Christmas Letter

December 23, 2009

Greetings little brother,
this is your elder not oldest
always half-inch taller
brother David checking in
to wish you Christmas comfort
and cheer--whether because
you could use it or I need
it more than ever in
remembering you, a task
which is ever more what
it has always been,
trying to keep a wave
from ebbing out of grasp.

I say “little” brother because
you get younger every year that
passes between your dying
and my living on—our gap
in is now almost two years
wider—but also because
in my memory the image of you
at four or seven is clearer than
the visage and height of the
man you became. Perhaps it’s
just because that child was
part of my own growing up,
while the man you grew into
was such an occasional
crossroads in my own
history, our meetings a half
dozen times over the
past three decades
always welcome, familiar
and filial and even close
in ways neither of us
tried to name, not at least
while we were together,
times which always were fleeting.

But that child I see racing
down the snowy hill on
a red plastic saucer, there
next to our house in Evanston
now four decades gone:
There is something in what
was your essential nature
which I sense deepest now
that time has alloyed
the presence that you were:
You would have stayed
that young if you could,
am I right? Free of every warp
and twist and shatter
which turns every child
into the eventual adult,
banished from the womb
of childhood’s Eden
to make one’s way alone
in the forest of the real.
You stayed loyal to that child
as the years poured on
through your short life’s glass,
keeping childhood’s wide-eyed
stare of wonder at the world
intact in all the photos that you took.

Did you know you would
die first, the youngest of our clan,
creating such a paradox
of beginnings and ends for
the rest of us? Growing tall
in adolescence, you proclaimed
your greatest wish was to sprout
taller than even me but
ended up a shy half inch short.
That distinction could never
be your own, though when
you wore your cowboy
boots at your sister’s wedding
you walked down the aisle
my equal. As life’s
ambitions go you missed
out on that one, but
in death you’ve earned
the title of the first to go.
a depth none of us will equal.
Sorry, but we would
trade any of our own
unsurpassings to have
you simply back
among us. You want to be
the tallest? Here, take my
shrinking inch …




But I digress. It’s cold this morning,
perhaps the coldest of the year
in Central Florida, down in the
30’s, this night the first
between the winter solstice
and Christmas and faithful
to the harrow, hallowing
the stars which burn on so
patiently and old up there behind
a scree of thin cirrus which
tide tonight’s hard skies.
Traffic’s light in the commute
to work and back because
school’s out; there’s
Christmas music everywhere
in the crowded malls
where grim parents
dig deep into their pockets
to buy exactly what
makes a kid’s eyes shine bright.
Well, all of that sleeps now,
exhausted in equal
measure to the expectant,
leaving just a cold soft-breezing dark
so pregnant with itself
I can feel the next’s year’s womb stir.

A silent night; a holy night;
a lonely one without my kid brother.





The cold though is its own comfort,
bringing out the blanket on my lap
upon which Belle our calico is
curled and sleeps, just to the
left of your laptop which I
have put to our common uses,
writing things down, praising
the beautiful image, and
yes, writing resumes just
like you did, over and over,
angling for some pedigree
which will help us find a bridge
across the country’s recession.
(12.7 percent unemployment
here in Lake County)—and
into the strange and virulently
changing century you saw
just eight years of.
Such employments of your
laptop don’t mean much to Belle—
I write sideways when she’s
with me as today, claiming
a space of warmth and
sleeping down into it,
leaving me cramped but
happy for the union with
the living while my hands
tap out its symbolic brogue,
a life of its own perhaps
forever short of the real thing.

As if a Christmas letter
sent off in a cyber bottle on
eternity’s dark tide has
any hope of reaching
what has been forever lost.






--But on, at last, to my errand.
What I meant to write
to you about was my walks
up and down Crescent Beach
near St. Augustine at dawn
a few weekends ago, when my
wife and I spent three days
in a condo her parents had rented
right there on the beach. The view
from those big windows
was spectacular and the beach
close to pristine, of fine
white sands and loud surf composed,
development stopped just south
of this condo complex marking
where the federal preserve began,
a national park mostly
for a fort built by the Spanish
in 1760 along an inlet down
the beach which fed a
waterway’s back route
to the city. Fort Matanzas
was named after the inlet
which got its own handle
after three hundred French
Hugenots were slain by the
Spanish in the 16th century
who were battling for rights to
a land whose real sustaining
value proved to be shores and
birds and flowers.

