news clips: death goes click

Viewed on the scale of a map, or from a great altitude, roads and highways often appear almost as straights lines, linking them ever so neatly between given way points, but that is hardly ever actually the case.

Except for the unusually featureless expanses of a desert or flat grid of Midwestern farmland, they each will invariably possess any number of unique curves, swoops and corners, and that applies to almost every road leading to anywhere.

Our very own lives suffer this same illusion, and particularly so when observed by strangers.

As horrible as it sounds now (which it does, and should) I once spent sunny weekends stalking motor vehicle accidents, the kind of which some newspaper photographers seem to specialize in, and along a certain road. I would agree that aspects of a pursuit such as this are, by its very nature, somewhat despicable, and in writing this I will mention that I neither seek forgiveness or expect it, except to say it was not done out of blood lust. It was all about pursuing the meager local offerings of journalism's sacred Three Ds: Death, Destruction and Drama. Such as they were.

Chuckanut Drive, a Washington byway often cited as one of America's most beloved and scenic drives on the Pacific Coast, was a such a place for me, and specifically for the above stated purpose. I do not pretend that I did it solely because "it's my job" (or was at that time), or that it was the most distateful aspect of my then profession (it wasn't). This is not to say I am a completely heartless bastard, only that where there are accidents there is drama, and where there is drama there is always the opportunity for a dramatic - perhaps stunning - news photograph to be made. Heartless bastards not withstanding.

And there were plenty. Of both.

A biker who cut the one last swooping corner into the oncoming lane - into the grill work of a 3/4 ton van filled with vacationers. Another who took his girlfriend out for a fast ride but lost control in the gravel of a sharp curve, then slid into a guardrail, rocketing them both down the cliff (he lived, she did not). A young woman who left a late-night party too late and was found the next day, 100 feet below, twisted into in a pile of dead leaves. They are not photographs of events that were ever published, except in a place I would choose to forget them, but won't.

Now, it must be pointed out that motor vehicle accidents, and especially fatalities, share a certain morbid irony. The more terrifically horrible they are, the greater - and lesser - chances are they will rate a photograph in the local rag. It's a tricky business for newsrooms, because while technically being real news ("spot news", to photogs) they will generally stand a slim chance of ever seeing ink, at least in the photographic rough. Editors avoid them like dog shit (not an undo comparison, in some cases), mommies don't like them, and a whole lot of other people don't either (not to mention the grief-stricken friends or relatives of the injured or deceased). Wise photographers learn to shoot around the ugliness, thus sparing their editors the dilemma of deciding whether or not to publish, and their readers the unvarnished reality as it honestly appears, year after year, tragedy after tragedy.

But again, death or heinous injury still holds the eager promise of high drama, and that is the magnetic force that attracts news photographers like flies, myself included. In this instance it meant cruising a lovely but occasionally perilous 10-mile strip of two lane blacktop winding north along the coastline cliffs into Bellingham.

There's one more thing I should mention about Chuckanut Drive - it was where I witnessed my first fatality, so in this sense we shared a sort of personal history, albeit a regretful one. That same accident (a motorcyclist hit broadside when a sedan ran a stop sign doing 40 mph) was also my first glimpse of a dead human being, or very soon-to-be. So I was a sort of a double-virgin at the scene, all eyes and with very little to say.

Such events stamp deep impressions in one's mind, if not their souls, and that's no matter their professional intentions. As paramedics and police went quietly about their grim business, so did I. Even when there is no decently publishable photo to be made (and with such happenings, more often than not, that is the case), there is still always a story, though it may not always make ink, for one reason or another.

This time is was about 16-year old girl who took a chance at a familiar intersection and lost badly, though not as badly as the teenager whose life she had just ended. By the time I arrived the motorcyclist was already dead - or very soon would be - sprawled across the road a few feet from the twisted hulk of his motorbike. There was very little blood (as was not unusual, I would learn). He wore no helmet, this fact explained as a horrible fluke by his parents when they were briefly interviewed in following days edition. He was simply unlucky, and only for a split-second.

The girl, the motorist, had already assumed a stunned pose of shrunken grief, and was kneeling, entirely alone, beneath a large fir tree not far from the intersection.

In terms of imagery, it was a scene neither fantastic nor even remarkable, except for its obvious tragedy. Looking back now, with the memory of having photographed literally dozens of accidents, fires, rescues, drownings, shootings and what-have-you, on the whole I'd say it was just about average, as fatalities go. Quiet, cold, sad.

