The House with the Weeping Willow on East 32nd St.: Part I

Parking-Lot Autocross on a Sunday in July, 1968; me in 356A

Early Spring, early 1970s, by the apple tree

I'm not sure precisely when I got the house of East 32nd Street in Eugene, OR. I simply began looking for houses in the Classified Ads of the Eugene Register Guard. With a car I no longer needed to be within walking distance of the university. Without too much trouble I went to the home of relatives of a young family who had had to move to Alaska, they said for the health of one of the children. In any case, the house could be leased with option to buy, meaning that there was no down payment, the first year's rent would count as payments on the principle, and I was assuming only the remainder owed on the mortgage. In short, they had to unload the house. So I bought a house, built to post-War FHA specifications, living room, dining room, kitchen, bath, and two bedrooms, with a hall running from the front door to the bathroom door (its only serious flaw). The garage was attached, the back porch was enclosed, and a new gas furnace was installed in a closet in the kitchen. The lot was 110 feet deep, back to an alley, and there was a dense hedge of blackberries there. In the yard were an apple tree grafted to bear early "Transparents", then Gravensteins, then Newton Pippins, then red Delicious (a late apple), and a prune tree. In a declivity in the center there was a stand-pipe with a faucet. In fact, a rivulet, a small creek, had once openly run through my lot, and probably that fact and the root system of the willow tree were the cause of the rotted main foundation timbers on the NE corner, so that it was part of the deal that I would have that corner and the porch stabilized, which I did. When I say, built to FHA standards, anyone my age will know that the letter of the law as to number of closets, width of hallway, number of electrical outlets, and the like, was strictly adhered to, while the grade of timbers and anything else that could be scotched could become a problem by the time the house was 25 years old.

The early Spring photo at the head of this posting shows me with my friend Jean's black cat, Angus, by the apple tree. There were so many prune-plums in late summer that one couldn't even give them away. Continuing to live out my postponed adolescence, I became a pretty good frisbee player in the long back yard. In the front yard, bad for the house's foundations but beautiful, was a large weeping willow, its branches (though occasionally trimmed) reaching the ground, a place for summer picnic lunches outdoors. One year I had the help in keeping the house in order of the French wife of a graduate student in English literature, who came twice a month and brought her little boy with her; there are slides, somewhere, of them picnicking in the shade of the willow, along with my own black cat Jason (I had been using Greek myths for my cats' names for years). I'll scan and post one here if I can find them. Anyhow, I had a house of my own, and it cost only $8,600; my monthly payments, which decreased as the principle did, eventually were only about $80.  I had a home of my own, but I wouldn't have a washer and dryer of my own until I got my present home in Louisiana.
Just south on East 34th were the Langs, the son, Bob, being one of my best friends among my coevals on the faculty. By this time, I had a real network of variously related friends in Eugene, some of them now from St. Mary's Episcopal Church, one of whom was Jean, who later became a Mormon but whom I knew because she sometimes served as organist at church. But some of my friends were gay, too, and some of those from Church, for that matter, were gay. Others were as agnostically humanistic as I had been. Of these, one was my lover for quite a while, and I got to know the guys from his fraternity, too.  Several of them had rented a house near campus; to the tune of "Alice's Restaurant" we celebrated when one of them, to avoid the army draft, joined the Navy.  We made with poster paint on butcher's paper a sign the full width of the house in order to document our party for his departure; it said, in letters two feet high, FUCK THE NAVY, and we all lined up beneath it.  I had my Nikon F on a tripod with the timer set to 10 seconds and a place was left for me to run into just in time.  The neighbors across the street called the Eugene police, who came, a nice young officer as young as any of the fraternity members.  We explained the occasion and invited him to get in the picture, too.  He couldn't keep a straight face, but he had to refuse.  My dearest friend of all, M. D. Ross, of my mother's birth cohort, watched all of such socializing unbecoming a professor without nagging me about it, never a part of that intricate network of younger friends, most of them in fact also younger than I was. None of us thought of ourselves as hippies, certainly, but the late 60s indeed is the decade in question. Anyone who wishes to could call all this "finding oneself", but I did not engage in the inspection of my own navel, as the saying was, until later and for other reasons.
Shopping now was easy, not only because of the car but because a new Albertson's, of the then new and still Mormon grocery chain, opened only three or four blocks away, and then a large Safeway opened up the hill and farther south, while we still had the nice family-owned small grocery up where East 32nd met Willamette. There was a steak-and-salad eatery up on Willamette, too (where on Sunday afternoons several times the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club ran parking-lot autocrosses in assorted sports cars, beetles, mini-coopers, and so on; for real autocrosses we had to go over to the desert; for rallyes we used Oregon's quarter roads and others of later origin all over the Willamette Valley and up into the Coast foothills). It was at a car show near Roseburg, OR, where (quite unqualified) the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club was serving as judges of the restored antique cars, in the public room of the resort motel where it was held, we watched the first Apollo moon landing.