(Remember flowers?)

The Hugenots were given the option
of conversion or death, and its
seems that most simply bowed
their heads, accepting the red
martydom (in another account,
the Spanish simply couldn’t
afford to garrison so many men);
crazy perhaps to our modern
sense, but you and I both know
many drunks who were offered
a spiritual way out and chose
instead to turn back to
the wall of the alcoholic night
instead and died.




Our state – Florida –
was so named in honor
of flora which burn on
while the rest of the country
up north freezes into boreal.
“Matanzas” means “Slaughters,”
a handled which proved
only foundational since
the fort which came
to be built along its waters
was rarely saw any action
over the centuries.
One of its cannons lobbed
at shell once at British longboats
(the inlet’s far too shallow
for a proper galleon) when
they thought to blockade
St. Augustine that way
The redcoats turned tail
and that was that. A place
with enough history for
us rootless Floridians—
a toehold on the greater
story is enough for us--that
the fort was rebuilt in
the1930s and the area
declared a national park.

My wife’s father and I
toured the fort one afternoon,
pressing hands against the
old stone walls and cold
cannon throats, stepping out
of the wind into a barrack
which had six tiny
bunks of straw, a few rifles
and a crucifix. From up top
the view was purely of
a shoreland’s wilderness,
shaped and carried as
all barrier islands are
by the tide’s rise and ebb
over the centuries.(No one
knows exactly where the
French were slaughtered
since the inlet itself has moved
this way then that by storm
surges.) We come and go,
but the ocean flows eternal
or almost so—two billion
years and counting—a book
too large and thick for
any one of us to read
though we certainly try
walking down its shores.
A book your name is written
in, with a mark which
represents your life—
a flower perhaps, or a shoe,
a red saucer turned sideways …





Your ashes are scattered around
this continent, somewhere
in the mountains of Oregon (if
your girlfriend’s gotten around to it),
at Dad’s place in eastern Pennsylvania
& in the memorial garden
of a public cemetery here in Florida.
A wide, landed scatter, encompassing
the arc which took you as far
west as two feet can walk.
I’d like my ashes, at least
some of them, to go into the
tide off Melbourne where I
was baptized at 14; Mom also
thinks to have some of her
ashes cast upon the Florida
ocean she so loves. Ashes
to mountains, dust to ebbing wave;
so we all go back to
the world’s wild places
that the sun will rise again.

Ah, sorry: my letter once again
digresses, like the mind
of a person on a long walk,
like the two I took on Crescent
Beach on two successive dawns.
The weather was dark and cold
and windy, especially the first
day, down in the lower ‘40s
with an Edmonton Clipper
bearing down. It was beach weather
of the other sort, the one which
consoles with heavy hands,
the brute elements of time
at it again on this next day.
The sky heavily beclouded
& looking like the insides
of an oyster, striated with
pearl-grey ceruleans
unscrolling from the hard north
& sweeping over this
old white beach, headed far out
to sea where the sun was
struggling up for a brief
appearance before disappearing
behind the clouds. Only
me and a few flocks of gulls
toughed out those early
walks, the condos and
beachfront mansions
almost all deserted (a
squat white modernist
beachfront house up
the shore belonged,
I was told, to Michael
Jordan; it looked like it
hadn’t seen a human
soul in years). South
of the property line (where
the Ft. Matanzas national
park began) it was really
empty, just a loud mash
of surf and slowly cusping
light with winds so strong
they whipped the sands along
my feet like pouring souls.




A solitary, wintry land,
boarded up and left for
warmer seasons round the
year’s revolving glass.
Alone with that eternity,
I trudged down to the
inlet and in a ways,
taking pictures here and
there for reasons I did
not quite know—I am
no photographer, that’s for sure,
short of patience and talent
where your older brother
has plenty, just like you did.
Maybe we three were walking
along through that viewfinder,
the Cohea boys (it rhymes)
riding once again,
huffing and farting
and laughing about the
bewilderments of life and
love like we never quite
got around to sharing. Suffice
to say I carried the
photographic torch that day for you
and for Will who carries on
your work with your camera
and also for our mother, the one
who taught us how to shoot
a good picture not with
any special technique other
than the grace of patience,
of waiting for the image in
one’s heart to line up
with the beloved in the lens.

