Barbara went to
Gonzaga and while Tom and I met there and became friends I didn't know her in our college years. It was
only after Tom and I made a couple of birding trips to Southeast Arizona
in 1985 and 1986 and recruited our Bay Area friends for bird trips to
Arizona and beyond that Tom persuaded Barbara to join us on these trips. Barbara's
presence among our group of disparate personalities had a wonderful
effect on us, individually and as a community.
I'm particularly
remembering our big trip to Namibia, where our friend and birder Donna
Kay was in charge of an AID education project. We had arrived in
Windhoek and our lodgings at the hillside inn Palmquelle, owned by a
family of Austrian expatriates. Fritz, the rotund and jovial host, was
showing us his impressive and musty wine cellar, and I made some kind of
smart-ass remark that made everyone cringe. But right on the heels of
my untoward words came the most appropriately skewering and funny
response from Barbara, that left us all smiling and at ease.
Barbara's
quick and rapier wit in defense of friendship and mutual support was
held at the ready for defense of our group's cooperative and
affectionate spirit. But Barbara's overarching contribution, as I feel
it, was her very essence of quiet friendship and support for each one of
us and all of us that accompanied us like an atmospheric aura as we
birded, or teamed up for preparing meals, or whatever we were doing
together. Her
quiet presence is part of my memory of our times at Cave Creek Ranch at
the foot of the Chiricahuas, where we looked up at the cathedral rose
rocks and blue sky, and hiked the creek for the trogon and
sulphur-bellied flycatcher and Arizona woodpecker. Barbara seemed to
absorb the natural surroundings in a kind of meditation as we hiked. To
my mind, she had a real spiritual appreciation of nature.
She
was a great team player and helpful in our travels. We made a big
driving trek through the Mexican state of Veracruz; and she and Tom and I
had a wonderful drive from Portland to Yellowstone to join our Bay Area
friends in a celebration of the buffalo, the grizzlies and wolves, and
the park itself as a national effort to acknowledge our human
responsibility toward nature.
Barbara
and Tom are also inspiring to me for their love of music. I believe
that brother and sister encouraged each other's love of music--Tom, who
listened, and Barbara, the artist, who played and practiced so
diligently and developed a society of artists like her who could play
piano and listen to one another. Barbara got us twice to Portland for
the Bach Cantata Choir's Christmas concert, a peak music experience for
me, for which I'm deeply thankful. Those were thrilling performances,
and I could see that Barbara was in her element.
But
Barbara as host for get-togethers at her beautiful house gives me the
warmest memories! Gathering in Barbara's kitchen, and around her dining
table, with a couple of different noble Oregon pinots from her cellar
and salmon on the menu. I just loved the camaraderie she inspired.
There would be Tom and Barbara's childhood friend Ed; Pat Mohr, Tom's
friend whom Barbara was close to; and us from the Bay Area, Audrey and
Dave, Donna Kay--those were wonderful moments when you could feel our
friendship for one another. Including Henry! And in the front garden,
which we could see through the big window in the dining area, there were
the finches, and the sparrows, and the Bewick's wren, at the feeders
amid well selected and nurtured native plants. And in the living room, a
grand piano, waiting for a gathering of another of Barbara's family of
friends, who shared Barbara's love of playing.
Those
dinners at Barbara's were the culmination of many weekend visits by the
Bay Area contingent, for concerts, for bird walks in the Sandy Delta,
Oaks Bottoms or Sauvies Island; and, for many years to march with Tom's
friend Pat Mohr's MS fund-raising team, Mohr Strength, along the
Willamette (followed by oysters and pinot gris at Dan & Louis').
But
my favorite memories are the two or three times Barbara and Tom and I,
just the three of us, went to Caffe Mingo, a quiet Italian restaurant in
Northwest, and sat peacefully in a quiet corner and talked as the
spirit moved us, about family and music, the trips we made, politics,
fate, or nothing at all, and over some great Italian food and wine, we
simply enjoyed the peace of each other's company; the conversations
could have gone on forever.
