1. I started the day vigorously. My longtime friends from our Whitworth days, Mark and Peter, and I met for breakfast at the Alki Beach Cafe in West Seattle and fell into a nearly two hour conversation, occasionally interrupted by taking bites of our food and sipping on coffee.
Mark and Peter and I have a lot of great history, so, inevitably, we talked about football games we attended between the Ducks and the Huskies and reminisced about great times at Whitworth and got caught up on what we know about people we knew, and still know, from those days in the 1970s.
At the same time, our conversations are not just about the "good old days". All three of us are deeply engaged with our lives in the present, all have family to talk about, are all pursuing stimulating and fascinating interests.
We are all trying to come to grips with the intrigues of Bob Dylan's music and lyrics and are always ready to pay our never ending homage to The Boss, Bruce Springsteen.
And so much more. It's a deep well we draw from.
I keep thinking that Seattle isn't that far away from Kellogg. It's an easy drive as long as the mountain passes are clear.
I must get over here more often to see my friends.
2. Back at my room, I took a short nap and finished up writing a blog post.
Soon, I hopped in the Camry and blasted back up Hiway 99 to Shoreline to spend the afternoon with Bill and Diane.
Upon my arrival, we settled into conversation about music, Bill's performance Thursday night, and other matters, including a discussion of Richard Hugo. I couldn't stop myself from offering an explication of Hugo's "Cataldo Mission" (which Bill read at his performance Thurs. night) and rambling on about how amazed I was as a nineteen year old that Richard Hugo wrote this poem, not only about what he experienced at the Cataldo Mission, but about the Silver Valley. I didn't know anyone else even noticed the Silver Valley, let alone worked out a poem that explored the valley's industry and the area's history.
I couldn't stop myself again after talking about that poem because, to me, Hugo's "Letter to Levertov from Butte" is a companion poem. It delves more deeply into the deprivations of poverty in mining towns like Butte and its next door neighbor Walkerville, poverty that Hugo knew early in his life, that was there for us to see in the Silver Valley when I was growing up, and that is so evident in the lives of the students at the school where Debbie teaches.
3. The original purpose of my visit was not to talk nearly endlessly about Richard Hugo! It was to join Bill and Diane to watch a movie together. Diane was eager for us to watch the 1946 British movie, written, directed, and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger entitled, A Matter of Life and Death.
I was not expecting such an unusual movie, one that took us viewers back and forth between life on Earth and an imagined world populated by people who have died.
The passages on Earth were vividly shot in Technicolor while the afterlife world was shot in a monochrome (a reversal of, say, The Wizard of Oz).
I don't want to give any other aspects of this movie away.
I was very happy, as I watched it, that I knew nothing about it and so I experienced its strangeness and the depth of its explorations as a complete surprise, a most welcome surprise.
Bill, Diane, and I interrupted our viewing with about 30 minutes left in the movie for a superb dinner.
Diane asked me if I liked cube steak.
I LOVE cube steak and it had been a long time since I'd enjoyed one.
Diane prepared the cube steaks perfectly. She let me use the pan she cooked in to fry myself an egg because I really love cube steak with a fried egg. She prepared a fresh and crispy green salad.
It was an awesome dinner -- simple, delicious, and invigorating.
We watched the rest of the movie, watched a video clip of Martin Scorsese talking about his experience with the movie, his relationship with Michael Powell, and what he sees as the movie's historical importance.
Bill and Diane are about to go on a getaway to La Push, WA. They had trip preparations to wrap up. I needed to drive back down Hiway 99 to my room in West Seattle and get some sleep since I will be driving to Portland on Sunday.
I don't think we wanted to end the evening, much like Mark, Peter, and I didn't want our morning time to end, but none of us could get around it.
We had to go our own ways.
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