1. It's simple. I often experience having a car as a hassle and I decided on Thursday that I didn't want to take the Sube downtown on Friday from my Airbnb suite out near Hawthorne Rd. in North Spokane. So, I hired an Uber ride. At about 7:45, a driver showed up in front of the property where I was staying and took me out to the Rockwood Bakery near Manito Park.
I met Scott and Deborah -- Deborah and I have known each other since 1974 when we were students at Whitworth College. Right away, we settled right into scintillating conversation. At one point, our conversation was interrupted by Pam Pendergast (KHS '73) and I recognizing each other, hugging, and gabbing for a few minutes. Later, Whitworth Professor Emeritus Leonard Oakland and I saw each other and he came to our table and yakked with Deborah, Scott, and me for a while. Seeing both Pam and Leonard astonished me and made me very happy. Just recently, Mary Chase told me that she had just talked with Leonard (my name came up between them) and it was especially fun to see Leonard so soon after Mary had seen him.
2. Having coffee with Scott and Deborah at the Rockwood Bakery was just the start of our wonderful day together. Around 10:45 we piled into Scott and Deborah's rig, parked, and went to the Spokane Convention Center to hear Bob Woodward speak at Whitworth University's annual President's Leadership Forum. Deborah had worked hard to get the three of us seated at the same table -- and we were -- and I got to sit by Gordon, a retired ophthalmologist who had lived in Eugene over fifty years ago, had a practice for many years in Spokane, and who, in his retirement, has become friends at the Y with my American Legion baseball teammate Hugh Marconi. Gordon and I talked about Hugh and a lot of other things as we ate our chicken salad dinner, but like the rest of the 1000 people in attendance, fell quiet as the program started.
My primary takeaway from Bob Woodward's talk was that he has a very high regard for the Office of the Presidency of the USA. He definitely sees journalists as having the difficult task of holding those who hold this office to account. He sees the president as the steward of a sacred trust with the citizens of the USA. Woodward told us his evaluation of Nixon (driven by hate and revenge) and Obama (too dependent on experts) and very deliberately withheld any final evaluation of President Trump. It became clear that Woodward is aggressively seeking the truth about Donald Trump while patiently waiting for the whole picture of Donald Trump's activities and actions to become clear to him. To him, journalists do their best work when they combine aggressiveness and patience. If anyone came to this talk thinking Woodward would castigate Trump or venerate Trump, such listeners would have been disappointed this afternoon. He's working on a second book about Donald Trump, working on it aggressively and patiently. To quote Bob Valvano, he's waiting for the cake to bake.
(I'm going to digress for a moment. Having heard Makoto Fujimura Thursday night and Bob Woodward today, on Friday, I've been thinking a lot about how much I loved Forum at Whitworth College. I don't know when the decision makers at Whitworth decided to drop Forum -- it was in place when I was there from 1974-78 as a student, chaplain's asst., and instructor and was in place when I returned to teach in 1982-84. Forum was a required course for all Whitworth students. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:15 a.m. the entire student body gathered to hear speakers from off campus -- both secular and Christian speakers -- or to enjoy musical or other performances, the occasional poetry reading, or to listen to presentations given by Whitworth faculty members or people involved in various programs at Whitworth.
The Forum program was organized by the Chaplain's Office. I loved that the Whitworth chaplains were committed to having students hear a mixture of Christian, secular, political, artistic, and other presentations. Each year, one of the Chaplain's Assistants worked on Forum with the Chaplain and in 1975-76 that Chaplain's Assistant was Deborah. [It was not my assignment when I was a Chaplain's Assistant. No problem.]
Those days attending Forum were heady and formative for me.
And I felt like I was, in a sense, back in Forum on Thursday night when students filed into the room in the HUB where Makoto Fujumara spoke and I felt some of the excitement of when I was in my early 20s as I listened to Fujumara speak of art as providing a different language for expressing Christian truths; I once again felt that old love I had for entertaining ideas and insights that were new for me and wrestling with them on a Christian campus in the company of Christian faculty who articulated their Christian experience in widely varying ways and with fellow students who were a stimulating blend of whole-hearted believers, skeptical cautious believers, complete non-believers, and full-blooded doubters about everything. When Fujumara was done speaking, unlike in my days as a Whitworth student, I left the room and was in solitude as I sipped on a Cadillac Margarita and ate chips and salsa and a couple of pork tamales at DeLeon's near campus. Had it been 1974-76, I am sure that I would have struck up conversations with other students in the dorm or out on the Loop or in the dining hall and talked about what we thought of the Japanese art of Kintsugi serving as a metaphor for something like Christian redemption.
Hearing Bob Woodward felt less like Forum because lunch was never served at Forum and Woodward's audience was not a student audience. But, I thought, this is, in its own way, a continuation of a Whitworth tradition -- the former college, now a university, sponsoring the intelligent (and secular) act of wrestling with the current moment in history, opening the way for people to talk to one another, to eschew polarization, and to learn.
I loved being in both rooms on Thursday and Friday, but it was especially meaningful to listen to Bob Woodward while sitting next to Deborah -- a lot of history I cherish is alive between us and I could feel the power of our history and friendship as, once again, here we were, at a Whitworth event, listening to a brilliant speaker wrestle with a moment in history and trying to sort out for ourselves what it all means.)
3. When I woke up Friday morning, my plan was to hear Bob Woodward and then hire another Uber driver to take me to Gonzaga to the Jundt Art Museum where I could attend a reception and then walk through Makoto Fujimura's exhibit with the artist himself.
But, I'm 65 years old.
Deborah, Scott, and I went to The Onion in the afternoon after Bob Woodward's talk. I was overjoyed to see that The Onion was pouring the revered Jai Alai IPA from Cigar City Brewing of Tampa, FL so I ordered a half a pint; then I saw that The Onion was pouring What Rough Beast IPA from Breakside in Portland. I could not resist a half pint pour of a beer alluding to W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" -- okay, here's what the poem refers to: "And what rough beast, its hour come at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" This poem has been with me, has been inside of me, since I was twenty years old, since I sat in Virginia Tinsley's Modern Literature class in the NIC cafeteria and we tried to work out what this poem was getting at. So I had to have this beer.
Scott and Deborah asked me if I was ready to go to Gonzaga and I said: "You know what? I think the Bob Woodward talk combined with last night's lecture is enough for me. I'm going to go back to my Airbnb." They generously offered me a ride all the way up to North Spokane, far from where they were staying downtown, and, so, we got to yak some more and we said our farewells as I got out of their rig.
I rested.
I napped.
I pondered.
I walked to McLain's Pizzeria.
I ate a small Caesar salad, a small pepperoni pizza, and drank a single glass of Petit Syrah wine.
McLain's was bursting with loud young to middle aged men drinking and telling stories and laughing and getting drunk.
I tuned them out.
I sat at McLain's counter and focused on the gratitude I feel for having such great friends and for being able to stay in a family's beautiful remodeled suite and to have heard two such stimulating speakers.
Momentarily, I thought, "Roar on, boys! Enjoy your beer! Enjoy one another! I, however, in the midst of your din, will now retreat."
And I did.
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