1. I finished reading the absorbing and totally enjoyable book The Fair and the Falls this evening. Reading this book took me back to 1974, one of the most memorable years in my entire life and almost nothing that made it memorable had anything to do with Expo '74.
I was preoccupied with all kinds of other matters in my life and it's odd to me now, looking back, that an event with the magnitude of Expo '74 was so unimportant to me.
So what was I so preoccupied with?
I was totally absorbed in my studies at NIC, especially the modern literature course I was taking from Virginia Tinsley-Johnson, and the way I was falling deeply in love with poetry, especially modern poetry.
I was also falling in love with the woman I would marry two years later. I might be remembering wrong, but, as I look back, I'd say those early months we spent so much time together were centered on discovering poems together. We drove to Seattle to attend the annual Theodore Roethke reading at the University of Washington and heard Elizabeth Bishop read. Richard Hugo gave a reading at North Idaho College. A few car loads of us went to Cheney to hear David Wagoner read. I'm pretty sure James McAuley gave a reading that spring at NIC. Nelson Bentley might have, too.
2. I was also preoccupied and indecisive about what college/university to attend after I graduated from NIC. My future wife was keen on enrolling at Whitworth College north of Spokane and I joined her on a visit to the campus. I especially liked what I learned was going on in the English Department and I wanted to be where she was going and so I applied and Whitworth accepted me.
Once I arrived on campus in Sept. of 1974, I became obsessed with the college. I was the happiest I ever remember being. I met one awesome peer after another. My professors and my classes invigorated me. I went all in intellectually and spiritually in pursuit of a Christian liberal arts education and was further invigorated by the college's ideas and practices around the idea of student development.
Honestly, I experienced Whitworth College in 1974 and the ensuing years I was there as a kind of heaven on earth -- under the tutelage of Whitworth's professors I explored a wide range of ideas and ways of thinking and loved doing this within the context of a Christian education.
Expo '74 was, at best, on the margins of my consciousness and concern.
3. Having read this book, I now have a much clearer understanding of what I missed. Oh -- I went to the exposition a few times. Our NIC choir performed at Expo. (Or maybe it was the Cardinal Chorale.) That fall, I took a course in the history of Russia and our class went to hear a speaker from the Soviet Union on the site. I went to a USA/USSR basketball game that was a part of Expo and I went at least once to the Opera House for a presentation by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
I saw the famous dizzying film at the IMAX theater.
And I often wonder if I saw Debbie working the booth at the Bureau of Reclamation.
Long after Expo '74 ended, memories of the AmTrak booth and its next door neighbor, the Bureau of Reclamation booth, stayed with me. I can understand why train travel stuck in my memory, but why did I remember that there even was a Bureau of Reclamation booth?
Maybe it was because of a woman who worked there -- Debbie Diedrich.
When I first saw Debbie in Eugene either on stage singing or working at Ritta's burrito booth at Saturday Market, I had this sense that I'd seen her before.
I'm enough of a romantic to think she made a very early impression on me at Expo '74 over twenty years before we actually met and first talked to each other.
And even if this romantic possibility didn't happen, it's a fun story to have going through my head and I'm enjoying how things turned out for Debbie and me.
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