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The Coolest Instrument | The Waltons | To Publish, Redefined
Freedom Can’t Protect Itself | UO Alumni Calendar | Duck Tales: The Best Laid Plans
The Coolest Instrument
Douglas Jenkins and a crew of Portland cellists create truly alternative music.
TARINA WESTLUNDOne day not long after he arrived at the UO as a freshman in 1994, Douglas Jenkins ’98 needed cash. He headed to Eugene’s Buy and Sell Music Center to sell a vintage 1964 Fender amplifier, and spotted a relatively inexpensive cello. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Jenkins had never played a cello, but “I knew it was the coolest instrument in the orchestra.” Classical music echoed through his childhood home on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, out of the radio and from his father’s Tchaikovsky records. It provided a refuge for the scrawny kid who felt like a misfit in Hawaii. “I was the haole guy who’s really skinny and never fit in,” he remembers. “So I grew my hair long and hung out with the punk rock kids. But I didn’t fit in with them either. I wanted something more intellectual. [Classical music] was an escape, but I also truly loved it. I was enraptured.”
So when he spotted that surprisingly affordable cello, Jenkins decided to trade the amp for it. Accustomed to teaching himself to play instruments, he picked up some used instruction books—but after a few months of sawing away on his first bowed instrument, it was obvious he needed help. He turned to the University, heading to the UO’s Community Music Institute, which offers music instruction to children in the Eugene area. The staff there pointed him toward CMI’s director, Sylvie Spengler—who happened to be the Eugene Symphony’s principal cellist. In 1995, Jenkins tried playing for her one of the famous J. S. Bach solo cello suites.
“Doug was very determined to play the cello and it was very charming,” Spengler recalls. “He was able to teach himself, and he obviously had talent.” He also desperately needed proper instruction.
Most of Spengler’s students were children, as young as eight, and the older ones generally had years of playing behind them. But touched by his eagerness and resolve, she agreed to give Jenkins private lessons, teaching him proper posture and other rudiments—starting with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
“He was so determined and enthusiastic about learning the cello that when he couldn’t afford lessons, we would work out some trade,” says Spengler, who also gave him her complimentary ticket to symphony concerts and wound up renting him a room in her house.
Along with studying for his bachelor’s degree in English, he spent his undergraduate years practicing cello, learning how to write arrangements from orchestration textbooks, and studying basic music theo-ry. He also learned by doing—in public, applying his lessons to scores for “crazy experimental films,” playing in rock bands, even composing a surprisingly effective two-cello score for himself and his strict yet generous teacher to perform as live accompaniment to a 1920s silent film, Sunrise, at a UO Cultural Forum film series event.
Following his graduation, Jenkins studied with UO cello professor Steven Pologe for a year, then moved home to Honolulu and enrolled in graduate school there. But he wasn’t happy, he confided to Pologe during a visit to Eugene. Then why, his old teacher asked Jenkins, was he going to graduate school? At this stage, if Jenkins wanted to play in an orchestra, Pologe said, he just needed to practice and take auditions—a graduate degree wouldn‘t help him get such a job.
His teacher’s advice struck home and made Jenkins wonder if an orchestra job was really what he wanted anyway.
Jenkins eventually returned to the mainland and earned a master’s degree in education from Portland’s Lewis and Clark College, then began teaching English in Lebanon, Oregon—a nonmusic job that provided needed balance to his hours of self-guided cello practice. He found an apartment in a farmhouse that would let him practice all night without disturbing anyone. Now he just needed to figure out what he was practicing for.
A few days after Jenkins took a teaching job at a Portland high school in 2004, a chance encounter with an old bandmate from Eugene, Dan Enberg ’01, ’09, led to their forming an ensemble, Bright Red Paper, committed to playing their own sounds. Jenkins was back in the music world—on his own terms.
The band played improvisational, cello-driven rock, winning raves from Portland’s music press. Eventually growing into a guitar-bass-drum-vocals-cello quintet, the band wound up touring nationally.
