Portland Magazine Winter 2014

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Question from prospective student’s mother, asked of me as we stand by the chapel on the most beautiful crisp sunlit October day you ever saw in your life: Does it rain here?

Does it rain here? Is the pope Jesuit? Is the ocean salty? Do swallows return in the spring? Are there still trees bigger than your house in the remote ravines of the dense moist forests of Cascadia? How do you think those trees got to be so epic? Did you know that those huge trees can drink water right out of the air? Do you think that a tree could get its water from the air without there being a lot of water in the air?

Does it rain here? Come back on All Souls Day, when the Rains begin with an indescribable gentle firm authority, so that you know, even before you are fully awake, that this is the Day, this is the beginning of the Wet, for the rain is thorough and relentless and inarguable, and this is not a shower, or a scatter, or a passing cloudburst, or a storm, but the opening bars of a very long song, the first chapter of a book that will take the next three seasons to read, the first minutes of a very long game, during which you will huddle under an umbrella, and thrash in the closet for your raincoat, and rub mink oil into your shoes yet again, and put that ratty old towel on the porch, so that when the dog wants to come in, some poor child has to kneel and wipe his muddy paws so he does not trot runes upon the floor I just this minute finished sweeping.

Does it rain here? Look about you, woman.

Gaze long and lovingly on the lushness of the grass, and the vault of the trees, and the tangled insistence of the bushes, and the startling prevalence of moss, and the little swale near the chapel that is always moist so matter how hot and dry the weather, and tell me if you think that perhaps yes, a drop doth fall here and there, and then another, and then a thousand and million and uncountable zillions from November right through June, so that summer here is accounted from July through October, after which the Rains begin, and neither they do not cease, day after day after day of mist and rain and fog and drizzle and pitter and drench!

Gaze about you piercingly at the endless ranks and shades of green across the river, and tell me if you think the long thicketed flank of the Tualatin Mountains is perhaps the product of uncountable years of the steadiest rain you could ever imagine!

Gaze down upon the broad muscle of the river, and consider whence came all that water, which does not cease though the sun be bright, and almost doubles its serpentine girth in spring, when months of rain and weeks of snowmelt send a rush and roar of immense proportions to the sea, the Water from which all things came, including, in a sense, us!

Does it rain here? Madame, it does. But rather than groan and moan about it, let us consider it an extraordinary gift from the One: falling free and fresh from the sky every blessed day here on the bluff is clean water, untouched and untrammeled by the greedy hand of man; and so let us step inside the chapel, and thank that which once called itself I Am Who Am, Who giveth us profligately the sweet and savory rain; and so amen.

Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of A Book of Uncommon Prayer (Sorin Books).

PHOTOGRAPH: HOB OSTERLUND

PITTER & DRENCH

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F E A T U R E S 16 / Save All of Yourself for the Wedding, by Heather King Flannery O’Connor: “Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues, and the more I think about it the less I know about it...”

19 / Astonished by Love, by Alice McDermott A Catholic family, in Brooklyn, in the 1930s, and darkness, and light...an excerpt from the lovely new novel by the University’s Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer in February.

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22 / What the Air Carries, by Brian Doyle Question: what weighs five quadrillion tons but you cannot see hide nor hair nor hint of it?

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26 / The Inauguree, photograph by Adam Guggenheim Three quiet blessed moments during Father Mark Poorman’s installation as the University’s 20th president.

28 / Writing Songs, by Jen Crow ’03 The impossible joy of catching songs that never were in the world before.

32 / County Nurse, photographs and notes by Steve Hambuchen A day with Thea Neal ’12 of Umatilla County Public Health, Pendleton, Oregon.

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3 / The University’s 20th president...taking selfies in the Pilot House 5 / Four saints, courtesy of the sixth grade at Eugene’s O’Hara Catholic School 6 / Catholic Jews: a note by theology professor Matthew Warshawsky 7 / Literature professors Lars Larson and Molly Hiro in India page 26

8 / Finding your voice: an essay by professor emeritus Louis Masson 10 / The University’s Yellow Ribbon program for service veterans 11 / Photos of rural Oregon by Portland’s Bobby Abrahamson 12 / Sports, starring the glorious Pilot men’s cross country team 13 / University news and feats and honors and awards 37 / The University’s new alumni director: math professor Craig Swinyard ’98

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THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MAGAZINE

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Cover painting by the wonderful artist Norman LaLiberte, of Massachusetts; our thanks to him for his generosity and verve.