One winter, perhaps 1968, Oregon had serious snow, as Washington DC had this year: it was 2 feet deep on the roof of my little FHA house, so that after boys were hired to shovel it off the house had to be re-roofed; Croesus the cat had gone under the house (not just on brick pillars as in Louisiana, but with enclosed foundations) and after a couple of days when I had to imagine him entombed in snow as the inhabitants of Pompeii had been in ash I heard a pitiable mewing and, estimating the location of the opening to the under-house where he was wont to enter, I shoveled and shoveled and out he came, indignant and hungry. In that snow, it was impossible to drive my 356A Porsche (very second hand but the most fun I ever had with a car and a joy on the Interstate, when the speed limit was 80 and the Porsche cruised at 80-plus and never got stopped), because with streets of frozen ruts and ridges it just got hung up. I hiked into campus, over three miles, in ski pants and boots I'd bought in England, serious boots with thick soles and fleece lining.

Now, I have mentioned many things that I haven't tried to deal with. I only mean to show that by most standards I finally lived a normal American life in Eugene, Oregon. And I do love the memory of almost everyone that I knew. For a second post, I'll try to organize my memories a little better, because I've left out many things of more substance, and I never kept a diary. Indeed, this blog is my first venture of any such kind.

I see that I tend to think that everything happened in 1968. Probably not everything, though a lot did, and not only in the nation at large.

Thoughts intersecting

The last post, on the cottage, was chaotic, but, excluding my work, so was my life: not defined at all.
This is a good occasion to essay the intersection of two trains of thought, each of which has tributaries.
Sometime in the early 1960s, reading C. S. Lewis or Dorothy Sayers, I noticed discussion of Sir Thomas Browne (and in Sayers a whole paragraph on a performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins). I don't have Miss Sayers' novels in the house now, but it is not unlikely that I picked up both Browne and that concerto in her "Gaudy Night". Some authors describe furniture and railway stations to authenticate their fiction, but not a few use authors and artists. Several authors, I noticed later, seem to have owned the same famous Gramaphone Society recording of that Bach Concerto. My beloved mentor and thesis adviser at Berkeley had advised me to do something about my own prose by reading Virginia Woolf's "Common Reader". It may seem an odd choice, being idiosyncratic, but so was Sir John Beazley, of the same generation, and together they brought me to understand that writing involved more than grammatically defensible statements. Besides, I wasn't quite so dense as to attempt imitating either of them, and, but for his intervention, I might have kept writing like the worst of Miss Alcott's works for the rest of my life. I learned to pay attention to how I wrote. That it is, as T. R. Reid said in an interview last week, very hard work all who have tried it will agree.

Sometime after 1958, when it was published, I acquired a very nice C.U.P. editio minor, by John Carter, of Thomas Browne's "Urne Buriall" and "The Garden of Cyrus". The title page of the original edition was reproduced as a frontispiece:

As a budding archaeologist, I found him delightful, and I was fascinated by the interface of embryonic archaeology and, more than impressive, awe inspiring knowledge of Authors (to which, now, I'd add his familiarity with Roman coins found in England). And his prose was as lucid as enchanting, just as promised. He must have had an impressive private library, because it is the books that one lives with, I thought, then as now that become one's own, not some sort of database but a part of one's mind. To this day I haven't read all the Authors that Sir Thomas Browne knew intimately. So I was not surprised that Leslie Stephen's daughter, Virginia Woolf, in her early novel, "Night and Day", at the end of Ch. 5 (in the Hogarth Press Uniform Edition, pp. 72-73) chooses a "very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne" from which to have Denham read "a passage which he knew very nearly by heart". The young Virginia Stephen probably knew it from her father's library and used the book that she remembered, but certainly did not have in hand, since she cited it as four titles. I mentioned the Uniform Edition, because it is what I had; the American editor emended it, and her friends had caught the error immediately. I was shocked and puzzled; I did not know until years afterward how very ill she had just been in 1919. Besides, she may have recalled from girlhood reading the really puzzling "Garden of Cyrus" rather than the "Hydriotaphia".

