92. A bit of humility

Our exhibit this month at the Josephy Center is called “Who’s Your Buddy?” It features paintings, photos, and ceramic renditions of dogs, cats, and goldfish that the contributing artists play with, talk with, live with. Some are striking, some fawning, and all show the overwhelming human reach towards something beyond self. 

 

Yesterday the local Center For Wellness gave us a noon “Brown Bag” program on “Emotional Support Animals”—at least that is how we advertised it. What we got was an amazing woman named A.K. talking about the two canine companions that help her make it through her days and nights. A.K.’s dogs are “psychiatric support” animals that she and others have trained. She explained that she suffers from severe PTSD, among other maladies, and quietly extolled her dogs for waking her from nightmares, guiding her to and from her apartment and outside destinations when mental lapses descend like fog on the brain, and even bringing her medicines. She could not live on her own without them.

 

The conversation included emotional support animals that we had advertised, and talk too of the pets that many of us don’t call that, but unthinkingly rely on for conversation, companionship, and help in raisiing our children. There was no surprise when someone brought up the dearth of animals in shelters and pet stores as the pandemic carries on.

 

 A.K. showed us just how substantial and important our animal friends can be in this time of the pandemic. For an inspiring half hour, check this one out:

https://youtu.be/5IOPiHK_N1U 

91. Remember--and wait

I got my first shot yesterday. I had a phone call last week setting up a 2:15 appointment this Tuesday. I showed up at Cloverleaf Hall at the Wallowa County Fairgrounds a few minutes early, got my ticket—a vaccination card with the date on it, got my shot at 2:10, then a piece of masking tape with “2:25” inked on it, got scheduled for the second shot on March 9, and took a seat alongside old friends to wait for 2:25.  

Cloverleaf Hall was a large and new metal building, built to replace an old fair hall that had burned, when I came 50 years ago. I first worked for the Extension Service, and set up tables and chairs in that building scores of times. I cannot count the fairs, dances, public meetings, 4-H meetings, and annual Cattlemen’s Balls that I have attended in that hall. 

 

But I remember the first one clearly. It was a “Sons of the Pioneers” concert. Lloyd Doss, then proprietor of the Imnaha Store and Tavern, was a Pioneer who no longer toured, but went to California to record with the group, and in this instance brought them here to take pictures for an album cover—and to perform at Cloverleaf Hall. The cowboys and cowgirls from up and down the Imnaha joined a huge crowd in welcoming the Pioneers, and the ceiling shook when Lloyd “Tommie” Doss was introduced in his cowboy finery. They were all dressed in fringe and color, and the matching hats floated over guitars and harmony, with Lloyd’s rich baritone easy to pick out.

 

They packed their equipment at midnight, but local vet Fred Bornstedt took the stage with his own guitar and own battered cowboy hat and sang and played as we sipped beer and booze that we’d openly carried in as the night wore on.

 

Yesterday was 50 or 51 years away from the Pioneers. Lloyd and Naomi Doss and Fred Bornstedt have passed on, and my older self waited, with other seniors in that place I danced young—to be sent home, to wait for a second shot. And to wait for some clearing in this national fog of Covid-19 that seems to grow closer to us in Wallowa County by the day. We’ve been lulled by our remoteness from the big scenes of overcrowded urban ER rooms and our own small numbers, watching the out-of-state license plates for almost a year now, wondering when our turn would come. Yesterday there were 7 new cases—a record. 

 

We wait, remember, and wait some more.

90. The Race(s)

Yesterday’s news of anti-vaccine protesters at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles follows on the Capitol siege and a year of sporadic resistance to safeguards against C0vid-19—and denials from partial to total about the virus itself. The California story is notable, because California is a Blue state with Democrats in control of most reins of government—and because California will soon eclipse New York as the state with the most Covid deaths. 

I wait my turn—my appointment is for Tuesday, February 9—to get my own vaccination, and watch the daily numbers of Covid positives among the 7,000 of us here in Wallowa County, Oregon. We’ve been a poster community, our schools up and running, our hospital and health care system on top of testing and tracking, and the rush of summer tourists apparently unable to bring us the virus. We’ve not been affected by the church outbreak in nearby La Grande, or by the relentless numbers of positives in Umatilla County to the west. But recently, in the last week, daily numbers of positives in Wallowa County moved from 0 to 1 with the very occasional 2, to daily positives with a high of 5. 