But just when BRP seemed poised on the brink of a breakthrough, Jenkins was invited to join a start-up side project by another cellist, who wanted a band where cellists could play together for fun. The group included the now-renowned solo cellist Zoe Keating and a couple other veteran cellists who’d ventured beyond classical boundaries. In October 2006, nine of them performed in a Portland bar, Doug Fir Lounge. The show drew 200 fans, entirely by word of mouth, because the press couldn’t figure out how to cover an unknown band of cellists that played classical music—Handel, Vivaldi, Villa-Lobos.
After the founder of what was now officially dubbed the Portland Cello Project left the city a few months later, Jenkins (who had experience with booking and publicity via BRP) took over. Members of the city’s burgeoning indie rock scene started sitting in, and collaborations grew as quickly as Jenkins could cook up arrangements of songs by everyone from some of Portland’s best indie musicians to Britney Spears (“Toxic”), Beethoven, Michael Jackson, and others. The ensemble gained broad exposure when Portland’s Dandy Warhols invited PCP to join them for a studio session at Southern California’s influential KCRW radio. Portland Cello Project played to all of Jenkins’s lifelong strengths—his do-it-yourself attitude (rather than relying on institutions) and his love of both classical and pop music. Now he wouldn’t have to choose between them.
PCP’s ascent in the five years since its founding belies any notion that the ensemble’s success may be due to its novelty alone. The band’s first CD, released in 2009, consisted entirely of collaborations with pop musicians. Its roster of partners includes Peter, Paul, and Mary’s Peter Yarrow, Sleater-Kinney indie queen Corin Tucker, and many more.
PCP’s tour last winter took the cellists to New York, Calgary, Montana, Idaho, Baton Rouge, and beyond. Now a licensed LLC business, the group faces the same challenges any touring band does—dealing with club owners, tight margins, and so on. Continuing his lifelong DIY inclinations, Jenkins still does most of the management and publicity himself, and the band has invested in a touring van large enough to hold the players and their cellos (that require purchase of an extra seat on airplanes) and now stays two to a room in “nice” hotels, he says. Last summer’s tour actually made a little money—an unprecedented outcome that told Jenkins that the band had really made it as a professional ensemble, although none of the twenty cellists on his roster (they usually tour with six to eight) has yet quit a day job. Jenkins says he reinvests half his take in the band, and continues to teach English when possible at a Portland high school.
Now thirty-five, Jenkins maintains his connections with Eugene, taking occasional lessons from “my mainland mom” Spengler. Portland Cello Project performed this summer at the UO’s Oregon Bach Festival. “It was such an honor to have been invited,” he says, and he celebrated the occasion by scoring out a flurry of fugues drawn from hip-hop music, which the band performed in an all-acoustic show in the Hult Center lobby. And he got to see every cellist’s hero, Yo-Yo Ma, again. They also played at the annual Art and the Vineyard outdoor festival, synchronizing their version of “America the Beautiful” to the July 4 fireworks display.
“That’s the best thing about Portland Cello Project,” Jenkins says. “We’re lucky enough to play serious music at the Bach Festival, and then play completely different crazy pop shows at clubs. It’s the best of all worlds, for sure.”
In the fifteen years since buying that first cello, the skinny kid from Hawaii is approaching rock star status. The group releases its fourth CD, which will be split between hip-hop tracks and music by classical composers such as J. S. Bach and Lili Boulanger, next spring.
—Brett Campbell, MS ’96
The Waltons
Memorial to a UO founder and his family to be preserved in granite.
When Judge Joshua Jones Walton Jr. was buried on December 23, 1909, the entire rolling stock of the Eugene street railway line was needed to convey the crowd of mourners following his coffin to the cemetery. Deemed by the Daily Guard as “one of the largest funerals ever held in Eugene,” Walton’s service included a number of leading locals including University president Prince Lucien Campbell as pallbearer. A pioneer, a lawyer, and a UO founding father, Walton lived for seventy-one years, fifty-one of which he spent in Eugene earning a reputation as one of the state’s most highly respected citizens. Now, more than a century after his death, the monument standing sentinel over the graves of the judge and his family crumbles into ruins, held up by nothing more than duct tape and the good intentions of a few community members.
