Full Denim Jacket

I recently had lunch with a dear friend. It’s a bi-weekly get together and the talk ranges all over the spectrum of two minds who revel in critical thinking and getting it right. We dabble in physics, technology, sports, literature, life in general, and even politics. We’re both of a mind that politics should be for the people, so there’s lots of common ground. I don’t like talking politics, really, because I don’t really know who I am politically. I guess I’m an Eisenhower republican. At least, I’m comfortable saying that. It is vastly vague, but my friends on both the left and right nod as if they understand what I’m saying. I’m not sure I do, exactly, but I find the label fits me like good boots.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about loss. I wrote a couple weeks ago about it from a very personal place and I guess I’m not done. Some would call the loss I experienced that lunch day as trivial and perhaps it was, but it still broke my heart.

I’ve ridden motorcycles for most of my life, save for a decade, or so, when my kids were young. Fifteen years ago my lovely bride and I bought a Harley and have been grateful ever since. Friends and I have ridden all over Western North America during these last fifteen years and I will jump on and go at the falling of a chapeau. My summer riding jacket was new when I got the bike. It’s a standard Levi jacket, no big deal, but it has traveled with me for sixty-five thousand miles and is now held together with new denim in places, a lot of leather patches, and miles of memories.

I wore the tattered thing into the restaurant and hung it on a peg like a badge of honor. I’m proud of it. It’s been maintained when it could have been just thrown away and replaced. It’s like my own personal flag, much like the “freak flag” David Crosby sang about back in the Seventies. After lunch, I carried it out because I knew the heat of the day had crept in, as promised by the weather guys, and I knew I wasn’t going to wear it on the way back to work. I folded it carefully and put it in my port-side saddle bag. I threw a leg over and remembered that I’d locked the ignition and the keys were in the jacket pocket. Shit O. Deer. (Thank you David James Duncan.) So I got off and rummaged in the bag, pulled out the jacket, and got the keys. I felt a little hurried because lunch had gone on for a while and the sooner I could get back to work, the sooner I could finish my time and head home. I did not refold the jacket as carefully as I had. I just kind of wadded it up and stuffed it in there. The lid of the bag was hard to close and I knew there was quite a bit of strain on both the hinge and the latch. No matter. It would hold.

I finished the work day and headed home. I took the freeway, I-5 north, because I had a stop to make on the way and that was the most direct route. Heading up that hill to Portland, I can blow some of the carbon out and my bike does love a good snort. I can only guess what happened because I never saw it. I’d come up behind a big chip truck who was following two idiots. I dropped a gear and grabbed a big handful. My beautiful black machine flexed and took off like a big tractor shot from a cannon. Exhilaration. I pulled back into the center lane, eased off and settled into the last climb that defines the northern-most lip of the Willamette Valley. Suddenly, there was a mid-sized green car next to me with a pretty girl leaning out the window.

“Your bag is open,” she hollered. I reached behind me and, sure enough, it was. I snapped it shut, gave her a thumbs up and shouted “Thanks!”

Then, there was another car along side with the driver doing a charade that looked like he was pulling a coat around him. I waved and nodded as it dawned on me that he was probably talking about my jacket. Aw jeez.

There was no place to pull over. A truck lane yawned, but that was no good. Traffic was bunched and the next exit was two miles up the road. I decided it best to live through the ordeal and get off there. Sure enough, when I was able to stop, my beloved jacket was long gone. Grimly, I found my way to I-5 south and roared back to retrace my path. I did that twice, a seven-mile loop each time. Nothing. No jacket to be seen. Sick at heart, I rode home and sat with my chin in my hand, grieving. It was just a dumb old tattered Levi jacket I kept telling myself. All things must pass. The feelings brought my mom and dad back into focus and I just felt sad and lost. Enter Philosophy. I vowed to go check again on my way to work in the morning, which I did with the same result.

When there is no real alternative, we all seem to shrug and do whatever we can to deal with loss. We have choices. We can let loss overwhelm us or we can press on. It was a microcosm of what I’d gone through with losing my folks. Not as profound, certainly, but loss is loss and it’s weight was substantial. I’m sure the loss of my folks piggy-backed right aboard with this new setback and added some extra weight. I gave thanks for the pleasure the jacket had given me and more thanks for the memories I would always have from wearing it through heat and cold and dust and torrential wet. I found some comfort there.

I made it through the day and wearily threw my leg over for the ride home. I decided to take the freeway again. What the heck. I just putted up in the slow lane at about fifty-five scanning the breakdown strip. And there it was, twenty-four hours later, crumpled in a blue heap by the side of the road. All the rally pins were gone, broken and scattered by thousands of cars and trucks. The safety-pin-and-beads American flag was twisted and crushed beyond recognition, but the jacket was there and whole and fixable. I yelled “Thank you!” all the way home and even after I got there. It was a blessed feeling and lifted my heart to a lightness that made me downright giddy. Happy? Oh my, yes.

What I can take away from this, and you can too, is to keep trying, even after your rational mind gives up. Yeah, it’s just a dumb old jacket, but tell my heart that. There is a lesson here that I will be sorting out for a long time to come.