For the most part, the others present were all professionals, or seasoned volunteers, who went about their work in a well-trained fashion. Their apparent lack of surprise or shock spoke to a presumption that there was probably little here that each had not witnessed too many times previously, and likely far worse. They undertook their role with the same steady cadence and precision as might a highway work crew, each man or woman silently at their own specialized task, secure in their own mind as to where their job fit into the team effort. The same could not be said for myself.

State patrolmen coolly measured and mapped the distances of tire marks and positions of the wrecks themselves, estimating speeds and angles of impact. As paramedics and fire personnel attended the motorcyclist as best they could, others set to sweeping up or gathering the assorted pieces of catastrophe - a shattered headlight, an empty shoe, a brown leather wallet, this in addition to a scattered bag of groceries that the motorcyclist has carried on his last, short errand from a local roadside market. Three hours later you'd have driven past and never guessed what had happened, if it occurred to you that anything had happened there at all.

In every sense, it was long ways off from the way you tend to picture such things in your head when you read about them, and definitely a far cry from the sirens, screams and body fluid-drenched dioramas that you see depicted on TV and in the movies.

If you had been there earlier, in the minutes soon after, I would guess that only three individuals might have stood out from the rest, if only subtly.

One was alone in the middle of the intersection, covered with a yellow cotton blanket, and one other was sinking slowly under the first waves of everlasting regret, alone, under a tree.

I had not captured a "moment". At the same time I received some friendly advice from an inner demon I thought of as being strangely benevolent, under the circumstances. The message was as clear as if it had been whispered into my ear:

Watch, carefully. Do not feel.

It was a good tip, and intended to help keep me alive.

On the inside.

news clips: a first pop

The first photograph of mine ever published in a daily paper was of a firecracker exploding in the hand of a kid standing in a Mount Vernon parking lot. It wasn't a "great" shot, but it did "capture the moment" (see glossary) and it was taken on a slow news day, which was also the Fourth of July, two lessons in successful photojournalism which are worth noting because they amply demonstrate how and why certain images reach the public, often in lieu of much better ones.

It was 1/4 incentive and 2/4 "newsworthy", chiefly, once again because it was a certain event happening on a certain day when a certain need arose. The other 1/4 came from my motor drive (at 1/1000th of a second), which captured an image that I honestly never even actually saw happen at that moment, at least with my own two eyes.

If I'd kept a copy of it (which I never bothered to do) I'd show it off to you now, but again, I didn't, and because of that you will likely imagine that it was far better than it really was. That's one more important thing: the facts surrounding a particular photo are often less interesting than the actual image itself. Your imagination will serve to fill in the blanks (the fragments of paper bursting in all directions, the look on the kids face), applying your own standards and imagination in the process, and I will gladly take the credit. I'd be crazy not to. That's the gig. When you win, you're a whiz, and when you screw up, the readers don't even know about it. Magic. Illusion, really. But that's the nature of the gig, as I said.

Not much later, after I'd signed on with that first daily paper (the Skagit Valley Herald) back in 1984, a favorite newsroom joke was repeated to me, which was: if you got more than two photographers in a room together, the first thing they'd do is appoint an awards committee. Funny, and also not entirely inaccurate.

Now, I'm sure no stranger to photo contests, nor to the large helping of foolish pride frequently attached to pursuing them. They can be heart breakers, but also career makers. And especially for the unknown photographer, they can provide a crucial means by which their best work, and their name, can be seen outside the small town where they may feel professionally marooned. In some cases this will mean it is shared with top editors and photographers from across the entire U.S., or even around the world. The effect of that kind of exposure (pardon the expression) can be nothing short of miraculous. My own career might have stalled right where it began were it not for a handful of winning photos that caught the eye of just the right folks, at just the right time. More on that later.

There was a time (I need also mention that it is a tradition now almost wholly extinct), where most newsroom employees (which includes reporters, photographers, editors, layout folks, advertising people, the entire lot) all began their respective careers at the very bottom and worked their way up, inch by (column) inch. In that distant, semi-non-computer-stone-age era there was still such a thing as a "print-out" (news copy being physically printed out before being passed on the next editor), and subsequently, a need for some poor schmuck to shuttle paper from desk to desk to desk. Copyboy, was the vernacular of the day, but in '85 it was a job description with a short lifespan.