The word territory still tailed Oregon’s name and Eugene wasn’t yet a city when the Waltons arrived out West. The eldest of eight children, Walton was born in Rushville, Indiana, to Joshua Jones Sr. and Ann Shockley (whose first cousin, the family claims, was the soon-to-be famous Confederate general Robert E. Lee). Walton was just eleven when his family left all they knew to travel 2,200 miles on the first gold-dusted surge of western migration. The family’s pioneer past would be fundamental to their legacy; one of the few engravings still visible on the Walton obelisk reads “crossed the plains with ox team 1849.”
Their hardscrabble journey into the unknown included giving birth along the trail (Walton’s sister Amanda was born in Humboldt County, California, at the end of the family’s westward trek) and surviving the opening blows of the Rogue River Wars. Driven north by the carnage, the family settled in Eugene in 1858, where Walton began reading law and joined the city’s bar association. In the decades to come, he moved between positions of power, serving as a deputy district attorney, U.S. land commissioner, and state legislator. He also became a judge, a position that made his name well known throughout Lane County. When Route 126 opened up the county’s western edge, the then-new town of Walton took its name from the notable local.
Walton’s best move, however, came later when he claimed the University of Oregon for Eugene. He was instrumental in convincing the Oregon legislature to choose not Salem, not Portland, but the lesser-known, lesser-populated Eugene for the location of the state’s flagship university. He smoothed flared tempers as the community strained to raise the school’s seed money ($50,000, equal to about $900,000 today). When even that large sum wasn’t enough, the judge, cemetery lore holds, left his chambers to go door-to-door seeking donations. He took anything, from chickens to bushels of wheat, that could be bartered for the funds needed to complete the UO’s first building. With Walton’s support, the city rallied and Deady Hall got its roof.
For thirty more years, Walton continued to watch over the school as a member of the Board of Regents. He also saw two of his own children attend the UO. Daughter Ada began classes the first day the school opened, eventually earning her degree in 1885. Walton’s youngest child, Pauline, graduated in 1906 and spent twenty-five years working with the University library. She was the only one of her father’s children to see his service to the UO formally recognized in 1957 when his name was chosen for the school’s new residence hall. In the ensuing five decades, more than 30,000 new Ducks have called the Walton Complex home.
The family’s own residence also has its part in Eugene history. Driving along Franklin Boulevard, generations of people have passed by what was, first, the Walton homestead, then, for decades, Moreno’s Mexican Restaurant, and most recently, Bates Steak House and Saloon. When Walton owned the land, orchards covered it and a water tower rose roughly where the U.S. District Courthouse stands today. The Waltons called 433 East Broadway home for almost a hundred years until daughter Pauline sold the house shortly before her death in 1966.
Pauline was the last Walton to join the family plot in the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery, where the judge had been laid to rest fifty-seven years earlier. Bordered on three sides by the UO campus, the cemetery’s sixteen acres are maintained by the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association (EPCA) with the Walton memorial standing just off its center square. To keep stone pieces from falling on to passersby, the EPCA elected to mummify the memorial in duct tape. The unsightly result raised much concern in citizens who contacted the EPCA fearing the historic site had been vandalized. By the end of 2012, the association plans to do away with the tape and replace the obelisk.
“The original monument was made of sandstone from the old Eugene quarry,” says EPCA member Dorothy Brandner. “That type of stone erodes very quickly so it makes more sense to simply build a new monument using granite.”
This heartier material, EPCA members hope, will keep the memorial as much a part of Oregon history as is the family it honors.
—Elisabeth Kramer
To Publish, Redefined
A poetry press rooted in the Willamette Valley is not your typical publishing house.
The way every season contains the next
and foreshadows it.
The yellow leaves in the summer green.
The shining branch, deep in the heart of the tree.
— Chris Anderson, from “The Watchful Tree,”
The Next Thing Always Belongs
In the living room of a house in the eastern foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range, the seven staff members of Airlie Press are holding their monthly meeting, beginning with bread and soup from the garden outside. It’s July, and poetry, per se, is out of season. This day’s discussion is all business: sales figures, donor thank-yous, grant applications, social marketing. Cecelia Hagen, MFA ’76, passes out copies of the press kit she has prepared, promoting her own and Chris Anderson’s forthcoming poetry collections. Not until September will the group begin editing the manuscript set for fall 2012 release—that of Salem poet Stephanie Lenox, who has just updated the group on the status of the press’s e-newsletter.
