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Dear Orval and Lolene,
This is a wonderful surprise and an auspicious moment to hear from you. When my mother was visiting this past month, we talked about Leann, as we are likely to this time of year, and I again considered writing the two of you on her birthday. Mom suggested the basket. I asked if she would arrange it and I'm delighted to hear that it brought pleasant thoughts of old friendships into your home. Lolene, you are kind to write so generously despite the difficult circumstance (you manage so well). I pray the whole family is in good health and spirit.
Memories of your daughter and our younger days together return to me often, not only near her birthday. Each remembrance is both a coming home and a rediscovery, like a propitious sighting of a rare Colorado Azure butterfly that punctuated many spring morning jaunts with Leann through the farm fields between our homes. I've long wished to someday share these with you.
I re-read your letter this morning while I sat in a patio chair sipping a caffeine-free tea, al fresco, from Celestial Seasonings (that Boulder company that got its start selling herbal teas to "hippies" on The Hill, and to other college neophytes of the emerging Aquarian Age, like myself, and which today advertises its product line in prime-time). The flavor I picked was " Tropical Escape". Hmmmm... someone in marketing must have envisioned palm trees amongst our constellations. This time of year, for six weeks or so, we commonly get the marine layer early in the day. The sun remains hidden while we wait for the cloud cover to burn off, hopefully before noon. Californians call it the "June glooms". (I write "we" though there's still the Colorado boy beneath my Save the Whales T-shirt, Billabong shorts, and LA-Tech running shoes.) However, this past month's weather has been, to the delight of many, unusual. The famous SoCal summer beaches bathed in sunlight and caressed by the cool Pacific wind arrived weeks early. Already the sandy shores are nearly overrun by surfers, bikinis, umbrellas, and oddly dressed tourists. Looks like it'll be another long, Southland season.
From the living room drifts the music of singer-songwriter, Beth Nielsen Chapman, a kindred soul, I like to believe, to Leann. She sings of summer days past, of family love, bittersweet romances and enduring friendship. It was a deliberate choice. 'Tis a fine day for nostalgic remembrances. Surf City, USA (a moniker claimed for Huntington Beach by the Beach Boys) is a world and life apart from my hometown. But, with your letter in hand, my thoughts cross in an instant, like the Wellsian traveler, 1,200 miles and twenty years. Images of your daughter, though, are easily brought to mind, as your letter and pictures vividly do. Gratefully, it's no longer painful.
Your words remind me of aspects of Leann's life which were essential to her. It's pleasing to hear that your family has endured well, is growing ever larger and that, despite the struggles and difficulties to manage the proverbial extended American family in these post-modern times, yours has remained together. To be sure, Leann would have been joyful and ever so proud of your anniversary scene - all that teeming growth and venerable age seated with as many generations as possible. Yet I feel some sadness in taking notice of the years that have gone by since I last saw your family.
Chapman's lyrics echo my thoughts:
"I let time go by so slow. And I made every moment last.
And I thought about years, how they take so long, and they go fast ...
And I thought of what I'd give to feel another summer linger
Where a day feels like a year."
A terra-cotta bowl on the patio floor is filled with wildflowers I sometimes collect from the wetlands on morning jogs to the beach. One can oftentimes smell the surf (there is a modest ocean view from the third-floor balcony) though today the air has been redolent with the scent of those fresh blooms. Leann loved gathering flowers, an act of her devotion to nature's beauty. You could see she felt as an integral part of the landscape. I witnessed it most acutely in our trips to the mountains (she was drawn to them, I wish we had gone more often). Hiking to her was less a physical enterprise, more the spiritual sojourn; a walk through a meadow was less a passage, more an interaction - a communion with nature of which I would be, for a moment, either envious or jealous. And she would carefully pick, if there were some to spare, a flower of each color or kind as one would select a Native American amulet. It was an act of reverence. A pious aesthetic, I recall now: she admired all of God's creations, but she had a special affection for flowers (yes, she did wear them in her hair).
With a blend of the transcendent and the scientific, Leann viewed such miracles within a broader context of evolution theory. We are somehow linked, she believed, to the lilies, honeysuckle, and columbines of the meadows. The naturalist, Dr. Lewis Thomas, would later write in a now famous essay that humans wouldn't have evolved had angiosperms failed to proliferate on the prehistoric landscape (How Flowers Made the World). I thought of Leann. Stephen Jay Gould, the writer-anthropologist from Harvard, corroborated Lewis' ideas with his contingency theory of evolution in the pivotal book, Wonderful Life. Leann would have eagerly agreed. In a more fundamental sense, as she would have explained it, we emerged not from apes, but from within the soft blue, red, yellow, pink, and white petals of wildflowers.
