1. I woke up at six a.m. and headed down to the beach and walked with my camera. I tried to take pictures, but as is always the case when I'm new to a place, it was difficult to get my bearings. I haven't looked at my pictures, yet. I'm looking forward to seeing if I got any shots I like.
2. Just after Bill, Diane, and I finished our quiche and hot sausage brunch, Bridgit and Dan arrived. What a great pleasure it was to see Bridgit, to find out the larger story of her new job, and to talk about any number of things! Likewise, it was a great pleasure to meet Dan, Bridgit's roommate, a person she had told us was a great guy and he proved to be exactly that. We talked about everything, it seemed, from God to what we see in the youth of our times to our Whitworth memories -- I even confessed that I had to have given Bridgit the wrong grade in The Family in American Drama -- I confessed to her that I cannot for the life of me figure out why I gave her a B in that course. (I discovered I had done this a while back when I was going through old grade books.) We joked that I should contact the Registrar at Whitworth and see if it's too late to submit a change of grade form! It's so hard to believe that that Bridgit was in that course thirty years ago and that out of it and other conversations in the Basement of Westminster Hall, our friendship was born and has stayed alive and vital. Likewise, Bill was my student in the first composition class I ever taught, in my whole life, in Fall of 1977 at Whitworth College and, we too, developed a deep and lasting friendship that started when I was 23 and he was 19. We all wished our other Basement friends Colette, Val, and Susan-Lousie could have made it to La Push. We missed them dearly.
3. Bill gave us a short concert before Bridgit and Dan had to leave. I don't know if I remember every song, but I know he played "How Long You Gonna Wait", "Comfort", "The Ravine", "Learning to Say Goodby" and "Life's a Long Song" in some order and the songs took me back to Bill playing all over Eugene, including in my house for one or two concerts, Sam Bond's, a coffee house under Smith Family Books, Buffalo Gals, out at Deadwood, and maybe more places as well. His songs took me back to Whitworth and to Seattle and all of the places his songs took me were happy places, all stuffed with stories, all strong threads in the fabric of our friendship.
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