Driving Audhumla

More John stories

Over the past couple of weeks, I've received a few emails and notes from people who knew my friend John Dauns who died June 4. They all had their own memories of John, and their stories triggered a few more memories of mine.

John was the single most law-abiding person I ever met. I suppose it comes from his having been a refugee with that implicit fear that all safety could be lost in the blink of an eye for not obeying the proper authorities.

Meanwhile, I'd been schooled by the Jesuits, particularly a salty British Jesuit named Gerard Bussy S.J., a British army veteran who'd fought with Montgomery in North Africa and picked up the vocabulary to go with his military service. Father Bussy, who was my major professor at my university's philosophy department and who taught my ethics course, was quick to scoff at things like no-parking signs and speed limits, and dismiss them as ``purely penal law'' that could be broken as long as one accepted the accompanying sanctions. This made perfect sense to me but can you see the potential for conflict with John?

We went to the Yucatan one Easter week back in the early 1980s. As usual, I found many Mexican crafts to my liking, and came home with my suitcase loaded with embroidery, woven items, folk jewelry and even a few small pottery pieces. We flew home from Merida to New Orleans by way of Houston, which is where we cleared customs and immigration.

We had very little time between flights, so when we got to customs, I simply gave a verbal declaration, telling the agent I'd spent about $200 on various Mexican craft items.  But John stopped to fill out a customs form and go over it with the agent, who simply stood there incredulous. That's because all John had to declare was one picture postcard he'd bought. But there was no way he'd dare risk going through customs without making the proper declaration. We almost missed our connecting flight, and I still remember the look on the custom agent's face when he had to process John's declaration.

John went on sabbatical from Tulane University when I lived in New Orleans. He spent his sabbatical teaching at the University of Natal (now the University of Kwazulu-Natal) and the University of Stellenbosch, both in South Africa. When he left for Africa, I offered to take him to the airport, even though I knew he had this powerful need to be there at least five hours before a flight, just in case. In those days, it was possible to accompany a departing passenger all the way to the gate, but once we got onto the concourse, they wouldn't let us back into the main part of the airport where the restaurants and shops were located.

So there we sat for five hours. No food. No magazines or newspapers to distract us. At one point in the long wait, it occurred to me that I'd never seen John's passport. So I asked him to show it to me.  I was unprepared for what happened next.

He unzipped his fly, reached into his trousers, and unpinned the safety pin he'd fastened to the inside of his pants to keep his pocket safely shut. Then he pulled out his passport. I suggested that perhaps he ought to modify that maneuver to go through international passport control, as officials would be likely to misinterpret the fly-unzipping gesture.

One of my treasures is an ebony bowl he brought me back from Africa. I keep my extra thread in it, so it's always close at hand when I'm sewing. The carvings on its outside depict South African gold miners at work.

John lived totally inside his head. I suppose this may be true of many mathematicians, but he may have been an extreme case.  The welfare of his brain was very important to him, and he was fearful of anything that could potentially cut off the flow of blood and oxygen to his brain.

He was always very slender, but he wore shirts with the biggest possible neck size, so as not to constrict his carotid artery. I used to think his skinny neck was like the clapper in a very large bell. 

At the time I first met him, I was living in a very tiny two-room former slave quarters behind one of the big houses on New Orleans' St. Charles Avenue. John was very nervous that the house might be airtight, and deprive his brain of oxygen, so he was continually opening the door. Whenever he'd spend the night, he'd get up half a dozen times to make sure the door was, at the very least, halfway open.  One morning I had company arrive and walk right in through the open door. I saw a flash of skin with my peripheral vision and realized that suddenly a tall and naked mathematician had leaped from the bed and dived into the closet.

One year a friend invited us over for brunch on my birthday, which is in January, a generally chilly month in New Orleans. The friend lived in one of the old New Orleans houses with a gas wall heater in the living room. The minute John saw it, he backed out the door and wouldn't stick more than his nose into the room. He was just sure that we'd all die of carbon monoxide poisoning from being in that room, and his brain cells would all be damaged.

So we left, and instead he said he'd take me to brunch at the Gumbo Shop down in the French Quarter. (The Gumbo Shop was one of the few places in New Orleans at that time that made calas, which is a kind of rice fritter eaten with Steen's sugar syrup, and I was a great calas fan).

We were seated outside, on the patio and had just ordered when John noticed the gas-powered portable heaters. He stood up and announced to everyone, ``this is not good. This is not safe. You could get carbon monoxide poisoning here. It's not good to eat here.''

That was probably the only time I really got angry at him. And the only time John ever got really angry at me was when we were in Hawaii and he was giving a paper at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society. We were walking down the street in Honolulu and he was really frustrated and annoyed that I was able to identify accurately who, among the crowds of tourists, the mathematicians were. Trust me, it wasn't hard . . . .

John saw the world through the filter of his particular area of mathematics, ring-theory algebra. The first time he came to visit me in Northern California, I drove down the peninsula, ultimately taking him to Big Sur and Carmel. On the way home, I drove up El Camino Real and stopped at Stanford University. I asked him if he would like to take a look at the campus.

Oh no, was his response. This university was not intellectually respectable as they didn't teach ring-theory algebra. He wouldn't and didn't set foot outside the car. So much for Stanford.

I always was the one to drive after our first date. On that day John picked me up in his Dodge Dart of ancient vintage and took me to a movie in Metairie, a suburb up the river from New Orleans. After the movie, we were tightly hemmed in by other cars in the parking lot. This didn't seem to bother John, who did a kind of bumper pool, nudging all the cars with his.

When we finally got out of the parking lot, we got on the I-10 freeway, on which John drove at a consistent 27 miles per hour. People honked and displayed their middle fingers at him, but he was nonplussed. ``They can go over me or around me,'' he said.   He told me he insisted on double the liability coverage his car insurance company recommended, probably a good idea, all things considered. I think he lived so much in his head that he wasn't aware of where he was in time and space, and that's a dangerous preoccupation for a driver. So it's a good thing that he depended mainly on his bicycle.

John was very very very careful with his money--he hated it when Woolworth's closed in New Orleans as he considered it a great place to buy clothes--but he was also the soul of generosity with me and really liked taking care of me in ways he considered appropriate. When we went to Oaxaca together, I ate something on the street I shouldn't have, and got a case of tourista from hell. It didn't hit until we were on a DC-3 flight to Puerto Escondido from Oaxaca. I was sicker than the proverbial dog, with a high temperature, vomiting and the usual GI disturbances.