But back to this year’s titles: where to have the launch party? The Corvallis public library? Wrong vibe, and you can’t serve food, Donna Henderson notes. The Catholic church? Too churchy, says Anderson, a Catholic deacon, but the Unitarian church might work. The Corvallis Arts Center? Someone makes a note to check.
Airlie Press, clearly, is not your typical publishing house. It’s a poetry publishing collective, one of only a handful in the country. It exists solely by the sweat and passion of the poets themselves, publishing beautiful books by fine Oregon poets without losing money. Not an easy trick.
First of all, you sleep too much. You never suffer
bouts of insomnia, waking aghast in the soundless dark
in dread of your impending death. Furthermore
you hate to sit . . . If you strive for anything at all
it’s for happiness—and who wants to hear daily updates
from the land of the blissfully contented?
— Jessica Lamb, from “Denial of the Minor Poet’s
Petition for a Change in Stature,” Last Apples of Late Empires
In 1973, a handful of poets in the Boston area founded a regional, nonprofit collective press, Alice James Books, designed to involve authors in the publishing process. Its success inspired the founding of a similar collective—Sixteen Rivers Press—in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1999. In 2007, four Willamette Valley poets decided to follow the Sixteen Rivers model, pooling their resources and launching their own collective press. Between individual book sales, subscription orders, and donations, Airlie has so far managed to achieve its goal: publish one or two collections by Oregon poets each year without losing money or costing the poet anything other than time.
In poetry, making money is rarely part of the equation. Poets never quit their day jobs.
How the press works: Each poet whose work is accepted for publication agrees to participate in the work of the press for three years. Meaning, participate in the call for manuscripts and the manuscript vetting, the editing, the design discussions, the marketing and publicity—everything required to publish and promote a book.
“It’s kind of daunting,” says Hagen. She joined Airlie Press in 2010, and her collection Entering was published in fall 2011. She was on the staff of the UO’s Northwest Review from 1982 to 1990, but Airlie Press has been an education nonetheless. “Poets are not very business-oriented,” she says, “and there are a lot of details, and there’s that loner mentality. . . .”
“I mean, we’re all poets—we don’t have MBAs!” says Anderson, an English professor at Oregon State University for twenty-five years, whose The Next Thing Always Belongs was also released this fall. “I had not written a receipt since I worked at Sears when I was eighteen.” But someone at the press had to take charge of the website, and he was it. “I’ve actually become moderately competent at content management,” he says, just a little smug.
Crack a sentence open and you will have an adoration of mountains
at dusk, you will have a dim day-line under the sunset,
like a decoration at the bottom of a lampshade.
— Anita Sullivan, from “About Sunset,”
Garden of Beasts
Airlie Press has not gone unnoticed. The Eddy Fence was a finalist—one of five selected from among nearly fifty poetry nominees—for the 2011 Oregon Book Awards. It was also a finalist for da Vinci Eye honors for superior cover artwork from the Eric Hoffer Award, a nationwide competition for short prose and independent books; credit there goes to Cheryl McLean, MA ’85, of Corvallis, who has designed all of Airlie Press’s books, and Monmouth artist Richard Bunse for his watercolor “Black Rock.” Both The Eddy Fence and Last Apples of Late Empires were reviewed in the literary review Poetry Flash, and Valparaiso Poetry Review listed both Out of Refusal and Garden of Beasts as recommended books.
Paulann Petersen, Oregon’s poet laureate, is a member of Airlie Press’s advisory board and a fervent champion. “Oregon is a state replete with good working poets, remarkably so,” she says, but given current conditions, getting a full-length manuscript of poems published is tough. “By limiting its boundaries to the Willamette Valley, and by setting high standards for the poetry that will appear on its pages,” she says, Airlie Press “guarantees that one or two more excellent collections from Oregon poets will get published each year”—filling what she calls an “achingly empty space.”