Patience. It was good
to have the time to linger
with my camera over
that slowly waking beachside
day lost to winter and you.
Whatever I shot those
cold dark mornings I share
first here, perhaps only here,
my Christmas gift to you
from the world which has
nearly forgotten you,
your high-tide line almost
fully erased by the next.
I hope you see beauty in
them, their wan tans
and pewters so much
like the bittersweet
canvas I call your life
or our loss of it,
colors faithful to the
way winter grieves for
warmer months
with tears of dark and cold.
And as shores seam the
firmaments of land and
sea together along a single
thin stretch of sand, so
these photos place a flower
on your altar exactly where
you left us, exactly where
we forever search the
incoming tide in vain for you.




And so I walked that
shore, walking, walking,
talking in my head to
God, praying that all be well,
thinking of my wife
who doesn’t care for
beachside walks yet
whose presence next
to mine in marriage
is surely a great shore.

Walking too in
some spell of vanity
which made me think
you understood just what I
saw, the way I vainly
think you’re reading this.
Believing, foolishly
and all-too-humanly
that you’re still with us
in the resonance of that
loud-crashing tide, a sound
which murmurs in my
ears two weeks later,
even though I know
I’m just imagining it.
Just as I now imagine
I hear your voice singing
a song you wrote for
my first wedding
twenty years ago (what I
would give for a tatter
of those lyrics, just
a fingerbone of driftwood
carved with a word or two).
Just as I imagine the
sound of us talking
across the table on
our back porch when you
got back from your
trip to Chile in ’03,
calm and almost happy,
Just as I imagine I
hear the long soar of
your screaming glee
as you streaked down
the snow-packed hill
next to our house in
Evanston on that Christmas
Eve I recalled in
the reverie I wrote in ‘87
as a family Christmas gift,
a memory which is
most substantial on pages
almost as thin as your
face flickering out
in the garden by
our dark Christmas tree.






For now I carry on,
ferrying toward my own
eventual last shore a heart
made fuller by your absence,
my grief awakening a
love which would not
quite waken when you lived,
not enough to count.
Maybe I’m just still making
amends for that—guilt
travels a very long road—
but perhaps this Christmas
letter is our walk down that
winter’s shore, present
and not, the heart’s fullness
summed from both.






Belle stirs a moment in
my lap and looks up to
me with eyes full of
sleepy contentment – how
else should we look
out on this day so close
to Christmas? A happy
heart is love’s full silo,
I believe, it granary
leaking gold from every
pore. You taught me
that we make those hearts,
deciding to sing of the
world’s half-fullness as
past the brim, making
of every still moment
captured in the lens
or in the life a smile
of celebration that life endures
even when it can’t.
There is an odd
unfoldment of our lives,
composed of tandems
which share a shore:
We picked out Belle
at the Cat Protection Society
because of Zooey, the
ancient calico we rescued
off the streets and gave
a good life for the year
she lived on. Hugo our dumb
Maine coon is the shaggy familiar
of Red, that stray rogue
who loved my wife’s pets so
much he transformed from
squirrel- killer into mama’s boy
after ten seconds under
her cooing soft hand.
And Violet our Siamese
is Buster’s daughter, in a way,
the living bridge back to
his death almost a decade ago.

Zooey (d. 2008) and Belle, our calicos.

Red (d. 2003) and Hugo, our shaggy creampuff males.

Buster (d. 2000) and Violet, the orientals.

And your tandem? What
moves into your absence
to thrive? Not a son
in the way of kin and kind—
our family won’t see that—
the name Cohea, at least
of our branch will end
on our eventual graves,
perhaps as all names should,
written in the sand before
the night’s final high tide.

No, it’s something else,
the outlines of which are
faint, only slowly coming
into present focus. Yes,
your images endure—how
could they not, so full
of life and beauty--but only so
with the husbandry
and care of the living.
I took up the task of
archiving and sharing
your work as a form of
amends for the brother I
couldn’t quite be in life.
I believe that I’ve become
less myself in the act
and my creative urges
have stilled and grown distant
(how little I’ve actually written
this year!). Become my
brother’s keeper, I’ve
become some third entity
between who I was
and who you were.
These hands tapping on
the laptop this letter
to you are reaching
out, through the screen
and deep into the tide,
trying to find yours
over there and hold on
to you as long as I can,
in all the ways I failed
to down all the real years
that passed. I am now
the tender of a fading
memorial, still trying
to secure a place
where your wonders can
be treasured and take on
a life of their own.
So the tandem which
bridges who you were
to what you’ve become
is this shore I now walk,
my voice bearing a few
far notes of your resonance.
Or perhaps I so fool myself.
Only time in its infinite
tide of God’s inscrutable
will will tell.