From that lowly post (and a 35mm camera, or ninth-grade grasp of the English language) you could conceivably work your way up to be a part-time "stringer", when you would occasionally be asked to cover a story or two, which very likely would be "breaking news" or a piss-grade local sports event. The same rule applied to any prospective photogs, except their lowest rung would be shooting "real estate" photos (in fact, houses for sale or rent), or used cars for the advertising sections.

With signature aplomb, it was little time before us "shooters" began competing for top honors, which in this case would come for having invested the very least amount of time possible required to shoot the actual picture. Note: When considering this dubious distinction, it is important to consider the extremely hybrid - and insular - environment of the average newsroom. In this particular case, the winner eventually was a photographer who not only didn't leave his car to get his shot, but simply photographed it by rolling down his drivers-side window and firing his motor drive as he (briefly) slowed the car while passing by. 1st Place!

Honors, by necessity, had to be gathered such as they were. On one car lot "assignment" I recall having to wait while a dealer coasted a vehicle out onto the lot by hand, not just because it simply lacked a battery, but also because it would not have started even if it had had one. This so that I could take an unobstructed photo of the vehicle for his weekly half-page ad, which proclaimed "Great Little Commuter - Needs a New Home!". True story, needless to mention.

On another occasion, as I scribbled down the details of a dealers weekly lineup, the sales staff (composed largely of men five to ten years older than me, mind you) took turns shooting me in the ass with paper clips, fired over their desks from across the room.

These were humbling affairs, for reporters and photogs alike, but their sting was always softened with the hopeful prospect of a shot at the real deal, which meant landing a full-time job at real newspaper (any newspaper), and the opportunity to be working on "real" news stories on a daily basis.

Starting out was always a tough gig for news folks, and one fueled far more by fantasy than the desire for overtime pay, an idealistic inclination that most any newspaper was (and still is, I'm guessing) only too happy to oblige. The "big" assignment beckoned.

As it turns out, however, when compared to sleazy car lots and real estate ads, your first so-called breaking news or sporting events often measure only a notch or two up on the scale of mediocrity, and - in grand newspaper tradition - they're frequently garnered standing in the rain, or working late on weeknights and holidays, most often with the verbal arrangement that your work time is officially "off the clock".

But, after all, what is life without the fantasy of fame or fortune? Or at the very least, a photo credit?

after the fremont thing

My wife, Linda, occasionally reminds me that in a blog, entitled "orange chair pictures", I hardly ever include any "pictures". I agree.

Even though I no longer earn my living by taking photographs, I confess that almost every night I dream that I am still out roaming with my camera bag, making snaps, meeting new faces.

Unlike my old, veteran and behemoth shoulder-lug, in the bag I carry now are nondescript items much closer to means of personal, rather than professional, survival. There is my wallet, a flashlight, extra batteries, Pepto-Bismal, prescription reading glasses and a variety of items that let me lead an orderly life. Lately, this includes a notebook, several pens, a few unnamed meds and two or three unpaid bills, just to help me keep track. Most importantly in there, however, I still pack a camera, although it is not very high-falootin' by today's standards. But it is reliable, and gets the job done in a fashion I find predictable and pleasing.

Today, spending a few hours with Linda at her Fremont flea market thing, I managed to record a good image or two, most notably of Frank, our friend and a premier junker. The two photos you see are my favorites of the day. One is plucked from a pile of abanonded old photos showing a young woman - whose name I shall never know - young, beautiful and sporting a new gown on her front lawn, obviously for a pageant or prom. Love that picture.

The other is our good friend Frank, also a beauty. I adore this photograph as well - far more, really - for the trust it took to take, and that it speaks of everything about my own self that I lack the honesty to tell you.

So here are photographs, just my same my orange pictures really, although somewhat more tightly cropped.

Thanks Frank.

bruce: weekends, radios, electric chairs

Workplace anniversaries are typically marked with perfunctory, polite accolades and tidy, room-temperature anecdotes, spiced up with few mildly embarrassing snapshots, and mine was no different.

Later that afternoon, as I zeroed in on our parking lot after quitting time, I was surprised to be gently confronted by a woman I did not recognize having met, on campus or otherwise. As she spoke she struck a classic poker face, vacant of both smile or frown: "They didn't mention the electric chair." she said.

