Tuesday, October 23, 2007

The Penance of Douglas Henry Harding

Ed. note: I love nothing more than stories about members of my family. I think this is partly true because from my earliest memory, I always wanted to be in the company of my grandparents and the other members of their generation, rather than in that of my parents or my contemporaries. However, there was a pretty solid wall between the generations.........I was constantly being admonished to "go out and play with the other kids." Thus, my juvenile insights into the lives of the people I admired most were always too few, gained only during precious moments of individual conversation with them, or during "story-telling" times at family gatherings.

As different as they were from each other, everyone in my grandparents' generation LOVED to tell stories of their earlier days, and I loved to hear them more than anything. I would feel so SPECIAL to hear a grandparent tell ONLY ME about some little part of his or her life. And at family gatherings, I would do my level best to sneak off from my boring cousins and sit within hearing distance of my elders. At first, I remember I would engage in some form of camouflage, and sit behind a chair or under a table so as not to be discovered and banished once again to the banalities of my own generation. (As I think back now, they MUST have seen me hiding there and just decided it was too much bother to once again chase this pesky stray back to the herd of little dogies.)



Later, as I grew older, and as cousins showed up less and less at these gatherings, I could openly claim what I always knew as my Rightful Place among The Wise Elders. It didn't hurt that my mom was the oldest of her generation and that I was in turn the first-born of mine....no wonder I was so bored with the "little kids" and so entranced with people that to my naive way of thinking must have come to the West on wagon trains, just like we studied in school!



One of the Cruel Tricks that life seems to play is that as I aged and became somewhat more adept at appreciating the richness of these narratives, three things happened: my parents kidnapped me and my sister and moved us away from my hometown and my beloved Elders; my grandparents became increasingly "uncool" to be around for someone as hip as me; and they started to die. As that same Life progressed, it took care of the two least limiting of those three factors: I got older, got jobs and cars (unlike my parents), and could go where I wanted; also I figured out that I could listen to The Beatles AND my grandparents at the same time without doing any cosmic damage to either my psyche or my image. But there was nothing I could do about that third factor, that my grandparents insisted on getting older and dying, ALWAYS too soon. And in the Cruelest Trick of all, my increasing mobility and my realization that my grandparents and aunts and uncles were Pretty Cool after all combined to render their respective deaths all the more poignant and heartbreaking to me. In my life, I could go to them and I WANTED to hear them, but they weren't there any more.



The story below is a bit different from the ones I might have heard as a hidden youngster. It is not so pleasant, it would never have been told (or perhaps even realized) by its protagonist, and it solves a mystery. It was related to me by my father, sometime in the 1980's, after Douglas Henry Harding died. It makes sense, and I want it to be true. Still, it was told by my father, and likely filtered by Annie Pearl, who survived her husband by a couple desperate years, and whose grasp on reality was somewhat slight even in more halcyon days, give or take.



In the cosmic lottery of "parent assignment," I came up snake-eyes. On the grandparent side of things, though, I hit the Powerball! I was blessed with four grandparents, two from each side of the family. My mom's parents were Lowell Coughtry Engelen and Nella Florence Engelen (nee VanderMuelen), and my dad's parents were Douglas Henry Harding and Annie Pearl Harding (nee Williams). (My maternal grandmother was apparently none too happy with her given first name, so jettisoned it early on in favor of Florence. I'm sure it didn't help that one of the cows in their South Dakota dairy was named Nellie.) From just about any standpoint you could imagine, these four people were as unlike each other as possible. Each of my grandparents was unique....and I say that from the perspective of someone who was a young man when they died, who was not as capable as he might be today of appreciating them and their qualities. (I can feel new posts brewing here, an homage to each of these wonderful people.)



Today, though, I think of Douglas Henry Harding......."Doug" to most everyone he knew, and "Douglas" to his wife of over four decades. (Actually, Douglas was my step-grandfather, in that Annie Pearl had divorced my biological grandfather in the 1930's and this was her second marriage. I recall meeting my "real" grandfather just once, when I was about five years old. As I recall, he was a decent fellow, but for all intents and purposes Douglas Henry was my paternal grandfather for all of my life.)



These are the things I know for sure about Douglas: he was born in Michigan, loved his mother above all other people, worked in a general store as a clerk in his youth, volunteered during WWI and served on a troop transport ship that plied the Atlantic between New Jersey and Brest, France, was mustered out in Bremerton, WA, and eventually settled in Portland, OR, to which a Michigan cousin had already migrated. I also know that his happiest days were spent serving on that troop ship, that he always regretted not marrying a young girl he met in Bremerton - the daughter of a shopkeeper there, whose picture he always kept - and that he spent virtually his whole adult life working a dirty job as a carman's helper for the Union Pacific Railroad. I know this last bit because after he died, I saw his laminated UP card with his picture on it. His lean young face was smeared with grime, and on the line where it said "occupation" was typed "carman's helper." I remember feeling a little sad for him then, that such a good, solid man - a Hero to me - spent his whole working life covered in grease and finally retired as someone's "helper." Even now as I write this, I get a little teary, just as he used to do when he told me about being on that ship and loving that Bremerton Girl.