By the time we got to the hotel, I could barely walk. John was scared so he had the hotel call a doctor, who came, gave me an injection of something and told John I had to drink lots of liquid lest I get dehydrated. This was a problem John was ready to solve. In 10 minutes he was back in our room with two cases of bottled mineral water. Unlike mineral water from other parts of Mexico, this was grayish and tasted like soap suds. But John stood over me until I drank bottle after bottle.

I think John believed I was an artist long before I was ready to claim the title. One year for my birthday, a heavy package came in the mail. I opened it and found ``Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition,'' which is the canonical art-history textbook. John said simply ``I knew you'd need it some day.'' The following year brought an equally weighty text on modern art. He took seriously the work I did, and told someone at Tulane that the quilt I made him was his most valuable possession.

Another year my then 12-year-old daughter Martha came from Seattle to spend Christmas with me. It was a year of extreme cold in New Orleans, with pipes freezing, and tropical plants dying all over the city. John and I took Martha to Pensacola for the day. It was very very cold, and, by the time we got there, the sun was already low and everything had long blue shadows. We stepped on the beach's famous white sands, and it was so cold that it felt like snow. So there the three of us spent a good hour, ``skiing''  on the sand. Ice crystals were beginning to form along the water's edge, which only added to the illusion of a snowy adventure.

I didn't see John every day, although we were in daily contact by email.  So I can't miss him the way I would if he had lived here and suddenly were no longer in the house. But he was a powerful and long-standing connection, and every day I find myself thinking of things I want to tell him, or news stories I want to forward to him. There's a book written by a bereaved parent about her dead child titled ``The Absence of the Dead is How We Remember Them,'' and I guess, for me, that's true about John.

Here's a photo I shot of John several years ago with as much of a smile as I ever was able to tease out of him for a photo. He did liked to be serious in photos.  Photos were important to him, and film was not to be wasted. I'm sure that whoever is going through his effects will find his camera with an as yet uncompleted roll of film that has photos from when he got his undergraduate degree from MIT in the 1950s. When I shot this particular photo, we were at a sushi bar on the Island of Alameda where we had Christmas dinner. He wouldn't let me cook Christmas dinner, so we had to go looking for whatever we could find that was open.

John had terrible teeth, worn down nearly to the gum line in the front  I think this was the result of his inadequate nutrition when he was a refugee during World War II, after his family fled Latvia. There were many things he just couldn't enjoy eating, because they were too difficult for him to eat. But the teriyaki salmon he had that night was perfectly to his liking.  When I look at this photo, I can see the kind and intelligent man he was and I'm so sorry his life had to end when, and in the fashion it did.

Dinosaur cousins?

I saw these folks in the middle of a back road in Washtucna, a tiny town in Washington State's Adams County, on the edge of the Palouse.

I was on my way back to Seattle after a memorial service for my aunt and uncle, and a family reunion picnic the next day, both in Colfax, the Whitman County seat. I don't know if it was the warm temperature or the couple of Wisconsin brats I had at the picnic, but I was getting so drowsy that I knew it was time to pull over and take a quick nap.

When I opened my eyes, I saw these three wild turkeys running down the road. And all I could think of were the velociraptors from ``Jurassic Park.'' Their shape certainly gives credence to the dinosaur/bird connection, doesn't it?

And speaking of turkeys, somebody sent me the link to the video of soon-to-be-ex-governor Sarah Palin ``pardoning'' a  turkey at a Wasilla, Alaska, turkey ranch, oblivious to the other birds being slaughtered right behind her.  Way too funny, although I'm sure this wasn't her intent.

Strange tribute for a strange man

When I arrived in Seattle June 25, I headed for one of my favorite places from which to watch the sunset, namely the Kerry Park overlook on Queen Anne Hill. It's the place from which the postcards photos of downtown Seattle are shot, and on days with perfect atmospheric conditions, the view of the city is backed by Mt. Rainier turning strawberry ice cream pink in the setting sun.

It was rather gray and misty that night. so I didn't see Mt. Rainier. The lights of the city were just beginning to glow in the twilight.

No matter what time of the day or night, people can always be found at the lookout, showing off the city to visiting friends and shooting photos. I'm always amused at the notion that people attempt to take flash photos of a distant skyline, and there were plenty of flash photos that night.  Kids often turn away from the view to climb in Doris Chase's sculpture ``Changing Form'' made from Corten steel that rusts to a beautiful finish.

I was looking at the view and shooting a few photos when something odd happened. All of a sudden a group of French-speaking tourists showed up, led by a young woman who was clearly American. She was very emotional about Michael Jackson's death that day and insisted that everyone light their cigarette lighters while she shouted out a tribute.

Then, to my surprise, she demanded that everyone in her party climb over the wall and head down the very steep hill. Everyone complied, even though some of the women were wearing wildly inappropriate shoes for such a trek. All the way downhill she kept shouting about how wonderful and immortal Jackson was.

I'll be so glad when all the Michael Jackson hoo-hah is over. He always struck me as such a tragic emotionally immature person, surrounded by paid sycophants and enablers.  The tackiness of waving cigarette lighters as a tribute seemed a case in point. It's all mighty strange to me.

Asleep in the Palouse

When my family came over from Selbu, Norway in 1922, it joined a group of immigrants from the same part of Norway who all ended up in Washington State's Palouse country. This is a region in southeast Washington State characterized by bosomy rolling hills, covered with as much as 250 feet  of wind-shaped volcanic loess, a type of silty sediment that's a byproduct of the Northwest's age of volcanoes. The soil is made to order for wheat culture, and everyone from the family spent at least some time as wheat farmers. (Most of Washington's wheat is so called ``soft wheat,'' and is exported to Asia where it becomes Cup o' Noodles and the different flat breads that are eaten by people in places like India and Pakistan. Only about 10 percent of the state's wheat crop is used domestically). 

``Palouse,'' incidentally, is a word of uncertain origin. Some scholars say it's derived from the name of Palus, a nation of Sahaptin-speaking people who once inhabited the region. Others say it's from the French ``pelouse,'' which means ``lawn'' or  ``short grass.'' In any case, the term is used for the wheat country which stretches roughly from the small town of Rosalia in the north all the way down to the northern bank of the Columbia River. Some scholars even include parts of eastern Oregon. The Palouse also stretches across the Washington-Oregon border as far east as Idaho's town of Palouse. Here's a photo I shot  last week that can give you an idea of the contours of the Palouse.