For a long moment I mentally stumbled, speechless, and upped my effort to place her face. Nothing. Electric chair...? Then it hit me: during the first days at my new job, the employees had gathered for the annual after-hours Christmas party. Among the usual festivities and chit chat was also circulated a fresh pad of post-its, upon one of which we were directed to scribble "something about you that no one knows", to be left unsigned. Favoring a persona of vaguely weird over the ubiqitous cuddly or cute, I jotted that I "..had once constructed an operational electric chair". Party goers where later playfully challenged to match this "secret" with the wide range of mostly familiar faces.

My note and I were eventually paired up and, apart from a few snickers, that was that. Again I mention, this event being ten years prior to the awkward moment I was currently sharing in the parking lot. "You remembered that?" I asked. "Well, yes." These two words came delicately framed with a facial expression which hinted kindly at the obvious, and in this instance might best be summed up as being Vaguely Weird. Ouch.

But weirdness is spawned not from sunshine, a poet may have said.

In the Pacific Northwest of the mid-60's, rainy weekends were not typically special days, and very often only especially-boring. It was such a day, left alone to drift about our fir-enshrouded house, that the challenge became to find out how best to make a good time of it, in spite of the weather.

On summer Saturdays I could walk the train tracks out of town for two or three miles and pay a visit to Bruce's new residence (a much smaller abode just off Hiway 9), but during winter it usually came down to making phone calls and hoping that someone would just show up and help you pass the time.

Burt, the latest of my short string of stepfathers, was an electrical engineer who had a passion for electronic gizmos even greater than my own. One of his best was a console reel-to-reel tape recorder that he would use to compile hours of Louis Armstrong jazz tracks for later listening. For me personally, this was a toy almost as much a delight as a movie camera (or video camera, if it were 25 years or so in the future). In a similar vein, it seemed so natural at the time that both Bruce and I collected the same, enhanced stereo sound effect albums (LPs), that the fact bore no scrutiny between us whatsoever. Together with Bruce, Burt's tape recorder and our pile of sound effects records, every MAD magazine or ARCHIE comic became a potential radio script, which we populated with an ambitious and ridiculous assortment of voice characterizations limited only by our imagination and a mid-adolescent larynx.

But, getting back to the electric chair, that was Bruce's idea. And a short time later, his sincere regret, of course.

The whole thing began when Bruce, alone at home in his basement, had accidentally dropped a large vacuum-style radio bulb on the cement floor. When it shattered, it sent aloft a pale cloud of an anonymous gaseous nature, potent enough to send him running for the stairs, and then to his backyard in order to avoid fainting after his whiff of the mysterious and unnamed fumes.

This event appears to have posed to Bruce a reverie of sorts, but not in the cautious direction of self-preservation that one might have expected. Instead, he began to quietly ponder a diabolical use for his newly discovered supply of "gas". By his own admission, his first inclination came in the thought of constructing an actual "chamber", possibly employing a hollowed-out hot water heater for the vessel itself, it being the approximately correct size to encapsulate a like-sized teenager. Into this sealed vault he could then vent the odorous contents one of his broken vacuum bulbs, and then "just watch". Then what?

His zeal for this particular contraption lost steam when he began an actual examination of the family hot water heater. It was soon obvious that the transformation from heater to gas-chamber would demand heavy labor, too much, he decided. But with his appetite for mock-execution already wetted, he wasn't about to give up, and began looking at alternatives to his original plans for "gas". Iron Maidens and guillotines posed much the same obstacle as the gas chamber - too labor intense - and while a trap-door gallows held a certain charm, he ultimately judged it too pedestrian.

It was about at this point that my Saturday blahs and Bruce's gruesome imaginings met head-long, in the way of a serendipitous visit to my stepfathers wood shop. It was only by chance that on this particular day an ordinary, straight-back wooden chair had been left there by person or persons unknown, but there in the sawdust it did linger. Bruce did not, his inspiration once more aflame. An Electric Chair. Yes.

Rummaging my house and garage for the additional components required (electrical wiring, some steel grating, assorted bolts, straps and a helmet of some kind), we devised a blueprint on the fly that bloomed before us as if it were a sunflower in a dark swamp.

