PETE is a combination of folks I've loved who died or were lost...he's a wonderful guy whose world is no longer in ours...I do very much miss those who have died before me. I'm not wild about this Death Business...this World is enough of heaven and hell for me...and it's not as great to be here when those I love aren't in sight....

PETE - World Gone By of Sunshines...Rains....


There is no sense to this. It's not about reality. It's about how the world comes to an end whenever some body dies. how it's not true for the rest of us. But. that one view of the world and the past and the present and the, also unreal, projection into the future. dies.
I wonder about such notions....

My friend Pete, my good friend who is dead for these two years now, is a great example of this line of questioning in my head....

Here's a bit of Pete's world...as I recall it, that is....others may tell you a different story....

Pete knew every thing there is to know about how to fix the world. he was a philosopher. a dreamer. and inventor. I used to watch him on his old wood shop machines. think about how they didn't have guards on them anywhere. how you could cut off a finger. which, in fact, Pete had, a few years back. his only comment at the time had been that it was lucky it wasn't a finger he actually needed. Pete considered himself a very lucky man.

He could bake bread. on account of, he had been a kid who volunteered toward the end of WW 1. They had put him into the Field Bakery. the shells would be whizzing by while he kneaded the dough to make the morning bread. he liked to say he was the last of the Dough Boys, because he had been a Dough Boy for sure. he still baked a loaf of very white bread, one a day.

Traditionalist. that would describe him. and Patriot would too. Especially in music. old songs. lots about America. his America, from way back... He played an old banjo that had never been worth much. now that he was dead, it was worth less, money-wise. only he could coax music out of that old hide. I had tried to learn on it. it sounded tinny when I plucked at it. in Pete's hands, it sounded like a trio on the TV. that good. Pete could play everything. blues. R and B. folk. jazz. anything before 1960. after that, he drew the line. The Decade The Music Died, he called it. well, there were hundreds of tunes before that. he knew them all by heart and hand...

Then, there were his gardening ways. traditional garden. lots of bug spray and herbicide spray and nitrogen spray, too. everything in rows so straight. plumb-lined them with chalk on the ground. all labeled. all weeded. all the time. watered overhead, 'the way God intended'....snails caught in beer saucers and dump all drunk to death into the compost the next morning. compost pile carefully tended. whole garden spic and span....tradition in the crops, of course....rows of carrots, string beans, sweet peas and shell peas. onions and radishes. ollala berries. raspberries. strawberries. potatoes. gladiolas. dahlias. roses. daisies. and a whole huge patch of saved Bantam Gold seeds of corn, dried on the cob in the wood shop. for the family Corn Feed late in the summer ahead....and, in the Greenhouse, orchids for his daughter...

The wood shop. he had never tired in the wood shop. he had been a Master of Wood since he had been a young lad. there were thousands of trees that had gladly given their warm and living trunks to Pete to cut into board feet for furniture and knick knacks and decks and porches and houses and doors and windows and lighthouses and boats and canoes. Pete could design and make everything with wood and he did. He milled and built and and designed and crafted four out of five days of the weeks for over seventy years....his hands were almost made of wood themselves, so close he was to woods...especially walnut and oak...

Sea Shanties. He recited and sang, a bit off key, Sea Shanties. He sang them to his grand daughter, who learned them all. He loved Gilbert and Sullivan too...especially the HMS Pinafore... he loved any songs about the sea. He loved everything about the sea and about boats...

He had been a nautical engineer...he built boats and parts of ships and propellers and hulls and masts. He built with the Sea Scouts and with cities and with the Navy during WW 2...he was happy building boats and repairing boats...he knew everything there was to know about boats and boat engines....

He had been raised on a island with a Lighthouse on it in the Bay where he lived. He knew all about the workings of The Light. how it functioned. how it was tended. how to keep all the glass clean. He knew how to keep a light house ship-shape in every way....he knew the birds of a Light Station. the loneliness. the beauty. the happiness of the work. tending the light. keeping the codes of a light house keeper. the log...
he knew the diaphone fog horn. the only man left on the coast of California who knew how to run it and maintain it and repair it. they video-taped him doing all the work needed to keep a diaphone fog horn going, so next generations could do it when he was gone some day. they held Fog Horn contests at the San Francisco County Fair (you heard me right) where people would get a day and night out at the Lighthouse in the Bay if they mimicked the fog horn sounds exactly right...

Pete got about a hundred folks interested enough to come and clamber onto an old whaling dinghy with him at least once a week, and go out into the harbor to the Lighthouse Island and refurbish every building inside and out, every piece of machinery, every bit of concrete, and every fence in sight. and, the diaphone fog horn. and, the entire Light itself...He led every work group and directed everyone until they dropped from exhaustion, at which point, he'd take the tiller and steer for home with his tired crew. He spearheaded the place becoming a Bed and Breakfast to maintain it's upkeep...in fact, its very existence....and he taught everyone which recipes to use to feed the people who paid good bucks to enjoy the little gem in the bay that he had created.....it's still there today...still thriving under his light....

Of course...this is only a list. a list of things he did....he cooked, for example, stuffed cabbages, when he had guests over for dinner...made divinity fudge that would make your mouth sing...he preserved berry jams and jellies from his garden....made 'abble skiver' dumplings with plum jam in them...what does that tell you about him? what kind of man was he, to do these things well?....

