Missing Real Contact with Friends

It struck me this morning in the middle of my 7th week of quarantine that what is getting me down these days is the lack of real contact with friends.  Yes, there's Facebook and email and Messenger and the phone, but there's no hugging, no coffees or lunches together, no singing together, no long conversations marked by laughter or tears, no cooking for guests, none of the deep normal pleasures of friendships both longtime and new.

As an extrovert with introvert tendencies, I can attest that I love the quietness, the solitude, the time to work on projects uninterrupted, the occasional sit-down at a distance with somebody equally wary about safe distance.  All these are important parts of my quarantined life and I am grateful.

But since I retired, I've had the chance to meet new friends, friends I'm not professionally connected to, friends who bring newness into my life, friends to sing with, to let down my hair with, to allow to know me more deeply than most others, to be my real self with, not the professional persona of ministry.

These (mostly women) friends have been the greatest gifts of retirement for me and I have loved the time spent with them over a glass of wine or cup of coffee, a meal, a jam session, a walk, a conversation that frequently erupted into gales of laughter, a chance to hug and be hugged, a sense of being nourished by a friendship.  Not joined at the hip but ready to meet and replenish the wells of responsible living that are easily drained down by our obligations.

Most of my friendships seem to be online or on-phone these days and I am longing for the day when I can see friends face to face, hug them, laugh with them out loud instead of with emojis.  I'm not planning to resist the rest of the quarantine but I sure will celebrate it when it comes.

Friends are clearly a lifeline for me, especially with family members far away.  This experience has made me so aware of my friendships and how important they are.  I am grateful.

Murder on the Riverwalk?

MURDER ON THE RIVERWALK?

Kit Ketcham

August 2018

         It started out innocently enough a few months ago, I swear.  I’d been hooked on the idea of a murder since my Gearhart days, wondering if it was worth the effort, worth the expense, worth the public condemnation, worth the possible repercussions, as I’d heard warnings of all of these.

         You won’t be able to quit, they told me.  You’ll get dependent on the thrill.  You’ll spend your hard-earned pennies on setting the stage, wooing the victims, arranging the set-up and following through.  Once you set things in motion, you have to continue, mindful of the enemies you may make and the friends you may lose.  And the victim may seek revenge.

         My early attempts in Gearhart were spotty and unsatisfying.  The set-up proved to be illusory, too hard to get the target to cooperate, and once I did get a feeble effort underway, I ended up moving to Astoria and having to bunch the whole deal.

         But I moved to Alderbrook in Astoria, to a spot near enough to the Riverwalk that it might be possible to pull off a murder without attracting too much attention.  So I brooded and I watched and I listened, familiarizing myself with my new environment, its challenges and its advantages.

         There’s lots of open space in the natural area, lots of trees, plenty of cover, and, early in the morning, not too many intruders on my intended territory.  The path seemed a perfect surface—easily picked clean of other debris, easy to spot the lure of the bait from the alders and willows, where my intended prey seemed to lurk.

         So I began to set the trap.  Each morning I’d fill a baggie full of bait, stuffing it in a pocket on the other side of the doggie biscuits I always carry.  If I saw an intended target, I’d make a great show of turning around and flinging my mysterious lures in the air, making sure that my motions would be easily spotted and the bait clearly visible on the path.

         The problem was that other people like to use the Riverwalk as well, so I had to conceal my murderous impulses and often make polite conversation with runners, bikers, dog walkers, and the occasional derelict sleeping on the Lewis and Clark bench.  So efforts were again spotty, with all the interruptions, but it was so clear that there was a population hungry for opportunities to group up and take chances on a mysterious snack from my hands.

         And then suddenly my potential victims did not show up at the accustomed time.  No raucous greetings, no swish of garb, no noisy thank you’s, no chatter amongst themselves.  What had happened?  Did the weather keep them away?  Had they sensed a threat?  I did see them in the distance, nearer the water, but not a one approached me and my baggie.

         They had posed for a photo earlier in the week.  I was eager to see that enthusiastic crowd again.  Was I being shunned?  How many individuals does it take to create a murder?

         Would 15 do it?  How about 25?  You be the judge.  Was there a murder on the Riverwalk

Post-College Musical Memories Part III.

After college graduation in May 1963, I spent the summer at the American Baptist Assembly grounds in Green Lake, WI, as an ice cream shop clerk, immediately gaining back all the weight I'd lost just before my senior year.

That summer, musically, was kind of like Baptist summer camp, with songfests weekly around a campfire, a little choir drummed up by the music director, and a review of a lot of Sunday School songs dressed up by the changed voices of the boys who were once sopranos and had, over time, become tenors and basses.