In less than two hours it was completed, right down to the leather leg straps we'd manufactured from an old belt. As much as possible, every necessary detail was attended to, including a five-inch eye bolt that could be "screwed" down into the head of the due-to-be-executed. Wooden manacles (sculpted carefully from plywood using a jigsaw) hooped around ankles, wrists and elbows with equal, solid security.

So there we stood, admiring our greatest creation, without doubt the pinnacle of our most heartfelt and malevolent mischief. The Chair. And if there was ever to be a single moment wherein our two peculiar-formed psyches merged to form a single, monstrous mind, this was it.

Of course, Bruce was a fool for ever letting me convince him to be strapped in. To say the least.

With every appendage secured or strapped into place, it was now all he could manage to simply twist his wrist, not to mention in any way actually free himself. True to his vision, he himself had made certain escape was virtually impossible, and he knew it. He also realized that, in as much as he'd become obsessed with the construction of this screwball abomination, so was I now being swept up with the notion of convincing him he would be it's first test pilot. So to speak.

As he bounced and squirmed atop the chairs steel-lined seat (an electrical conduit cleverly fashioned from the bottom rack of my mothers refrigerator) I held up the electric cord wired to the chair and dangled it absently in the direction of the electric outlet next to my stepfather's workbench. Try as he might (and did, desperately), he was trapped.

But of course I let him go, eventually. And he had his day as well, when my own time eventually came. In both instances we remained close friends.

While she doesn't actually know me, or for that matter ever heard of Bruce, or even the slightest in particulars regarding our friendship, the woman in the parking lot was right.

In fact, a few minutes later that same evening, as I drove home and caught myself giggling out loud, I was sure of it.

bruce, later

Throughout my younger years, Bruce was (and even in absentia, honestly still is) a strange and singular presence in my life, a product of personality which I have observed emerges only in the rarest of circumstances from a mundane and healthy home life. Given his bloodline, this was a case which Bruce certainly needn't fret be his own.

Rosemary, the mother, a woman near a skyscraper in height and given to a forceful, no-nonsense nature, was quite as likely to deliver, seemingly without provocation, a flat-handed slap across your rump as she was an unexpected compliment on the curl of your hair. On a visit over coffee in our living room, she once bargained to buy all of the warts on my middle finger for a single copper penny. Soon after they promptly vanished, and remained so forever, she being not nearly as surprised as I, if she was even surprised at all.

Bruce's father on the other hand was as an unassuming individual as Rosemary was outspoken, nearly invisible, really. Although rumored to be an fanatical eccentric with esoteric dabblings ranging from antique steam engines to wild electrical experiments, and while his experiments may have been ignited from the published letters of Nikola Tesla, the man himself seemed more an apparition than a parent. Personally, I can recall nare a glimpse of him until I was almost out of high school, many years later. What I do recall is that he leaned towards wool cardigan sweaters and constantly smoked a pipe, a habit I took be a wonderful and professor-like distinction, in particular during an era where Camel, Pall Mall and Lucky Strike ranked (in every sense) supreme.

Their relationship itself appeared tepid to the extreme. Words were rarely exchanged (almost never in the presence of another neighborhood boy or girl) and, while his dad was odd enough right out of the box, Bruce was compelled to up the ante considerably: it was crucial that we all believe that he had also secretly been a pre-WWII member of the American Nazi party (this being a supposedly distinguished heritage), a footnote which I was in no position to challenge, either then or now. This was entirely Bruce's call.

All subjective observations aside however, there was one indisputable bit of evidence in his household which could not be overlooked, or set on spin: a few feet inside the entryway to his family's front room was a enormous, chest-high glass cabinet just too large to miss. Inside, gaping at you at full attention from the inside-out was not one, but two stuffed adult Emperor penguins, one slightly larger than the other, the two being nestled in an accompanying throng of dozens of smaller porcelain facsimiles, also glass-eyed, also erect. If they were a male and female couple it was a detail that escaped my pre-adolescence scrutiny. But, needless to say, it was the first thing you noticed when entering the home, and almost certainly the last detail you'd be pondering on the drive home.

Such was the mirror of Bruce's early family years, at least as I viewed it.

