Matt, I’ve got something to show you. This warning from Costco. Let me read it. “Fresh Food Concepts is recalling Rojo’s Layer Dip because the guacamole might have Listeria Monocytogenes. Listeria is the leading call of deaths from food related bacteria.” How stupid is it to send a letter. By the time you read this you’re dead.

I know. I didn’t eat the dip.

I ate the stuff, I finished it. Wait, you knew what?

I got the phone call.

Phone call?

I didn’t tell you?

Tell me what?

That they called. I meant to. I told Sarah.

John didn’t wait for me this morning to ring his door bell. He strode right up to my car.

“Did you hear the helicopter? It flew over these fields this morning for almost two hours. They started at Pete’s house and covered he same territory we did. I thought you had something to do with it.”

“Didn’t hear a thing. I ate breakfast at 6 and went back to bed.”

“We won’t find out till next week why they were here. I don’t know if you know but our paper comes out only twice a week. I saw the pilot and two guys swooping back and forth above the telephone lines, right where we walked. They had to be looking for someone.”

“I wish they’d done that yesterday. I’m still pulling thorns out of my socks and clearing my throat of dust. So now what do we do? I was going to suggest we follow up on yesterday and walk the fields again.”

“If there was someone down there they would have seen him.”

And that’s how, heat and clockwork be damned, we ended up back at the water tower. I called Ken to check again on Pete’s last journal entry and it hadn’t changed. “He wrote he’s gonna test himself by walking to the water tower.” This time I parked not at the tower but below it and spied a distinct cairn trail. We followed the cairns back towards the mountains alternately talking ourselves in and out of believing they were Pete’s.

And, to repeat myself, that’s why this hunt is so aggravating. There are no declarative clues. Not a one. There is no right direction to go. Only theories, only sentences with question marks. Not to be too graphic but four months later we’re limited to nothing but guess work. No black spiral of birds, and nothing to smell. We have sight and that is it. I can’t even, in good faith, raise money to send Goose and his friend, John, down here. What would I tell them? Don’t look where I’ve looked even though he could have been five feet to my left or right. Go to the water tower because of a journal entry but disregard Sam’s advice about the scorching heat that week. Look for cairns in the desert because Pete has them in his yard, but ignore those in the nearby trailer park? Go north to the Test Site because a psychic told me to?

I didn’t expect to find Ken’s father when I decided to come here, but I’m very disappointed. As I said to Sam, “Other than happiness, I’ve never looked so hard for anything.”

The water tower from Pete’s neighborhood.

This seems like a nice place for all of us to work together. I’m posting photos of cairns because John Barnnard suggested that I look for them.That’s because outside of Peter’s house, on the perimeter, are cairns. Right now I’m about a half a mile above the water tower walking up a stream bed.

By the way I am posting from my phone using an application that works with WordPress so go easy on me. You know punctuation,literacy, all that stuff

“Matt, I had a physical today. I need a colonoscopy now, and every five years thanks to Peter, I’m gonna have that sleep study thing that you’ve been harping about,  and I had a preliminary hearing test today.”

“Deaf?”

“They use a laptop. Is there anything that’s done without a computer nowadays? You put headphones on and hold a buzzer in your hand that you press every time you hear a sound.”

“Deaf?”

“The nurse ended the test before I pressed the button.”

“Deaf.”

“Matt, I had a physical today. I need a colonoscopy now, and every five years thanks to Peter, I’m gonna have that sleep study thing that you’ve been harping about,  and I had a preliminary hearing test today.”

“Deaf?”

“They use a laptop. Is there anything that’s done without a computer nowadays? You put headphones on and hold a buzzer in your hand that you press every time you hear a sound.”

“Deaf?”

“The nurse ended the test before I pressed the button.”

“Deaf.”

“Adam told to write about the Ice Hotel and dipping into the frozen river with Marianne. He thinks I can develop a story that follows on one I’d already written about cold water swimming in Maine. Start there, weave into it last year’s obsession with White Pond, add a dash — am I mixing my metaphors? — of Québec City and voilà! the blog lives again.  But I can’t because it’s so all about me. Mainecourse is full of what I see as  my woe-is-me will I ever find happiness sob-stories. How do I write about stuff I’m doing without it being about stuff I’m doing?”

KO: “Write it in the third person.”

“You always say that. The third and I’m still me, I’d have to write in the  sixth or seventh person.”

KO: “Breathe, Michael, breathe. First those stories aren’t as self centered as you think. Secondly, the third person gives you more freedom to play. You’ll have less obligation to stick to the truth.”

“Not that I do anyway.”

KO: “Not that you do anyway.”

Time passes and no new stories magically appear on this here blog so  Adam offers less work: “Post a bowling photo and link it to the bowling movie — how  hard does it have to be … ? Or do you fear the slippery slope of re-immersion & expectation … ?”

Bowling? Yeah, bowling. Compare our passion with Ralph Kramden’s and the “Hurricanes.”  Maybe begin with Ralph yelling at Alice, “Hurry up with the eats, I’m going bowling,”  because often at our table it’s something like, “Why’d we start dinner so late we’ve got to get bowling.”

“Pick an Oak,” was a toe dipper. Water’s warm.  This next one could be a dive off Caroline’s pier, and if so, then I’d hope to have more than voyeurs. Here goes.