 

The next photo is shot from Steptoe Butte, the highest point of land in the Palouse. The  brown fields you see are ``summer fallow,'' left unplanted to ``rest'' and soak up the rain for the following year's crop. As you can imagine, irrigation in the conventional senses is impossible on these hilly slopes.

Life for the new immigrants was hard. My family arrived before tractors and self-propelled combines were in use. My dad used to have to hitch up as many as 24 mules to pull the combine -- a piece of farm machinery used to harvest the wheat --and then sew shut and toss the 130 lb. sacks of wheat into railroad boxcars. Here's an early-day photo of the mule rig that pulled the combines.

When the family first arrived, the children were all too young to help all that much, but as soon as they grew tall and strong enough, my grandfather put them all to work, hard, backbreaking work. Here's a photo of my dad and his five older siblings in that first summer of their arrival from Norway. And no, they're not camping out. That tent was home.

Many of the new immigrants never got that far from the Palouse. They joined with other Selbu immigrants and founded a small church, called, perdictably, the Selbu Church.  They thought of it as a daughter church to the historic 800-year-old  Selbu Church back home in Norway where my father, grandparents and many many generations of my family were baptized. 

The church was the center of their lives, and one of the mechanisms by which the new immigrants assimilated into American life. Services initially were in Norwegian only, but my father was in the last confirmation class taught in Norwegian.  Today much of the family has scattered -- mainly to Western Washington -- in search of better jobs, education, and a lifestyle that no longer includes backbreaking farm work. But when they died, many members of my family chose to come ``home'' to the Selbu church's small cemetery that lies amid the wheat fields of the Palouse. Here you can see how the wheat fields verge on the cemetery.

I checked the online records from the cemetery and see the family names I've known forever. Probably at least 20 members of my extended family are buried in this cemetery, and soon the ashes of my Uncle Ole and Aunt Bertha Slind will be placed there, too.  I suppose the Norwegian family names on the tombstones sound like an immigrant's role call: Aune, Baaken, Carleson, Emerson, Garberg, Guldseth, Gunderson, Gustafson, Kjosness, Klegseth, Kyllo, Nervig, Ronsberg, Sather, Solem, Torgeson, Walli and Wigen. And of course there are lots and lots of Slinds.

My grandfather Ole G. Slind is buried there between his first two wives, both of which were named Ingeborg. My grandmother is the Ingeborg O. Slind who died of von Willebrand's Disease in 1930 at the age of 41. Of course I never had a chance to know here. I did meet Ingeborg #2, when she was elderly and frail.  Grandpa's third wife, Anna Walli, is buried beside her first husband Johan Walli.

My Aunt Magna and Uncle Gilbert share a tombstone that is carved with the Selburose about which I wrote a posting last month. In addition to being a common knitting pattern, the Selburose is also found on the municipality of Selbu's coat of arms.

 

My great uncle Jorgen Klegseth (brother of grandmother Ingeborg O. Slind) is buried there, too. He died when I was only one year old, but his reputation as a kind and gentle man lives on in my family, so much so that my brother named one of his children Nicholas Jorgen Slind in his honor. (Jorgen is the Norwegian equivalent of George).

 

Also buried there is my Aunt Johanna Slind Bryant, another victim of the von Willebrand's that plagues my family. She died in 1946, leaving a one-year-old daughter. I think hers was the last in a long line of von Willebrands-related deaths. The disease is still handed down in my family, but modern medicine has made it much more manageble.

 

I don't know how many other family members will be buried here. Today, with our vogue for cremation and the scattering of ashes hither and yon, I don't see a lot of Selbu Church burials happening. While I do support our modern ways of dealing with death, I think cemeteries are invaluable genealogical records. What, I wonder, will be the modern equivalent of simply walking through the cemetery with a camera and notebook?

Mysterious Deadman's Island

A small island lies near the bottom end of Washington State's Puget Sound near Gig Harbor. In all the summers I spent as a camper and, later, as a counselor, at CYO Camp Blanchet, that island was our ultimate destination.

We called it Deadman's Island, and it was the usual site of our overnight camping trips. They'd haul us over to Deadmans from Raft Island in the Walrus, a Navy surplus landing barge from World War II, and we'd storm the beach, carrying our sleeping bags and camp gear. One of the great events in Camp Blanchet's history was the day the Walrus sank with a bunch of campers aboard. Fortunately, the kids were all required to wear heavy cork Navy surplus life preservers, so the only down side of that great adventure was wet clothing and sleeping bags.

Deadman's was like a cupcake floating in the shallows of the Sound. I would bet that most days we could have nearly walked there from nearby Raft Island which, at one time, belonged entirely to Camp Blanchet.  But the trip on the Walrus was a big part of the fun., our own little D-Day with 40 10-year-old girls in tow.

On our overnight camping trips we spent most of the time on Deadman's beach. To climb to the island's heights meant an almost certain encounter with the abundant poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) that only added to Deadman's mystique.

Camping in those days meant sleeping on the rocky beach with an underlayment of sword fern fronds, cooking the invariably lumpy CYO oatmeal and watery cocoa over an open fire, and digging a pit latrine. We spent lazy days walking the beach, blackberry picking, digging clams for what was inevitably a gritty and sandy clam chowder, and wading around in the shallows. Nightimes were reserved for singing around the campfire, the making of s'mores, and the telling of ghost stories, most of which had to do with fictional events that occured on Deadman's Island.  It was a lot of fun when I was a camper, and when I was a counselor, I suddenly realized I had awesome responsibilities to keep 40 little girls safe and to help them have a good time.

Biggest dangers, I suppose, were relatively minor: sunburns marshmallow burns from overeager marshmallow roasters, barnacle cuts, and, of course,  poison oak. Unfortunately, the best blackberries always seemed to be growing in tandem with poison oak. 

CYO camp was not an elite camp. I think the 10-day session cost only $25, which wasn't a that much money for summer camp even in the 1950s.  Most kids who were in Catholic school in western Washington got to CYO camps at least once, and always there were plenty of so-called ``camperships'' for low-income families. A lot of the kids who came were from foster families, and, for some, this was their first time ever outside the city. The name of the game was for me to make sure  everyone was part of the fun and had a good time.  I suppose I even now bring some of that camp-counselor mentality to my activities in the Pagan community.