Rosemary taught piano, and while shy of being an bonafide child prodigy, her son still posed a mental force to be dealt with, headlines she simultaneously endorsed when proclaiming to friends and fellow parents that Bruce was both unteachable and gifted at the keyboard. He was able play the instrument completely and intuitively and without the cue or guidance of a single written note of music, "by ear" as she put it. Whatever the case, this was a boy clearly gifted beyond his years, a trait of fascination and frustration to the uneasy adults in his orbit, and one that he dispensed in gleeful torment, employing both his expanded vocabulary and guileless appearance to exhaust little doubt as to his complete and total disregard for grown-ups and all they held sacred. Indeed, even from the earliest age, Bruce was his own champion, living by his own standards, which included converting his upstairs bedroom into an combination chemistry lab and middle eastern oasis, or WWII bunker, at his whim.

Personally content with my own backyard sandbox, I was impressed to watch as, before he was even ten, Bruce managed to assemble a mail order HeathKit Ham radio entirely from scratch. At a time when I may have mistaken the name of Frank Zappa to have been an Tibetan mystic, Bruce informed me that he was, in fact, a genius at the helm of the next generation of music. "...the dream of a girl, just thirteen. Off with her clothes, and into a bed, where she tickles his fancy, all night long... BABY, BABY, BABY, BABY!!!". In a very real sense, of course (something it would take me a near-half century to confirm), he was largely correct.

As Sedro-Woolley offered no Louvre or Smithsonian Museum, or even the reliable outside possibility that you'd ever get closer than a postcard to either one of them in your own lifetime, Bruce was a precious commodity.

While his somewhat skewed portal to the real world may have been cluttered with stuffed penguins, rampant sarcasm and an intimidating mother, a portal, at least to the ragamuffin kids on Jameson Street, he truly was.

last call

The right brain ponders: The lives we share, or choose not to, with our supposed most-loved ones, are victim by their proximity alone to also be our most contentious and confusing. This despite the rivers of love and understanding that run deep in such relationships, at least as commonly depicted across the maps of popular human culture. More often than not, given to the same flaws as their human craftsmen, these maps are in error. Even at the very end of a lifelong arch, at a time when we are lead to hope that the big picture might at last snap into focus, we are left lacking. No such map exists, or shall ever exist, except for what little landscape of light and darkness that we have foraged out somewhere within ourselves. This is our personal, imperfect guide to the experience of death, as was always the intention, it would seem.

On a recent Saturday morning, Linda and I met with the staff at a local hospice and checked my mother into a private room, a quiet and sunlit place that we understood was where she would take her last breath. Hovering in a coma since the previous weekend, she'd collapsed with a stroke on Sunday afternoon, spent several days in a critical care ward, with hopes she'd somehow bounce back. At 87, she'd held a reputation as a tough old bird, but the time for tough had run out. On the brink of renal failure and paralyzed completely on at least half of her body, she was now presumed never to awaken, or even live out the week.

Earlier, when the decision to withdraw feeding and fluid tubes was finally made, Mom was unplugged from her tangle of plastic tubes, scopes, probes and cables and set free to lean her head back and snore like a logger, as was her style, this time in the numbing embrace of a morphine IV drip.

During a long week in her hospital room, my brother Rog, Staci and I exchanged remembrances, do-it-yourself tips and hour after hour of topics ranging from my mother's current breathing rate, to HBO On-Demand, bargain gasoline, back exercises, best vacation stories and back again. We sought comfort in each other and the common thoughts and events of the everyday. Doubtless in countless rooms surrounding us in all directions, others were relating similar tales, and under similar circumstances.

Her gray head braced by a stiff pillow, the three of gazed silently at the woman between us: perilously near the edge of the past-tense, here was a helpless figure that for each of us at a given time had once been the bright center of our respective universe.

That same week, in the course of a regular-scheduled hour with my therapist, death was naturally the main topic. My summation came in the form of a childhood memory: when I was nine or ten and we lived in Burlington, I'd often ride my bike to the small park across the street from the city library. Here, I would sit and imagine how wonderful it would be when the carnival would return in June, and set up their show on this very lot. On one of these afternoons I looked up from my swing and saw my brother's '53 Ford sedan - canary yellow with a black top - heading up the street, just across the playfield. Mom was driving, alone and at the wheel, window rolled down, and when she spotted me she threw her arm out the window and flapped it in a tall arch, all with a huge, happy smile. As if it was the happiest day of her life. Back those days her hair was a rich, dark brown and her lipstick an impossibly bright red. Beauty, laughing. That image of her through the window, waving and waving with that big smile, in the old Ford, that picture is still as clear as if it had happened a few moments ago. At that same instant, the moment when I raised my hand to wave back, was when I also suddenly realized that She will die someday. She, my mother. Will die.

