In Memory of John Olmsted (1938-2011)

 J. Perlman Photography 2010

             I first met John Olmsted at U.C. Davis, where I was enrolled in the Planning Certification Program and he came to speak at one of the seminars, and I was struck by this odd tall passionate man who seemed to channel John Muir and who closed his eyes as he talked of his vision.  Before he talked very long I could see his vision too, of his chain of jewels, of conserved precious lands stretching across California.  Before he’d finished his short presentation which involved an overhead projector and a bunch of photos and a lot of stories I was totally enrolled – how could I not be?  His vision was so clear, so tangible, so graspable, that it seemed the least I could do – in fact it felt an honor to be asked to help bringing it forth.

            How do I describe his utter unstoppability, his unreasonable indomitability?  No, I take it back, his indomitability was not unreasonable, it was beyond any notions of reasonable and unreasonable, he simply knew what was so, and what would be.  It was not a personal vision that drove him, and drove him to drive the rest of us, it was a vision much bigger than him, it was a vision, I came to understand, borne in a meeting of giants between lifetimes, a meeting where he sat at the table with his peers, the spirits of John Muir and Frederick Law Olmstead and discussed what was to be and how it would be made so.  I believed he returned to that table every time he closed his eyes and prepared to speak, and I understood what gift it was to be shown his vision of what was to be, and what an honor it was for all of us to be given the opportunity to share in the bringing forth of that vision into this world.

            And how to describe the gentle quality of his persistence?  He could, and he would, ask such unreasonable things of you.  And the natural response would be to push back, to say “don’t you understand, I’m busy, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the money” but then you’d see how profoundly less he was asking of you than he was asking of himself and how could you possibly say no? 

            Though he would be so sweet when you did say no. No matter what the crisis was, if you could not do that which was needed so badly this time, hey, it was no problem, he knew someone else who would take care of it and he knew you’d be there for him next time, and if not next time, then the time after that. 

            And there were those glorious disconcerting mad periods when he would be consumed by the movie he was making and he would call me up, from his home or perhaps his hospital room or the room at the Outside Inn and leave these enormous long messages telling me what he could see and how everything was coming together into this tremendous climax and how we were all each one of us at the very center of it and I could not help but see it too. And I cannot help but see it again now – how it is all coming together, right now, and how we are all, each one of us, at the very center of it.  I brought him boxes of my old Grateful Dead concert tapes to put into his shoebox-sized cassette player which was held together with duct tape and he filled dozens of them with his amazing brilliant streams of consciousness laid over the music, and his excited voice, describing all that he could see segueing seamlessly back and forth with Jerry’s guitar, was so perfect I could not erase those messages from my phone.  His vision was so complete and so simple it was funny and in his messages he would roar with laughter and he declared he had become a standup comedian, especially since because of his prostate problems he couldn’t sit down very well anyway.  The omniverse, the Obamaverse.  Time standing still, time going backwards.  The movie he was born to make revealing itself fully, with each camera angle determined and the narrative completely written and all we needed to do was assemble a camera crew and we could make it in a weekend and it would be the greatest movie of all time.  The first cosmic download in history.  All of it coming together, right there, right then, in him.   He would call the movie “Pain in the Butt” in honor of both himself and his condition.

            I remember descending with him into the tightly packed tiny rooms where he kept his collections, shelves and shelves of old books and old typewriters and Victrolas and rocks and taxidermied animals and maps and, my God, it was like the movie “Being John Malkovich” and I was descending down those narrow stairs into John Olmsted’s brain, and at first it looked like utter chaos but then I began to listen to John speak about this piece and that piece, each with its own story and the story of one piece leading seamlessly to the story of the next and the next and by the time we went back upstairs that crowded little basement had been transformed into a shrine where the perfect order and beauty of the universe had once again been, by John, revealed.

The last time we spoke he lay in his bed without the strength to raise his head, but he could still rattle off parcel numbers from memory as we spoke of some of his properties along the Yuba River, there in the middle of his necklace of land-jewels across California, and we talked of what was needed to pay the property taxes –for John, there were always property taxes to be paid – and rebuild the old house which had recently burned to the ground and taken many of John’s antiques with it.  And for John the loss of the house was only the briefest of blows – he had the house plans and he knew contractors and he would rebuild the house as it had originally been, it would be better than the patched-up remodeled shell that had burned.  And as we talked and shared ideas and thoughts of what should become of the properties John would close his eyes and say “Yes!  That makes me tingle, I can feel it, yes, I know that will happen!”  And I could see that John’s spirit-peers, John Muir and Frederick Law Olmstead, and, probably Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, were all there sitting at the table with him and when he felt the tingling it was his spirit trembling because he was in the presence of Truth, of what will be, and John knew what a sacred thing it was, what a blessing and honor and obligation it was to be gifted with that vision of Truth.  It was that vision which drove him, relentlessly, and which sustained him, and enriched him, and demanded his entire life, and gave him his entire life.