*****************************

In the depths of last summer’s humdrum,  Matthew and friends chose Wednesday nights to meet at the “Drome,” the local candlepin (small bocce-like balls) alley down the street across from K-Mart and the only McDonalds in America to have gagged on its own grease and gone belly up.   Why Wednesday? 1960s prices: A dollar a string and two bucks for a beer. Some nights Matt and his crowd commandeered multiple lanes, and he’d return home with stories of his high scores and near fistfights. I remembered my early competitive days bowling against my roommate, Jim McMahon, and later taking Matt and the foster kids to what was then called, “The Bowladrome.”

But this latest entry is not going to be  about Candlepins and little balls, this one, or the upcoming one which I hope materializes, is about big balls, chainsaws, and ice.

*****************************

“Hey, Matt, I need an editor. Your mom’s gone and I have to have someone tell me I’m not embarrassing myself before I embarrass myself. I’d like to keep it in the family and you’re a writer.  Will you read my latest attempt to get the blog rolling?”

“Sure, I’d like that.”

(Thought bubble : You’d like that?  What, no, “Is this punishment for living in the same house with you?”)

Matt reads this while I burn an omelet with cheese, veggies and beans.  I hear a snort and a laugh which I take as good signs. Then he looks up from his computer, “I like the way you say you’re going to write something and then you don’t.”

“Or that I act like I’m going to write about bowling but don’t? Or is it more like saying I’ll finish a job like the bathroom and then don’t?”

“ And, I’d take out the pick-an-oak sentence.”

“You mean I can’t publicly pressure people to help out here like they did in the  old days?”

Matt’s back is to me as I enter the kitchen. He’s emptying the dishwasher and the sounds of our odd collection of plates banging into one another partly masks my entry from the hallway.

“Hey Matt”

He jumps but not high enough.

“WHAT,” he answers

“Marianne is taking me to a puppet show tonight in Boston.”

“Why not drive into a tree right now?”

“No, no. It’s an adult puppet show presented by socialists and anarchists.”

“Pick an oak.”

for Betty Lou Kibbe, nee Kidwell, 20 July, 1929 to 16 October, 2009

As I flew west towards Omaha with my wife on 15 October, my brother and I still had a mother. Only a little over a day later, we wouldn’t; in fact, within 5 hours of landing we’d lose all of her but the waning rhythm of breath and pulse as she slipped into a coma that evening, lingering for about 21 hours before her improbably able heart finally failed. It is perhaps too melodramatic to say it was broken after the death of her husband of almost 50 years just over 4 months ago; but perhaps not.

There was little left of the woman who’d raised us when I walked into her room and kissed her forehead hello at the rehab center where she’d been on and off since falling 6 weeks before. But she was alert and fully there, and we shared an afternoon of voluble companionship before our role shifted to sitting vigil and talking in unnecessarily hushed tones as she ebbed. In the days that followed her death, two brothers who see rather less of each other than many would reminisce and go through pictures and work on rebuilding our image of our mother. Like putting flesh back on her by-then sub-80-pound frame, we set about redefining the twinkle in her eye and putting a spring back in her imagined step.

More in images and less in prose than for my father, here are snippets of her expansive life.

Born in Saint Louis in the Great Depression, upper-middle of six siblings (4 still living), she posed for this picture at age 2 before the family headed for some possibilities in California, ultimately resettling for good back in Saint Louis.

A slight but natural beauty, she had a career at Purina as a nationally-noted feed microscopist, which is an optically-armed industrial spy of sorts, divining the makeup of competitors’ feeds, mostly from gross examination by microscope (in those days before mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs).

While taking one of her sisters to visit that sister’s boyfriend in a mining operation in Colorado in 1957, she was fixed up by said boyfriend with his friend, the temporarily wayward engineer-to-be Jack Kibbe, and they were married the day after Christmas in 1959, seen dancing here at their reception in the house of her sister Peggy and husband John.

Family legend has my father off on a compulsory engineering-school graduation fishing trip when I was born — my mother caught a cab to the hospital when her waters broke, and I narrowly missed being born in the back seat. Jack had taken a job in the iron ore industry in Venezuela, went on ahead after I was born, and Betty traveled unaccompanied to Venezuela with 5-month-old me to join him there. She later bore a second son, Douglas, and raised her two boys in an expatriate community of Americans given to the living-large lifestyle of the 60’s; easily recognizable to their stateside counterparts but with the exotic tinge of the latin locale, forging a new city in a fledgling country of boundless natural beauty.

While in Venezuela Betty traveled extensively about the country with us, including on Jeep expeditions into the mostly-uncharted Gran Sabana jungles. She learned to golf, and even learned to fly, piloting a single engine, low-wing Piper Cherokee my parents co-owned with another couple. Here she’s on the Auyan Tepuy above Angel Falls with her mother, and more or less cheerfully enduring the ritual ablution in used engine oil after soloing in the Cessna behind her.

After leaving Venezuela (the second time and for good), they settled in Albuquerque, where their second house was nestled in the scenic foothills of the Sandia mountains.

From there they traveled to many places, including here for Tricia’s & my wedding

and Fiji, amongst many other fascinating and remote places (she and my dad are to the far right).

This last was taken shortly after my dad died as we were cleaning out their house for sale. We’d gotten her the roses, which here, I guess, served as a sort of stand-in for my dad in this family photo (that’s Suzanne with Charlie and Doug with Sam). She bravely left that house and the life they’d known and went to live in Omaha with Doug & Suzanne, but her roots were done growing and she never settled in. Near the end she told us to make sure to enjoy life.

We are who she raised us to be. We dearly love and miss you – ‘bye, Mom …