What falls away is always

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I never mentioned to him, during those four years that we knew each other, that I was familiar with Theodore Roethke. I never recall Murray saying a word about Roethke to me. It is the greatest irony to me; a small thing to you, of course. But when you meet someone, and see them many, many times over the course of four years, and your lives cross paths in both big and minuscule ways, you’d think that “knowing” Roethke would have been a topic that might have been shared.

Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have to go.

Some people you know wide, some people you know deep.

Wide is knowing a lot of small details about someone and knowing the right details may fit together in a mosaic that makes sense of a person and their character. Maybe that mosaic gives you background enough to maintain a mere acquaintance, a sometime connection; or perhaps, instead, you grow a true friendship, a deep camaraderie.

When you know someone deep, the details you know fall together in a pattern that allows your own pattern to synchronize with their pattern on some familiar level. 

Some folks you never know at all.

I didn’t really know Roethke, any more than I knew Kennedy. I link this because Roethke died in 1963, a signal year in history and the turning point for so many things this country is identified by. The loss of Kennedy and “Camelot”. The start of the ramp-up to Vietnam. Just over the horizon, the British invasion in music. Growing heat in the civil rights movement. 1963 was a pivotal year.

1963 was the year Roethke died in a swimming pool at a friend’s house on Bainbridge Island in Washington State.  55 years of age, and Theodore Roethke’s heart gave way. A heart of deep and longing sadness. A heart of lyrical, spare words, organic and questioning emotion. Uncut, unpruned, Roethke lived his adult life almost solely confined to an academic forest.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Roethke was a poet. Murray was a local icon.

Murray has died, and he and I, we never spoke of Roethke.

I have not seen Murray in almost five years. I’m sad at that loss, a loss like so many other losses, a failing of time and place and circumstance. I found his obituary in the paper online and I know the loss of his family and friends and I’m sad for it.

In 1990, his friend Terry Gleason suggested creating a poetry club with just two rules, Mr. Ferguson recalled in a UW newsletter last year: “First, that we start every meeting with a drink. That, of course, got me interested. Second, that whoever is host sets all the other rules. That’s worked perfectly all these years.” A model neighbor and father on Queen Anne

It happens; so often you drift away from people who’ve charmed you the most. Sometimes there is no possible recovery of the friendship, or the acquaintance; no continuance in the story you have both started, for in the meeting of every new person, there is a first chapter of a story. This story that might have grown into a wonderful tale of anecdotes and as years passed, we’d add more curious and whimsical events to the narrative.  Not to be. I’ve found that the last chapter has already been written, the book is closed.

Some of the “wide” of knowing Murray came from listening to the stories he related – of his own life or his perspective on other lives. Such tales were often whimsical in nature, told in a self-deprecating fashion.  Murray had a way about him and a story was always related with wryness and evident humility. You knew Murray was completely aware of the many angles from which a story could be perceived. Amusement and gentle evaluation of his listener lurked there, behind his unfailingly graceful demeanor.

One story of whimsy was how he went on a bike trip with one of his sons a few years back. It was a journey across Ireland on what I seem to recall was a five speed bicycle.  Murray had brought the wrong kind of shoes for the trip. Unlike other folks who might outfit themselves with expensive touring shoes or at least with new footwear more personalized and made for biking, Murray simply picked up a pair of old oxfords at an Irish thrift store along the way.

Those beat-up shoes carried him across that green island, only because the spirit was willing.

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

When it was time to talk serious with his sons, Murray would schedule a trip to Thirteen Coins, a restaurant close by the Space Needle and across the street from the Seattle Times building. This was a Dad tradition. If it was time for the “Dad” talk, it meant dinner downtown. Here was where he sought to set things straight for his children, on the straight and narrow at least from his perspective. I would assume that he never raised his voice. I knew Murray briefly enough, but I can envision a gentle terror, a frisson of anxiousness settled on the shoulders of each of his sons before the talk with Dad. Thirteen Coins, with its anachronistic high-walled leather booths, dark wood on every other surface in a gentlemen’s club kind of way, was secluded and perfectly discreet enough for Murray’s come-to-Jesus moments.

There are other things I could tell about Murray, the little I knew of him. How he canvassed all his neighbors each year for a community home tour, the Tour of Homes on  Queen Anne Hill, a fundraiser that benefits the school that his seven children attended, and the heart of the significant Catholic community on the hill.  He greeted each and every Trick-or-Treater each year at Halloween at his front door with the bowl of candy and an invitation to come into the foyer for the annual picture. There, in the corner near the second floor staircase, he’d place a poster board of years past featuring pictures of many of the previous scary ghosts, pirates, goblins, and other dreadful creatures who tromped down West Highland Drive each Halloween night.

There are other stories, the bits and pieces that one can absorb from another’s life.  But in all these pieces I’ve picked up and not let go,  I never learned until after he died that Murray had studied with Roethke.

It’s one thing I would have liked to have shared with him. But the book is closed.

(Scattered, displaced excerpts from The Waking, Theodore Roethke)