Airlie Press exclusively publishes work by Willamette Valley poets for one simple reason: That’s where the work gets done. Though there’s plenty of e-mailing between meetings, members of the collective gather at the same spot in the middle of the valley, in person, every month, all year long. Jessica Lamb of Portland currently represents the collective’s north pole, Carter McKenzie of Dexter the south pole.
As for the name, the genesis of the press was a poetry group that had been meeting for several years at Henderson’s house—a quiet spot west of Highway 99W roughly equidistant from Portland and Eugene, a mile off Airlie Road, next door to Airlie Winery, near where Scotland’s Earl of Airlie owned a railroad terminus in the 1800s. Her house became the press’s meeting place, too, and the name seemed a natural. Airlie, it seems, is derived from the Old English hoer, for rocks, and leah, for a fenced enclosure. A farm by the rocks: a place of arduous, honest work. Not unlike poetry-making.
The only way to begin
is to pick up the brush
and paint what’s out there,
starting to coat white paper
with the invisible sheen of water.
— Cecelia Hagen, from “What’s
Out There,” Entering
The three-year commitment of the original four members has long since ended. But as of this writing, none of the four plans to leave the collective, not yet. “I want to feel that I’m still making a contribution,” says Anita Sullivan, whose Garden of Beasts was published in 2010. “It’s obviously a lot more than the ego trip of just getting your book published.”
“There’s this moment for poetry right now,” Hagen adds. “As publishing houses get swallowed up and get bigger, it creates spaces for these smaller, more innovative things. I’ve done a lot of volunteer writing stuff—Northwest Review, other things—but this is fun. It’s a lot of work, but it’s work you like to do.”
Says Sullivan, with an apologetic grin: “I think it is a little addictive.”
—Bonnie Henderson ’79, MA ’85
Freedom Can’t Protect Itself
Duck takes top job with the Nevada ACLU.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it was that convinced Dane Claussen ’84 to join the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) some thirty-two years ago.
As a budding journalist at Crescent Valley High School in Corvallis, Clausen likely had his interest kindled by curiosity over the First Amendment rights of students. At the same time, the ACLU was very much in the news, a target of national attention over its controversial opposition to efforts to outlaw neo-Nazi parades in Skokie, Illinois. The ACLU saw the matter as a free speech issue—a position later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although the Skokie case certainly wasn’t the primary reason he joined the ACLU, Claussen, forty-eight, has long supported the organization’s willingness to do just what it did—wade deep into the public fight to support constitutionally protected free speech and expression.
This year, Claussen went back to his roots, philosophically speaking. He took his thirty-two-year-old ACLU membership to a new level, leaving a tenured teaching position as chair of faculty at the School of Communication at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to become executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.
“Over the years I’ve been a member, I haven’t always agreed with all the positions the organization has taken—I don’t know that every member does. But the ACLU takes so many important positions on such a wide range of issues,” Claussen says. “It’s the diversity of those issues that I’m interested in.”
You want issues? He’s got issues. Racial justice. Religious freedom. Police practices. Voting rights. Criminal justice. Open government. Free speech. Privacy rights. Education. With the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights as a guide, the organization works to protect individual rights and civil liberties through legislation, litigation, and community education.
And though it may seem a considerable and unusual career leap, Claussen has found the move to be a good fit. As a journalist and educator—his primary focus was media law and regulation, with a First Amendment emphasis—he’s no stranger to public service and the political arena.
Born in Salem, the fifth-generation Northwesterner was raised in a home where politics were a fact of life. “My parents were working on Mark Hatfield’s campaign back in the 1950s,” he recalls.
Growing up, an early love for history found root in what would become a lifelong passion for stamp collecting. While in high school, Claussen was already writing columns on the subject. He would go on to edit two of the world’s largest magazines on stamp collecting, serve as president of the American Philatelic Society Writers Unit #30, and eventually be elected a Fellow of the Royal Philatelic Society in London.
He arrived at the UO in the early 1980s determined to become a journalist. He quickly found his way to a job at the Oregon Daily Emerald, serving—during his freshman year—as associate editor on the student government beat.