I remember being paid the royal sum of $10 a week my first couple of years. I think my last summer, when I was a college student and elevated to senior staff, I got a whole $25 per week for a 10-week summer, with the paycheck coming only at the end of the summer. But in many ways, those were the best summers of my life.

The press of suburban development in the South Sound area made Blanchet a much less secluded camping environment. In the 1970s, the archdiocese sold the camp property itself to a Greek Orthodox church from Seattle,  and the rest of the land outside on Raft Island was developed for housing. Today Greek Orthodox kids attend All Saints Camp on the island.

And Deadman's? I learned from looking at nautical charts that it's really Cutts Island, a Washington State Park. It and nearby Raft Island were ``discovered'' in 1841 by members of the United States Exploring Expedition, led by Admiral -- and Antarctic explorerer -- Charles Wilkes.  Raft Island was originally named Allshouse Island for Joseph Allshouse, a member of the expedition crew who was killed when struck by a spar as one of the Expedition's ships hit heavy seas when leaving San Francisco Bay. 

Anyway, I did get to Raft Island earlier this week when I was up in the northwest.  'I even drove over to the camp property, but camp wasn't in session. There's now a bridge to Raft Island--and its pricey homes--so I was able to shoot this photo of Deadman's from the middle of the bridge.

 

Ah, to be 19 again and facing a summer of sleeping on Deadman's  beach, blackberry picking, clam-digging and s'mores and songs around the campfire. I hope those Greek Orthodox kids have as much fun as I did in the golden days at Camp Blanchet and on those overnights to Deadman's.

Oplopanax horridus and friends

Got home Tuesday night from what will have to pass for a vacation this year. When I say I went up to the Pacific Northwest for a funeral, everyone is quick to offer condolences. But this was a memorial for my Uncle Ole and Aunt Bertha, both of whom were in their 90s when they died late last year.  So the tenor of the event was much more a celebration of lives well--and very fully--lived than it was an occasion for grief.

I gave myself two days on each side of the weekend so I could visit with family members and recharge my soul with big hits of the greenness of Washington State. Shot lots of photos, many of which will show up here in time, I suppose. Hung out with my favorite aunt and uncle. Had dinner with two of my adult children and my barnebarn (grandchild), who is now nearly nine years old.

But I also spent a lot of time alone, visiting favorite places whose beauty tethers my soul to the Northwest, no matter how full my California life may be. It's just the way it is: I was as imprinted by the sight of fir tree tops against a sunset sky as a baby duckling is upon the first sight of his mother.  I see the familiar sights and I start to hear the melody of home home home home singing in my ear.

Shot a few photos of some of my favorite green things, trees and plants and landscapes that simply do not exist in California. Here's a plant the dangers of which I probably warned 2,000 little girls during my stint as the nature counselor at CYO summer camps. It's Oplopanax horridus, more commonly known as devil's club. We pagans don't believe in the devil, but if we did, he'd inflict these leaves on the denizens of hell as toilet paper, I bet. It's so green and beautiful, with its massive hand-shaped leaves. But the leaves are covered on both sides with fierce hooked thorns, as is the stem, and, when it fruits, the berries. I was very surprised to learn that it's apparently a medicinal plant much revered by the Tlingit people in southwest Alaska. I noticed they use skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) leaves to protect their hands when they are harvesting leaves from devil's club. I love the way the leaves reflect and filter the light.

I also was pleased to see my old friend vine maple (Acer circinatum), and be able to shoot it from underneath, with the light coming through the leaves. It's shrubby, growing in a thicket rather than having a tree-like shape, and is often found in the otherwise evergreen forests. I shot this one on the trail up to Salmon la Sac in Kittitas County. My family has gone camping there since my great-grandfather used to hitch a wagon to a team of horses and bring everybody up from the ranch they homesteaded in Ellensburg.

My grandmother loved vine maple, too. She used to tell me that whenever she was crossing Snoqualmie Pass in the autumn during the first snow, the red of the vine maple leaves looked to her like strawberry jam running down a dish of ice cream. They do turn brilliant red in the autumn, but I think I like them the best when the leaves are new, intensely green, and almost translucent. It's too hot and dry for them here in the Bay Area, alas.  Here are some very green vine maple leaves.

 

I also miss the subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa)  one begins to find in the northwest at an altitude of about 2,500 feet. I've been in love with this tree ever since my first backpacking trip back in my Girl Scout days for the minute it shows up in the landscape, it's a sign that alpine meadows are to be found nearby. For me, this tree has always looked like it belongs on a Christmas card. The trees are relatively narrow for their height, and some of them are grotesquely shaped as a result of the weight of snow they bear in the winter. 

I shot these trees along the Denny Creek Trail that was once the wagon road over Snoqualmie Pass. My grandmother and great-grandparents would take this route by wagon to get over to Seattle long ago, and when my kids were little, I'd take them hiking along this trail as many times each summer as possible. It always felt like our own personal hiking trail. 

 

Finally, here's Cooper Lake  framed by subalpine fir. I shot this from the bridge over the Cooper River, which flows from the lake. It's just northwest of Salmon la Sac, and the mountains you see in the background are Chikamin Peak and Lemah Mountain. The last time I was here in June, it was way too snowy for me to get up to this elevation of 2800 feet, so I guess we really are seeing the effects of global warming, even in the arctic-alpine zone of the Washington section of the Cascades.  It was a beautiful day, and had I been a little more nible, I would have been out lying on my stomach, photographing some of the wildflowers with my macro lens.  This time I brought home only my memories of how beautiful they were. Here's the lake.

 

It looks like a dry dry summer here in the Bay Area. When I got home I saw that some of my annuals had already burned to straw, despite my friend Thalia's best efforts to keep them watered. So it's a good thing I have these photos and memories to draw upon when the Berkeley Hills turn brown this summer and the Diablo winds start blowing and drying all the vegetation to tinder. I can remember with Hopkins that ``nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.''

Jāņi

Today, June 24, is celebrated as Midsummer in many northern European countries. In Latvia, the day is known as Jāņi and it is also the name day of Latvian men named John (Jāņis in Latvian).

Name days are big deals in some European countries. Right now I'm looking at a Norwegian calendar that carefully notes the name days for every day of the year, and as one might expect, today is the name day for people named Johannes, Jon or Hans.

