Yellow Jacket Day

Trude "Junior" Gillman Now and Then

You know those days in the Fall when it’s warm enough to think about eating out on your deck or at the picnic table at work? And if you do, you are invariably bothered during your meal by a yellow-jacket looking for protein because he’s about to hibernate and he needs the calories. And the light is slanting low and golden as a glass of good bourbon and you’re reminiscing about Octobers in the past when you were picking out pumpkins for your kids to carve. And you can feel Winter right around the corner but there is time, just a little bit more time, before the cold comes. Yesterday was a day like that in Keyport, at the Whiskey Creek Cafe. I wish you could all have been there.

I was too early. I left my house way too soon, anxious to get to our CK Alumni lunch, the third I had attended since that wonderful 45th class reunion last summer. As I came down off the freeway, heading toward Keyport, I decided, in order not to look too anxious, I’d take a left turn at Scandia and see if there were any pumpkins in the fields, maybe take some pictures. There was a nice field at Scandia Farms and I drove in and almost drove into a passel of kids about the age of my next to youngest granddaughter, Alison, who were being toured around the farm, looking at the sheep and goats and, probably, the pumpkins. They were in no hurry to move out of my way so that I could park, so I watched the wonder and curiosity on their faces as they looked at the animals that were eating the grain laid down for them inches from their feet. Kids, just starting out in life, no more than four years old, with all of it still ahead of them. 12 years further on they would be in high school and 45 years after that they would be attending reunion lunches like I was going to do after I had parked and taken some Fall pictures of old stumps, that pumpkin field and a Halloween scarecrow against a tree.

After 15 minutes of snapping pictures I felt it was now the appropriate time to make my way into Keyport. To my surprise there were ten or more high school chums already milling around outside the cafe. I wasn’t the only one who was ready to start the delicious process of getting back in touch with old classmates. The first person I spied as I made my way to the group at the door was Joan Aaro. Immediately I was sped back to one of the most memorable vacations of my teenage years. It would be called a “stay-cation” now, because we went no further than Holly. Our family of 5 rented a cabin at Holly, right on the beach of Dabob Bay (?) for a week. This seemed the height of luxury to a 13 year old, about to start junior high school in the Fall. I had no idea what I was going to do that whole week, past bringing 4 or 5 books with me and intending to get a tan. I soon realized that there was a good-looking blond boy, my age or slightly older, staying with his family in a cabin just North toward the pier. My little brother, Stanley, was 2 years old and had started walking and he was my responsibility for part of each day. I brazenly used him to meet this boy, sending him up the beach as if he was running away from me, and then running to fetch him right when he got to where this blond boy was sitting. The blond boy was Bud Smart who lived in Seattle. He was glamorous in that “privileged and more sophisticated than me” sort of way and we had a short summer romance that week. But more important than Bud Smart was who I met because of Bud. Bud was Colin McGinnis’s cousin. Colin was another blond boy who in September would become one of my classmates in junior high. Because of that meeting in the summer at Holly, Colin and I began to “see” each other when school started that Fall and Bud had become a distant memory. And Joan, who I also met that summer, and who lived next door to Colin in Holly, became the person who passed notes to Colin for me. When you were in junior high in the 50s you did not date. You walked or stood in the halls together and you wrote notes to each other. That was about the extent of it. So Joan was our go-between. After Colin was no longer my boyfriend, Joan remained my friend. I enjoyed her down-to-earth sense of humor and it was great to see her, fundamentally unchanged, at the lunch in Keyport. In conversation yesterday, I found out that Joan bowls with my Aunt Billie, in her 90s and still slinging a bowling ball, at All Star Lanes. It is a very small world.

The rooms at the front of Whiskey Creek Cafe are dark with wood paneling, but the room we were in yesterday was called the Sunshine Room and it was bright with that rare Autumn sunlight we were lucky to be getting. The sunny room filled up fast with folks I’d seen at the first and second lunches, Linda Greaves, Vicki A.Holt, Linc David, Ralph Erickson, Dean Johnson, Joyia Mentor, Lavonna Rubens, Junior Gillman, Terry Scatena, Jim Peterson. One of the first newcomers who spotted me was my old friend from Madrigals and, after high school, The New World Chorale, Fred Graeff. Will anyone ever forget Fred’s classic car from the forties that he drove to cruise Graham’s Drive-in? Or his deep bass voice in choir? Or his crooked smile? It was terrific to see him and his pretty wife, Penny. I had sung next to Fred for so many years--it didn’t seem like it was that long ago since we had been learning and performing songs with Jack Unger and the other singers we grew so close to in those years. Fred and Penny told me about recent trips they had been taking to England, where Fred actually drove a car on the English side of the road. I had no idea he was that brave! We agreed that Jack (Mr. Unger!) had spoiled us for choral music and though we had both been in small groups since the chorale broke up in the late seventies, we had never found any group as satisfying.

Even though the majority of the people at the lunch had been at previous lunches, there were still some new/old faces. Several times I was asked and I asked, too, who that person was across the room or at the end of that table. One of those mystery faces belonged to Bob Lauck, now with a thick mane of silver hair, who told me he’d worked for many years with my Dad at Keyport, in Planning and Estimating. He remarked that he was surprised I’d “turned out so well” with a Dad like that. Apparently he’d had some experience with my Dad’s temper both at work and on the golf course. I assured him that Dad mellowed out a bit after he retired from work. I’d speculate that we’ve all mellowed out a little since we’ve retired.

Another face that wasn’t immediately recognizable belonged to Terrie Baughman, who is a tall, attractive woman who has left her gangliness behind and has that height and elegance all of us short women admire. She told me she’d been reading my blog and wasn’t the first to ask how my Mom was doing. One woman I have to look up in the old Echo is Dewene Buffet. I remember her name but I never could find the classmate face in the face I saw yesterday. She has silver hair like most of the rest of us, a bright, sunny face and a cheerful manner and she left before I got a picture of her or got to talk to her. I hope she comes to the next lunch so I can find out who she is now. Right behind Terrie came Sharon Briggs, who looked just the same to me. I can’t wait until the next lunch to find out what it’s like to get up at 12:15 a.m. to go to work in the bakery at Fred Meyer.

A pesky, hungry yellow-jacket intruded on our golden day, buzzing around Sharon Briggs’ head as if he knew that she was allergic to bees. Joan Aaro had been telling me about the salsa she cans in large quantities every summer but beat feet when she saw that bee. She, too, is allergic. But the bee let us enjoy ourselves for several hours before he intruded and after all, bees have to eat, too.

This lunch was different than the first for me in the sense that I didn’t have to figure out who all those not quite strangers were. It wasn’t a puzzle that needed solving. It was a joy to see those I’d seen at the previous lunches and a surprise to see the new faces. These lunches are rapidly becoming one of my favorite things to do.

At the end of the Presidential Debate on Tuesday night Tom Brokaw prefaced the last question with, “This is a bit of a Zen question from an email we received”. He continued with the question: “What don’t you know, and how are you going to learn it?” Neither one of the candidates answered that question very well, but I’ll take a stab. What I don’t know is how Lavonna Rubens has stayed married to the same man for 45 years. I don’t know how Ralph Erickson keeps up with all the email he’s been getting from all of us. I don’t know if John Sleasman is as happy as his perpetual grin indicates. I don’t know when Linc David started riding a Harley. There is so much I don’t know about these people and I want to know all about them. How am I going to learn? I’m going to go to every lunch I can and I’m going to ask! I hope you’ll be there.