Thank you for sharing the gift of that vision with me, John.  I will carry it with me as I walk your trails and, together, we will walk your vision into this world.

           

           

            

            

"Gentle on my Mind" stuck in my mind

For weeks I haven't been able to get Glen Campbell's version of John Hartford's "Gentle on my Mind" out of my head. If better lyrics have been written, I haven't heard them:

It's knowin' that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleepin' bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowin' I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that have dried upon some line
That keeps you in the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind

It's not clingin' to the rocks and ivy
Planted on their columns now that bind me
Or something that somebody said because
They thought we fit together walkin'
It's just knowing that the world
Will not be cursing or forgiving
When I walk along some railroad track and find
That you're movin' on the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
And for hours you're just gentle on my mind

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother 'cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence
Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me till I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walkin' on the back roads
By the rivers flowin' gentle on my mind

I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin' cracklin' cauldron
In some train yard
My beard a rustlin' coal pile
And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands 'round a tin can
I pretend to hold you to my breast and find
That you're waitin' from the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
Ever smilin', ever gentle on my mind

A snippet from the journal - incident in Berkeley

Overslept on this slightly cool, unexpectedly clouded, September morning. Driving to the bay area and back, and not arriving home ‘till eightish, throws off my inner clock, and besides I’d arrived home hungry, after only having had appetizers there at the Hotel Durant instead of a full fledged dinner, though I also indulged, riskily for a driver and setting a poor example for my daughter, in a pair of yummy draft IPA’s (Racer 5’s, for you hopaphiles) which seem to have quickly settled into the jiggly pluff growing above my belt buckle where there was once muscle mass as my Knee Problem continues persistently and disconcertingly. I’d actually told myself, quite convincingly, that the knee was Getting Better, and was even starting to believe it, feeling just the slightest of twinges and getting in and out of my car normally and even following Elsie up and down hills and stairs as she led me across campus to see her office and meet her work mates. But alas, my freshly-fledged optimism evaporated when instinctively I made my usual move as a pedestrian (an alpha-male pedestrian, that is) to scurry across the street in front of traffic with the light changing and I got about half-way across the street when I pushed with my bad leg and felt something in the knee stretch and pull, and felt a white-hot burn and suddenly there I was stranded in the middle of the street as engines were revving with only one good leg and the other which was suddenly limp and hurting like hell and I wanted to call a time out but that didn’t seem to be an option so I hobbled with as much dignity, and alacrity, as I could, hopping on my good leg and dragging my virtually useless left leg behind me like a recalcitrant child, with the crowd of vastly more sensible pedestrians I left on the curb behind me no doubt wondering what on earth that crippled-up old fart had been thinking. And also on the curb behind me the clear tones of my sweet younger daughter, laughing.

Reminisces of kisses...

My friend Hap Hazard challenged KVMR listeners to come up with some reminisces of kisses for his full-moon Friday Espresso Magazine radio show. So I came up with a few, and could have come up with quite a few more since the really good kisses, you never forget. And the best part was having Ellen come downstairs in the office when he was reading the one about her and me in Santa Cruz and the kiss I got when she realized that couple he was talking on the radio about that sounded so familiar was actually us. So here's what I sent to Hap:

Okay, Hap, here’s a few first efforts at this very compelling theme…

A few of first kisses occurred to me off the top of my head: first, Joanie, that endlessly alluring friend of my (one year) younger sister who for some unknown reason liked this slightly older geek brother of her best friend and took some time out from her project of sleeping (utterly unbeknownst to me) with absolutely every other unattached boy in Watsonville High School to show this young man a thing or two about kissing and yes! I did have a thing or few to learn and, with Joanie's assistance, learn them I did.

And I remember at a party with Leah in high school in the sixties. We were both too green to roll joints yet, so we both just massaged out the tobacco from Marlboro cigarettes and somehow packed the flaccid cylinders back with pretty potent (for the time) pot. And smoked it to our mutual satisfaction and then made out to stroboscopic lights and Cream and Hendrix for the rest of the evening. And I didn’t think I needed any more sex than that ever, that seemed more than enough mystery in those endless kisses to keep me venturing forth for a lifetime.

And, finally, that first week or two with my future wife, when (God I hope my children don’t read this and recognize me right off) the sex was great but the kissing, my God, the kissing was fantastic, I could stand on Pacific Street there in Santa Cruz and our kissing would become an opera in which I was fully self-expressed and she was as well and there was nothing we couldn’t say from the utter depths of our hearts that wasn’t purely heard and perfectly understood from the utter depths of the other. And I remember some incredible, never-to-be repeated show at the Catalyst that we both missed, deliriously, happily, because we were both too busy kissing. And, praise God, thirty-five years later, we still are.

Thanks for asking, Hap.

Brian

A few more recollections about my dad...

For the father’s day we knew would be Pop’s last, I was freed from my writer’s block and gifted with a verse to put into his card, which read:

You taught me the difference
Between right and wrong
And how to be kind
And when to be strong

And all the good
That I may do
Is owed to lessons
I learned from you.