Winter 2014: Vol. 33, No. 4 President: Rev. Mark Poorman, C.S.C. Founding Editor: John Soisson Editor: Brian Doyle Amused Bemused Musing Designers: Joseph Erceg ’55 & Chris Johnson Mooing Assistant Editors: Marc Covert ’93 & Amy Shelly Harrington ’95 Fitfully Contributing Editors: Louis Masson, Sue Säfve, Terry Favero, Mary Beebe Portland is published quarterly by the University of Portland. Copyright ©2014 by the University of Portland. All rights reserved. Editorial offices are located in Waldschmidt Hall, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97203-5798. Telephone (503) 943-8225, fax (503) 943-7178, e-mail address: bdoyle@up.edu, Web site: http://www.up.edu/portland. Third-class postage paid at Portland, OR 97203.

Canada Post International Publications Mail Product — Sales Agreement No. 40037899. Canadian Mail Distribution Information—Express Messenger International: PO Box 25058, London, Ontario, Canada N6C 6A8. Printed in the USA. Opinions expressed in Portland are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University administration. Postmaster: Send address changes to Portland, The University of Portland Magazine, 5000 N. Willamette Boulevard, Portland, OR 97203-5798.

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THE SEASON “He disappeared in the dead of winter,” wrote the great poet Wystan Hugh Auden of his fellow great poet Billy Yeats: “The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, and snow disfigured the public statues...” ¶ Winter has been hoop season on The Bluff for 112 years: the Pilot women feature their calm smiling new coach Cheryl Sorensen, and the men are led by their all-WCC (and Academic All-American) center Thomas van der Mars. See portlandpilots.com for schedules and tickets. ¶ Winter is also volleyball season: the Pilots have a new coach, Brent Crouch, and plans to start a sand volleyball varsity program as well as the current indoor team. ¶ Among the saints of spring: David of Wales (March 1), for whom former University president Father Dave Tyson was named; and Joseph of Nazareth, who must have been one of the great patient humble egoless men in history. A prayer for the quiet man, and for all foster fathers and stepfathers.

ARTWORK BY MILAN ERCEG

ARTS & LETTERS The spring semester Schoenfeldt Writers Series visitor, February 26, 7 pm, BC Aud, free and open to all: the wonderful novelist Alice McDermott, who won the National Book Award for Charming Billy. See page 16. ¶ On stage in the lovely Mago Hunt Theater: Full Circle by Charles Mee (February), and Three Sisters by Doctor Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the greatest of short story writers, and

not a bad playwright either (April). ¶ February 28: a concert in the chapel celebrating women of the Bible, with a brief introduction by theology professor Candace McLean. ¶ Guests of the English department this spring: essayist Father Pat Hannon, C.S.C., February 10, reading from his newest book, Sacrament: Personal Encounters with Memories, Wounds, Dreams, and Unruly Hearts (Ave Maria Press); and novelist Caleb Crain, March 31. Both events are at 7:30 p.m. in BC 163 free as air. ¶ The University annually sponsors ticket packages to musicals downtown at Portland Opera’s Broadway series: this spring the events are Guys and Dolls (March 13), I Love Lucy (based on the great old show) on April 10, Phantom of the Opera (May 16), and Wicked (August 7). Informa tion: Connie Ozyjowski, ozyjowsk@up.edu.