Tandems. Your camera survives
in your oldest brother’s hands
and your laptop gets a beating
from my own—Lord, I promised
to be succinct—and your pictures
now find a better more durable
wilderness in the book I just
published, sending a copy to
every family member as
this year’s reverie, with
the motto you believed:
Beauty Heals. Heals, I
believe today, because
it endures, being one of
the portals to God we
each possess when we
tune our five senses to
that fine high signal
inside the world which
semaphores You Are Here,
here in this moment
which I will mail to you
on Christmas morning,
posting this poem and its
pictures on your website.

Along with this letter
I send a gift, a picture
of our garden Christmas tree in
full lit glory, those lights
hiding a multitude of faults
(we’ve had to re-set up the
damn thing three times now
after falling over in the wind)
when in darkness it glows.
Hardly anyone in our neighborhood
has lights out this year—probably
can’t afford them, given the
economy—and it’s too bad,
because those Christmas lights
bring a little of silent night skies
down to earth among us,
a light made warmer and
more intimate for the human
spaces we call home.





We sure miss you this year,
even though you were never
home for this holiday.
Miss you as well as all
the others who won’t
be coming home for Christmas,
ever—neighbors, nephews,
old friends, cats, pop singers,
senators, evangelists,
poor kids who got run over,
pretty girls who disappeared,
soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the thousands
who succumbed in an instant
to tsunami and earthaquake,
and a much larger count dying so
slowly, starved of life by
those who would have it all.
Et cetera. No need to litanize;
I simply underscore the lonely
paradoxical vowel inside of the
word pronounced home,
that warm hearth which
is also a hole through which
such lonely cold winds blow
carrying on black wings the
sound of distant surf
whose eternal resound
is inside our own bones.





In our various and scattered
homes, the rest of your family
will get together, each in their
own home-ways: Mom and your sister
and I together in Mom’s
decked-out house on Christmas Eve,
Dad with Fred by the fireplace
looking out on snowy
fields in the hills of Pennsylvania,
brother Will not far from him
with his wife celebrating
in his own home, the one
he’s worked on so hard for years
to create his own thrall of place.
But wherever we will gather,
all of us will be together most
in missing you, Timm O’Cobhthaigh,
united by a moment’s silent awe
and awfulness as we remember
your sleepy face on Christmas Day,
the last kid to rouse at last
and join a merry fray
that’s so far away the sound
of it is dim, almost a white wash
mixed in all I try to hold on to
while your grasp slips ever
further in the tide.

A legacy as enduring as the beauty of this day

For a late Tuesday (or early Wednesday), the night has been restless, our Siamese Violet scratching herself loudly at 3:30 a.m. when I got up, the sprinklers on automatic in the back yard (turning them off, we're on once-a-week watering restrictions), a dog barking, three teens walking up the street talking in low voices, something large dropped downtown, big trucks lumbering on US-441.

Unquiet, or signs thereof. It's the 18th and I always think of Timm when this day of the month comes round. I've assembled another 8 or 10 pictures by Timm I haven't published on the memorial blog and will post it with a short message and a link to the second of his three songs we have files of.

The grief for Timm here something which has gone to ground—it’s deep down, below a certain threshold. My sense of his loss is now a permanent low thing in the heart. Memories of his face arise now and then bittersweetly, are sepia-toned, more static, singular and fixed like stones in a cemetery.

But in another way, his memory is florid with the plenitude of images he left behind, showing God's bounty even though nature's cycles are hard, especially on hearts. When I think of Timm, I see him wandering alone in the Oregon wilds (or perhaps with Christie), camera bag slung over a shoulder, those big shoes padding further into wilderness, willing to go the distance
to get the shot, the picture which is all that remains of the mind which thought to frame a stream, field of flowers, a shore at dusk, clouds, trees, a butterfly, a mountain's reflection in still water ... shots from the wilderness of the human heart too, love at a banquet table, an amusement park ride at dusk whirling so fast as to suggest how fast a life passes on this earth, the frenzied movement of engagement which trails off the edge in slowing ellipses, coming to an end ...