Douglas Henry Harding came to Portland in the 1920's and got a job on the railroad - Portland being its western terminus. (To this day, Portland's Union Station is a National Historic Landmark, and a sight to inspire. It somehow escaped the national campaign to "update" America's beautiful but aging rail stations in the sixties and seventies, which resulted in some of the most hideous urban blight imaginable, right in the heart of our big cities. Seattle, for example, was not so lucky.) He bought a one-bedroom bungalow, coincidentally on North Michigan Street, in the Piedmont District, and promptly brought his beloved mother to live with him. A few cousins gradually moved west and also settled in North Portland, within blocks of Douglas. The dutiful son accorded his mother the bedroom and he slept on a cot at the northern end of the small living room. A tiny wooden armoire held his clothes, and a nightstand held the treasured family Bible.

At about 600 square feet, the home was......"cozy." It was heated with coal, with about half of the unfinished basement devoted to a coal bin. The earthen basement walls were augmented by a manmade partial barrier separating the pile of coal chunks from the furnace area. As needed, the coal delivery truck would pull into the narrow driveway, insert the chute through a basement window, and dump enough black, sooty coal to keep the home fires burning. (To this day, I recall the beckoning smell of the coal and my delight in playing down in that bin. Annie Pearl would continually clean me up, only to lose me again to the delights of that mysterious subterranean cavern.)

For several years, all was well in the peaceable kingdom at 6927 North Michigan Avenue, where the telephone number was Butler 5-5126, the dialing of which would cause the surprisingly heavy phone - black as the coal downstairs - to ring in the breakfast nook off the miniscule kitchen. Douglas worked the various and sundry railroad shifts as he was told, took care of his aging mother, and the extended Harding family circulated amongst themselves throughout the neighborhood. Then one day, as was his wont during the Depression, Douglas Henry went to the movies.

While waiting on line to buy a matinee ticket at one of Southwest Broadway's magnificent movie palaces, Douglas Henry Harding met one adult and two children who would come to define the remainder of his personal life, just as The Union Pacific Railroad defined his working life.

Annie Pearl Welsh had moved from El Paso, Texas, with her husband, Thomas Franklin, Sr., and two boys: George Gregory and Thomas Franklin, Jr. Like Douglas Harding, they had been preceded by various extended family members' relocation to Portland from their ancestral homes. (One particularly nefarious female cousin was reputed to have been the proprietor of a brawling saloon situated on the western bank of the Willamette River, which was the source of many a "shanghaied" sailor. The routine would involve the drugging of unsuspecting, heavy-drinking boatmen, who would in their stupor be secreted downward through underground tunnels directly onto ocean-bound ships moored at the river's edge. When they awoke, they would be miles out at sea, helplessly and unwillingly conscripted to weeks or months of hard labor on deck.) Their marriage had soured, a divorce ensued, and Thomas Senior hied himself back to the southwest. Devoid of treasure and options, after a time Annie Pearl - raised a devout Catholic - became desperate. Unable to provide for her children, she placed them in the care of the nuns at St. Mary's Home For Boys, a sprawling campus located a few miles west of Portland in the farming community of Beaverton. At the approximate respective ages of nine and seven, Thomas and George felt themselves to be lost, abandoned, and abused.....and neither of them - to their dying days - EVER forgave their mother for her bewildering (to them) lapse of judgement.

But rays of sunshine tend to penetrate even the most smothering fog. By hook and by crook and by streetcar, occasionally Annie Pearl would collect her boys for weekend jaunts to the downtown movies. And it was there - at The Fox or The Orpheum or The Blue Mouse or The Paramount - that the happy threesome encountered a bachelor named Douglas Henry Harding, who had driven his own car into town for an afternoon's celluloid escape. It is unclear as to who he was most charmed by - the shy urchins or the coquettish Southern belle - but quicker than you can say "aisle one," it was popcorn and candy all around courtesy of the handsome lad from Michigan. By the time the newsreels told them what they needed to know, Tom Mix rode to justice, and Mr. Deeds Went To Town, four fates were sealed.

The courtship proceeded. Douglas' car made visits with the boys easy and frequent, and to them he became that shining knight with a Ford. Eventually, Annie Pearl was able to reclaim and feed her boys on a regular basis. Douglas proposed marriage, Annie accepted, and a problem arose: Where would Mom go?