THE FACULTY Joanne Warner, the University’s cheerful witty passionate dean of nursing, will retire July 1, after nine years on The Bluff. During her tenure the School of Nursing started a doctoral program, launched a nationally renowned Dedicated Education Unit, and welcomed booming enrollment, among other feats; but you never met a more gracious, quietly devout, sinewy-brave, and entertaining soul. That will be her legacy, and enduring gift here. Best wishes, O Deanness. ¶ Theology professor (and president, by the way) Father Mark Poorman, C.S.C., will lead a cruise for alumni and friends through the Mediterranean Sea October 7-19; the wry Father Ed Obermiller is cruise manager, obermill@up.edu, 503.943.7488 if you want to go.

Venice, Naples, Greece,

Monaco, Barcelona...sigh. ¶ Education professor Karen Eifler and theology professor Fr. Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., will host Catholic Winemakers event, featuring Columbia Valley vintners, on campus March 21. Details: Jamie Powell, 503.943.7702. ¶ Campus composer Maureen Briare has a new record of her harp music, Peaceful Prayer, Shores of Grace. Email her at briare@up.edu.

ni@up.edu, 503.943.7328. ¶ Awarded at the annual staff Christmas lunch in December: the employee of the year awards. The reigning administrator of the year is the ebullient director of the Freshman Resource Center, Brenda Greiner, who totally deserved it. ¶ Retiring in February, after more than 40 years as a genius typesetter and designer on The Bluff: Sue Safve, who personally helped create this magazine for 25 years. Pithy, funny, terse, and brilliant. Sigh. ¶

FROM THE PAST THE STUDENTS Junior Parents & Families Weekend this winter is February 20-22; the days are filled with music, meals, chances to meet with academic and career counselors, and a Sunday Mass with University president Fr. Mark Poorman, C.S.C.. Call the student activities office: 503.943.7470. ¶ The new editor of the Beacon student newspaper this spring: Katie Dunn from Puyallup, marketing major and the paper’s current sports editor. ¶ Commencement Day this year: May 3.

Among the honorary doctorate recipients: the terrific essayist Anne Fadiman, the great Portland cancer doctor Walter Urba of Providence, and regent Larree Renda, who started as a Safeway checkout girl and is now executive VP of the company.

THE UNIVERSITY Campus chief chef Kirk Mustain will again host one of his unreal Chef’s Tables on January 23 in the Bauccio Commons kitchen: 12 courses, the finest wines, savory desserts, hilarity. Call the alumni office to book seats ($85 each, and worth twice that), alum-

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Born January 2, 1920: the wonderful dreamer Isaac Asimov, in Russia. ¶ January 8, 1942: another genius dreamer is born in Oxford, England: Stephen Hawking. ¶ Among the interesting musicians born in January: David Bowie, Mozart, Schubert, Brian Wilson, Antonio Jobim, and Warren Zevon. Wow. What a band that would be... ¶ February 4, 1902: Archbishop Alexander Christie of Portland telegraphs Father John Zahm of the Congregation of Holy Cross that he had indeed purchased 44 acres of land around Waldschmidt Hall — about a third of the present campus. ¶ February 8, 1935: The student journal The Columbiad begins coming out weekly, and will later that year turn into the weekly Beacon, still the student newspaper. ¶ December 29, 1937: the Irish Free State is replaced by the current Republic; the Free State had, for one day in 1922 comprised all of the island, until Northern Ireland removed itself. ¶ February 10, 1952: Portland’s Blanchet House opens, founded by University alumni; it has offered millions of meals since to the poor and homeless. Millions.

Wow. 8 born Feb-ruary 11, 1799, in the village of Laignéen-Belin in France: Basil Moreau, who would invent the Congregation of Holy Cross.

Good man. Rest in peace.

Prayers on your soul.

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A Sense of Sacred Time and Place “One evening a few weeks ago, shortly after school started, I walked across the campus from my office in Waldschmidt to my home. It was a warm evening and people were everywhere, sitting together on the benches under the bell tower and in front of the library, gathering near Buckley Center for a lecture, moving to and from Bauccio Commons, headed off to evening classes in Shiley and Franz halls. The lights were ablaze in Swindells, where faculty were no doubt checking on labors of love in the labs. There were frisbee players on the practice field and a constant stream of runners keeping our 24-hour-a-day vigil of jogging along Willamette Boulevard. The heavy machinery was silent where the Beauchamp Center is now rising out of the ground, but an older couple from the neighborhood was peering through the construction fence to take its measure. A crowd of students had gathered around the volleyball court in front of Fields and Schoenfeldt halls.