In the Catholic church, today is the feast of St. John the Baptist.  As Christianity spread  through Europe and/or was forced on the various Pagan tribes, many of their traditional celebrations were brought indoors, baptized, so to speak, and made into celebrations of saints' feast days. Certainly this is what happened to the summer solstice, which is celebrated -- albeit under other names -- on June 24 in many countries.

I've always wanted to see a Jāņi celebration in Latvia. Women wear crowns of daisies, men wear wreaths of oak leaves, they hold big bonfires and sing ancient folk songs in praise of the sun. Some of the songs mention Saule, the Baltic sun goddess, wearing a garland of red flowers and dancing on the hillsides in silver shoes.  The Baltic nations were the last in Europe to be Christianized, and many of the pre-Christian folk beliefs are kept alive in the dainas, which are Latvian folk songs.

The songs are so important that Latvia's single greatest cultural treasure is a piece of furniture built to house dainas lyrics collected in the late 19th century by Krisjanis Barons.  He did for Latvian folk music what Elias Lönnrot did for the Finns by collecting the Finnish and Karelian folktales that became the foundation of the ``Kalevala.'' This cabinet of dainas contains more than 300,000 dainas quatrains and is housed in the Krisjanis Barons Museum in Riga. The cabinet has been designated in the Memory of the World registrar kept by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Today is my friend John Dauns' birthday and name day. He was born Jāņis Drinks in Latvia. When he emigrated to the U.S., he was teased unmercifully about his name, with kids calling him ``Janice Drinks, Janice Drinks.'' So he Anglicized his first name and changed his family name as well. But he never lost his connections to Latvian culture, of course.

Over the years he gave me a few special things from Latvia. I have a small string of Latvian amber beads he bought on his last trip to Riga. And he ordered for me one of the big white shawls with an hand-embroidered border that are worn with many Latvian folk costumes. He knew how much I like to wear oversized shawls and how they're the perfect weight for our San Francisco weather.

The biggest treasure is a bracelet that was made for his mother when they were in the displaced person's camp. It's a cuff bracelet made of steel, pierced in a geometric design and set with small pieces of amber. It now belongs to my middle daughter, of whom John was very fond. And I know she will treasure it as a memento of a kind man with whom she shared some winter adventures from the Christmas she spent in New Orleans when she was about 12 years old.

Last year John sent me the URL for a huge collection of photos from Latvia's Song and Dance Festival that is held in Riga every five years. It's an enormous event and celebration, with thousands of Latvians in folk costumes marching in a parade, folk dancing, and singing the dainas in one huge performance in a massive stadium. The most recent festival was held in 2008, and I do plan to go to Riga for the 2013 festival if I can.

I found a YouTube video of the final night of the 2008 festival with the massed choirs singing the song ``Saule Perkons, Daugava,'' which just gives me shivers. Saule is, of course, the Baltic sun goddess, Perkons the thunder god, and the Daugava is a river that flows through Latvia to the Baltic Sea. It seems this is a great favorite song in Latvia, an expression of national pride and unity.  In the video you can see women with beautiful head wreaths and some of Latvia's many folk costumes, which seem to rival Norway's bunads in variety and quality of hand workmanship. Whenever I watch the video, I see many faces that are younger versions of John's.

I thought of John at our solstice ritual, and when I invoked all the sun goddesses, and I included Saule, in his memory. I know he thought my Pagan enthusiasm were a little on the strange side, but he very carefully read everything he could find out about Paganism, and certainly enjoyed meeting all my Pagan friends. He also kept track of all the holidays on the  Pagan wheel of the year and loved to remind me in an email that the next day would be Imbolc or Beltane.

I had planned to give John a pocket watch for his birthday this year. For years he had an old wristwatch he wore on his belt because it seemed irrational to him to wear it on his wrist, where it could easily get broken.  I'd spent some time sleuthing various websites, looking for a watch that he would consider sturdy enough and that I would find aesthetically pleasing.  Of cousre once he told me he had inoperable cancer, the plan went out the window, as I thought the gift of a watch to someone with such a diagnosis would be only too cruel a reminder of how little time he had left.

I think what I will do instead is buy a silver bracelet in a particular Latvian design and wear it as a remembrance. There's an old story about Namejs, the leader of the Semigallian tribe during the time that German crusaders were attempting to subjugate the tribes and force them to reject their old religion. Namejs had to flee to Lithuania, but left his distinctive three-strand ring with his young son, so he'd be able to recognize the son on his return. The crusaders found out about the ring, and went looking for it with the aim of kidnapping the son, forcing his father's return and his subjugation and acceptance of Christianity. So all the Semigallian men and boys had identical rings made as a way of protecting Namejs and his son. And to this day, most Latvian men will wear a Namejs ring, and women may wear bracelets, rings or earrings designed along the same lines. I've found several Baltic import shops online and will order a Namejs bracelet from one of them.

Tomorrow morning I head off to the Pacific Northwest for a joint memorial service for an aunt and uncle. Seems like a lot of death is surrounding me these days. It's always sad to lose these dear people, even if their deaths mean an end to their physical suffering or come at the end of a long long life. What is remembered lives.

Come sisters, come to the radiant sun . . . .

Every year I have the privilege of  priestess my coven's summer solstice ritual. It's always somewhat the same and somewhat different each year. The ritual's always outdoors, always in a public place, and always involved dancing in the meadow. For me, that's the utter essence of a solstice celebration.

When we began our ritual on Sunday, I asked everyone how many times each had celebrated the solstice. Surprisingly, most of our answers were similar: we'd celebrated the solstice formally as part of the Pagan community for a set number of years, but almost every one of us had felt drawn to celebration of this special day long before we had much of a Pagan consciousness.

When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I can remember taking my kids to the top of Somerset hill--long before it was developed-- overlooking Lake Washington, Mercer Island, the city of Seattle, Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. We'd go there toward sunset on the solstice. The kids would weave crowns for themselves from lady's bedstraw and clover and we'd all watch the sun as it set at the northernmost point of the year and the kids would run, play, tumble and dance in the meadow that used to be there. If we were really lucky, we could see Mt. Rainier turn to strawberry ice cream in the pink rays of the setting sun.

And several times we went to various Scandinavian Midsummer festivals with folk dancing, and floral wreaths suspended high on a decorated pole. Something in me just knew that dancing and being outdoors were essential on that day.

This year my coven went to a new site, at Marina Park in San Leandro, California, right on the edge of San Francisco Bay.  It was a wonderful place, with green soft grass, shade trees, and lots of dappled sunlight.

