Slouching toward Sedona

December 11, 2024

Fields and distant mountains near Mt. Hope, WA

The blessings of really good company

Rather than leave you guessing, I’m taking a break from my desk and deadlines for a few days to go visit one of my oldest and dearest friends and his magnificent wife. My soul-supporting daughter, Audrey, will join us on Friday. In Arizona. I am eager to do introductions.

Willy and I met in the 1960s when our families lived a block apart in the company town of Corozal, not far from an old French cemetery and a mental institution surrounded by mango trees. We were decent football players and were both selected to the All-Zone (Panama Canal Zone) football roster in 1972 when we were sophomores at Balboa High School. I was a quarterback and Willy was a formidable defensive tackle and a talented punter, the son of a gifted soccer player who literally swam to freedom from East Germany in his youth. When Willy flushed his kicks, the sound was like light artillery going off. I think of him as the tropical version of Alex Karras, the wry, witty All-Pro defensive tackle for the Detroit Lions who played himself in the 1968 film Paper Lion. For a half dozen years, Willy and I played and scrimmaged against each other. Suffice to say, he knocked me around quite a bit. All in good fun, he would say. We harbor precious memories.

I haven’t seen my daughter in five months. That aches. She’s been crazy busy with her work and schooling (she’s working on an advanced degree in art therapy) but, when the spirit moves her, she still makes time to write pieces for us in this space, including her most recent in late November.

That’s us, on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Montana when she was two, and (on the right) Audrey during a father/daughter hike at the Odessa craters in Lincoln County a few years back when I was working on the Beautiful Wounds book.

In a notebook that survived a big fire two years ago, there is this page of “Field Notes” from our outing to the Finch Arboretum in June of 2002, when she was nine. It’s such a precious artifact, reflecting how we move through nature and time together, not just learning from each other but sharing the wonder of our experiences, like passing a delicious burrito back and forth.

We drew up a father/daughter bucket list a couple years ago. It’s aspirational and includes venues like Crater Lake in southern Oregon. Given the inexorability of mortality, I doubt I’ll get to experience it all with her, but we’re hoping to get in a decent chunk of it in the coming days. I really don’t know where I’d be without the gift of my daughter and her incomparable younger brother. I wake daily with the hope that I can still be a part of enabling a better future for them and the next generation that comes to life, to hold their hands and share their notes and memories.

Idaho Blue-eyed Grass: Audrey’s drawing on the left, my photograph on the right

I’ll be back in this space before long, likely with some new photography.

Blessings, tjc