“Everywhere I walked, the campus was alive and was harboring and nurturing and animating people. I felt a tremendous sense of sacred time and place, and I couldn’t help but think to myself: This is what we are all about, now and in the future — an intentional gathering of talent and potential and excitement and hope and community — a city on a hill, if you will — all in the name of a mission that lifts up education as intensely personal, unabashedly holistic, proudly rigorous, charged with faith, and committed to service.

“There is something that happens when people are joined and shaped by a shared purpose. Our ideals are only abstractions until we come together, until we accomplish things with one another, until we can be and become what is beyond our reach when we are alone. And here at the University of Portland we believe that when we are together the Spirit is with us, right here, in this very moment, informing our engagements and interactions and inquiries, breathing life into our mission...”

From Father Mark Poorman C.S.C.’s inauguration speech as the University’s 20th president. Characteristically, he paused during Inauguration events to visit the Pilot House and take selfies with students for an hour. It was hilarious.

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PHOTO BY ADAM GUGGENHEIM

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The men of the Congregation of Holy Cross were involved with the University even before it opened its doors for the first time in September of 1901; the University’s founder, Archbishop Alexander Christie, much admired the way the Holy Cross energized the University of Notre Dame, and it was Christie who invited them to come do the same to his new school. The Holy Cross men arrived in May of 1902, led by the first Holy Cross president, Father Michael Quinlan — all of 28 years old, the youngest president in our history. The men of the Cross have been here ever since, teaching, directing, counseling, listening, praying, laughing, elevating the whole idea. They have been, to be blunt, the bone and heart of the place, and we pause here to thank them for their humor, their grace, their devotion, their generosity, and their commitment to the love of the Merciful One. Well done, lads. Cool suits, too.

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Every year at Eugene’s O’Hara Catholic School (founded in 1889 as St Mary’s, and long gracefully staffed by the Sisters of the Holy Names), the sixth grade embarks on their Living Saints Project — a three-month odyssey during which each student chooses a saint to study, write about, perform as, and “write” as iconography. The University’s Buckley Center Gallery hosted an art exhibit of the icons this year; among them were Saints Faustina Kowalska of Poland (painted by Emmerine Helbling), Hildegard of Bingen, Germany (by Kira Elliott), Bridget of Sweden (by Ella Puls), Pope John XXIII (by Sam Bell), and, on the back cover of this issue, Isabella of France, by Hannah Walter. Terrific show. Could the deft cheerful art professor Pat Bognar, who runs the gallery, use some generous gifts to help in her curatorial work? Sure she could. Call Trevor Harvey at 503.943.7826 and startle him with a gift for the gallery.

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CATHOLIC JEWS?

By University theology professor Matthew Warshawsky, who is absorbed by how religions grow and morph.

For as long as he could remember, Simón de León always felt a vague but nagging sense of difference from most other children in Mexico City.

It was the 1640s, and he had lived all 15 years of his life in the capital of the sprawling viceroyalty of New Spain. The family went to Mass, but never with much enthusiasm. In a place where everyone cooked with lard and ate pork, his family rarely did either. His parents and other elders fasted often, sometimes every Monday and Thursday, and for several days in summer, fall, and winter. On Friday evenings his mother, Isabel Núñez, assiduously swept the house, set out clean linens, drew the curtains facing the street and lit two candles in her bedroom, and along with his father, Duarte de León Jaramillo, mumbled prayers that at times sounded incomprehensible to Simón.

Strangest of all were the surreptitious nocturnal gatherings of other “Portuguese” people in his parents’ storeroom. The adults never invited Simón to these meetings, for good reason. While trying to espy one such clandestine gathering, what he saw through a sliver of light between a curtain and the window frame made Simón recoil in shock: first Duarte beat a crucifix with a belt and then his uncle, Simón Montero, pronounced insults against certain saints and even the Holy Family.

