Remembering Timm

My room, with a view.

I write from my fifth-floor hotel room in St. Paul Minnesota: the large window here overlooks the hotel roof and a panorama of office towers to the left and the Mississippi River to the right. It's 68 degrees and placid at this hour (5 p.m.), the sky a deep cloudless blue, faint breezes with a touch of cool, quite nice for this Florida boy when it was humid and 80 when I went out to feed Mamacita on our front stoop at 3 a.m. this morning.

I'm here on business (a newspaper convention) til Saturday morning, and then fly on to Pennsylvania to spend a few days with my father. This is the first I've seen Dad since Timm died, and I'm looking forward to walking the grounds in moonlight with him and spending some time in the chapel where Timm's ashes are interred.

As you have noticed, the posts here have slowed. I don't know how much more I have to put up. My father-in-law Wade still has about 3000 slides of Timm's to scan, so surely there's more of Timm's photos to come. But there isn't much more of Timm's writings - I've posted most of the stuff he had on his laptop -- and there isn't much to pull from his older journals, which record chapters in his history too painful for a public forum like this. His girlfriend Christie has his latter journals and I don't know when she will send them. Now and then someone comes across the site and sends a remembrance, but there is quite a gulf between Timm's family and his friends out West. Mom still talks with Christie now and then but that's about all the communication which remains. I had hoped that Ken or some of Timm's other friends might want to share some Timm stories, but I don't think we'll see much more from them.

I'm planning to make some kind of .pdf book from a chunk of the posts to give to my parents; if anyone else is interested in them, let me know and I can send a copy when it's done. Probably will be another six weeks or more before that's finished.

I had always planned to expand Timm's photography site to include more of the pictures I've come across, and I probably will do that, too. And I'm going to work out some way for folks to order digital copies of certain pix if they're interested.

So what work I've done here is slowly moving elsewhere, but it's far from finished.

This blog will stay up indefinitely, a lasting memorial of Timm. I see it as a vastly engraved headstone, writing a life for others to read whenever they might chance across it.



Timm seems so distant to me now. It's hard to believe he's been dead only four months. The big hurt has slowly slowly washed clean in grief's salines.

I always felt Timm and I were twins separated almost from birth, living some strangely identical course. The arc of our stories is similar in so many ways -- the love of playing guitar, the restless Westward motion, our fondness for words and images, our predilection for alcohol, the difficulties with intimacy, the long years of recovery.

I visited Timm in Oregon back in 2002, on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 bombings. I was attending a newspaper conference put on by the same folks who are staging this one. Some of Timm's newsphotos had been entered in a photography contest for that show, and I think he won second or third place. He drove up to Portland for a night; we ate oysters and salmon on my company tab and then we walked and talked a long while along the river on a bright breezy warm-cool evening much like this one.

Timm would lean into me a as we walked, trying to hear with his good ear; but other than that it was like I was walking along with myself, his presence echoing the same tall-man's gait, the same build, the same voices.

We talked about AA recovery and relationships and the state of the world, about football and the newspaper biz. We talked about family in our oh-so-distant way, close even though we lived a continent apart and had spent only a few days together in the past decade. A happy, easy, comfortable talk which we knew we may not engage in in another three or five years -- that's the way we related, Timm and I, no need to say much more than that: just smile and go on and someday maybe have some more time to get to know each other.

But we never got that chance; time ran out for Timm. On the last day of his life he listened to "September Fifteenth" and "Forgiven" on his iTunes, ran around on his job, went for a run and then had a massive heart attack which eventually killed him in the middle of the night of April 18, 2008.

Since then I have been trying to find my brother, sharing whatever resonance of him that remains in his photos and words, in the photos of him we have from his growing up and passage in the world, in the music he saved on his computer. A scant, fleeting record, but I found there was something to be made of it, collected, sung about, shared. Remembering Timm has made him so much more real to me.

Chris Botti's song "Forgiven" was the top-played track on Timm's iTunes, along with Hayley Westerna's "Benedictus." I have heard the Botti track continuously in my deep ear since - I don't know why, but I believe it's the song of Timm's own deeply yearning heart. "These are the chances we take," goes the chorus,

Reasons that we can't explain
Follow your heart everyday
Pray it'll be forgiven

Don't let go
Until all your days are broken

What an unrelenting song -- and what is there to be forgiven, feeling so deeply? Perhaps too deeply, in the way that longing and yearning can never be requieted, not until the last breath we take. A mad song, perhaps, defiantly true to the heart.

The screen saver I have on Timm's laptop is of Timm walking the Oregon shore at sunset -- a self-portrait of my brother in silhouette in the last of Western light, somewhere beteen there and the forever he sings on in now. I'm wondering if I should change the screen saver to something else now - Timm's gone - but then I hear that music and I just don't want to let go yet. You know? Seems like there's always a little further I can carry him. Maybe he and I will walk forever in this late-afternoon gold light, talking in that same baritone, chuckling, wondering about our love lives, talking about Mom and Dad and the family we once had, talking about our dreams for future work. Living in the heartland. I look forward to walking with my father in moonlight in a few days, remembering Timm, loving the dream. When I power down this laptop Timm's image on the beach slowly fades and goes dark; but the music always plays on.

Walking the Field in Moonlight

Oct. 2007

Shouting world behind, back here again,
I walk with my father in his field,
talking to tall stones in moonlight,
their true faces here revealed.

My father links his arm in mine
both to steady and embrace as
we talk softly, our voices low and
deep in the register of this ancient night.

Cool winds heave the trees
that round us from the forest's edge,
American beech and red oak
and tulip poplar, dark deacons
with their long creaking spines
and remaining leaves that flutter
like so many hands receiving poems.

At the far end of the field
up the mound to Manannan's stone
we linger, gazing up its tall
brutal face so milky and pock-
shadowed in moonlight
with planets and stars
woven into its ocean crown:

And sigh, looking out over
the field of stones my
father has lifted for the
past 30 years, drenched now
in moonlight as it rises
over the trees behind us.

We wonder how lucence reveals
the inside leys of the land,
the stone circle and bell tower
like pale candles set in a vast
lintel between this world and Your other,
more human and less, less mortal and more.

"The trees look so much taller now,"
my father says, puffing his pipe
as we begin to walk back to the house.
And they do, almost monstrously so
in moonlight, the American beech
and tulip poplar to the left of
Manannan and the red oak at the
forest rim which paths to the chapel
taller than tall, silvery black and casting
blacker shadows that dance with
the frozen and mute standing stones.

The magnitude of that field in moonlight
something we only come close to
though we surely author this wonder
of treasure as we walk back toward
our end of the field, for a few
moments longer in this other world,
the wildest shore of the one
up at the house where doors lamps
and walls extinguish as nothing
that field of stones in the moon
where we walk forever.