FRAGILE AND RESILIENT

Dear Spike:

The alumni magazine from Oregon State University came in the mail today. It’s typically a pretty skimpy publication, but I usually flip through it to see if any of my college friends are featured.

This edition included a story about the Beavers’ storied run to the 2007 College World Series baseball championship, another article about an OSU grad who produces the records of a rock band I like and a third feature about a new assistant football coach, Jay Locey, whom I covered when he was running the legendary Divison 3 program at Linfield College.

And so it was that, having spent quite a bit more time leafing through the pages than I normally would have, I ended up in the back of the magazine, reading the obituaries.

The first entry was a graduate from the Class of ‘23, Christmas Jean Tuttle Gaily, who boarded a train for Corvallis at the age of 16 and didn’t return until she’d graduated. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living graduate of OSU. She lived to be 105 years old.

One of the last names on the list was Sommer Nicole Chambers, from the Class of ‘02. She lived to be 29.

Sommer was my friend and, for a short time (right around the time your mother and I started dating) my housemate. We met for the first time on a snowy winter day, when she and two other animal rights protesters had locked themselves into small cages in front of the Memorial Union to protest the use of animal test subjects in the university’s science labs. I penned the story for the student newspaper.

Needless to say, we didn’t have a lot in common. She was a heavily tattooed anarchist who worked at a local animal shelter and was raising orphan raccoons in her garage. I was a midshipman in the U.S. Navy Reserve with a part-time job at the school paper.

Over the months, we got to know each other better as she tended the bar at the local coffee shop I frequented — mostly late at night — to read, study and write. After a while, she stopped kicking me out at closing time, I think because she felt better having someone around as she closed out the register, mopped the floors, cleaned out the sinks and locked the doors. I suppose that’s how I ended up in her rather limited circle of trust.

But as things often go, we fell out of contact shortly after graduation. I got married and began a career in the papers. She traveled the globe teaching English and working to promote western ideas about animal welfare, most recently in South Korea.

I didn’t feel surprised when I saw Sommer’s name in the back of the magazine tonight. She always seemed to be a shooting star. And I suppose that one condition of having a lot of friends and acquaintances in the military, in a time of war, is that you grow used to seeing familiar names in the obituaries — even those who would never have the first thing to do with the military.

But I did feel sad. And regretful. And guilty. In an era in which it has become so easy to keep in contact with far away friends, I’ve made a pitiful effort at doing so.

You’ll cross paths with many people in this life. And you can’t keep in touch with all of them — not in any sort of meaningful way, at least.

But do not allow those who are important to you to slip away. Like Sommer Chambers and Christmas Gaily, life is both fragile and resilient.

And so is friendship.

Love,
dad