Watching this thick and rain-soaked snow stream down the road in clumpy rivulets, there is a kind of sorrow about the quiet, white, and hushed world that is being washed away. We listened to KGON in the mornings, and waited impatiently between Supertramp and Foreigner for Iris Harrison’s smokey voice to read the list of school closures. One by one and then—pow!—‘Lincoln’: snow day. Led Zeppelin song.
Meeting up was extra tough on the snow days; the hills were always the worst, but since snow in Portland only lasts until about 10 a.m., by then we’d be up on Council Crest bombadiering down the hill with plastic sleds. Significant distance in various orbits of different cliques. A fair bit of standing around. The overly aggressive snowball fights and a lot of wishful thinking about who was there, what they were doing, whom they were with: did she see me? Did that snowball mean something more than a snowball? Slush on the back of the neck surely implies affection. We knew how to talk, but just didn’t.
From Council Crest to downtown was a long walk and we rewarded ourselves with Escape From New York Pizza and walking, briefly, around the Galleria, which we did more out of habit than in any real interest. Downtown would have no snow by afternoon and it faded further after an hour or so in the Multnomah County Library. Karen carried a load of books in a funky bag on her shoulder; I worked with more pinpoint accuracy—or laziness—just pocketing one for the ride on TriMet 51 back up the hill. I remember talking about Eric Hedford (he played drums, he was funny, he was so nice) in the flicker of grey sky and bus fluorescent. I remember talking about Joann (she was wickedly smart and sarcastic, she made art, she was so cute) amid the rumble and squeak. Sometimes we read to each other: Nabokov, Kundera, Stafford. Getting off at Ainsworth and saying goodbye—Karen left her car near the Shell—we’d hope in the dimming light for more cold, more snow, more days like these.
The Decemberists - California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade
Spring or summer of 1986. Karen got her drivers license well before me, because, well, her birthday was before mine, and I think, she had her shit together; my shit was unequivocally not together: it was all the hell over the place. I was spread out all over the map, almost the opposite of a patient etherised upon a table: not numb, still, and incapacitated but more like a bag of sunburned snakes: hypersensitive, twitchy, and incessant: perilously in love with Joann Bolte; vestigially compulsive about tennis; neurotically self-obsessed in poetry. Karen also needed her license because of the Midmar Imperative: a long trip from out there to LHS, to downtown, and everywhere else. When I got mine, I slowly earned access to the two-tone tan Chevy Malibu. On Fridays or Saturdays, and sometimes weeknights if things were clicking, I would drive over the hill, past the Alpenrose Dairy—which seemed a kind of strange theme park-slash-bovine playground-slash-array of sports fields that somehow kept a small part of some older Portland alive—and down to her house. But once Karen started taking photography and became friends with Matthew, a new and, to me, both odd and cool scene presented itself: Matthew had a darkroom in his basement, and Karen would go there to develop prints, even when Matthew and his dad were gone. Traditionally parented to a bewildering degree, to me, being alone in a house with a friend was disorienting; being alone in a house with a friend unrelated to the owner of the house was completely strange. Add a darkroom and it was a displacement: plucked up by a starry hand from where I was and gently ensconced in a calm parallel cosmos. All in a good way. It was there, in the tangy moist air, in the warm dark lit occasionally by the red bulb, enveloped in the delicate sounds of trickling water, that Karen talked me through exposure times, shaking the paper, and other tricks she used to make her pictures so compelling: we’d work on contrast or how to develop a razor sharp line; how to solarize with a flash of light or make images grainy by blowing up a detail. In the dark and water and quiet, with bleached pride and washed out defensiveness, I actually picked up the careful movements and their underlying principles. Karen was a good teacher: steady, calm, funny, nice. I have utterly forgotten all of the steps now, how the machines and chemicals worked, learning each action’s legible consequence. I remember instead the feel and taste of the air, the measured directions, the music beneath the water, and Karen’s intense focus and stillness.
The Velvet's "After Hours" is kind of exactly right: we were doing a lot of VU then, and the close miked fragility of the song is perfect. Gavin Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic" (here, "Hymn III") is the slow submarine music; not something we listened to in 1986, but K gave me the CD.