So in the place where Timm has been lost is God's plenty, and that¹s about as great a gift as someone could impart to those he left behind. Legacy as the enduring beauty of this day.

All of Timm's heart troubles, emotional as well as physiological, prepared a resting place which has become the vantage on an ecstatic wilderness, the sum of Timm's yearning and love of beauty. So when I see these pictures I smile, and smile listening to his play his guitar, and smile knowing he was my brother in this life at a great distance, but has become so close and
familiar over the year and a half since he left.

Another song by Timm.
(Click on "Play Full Song".)

A heart up in God's country

Several months back, Mom was cleaning out a drawer in her dresser and came across a white cassette tape containing 3 songs by Timm, performing on his guitar. The tape just sort of dropped out of nowhere, she says -- she had no idea it was there, nor when she had received it from Timm. Best guess was following his Bolivia trip in 2003 but that's only a guess.

She had the songs digitized and sent gave them to me on a CD. I've since been trying to figure out how to include them on a blog post. Nothing seemed to work until a last week I came across a company and software that allowed a decent enough way to put a market in a post that, when you click on the line which says "play full song here," another browswer window opens at the file sharing site where you can listen to the song. If you want to look at Timm's pictures while listenting to the song, select the tab for Rememberingtimm, the original page, and the song will play while you'e on the rememberingtimm site.



This first song is the only one of the three he's singing on. I don't think it's one of his own creations -- it's about loving the Carolina mountains, which I don't think he ever ranged -- but it is true in spirit to Timm's love of the mountains, of hiking out far and being one with the greater creation.

Timm's guitar was never far from him. He loved playing it, loved singing. He loved many of the same guitar players I love. The songs remind me of songs I played back in the 1970's on my Gibson J-45, rich in the full tenor of a guitar's throat.

On this 18-month anniversary of Timm's passing, it's fitting that we hear from Timm, and the song that was so big in his heart.

We love you, Timm. Thanks for the music of God's country.

A song by Tim.

Apparitions of history (and its mystery)

It's October now, Timm, and you would feel greatly re-confirmed in your decision to move far north and west of Florida all those years ago, although it meant farewelling your family in a way you did not have the time to re-constitute: for this past week we've been stuck under a high-pressure dome which has kept temps soaring back in mid-July heights, into the mid-90's day after day after day, not enough moisture in the atmosphere to whip up much storm relief, just fleeting 'boomers which bolt about a little, pour a bucket of rain, then vanish ... There hasn't been an October like this in Florida since 1980 when I moved here, right about the time you moved away. Hot sunlight oddly poised against short-and-shorter days as the light creeps away toward its winter manger. You would feel quite refreshed to have instead your Oregonian autumnals, loving to be in the great outdoors as the year gilds with transformation, winds cooler, leaves falling, forests becoming a more transparent blanket of foliage as the leaves fall, the sky that heartbreaking hue of blue which says the change is upon us ... Sigh.

Well, we're finally in for a change, or so they say, with rain moving into the area today ahead of a cool front, one high-pressure-dome knocked out of the deep-Southeastern ring by a burly enough customer. Dad says snow is coming this week to Columcille; we won't get any of that, but daily temps will sink to the mid-70's by Saturday, hooray ...

And it's 2009, and the world has changed greatly since you last saw it, running the early spring evening in April 2008: changed in ways you would not much like -- you might still be looking for work, and the local ambience is surely much darker, with unemployment so high, so many people heading to financial ruination, real-estate market shot, stimulus money from the government mostly helping teachers and construction workers, no great funds for the sort of arts funding there was back in the Depression, no government grant to you to capture Oregon as it is through your accomplished camera ... Well, these consolations: Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, albeit for reasons no one is quite sure of, except that maybe it was awarded in recognition of things the committee would like to see him accomplish at some later date. And your Denver Broncos are undefeated this season, beating even the likes of the Boston Patriots.

