Coincidental Verse

The Writer’s Almanac. I’ve mentioned it before. Praised it. I like it. Appeals to my “finer things in life” side. (Yes, there’s more to the world than “Survivor” (finale tonight!), “CSI,” and “Six Feet Under” (the last viewed on DVD only).

I get The Writer’s Almanac email every day. Often I can’t bring myself to open it because of the possible emotional and time commitment. When I do, though, I’m occasionally surprised by how fitting the poem for the day seems to be. Not the predictable ones, like Thanksgiving-themed verse during Thanksgiving week. But shots in the dark that just fall squarely on some event in my life, something I’m thinking of. For instance, the poem “The Longly-Weds Know,” which the almanac sent out December 2, the day after my wedding anniversary.

And then there’s today’s almanac. The poem is “1100,” by Emily Dickinson. I hardly know from Emily Dickinson, though if pressed I might be able to tell you that she came up with the line “hope is the thing with feathers” and that Julie Harris played her on stage and small-screen. I was puzzled by the title, having been so Dickinson-deprived that I did not know her poems were not titled, but numbered. With Max’s passing on my mind, the poem’s really a bull’s-eye. It starts:

“The last Night that She lived

“The last Night that She lived

It was a Common Night

Except the Dying – this to Us

Made Nature different.

We noticed smallest things –

Things overlooked before

By this great light upon our Minds

Italicized – as ’twere. …”

Go and read the rest.

The Tribune on Max

The Chicago Tribune is running a nearly heroic-scale obit on Max. Here’s the lead:

“Australian-born Maxwell McCrohon was a journalistic visionary whose innovations in design, story-packaging and feature writing changed the face of the Chicago journalism and had a wide impact throughout the U.S. newspaper industry.”

And a fun detail recounting his early days at the Chicago American:

“He also was a fill-in movie reviewer. A sample lead from one of his reviews: ‘The Frenchmen who produced the film version of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” have spread the rather bitter bread of his play with a heavily spiced syrup of sex.’ ”

12/10/04: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is carrying Hearst’s more workaday version of the obit. The WLS site in Chicago is running the AP’s version at length. And the Washington Times has UPI’s take.

12/11/04: The New York Times has an obit, too, this morning.

Max

One of our family’s oldest and greatest friends, Max McCrohon, died yesterday. He’d been sick a long time with emphysema (I remember him as an unregenerate smoker of unfiltered Camels) and, for the past three or four years, with lung cancer. There’s a lot I could say — that everyone in my family could say — about Max (and about all the McCrohons). For now, just this: He was the one who inspired me to become a journalist and who gave me my first opportunity to work in a newsroom. And he and his wife Nancy somehow were always welcoming to the Brekke kids; their home was always, always open to us. I honestly can’t imagine what my life would have been like without him, and them.

Nineteen

Nineteen years ago today was a chilly, overcast Sunday, the close of Thanksgiving weekend. Kate and I had a date at 2 in the afternoon at Turning Two, the preschool in the Berkeley Hills where she taught. She had gone ahead to meet some people up there; I was running a little behind, cooking a couple of Russian macaroni casseroles out of the Moosewood Cookbook. When I finally got there, about 15 minutes late, it was just starting to rain.

Who was there? My mom and dad, on their first visit to Berkeley since I moved out here from Chicago’s south suburbs in 1976. My son Eamon, who was six at the time. And a small group of friends. Trapper Byrne and Judy Wong, whom we knew from our days at The Daily Californian (they’re married now, live in Lafayette, and have two kids, Elizabeth and Keenan). Robin Woods and Jim Tronoff, also close friends from Daily Cal days (they’re married now, too; Robin got her Ph.D. in English literature from UC-Berkeley and is now a professor at Ripon College, in the same Wisconsin town where the Republican Party got its start in 1854). Our great friends Larry Hickey and Ursula Stehle, whom I’d met shortly after Eamon was born in 1979; they came down to Berkeley for the day with their two sons, Dylan and Dominic (Ursula was about halfway through her pregnancy with their daughter, Megan). Bill Joyce, a friend we met through Larry and Ursula, a teacher, lover of literature, and prankster of note. George Paolini and Jane Paulsen, comrades from the Alameda Times-Star (slogan: “25 cents — worth more”). Vicki Carlton, who started and ran Turning Two, and her husband Ross and her daughter Cedar. And finally, Bruce Hilton, a Methodist minister, copy editor, and tuba player. I think that’s everybody.