We are the stuff of stars and of flowers, then. It was certainly true of Leann. Through the years, this idea has remained, in my mind's eye, an enduring metaphor of her life.
Your daughter's abiding spirit forever affiliates me to the Petersen family. Hers was a "pilgrim soul" of which William Butler Yeats so famously phrased. In his most memorable poem (see below), and one of Leann's favorites, there is a hint of the true measure of her passing. Leann had enormous charm and beauty; a kindness of manner and an intense way of listening. All that, combined with an extreme intelligence, sensitivity, and extraordinary awareness. She could "hear a butterfly stirring in the tiny soul of a caterpillar." Her compassion was boundless; her energetic curiosity, enchanting.
I would come to profoundly miss her and her moments of glad grace.
In many important ways we grew up and discovered life together. As you well recall, we first met as children. I remember an ebullient little girl who, despite her adventursome energy, stayed close to her mother. We seemed ineluctably drawn together, and inevitably had a teen summer romance - the kind only some of us fully come to cherish later in life. "O, that the beautiful time of young love could remain green forever" wrote the German poet, von Schiller. We lived for each fragile moment. And June thru August moments were the most tender; the most thrilling.
Our first going-steady summer we later referred to as our September Summer. Ironically, we spent much of it apart. Leann had to go away for several weeks to your family's Iowan farm. Nothing worse could happen at such a time, we thought. The best days of our young lives, denied us! That was the year a pop song by The Happenings blasted onto the airways in June, quickly climbed to the top of the charts and became indelibly, fatefully, our song. "See you in September" echoed our sentiments all too perfectly (one of the blessings of a generation's pop music culture: there's always a love song for each of us). Even today, after a long career as a professional musician and now with an adult's perspective about Puppy Love, I still smile a tear at the sweet coincidence of those words:
"I'll be alone each and every night,
while you're away don't forget to write.
Bye, baby, good-bye. Bye, bye, so long, farewell.
See you in September.
Will I see you, when the summer's through?
Here we are, saying good-bye at the station.
Summer vacation is taking you away.
Have a good time but remember,
there is danger in the summer moon above.
Will I see you in September, or lose you - to a summer love?"
With the June moon our witness, we promised each other that no matter what happened, regardless of whom we met, or what we did in those endless days and nights of summer, nothing would change the way we felt about each other at that moment. And I think we inexpressibly knew, though we couldn't foresee where our lives would take each of us or what our destinies together or separate would be, we were forever linked in memory by these innocent magical moments of first love. In these, my middle years, I know now that the dimensions of human emotion can't be deconstructed to a simpler truth. Two young sweethearts captured in one summer night's kiss the birth of life's greatest joys: friendship and love.
I abandoned myself to the sun, and to baseball, and to the last of my idle days (the following year I started driving and built my first of many hot-rods). I also embedded to memory a teen's lifetime of sentimental songs. Another new moon came and waned, and then yet another. Still, September lingered in the unendurable distance, an oasis beyond the dry August desert. Yet, even adolescent time passes, and thus despite the unavoidable infatuations of youth (another boy stole a kiss, she intimated), Leann returned to me that September summer, tan and prettier, and nonetheless My Girl.
The vicissitudes of the late sixties generation swept us toward our adulthood like a hurricane. We were within what historians call the second wave of the baby boomers. Idealistic, earnest and visionary (we believed), we sought a part in creating a better world. We thought our lives and relationship were meaningful in new and unique ways and hoped our families would understand our lifestyle choices. Together we joined hands with our contemporaries in opposing the war in Vietnam. We put aside the Surf music, the teen idols, and Top 40 radio, and the music of Country Joe, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and, of course, the Beatles, became our leitmotifs.
Rest assured we never emersed ourselves deeply into the sub-culture, but who under thirty could have remained unaffected by the multifaceted, onrushing American milieu? We breathed the air of history in the making. And as fanciful as it sounds now, utopian visions genuinely inspired us. We engaged in helping each other know ourselves and the human spirit, or as Jung (popular then) called it, the "collective unconscious". Leann taught me the meaning of the German word, Zeitgeist. I explained as best I could the paradoxes of Einstein's special relativity. Together we explored neoteric notions of spirituality and searched for the true nature of God (who first drives life to begin its journey?). She was the more visceral; I was too analytical. She would talk of altruism in dogs and other animals; I discussed Schrodinger's Cat - the classic analogy of particle-wave function in quantum physics.