Your recovery would reaffirm that where the darkness is greatest, there too is light, the possibility through surrender to reach the ground which holds fast, no matter what comes. I've heard it said in AA that when a person dies, their sins are forgiven and your crimes fade from the collective memory; all that remains, is durable, is the legacy of your good acts. I'm sure you are still sorely missed by your community. Like Rep. Hooley said at your memorial, who will hurry to help first as you always did? And who will aid in healing the sufferings of our tribe with images of beauty, the way you did, believing in the immortal physic of a perfect mountain stream?



Your brother Will continues with that work, with your camera, staying quite busy with his photography following the publication of A Stillness Within A Frame. Recently he sent me photos of flowers in his garden and a St. Francis Day Blessing of the Pets event at Columcille.








Will also recently sent me a series of old pictures he unearthed from our Chicago days, when Dad was minister at Lakeview Presbyterian Church at the corner of Broadway and Addison, about six city blocks east of Wrigley Field. A mission church, heavily supported by the city Presbytery, the church was abundant in mission, with a senior center in the basement serving lunch on weekedays, a thrift store, and a high school up on the second floor. It was a free school, meaning a school outside the public school system and not supported by private tuition. When the school - Lakeview Academy - started in 1973, I was 15, you were 8; the family had reunited from Florida and was living in a row house on Fullerton Avenue, adjacent to Fullerton Seminary.

Trying to capture the ambience of this time is difficult; it is both memorable and washed away. Scenes, moods, the gray cast of the Chicago sky still seep through. The difference between ever-warm, sleepy Winter Haven in Florida and that big Northern city was immense. Chicago was noise and grit, poverty and eternal motion; it was junkies and crazy people and kids going to and from school and lanky unisex men and women in baggies and tall platform shoes, it was cops and cabs racing by on the street and hookers and transvestites and the Salvation Army across the street from the church, a walled enclave where devotees emerged from in full uniform, to ring the bell and help the sick and poor of spirit, much as the spirit-filled congregation of our church tried to. My adolescence tints the glass a grayish-blue, hopelessly infatuated with Ronnie Andre and playing guitar for the church choir and going about school and being so earnest about Christian mission.

Where were you? You had a room in that row house, but I can't remember if it was on the second or third floor. You attended a private Lutheran school with Molly. You had a friend down the street named Paul Roth whom he played with frequently. You had your dog Tippy and when you slept, you still sucked your thumb. You was around, but I was in my own teenaged world, a confused jangle of faith and evangelical music bound to their lower charkas of unrequieted love and rock 'n' roll.

In my adolescent dopiness, I didn't think much about you or anyone else except the objects of my obsessions. I wanted it all and I didn't know what I wanted. I stayed up late in the front bedroom on the third floor of that row house with various boarders we took on from the school in singles or in pairs, Eddie Rivera and Al Arguellez, Eddie's brother Ritchie, Bernardo Medina. Up there we'd stay up late every night reciting lines from Cheech & Chong comedy albums, play air guitar with a vacuum cleaner to Alice Cooper's "Halo of Flies," occasionally do homework, bang on whatever served as a street tympani to the O'Jays "Papa Was a Rolliing Stone," sing Christian songs on acoustic guitars.

It's all muddled together, so bent through the prism of an emerging self, self-centered in the extreme as all adolescents are, bearing the brunt of eternity with each day walking the twelve blocks up Halstead or Broadway to school, on days that alternately cold or brutally so, the wind whipping off Lake Michigan and rushing around and down the canyons of stone and steel so brutally that tie-lines were strung around the John Hancock building downtown. (The Chicago American - remember that paper? - would run pictures every year of some little old lady holding on for dear life to that rope, feet perpendicular to her body as the wind tried to haul her away).

What else of the era, now nearly four decades gone? Publication of the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon entering the Watergate crisis, the oil embargo creating long lines at gas stations, "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie and "Angie" by the Rolling Stones, race riots at Senn High School and the Jesus People living in a Korean Church up the street, moving into our evangelical territory with longhair salvation and the Resurrection Band.

The school had 13 students, almost all of them dropouts from Senn High in Uptown, a true battlefield of a melting pot, the black and Puerto Ricans always at war, mixing in white Appalachians and Asian-American immigrants from now and then. Horrible. Our school was really created for these dropouts and provided intensive, one-on-one remedial tutoring. Triage for a broken system's broken charges. I was sort of along for the ride, didn't want to try my hand at the 4,000 student Lane Tech - a little more middle-class, less of a prison but still a too-enormous mill of angles and fists I quailed to negotiate.