It was our wedding day, in a preschool classroom looking out into the mist and rain and dusk spreading across the town below us.

Kate and I said the vows we’d written with Bruce’s help, including a bit from Yeats’s “The Two Trees,” Bruce married us over no objections from the onlookers. Then we ate our potluck dinner, the kids played in the schoolroom, and Bill and Larry led us in a couple of songs, “The Gypsy Rover” and a version of The Clancy Brothers’ “Haul Away Joe” refashioned for the occasion. After dark, the party broke up, and a few of us went down to the Albatross, our semi-regular bar on San Pablo Avenue. Bob Johnson, one of the two Icelandic-American North Dakota brothers who owned the place, brought out complimentary bottles of Cook’s champagne (OK, “champagne”) when he heard what we had been up to. Later, we went home to the “little yellow apartment,” my tiny studio-like hovel on Addison Street.

Nineteen years. Not so long, really. We look different, but I think we’re still the same two people, still learning about each other and about how life and marriage work. I’d gladly go back and do all the years again; but I think I’m happiest to trace them back, remember them, and go ahead from where we are on this December 1.

Thanks, darling Kate.

Mom’s Day

So, certain dates come to have a meaning of their own. For me (and for the rest of my family, I think), November 26 is Mom’s birthday. She would have been 75 today. Born in Chicago in 1929, just a month after the stock market crash. Knowing that, and knowing what happened in the world over the first 12 years of her life (the Depression, the New Deal, the rise of the fascists and Nazi Germany, the war in Europe, Pearl Harbor), I’ve always imagined that she was born into a world that must have seemed, to her parents, to be on the verge of chaos or calamity. But it probably just wasn’t that way. I’ve heard that her dad, who worked for the First National Bank in Chicago, was never out of a job. At some point in the ’30s after the last of her six kids was born, her mom went back to work as a grade-school teacher in Chicago. They never lost their home or anything like that, and in fact seemed to have been an anchor for relatives who weren’t doing as well. So all that stuff happening out there in the world someplace probably seemed remote from the day-to-day cares of raising a family. And when tragedy made an indelible mark on their lives, it had nothing to do with the wider world: one of Mom’s brothers and three other relatives drowned in Lake Michigan one summer day in August 1939, her father died on lung cancer in June 1941. By then, of course, the big troubles from outside were starting to squeeze in on everyone, though maybe the family story and the world story never really did twine together; I guess I imagine they did from having a rough outline of what was going on around the family in my head, on one hand, and having heard lots of stories from Mom (and Dad) about those years.

Anyway, Mom, happy birthday. Thanks for — among all the other things — giving us so much to remember and to think about.

Road Blog: Eugene

Cimg2617We made it to Eugene. Got up early, but not super-early, and drove up Interstate 5 from Yreka to Eugene. It’s different up north: They actually have an autumn with trees turning color and frost in the air and the whole bit. The country along the way starts out mountainous — you have to cross the Siskiyous (SISK-yoos, to you auslanders) to cross into southern Oregon. Then you travel through the valley towns of Ashland (lovely unto annoyance) and Medford (annoyingly ordinary), then begin crossing a series of divides into the watersheds of the Rogue and Umpqua rivers, their various branches, and lesser streams. North of Roseburg, about 130 miles north of the California border, the road begins flattening out some as you pass towns like Oakland, Rice Hill, and Drain. Eventually, you enter the watershed of the Willamette (wa-LAMB-it) and soon get to Eugene.