One afternoon when Simón returned home from his apprenticeship as a tailor, his mother escorted him into that same storeroom and, surrounded by boxes of dried fish, revealed a liberating but potentially fatal secret: she and the rest of Simón’s family were secret Jews, who despite their baptism believed that adherence to the “Law of Moses” would ensure their salvation. But Simón must never discuss this matter with anyone, particularly his two younger siblings or other children. Doing so could ensnare the entire family in the clutches of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, whose principal function at this time still consisted in investigating, correcting, and if necessary, punishing the real or suspected

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Jewish heresies of “New Christians,” or Catholics of Jewish ancestry.

To make her point clearer, Isabel described to Simón the travails of her own mother, who more than 40 years previously was “reconciled” to the Church at a public sentencing called an auto de fe (act of faith).

Often called Sephardim, from a reference to the Iberian Peninsula as Sefarad in the book of Obadiah, Jews had lived and prospered in Spain for at least a millennium and a half, until their expulsion or conversion during the last decade of the 1400s. While Columbus set sail for what he thought were the Indies in 1492, those Jews who would not forsake their ancestral religion undertook a journey of similar peril, to points near (Portugal) and far (Italy, the Ottoman Empire). A few short years later, the exiles who had taken refuge in Portugal found themselves arbitrarily baptized en masse. Significantly, however, the Portuguese Inquisition did not start functioning until 40 years later, allowing two generations of the converts, or conversos, to cultivate the seeds of crypto-Judaism without fear of punishment. At a time when many people rarely traveled far from the town of their birth, these Portuguese, as they came to be called, demonstrated a remarkable geographic mobility: a family might count members in Amsterdam, Venice, Madrid, Salonica, Istanbul, Lima, Mexico City, or Recife, and individuals might have lived in several of these places themselves.

Parallel with this geographic mobility was a spiritual one. Depending on place of residence, the same person might, at various times, have practiced Catholicism, Judaism, or, as in the case of Simón’s family, crypto-Judaism, that is, Catholic rites publicly and Jewish ones in the home. Regardless of religion, to be Portuguese was to belong to “those of the Nation” (os da nação), an invisible but potent bond that glued together Portuguese Sephardim all over the world during the 1600s.

Taking advantage of this newly conferred ethnicity, many Portuguese New Christians immigrated to the Americas, hopeful of reinventing themselves. Some thought distance from Spain or Portugal would enable them to live as Jews. Others came to make their fortune, perhaps trading in slaves, silver, sugar, and other commodities. Whatever their reasons, Iberian crypto-Jews lived a bifurcated Portland 6

existence, often hidden in plain sight.

Could Simón de León and his family reinvent themselves in this great land of possibility? The answer is ambiguous at best. When not working as a merchant, Duarte turned his belt against his six children, beating into their holy bodies the command to follow what he called “the good and true law” of Judaism and disparage that of the Church. This unprecedented violence, spoke of the tortured desperation of one secret Jew in an era devoid of spiritual freedom. Soon thereafter, the Inquisition unleashed its “Great Conspiracy” trials on the crypto-Jewish community of Mexico City, the largest prosecution of conversos in the 350-year history of the tribunal in Latin America, and one motivated as much by politics and economics as by religion. Schooled by abuse at the hands of their father, Simón and his siblings must have testified against Duarte as much for fear of him as for the frightful apparatus of the Inquisition. Duarte and Simón Montero were burned at the stake, Isabel barely avoided such a fate, and all the children received lighter sentences.

Yet although the Inquisition endeavored to erase the memory of families like that of Simón de León, their legacy survives amongst small groups of Hispanic Catholics scattered throughout the American Southwest. For several decades now, these individuals, some of whose ancestors arrived with the earliest European settlers, have stepped forward to describe or ask why their families practice rites that suggest a Jewish past.