As my dad, Thomas Jr. told it, Douglas' beloved mother was shuffled off to a nearby cousin's house in favor of his new bride and her two boys. The cousin's house was none too large, and Mom, while she was well-integrated into her new household, was consigned to sleep in an unheated closed porch area. The months grew bitterly cold that year. Due to the unusual situation of Portland at the moist northern end of an alluvial north-south valley and at the west end of the Columbia Gorge, with dry winds blowing out from Washington desert country, some of our winters are marked by relentless ice storms. Frigid temperatures, along with severe accumulations of blowing ice on trees and power lines can mean - even in this modern age - many days without power in both urban and suburban areas. In the depression-era thirties, I can only guess what this meant to Portlanders.

In that first blighted winter, pneumonia took Douglas Henry's elderly Mother from him. In his mind, as he was faced by both his allegiance to his new family AND a too-small house, he forced his mother out into a literally cold, cruel world. In his mind, Douglas Henry was responsible for his Mother's death. His Penance began.

I don't know if her death caused his marriage to Annie Pearl to sour, or if its decline was brought on by the everyday garden variety boredom and frustrations suffered by most married couples. I do know that by the time I came along in 1951, among the first faces I recall seeing were those of Douglas Henry and Annie Pearl, and among the first sounds I recall hearing were of the two of them arguing. And I don't mean the faux-but-friendly bantering between partners who deep down love each other, like in the movies or in All In The Family.....polite disagreements as to whether the in-laws get invited to Thanksgiving and whom they sit next to. I mean Arguing. Fighting. Yelling. Screaming. Like Cats and Dogs. For over forty years.

Douglas Henry Harding: sweet, lanky, mild-mannered mama's boy who got greasy during every shift on the railroad with nary a cross word, who left each day with a full lunch bucket and a folded newspaper and returned home on time and relentlessly sober, and who was the kindest, most caring and loving grandfather any could hope for, whose asthma never gave him a break and who never smoked a cigarette or took a hard drink in his life, who adopted and raised two little Depression boys as his own, and who was loved by one and reviled by the other for the rest of his life.

Annie Pearl Williams: boisterous, roly-poly daughter of hard-drinking Texas railroad catholics who suffered unimaginable abuse as a girl, who snagged a husband, bore him two boys and migrated to this strange cold land with him, only to lose him and her boys and to descend into a personal netherland of eccentricity, confusion, occasional beer-drinking and tobacco smoking, and who doted endlessly on me and bought me cowboy boots.

This was Douglas Henry's penance: he had in effect murdered his mother and his punishment was that he had to stay with the shrewish, indomitable Annie Pearl for as long as he lasted on this earth. A self-imposed exile from whatever visions of normalcy might have informed his life plans. No matter how bitter or brutish his lot in life became, no matter how much of his hard-earned money his wife spirited away and gave to her younger son, who drank and whored it into oblivion, no matter how little she cooked for him or how much she taunted him, no matter how even in retirement from the Union Pacific, she forced him to retreat every day to the company of his cronies at the local Manning's cafeteria and sustain himself on coffee and jello, staying with her was how he made up for his supreme crime.

Still, they loved me.

And of course in the end, it became clear that they were living for each other and only for each other.

Douglas Henry died first, in 1980. Annie Pearl also died that day, it just took her a few months longer to make it official. She became so quiet, so resigned. Not like Annie Pearl at all. All her life's fuel was gone. No more sooty coal in that bin down below. No one to fight with. Like two opposing figures leaning one against the other, when one collapsed, so did the other.

For a few weeks, she tried to struggle on in that little house by herself. She shrank. She quit peeking through the gauzy drapes to spy on the neighbors. She gave up, refused to eat. She did not even know how to write a check, as Douglas had maintained the household all those decades. I would visit occasionally from Seattle and her elder son, my dad, would come up from LA. The estranged younger son, George Gregory, in Albuquerque for many years and perpetually stewed in three kinds of gin, somehow failed to return the favors of care bestowed upon him in his randier days. It was hopeless. The wind was out of her sails. No tack, no correction would restore her. There was nothing for it.

Later, I ventured south one last time in April, 1981, to put her on a plane for LA. She had gone from one Portland nursing home to another, and was "difficult to deal with." Every day on this earth was to be her last. She knew this even as she wished it to be true. Without Douglas in it, her life........wasn't. Her ghostly, emaciated body survived another couple of years in nursing homes near her LA son. To her end, she was animated by daily visions of horrors perpetrated on her by doctors, which she would gladly share with anyone within hearing. But the one and only set of ears to which her ramblings were forever directed was gone.