Leann never lost that "Sense of Wonder" we experience as children, of which Rachel Carson, the matriarch of the modern environmental movement, wrote. Ever the quintessential woman-child, Leann would laugh for pure joy - her "spine tingling response to the world around us."
There is a theory of memory that says you remember more of the things that happened when you were happy than those when you were not. My best memories of Leann are bright and clear, color-drenched like a Matisse tropics-scape, and infused with the music I love most. I remember her delight at the evening sight of migrating birds crossing the face of a full moon. Instinctively, I think of her at the crest of a roller coaster (she coaxed me into my first ride). I can't think of my '68 GTO convertible without envisioning her golden hair colliding with the wind. I recall her standing in flashes of blue light, watching lightning travel like networks of nerves through evening clouds. Sometimes I see a girl sitting precipitously on a rock ledge, offering to the wind seeds and petals, which launch from her hands as if a mass of butterflies were taking flight. And on occasion, I see an elegant, young woman place down her wine glass and offer those same caring hands to me.
Leann Petersen was intellectual, eclectic, literary, intriguing and complex at times, but more often easy and enjoyable to read, like a Fitzgerald novel. She was part Aquarian ager, part free spirit and flower-child, part feminist, part genius; part mother, goddess, girl-next-door, sister and daughter. She loved the Beatles, Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkle, the Beach Boys, all poets, Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), Byronic heroes, science fiction, summer dresses, dogs, picnics, and white winter scenes. Leann celebrated in the symphony of nature: June thunder storms, gentle rain on the roof, winds sweeping a deep mountain valley, the sounds of a country evening. And she was not shy to float a few gentle pianissimo phrases in the nocturnal breezes. She liked visiting farms, zoos, art and natural history museums and, most of all, any of her myriad of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents*. She enjoyed the smell of wet earth, wheat grass, suntan lotion, Chanel #5, roses, sweetpeas, and campfires. In her teens, she looked forward to riding horses, or hay rides, carnivals and amusement parks, and polkas (how could I forget the German hall)? Later would come rock concerts, the theater, movies, candle-lit dinners, and slow dancing in the moonlight.
* I sensed, above and beyond everything, Leann loved her family.
Mozart, Puccini, Beethoven, Vivaldi, were also on her play list. She adored Ludwig's Pastoral Symphony and Greig's Peer Gynt Suite. Music was ubiquitous in our lives. It helped both center and define us in the world. We favored the Pythagorean cosmology - the Music of the Spheres - for a poetic analogy to the harmony in all things.
She tolerated my Jimi Hendrix albums, my tabletop drumming, and my occasional abstruse philosophical wanderings. She forgave my idiosyncrasies; I could forgive her of anything. Like most couples, there were the concomitant struggles, but we remained, in principle, egalitarian toward each other. We agreed with Goethe - love does not dominate, it cultivates. And as simply sung in so many tunes, we believed in Love.* Freud said that the credulity of love is the ultimate authority (one of the few things about which he was right). I prefer to hear it in a song; with a good beat.
* I don't wish to idealize Leann or our relationship. I hope only to give you some additional insight into our lives together and possibly articulate in writing what may be difficult to say. All of us have lives tilled from mistakes and imperfections; perhaps it's those flaws that can help make a person more human, more real. So, how does one summarize in a few pages the life span of someone loved?
My favorite picture of Leann is a black and white portrait I took in 1974, 20 years ago. She was twenty-two. The close-up photo of her shows a serene, contented young woman with soft eyes, and a slight smile that suggests there's more to it than meets the beholder's eye, as if a private wish or, rather, a witticism lies just beneath (rather more: a world of unlimited potential). The slight asymmetric turn in her lips was her signature look. The photo captures Leann as I best remember her.
I particularly treasure another picture in my old album - taken at the Grand Canyon, I guess around 1977. Leann is leaning back on a railing, smiling eyes squinting from the brilliant sienna sun of late afternoon, a small figure in the wide-angled view, backdropped against sunstruck pinnacles and rusty cliffs that plummet over each other to the canyon floor a mile below. That same distinctive smile is there. Amid all the grandeur and splendor, she remains the prime aesthetic object.