As is our custom, we made each other floral head wreaths for the solstice. And before the ritual, I asked everyone to make a flag decorated with symbols of something that takes them through the dark part of the year. The flags were made from rectangles of muslin that were about 12" by 18", with ties to attach them to ``flagpoles'' that were 4' bamboo garden stakes.

We always start the ritual singing a call-and-response version of a song I learned from Sparky T. Rabbit's ``Lunacy'' recording. It's called ``Come Brothers Come.'' We're Dianic Pagans, so we don't have brothers at our ritual. We sing ``I see XXXX in the radiant sun, come and dance with the Goddess'' to the tune of ``Come Brothers Come.'' Each person who's called then gets up and danced to the drumming and calls the next person up to dance. We continue until everyone's dancing and then we dance a whole lot more.

Then we got to work on our head wreaths. I strip my garden of anything that's flowering and also hit the discount flower market in Oakland the day before. And everyone else brings flowers, too. This year we had several colors of yarrow, marigolds, wallflowers, several different sages, lavender, statice, eucalyptus flowers, baby's breath, sunflowers, geraniums, several colors of dianthus, mint, basil, rosemary, and probably a lot more things I can't remember. Here are some photos that will show you how wonderful everyone looked in the wreaths. (I love making them because it's just the profligate creation of beauty as an end unto itself).
 
After everyone was suitably be-wreathed, we had a flag-twirling parade through the park. Since the creaky-kneed crone led the parade, we didn't get too far, but we still had fun. We sang ``We are marching in the solstice sun'' to the tune of ``Marching to Pretoria.'' We made up a lot of funny verses, including twirling, sitting, kissing, dancing, flag-waving, all in the solstice sun. Here you see us in action:

The flags were wonderful, each one so different from the others. I think if I'd have to choose favorites, they'd be Sarah's, with an image of Amaterasu Omikami, and Linda's, with a whole flock of birds;

Brighde, who lives in too-hot-in-the-summer Davis said it was the promise of winter rains that kept her going, and Linda Harrison made a cool flag containing images of both light and darkness:

We danced the spiral dance at the end of the ritual, using a song we learned from the women of Gaia's Womb:

``Listen sister, listen to my heart song.

Listen sister, listen to my heart song.

I will never forget you, I will never forsake you.

I will never forget you, I will never forsake you.''

Seems just about perfect, doesn't it?

Then we had our usual post-ritual feast which, this time, seemed to run pretty heavily to seasonal fruit and cheese.

Here's Orgy, the terra cotta goat outside my front door, who always gets my solstice head wreath when I'm through with it. And I'm already counting the days until our next solstice ritual. I do love dancing in the meadow under the summer sun.

\

When someone dies

I've spent much of this past week thinking about my friend John Dauns, and what his death means. And I've come to the conclusion that we grieve when someone dies because a part of our own life dies, too.

I'm now at an age at which my parents' generation is gradually being extinguished. There is no one left on my father's side, and In this past year, we lost an aunt and an uncle on my mom's side. As each of these elders dies, I lose a connection to the people who always have been the ``real'' adults in my life. I have no knowledge of them as anything but adults, and they are the few who can remember me as a child. They are the ones who were all-knowing and all-powerful, the tall beings on whom I initially modeled my speech and behavior. They're the ones who knew the stories about what we called ``the olden days'' in our family's history. Now there's no one left to fill in the blanks but me.

In recent years, some of my age peers have died, too. Now, whenever I get the alumnae newsletter from the convent school I attended, I look first at the obituaries, and increasingly, there's someone from my class who is listed there. These are member of my age cohort, who had those same experiences of growing up female and Catholic in 1950s America in the Pacific Northwest.  They're the ones who, like me, think movies should cost 20 cents, Popsicles a nickel, and who can remember struggling with our first pairs of nylon stockings years before pantyhose were invented. They can probably remember dancing a peculiar dance called the ``camel walk,'' lusting for plaid Pendleton wool skirts with stitched-down pleats, and trying to sleep on those torture devices known as ``brush rollers.'' We had a shared vocabulary, a kind of verbal DNA that marked us as women who came from a particular set of roots. And what will I do when there is no one left who can speak that language with me?

And then there's losing those with whom we've had intimate relationships, the people whose hands we held, with whom we danced cheek-to-cheek, in front of whom we terrifyingly took off our clothes for the first time, with whom we deliciously shared a shower or a daring naked stroll in a mountain meadow.  They're the ones with whom we had those long lazy horizontal conversations on a Saturday morning while listening to the opera on the radio, the curves of whose cheekbones and hips our fingers memorized. Intimacy with them finally felt like a pair of old comfortable loafers, molded to our feet so perfectly that we could slip right into them in the darkness with no confusion.

I suppose at my age, that someone who falls into this latter category is unlikely to show up in my life again. Actuarial tables being what they are, I will be part of a growing sisterhood who has survived the men in our lives. Waking to and walking toward that possibility is hard. I think most of all it's hard because it means never again embracing the degree of vulnerability that is so central to that kind of intimacy.

It's funny, but a phrase from one of the psalms has been running through my head all week. (Yes, this Pagan knows her way around the Bible and can appreciate it as literature). It's ``Harden not your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert.'' I'm sure the psalmist's intention was other than what I read into that phrase.  Whenever I hear it, I think of the big lump of obsidian on Gianinni Piaza, outside the Bank of America building in San Francisco. It's called ``Transcendence,'' and was made by Japan's Masayuki Nagara, who calls himself the ``Samurai Sculptor.'' But everyone in San Francisco calls it ``the Banker's Heart'' and it's always personified for me that phrase about hardened hearts.

There have been moments in my life when it literally felt like my heart was breaking. Probably the day I was sitting on the kitchen floor, re-setting the tile and received the awful phone call telling me my eldest child had fallen off a mountain to his death was the worst one. Another came when I stood in a room in Davies Medical Center, looking down at my husband's AIDS-ravaged body after he died, knowing that once I left that room, I would never see his dear face again. And I think another came last week, when I got the email telling me that John had died, and all I could think of was how hard his life had been in the post-Katrina years, and how little I was able to do to ameliorate the difficulties in any way.

The trick, the task, the job, the existential dilemma that lies ahead is how to proceed when one's heart feels tattered and torn. And it is to know that hardening one's heart into that cold black lump of obsidian is not the solution.