I'd been urged to come by a sort-of boyfriend who was part of a musical quartet invited to provide worship service music.  The romance cooled shortly after we arrived at Green Lake, but the music continued in staff housing and in theatrical productions.  And it took on a distinctive social-justice flavor. 

The South was tumultuous in the summer of 1963 and the issues of voting rights for black people, unions for blue collar workers, and women's reproductive rights were part of our cultural milieu, even far far north of the Southern states.  And the songs of social upheaval were what we sang around the campfires and after hours.

At the end of the summer, I returned to my parents' home in small town Washington, as I had no job prospects, and attempted to get back in step with conservative theologies and hymnody.  But I had learned enough about more progressive hymn writers and modern theologies of freedom that I craved music other than what we always had sung in my dad's churches.

I accepted the invitation to lead the junior choir, where I could make my own choices about songs to teach them and felt daring as I chose less traditional Christmas and Easter songs for them to sing.  Not that "I wonder as I wander" is particularly daring in itself, but it does push the envelope a bit, though it was irresistible to even the most hidebound mama in the congregation when her angelic Ruthie sang the plaintive verses in a sweet, pure soprano.

A job came along and I let someone else lead the junior choir, as I explored the new freedom of living away from home for a full year, living in the Columbia River Gorge in a tiny apartment and serving a small WA county's welfare recipients.  No music, except for records, but I did join the Columbia Record Club where you could select several records for a dollar and just pay postage.

I remember that I discovered the Swingle Singers, Norman Luboff Choir, Robert Shaw Chorale, and played and replayed the two albums our college choir had recorded during my years at Linfield.  But there wasn't much radio reception in Stevenson WA, just upriver from Bonneville Dam, so it was records or nothing until I went either to Portland (downriver) or back up to Goldendale (upriver) where reception was better.

After 18 months of serving welfare recipients in the very backwoods of rural Washington, I had a chance to move to Denver CO to be a program worker at the Denver Christian Center, and that will be a story for another day.

Love Medicine

In the May 2020 edition of Discover Magazine, I ran across an article entitled “Love Medicine” by Jeffrey Rediger, which quotes Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Dr. Fredrickson has been involved in research on the link between the vagus nerve and social connections for more than 20 years, and what she’s learned from her studies is that what keeps us strong and healthy mentally is small moments of positive interaction, which she dubbed “a sort of falling in love” with the people who surround you on a day-to-day basis.  That means everyone, from your spouse and children, to the barista you’re getting to know at your corner coffee shop.

Fredrickson believes that culturally, we underestimate these fleeting moments.  To her, love is a series of “micro moments of positivity resonance” that we experience, over and over again, as we go through life.  We may have one of these interactions with a stranger at a bus stop or a million of them over the course of a lifetime with the person we marry.  

Rediger goes on to muse about an interaction he’d had soon after his interview with Fredrickson, with an older woman who was pushing a baby in a stroller as Rediger hurried toward his office.  He joined her in walking and afterwards he recognized that in that fleeting conversation, filled with laughter and friendly talk, he’d experienced a moment of real bonding with someone and exercised his vagus nerve in the process.

I was so struck by this article that I looked back at what gives me great pleasure and a sense of being right with the world.  I’m a single woman with a couple of good love experiences with a mate but with no partner or love interest in my life at present.  In fact, I’d go so far as to call myself asexual, not interested sexually or romantically in any person, male or female.  I’m happy with my celibate life and do not feel deprived by it.

And I realized that my life is enriched and made delightfully pleasant by the moments I have talking with others at the grocery store or over coffee or on the Riverwalk, the times when I extend myself to greet another person and warmly receive them into a kind of friendship, if only on the Riverwalk or over the salsa at Freddies or admiring someone’s dog or a color they’re wearing.  In fact, I go out of my way to make those connections.  And when I come home and look back, it is those moments that help me realize my own place in the universe and how I maintain it.

Incidentally, the vagus nerve is worth reading about.  Look it up.

Musical Memory Lane Part II

Let me regress to high school years briefly, for this was a period in my life where I began to realize that I could sing, could carry a tune accurately, stay on pitch, and read the alto part mostly successfully. So I joined the high school choir which introduced me to some show tunes (even though I hadn't seen the movies!), classical religious choral music, and choral renditions of folk tunes and other non-Baptist hymnody.

So I wasn't musically illiterate when I headed off to college at Linfield, a historically Baptist college but moderately liberal in its outlook on life, with historical rather than literal studies on religious topics.

Two of the first things I did at Linfield were to join a sorority and, second semester, to audition for the a cappella choir.  The sorority was local, not national, but it offered opportunities for socializing and projects with other young women.  Phi Beta Mu was a good place for me to make new friends and the choir an entirely new musical experience.

