on, hoping for richer fare.

We eventually walked back over to where we'd started, Matt's house, which was on the complete opposite side of town. Matt lived with his folks and his older brother in a modern styled house the likes of which were then referred to as "ramblers". It was fairly new, at least relative to most of the other homes homes in town at the time, many of which dated back to the '20s, or even earlier.

I had never met or even seen Matt's father, but his mother was a very familiar face, since she'd worked for many years as one of the cafeteria cooks at the town's single junior high, just down the street. Like her two sons, she was shorter than average, but her emaciated figure gave the impression of her being even tinier. She seemed quite frail, in addition to appearing prematurely old, the way heavy smoking and/or drinking will make you look after 20 years of it. She also wore an expression of grief stamped permanently across her face. Very sad.

We arrived at Matt's home that night before 9pm, disappointed and dead-sober, turned on a few lights and went into the little den where Matt kept his stereo, LPs and 8-tracks, He slipped on an LP, perhaps "It's a Beautiful Day" (very popular at the time), perhaps not, but something I recall as being "cool" and fairly loud. He handed me his headphones to listen and then drifted away towards the kitchen.

I'd been cradling the headphones (by myself) for about 10 minutes when I realized Matt had yet to return, and slipped off the headphones to go look for him. Instantly I could hear there was some kind of commotion going on out near the kitchen and, rounding the corner, the first thing I saw was pat's mother wringing her hands, weeping. At her feet her husband (a much meatier male than either of his sons) had Matt pinned to the floor with one hand and with the other was punching him in the face, and then trying to strangle him, as Matt struggled to escape. He was screaming at full volume, accusing Matt of being "GOD DAMNED HIGH!", which ironically on this one occasion he definitely was not. Not that it mattered.

I have no logical explanation of exactly how I may have ascertained this, given the riot of swearing, screaming, crying and slapping, but what I believe to had occurred was this: About the same time Matt and I were roaming town, his parents - already drunk - had arrived at the school wrestling match, where they sat and watched as Matt's older brother fought his best fight, but was defeated. Although only a ten-minute drive back to their home, it was amble time for dad to knock back what remained of his bottle. His rage unabated, it might have been pure bad luck that Matt was the first person he spotted in the crosswalk, so to speak. Employing that same metaphor: when he saw Matt, he floored it.

By any estimation, it was a horrific scene, and looked as though his old man was going to kill him, trying to kill him. Matt himself was crying and screaming, trying to fight off his dad while at the same time begging for his mother to call the cops and "have me tested!! I'm not high!!" but she just stood there, afraid to move a muscle. Just like me, cowardly shit that I was.

In fact, I remained frozen and watched for a few more seconds, then just stumbled back into the den, put the headphones back on and proceeded to blank out. When his mother came into the room a few minutes it was to ask me, in tears, to please leave. I can't tell you if there were still sounds of a struggle coming from the other room, only that when I walked out of the house I wasn't sure if I'd ever see Matt alive again or not.

I walked home in the dark and never said anything about it to my mom or to anyone else, mostly out of pure shame. The whole thing still makes me a little dizzy when I think about it, literally.

At that point, on my long walk home, guided by a vanishing point of ragged streetlights, if Matt's deepening submersion into hard drugs had required an explanation, it did so no longer.

The next week I passed Matt in the hallway at school, and later bumped into him in the smoke lot. He never mentioned the previous Friday night and neither did I.

We continued to be friends, but lost track of each other shortly after graduation. While I may have heard brief, unsubstantiated reports of him from time to time, when I did try looking him up a few years back, I hit a dead end. The sweetest kid I'd ever met had dropped from sight, perhaps never to be seen or heard from again.

Now it comes, some forty years after the fact, that Judy has some real news for me: she's talked to Matt.

Matt is alive and well, and very happy. Chased the demons out of his soul years ago and made a real life for himself, a hard-working one. Never married. No kids. Not too long ago drove a full-dress Harley from B.C. to Belize, solo: "No booze, no dope, no women, just the bike." He laughs and his laugh has a familiar, warm resonance. Real. Matt.

When I hear that his dad has passed away, I feel no sadness. That Matt managed to carve joy and a good life out of that mess is to his own immense credit, as well as a measure of his own strength - part of that hard work he mentioned - against all odds.

One of the nicest, sweetest young souls I have ever known. One I judged would never to live even to legal age. But he'd made it. Happy.

He won.