A friend and I were discussing by e-mail what makes Tolkien more likable (to me) than C. S. Lewis, and I had said that it was that Tolkien's scholarly infrastructure was incomparably vaster and stronger and more wholly digested than Lewis's. It seems unkind to point out that Tolkien actually had children of his own to write for ("The Hobbit", anyhow), but it may be important. It was in that context that I remembered how I forgave Virginia Woolf practically any scholarly sin (rightly or not, I do not believe that she really mastered much Greek), and I had to conclude that I liked the way that she wrote, that I read her for her writing. Here, in any case, I only want to explain how it was that I located my own copies of Sir Thomas Browne and re-read (so far) the "Urne Buriall" (by now the preferable title, since the vessels shown are not what we'd today call hydrias):

In fact, I still do not know what to call them, but not, I think, 'Roman', unless chronologically speaking.

But here is the intersection of trains of thought that led me to record it here. Timothy Ferris, a science writer, has published a book, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, on which he spoke on BookTV last weekend. I listened twice. I have not yet decided to buy his book, for two reasons: he used charts projected in Powepoint, and in me he was preaching to the choir. Not only Virginia Woolf's friends had inculcated the Age of Enlightenment, as well as her father and Edmund Gosse, but, as I think I mentioned in an earlier posting, Hans Reichenbach's "Rise of Scientific Philosophy" and Karl Popper himself had helped form my mind in the 1950s. What interests me is, I suspect, a revival of the thought of my youth, opposing Liberal to Totalitarian (for example), and valuing what I might regard as a blend of Stoic and Epicurean points of view. In fact, it was just last year, if I remember rightly (time passes more quickly for the elderly), that a new translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was presented on that same BookTV. So, when I was enjoying the "Urne Buriall" again after at least twenty years, I noticed how perfectly his reading of the ancient Authors was brought to bear on the ancient cemeteries that in the 17th century were already known and how critically, as a doctor but not only as a medical doctor, he assessed the contents of burials for the evidence of the tools and ornaments and coins, or absence of coins, in them. Today he would be the perfect amateur numismatist, studying hoard evidence closely but refraining from drawing unwarranted conclusions from what he realized must be very partial evidence. In fact, medical doctors today do tend to like numismatics and epigraphy, too. I suppose I ought to find out whether Timothy Ferris used him as a witness.

Since I respect Ferris's ideas (though on looking it over I decided that I didn't like his prose so well), I am delighted if a generation that, like mine, will not be able to take prosperity for granted will be sustained by the kind of thought that sustained me. I am used to seeing Ravi Shankar revived with every new form of sound recording, but empirical thinking is not quite so marketable. It makes me wish I were not retired and might enjoy undergraduates responsive to ideas that excited and continued to inform my own mind.