I lingered on my swing and let it in sink in, and then cried. As every child must discover, it was true.

On Friday morning, having shared the week in Mom's Hospital room, Stacy flew back to her home in Frisko, Texas. The evening just before, this most beloved granddaughter had slept in the chair next to Mom's bed for the entire night, their hands entwined in a familiar fashion, but for a last time.

Two day later, at the hospice, I gingerly combed my mother's hair and left for short trip to the local supermarket, then headed home. When the phone rang a few minutes later, I was surprised to hear the caller announce herself to be Resa, a hospice nurse we had met only an hour or two earlier. My mother had just passed away, she reported.

Whatever goodbyes were coming, had all been made.

orange chair pictures

My old, orange chair began its life as a different color, and so long ago I no longer have even the slightest recollection of its original print or shade, except that it was definitely not orange (the orange cover arrived by mail, from Sears). It was stuffed with foam rubber, the usual treatment for lower-priced furniture in the 50's and 60's.

It's anybody's guess the first day I discovered the small wooden table leaf, or that it would fit exactly between its arms, but from then forward the chair became my personal throne and drawing bench.

Squished into that orange polyester cockpit is where the best pieces of my mind met paper. Two-man submarines figured heavily in that mix, as did dark and elaborately dangerous funhouses. From here I also mapped out my future (if not highly unlikely) adventures, as well as an plethora of "scientific" notions, their topics ranging from spacecraft to motorcycles to a breed of deadly advanced lasers fashioned from common light blubs. Among others. These were lovingly rendered in pencil, and later by felt tip pen or colored marker, as my budget would allow.

Although my chair also served me as something of a small, privare bubble, it could not completely isolate me from the household events that swirled in shallow orbit. It was a decade in which we packed up and relocated on a pretty regular basis, a new boyfriend or husband entering or exiting with each move. Next we'd moved to a farm in Ferndale, a tattered horse trail of a town near the Canadian border. Here Till re-married for a first time, and then moved to Bellingham when she divorced Don just a year later. We moved back to Sedro-Woolley when she had began dating again, eventually marrying Burt. In another year we moved out yet again - on this occasion just across town - when the new husband took to gambling his paycheck away on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, while my orange chair was no match for bucket seats in James Bonds' Aston Martin, the 007 spy car continued to be one my most extensive and pet projects. This was a vehicle whose arsenal I judged to include far too few machine guns, not to mention ground-to-air missiles, and booby traps and countless other secret weapons still in development by both me and govenmental agencies unknown.

Then came the blueprints for my future Adult Home, a design born by equal parts Playboy magazine and Edgar Allen Poe. A five story A-Frame, it was both a vision only a boy could adore and even believe even possible. Unencumbered by the faintest grasp of architecture (or laws of gravity), my drawings called for the ultimate playhouse, replete with a swimming pool penthouse, sliding bookcases and gothic stained-glass windows that stretched from the ground floor to the astro observatory five stories above. My palace to be.

Despite all of my full-color illustrations, real life was pale. But no matter when or where we moved, my archive of drawings would follow. Eventually this came to be a huge floppy-eared grocery box, which though kicked and clobbered with each subsequent move, protected my orange picture collection like a behemoth cardboard vault.

Until.

As had become the norm, our next move arrived again on the cusp of marital dissolution. On this occasion we'd be moving on a Saturday, just across town.

Saturday arrived but, I had privately declared to take this Moving Day off -- my butt hit my bicycle seat and I was gone for the day, who knows where. When I returned later it was nearly dark, with all the packing nearly entirely finished, it seemed. As I rolled my cruiser into a silent driveway, I spotted my mother in the back yard out by the burn barrel, the two of us avoiding both eyes or answers.

It was only weeks later, having settled into our new address on Jameson Street, and all boxes unpacked, that I realized what had actually taken place on that particular Saturday, and in the burn barrel specifically.

So many dreams, up in smoke.

Forty years has shed little wisdom on the wound. Clearly, while there was much we didn't share that long Saturday, my mother had moved to impart a notion that she had long and deeply embraced. As viewed from my own twelve-year-old haze, that notion still remained faint, but was no less impressive.

Alone.