Frustrated with the lack of divergent perspectives being expressed on campus issues, Claussen would eventually help found the Oregon Commentator, launched in October 1983 as “a conservative journal of opinion.”
“There was a certain amount of ‘stick-it-in-the-eye-of-the-Emerald’ spirit,” he chuckles. “The ODE was the only student media on campus, really. So the paper loomed large on campus in framing things and setting the agenda.”
The Commentator was housed in an office at the EMU that was “honest to God, probably the size of a large closet,” and Claussen paid production costs for the first issue out of his own pocket. The experience was fun and exhausting, exhilarating and humbling. And it was a remarkable classroom all its own.
“At the time, and since, I think it was important to have an alternative on campus, to be part of that voice,” he says. “I’m glad that I did it.” And that voice has continued; By the Barrel: 25 Years of the Oregon Commentator was recently published (see “Beware the Underdog,” in the Spring 2010 Oregon Quarterly).
Following graduation, Claussen earned an MBA in corporate finance and labor relations from the University of Chicago, followed by several years spent editing and publishing community newspapers and newsweeklies as well as business and trade magazines.
“One thing I’ve always told people about journalism is don’t get too excited about getting a job at a big daily—you’ll be a small cog in a big wheel. The smaller the medium, the more diversity, variety, experience, and responsibility you’ll get,” he says.
Claussen went on to earn an MS degree in mass communications from Kansas State University and a PhD in mass communication from the University of Georgia, launching a solid academic career.
But after more than a decade of teaching on the college level, he found that he was ready for something new, the next big challenge.
“Certainly, I had accomplished a lot of what I’d wanted to accomplish,” Claussen says. “It was a huge step in my life to resign a tenured full professor’s position. There were a lot of considerations.
“After all these years as a member of the ACLU, I guess you could just say I’m finally putting my mouth where my money is,” he adds.
With his new job, Claussen moved from the editorial sidelines squarely into a role as public watchdog, advocate, and legislative lobbyist. Suddenly he was in the center of some of the state’s stickiest hot-button issues.
It was exactly what he’d hoped for.
“The Nevada state legislature meets only once every two years, starting in early February,” he recalls. “We were reading every bill that was of even potential interest.”
Within weeks of starting the job early this year, Claussen had become a legislative lobbyist. A talented and knowledgeable staff helped ease the way. In journalism, you frame the news. Now, he was making it.
There were pleasant surprises—the ACLU was geared up to fight a number of anti-immigration bills that were introduced, which never even got hearings. The Nevada Legislature also passed several bills that extended nondiscrimination protections to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community.
And there were disappointments. An effort to impose a two-year moratorium on the death penalty never got off the ground. Even a proposed study to examine the costs of implementing the death penalty in Nevada was vetoed by Governor Brian Sandoval.
Then there was the work that might seem, well, somewhat unique to the region. The rights of celebrity impersonators to work on Las Vegas sidewalks. The rights of visitors attending the Burning Man festival. Simplifying the state’s complex rules for the restoration of voting rights for felons who have completed their criminal sentence—a system so complicated and cumbersome that many county clerks can’t even understand it, Claussen says.
As in journalism, the ACLU presents different challenges, fresh issues every day. And that appeals to Claussen.
“Sometimes, you have to convince yourself and others that there is more to Las Vegas than just the strip—there are real people, real lives. Teachers, truck drivers, and dentists. It’s not just all blackjack dealers.”
Every day, Claussen knows that he is doing work that matters. And it is good to be back on familiar ground.
“I know the West. I understand the West,” he explains. “I understand the constituencies of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians that you can find throughout the West, and most of them are very strong. To know something about the history and the people and the politics of the West, that’s all very helpful. If I’d taken an executive director’s job in Arkansas, I might go years before I understood the place.”
—Kimber Williams, MS ’95
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
November 3–19
Civil War blood drive
Statewide
November 15
Duck Biz Networking Lunch
Seattle, Washington
December 10
Chapter holiday party and scholarship fundraiser
Washington, D.C.
