A (brief) Rhubarb retreat

March 6, 2024

The creek near Granite Falls (2023)

Heading West, for an old friend

One of the lucky bounces in my life is that I got to meet C.R. Roberts when I was merely 24.

I’d only recently moved to Spokane. C.R. was living on a ranch just outside of Rathdrum, Idaho, about 40 minutes to the east. We were both freelance writing, primarily for Spokane Magazine, which is how we met, by reading each other’s work in the magazine and then meeting once a month or so for lunch at a restaurant near Riverfront Park.

We did prove at least one thing of note. In college he’d been a star writer at the University of Washington’s UW Daily in Seattle. I filed stories, nearly every weekday, as a deeply-digging staff writer for The Daily Evergreen, the student newspaper at Washington State University in Pullman. So yes, under the right conditions the rains and the parched winds can unite, and Huskies and Cougars can become very good friends. C.R. was the best man at my wedding (in Florida, in 1990) and when my son Devin was born (in Spokane in 1998) we enlisted C.R. to be Dev’s godfather.

Life goes on. When Dev was in high school I remember the two of us in my living room reading C.R.’s classic Spokane Magazine pieces aloud. One of my favorites is C.R.’s October 1981 cover story: “Let’s Talk & the Last of the Downtown Dime Stores.”

It appeared beneath this editor’s note: “We assigned two stories, one about conversation-for-hire, the other about the disappearance of the dime store. It was the writer’s mistake to plug research for both into one day and risk overloading his systems “…things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…” —W.B. Yeats

“A woman answers the phone,” he begins. “Says ‘Let’s Talk’ in friendly, capital letters…We are out on Sprague among the car lots, just past a cemetery stonemason. Let’s Talk, the office, is hard to find, it’s on a side street, as the ad in the Personals promises. We’re standing in a phone booth in front of a drive-in. ‘Look over your left shoulder,’ says the voice.”

There is no ‘mistake’ in sight, just a masterful tour of the city by the falls. Subdued by the encounter with the group of professional “conversationalists,” C.R. accidentally knocks over a plant as he leaves, and heads downtown to the lunch counter at J.J. Newberry’s, a “variety store” in a chain that would file for bankruptcy in 1992 and close the downtown Spokane store shortly afterwards. The story walks unhurriedly through the present, revisits the past in quaint details and conversation, and exits with this passage:

A season or two from now the old bank across the street, with its chipped pink marble and torn red bricks, will be cleared away, and built upon. We may even forget that there was anything else over there. Noisy progress, jackhammers, cranes, perhaps like Yeats’ beast, crawls on, won’t go away.

A new blue Buick stops at the corner. In the front seat sit two adults, in the back, two children. The adults are talking. The children are looking out the window, up to the J.J. Newberry building.

I want to say, ‘hey kids! Turn around! Look across the street!’

An old man sits down next to me on the bench. He points to the old bank.

“Won’t be long now.”

Ivan Munk illustration of the Newberry’s lunch counter

Last week I got a call from C.R. He’d endured a post-midnight ride in an ambulance and was in St. Joseph’s hospital in Tacoma, scheduled for heart surgery that took place, successfully, this past Friday. The itinerary is to collect him this coming Friday and bring him back to his home in east Tacoma where I’ll do my best to care for him for the next month or so as he recovers.

Of course I’ve had to warn him about my last stint as a caregiver—for my parents, in their last years—because after a half century or so I had started singing again with a voice I’m reluctant to share in public. The repertoire is Rodger’s & Hammerstein mostly, as mom loved their musicals. I can pretty much cover all of Oklahoma!, except Surry with a Fringe on Top, which is ridiculously long and interrupted, mid-way, by the romantic quarreling between Curly and Laurey. I can’t really help it. My singing is embedded in the whole caregiving package now—a-yippee-oh-eye-ay!!!

And that is a long of way of reporting that I’ll be stepping back from The Daily Rhubarb for the next several weeks to be with C.R.

I’ll continue posting as circumstances allow but not as regularly as usual. I’ll appreciate your patience for that and look forward to coming back up to speed, here, in late spring.

In the meantime, there really is a veritable ton of past Daily Rhubarb/Rhubarb Salon postings within easy reach. A quick way to survey and access previous posts is to go to the Follow the Daily Rhubarb feature on my mothership website, Rhubarb Skies. Again, I so appreciate the encouragement from all of you and deeply appreciate those of you who’ve enrolled with paid subscriptions. There’s a lot happening in 2024 and I’ll be primed to get back to it in late April/early May.

Until next time, Happy Trails…

—tjc