The Cottage on East 20th at the Alley

Certainly I moved into the cottage, at 1460 1/2 East 20th Avenue, where the alley divided the block, just south of the UO campus, but the full width of the campus from the Architecture and Allied Arts building (which by chance happened to be named for someone with the same last name as mine) where I taught, when I no longer had to shop on foot, in the absence of much public transportation, when I had a car: I had the red 1963 Beetle by then, for that reason and because I needed it to go visiting, too. I have no photographs of the cottage, and it is not visible on the satellite photo of the block in Google Earth. I did buy my first Nikon F, in 1965, when I was there: I remember taking a test roll of black and white film with it in and around the cottage. As usual, with any new camera, my first pictures were poor, except for optical superiority of a good Nikon lens, but I don't have any of them now.
Measuring mentally, I can say that the cottage, on a concrete slab, was about 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep, with living space reduced by the 10' X 20' garage at the west end. It was meager in design, a feature of Oregon houses, but extremely so. Minimal sills, minimal overhangs, minimal stoop for a door mat, linoleum tile floors throughout. A living room, which also held the oil-burning furnace, and a kitchen were across the front, looking out on my landlady's back lawn (one interesting thing about Oregon, I thought, was that in the Spring robins actually did pull very long earthworms out of the earth, just as in picture books of my early childhood). The rear rooms (and having measured the "study", the NW corner room, for bookcases, I now use it to estimate the total living space) were only 8 feet deep. The landlady said the small room had been intended as a starter nursery; I put a student desk and some book cases in it; for the first time I had a separate room for a study at home. The rest of the rear was a bathroom and a bedroom. I remember that I did not have a bed frame but just a mattress on box springs on the floor. Having no raised foundation, the cottage had windows only about 30 inches from earth to sill on the exterior; I put screws in for security and usually had the kitchen window open just high enough for Croesus the Cat. The landlady said his muddy feet (and Oregon is muddy) were staining the white paint, so I took a cloth, merely dampened, and gently wiped off the mud, to show her that she needn't worry. She didn't like the cat, because, when her short-legged dog chased him, Croesus just turned around in the corner of the yard and welcomed the dog to 20 sharp claws, sending him yiping (and giving him a wide berth thereafter). I remember her new car, too, a brand-new first edition Ford Mustang, now regarded as a classic, but merely pseudo-snazzy to my Berkeleyan inverse snobbery. No, I didn't tell her so. Yes, I always have regarded the Mustang as a middle-aged lady's sports car.
In any case, the cottage was my first free-standing residence, and it did permit me to play music without sharing it with the unappreciative, and it did garage my car. A student in architecture who played violin brought it and played it in the front room. Until you have heard a violin in a concrete-floor, 7-foot ceiling structure, you have no idea of how loud it actually is.
The cottage had one visual amenity. I had the kabuki-theater colors corduroy curtains that accompanied me from 2308 Haste in Berkeley, when my friend C. let me have the apartment for which they were made, to every place I lived in through to my first real house on E. 32nd Street in South Eugene.
My sister Lorna and her family, I'm almost sure, visited the cottage once; I remember the boys on the lawn. Writing this, I realize that I am not sure of the dates. Part of my life, which I thought of as making up for having had no adolescence (which, of course, is not true, but I had no adolescent 'social life') and which by the 1980s I regarded as typically Thirty-Something (even though I saw that TV program only once, I got the idea), took place in the cottage. Since nothing I did was illegal or even interesting and did not keep me from earning tenure, I am leaving all of it out of this blog; I merely assert that it was like everyone else's. I was ashamed of one episode, for all the typical reasons.
I already have spoken of my colleagues, whom I regarded highly. My colleague, Dean Mackenzie, who had been the teaching assistant when I started Art History at Berkeley, was now at Eugene, and, as professor emeritus, he still is there. But the cottage was no place to entertain, however simply, and generally evening parties in Eugene were for sets of married couples.

1965-6 A year in the house at 2408 Atherton Street

My grandmother, in front of 684 Church in San Luis Obispo, Xmas 1966 by my newly acquired car.

Left: 2408 Atherton (note column); Right: on UC Campus with Lorna's family

Atherton Street in Berkeley, CA, is only a block long, numbered in the 2400s, running N-S from Channing Way to Haste, with Fulton Street to its west and Ellsworth St. to its east—in other words within a block or two of other addresses I'd had on Haste. But 2408 Atherton, though it looked out east on the child development lab opposite it on Atherton, was back to back to 2407 Fulton St., only about 100 feet separating them, and, as you can learn from a search (http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt3h4n99mj&brand=oac), that was the headquarters of the Vietnam Day Committee, as I would learn very forcibly in March of 1966. In Eugene, OR, the university was much opposed to the war; the male students were being drafted unless their grades were high, and the student body as a whole objected to it, but the UO campus was still at the stage of protest that camped out on the lawn of the student union to dramatize the plight of migrant farm workers, using backyard play tents to sit in, though these weren't of much use when it rained, as it does twice as often in the Willamette Valley of Oregon as in the San Francisco Bay area of California. And I, in any case, was not then and never became an active public participant in defending or protesting anything. I said, it is likely to be counter-productive, by scaring people in general (which is true, but also I would not for anything have endangered my newly won academic position or disappointed everyone who had helped me). I had never heard of the Vietnam Day Committee and, without a television set or an FM radio, and disinclined to read the Eugene Register-Guard very much, I did not know how large a demonstration they had organized shortly before in Berkeley.

I had the lefthand half of the ground floor of a very nice old house, c. 1910, still today in fine condition.

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Google Earth, last year, shows it light gray, newly painted, instead of light tan. And the picture of myself in my bright orange favorite dress, at the top of this post, shows the column on its porch.