Happy Fathers Day, Pop.
I love you.

About his life: Things were always hard for him. He worked hard and felt things deeply and loved his family. He only had one good eye. He was left handed. He did things different. He was different. And he was a very smart man – he invented things. He could fix anything and build anything. He could figure out a way to work around any obstacle that life, or he himself, put in his path – and there were plenty. He could figure out a way to do anything. And it was never, ever, the way the directions said to do it.

His love for Mom was absolute. Mom was the love of his life and he was faithful to her and from him I learned faithfulness. And his love for his children, for his family, was unshakable. I remember a few times as a teenager when I had to call home with those calls you never ever want to make as a teenager, and as a parent I know now you never ever want to hear – and I thank god that I seem to have been spared on this one, knock on wood, and that my children have never had cause to make one of those calls home to me. But his support never wavered. He was always there, he was a rock for me. I have told my children, I could not love them the way I do if Pop had not loved me the way that he did. The way that he does still.

I remember a very big man.

My father died last night -- from the Journal, 7-6-06

My dad died last night. I watched him breathe his last breath. He’d seemed weaker that day, and his good eye was looking far past us. The nurse came, and said she did not know how long it would be, but that patients could survive several weeks after they stopped taking fluids. He seemed restless, at least was not sleeping nearly as much as he had been the days previous, which was a sign, though a vague one, the hospice book mentioned, that the end may be near. More significantly his lungs sounded congested for the first time, the gurgle or death-rattle which I was hearing then for the first time. His grip was still firm holding onto our hands, though I could not believe that the day before he unexpectedly asked me clearly “How’s it goin’” when I said I was there. My father-in-law Del came over from next door to sit with him, and held his hand and wiped at his eyes and admired Dad’s big hands and spoke of Dad’s big heart. His visit honored Pop, and the things he said caused my eyes to burn and my voice to catch in my chest. Del also said that in our family it was his turn next in the order of things and he said it calmly and clearly and I could not deny there would be many more goodbyes not far in our future, each as hard as this one. And Jon and Martha and Nola and Anya came in to stand for a few moments and give their respects, and though little Anya pressed back against her father’s legs and averted her eyes Nola spoke clearly and seriously when she said ‘Hi, Nard, it’s Nola.’ And I had just stopped by when I looked up and saw a priest walking towards the office. It was Fr. Tom from St. Patricks, with a deacon named George who was there for the Last Rites. I was glad to be there, and Mom, Yvonne, Michelle and I went into the room and stood around him and Fr. anointed his forehead and palms (Pop opening up his clenched hands for the priest) and we held hands and prayed and Fr. read a gospel and forgave Dad his sins and though Dad’s milky gaze remained straight up, into the distance, it felt calming, holy, and, I thought, gave Dad comfort. Perhaps even enough to make it easier for him to let go. Mom gave me a small wad of money to give the priest, which I did outside as I walked them to their car.
And we had dinner together, mom and Y and Michelle and Ellen, and at one point I phoned Elsie to tell her that her grandpa was not doing very well. Then back home and to bed earlier than the night before (when I’d mucked about reading the Grateful Dead book until 12:30 and ended up with only 5 hours sleep or so) And at 2:00 in the morning we heard the phone ring and it was mom, calling us thank god in the middle of the night saying Dad did not sound good and it may be time. And we went straight over – a couple of owls were screeching out their cries of portent ready to catch and carry this waiting soul – and Mom was giving Dad oxygen as Yvonne had suggested for his difficulty breathing and his breath was thick and gargly and uneven and we circled round the bed and put our hands on him, and on mom who kept popping up and wanting to do something but we finally persuaded her to sit down and turn off the oxygen which made no difference and we listened to the sweet sound of my father breathing, a sweet sound I will hear no more, and the pauses between breaths grew longer and he gasped a little and gave a couple more quick breaths and then …. there were no more. We waited and watched and the room was very very still except for the soft sounds of mom sobbing. And one by one we kissed his still warm head and we tried to close his open pale distant-staring eyes. And we hugged and I led an Our Father though I somehow ended it with ‘now and at the hour of our death, Amen’ from the Hail Mary but that was all right, and Mom did lead us in a Hail Mary and I sat for awhile longer with my hands on him. And then we gave Mom a Tylenol PM and went home. Yvonne did not sleep more, though she tried for awhile. Neither did Mom, and Michelle slept a little and I slept quite well until 8 AM when I got up and had some thoughtful tea in the beautiful cool morning light, the sun having risen like any other day. And when I got over to the house the van from the mortuary was there and they brought Dad out wrapped in a blanket but paused noticing the aching in our faces and asked if we wanted to see him on last time and pulled down the blanket and I looked for one last time at the beautiful, beautiful face of my father and kissed his now-cool forehead and they wrapped him up and we carried him up the stairs and into the van and he was gone. From my sight.