On Tuesday I had the privilege of speaking to the Eugene Active 20/30 Club (http://www.eugene2030.org) at the Oregon Electric Station. Wow. Though not as “huggy” as the Cottage Grove Rotarians, I’ve never seen so much energy at a luncheon meeting: People popping up to give report after report about some of the 19 projects the club does to benefit kids in the community. People donating money. People making jokes. Good stuff, this.
In the past, I’ve expressed concern that the giving spirit that the WWII generation passed on to we boomers seemed to be dying out at the Generation-X level. I’m rethinking that, in part because of groups like this. I’ve been part of a lot of luncheon meetings and this one seemed like a social-service club on fast-forward. They got more accomplished in an hour than some groups probably do in weeks.
I read a piece I’d written years ago about Katie Barr, the former Pleasant Hill High teacher (and Gen-Xer) who lost her husband, daughter and dog in a car accident but bounced back to found the Patrick McCurdy Education Foundation (http://www.mccurdyed.org), in honor of her husband and daughter. It reaches out to at-risk kids in rural communities by offering mentorship relationships, scholarships and child care. One of the best examples of young people investing in their communities. And, bluntly, the most impressive story I’ve covered of someone forging on despite tragic losses. (See my October 2003 column on her below.)
It’s all relative, this young/old stuff. In somewhat of a hurry, I parked my car and headed for the restaurant. “Uh, sir,” said a young woman who turned out to be a 20/30 member, “you left your car door open.”
“Oh.”
But I found it somehow reassuring, at the luncheon, when a 20/30 member talked about playing in a doubles tennis tournament over the weekend and being beat by a couple of teenagers. We’re all in this together. All aging at the same rate. It’s just that some of us got a head start.
TIME ARRIVES TO RECLAIM HER JOY, HOPE
Bob Welch / The Register-Guard
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
- John Lennon/Paul McCartney
You wake up one morning and your world is in order. Husband. Daughter. Dog. Career.
In Eugene, you all pile into the Subaru to head for work at Pleasant Hill High, where you’re an English teacher and your husband is a guidance counselor.
The two of you are worried about war in Iraq. But the previous night, 2-year-old Olivia was so tired she was asleep by dinner and so you had the rare opportunity to just talk. And what you talked about was this: being compassionate to others in a world that often isn’t.
Now, you’re on Highway 58. Patrick is at the wheel. Patrick your best friend, the guy you met at the University of Oregon when your black Lab, Runa - the same dog now in back - got lost and he offered to help find her. Adventurous Patrick who leads the family on totally unplanned summer trips across the country, laughing as he says the names of states backward. Now entering Odaroloc! Patrick who is now giving you a hard time because it’s March 17, 2003 - St. Patrick’s Day - and you’re not wearing green.
Olivia is in back. Olivia, the little girl who strikes up conversations with total strangers. Who loves dancing and doing puzzles with you on Saturday mornings. Who fears only one thing: school mascots. Thinks the Pleasant Hill billy goat is Godzilla with horns. Runs in terror from the Oregon duck.
The dashboard clock says 7:45 a.m. You turn to look at Olivia. Suddenly, Patrick’s panicked voice: “Oh, my - ‘
The sickening sound of metal on metal. The jarring impact. The eerie quiet ...
You wake up one morning and your world is in order. Then suddenly you’re at a hospital and Dr. Mary Budke is telling you something you can hardly comprehend. They’re dead: Patrick. Olivia. Runa. Just like that - gone.
Katie Barr tried to stay at Pleasant Hill. She returned two weeks after the accident. Returned after summer vacation.
But Oct. 10 was her last day. She wrote a letter for the school newspaper to explain why she was abruptly leaving the place she loved.
“Patrick and I had an ongoing dialogue about what makes a good teacher,” she wrote. “My reply was always that a good teacher is content, bringing experience, joy and hope to the classroom. I want to continue to be that teacher, but as it stands right now, I need to reclaim some of these qualities for myself.”
It is about the most difficult thing she’s ever done, she tells you later: leaving students who gave her a new black Lab, Elmo, and devoted a couple of weekends to fortifying her back yard so the dog wouldn’t escape. Leaving teachers and administrators who brought meals, lent shoulders to cry on and listened.
But Patrick McCurdy worked at the school, too. “I already miss him as a friend, as a husband and as the father of my daughter,” she says. “I can’t miss him one more way. I feel like half a person now. And I can’t be the teacher I want to be without finding that other half.”
So she’s selling her house. On Friday, Barr, 35, plans to get in her Subaru Outback with Elmo and head south to the San Francisco area to be with family. And after the holidays, who knows? Probably a Patrick-esque road trip east - no itinerary, just a quest for discovery in unexplored places, perhaps passing through Odaroloc, Sionilli and Wen Kroy en route. And maybe a return to Pleasant Hill come fall.
“Everything that means something to me is gone,” she says, “but the human spirit has some incredible ways of helping us cope. Patrick and Olivia and Runa gave me so much. Now I have to find those gifts again.”
And so you wake up one October morning and leave, not to forget what you’ve lost, but to remember what might be found.
Note from Welch, February 2008: Obviously, Katie found a lot. Not only a new purpose. A new husband. A new life that continually honors the people she left behind.
Posted by Bob Welch at 09:31 AM on Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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