On my way home in the late afternoon, despite five years of living here in Canada, it still surprises me that evening twilight starts pulling across the sky before 4. The dark comes too soon, over and over. Crowds of crows—a murder I suppose—black and delicate, swirling with their wingtips in the streaky pink and gray indigo. The colors are stretched, a tympanum, immeasurably vast and immeasurably thin, hiding the depthless empty black behind. I am listening to the crow-like squall of The Tallest Man On Earth, who appears to have no self-doubts about his pinched, gravelly, nasal twang of a voice. I tend to doubt my bleating volume when I blare out my lectures on Dylan Thomas or Elizabeth Bishop or ‘Westron Wind’. The Tallest Man doubts not. I press on home. Even though I have Greta and Ev and Silas waiting in a discombobulated house, a mess of Mexican dinner, and dozens of student emails asking stultifying questions (I think, also, large groups of students’ emails should be called a ‘murder’ like the crows), I am alone and cold slender fingers rasp at my pericardium, lifting layer by layer it all away; with their filigreed and iron grip, they clutch my trachea. This desolation is all anatomical. The branches of nearby trees groan with the heavy black bodies of the birds; the dark figures against the fading light like an exploded Rorschach. New York is buried in white blank heavy snow and New York is far away: nothing is not there and nothing is. It is not just another day, and I am really terribly sorry.
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
I usually laugh, seeing as this poem is a villanelle, and Hein and Schmeer used to mock such a pretentious form, shouting after Gerry Foote’s class (which Karen wasn’t even in): ‘Vee Yah Nay Yah!’ in a terrible fake French accent.
The Tallest Man on Earth – ‘A Lion’s Heart’ and ‘Kids on the Run’
Gretchen and I had been living in Oxford, it was 2001. When our time there was up, we blew all our deposit money on mailing our crap back to the U.S. and changed our flights to stopover on the East Coast. It was June, and hockey was on television at Gretchen’s sister’s house in Larchmont, New York. Amidst the family visit, we decided to borrow a car and drive up to Boston and visit Karen. The complexities of East Coast highways (make that turnpikes, parkways, and so forth) seemed challenging, but we managed the drive. And waiting was Schmeer: we hiked up into the Somerville apartment and balanced our bags between the perilous piles of books, papers, photographs. Karen made us coffee in the golden sunflowered kitchen and we plunged into the catch up part of the visit, before emerging in the Thirsty Scholar (I always made her go there because I was flummoxed by the miracle of having a pub downstairs). We were pronouncing it, ‘da terstee scole-air’, our fake Irish accents sounded like fake pirate accents. This is how we made plans. One of the plans was a going to Fenway for a game. However, we had no tickets and there were none to be had when we called. We decided that we would go anyway and scalp tickets. A day game. We rode the T to Fenway, wandered around with plenty of time. Getting into a bar was a heroic effort, as each and every seemed packed with game dayers. Finally, we crowded into a slot behind a door, pressed up against the window and leveraged the bartender into drinks. The sky was heavy, the light gray, and surges of thick mist came and went. It didn’t look good, but we walked to the park and started listening to the scalpers. A wiry guy had three tickets that were pretty close on the third base side. I felt very illicit—looking this way and that—but Karen was worse: ‘you have to do it, Matt’ and she sidled off out of view, like we were in high school and I was buying certain health products or a DeBarge cassette single. I fumbled with the money, had to ask twice how much, and didn’t get change. My worry that the tickets were fake melted as we went inside the park and milled around underneath before heading to our seats. The rain was falling and game time came and went. We sat, just under the roof above, talking, watching the rain, waiting. People started to leave, but we stuck it out until the announcement over the P.A. that the game was called. We filed out, slowly, and back to the T, disappointed and moist. Back above the Thirsty Scholar we started thinking about dinner, but Karen made some kind of fruit juice slushy vodka concoction. We started making a list of the songs that were huge hits but that we hated with bilious venomous disgust. We sang them. ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy’, ‘Who’s Holding Donna Now?’, ‘Zanz Kant Danz’: it was despicable and reprehensible. The rain fell some more. Further blender related beverages. Maybe we should get take-out. ‘Rico Suave’ and Four Non-Blondes. Utterly repugnant and loathsome. We could just go downstairs to the scole-arrrrrrh! ‘One Night in Bangkok’, ‘Walkin’ On Sunshine’. We never made it to the Sox and we never made it out that night. I told Karen she should return the tickets for the refund and it turned out that the scalper messed up and she came away with forty extra dollars. Missed the game, got wet, made money, suffered the bad music juke. It was such a good trip to Boston, we did it again a year or so later.