We operated on a wing and prayers, getting cardboard desk/workstations donated from somewhere, books from somewhere else. The driving force in the school was Anita Smith, the only paid teacher at the time, a 30-something no-nonsense teacher with a real passion for the vocation. 35 years later the school is still there, and Anita is still teaching there, taking on crop after crop of ill-educated, poorly-disciplined kids from the flotsom and jetsam of our ever-broken working-class family caste, kids who deserve a break from their lousy origins. I haven't been back since 1974 when I graduated, but hear about the school from time to time from Dad, who's been back to visit numerous times (most recently late this summer).

Anyway, the pictures Will found and sent are as if up from a time capsule - grainy and poorly-lit snaps of a day at that school. He was giving photography a first, schooled hand, and these are samples of that work. They are very grainy -- most are enlarged from a contact sheet that Will scanned -- but the faintness of the images lends to the ambience of the distance of these memories. A door to the mystery of what was our history.

Eddie Rivera fashioned himself in the likeness of his hero Bruce Lee. Here he performs flips in the snow.

Danny and Cookie.

Phyllis Arguellez and Nancy Guitierrez.

Ritchie Rivera.

Phyllis and me.

Edwin Negron with Al's guitar.

Ronnie Andre with her blithe boyfriend Eddie. Boy did I have a crush on Ronnie.

Edwin Negron with Eddie Rivera in their Phantom Lords gang suits. They professed to be a Christian gang, out to help people, but when they were busted on the grounds of Senn High School my father took their hats away.

An arty shot by Will of Phyllis.

We were all so busy - Dad with the day-to-day operations of a mission church, Mom engaged in helping out in the senior center & prayer groups & bible study, Molly and Timm in their school, Will and I at Lakeview Academy and me so involved in other church activities, mostly in music, playing a 12-string Epiphone acoustic guitar in lieu of an organist. We were together as a family for breakfast and dinner, the six of us plus the one or two boarders, Lord what a full table that was, Shep and Monte and Tippy, our three dogs, lined up in the big window of the front living room looking down, like vultures, on every passserby. (For some reason, they were always on the third floor when the front door opened with one of us coming in, and the three dogs would roll down three flights of stairs in one barking fur tumbleweed, Tippy peeing on the steps as she raced down.

Lots of stories - many part of routine family lore which we repeat to each other whenever we're together. It was an odd, sometimes fun, sometimes hilarious, other times hurtful, still other times wonderful experience. Some of the stories were been too difficult to tell -- right, Timm? I didn't find some of yours out until after you were dead.

Will and I graduated from Lakeview High. I wrote a lot of Christian songs, my first hand at merging music and words. New Town became quite hip, with its bars and unisex fashions. Uptown remained a hard ghetto. The Cubs kept losing ("Awwwwwwww" was a sound echoing up frequently from Wrigley Field a few blocks over). Dad and Mom were together for another couple of years, separating for the last time in 1974. That's when the great family diaspora happened, with Dad moving to New York City, Mom and Molly and you back down to Florida, Will to California and me out to Whitworth College just outside Spokane, Washington. Our family ceased to exist then, or became an entity of great distance and small communication. Mom and Dad's divorce was final in 1977. We would not re-unite as a family again until 1987, when Molly got married, and there were only two re-unions since, with my first wedding in January 1988, and then Will's wedding in 1996.

Filter all that back through the lens of Will's camera as he snapped away regularities of our day at Lakeview Academy: a complex, bittersweet whole, with all of the yearning and angst of adolescence fully in the frame. You appeared only two times in them, and one is the ghostliest and strangest and most serene of them all. It's group picture of students from Lakeview plus you and it's awry, everything tilting to the left (everyone's laughing, so the purpose is meant), slipped into the motion of chaos. You are center and Albert and Eddie are holding your hands, more brother to you than Will or I. Maybe Will was laughing as he shot the picture or getting tickled from behind; maybe everyone was breaking up at once. The aperture is too open or the shutter speed too slow for the exisiting light, so everyone is a phantasm in the image, as if there yet fast slipping off, like my memory of those days.




How different that image is from the following one which was clearly arranged and well-shot, the only one in color, of the Academy that first year of its existence.