Douglas Henry Harding's penance was complete.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Living The Ristretto Life

I was captured by coffee in 1975 while sitting in a former funeral home. It was Fall in Seattle, my date (I was hopeful then) and I had just been to a Pops Concert by The Seattle Symphony, and we had at my suggestion decamped to Cafe Allegro. Allegro was the first of the "second wave" of Seattle coffeehouses, and was in fact established in a fomer funeral home directly across the street from the western front of the University of Washington. (Cafe Allegro would eventually have much to do with Starbucks' conquering of the coffee world, but that is another digression.) The then new cafe had been advertising on my favorite FM station and I was as eager to go check it out as I was to impress my date with my suave urbanity. We pulled up on that rainy night to a comely brick building covered with that kind of vine maple that goes all crazy golden in the Fall and transforms whatever hovel it might cover into a Venerable Establishment.

"Oh, yeah, I come here all the time," I lied.

Little did I know.

That was the first night of my short, weird relationship with my date AND of my long weird relationship with all things coffee. The years to come would find me lurking in, working in, managing, and escaping coffeehouses. Ah, the formative years.........

Come to the point!

Early on in my training as a barista (he or she who brews and serves the espresso), I learned about caffeol and The Ristretto Life. (Well, not exactly in those terms at the time, but this is what years of reflection and a serious caffeine addiction will get you.) In Italy, one must apprentice for years before one is allowed to extract and serve espresso. As you might guess, here in America it is, sadly, more a matter of minutes.

But I had training from the best! I will never forget my first lesson:

One day at The Grand Illusion, we were told to dose and pack a portafilter for extracting a double shot of espresso. (In English, you take the thingie that holds the ground coffee in your left hand, put it under the grinder where the coffee comes out, and pull the lever twice with your right hand in order to measure out precisely 14 grams of ground espresso, tamp the coffee down with a blunt heavy object, insert the thingie into the espresso machine, and either push the button or pull the lever to start the pressurized heated water coming down through the coffee and into the demitasse.)

We were told to "pull" three successive double shots into three separate demitasses: the first for ten seconds, the second for twenty seconds, and the final one for thirty seconds. We then tasted each demitasse in order of extraction. This proved to be a classic demonstration of what happens when espresso is made.

We learned that the first component of coffee to be yielded is caffeine: a tasteless, odorless liquid that is responsible for the buzz, the addiction, and - depending upon whom you believe - inspiration, motivation, energy, and smiles......or a hopeless descent into hell's own maw.

The second component that coffee gives up is caffeol: that for which we are ostensibly all gathered here. Caffeol is the essence of coffee flavor, the gustatory manifestation of coffee's virtue, the sublime mellow syrup that says Sumatra! or Colombia! or Harrar! or Mocha! or the name of whatever hallowed land those particular beans hail from.

The final ten seconds is devoted to tannic acid, and a little goes a long way. You want SOME tannic acid in there for brightness and complementarity, but not enough to strip off the protective layer on your tongue. So the idea is to extract your espresso for the Goldilocks Time. You're gonna get the caffeine first anyhow, so never mind about that. The magic comes between the final two stages of coffee's gifts: when the caffeol is all in there but the tannic acid is just saying hello. Because the fact is that while caffeol is soulful, nuanced, creamy, and rich - tannic acid possesses all the subtlety of brass knuckles. Two seconds too long, and tannic acid OWNS the party.

Yes, this is about BALANCE! This is about Cafe Ristretto as a model for happiness and achievement of all we yearn for.

All of the Italian I have learned, I have learned at an espresso machine. Buon Giorno! Arrivederci! Ciao! Il Giornale! Doppio! Trippio! Quadruppio! (Double, triple, and quadruple shots, respectively) Al volo (to go)! Senza schiuma (no foam)! And yes.............RISTRETTO!

Ristretto means "restrained." For the purposes of Coffee as Life, it means that in extracting our espresso, we aim for that Goldilocks Moment: not too short, or we forsake precious droplets of the ephemeral flavor delight that is caffeol. Not too long, either, or we end up with nasty, rasty, bitter dregs of what might have been..........and a sour stomach to boot.

Now, here in the aforementioned America, I don't recommend ordering a Cafe Ristretto. The three-minute baristi one encounters in this barren land will offer you looks both blank and irritated. Unless this makes your day, and unless you revel in the casting of pearls before swine, I say let's just keep this our little secret. Let's appreciate this as a Life Lesson and save our suave urbanity for Italy, where they invented it. We can live The Ristretto Life without uttering a word.

So, my friends, here's to The Ristretto Life. Here's to Goldilocks, and the bed and chair and the porridge and the coffee, all of which are Just Right.

Ciao!