It was an eventful year. I was teaching and working on Corinthian vase-painting. My sister Lorna and family en route again to the Northwest as civilians spent a day with me and somehow we had arranged to have my brother's two children with us as well. I was seeing my niece, Debby, for the first time. See the pictures in an earlier posting and the one at the top of this post. I found a nice 1963 red Beetle for sale by a German graduate student living in the same block of Atherton; he had brought it across but would not take it back. In Berkeley there was a driving school that would instruct four gear, manual shift VW driving, with defensive driving as part of it, and how to hold the car from rolling backward, using the clutch, on San Francisco and Berkeley hills, and how to deal with the bridges at rush hour, and much more. By Christmas I was confident enough to drive to San Luis Obispo and impress the grandparents. I was so enthused about knowing how to drive that I made my little sister, Linda, the gift of the course of lessons, and she learned to drive, too, though not in a Beetle. This was just weeks before my brother's life and his family fell apart (which is not for me to describe here). It was just a couple of years before that terrible year, 1968. I had a season ticket that Fall to the San Francisco Opera, something I'd never had before. One of my favorite Oregon students, Viv, was now at Berkeley, too, and I made the acquaintance of her wonderful Border Collie, named Ami. As I said in the last post, I read a lot, anything I pleased. Without anything like wealth, I had some money to spare.

And yet it was also the year of my brother's calamity, and on Good Friday, as if out of a clear blue sky, late in the evening when I was reading my way through one of the books of the Moncrieff translation of Proust, suddenly there was a terrible explosion: window glass was blown in and fell on my row of LP records (mercifully, tightly packed so that only the edges of the cardboard sleeves were hurt), plaster fell from ceilings and here and there from walls, the back door, which was locked, was blown off its hinges, and (as it turned out) such damage extended as much as a mile. But 'my' house took the brunt of it. The Berkeley police and fire department were quick to arrive, and the gas was turned off in case there were breaks that might cause fires. I called the owners, who lived in one of the communities east of Oakland, San Leandro or Hayward, I think, and they came as quickly as they could carrying with them their small children in their pajamas. They photographed everything for insurance, and I begged them to have plasterers replace the coved ceilings, which in the event they did, since the insurance covered it and I was willing to put up with plastering in progress. I would not leave my place wide open, lacking half the windows and the back door, so I called Viv, and Viv brought Ami, with whom we both felt utterly safe (and rightly so). Within a week the police and the FBI had identified the perpetrators, who were right-wing persons from San Jose. Already, I finally realized, the newspapers' and even Time magazine's coverage of Berkeley (as later of Columbia University in New York) had convinced some of the easily alarmed and aroused general public that UC Berkeley, our idyllic ivory tower where one studied vase-painting or Pindar or Sir Philip Sydney or Romanesque architecture (Viv's subject) hardly aware of a rougher, tougher world, blissfully lost in the subtleties of Proust or the author of your choice, was not what it was, liberal to be sure, unwilling to judge or be judged, but some hotbed of Communism. Of course, the slogans of activists did endanger the ivory tower image of a good university. Not that we intended to live off the labor of those tougher than ourselves; we knew that we were preparing to go out and teach languages and arts and sciences, which certainly is work, but that we needed no more excitement than our studies (and the beautiful weather of the bay area) gave us, and had no desire to dictate to those who, alas, could not enjoy what we enjoyed. In short, throughout the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s though there was plenty to worry about, my friends and I all had concentrated on treasuring what we'd hate to lose, tranquillity, thought, beauty. The Golden Rule covered ethics. When I stop to think, I wonder whether in part we were numbed by helplessness: what could one do about a bomb or about those who made them? But (here I generalize) the children born after the War were undaunted and were sure that protesting could work. Yet protesting had never made older parents consent to our staying up or staying out late at night. I thought, and I still think, that convincing friends who would listen was the only way to change anyone's mind, and even that probably wouldn't work: you'd never know. I never thought I could stop war in SE Asia, but I could give tutoring to help students who needed it to get grades to avoid being drafted. Be that as it may, the group from San Jose planted a bomb under the rear of the Vietnam Day Committee headquarters and shocked a whole square mile out of their idyllic way of life. Not that it made me more an activist, if anything less so, had that been possible, though I understood how others felt. Another thing happened that year and in that place: one evening at dusk when I ran half a block up to the corner to mail a letter to my grandparents, not locking the door after me, in the five minutes that I was gone someone came in and took some of my best clothes. When I came in I was surprised that the door was hanging open, which I thought had latched behind me, but when I saw the back door open, too, and some drawers half open, I was alarmed, even afraid that I was not alone, but I called the Berkeley police, who came immediately and listed what was missing. I said, of course I didn't expect to recover them, but I wanted to report that such things were happening. No, never before had persons just been hanging around where one lived ready to barge in and grab what they could. It had never happened to me before. Thenceforward, I locked doors, even in the peace of early evening, even for five minutes.

