Thanksgiving Weekends with the Valley Boys....and Patty, too

Back row: Ed, Bruce, Terry, Scott, Jake
Front row: me, Mike
The serenity glowing in the center: Patty

I don't think it had to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I'd survived a 1974 Zinc Plant accident, Scott survived testicular cancer in '00-'01, Bruce is always under observation for melanoma and has been through treatment, I survived an attack of spinal meningitis in '99, and Ed drives log truck and has been speared, busted, bent, and bruised in every way possible, plus he fell off a roof in '03 and busted up his pelvis and leg. He was back in the log truck in about three months. Jake's diabetic. Terry has an ulcerous job in management at Xerox. Mike helps juvenile delinquents. He knows stress.

So, it was coincidental that this bunch of old friends from Kellogg High School Class of '72 started in 2001 getting together every Thanksgiving weekend and that it was the same year that the twin towers fell. We thought we'd better start meeting every year before 9/11 and we decided to do it not because we thought the world could end any day now, not because the 9/11 attacks "put things in pespective" for us, not because we "got our priorities straight" after the day America would never forget and that changed the course of history forever. No, we just figured any one of us could die any day now. We figured it out on our own. We didn't need 9/11.

I live a very responsible life. I worship, work hard, invest myself in my students, provide for my family, and try to do what's right by people. It's the Silver Valley way. It's also the Silver Valley way to drink hard, tell profane stories, mock sports teams, complain about how things have changed for the worse, gamble, eat bad food, and watch sports on television. Starting the day after Thanksgiving and lasting until Sunday, Bruce, Scott, Ed, Mike, Jake, Terry, and I pack all of this into a weekend. We get drunk. We get loud. We get hungover. We eat crap. We play cards. We play slot machines. We glorify the past. We complain about past injustices. We deride the way world is changing around us. We tell stories again we've told 5,000 times already. We pick on each other. By the way, picking on people is not a normal part of social life here in Eugene, Oregon. Because, in Eugene, actions are always seen as an expression of one's menacing and racist/sexist/masculinist/homophobic/enraged subconscious (known in Eugene as "issues"), it's implicity forbiddened to pick on people or get picked on. It would be seen as masking real aggressiveness toward others behind a facade of joking around. Jokes are never jokes in Eugene. In this humorless, self-congratulatory, Narcisstic town, speech is not free, but measured.

In Kellogg, I guess we never got far enough in our Freudian Studies class to recognize all the cruelty and violence that underlies flipping each other some shit. In Kellogg, we just love to pick on each other. In Kellogg, harrassment is a positive word. I go to Kellogg as often as I can so that I can get picked on. I want to wear a sign in Eugene: "Please give me some shit! Pick on me! I'll pick on you. We can do it together!" But, it ain't that way here -- although I have some fellow teachers I can pick on and who pick on me and I have found a few select students who enjoy it. By and large, in the eggshell environment of Eugene and its institutions, where being offended is a sign of high character and where anything from wine served at a function welcoming new faculty to wreaths of Douglas Fir at Christmas time (a holiday I've joined my wife in calling Winter Day) to a Poltergeist derived jokey comment can offend, it's just not much fun to be yourself. Someone will be offended and in high dudgeon.

So, you ask, what's Patty doing as the serene center of this picture? Last year, after our 40 some hours of man-fun in Lincoln City, the boys and I looked up Patty Reasor, another classmate, in Newberg, Oregon where she's a nurse. We invaded her hospital looking for her and scared the stuffings out of some nurses and desk attendants who evidently hadn't seen this kind of tonnage moving together as a merry pack before. Patty had called in sick. We reached her by phone, met for coffee, and had a terrific visit. I think all of us guys would agree that we enjoy each other's company, but that the highlight of last year's trip was spending an hour in the company of our beloved Patty.