Earlier that day at the South Rim we found a spot for clear viewing (a safe distance from the extraterrestrial cacti). We had read about the Great Unconformity, one of the grand mysteries of geology and paleontology, and were determined to find it with the aid of geologic charts. Under the shade of a mesquite tree, we sat near the edge of the canyon eating lunch, and stared across eons of time. We scanned the bluffs looking for the Tapeats sandstone layer where it rests above the Vishnu schist formation. Between the two massive geologic forms is a thin line averaging about one inch wide (imperceptible at our distance). It shouldn't be there; or, rather, much more should. One inch is all that remains of 1,200 million years of stone; thousands of feet of rock once here, now gone. We thought we located the Tapeats sandstone and tried to imagine the unfathomable. 1.2 billion years. A mountain eroding at the rate of one inch every thousand years would have to be seven times higher than Pike's Peak to last the length of time represented by that thin line. It was a humbling realization. In the unimaginable vastness of geologic time, our lives are merely twinkles from a Fourth-of-July sparkler.
Like a decade earlier we were to make a new promise to one other that day: Whatever road each would take in life's brief journey, we would seek to understand the miracle of that sparkle within. We would dare to ask "What makest Thou?" (Isaiah 45:9). And even if it meant challenging cultural norms, we would endeavor to understand the truths of human nature. This was a pledge of greater scope; one which, ultimately, helped pave the path I was to walk. Yet, an addendum to that promise would remain unfulfilled: We also vowed to see each other through the passages and seasons of our lives - eternal friends. Like the novelist, Joseph Conrad, expressed, "I remember acutely my youth, the feeling that will never come back anymore - the feeling that we could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth," we anticipated we'd be there, here, to share in each other's happiness, wisdom, and families, as the years continued.
I have aged slowly; getting grayer but with still a full head of hair and just a hint of middle-age lines. Thankfully, I'm fit and healthy at 44 (with mild, though grudging discomfort in a faithful knee that can still get me through a 10K run in good time). Deciding to become a vegetarian on environmental and ethical principles, a process that, in a way began with Leann, is paying off. Kaeti and I divorced after a happy 10-year marriage (no children) and we remain devoted friends who see or speak with each other often. I now live with a querulous 30 year-old parrot (remember Pedro?) and its diminutive sidekick, Paradise, a brilliantly colored Lovebird named after the tropical plant that shares her shades of red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.
Leann, I'm sure, would approve of my loyalty to the environmental movement which survived in the wake of the sixties' cultural revolution. I've traded my SDS membership for several other activist groups dear to me: the Sierra Club, the Animals' Voice, EarthSave, Amnesty International, and Greenpeace.
My magazine rack reads like a catalog for the Alternative Press: Utne Reader, Mother Jones, Trilogy, Environmental Journal, Z Mag. I long abandoned Timothy Leary and Carlos Castaneda for Stephen Hawkins, Joseph Campbell, Carl Sagan, John Robbins, Francis Moore-Lappe, and Alice Walker. Reading and collecting books remains my last vice.
Vietnam is but a dusty memory of faded news clips and slogans. I make an effort with activist groups to fight against world hunger, rainforest destruction, the eradication of indigenous peoples (a life-long affinity for Native American culture) and other socio-political causes.
Each of us who knew Leann well remembers her in their own way. She left a legacy in my life, of which a small part is written here. The tragedy of her death was, for me, of classical dimension - I had not known a greater sorrow, or have since - and it took years to fully reconcile. It was Disraeli who said of grief: "it is the agony of an instant: the indulgence of [which is] the blunder of a life."
Thus, I reminded myself of our irrevocable pledge, sworn on a periphery of eternity.
I cannot agree with Yeats who said we begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy. It began for me when I learned to recognize what beauty is in this world. Perhaps this is the greatest lesson I learned from my life with Leann. And I've since come to understand a revelatory truth. Leann, I believe, would have marveled at its simplicity. The words of Joseph Campbell – scholar, philosopher, and foremost mythologist – best explains:
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. And the waters of eternal life are right here [in heaven on earth]. If you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."
So, what Leann and I had sought in our quest for meaning and truth, was there all along. We had been living it, full of life - in those halcyon days of our youth.
Leann's life was a triumph of courage, lived passionately to be sure. Yet, like a "snowflake fallen on the hearth fire" (Ann Drunyan), hers was far too fleeting; ephemeral - a meadowlark who flew in at one door but, after a short song, quickly vanished out another. With a little fortuity and much determination, I hope to age and wrinkle with dignity. Leann will always be sweet sixteen ... or twenty two.
And each year at this time, I will take down a book and think of her, and count the gifts she bestowed to all of us. And murmur, yet sadly, a promise once given, but now impossible to keep:
That we would again see each other, when life's long summer is through ...
in September.
M.P.L.
When You are Old and Gray.
-- William Butler Yeats
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Bookends Theme - Paul Simon, 1968
Time it was,
And what a time it was,
It was...
A time of Innocence,
A time of confidences.
Long ago... it must be...
I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you