Cimg2634 We wanted to attend a 1 p.m. orientation session, and we got there in plenty of time to park and get to the Erb Memorial Union (Emu for us auslanders). Since it was a holiday, Veteran’s Day, the session was packed (about 40 or 50 people). We spent an hour hearing how much the University of Oregon cost, what sort of grades and test scores you need to get in, and many, many other aspects of campus life. At 2 p.m., a sophomore business student named Matt Plumb gamely took the whole group on a tour: of the union, a dormitory, a future dormitory (now a hole in the ground), the student rec center, the library, the new Lillis business building, the journalism building, a new science building, and much more.

Quick impressions of campus: Smaller than expected, on a much more humane scale than any of the Big Ten campuses I’ve seen or the UC-Berkeley campus in its present incarnation — maybe more the way Berkeley was through the ’60s (the scale probably reflects enrollment; Oregon’s got a total of about 20,000 students, including graduates; Berkeley’s got about 34,000; several of the Big 10 schools have long since been at or above 50,000 for years). The tallest buildings at Oregon seem to top out at about five or six stories, and there are only a handful of those; there’s just one big lecture hall, and it seats about 500 or so; that’s mid-size by Berkeley standards. The campus is beautifully landscaped; lots of trees, lots of green, lots of open space, still, so it doesn’t have the overbuilt feel you get in some areas of Berkeley. You can’t judge much from a single afternoon, but overall the place felt quieter and less rushed and crowded than Berkeley.

The tour lasted an hour. We decided to drive around Eugene a little to see what flavor we could get. Well — not much from driving, aside from confirming the fact that drive-through espresso is huge north of the California border. Afterward, with no real plan, we decided to drive back south to Ashland to spend the night. But by the time we got there, about 7 p.m. or so, we were in driving mode and after a walk up and down the main street looking for something to eat and deciding we weren’t hungry, we decided to drive all the way home (another 340 miles or so). After stopping for bad Mexican food in Mount Shasta (note: Stay away from Lalo’s, except maybe if you just want a beer), we split the driving (me to Mount Shasta, Tom the next 165 miles or so to Williams — site of the phantom Dairy Queen — and me the last 100 miles) and got back to Berkeley a little before 1 in the morning.

(Pictures: Top: Tom listens to University of Oregon tour-leader guy. Bottom: People, trees, and autumn colors abound on Eugene campus.)

Road Blog: Yreka

Tom and I are staying at the Best Western in Yreka (yes, Yreka, California, north of Weed, east of Krakatoa) tonight. On our way up to Eugene for a tour of the University of Oregon tomorrow. Got kind of a late start out of Berkeley — about 7:30 or so — and arrived here just after midnight, Veteran’s Day. This happens to be the same place Dad and I stopped in October 1990 on our way up to see Mount St. Helen’s (Dad, I asked for the Brekke Suite, but the desk person affected ignorance and eventually threatened to call the sherifff when I persisted; so we’re just in a regular double room)

. Not much to report from the road: Light rain off and on, light traffic pretty much the whole way, and we traveled sans landscape since we got on our way so late. We had Tom’s iPod plugged into the car stereo and sung along with many songs, including hits from the Jackson 5, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. The schedule for tomorrow (later today) is up early for the fine Yreka Bakery complimentary breakfast, then over the Siskiyous to Ashland for real breakfast, then up to Eugene for a 1 p.m. campus tour. Further than that we have not planned.

25 Years Ago Today …

Happy Birthday, Eamon (he’s celebrating his 25th birthday at Japan’s Disneyland; ust talked to him on his cellphone, and he’s waiting in line for the Peter Pan ride; he says the crowds there — it’s a holiday called P.E. Day; yes, physical education day — are really intense). Anyway, Ea-chan, I can hardly believe it’s been 25 years since I watched you born at the little cottage on Prince Street.