February 24
Chapter scholarship fundraiser
Honolulu, Hawaii
April 2012 (TBA)
President’s reception
Washington, D.C.
The Best Laid Plans
A pair of surprises for a quarter-century celebration
Every fall the same ten friends attend the fiercest rivalry in the Pac-12, the Oregon Ducks vs. the Washington Huskies. I’m a Duck, my husband Jim’s a Husky, the eight friends are a mix, and we have plenty of time on the train from Seattle to Eugene to trade team jabs and predict the score. In Eugene, we take over a bed and breakfast, and 2010 was no different, except that the Sunday after the game was our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. In a postgame coma and on a train all day back to Seattle, we knew the last thing we’d feel like doing was celebrating the milestone when we got home. So we arranged to fly from Eugene to Phoenix and steal a few days of sunshine.
Initially it seemed possible to pack for both trips—the damp chill of Eugene’s Autzen Stadium and the seventies predicted in Arizona. We could send our game clothes home with friends and desert garb doesn’t take up much room. When we started to consider what we’d really need in both places, however, packing seemed more complicated. But our daughter volunteered to do a bag swap at SeaTac airport, where we had a layover for two hours anyway.
The previous spring, Jim and I had flown to San Francisco for a getaway weekend and spent our last morning at that city’s Museum of Modern Art. We’d been there once before, when it first opened, and, as designers, admired the building as much as the art. We meandered through the gift shop on our way out as we always do, rarely buying anything but appreciating the well-designed merchandise.
On shelves backlit by a strong sun, an acrylic sculpture caught Jim’s eye. The artist was Vasa, known for his small acrylic cubes. But this was larger, maybe ten inches tall, a monolith made up of planes of blue, red, yellow, and green. There were two others—an arch in orange and a pyramid in green—but it was the monolith and its deep cobalt blue that attracted him. On the plane home from San Francisco, I realized it was a perfect anniversary gift and I was smugly proud that I had six months to spare.
But going home from that trip meant picking up our regular life—work, writing, dinners with friends—and the sculpture was forgotten. Two months passed before I made the time to call the gift shop. All three of the sculptures in the window were gone. Where could I get one? The saleswoman suggested two other contemporary museums. No luck. I checked eBay and found Vasa’s work, but not the monolith. Summer passed and I occasionally checked some websites, each time kicking myself for not calling the museum sooner. Then in September I hit the jackpot, finding the number and address for his studio in Los Angeles. I e-mailed. Vasa himself e-mailed back. He gave me an assistant to work with, and she sent a photo of the piece to assure we were discussing the same thing. I sent the check and had the sculpture mailed to a neighbor, so Jim wouldn’t see the package. I was excited and relieved.
As they had for years, the Oregon Ducks won the match-up last year—53–16. Sunday morning in Eugene, Jim and I woke to an early alarm because we had to catch our plane to Phoenix. The monolith was in a padded case in the bag my daughter would hand off to me at SeaTac. Jim turned the light on in our room and handed me a wrapped gift.
“I thought we were doing presents tonight,” I said, because we had reservations at a special place on Camelback Mountain.
“I know, I just want to do it now.”
The package was rectangular and sharp-edged. Heavy, too, and though I couldn’t believe it, I knew what it was. The monolith. For a wild minute or two, my heart lowered into my stomach and I was filled with disappointment, all the while giving him my best attempts at being pleased and surprised. But then I realized how fitting it was that we’d chosen the same gift for this memorable anniversary. At the time we got married, out of the thousands of wedding cards in the world, we’d both—on our own—selected the same one to give each other.
I didn’t let on to Jim about my gift, just carted my new monolith carefully to breakfast to show it off. At SeaTac, our daughter dutifully showed up for the luggage swap. One acrylic monolith went back with her, one joined me on the plane to Phoenix, disguised in its zippered bag.
Dinner that night, to say the least, included a second big surprise.
Martha Clarkson manages workplace design for Microsoft. She is also a poet and fiction writer, and recipient of a Washington State Poets William Stafford Award and a Pushcart nomination. Her work is listed under “Notable Stories” in Best American Nonrequired Readings for 2007 and 2009. She is the poetry editor for Word Riot.