So what have I done the past week? I've been here, by myself, thinking, writing, making occasional trips outside to pour compost tea over the plants in the garden. For the most part, I've not answered the phone or replied to anything but work-related email. I've just not wanted to talk to other people, to have to explain or tell the story, or try to respond to their efforts to be of consolation.  I've gotten perilously close to obsidian territory, but something always pulls me back. 

As usual, it's my garden: the lavender and jasmine fragrances that twine around my nose, the buds on the Cecile Brunner rose that are about to explode, the brilliant color contrast of cobalt lobelia trailing from a pot of marigolds. It's my last, best, and sometimes my only hope: going out into the garden and sitting a while with Persephone. She throws me a green and blooming lifeline every year at the vernal equinox and I hang on for all it's worth, more this year than most, it seems. The garden says life. the here and now, and speaks of possiblities and future and growth. It's an upraised middle finger to death, loss and despair.  And so I go into the garden once more and let it lift my heavy heart.

John Dauns: June 24, 1936--June 4, 2009

Today my old friend John died of what I will have to say was a combination of liver cancer and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This is such a sad day.

I met John in New Orleans back in 1982 or 1983. I was at a Unitarian singles event and saw him across the proverbial crowded room. He was tall, slender, blond, and looked over at me and smiled. I smiled back, and then John came over to talk to me. Years later I asked him why he did so, and he said ``because you had such a pretty smile.'' That's honestly the only time ever in my life any man told me there was anything physically attractive about me, and I'll never forget it.

I realized right away that John was different in many ways. He was a mathematician who had taught at Tulane University for years. At first I couldn't locate the source of his accent, and then he told me he was born in Latvia and that English was very much his second language.

We dated through most of the years I lived in New Orleans. I know he'd never before had a woman in his life, so everything we did and everywhere we went was a new adventure for him. I was then working for a newspaper where I was, among other things, the food editor and restaurant critic. So John, who always sought out people with expertise, loved to take me out to dinner at the nicest New Orleans restaurants.  He'd dress up carefully in a suit he'd probably had since he got his undergraduate degree from MIT, and top it off with the necktie he got when he did post-doctoral research at Tubigen University and kept pre-tied and slipped over his head like a noose.  We'd go to Commander's Palace, LeRuth's or Galatoire's, and he'd be intrigued by the menu, but always tell the waiter what he wanted was ``fish, plain boiled fish.'' Finally I figured out that he meant broiled, and the whole ordering-food business became much less difficult.

John was born in Riga where his father had a fireworks factory. This meant that his dad was one of the few people in Latvia who knew how to make bombs, and when the Russians invaded, his family knew this was a liability and chose to flee. They made a very poor choice of a city of refuge, ending up in Dresden, before the Allied carpet bombing nearly flattened the whole city. He had terrible experiences in Dresden as a young child, knowing many moments of hunger, deprivation and fear.

After the war, Dresden was in the Russian-controlled part of Germany, so his family had to leave again. They made it first to West Germany and then to Austria where they lived in displaced person's camps. His parents' marriage didn't survive the trauma of the war, so when they had a chance to emigrate to the U.S., they did so separately. John and his mother ended up in Nebraska where she--a former mathematics teacher--worked in a hospital laundry. There were few Latvians there, so eventually they found their way to the Boston area, which had a sizable Latvian community. There John went to school, and did so well that he got to MIT, then picked up a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that paid his way to Harvard, where he got his PhD.

Those were lean years, and it took all his energy to learn English and to excel in school. So he missed out on all the normal teenage and college experiences. And then when he got to Tulane, he buckled down with an intense seven-day work schedule that left him no opportunity to discover much about the city where he lived. When I met him, he was in his early 40s, and had rarely eaten a meal in a restaurant, traveled for fun, or gone on a date.

John was physically awkward. I think, on many levels, he lived so totally inside his head that he somtimes didn't notice he walked around inside a body. One day we were walking from the French Quarter up to the Fairgrounds to go to JazzFest, he walked the entire distance of many blocks with a full-sized broadsheet newspaper stuck to the bottom of his shoe and never once noticed. Then he stood in the gospel tent in the middle of the aisle with his fingers stuck in his ears because the music seemed way too loud to him. He was oblivious to the odd looks everyone was giving him. He swam every day in the Tulane pool for exercise, and often rode his bike to school, but his more than a few nasty spills from the bike and the diving board spoke about his obliviousness to his presence in space.

Like many other refugees, John had a lot of anxiety about losing his papers and his cash. (My immigrant father did so also, although to a much lesser degree). When we'd go out for dinner, John would cash a check at the university bursar's office, roll each $20 bill into a tight cylinder and secure it with small orthodontic rubber bands.  Then he'd place them in a small leather coin purse that he zipped shut and wrapped with the big rubber bands that are placed on celery. This would go into his shirt pocket that was pinned closed from the inside of his shirt with an enormous safety pin.  When it came time to pay the check at the restaurant, a certain amount of drama ensued and I can recall conversations stopping at all the other tables at Commander's, as everyone watched him flip his tie over his shoulder, unbutton his shirt, reach inside, unpin the safety pin and begin the process of taking out his money.

Because I was on the food and culture beat, I got to go a lot of fun places for free and loved to take John with me. We'd go to the opera and the symphony, and the openings at the museum and galleries. One time the ballet held a black-tie birthday party for ballerina Margot Fonteyn at a Prytania Street mansion of one of the  New Orleans Ballet's board members. John showed up at my house in his Earth shoes, rented tux, a cummerbund in one hand, a handful of shirt studs in the other, and a look of utter panic on his face. But once we got him pulled together, we went to the party and had a great time. I remember there was a little sugar medallion in the middle of the cake that said ``Happy 65th birthday Dame Margot Fonteyn.'' Nobody was eating much of the cake, and the caterers were just about to haul it away. John saw that I had my eye on the medallion, then this ordinarily extremely law-abiding man snitched it, wrapped it in a napkin and stuffed it into the pocket of his tuxedo for me.

When I had my 40th birthday, he took me to K&B Cameras down in the French Quarter. My car had been broken into a month earlier and I lost, not only my own camera, but one that belonged to the newspaper. John walked me into the camera store and said ``you must have the camera you want. the best one you want. Don't tell me a cheap one, just because it's cheap. I want you to have a good tool.'' So he bought me my beloved Nikon F3, and for the next 20 years, every time I took one of the thousands of photos I shot, I thought of him. Later, when I made the transition to digital photography, he bought me a fabulous macro lens for my Nikon DL 70 because he knew how much I loved doing close-up nature photography.