At some point in the last few years of high school, late junior, maybe even senior year, Becky had this plan. A photo essay. I think all of the Mort acolytes in the photography classes had a final project of some kind and Becky, rather than a tour of Guatemalan sweater vendors and street musicians at Saturday Market or the tedious inevitability of a series on her grandmother’s hands, invited Karen and I to take part in this adventure-slash-photographic essay. The Plan. At Lower McCleay Park under the bridge of Upper Thurman, there was a trail that led up into the forest. I would walk there sometimes with various friends, sometimes with Joann. The trail led up to an odd mossy stone structure whose roof had long since disappeared. Kids—freaky ones that freaking freaked me out—would say that every Halloween, there was a witchcraft mass there and black cats would be sacrificed. I would venture to guess that mainly there were just a lot of vaguely odd sketchers getting stoned. Before the trail though, just beneath the bridge, the stream that tumbled out of those woods went below a huge and tightly spaced wooden grate. From there, it plunged into a tunnel: essentially a huge sewer pipe. This tunnel, it was thought, ran under Portland to the Willamette. Becky, Karen, and I—daring souls that we were—were going in and down. Becky would take pictures as we scrambled. It would be dark, strange, wet. A daring hair raiser? A parable of loss and recovery? A metaphoric plunge into a trickling unconscious? D: all of the above. Becky, Karen, and I parked in the lot under the bridge. We had a few flashlights each, relatively sturdy shoes, and our usual 80s grasp of 60s hippie-wear all about us. Looking back, I think costumes of another sort would have been more appropriate. To evoke the binding strictures of oppressive conformity, K and I sprawled out on top of the jail-bar-like slats of the grate. The wrinkle of my blue flannel shirt pressed by the parallel bars undoubtedly told of society’s pressures as well as our heroic rebelliousness. Then it was time to go down. It took some squeezing, but we fit through a gap between the wood structure and the carved out ground, and we climbed down some rock under the vast cage-like grate. More pictures. My favorite was when I pressed Karen to be in a ‘meaningful’ pose. Slouch like the world makes you sad. Hang your head at the weight of it all. Let your hair cover your face. You are an allegory. I had just figured out that word, allegory. Literal, historical, typological, and the inexorable mystic swing into the divine. And I took to calling Karen, ‘Allegory’ after that. I even painted a t-shirt that proclaimed her as an ‘Allegory’ whenever she wore its sloppy too brightly colored letters. The thing is, in the moody, world-weary pose, communicating the sadness of an uncaring universe, on Karen’s black vest, she still had her chipper, ‘Hug Me! I Gave Blood!’ sticker. This was overlooked in the high drama of the photo shoot. With the introductory photos taken, we went in. The cement tunnel was round, not quite tall enough that I could stand up straight, smooth along its interior, and one had to walk in an awkward straddle because of the small steam of water running down the center floor. As we walked the bright blank white diminished behind us, and soon it was impossibly black. If I stretched my eyes wide, and concentrated intently, I could still see nothing. There was a complete, whole, and entire absence of light. The sound was water running, and the unsettlingly loud echoes of our voices. Despite being deep underground, in a small tunnel, far from anyone, my voice sounded like a bad a.m. radio with the volume all the way up inside a tin box: everyone could hear me, everyone knew. We trudged along, talking some, laughing at stupid things, turning on our flashlights, but their light was fearsomely feeble: shining out ten or twenty feet ahead revealing only exactly more of the same: cement pipe, dark water, circle of abyss. I have no idea how far we went or how long it took, but we came to a place we had heard about, ‘B Wetz’. At this point, the round tunnel dropped off a small ledge, and the new lower drain went on, but about waist deep full of water. Scrawled on the wall in crude graffiti was the place-name, ‘B Wetz’. We stopped there, and like backpackers surveying an alpine ridge, we ate trail mix and took snapshots. I knew people who said they had gone on from there, but not us. That was all there was. We all were ready to go back, and we began the slog. The air was dank and only gave way stintingly. My muscles ached from walking splayed out, my battery was dying. Eyes ached from trying to see. It was a long while before the small disc of gray white showed, and longer still until we got out. Coming to the forested brightness, the air’s density gave way ethereally; it was scented with doug fir and sap. Green as pea shoot Sundays. The open space released the clanging echoes from around my head. It was warm and it was spring. We shimmied out and skipped like third graders on the path back to the car. Put all our bags and flashlights and things in the trunk. Sat on the bumpers in the sunshine looking up. Almost directly under our feet, somewhere down there, was that pitch-dark hollow concrete passage, the small slip of water sliding by.