He had huge bar-be-cues in his back yard by the creek during the summer. especially on the Fourth of July. when he would also shoot off huge illegal fireworks up into the trees over the creek. thereby terrorizing all the neighbors and his guests....

What does that tell you about him?

He told poor but extremely funny jokes. many of them were politically incorrect. he did not go to church. when he got mad, he did not take God's name in vain, ever. he didn't tell jokes about God either. The Garden was his Church...when we would meet for pancakes, called "hotcakes" at seven in the morning on Sundays, we would eat, clear-up, and then he'd intone, "time for church! let us pray!"....and down to the wood shop or up to the garden we would go...to work!

He had loved his wife. who died mysteriously. he had loved many women before she died. after she died, he made friends with women. But she had been his everything... he was very, very kind to women. rarely judged women. put them mainly on pedestals of varying heights all of his life...was rarely upset with anything women did. considered them, even his own daughters, as being rather mysterious. not of this world in the same way men are...when younger, I had thought this old fashioned. the more I have known women over the years, the more I have come to believe and think as Pete did. he was right. besides, women, he had found, did not want anything but kindness and love. he knew how to give that with dignity and grace.He especially loved to have meals with women friends...any time...anywhere....right until the end of his days....

To be admitted, he was frugal about some things. about others, he was too generous...with his time, he was profligate. he always said yes to every request for help. to every invitation. to every one who would ask of him. He helped and taught and gave away to hundreds of people...and never made a fuss about it....

He had also, at one time, been a lithographer. a salesman. he had been a proud worker...then his work became unwanted and un-needed in the modern world. he lost his pride in work that took his creative edge away. Still, he worked and did his very best. and every one knew that. he was his own code of behavior. no boss could bully him into doing well. he did well, simply because that is what he always did. well as he could...

His relationship to men: business-like. He worked with men. He loved good workmen. Men who did not work were dismissed as "Bums". Color. Race. Religion. Politics. none of this mattered to him. the character of the man was all to him. A good man was a friend. A bad man was not...life on this level was simple for Pete.

He was a true Patriot. America was simply "right". the government was often wrong. Liberals werelsometimes wrong. Conservatives were rarely wrong. Wars were right if America was in them. Right for our side. foreigners, as a mass, were wrong. individual foreigners were often right. strident folk of all ilks were wrong. reasonable people were right...life on these levels was simple for Pete, as well....

Does this tell you of his world? If I tell you that he cried for a long time when any friend, especially a woman friend, died....would that help you to understand him? When I tell you that he built a gate for Dixie to come through into his garden, to make it easier for her to bridge the space between them, would that tell you who he was as a man? If you saw him picking flowers to take to the hostess who invited him to dinner, would you find that poignant? would it tell you what he was thinking as he arranged them in the nice vase? If I tell you that he longed for true love all of his days, would you think that strange, for such a practical man? a loyal man. beyond belief, loyal...

And the animals! all of them, he called "Bums"...but this time, with a fond look on his face. he spoiled every animal that came his way...he was mainly a dog man...when his dogs died over the years, he buried them in his garden with little headstones... when he took in all the dogs of the neighborhood for visits, would you think him soft? how about the raccoons he fed in his living room?....the feral cats?....

Cutting wood for the fire. pickaxing holes to plant his lilies...saving the bulbs for his dahlias and glads each fall, for the next Spring...keeping a place in his "dessert pouch" for sweets after meals...hanging off the very most frail branch to reach a piece of fruit...winding up the compost turning barrel he'd devised...rigging and jigging and whirly-gigging wood to do whatever design he had in his head...piloting any boat in any sea with no more fear than any water creature...crafting thousands of hard-wood pens on his lathe for the "fighting boys in Kuwait" well into his mid-nineties...if you saw any of these parts, how would you...how could you...tell of the Whole?....

Music was his soul. Sometimes his soul was sad, and he didn't play his banjo or sing then....most times, though, he listened and listened to music...music beat with his heart like a blood stream...he could not live without music.

These are the questions I think about...

when Pete died, every single thing I just told you about him died with him....so...

did that world come to an end? just that one world?.....

the workshop still stands, but hardly any one works there any more.
his banjo sits unplayed in his middle-daughter's living room.
the garden is not as it was when he was it's keeper. tho everyone works in it now and again.
the lighthouse Bread and Breakfast is still going strong...his Monday Morning Crew still goes out in the old whaler and keeps up its maintenance regularly.
his daughters and grand kids and his few male friends and his many women friends still recall him with much love...

But, you see, don't you? A whole world...a planet of huge proportions...died when he died.
Every thought he ever had. each feeling. all the wonderful things his hands had done. his bright and bonny mind and every idea. design. plan. reflexion...all the music in his head and hands. all the skill. gone....

Given all the rains he lived through....given all the suns that rose and set in his life...

where did he go?

where did his world go?....

I am given to wondering about such things.
Pete would say that people who analyzed life were always asking "wither do I wander?", but that really they were just "wandering while they withered!" he found that notion very, very amusing. he would always laugh at that thought. as he would at all of his jokes....!

It is an amusing thought....really....
I find my self giggling at that thought....and now...

laughing...really, really...

laughing!....