 

It feels like I am—we are—in a race to get our vaccinations as the virus finally makes its way through the long windy road from La Grande, or up and down Rattlesnake Grade from Lewiston, Idaho (a state with recent jumps in cases and deaths amid protests at masking and distancing). There are only two roads in and out in the winter, with one more open just a few months each year. We wait—and watch the Idaho license plates on Main Street and the daily numbers from the Oregon Health Authority (1 on Friday; 3 yesterday) against the days we get vaccinated and the weeks before efficacy. 

 

The country too is in a race, on one side the protestors, naysayers and deniers, who are wary of coronavirus vaccines, or don’t believe in vaccines at all, or who believe that the virus itself is a concocted story promulgated by Democrats or aliens. On the other side are the hundreds of thousands of health care workers who continue to risk their own lives to stop this thing; the survivors mourning lost relatives; the children and grandchildren who have parents and grandparents like me, 78 years old and in good health but nevertheless deemed “at risk”; and the new Biden administration and its efforts to get a grip on the pandemic and move on to the economy and climate change. 

 

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89. Skating

 Skating

 

How people leapt at the idea and mind’s eye visions of ice skating… Thank all of you so much for stories of skating on a frozen river in the Yukon, playing pick-up hockey in New Jersey, skating in “wild” places away from closed and bounded rinks; picking up skates after six years and taking a grinning selfie. You wrote of “flying on ice,” of “skating in the wilds,” and of a grandfather who skated on Wallowa Lake.

 

I want to read something more into these memories, that maybe now, with Pandemic hopefully—hopefully slowing and politics hopefully—hopefully settling, that there’s a soul-calming—at least for many of us—that has released pent-up tension and allowed us to remember times when we “flew across the ice,” skated wild rivers, chased frozen pucks, and, today, as one so concisely said, find “a place to feel young and strong again.”

 

So thank you all for sharing your memories—and please remember Gerry too, a Vietnam vet smarter than a whip, who could quote Joyce and Ray Carver, who struggled much and accomplished much—we skated and skied and read books together many times—finding a loving relationship and a teaching mission and grateful students at nearby Eastern Oregon late in life—before cancer took him away. If you are of my age or a bit younger, and you are lucky, you’ll have people in your life like Gerry—or maybe you are a Gerry yourself.

 

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88. Memory break

I know that it was 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in February, and I think it was in 1988. It was cold and the sky was magnificent—like today’s sky.  

Gerry McNamee walked into the small corner of Ralph Swin hart’s engineering office on Enterprise’s Main Street—where I shared Ralph’s computer and managed my new Pika Press publishing company and started dreaming a new thing called Fishtrap. (Pika Press stumbled on for a few years, publishing a few books that did not become best sellers but pleased some local history buffs and baking enthusiasts; Fishtrap lives on.) Gerry said it was a fine day to go ice skating on Wallowa Lake. 

 

So, we did go ice skating on Wallowa Lake. Out of the car at the foot of the Lake, we toted skates to the frozen shore. It was a beautiful day—the temperature must have been in the single digits; the sun had climbed over the East Moraine, and there was a fine layer—maybe a quarter inch—of hoar frost on the ice-covered lake. We tied on our skates, pulled on our mittens and pulled down our stocking caps—and glided off.

 

I learned to skate young in Minnesota, but we moved to California when I was ten and I’d not made the transition to roller skates (this before the aligned single rollers, when roller skates were clunky, many wheeled things you strapped to shoes).  I’d taken it up again after moving to Wallowa County in 1971, but was only a workmanlike skater. I was not graceful skating backward and making sharp turns skate over skate. 

 

But on that Wednesday on Wallowa Lake Gerry and I were speedskaters. We headed for the broken topped pine a mile or two up the eastern shore. We swung our arms and listened to the swoosh of skates through frost on ice. I don’t think we stopped for breath until we reached that goal. Then we laughed and chortled at our private pleasure. No one else in the County, no one else in the whole world was there that day to earn that pleasure. 