A formal photograph of the inaugural class of Lakeview Academy, which is still going strong 35 years later. (Head teacher Anita Smith, front row second from right, is still teaching there.) Will is second to the left in the back row, and I'm in the center rear standing in front of the cross.

And yet the one in which you so frostily appear with that huge smile is the clearest image of how the distant past becomes in our minds as it soaks down into oblivion, retrieved for this one moment. Those assembled for this picture have been scattered from it - as the youngest, Timm, you are dead; several others may be, too. (A Native American kid named Lloyd who loved playing guitar and had jam sessions where there was always drugs overdosed and died at 15.)Some got heavily into drugs, some went to prison. Many have alcohol habits which they've kicked or endured or vary between periods of sobriety and slips. Some eventually married and had kids, got divorced and re-married, worked this job and that into some form of career. There have been reunions but I have never been back, not since '78 or so when I stopped over on the way to Columcille.

Chicago stayed Chicago. Lakeview Academy is still going strong, the oldest free school still in existence anywhere. Real estate got pricey. Our family home in Evanston, which Dad bought for 30 thousand in 1963, was on the market in the late 90's for 1.2 million. The Cubs made it to the playoffs a couple of times but no further and havejust been recently sold by the bankrupt Tribune Corporation to a private family, along with Wrigley Field, for some 800 million dollars. Tribune is bankrupt, and so is the Sun Times. So it goes.

And we were one of its passing, throwaway moments, of not much value to it and yet among our most precious. There we all were before we were gone.

A more recent photo of Lakeview Presbyterian Church, quite renovated.

Note

Timm traveled to Chicago in 1998 with his wife Mik to attend what "PCM School" - something to do with Christian ministry -- taking the train one day into the city to confront some of the scenes of his growing-up which had determined, he believed for years, much of the hurtful courses of his later life.

On 6.11.98 he writes in his journal,

"I've taken a break from PCM School to go visit the Fullerton house. I realized yesterday I need to . I've made a vow to no longer "react" & avoid the pain of my past, but face it. In going back I hope to do two things: 1) Reassociate with the actual feelings. Last night when I visualized standing in front of the house I could see myself picking up a rock and throwing it with all my might through the front window. The rage of being abandoned, neglected, unprotected welled up to all parts of my body. I guess I need to re-frame the picture with me as an adult. It's funny how I must associate the rage with a little hurting boy.

"The second part of what I need to do today and when I go to Evanston is collect symbols of my lost innocence, needs unmet and wounds created. On Sunday Mik & I will have a burial service, where I can take all these symbols & lay them in a grave. Like most burials, this does not signify the ending of grieving, but I think in many ways it is beginning. I know I can grieve the losses, cry, feel my pain, knowing that it's time.

"I think on balance I need to somehow find a symbol or symbols to which take back the good parts of my childhood. It's easy to see only the bad & ignore the good.

"As I ride the train right now into Chicago,there's this gooey, dark anxiety, mixed with trepidation. I view the area as enemy - one I'm powerless over. I was powerless ver my parents' inability and decisions, and against my abusers. I just accepted it all as a passive receptor, resigned to the thought that this is just how life is. I know now that this isn't true.

"A few minutes ago as I stood on the train platform I found myself needing the presence of Jesus with me. Not that He's ever not there, but I need the sense - the reminder that I do not make this trip alone. In the empty seat next to me He sits; as I walk down Fullerton and cross to the DePaul campus, I see Him by my side; and as I stand in front of my old house His arm is draped over my shoulder, sharing my pain so I don't get overwhelmed. Now the house windows are dark and broken; I realize nobody lives there any more - especially me ..."

A train ticket from the Illinois Regional Commuter Railroad Corporation for June 11 is stuck in his journal here.

Timm does not write of his actual visit to these places, and the conclusion of the trip is quite different, with he and Mik getting into a fight of such enormity that they end up traveling back to Portland on separate flights. The healing, it seems, had a longer row to hoe. But the garden of his life did get seeded, and he did see it come to bear fruit, transforming old hurts into a harvest for others to take nourishment in and savor.

There's Timm at the left performing with, I think, Lakeview's version of the Youth Choir -- there weren't many their age. Sister Molly is next to him, then Nancy Guiterrez on guitar with, I think, her older sister singing along.