This small post is deviant from the usual self-indulgent recollections here. But I am not sure if or how many people even read this, so it's probably fine. It's been a few (too many) weeks, and mainly because over the last month Paula and I have been planning--from our various long distances--the memorial for Karen in Portland. We've now come out on the other side, and everything went very well. We had lots of help from awesome people in Boston and New York, and in Portland too. In the finally emerging sun, skylights flooded, at the excellent BodyVox, quite a few (more than expected) people came together and remembered and celebrated Karen with words, music, film, photos. And we had a reception afterward with her favorite Portland pizza and three kinds of pie and lots of friends and family. Selfishly speaking, it was intense, exhausting, satisfying, and awfully sad. I threw myself into the memorial with increasing intensity as it approached. On the Friday, as I shuttled between the printers, big box stores, photo processors and more, I started to wonder why I was doing all this. And I stopped cold when I realized that no matter how much energy, time, money, thinking I threw at this, no matter how hard I worked, none of it would get her back. It was a sickening feeling. I cringed at myself. But then I just kept going. And it all came together. Alexis' art and idea gave us a theme. And between Alexis and Peter, old childhood Portland came to life. Nicky shredded gorgeously. David was brilliant. Mary and Paula played and sang heartrendingly. Leah mixed the sweet and funny in such a way that I felt like I was back in the Somerville kitchen. And then it was over. I saw lots of old friends, remembered Karen in numerous ways, ate Escape pizza, drank a beer, gave away flowers and food and pictures. At the end, I was really tired. The bright open space was clean. There were about eight of us left: Paula, Miska, Leah, Alexis, Gretchen, myself--maybe more. We were done. It was over. So we put on James Brown, the Brothers Johnson, the Beastie Boys and we danced. And I knew a little better why I did it.
A few people asked me to post the program--we ran out--and so here it is. Others have asked me to post what I said, and I will soon. (What I'd really like is "To Be Schmeerish" as my new modus operandi). For now, here's the program. My thanks to everyone who helped make it happen. Link to program below. Karen's Portland Memorial and Celebration Program
Karen and I were in Ms Finch Miller Jones’ ‘British Literature’ survey. This was one of the three English classes I was taking my senior year. I was typically scatterbrained and scrappy, reading Carlos Fuentes with Lenore Allison, Thomas Hardy in BritLit, being a teaching assistant for Gerry Foote, parsing the lyrics of ‘Graceland’ and trying to read ‘Orientalism’ with Sweeney. It’s a wonder I passed any classes. The Brit Lit class was hard, serious, not to be trifled with, the real deal. It had that stentorian glint that the supremely canonical picks up with age. Karen and I commiserated, by turns angry, sad, disgusted, enlightened by one early scene in one book. At one point, in Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’, Sissy recounts her father beating their dog, Merrylegs.
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‘And your father was always kind? To the last?’ asked Louisa contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.
‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands. ‘Kinder and kinder than I can tell. He was angry only one night, and that was not to me, but Merrylegs. Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful fact; ‘is his performing dog.’
‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.
‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them - which is one of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn't do it at once. Everything of father's had gone wrong that night, and he hadn't pleased the public at all. He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing, and had no compassion on him. Then he beat the dog, and I was frightened, and said, “Father, father! Pray don't hurt the creature who is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!” And he stopped, and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face.’
Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her, kissed her, took her hand, and sat down beside her.
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Out by the fountain in Lincoln’s back courtyard, Karen flicked leaves off the concrete edge, and we worried over Merrylegs. This minor scene in a very long book is the only one that stuck. And we talked about why all of our pity was heaped on a dog amidst the ceaseless barrage of sorrow in Dickens’ novel. And in talking about Merrylegs, we found that the real dagger to the heart, the real yank that left gaping holes, was that Merrylegs licks the face of his brutalizer. A small epiphanal moment that reminded me of Tara Colleen B.’s poem about how she would still want to kiss Jason Applebottom even if he shot her dead. Karen tallied it up as another example of how fucked up love can be.
In the Brit Lit class, we chose authors. Hubris led me to Joyce. I read and reread ‘Dubliners’ because it was one of those books that gave the impression of so much going on, and yet in the actual perfect and spare prose, all that I thought was going on was absent, materializing from the open white spaces between the words. Only the last story in the book was satisfying in its slip into the cosmic moving from the self-conscious nitpickery of manners and quips and details into some vast opening of dark and perilous regret, loss, realization, and doubt flecked by snow and song and lamplight. ‘The Dead’. Karen decided we needed to see the new movie, John Huston’s adaptation of the story that came out in December. We talked about this in class, making a plan. Another student in the class, Renee Robbins, also had Joyce, and somehow she was worked into the plan. A Friday or Saturday night. Dry and cold in that chalky winter way that Portland sometimes gets. Karen and I drove way out to pick up Renee. She seemed to live impossibly farther south than Karen lived impossibly west. With Renee we returned to downtown Portland and the still glossy, bright and angular KOIN cinemas. In my neophytism, the place still smacked as some kind of upscale high-brow place that showed movies for opera aficiandos. Escalators. Glass. The scent of popcorn suppressed probably by some elaborate robotic system. Instead, essence of hotel lobby and German chrome. Carpet. But we saw the movie and it was very good, though much is lost by not being inside Gabriel’s both insecure and arrogant head. It all comes together in the final reverie as he looks out into the swirl of flickering and vanishing snow and reflects on the world’s transience. We walked quietly to the car, but we started talking more when the heat came on, the radio came up, the city sped by. Did she always love Michael Furey? Would Gabriel’s epiphany mean anything to him? Can people really love that long and tough and deep? Just before dropping Renee, we were driving on a straight flat stretch crowded by trees on either side. Thump! Karen slowed and almost stopped. ‘What was that?’ She pulled over. She asked me to look. I climbed out and walked back and found a crumpled gray heap, a possum. There was no blood. And the possum was still breathing, short flashes of breath. I was afraid to touch it or move it. I went back to the car and told Karen. Renee had to get home. As we drove away, Karen was crying. ‘I killed an animal. I killed an ANIMAL.’ She put the emphasis on the last word, as if killing something else would have been better. I looked back and told Karen that the possum was crawling away, to the side of the road. I wanted her to feel better. We dropped Renee, and driving back, we could see no possum in the road. Karen was still sad, telling me that she never wanted to kill an animal. An animal. She told me that she was going to drive by the possum spot extra fast, so we wouldn’t see it if it were dead. Okay, I said. She floored the gas and I think we must have been going about 50 when we passed the possum spot. Back on normal roads and normal speeds, I was (and still am)—as Gabriel—casting about my mind for words of consolation and finding only lame and useless ones. So I lied and told Karen that the possum was gone. ‘When we went zooming by, I saw that it was gone. You didn’t kill an animal Karen. It’s okay. It walked into the trees. It will be okay.’ I am not sure she believed me. It snowed the next day, and I drove all the way back down there to the possum spot. I didn’t find the animal. There was just snow, and brittle frozen grass, and the rush and spatter of cars rushing on.
A professor of medieval English literature in Vancouver, BC. KMS was my oldest and best friend for more than two decades.
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