 

Gerry’s gone now; I’d be afraid to get on skates at the Lake—though I might risk it on a small rink with side rails to catch me. But the mind and memory are sometimes wonderful, and on this cold Thursday in 2021 I can still hear the swish of four skates and see a glorious grin on Gerry McNamee’s face the day we skated the Lake alone. 

 

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87. Corruption

When I read the story of the wealthy Canadian couple who flew their private plane to a remote Indian reserve and posed as motel workers to get Covid vaccinated, I felt sick. And this morning, reading about people cutting in line—medical workers with no patient contact: administrators and psychiatrists and radiologists who work remotely; political wives and ex-wives who have been able to jump the lines—I felt pain in the gut.

 

We’ve had four years of turmoil over issues of race, religion, and fabricated realities, but somehow, effective vaccines were speedily developed by conscientious scientists, medical experts, business executives and government workers—and now we bow to favoritism and greed!

 

I’m told that one of the hallmarks of Roosevelt’s New Deal was the absence of corruption. Yes, one can probably find instances of people making the dishonest buck or nudging their communities or institutions ahead in the Works Progress Administration line, but one never hears talk of it when the stories of CCC crews and the money sent home are told; no one talks about payoffs when Post Office Murals and state by state information books written by out of work authors like John Steinbeck are celebrated; and although there were fights between public and private power companies, I’ve never heard that the Rural Electrification Agency was politicized. 

 

For my money, President Biden should step up on a national platform and decry all cheaters and line-jumpers. He should make sure that vaccines get to poor, black and brown neighborhoods, to garbage collectors and mail carriers before it gets to hospital CEOs. He should tell private companies involved in vaccinations to do their jobs and get paid for doing them—but to forgo adding the 20% or 40% profit figure atop expenses. 

 

The way out of the mess we are in is to do it together—fairly. I’ve heard seniors say that being healthy and in a secure living situation, they’ll wait for the garbage collectors and grocery clerks to go first. How can we get the country to do that?

 

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86. Hard Promises

The inauguration is over; President Biden has signed a flurry of executive orders, had a few cabinet appointments approved, and the Senate has negotiated a small delay in taking up the Trump impeachment—hopefully allowing Biden to complete his cabinet.

 

Dr. Fauci is back in front of the cameras, with renewed vigor and occasionally a small smile. He made a kind of apology for previous imperfect statements—he had not wanted to directly contradict President Trump. Smiled now remembering his distressed look in the background as Trump promoted hydroxychloroquine. Fauci says that we can now expect talk and action reflecting the best that science and medical advice can give us. 

 

Fauci does predict a continuing high coronavirus death toll—3,000-4,000 per day—even as the number of new cases declines. Others on Biden’s health team are trying to get a handle on vaccine distribution, still touting the goal of 100 million vaccinations in the first 100 days. 

 

This, it seems to me, is a hard critical promise that the new administration can and must make good on. Meeting it will have the practical effect of reducing transmission, and the social/political/psychological impact of keeping the promise. Biden has told his staff that they need ambitious but doable goals, and they need to fess up if and when they don’t meet them. 

 

* * *

 

Baseball’s Hank Aaron died yesterday. I’ve watched homerun number 715 replayed a dozen times on the news. Number 715 broke the legendary Babe Ruth’s record for career homeruns, and spawned a year of hate mail and death threats as Aaron, a black man, approached Ruth’s record. 

 

Aaron was raised in Alabama, started in the Negro leagues at 17, and played a couple of seasons of white minor league ball in the Deep South. Jim Crow was strong and Aaron often couldn’t eat or stay in hotels with white teammates. He went to the major league Milwaukie Braves in 1954. When the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1965, Aaron was concerned about living and playing in the South again. So he talked with Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, and they told him his work was as important as theirs; he should play ball and be a black leader in Atlanta. He promised—and held to that promise with grace through death threats and the Civil Rights years.

 

Promises are promises, and hard promises met move us ahead. 

 

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