All That Love Made Tangible

Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a hard time turning off my brain at night without watching a little television for some much needed alpha wave relief. I still do that, but modern television stories are so mind-numbingly vapid or alarmingly violent, that we rent older TV shows from Netflix, just to be reminded of what good writing is all about. We've gone through all of Six Feet Under, West Wing, and are just about wrapping up the early 90s masterpiece: Northern Exposure. Truly delightful stuff and really quite prescient about global climate change and gay marriage!

A few months ago while we were watching Season 3, there was an episode where Dr. Fleischman is awakened in the night by his windows rattling and a ghostliness swirling around his cabin. He is unnerved by it and learns that a previous tenant many, many years earlier had committed suicide in the house. So, the good and kind people of Cicely, Alaska decide to hold an exorcism, but Fleischman objects. He is reminded though that, without friendship there would be no one to mourn him if he passed away, like the poor soul haunting his house. So, he throws a barbecue for the town in a show of friendship. There were simultaneous storylines, as is the usual fare for Northern Exposure, and the episode ended with many of the town's people in Dr. Fleischman's living room posing for a group portrait. It was a scene of great support and love. This piece of music came on.

It was that scene of support and the music that tugged at me. We have that piece of music on our iPod (I have no idea where we got it). So, the next day, I turned it on to hear it again, and have been listening to it ever since. Bobby McFerrin wrote it as the score for the documentary: Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, which tells the story of the NAMES Project. That generous outpouring of love and remembrance, stitched together into a quilt that covered a fair distance along the Washington Mall. And that sound of Bobby McFerrin's voice singing something to us about those common threads. All those names. It occurred to me that the quilt is about all that love made tangible.
So, I am thinking of quilts, and am suddenly reminded of one of the last cards I sent my father while he was struggling with cancer at the end of his life. I had found it at my favorite hippie card shop (now defunct), Aries Arts, in Capitola. It was late 1991. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was the perfect card to send him. That beautifully painted scene of an old man wrapped in a quilt with all those loving scenes and memories patched together to keep him warm and comforted. It was just what I wanted to do, to wrap him in something that would heal and keep him whole. Something like love made tangible.
And then there is this quilt, the one sent to Roger just after his surgery last summer. A quilt made of patches sent from people we know and people we have never met. A wonderful friend, also someone we have never met, put these patches together. Wrapping it around us is like hearing those voices singing about common threads. Our hearts rise to the familiar sound, safe and comforted. We are warmed by this love made tangible.

But here's the really crazy and interesting thing about that Northern Exposure episode, Season 3, episode 17: Lost and Found. It aired on Monday, March 9, 1992, and would have been the last Northern Exposure my father could have ever watched, he died 5 days later. Life's beautiful common threads.

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On a very sad and somber note, Roger and I want to bid a farewell to a fellow blogger and Facebook friend, Jim Otterstrom. Jim's blog Earth Home Garden was one of the places Roger and I checked in on a very regular basis. We never met Jim, but we felt in him the deep sympatico of aging hippies and tribal connection. For five years we've held a long-distance conversation that ended on Saturday, January 22 when Jim died. We had a long cry over it and will raise our glasses in his honor. Perhaps we'll listen to Common Threads and know that life is really about love made tangible.