Life O'Star Trek

Part of the $112 Million that the new Star Trek movie made last weekend came out of my pocket. I popped for the IMAX version, which is probably twice as much as a regular theater ticket, so from a marketing standpoint I guess you could say I’ve seen it twice. I went with two great pals, with whom I’ve seen many an opening-day Star Trek flick. As it turns out, I enjoyed myself thoroughly and would even consider seeing it a “third” time.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan since the show debuted in the Sixties. I’ve seen most of the movies. I’ve seen all of the movies with the original cast. I like Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi is stunning, but I don’t think I went to the theater more than once. I don’t have the emotional attachment to the Next Generation stuff that I do to the original characters. So, that being said, I loved this new movie with the new cast. I think Chris Pine is a completely believable Kirk who burns with competence and emotion. I think he’s taken the role in a much-needed different direction than William Shatner found himself going. Shatner was almost a caricature of himself as Kirk. But of all of the original cast, he is the only one who created a completely different memorable character. Boston Legal’s Denny Crane is a classic TV character and Shatner has to take enormous credit for creating him and putting him into the lexicon. As an actor, Shatner will not always be thought of as Captain Kirk. Even though Shatner defined the role, Chris Pine has created an equal character with all of the contradictions, but without the almost campy wryness that was threatening to overcome the entire franchise.

The trinity of Kirk, Spock, and Bones McCoy is in good hands. Zach Quinto and Karl Urban are true to their characters and bring humor and the needed energy to their younger versions. You can believe these guys when they respond to dire circumstance.

The secondary characters played by Zoe Saldana, Simon Peg, John Cho, and Anton Yelchin are also excellent. Like I said, the campy stuff is gone. These are vital young characters that have somehow arrived and continued without some of the baggage the older versions had developed over the years. The plot vehicle of time travel and parallel universes helped with this too, but it is truly a character-driven series and they pulled it off. It would have been easy to screw it all up, but the production values and the writing did not allow it.

Gene Roddenberry created a series of fables, if you will, that examined a multitude of ethical questions and philosophies. These were presented obviously and the outcomes were almost never in doubt or ambiguous. The new actors have imbued the franchise with a new energy and subtle character changes, which has ignited the potential to create sweeping epics, whose stories may enlighten the human experience in ways that transcend what Star Trek has previously given us. Philosophy and ethics may be artfully revealed rather than simply stated. There is room for darkness and a deeper examination of the human spirit. Villains and heroes alike are complete beings and not just cardboard cutouts. The intrinsic friendships that carry much of the emotional weight throughout the series have new potential for growth and increased depth.

It’s a lot to hope for, but after the first episode in this incarnation, it certainly seems possible.

No Humans, No Nothing

A deep, almost unbearable sadness has transfixed me this evening. It came over me as I played with Toulouse, games we play every day. It started with me thinking of how I’ll miss him when he’s grown old and gone, or when Jessica moves away into another phase of her life. Toulouse was doing his predictable dog things, keeping the toy from me, growling as if to warn me away but watching me with hope to continue the game. I was filled with affection for him in particular and for dogs and all non-human creatures in general. And then I thought, what if there were no humans to feel and show that affection? What if we were gone from the earth? There would be no poetry. There would be no ears to interpret sound patterns as music. There would be nobody to stare out over a grand vista and feel the power of it, to rise to touch the face of wonder and to feel profoundly grateful for the privilege of being able to simply breathe the miracle of air. There would be no imagination.

This human experience has certainly put the planet’s ability to sustain warm-blooded life in jeopardy. Greed and rapacious human behavior have put everything at risk. The dark side of human nature is producing endless war as the dangerous hybrid of corporate economics and exclusionary ideology grope toward some kind of have and have-not world order. That’s been around forever. It is upon the Dark Side that poetry, music, and enlightened thought crash like waves against an impossible cliff.

If humans were not here, the Dark Side would vanish, as would all that stands against it. There would be no need to uplift the human spirit. The rest of Life would go about it’s business without the slightest hint of worry. We are the creators of Art and the only appreciators of it. If we were gone wolves would live in symbiosis with the deer and elk. Salmon would still have a heck of a time getting around the dams, but they wouldn’t be fished to near extinction. The oceans would heal, as would every thing else. Plastic would become part of evolution. Climate would shift and dance like it has since the dawn of time. And there would be no time, none whatsoever. There would only be cycles of vast complex relationships. There would be nothing to define, categorize, or understand them. Things would just be. Events would never be analyzed.

This made me profoundly sad. Both cruelty and kindness would be gone from the world. All we bring to the moveable feast is our ability to interpret it to express it to each other. We are unique in that regard and our passing would still be insignificant to the rest of the creatures here. We would not be missed. Dogs would still be dogs for as long as they could survive. Perhaps we have taken a path that is doomed to ultimate loneliness. Perhaps we could have nurtured better relationships with the other species. That is one of the reasons that I will always pay attention to dogs and believe they are worth spending time with. Through relationships with animals I can understand my own animalistic nature. Even if it becomes simply wondering about my relationship with Everything Else. It is difficult to understand a world where we are not here to attempt to understand it.

Good night.