Three Beautiful Things 09/04/13: Reunion in Corvallis, Walking Beside the Ocean, The Big Questions

It's a too rare pleasure when I can spend time with Mark Cutshall and Peter Blomquist.  We were college friends at Whitworth College and we reunited for about forty-eight hours, starting today.

1.  Peter and Mark and I saw each other for the first time in about twenty years today.  We rendezvoused at the Book Bin in Corvallis and made our way to the American Dream pizza parlor and fell right into the laughter and list making and deep conversations that we have enjoyed every time we've been together.

2.  Once Mark and Peter settled into the John Steinbeck room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel and I got checked into the Comfort Inn, we took a long walk on the beach, basking in the sunlight and continuing to tell stories, laugh, dig into big questions, and formulate our individual lists of who, for each us, are the top ten music acts of our lifetime.

3.  After a seafood dinner, Mark and Peter and I reconvened in the Steinbeck room and Peter unearthed letters he'd received in the neighborhood of thirty years ago from Dean Ebner, Clem Simpson, and Lew Archer.  I read passages of the letters from Lew Archer in which Lew poured out on paper his deepest and hardly orthodox convictions regarding the existence of God, his complicated thoughts on the nature of reality, and his deep sense of ethical response to the world he lived in.  These letters and conversations stimulated me so strongly that it took me 90 minutes, once back in my room, to settle myself down and be able to sleep, and, even then, I kept waking up, my mind racing with strong longings to go back to my days at Whitworth, both as a student and an instructor, and throw myself back in the middle of these great questions and be, again, with the professors who took us so deeply into them.  I hated that Lew Archer is dead.  These questions along with the meaning of my life and way I've lived my life are all so unsettled inside me and, so, that sense of really not knowing, even when I talk like I know, pulsed throughout my entire body all night long, in my head, my heart, and my stomach, making restful sleep impossible, testing my life and how I live it.