Contact lIght
Contact light, for the year 2020 [Annus Horribilis], the annual newsletter from John M. Burt, sent to all friends and relatives of John and Kathe, originating from 1012 NW Fillmore Avenue, Corvallis, Oregon 97330 USA // Also originating from john_m_burt@hotmail.com // 541-602-6026 // Also posted to john_m_burt.blogspot.com
Well . . . 2020. Did anybody have a good year? If you did, please have the decency to keep your trap shut. Seriously, what HAPPENED? I mean, in January we knew donald was going to squat in our White House for another year, so we knew it wasn’t going to be one of your totally swell years, but did anybody think we were going to be living in a John T. Sladek novel? [Or maybe a Robert A. Heinlein novelette? This really did seem like it was The Year of the Jackpot.]
If you’re reading this at all, you probably know why this was my least-favorite year of all time. Late in 2019, I began noticing that Kathe was forgetting words in a way that didn’t seem like anything that had happened to her before. She blew it off repeatedly, but finally I persuaded her to see a neurologist. It turned out to be someone I had seen for a minor issue a couple of years before, and by the end of our appointment, he was well and truly alarmed. Kathe just wasn’t anything like the woman he had met before. Evidently, his alarm was persuasive where mine wasn’t: she agreed to get a CAT scan. When we went in to discuss the results with him, the source of Kathe’s confusion was very, very obvious: she had a plum-sized tumor pressing on her speech centers. It was a bad news, worse news situation, though. The diagnostic name Glioblastoma multiforme provided the worse news: besides the battleship, there was a whole flotilla of cruisers all over her brain. Kathe never had a chance.
She did have a choice, though: after having the big tumor out, she could have radiation and chemo for two or three years, or comfort measures for two or three months. The landscape ahead didn’t look appealing, so she chose the short trip. The comfort measures were definitely comforting. Kathe was clear-headed once she recovered from the surgery, and wasn’t in any pain, even at the end. I noticed that once we had passed the 8th of February, the three-month mark, she started getting a trifle…short-tempered, as though she were impatient once the “deadline” had passed. The end came on the 11th, while we watched a compilation of music videos which were in rotation in the early years of MTV, when it was a utility, supplying music videos on demand, 24 hours a day. It was a period of great creativity, with good music and good videos. They were also the videos we watched in the Summer of 1984 while we were getting to know one another. Really, the only way it could have been better is if we’d been able to play a hand of Anomaly, the card game we’d invented around the kitchen table that Summer, to make use of a strange mix of incomplete card decks. I held her hand, watching videos with her until her eyes closed, and then watching videos by myself, holding her hand, noticing how her breathing was slowing to an unnatural pace, with long pauses, until finally she took a breath which didn’t look any different from the last one, except that it was not followed by another.
A few days after Kathe died, something brought to my mind a song I hadn’t heard in years. Before I met Kathe, I bought an audiocassette tape from a company that no longer exists, Off-Centaur Press, which sold collections of filk songs, science fiction folksongs most often heard at SF conventions. When I remembered “Time and Stars”, it struck me very powerfully in Kathe’s absence. I haven't been able to find “Time and Stars” on YouTube or anywhere else, oddly enough, neither a recording of its being performed nor of its lyrics, but I had no trouble remembering them:
Our lives are brief as falling stars
That streak the sky like tears
My life is stretched by a slender thread
Across a million years
The Weaver of Dreams has spun our lives
Our webs of joy and pain
She casts them forth for a little while
And gathers them in again
Although 'til now my thread was drawn
In solitary ways
I think your dreams weave through my nights
Your memories through my days
Life's tangled skein takes shape upon
The Loom of What Will Be
Our lives entwine in the warp and weft
Of the Weaver's Tapestry
For there is a Pattern vast as time
The stars weave 'round the Earth
In smaller rhythms weave our years
The promise of rebirth
When the Weaver draws our threads across
Another where or when
I will meet and know and remember you
And love you once again
Returning to card game metaphors, are you as impressed as I am at how many of the trumpery are still doubling down, trying to bluff President-Elect Biden into folding? My father told a story like that from his time in the Air Force, of playing cards with some guys, one of whom kept raising and raising, wearing a smile that he was sure was, along with his huge raises, going to get the other remaining player to fold. Problem was, they were playing stud poker, and he had something like a Trey and Five of Clubs and a pair of Deuces showing, and the other guy had something like three Kings up. Mathematically, there was no way his hole card could possibly turn the mess he had showing into a winning hand. The two players who had already folded were looking sad. The guy who was about to rake in a ridiculously large pot looked sick. But there was also no way, by the gentlemanly rules of poker, that any of them could point out to him his blunder. They just had to wait for the poor sap to figure it out for himself, or run out of money with which to raise. That’s pretty much exactly how I feel, reading these ridiculous rants from the trumpery.