They share stories, both lived and heard, of clandestinely washing infants after baptism, avoiding the consumption of meat and dairy products together, marrying within families of similar background, and washing and wrapping their dead in a shroud before burial. Recently, support for the preservation of this formerly unacknowledged legacy has come from a most unlikely source: the Spanish government presently is debating a grant of citizenship to the descendants of Sephardim expelled in 1492. Such an attempt to right one of the country’s most tragic decisions, while magnanimous and important, will only be complete, however, if also extended to the descendants of Moriscos, the Christianized Muslims expelled from Spain in the 1600s.

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LETTER FROM INDIA Literature professors Lars Larson and Molly Hiro are in Mysore, India, this year on a rare double Fulbright grant, with their children; notes from Lars on their life in the city that probably was the model for R.K. Narayan’s superb ‘Malgudi’ novels.

Khadi is a hand-loomed cloth that Gandhi made symbolic of self-reliance; all Indian flags are supposed to be made only of it (despite the plastic ones sold everywhere).

Everything tastes better with mango or lime pickle (the Indian form of salsa).

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Despite the soul-rending air-horn blasts of passing trucks, the vehicles themselves are a form of folk art.

Each driver appears to have handpainted and decorated his rig.

“Incense City” is one of Mysore’s nicknames (due to its longstanding work with sandalwood and perfumes).

Another nickname: “The Regal City” (for Mysore was the region’s seat of power for hundreds of years, until Bangalore took that prize of late). Still another nickname: “Silk City” (with its historic sericulture industry, thanks to the circulation of the Silk Road).

While the ever-present lawn (turfgrass) is acre-by-acre the largest “crop” grown in America, it’s nonexistent in Mysore (save one golf course on the city’s outskirts).

Mexican food appears to be completely absent in India; no one we’ve met knows of its existence. Avocados can be found in stores but they are only used to make smoothies.

While North India drinks its daily chai, South India sensibly prefers coffee (though it’s always diluted with chicory and heaps of milk and sugar).

The most common bicycles ridden on the streets appear to be from the 1950s: they’re beautiful work-horses of heavy metal, with metal doodads everywhere, and they bear muscular names like “Atlas” and “Hero.”

Vehicles always have the right-of-way, the bigger the righter. There is zero automotive deference to pedestrians.

With this rule of thumb in mind, India’s road usage is perfectly predictable, rational, safe, and unambiguous.

Custom here makes it somewhat impertinent to address strangers by their names; it’s far more polite to call strangers “brother” or “sister” (if they’re around your age) or “auntie” or “uncle” (if older).

Swastikas are everywhere: scratched into temples, painted on street-corners, incorporated onto buildings, included on official publications. Here, they do not signify one of humanity’s most obscene episodes, but rather their original meaning from Sanskrit origins: good luck (“jai ho”). This is causing us tremendous cognitive dissonance.

Shockingly, there is no India Pale Ale in India. (It’s lager.) In fact, alcohol of any sort is largely a social taboo, at least in non-metropolis India. At dinner parties, you’d never bring wine—you have to play it safe with a box of sweets.

Wandering cows can be found on nearly every block here — every day is Independence Day for bovines.

Best time of day in Mysore: 4 p.m., when schools release streams of India’s youth giggling in their smart uniforms down every neighborhood street. Some wait for busses, some walk soberly, some do a synchronized dance from last weekend’s Bollywood film. Others smile at the passing foreigner and try out their English and school-learning (“Excuse me, uncle: what country?

Ah — U.S.: Barack Obama! Capital: Washington D.C.!”).

Lovely: solo Mysore women steering their own dark scooters through the streets with silk scarves breezing behind in puffs of turquoise, saffron, or lapis.

Nearby: the friendly neighborhood crematorium (disposal-of-choice for Hindu corpses). Shops selling bangles (five rupees each), coconut vendors, the occasional candy-colored temple (Please Remove Shoes Before Enter), yoga parlors.

India is still a hand-lettered world — slick machines have not yet entirely replaced the art of hand-painted lettering. A plurality of street signs, home addresses, ads, etc. were all done with a can of paint and the human hand’s gesture.

India has the world’s second-largest newspaper market. But what does it mean if a major newspaper regularly sells the entirety of its front page (except for the masthead) to an advertiser? (Talking to you, Times of India).