He asked me to marry him just before I left New Orleans for a new job with a newspaper in Los Angeles. I told him no because I could see that the level of anxiety, vigilance and rigidity that were part and parcel of his everyday life  would have driven me crazy and him crazier at my loosey-goosey Bohemian lifestyle. But we remained friends. He'd come to California two or three times a year, and we'd often travel together. I know that in his office is an enlargement of a photo I shot of him at the top of the Chichen Itza pyramid in the Yucatan.  And tonight I looked for, but failed to find, a photo I shot of a relaxed John in a yellow t-shirt and shorts, sitting on the sand of Poipu Beach on the island of Kauai.

I was on my way to New Orleans to see John when Katrina came ashore. He had actually made dinner reservations at Commander's for that night. I was in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the night before and planned to drive down to New Orleans the following day as I'd lived through hurricanes in Louisiana and Florida and knew it couldn't be all that much to worry about. Fortunately, my friend Mark sent me an email from North Dakota urging me to turn on the Weather Channel and check things out before I headed further south.

I aborted the trip, drove across north Louisiana and ended up in Dallas, where I spent four anxious days watching the city I loved be destroyed live on television, and desperately calling everywhere and combing the Red Cross lists in hope of finding John. I was unsuccessful, and ultimately headed back to California, not knowing if he'd lived or died in the storm.

John did eventually manage to get out of New Orleans, and spent a long time in Boston, trying to do his research in an office Harvard loaned him, and sleeping on a small mattress on the floor of his brother's apartment in Jamaica Plain.  Eventually he returned to a FEMA trailer, where he was stuck for something like two years while he waited for his destroyed apartment to be rebuilt. He lost everything he owned during the hurricane except for what was in his office at Tulane and his papers and important documents he carried to Boston in a backpack.

John never recovered from Katrina. Every task of daily living was three times more difficult for him. He had constant car trouble, and sometimes had to take his bicycle long distances to any of the stores where he could buy groceries. He began eating only one meal a day, and because shopping was so difficult, his food choices became more and more limited. The first time I saw him post-Katrina, when he came out for a visit, I was appalled as he'd lost so much weight and had such ill-fitting clothing. And he seemed so much more anxious than he'd ever been before.  Each time he came out to California, he saw more risks, more dangers, more causes for anxiety in all directions.  I'd go out into the garden to water and come back inside finding him sitting in exactly the same rigid and vigilant position he was in when I left. He didn't sleep well at night when he was here, constantly waking and looking around anxiously.

I made him a quilt because I knew he had lost everything and because I wanted to do some small thing to help restore a measure of color and life. You can read about it here. I think he liked it, but he was unable to do much about refurnishing his apartment once he got out of the FEMA trailer. I questioned him and was appalled that he only seemed to manage a mattress on the floor and one green plastic lawn chair.  I tried sending him care packages of easy-to-prepare food items because he confessed to me that he was living largely on boiled cauliflower, and I could see that his weight was going down down down.

We stayed in daily touch by email. John acknowledged every email I ever sent him, often with a wry commentary. We were worlds apart politically, so before the last election had conversations that were spirited, to put it mildly. But I think those conversations were in the spirit of the kind of disputation that he, as a mathematician, enjoyed.

I knew he wasn't feeling good for a while. He thought he had bursitis and complained of pain in his hips. I was worried and made him promise to call me after he got back from seeing the doctor. When he did call me back, the news was terrible: inoperable liver cancer. He tried to talk to about it in a very calm and rational way with what sounded like a good deal of acceptance, but I know he was scared and sad.  And so was I.

He told me that the docs had given him six months and, characteristically, he was going to take care of himself on his own. I knew this wouldn't work so I tried to arrange my work schedule so I could take some time off and come to New Orleans, to help him figure out what resources were available, and to move into either assisted living or a nursing home.

But the cancer moved too fast, and he spiraled downhill rapidly. I think he probably just lost heart, particularly after the docs told him he was too weak and frail for chemo or other stopgap measures. I tried and tried to reach him by calling his house, his cell phone and his office and kept getting no answer. I didn't know what, if anything, he'd said about his illness to people at school, so was very reluctant to call Tulane to inquire.

Finally I did so earlier this week and found that he was in the last days of his life in a nursing home and was no longer able to see visitors or talk on the phone.  The people at the math department helped him with so many details: his will, filling out the forms donating his body to the medical school, and getting him into the nursing home. I will forever be grateful to them for their kindness to someone I know must have been a difficult colleague on occasion.

John died at 1 a.m. today. For now, there is no memorial planned. His only living relative is an elder brother with serious health issues of his own who lives in Boston.

I have tickets to see the Bolshoi this coming Saturday night. I'll be using the very fine opera glasses that were John's last gift to me. I had taken him to see SF Ballet's production of ``Nutrcracker'' last year, and the magic of the ballet totally captivated him. He sat there in the Opera House as thrilled as any 10-year-old child at the wonders that unfolded in a two-act ballet. I don't even remember telling him I wanted or needed opera glasses, but they arrived at the Yule, and they are just perfect. I'm sure as was the case with my camera, every time I hold them in my hands for the rest of my life, I'll think of John. 

We Pagans say what is remembered lives. And I know that will be the case for John. I won't let his memory fade away. He was a good, gentle and kind man, decent to his core. Several of my famously critical and difficult children were befriended by John. Somewhere in his office is a black and white photo I shot of a tall awkward mathematician and my 12-year-old daughter riding an elephant together in the Audubon Park Zoo. After my son David was killed in a mountaineering accident, John very painstakingly photocopied every letter David had sent him and gave them to me because he knew how precious my few mementos of him were.

Every year at Samhain, it's my privilege to stand on the top of a mountain under the stars, in the middle of a circle of friends, and call out the names of the Beloved Dead, who have passed from this life during the previous year. This year, John's will be one of the names I will call. And my friends will slowly dance a circle around me, chanting softly ``What is remembered lives'' at each name.  John, you will always be remembered with love and affection. Thank you for the gift you were to me, and to many others.

Here are several photos I shot of John in recent years. Several are from a day trip we took over to Angel Island. The photo that shows a quilt in process behind him is the one he used on his Web page at school. I wish I could find the one from Hawaii as it's my favorite, but it hasn't turned up yet today.