The worst of it is, donald himself isn’t the guy bluffing: he’s a kibitzer who keeps pushing one five dollar bill after another at the stupid player, reminding him each time, “Six for five on payday, my dude.”
Besides losing Kathe, I also lost Blackberry House. That house, where I spent most of my life, had always been as much a burden as a blessing. It was a huge old house, in extremely poor condition when Kathe and her previous husband bought it. It was charming in its decrepit way (I once overheard one of my kids on the phone, giving directions to a friend coming over for a play date. He told them to look for “the one that looks like a haunted house”). Kathe worked on it for every year she was physically able to. I helped, as her previous husband had, and the kids, but at the root, the house was Kathe’ project. She did most or all of the roofing (it had a completely sound roof when we sold it), the plumbing (she dug trenches in the crawlspace to get around down there), and oh, boy, did she work on the wiring: one day, finishing a circuit repair, she gave a Tarzan yell and called out, “Everything in this house that works, works because I made it work!”, which had our daughter Mestowet come out of her room to cry, “I want to be like you!”
Another problem the house had was the mortgage. Under circumstances I never fully understood, we had become trapped in a usurious mortgage which essentially meant we could never pay it off - it would simply loom over us, while we paid the sale price a second time, and then a third, without the principle ever shrinking.
There was a tree, too. Oh, what a tree: a cedar that rose majestically into the sky from the corner of the lot, its top a good deal taller than the house, its branches pruned so that they overhung the sidewalk in a way that was charming, although definitely in violation of the sidewalk code. We’d often look outside and see new arrivals and courting couples getting photographs taken inside the frame of those branches. If we were fast, we’d get a chance to run out and offer to take the photo.
We loved that house, but after the kids had left, and as none of them showed any interest in owning the house themselves, it was more house than we really needed. When the city began harassing us about the condition of the attached shed, and we saw just what a disastrous state it was actually in, the next time someone made us an offer on the house, we considered our options and accepted. We were especially happy to be selling to this buyer, because he loved the house and talked about how he looked forward to continuing Kathe’s restoration work. He had an in with the city planning department, and was confident that he could restore the house without interference from the city, and get it the historic designation it deserved.
It was easier to be parted from the house when we knew it was going to a buyer who appreciated it the way we did. When we told Gideon that we had sold the house, his first question was, “What about the tree?”, which endeared him to me all the more. We told him that the buyer would be responsible for protecting the tree from now on, and we would have to accept that.
Too bad, then, that a couple of months after we sold the house, we rode a bus past our old address and the house was gone, and so was the tree. Evidently, the city double-crossed him, and forced him to demolish it. I really don’t think he was buttering us up to get a good deal on the house.
The apartment isn’t bad, mind. Kind of lonely. It’s definitely tricky to think of the space as not having room for just anything - we sold and gave away so much when we moved. Mainly because for decades we had been acquiring things, saying, “Someone will want this.” Quite a few people DID want things we had on hand. We loved giving people things they needed. On one memorable occasion, a hitchhiker passing through Corvallis needed this, that and the other thing (I believe it was three quite different items) and we managed to provide him with all of them. Our hearts were warmed by being able to do this - although our mood was somewhat soured by his then scolding us for being so hung up on material things. Sigh.
Well, now I have two storage lockers full of things I can’t fit into the apartment (down from three), as well as ungainly piles of stuff around the apartment. Once I get some shelves set up, that will help a lot. I still do have things to get rid of. We were selling “Books By The Inch”, and I’ll probably go back to that sometime in 2021.
"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.” -- John Ruskin
Kathe loved this quotation. She had in mind to carve it into a plaque and build it into our house.
That’s the house that has now been demolished, of course. If she had, in fact, placed it, that plaque would now be in splinters in the Coffin Butte Landfill. Her years of labor were not truly for nothing, though. That's no more true than to say her life is irrelevant because she's dead now. She lived in that house, as did her children, as did I, and others besides. We all loved that house. It is a shame that the house is gone, though. She built well. Generations more could have loved it.
Notes (in case you’re reading this in a format where the Hyperlinks don’t work)
The Year of the Jackpot: http://www.weylmann.com/The_Year_of_the_Jackpot.pdf
John Ruskin: https://goodreads.com/quotes/7583630
Filk songs: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FilkSong
Glioblastoma Multiforme: https://www.aans.org/en/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Glioblastoma-Multiforme