Linfield's a cappella choir was directed by a well-known Oregon conductor and musician, Dr. Robert Zimmerman who also directed the Portland symphony and chorale.  He was an exacting director, always helping us learn the skills of musicality ("you're sharp!  you're flat!" were shouted out as necessary during rehearsals) and performance (we memorized everything, we were schooled in walking onto risers, exiting the stage without stumbling, looking professional on stage, etc.).

And we sang the most beautiful religious and secular music I'd ever heard:  classics like the Faure' Requiem, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Peaceable Kingdom, Gershwin selections, show tunes, even some pop oldies that met Zim's critical standards.

We had fun, we traveled on fall and spring tours, singing nightly in Baptist churches all up and down the Pacific Northwest, romances sprang up in the chartered bus seats between the singers and the instrumentalists, our bus driven by a genial, chubby man we called Lefty, whose musical contribution was his effort to convince us that he could sing fugues.  

We sang regularly at major college occasions like graduation, welcoming new students, and Parents' Weekend.  There was status in being in the choir.  We rehearsed two or three times a week for two hours and were granted the privilege of coming to supper in the Commons late on those days because we were similar to the famous Linfield Wildcats in terms of cachet.  I was in heaven, never having had that sort of public approval in my young life!

Musical Memory Lane, Part 1

It's been fun to review (or to use the cool-kids' word "curate") my musical life, from as far back as I can remember it, which would mean starting when I was quite young---about 4 or 5.  The songs and music I heard and learned at that time were straight out of Baptist Sunday School curriculum:  Jesus Loves Me, of course, and others with a Jesus-theme.

We kids attended Sunday School first and then sat with our mother during the regular, upstairs service, participating in all the small rituals of Baptist worship (very low-church and homely), including all the old hymns, many of them rather blood-drenched in their theology but others reverent or energetic and easy to sing.

So I grew up on "Washed in the Blood" for one (fun to sing with its repetitive chorus and "warshed in the blood" rhythmically bellowed out by those of us destined to grow up with dark senses of humor and to forsake blood sacrifice theology forever) and "Wonderful Grace of Jesus", also rhythmically fun to sing and belt out its forgiveness and sunny attitude toward sin.

But a few years into my life, suddenly there appeared in our living room a turntable and a set of children's records that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with international music, including classical themes like "Peter and the Wolf".  I suspect that our mother was the instigator of that shift in our musical tastes, with her college education and teaching experience.  I still remember some of those tunes ("There's a boat from Bahia, Bahia" and "Grand Canyon Suite" morsels) which opened me up to a wider range of musical experience.

At age 9, I moved, with our family, out to northeastern Oregon, where we kids had our first experience with public school and a public school music program:  "Happy Wanderer", "Walloping Window Blind" and the like, sung gustily by 5th and 6th graders to the accompaniment of the old upright piano played by our music/PE teacher Mrs. Lewis.

Before too many more years, I was swept up in 50's teenage culture, with Pat Boone crooning "Friendly Persuasion" over the local airwaves and "Earth Angel" the favorite request song of my friends.

High school days brought a lot of pop music---Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis the Pelvis, and others like them.  Rock and Roll hit the charts and worried the Baptists and others concerned about "modernism" in religion and in the cultural life of small town America.

In Athena, we were not "allowed" (by community norms) to attend movies, go to dances, or play cards.  We were the Preacher's Kids who had to set a different standard of teenage behavior, so my sister and I were careful about what music we told our folks we liked.

I kinda liked Johnny Cash and "I Walk the Line" which hinted at illicit behavior but didn't elaborate.  Of course, this was at the time of my life when I had just barely realized how babies were actually made.  I was smart, but not that smart.

Having started to learn piano at about age 8, I had the advantage early in life of reading music, which has served me well all my life.  It is a skill that goes beyond simple sight-reading of new music and led me into inventing my own sense of harmony and of music theory (some of which actually worked but was all seat-of-the-pants).

College years changed my tastes again.  More on that later.

All the Paid Jobs I've Had in the Past 65 years.

1,  Babysitting, 25 cents per hour
2.  Pea truck driver, 85 cents per
3.  Wheat trick driver, 1.00 per
4.  Harvest timekeeper, 1.00 per
5.  Retail clerk, JCP
6.  Row boss/bus driver, strawberries and beans
7.  Receptionist, hometown newspaper
8.  Soda jerk
9.  Welfare worker
10. Missionary
11. Office staff
12. Kelly Girl
13. Spanish teacher
13. School counselor
15. Office staff
16. Minister