Still Before the Cottage-II

On a less mundane note than the last, I should note that it was before Berkeley borrowed me to cover a sabbatical in 1965-6, and I had an apartment on Atherton St. there, I learned that Oregon's professor in Old English language and literature, Stanley Greenfield, was both eminent and beloved. As a faculty member I had the privilege of auditing a course, with the professor's permission, free of charge, and I decided to learn Old English. My attraction went back to the publication of the Sutton Hoo treasure and my seeing the objects in the British Museum and having been introduced to the great illuminated manuscripts in art history. It also helped that in doing the St. Gall seminar with Professor Walter Horn as a graduate student, when by virtue of being the only one with enough Latin and paleography for the task I was assigned not the types and structure of the buildings but all the legends on the famous St. Gall plan, the longer ones metrical and the scribe's hand really beautiful Carolingian miniscule. Here Late Antiquity which Erich Auerbach's books had introduced me to met the Middle Ages. Here again I could spend long afternoons in Migne and other august works of reference. To read Anglo-Saxon literature, like Homer, in the original was natural therefore.
Once the time came in a semester when stacks of term papers had to be read and annotated, for a while I could not give the class the attention it deserved, but I kept up as well as I could, and I got books from Blackwell's, editions that I could keep and continue studying, in addition to those ordered for the course. When it is a pleasure to dally in a great subject over a long period of time, it is hard to regard the dallying as a sin. I never have mastered Old English, but neither have I forgotten as much as I learned. I had a great privilege in Prof. Greenfield's class; he did not live to a very old age, and I had no right to expect such a scholar and teacher in Eugene, Oregon, though he was not alone there among the quietly eminent.
I was reminded of the importance of this venture when, the other day, I was explaining to a friend how I'd happened to read J. R. R. Tolkien at a more advanced age than most of his fans in the 1960s. His is not a common name, and I knew it from his edition of Pearl. If this man was writing fanciful fiction, it could not be bad, so I bought the bootleg U.S. paperback of "The Fellowship of the Ring" from UC Corner on Telegraph Avenue while I was there and on leave from Oregon to cover a sabbatical leave, as I said. I think I have the year right; I cannot locate the date of that unauthorized U.S. paperback now, and I shortly replaced it and bought the rest of the trilogy and the Hobbit, too, in the hardbound edition. Needless to say, I couldn't resist the Elven tongues or the somewhat rune-like alphabet, so obviously properly composed by an author who knew what he was doing, and I couldn't resist this restitution of pre-Christian European mythology, either. This was no William Morris or C. S. Lewis stuff, but the imagined world of someone who virtually lived in it. An author who gets the philology right, I felt (and I said felt, because I hadn't authority to vouch for everything), could not lie. Yes, of course, that is laughable. But like the Old and Middle English poems and the Old Norse and even the Old High German so far as preserved, the Tolkien books are pure pleasure. I have no intention of reading all the later literature concerning him, though I did read his son's biography, much later, in the 1980s, and at some date in the 1960s I read W. H. Auden's essay on the work in The New Yorker. Finno-Ugrian? Well, I couldn't master that.
Yes, there are films, and I have shied away from them. But that same friend who jogged my memory to remember how the Beowulf course had led me to read Tolkien also recommends the first two of them. There is also the Silmarillion, which I have looked at but which I felt (that verb again) might not add much to what I had guessed, that Tolkien had built a whole aeon to sustain the trilogy.

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If you want to join those of us who have petitioned to keep the Cabinet des Médailles as it is and where it is, it doesn't take much French to follow the instructions. Anyhow, there is interesting material about the Cabinet des Medailles at the web site.

Still Before the Cottage

True, I still had things left with long-suffering friends in Berkeley, but I did have too much to put in a box already in Eugene, not to mention Croesus the Cat. I can't remember what I did when I went for a summer in Berkeley for research or to Greece for a summer. I must have found someone to stay in my apartment and enjoy the cat. Even if there had been any of today's storage units to rent, I didn't know of them.

So long as I had no car, the first time I went to teach a Summer Session in Berkeley, a great boon, I stayed again on Haste Street, only a block farther west. I remember one of my Oregon colleagues, L.G., whose family lived in Berkeley and were a very fine French family, coming with her father to visit me in that bed-sitting apartment and their being the most considerate guests; one day my dear friend Sylvia's husband came by with their baby son, a delightful baby; one day the UC campanile chimesmaster's elder daughter, whom I'd known since she was seven and who had visited me at about twelve at 2308 Haste, came in adolescent grace with her friend (called Christine?), and we spent a most enjoyable day. In that rather dark apartment we photographed each other by the bright kitchen window. Not much later she had married a Hungarian-American, had traveled and met his family in Hungary, and had moved to the NW corner of California near Arcata, where I visited and met their baby later, when I drove down to California once by the Coast route.

Summer of 1963 at the kitchen table in the apartment I rented at 2237 Haste in Berkeley. Cathy was in her late 'teens.

It was a special occasion in Eugene when a film had a 'special' engagement at one of the mainstream movie theaters downtown. The two I remember were "Der Rosenkavalier" with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as the Marschallin, very beautiful (and I had never seen it live, though the San Francisco Opera had it when they could; but I was not always there to be able to see it) and, also then new, "Lawrence of Arabia", a splendid film. They may have been, in fact, the only two movies I ever saw in Eugene. There were of course no video discs or VHS or beta tapes, let alone DVDs at that time. I just remembered: one of the times that I saw "Les Enfants du Paradis" was on campus in Oregon. Every time I went to Berkeley and imposed on my friends' sofas to sleep, usually that of L.S. in his delightful backyard garden cottage, I also bought LPs from my friend in the rear of UC Corner, and brought them back. I know every note of performances that I had on vinyl in those years--and I still have most of the actual LPs. There was, indeed, a record store in Eugene, but maybe only later, because it was called Crystal Ship, which had some Classical music. As I recall, it was misspelled: 'Chrystal'. The UO book store actually was very good, but it was the only book store in town that I regarded as such.

I think I should mention, when I still have a place for it, that Eugene has two geological anchors, Skinner's Butte, flat topped, at its north, with fine columnar basalt on its north face, and Spenser's Butte, peaked, at its south, where in the Spring a profusion of wild irises, protected, not to be picked, bloomed along the sides of the road that led to the top, approximately, of the butte. They call them buttes in Oregon, and they call their variety of crêpe myrtles 'grape myrtles' and, naturally, say that grape myrtles grow only in Oregon. One lovely plant, called vine maple, which turns bright red in autumn, really is native to Oregon.

I honestly can't remember much else about living at that address, except that it did snow a bit one year, but not much (there was much snow when I was living on East 32nd, later), and one year some students climbed up the drain pipe to climb in at my office window, which didn't lock, being old, in order to steal tests just before one midterm. The tests they got were from the previous year (I had the current ones at my apartment), so they risked their necks for nothing, but they left plenty of evidence (torn ivy, ancient dust removed) in getting in, apart from the absence of the old tests from the file drawer. One more thing: I remember that the Beatles' "Help" was released while I was there, and its LP, too, but I didn't see the one or hear the other except from the sorority house opposite or from the neighbors below me.

Yet another thing: it was in these first years that I was considered for other positions, one which I wanted very much, because it was at Wellesley, so near Boston, but I was out-classed by another candidate who also had roots in New England and more important yet links to the Museum of Fine Arts. It wasn't just her connections, because she had published some very important things. On the other hand, even after two years in Athens, where I had made probably every social error possible for a bohemian Californian to make, ones that even in relatively classless California still could not in half a dozen years be eradicated to make up the difference between low-income working class and middle-income academia, though my friends and mentors had made considerable progress in that regard, I might have had a difficult time at Wellesley. The other position, which was offered and which with mixed feelings I turned down, was at a very large midwestern university, temptingly within reach of Chicago, but there was at least one person in the John Birch Society there, in Classics, people said, and the unending flatness and and absence of any kind of geographical, geological definition, was dismaying. The architecture seemed too stolid to me, though good; it hadn't Chicago flair. It was too far from the Mississippi River for that to capture my imagination, as it does in Louisiana, and I did NOT think that grain elevators were the Chartres of the midwest. So I remained in Eugene.