Mughals, Brits), India itself hasn’t invaded another country. It absorbs difference without swallowing it whole.

Having grown melancholy over the minimal presence of libraries in Mysore, I’m convinced America’s libraries are one of the nation’s greatest assets. We miss them and the gifts they bring to our daily lives.

India is famous for fostering difference: 350 languages, 1,600 dialects, 650 different tribes. Despite waves of invaders through the eons (Aryans, Portuguese, Winter 2014 7

90% of India’s marriages are still arranged by parents rather than the spouses themselves. (The latter of which are marginalized under the phrase “love marriages”—the very idea!). The Indian divorce rate compared with the US, where more than 50% split? But India still suffers under the misery of dowry and its great expectations.

In India, slowly rocking your head back and forth, back and forth means Yes! Struck up a conversation with a vendor of ankle bracelets one Sunday at the city’s open-air market. We bought nothing, but he took us for a tour of place, gave us directions to all the things we needed, coached us through several vegetable purchases with the help of his native language, and gave us an envelope with a thick, creamcolored invitation to his sister’s wedding next month.

Reason to feel good today: India’s nation of 1.2 billion has a free and argumentative press, thriving mass media, and a deep and exuberant creativity.

What better situation could be wished for one-sixth of the human species?

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THE SEA OF VOICES The young poet Lilah Hegenauer, University of Portand Class of 2004, was responding to questions after a reading on campus from her poems.

Her audience leaned forward on their folding metal chairs in a room where Lilah sat not so many years ago — very much like them, a student and an aspiring poet. Now she was recounting how she found her voice as a writer. Some students took notes, but I closed my eyes and relished the music that I remembered as the singular melody of her voice.

Most in the audience had never heard this voice before, certainly not in person. For me, though, listening to it brought back the young student asking me a question, or whispering an apology as she slipped in late to a class after a morning as a nanny, or her laughter when I occasionally hit a class’s funny bone. I imagine her own young charges will remember their nanny’s voice, and her own students will remember their teacher’s voice, just as those in the audience who read her poems will now hear her voice, as I do whenever I open one of her books.

I, too, sat in a college lecture hall long ago, listening to a young poet with a sonorous voice read from his

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newly published first book of poems.

All I have to do is see his name now, Galway Kinnell, and I am a college freshman again, and he is reciting the song woke/his heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy. Spellbound at that moment, I believe I found a path that would lead me to a life of poems and stories.

Once, when the great Ursula Le Guin visited the University to read, she preferred that her reading not be recorded, that it should be for the moment, a unique happening. In some way this was an eccentric request, but it also recognized and honored the defining intimacy of someone speaking directly to us in person. And she was right: no recording—symphony, rock festival, speech, play — truly recreates the living present. “You had to be there,” as we so often say. And every day we are “there,” in a sea of voices.

I’ve often thought about that sea and my journey in it. Years before I retired from teaching, I composed what I called an “academic glossary,” a tongue-in-cheek list of brief definitions of university life. I quit at the letter V: “Voices: That’s what I have been for thirty years: a voice. At first, unused to projecting into a large room, I was a creaking voice: of late I am a bit raspy with age. One beauty of teaching is that even a rather ordinary and undistinguished voice is allowed to send so many precious

The University's mail center receives a lot of nutty mail (couches, tires, birds, lutes, cakes, basketballs), but this leapt out at the staff recently...

words into the world.” Of course, we are all voices; are not our voices a defining attribute of the beings we have become? We emerge from the waters of the womb grasping for air and instinctively searching for our voice with that first cry: Here I am!

Hear me!

Even before mama and papa, we begin to discover and master the sounds of the language spoken around us, the background music that envelops us, that washes over and through us. And the tiny ears hear with a clarity that initially escapes our tiny eyes. And our mother’s heartbeat whose iambic beat was the rhythm of the life flowing into our nine-month’s wait gives way to our mother’s voice and with and through her voice the mother tongue.

Mother tongue — what a beautiful and telling phrase.

How do we find our voice? First, in our mother’s arms where we sing sounds back and forth and together in the universal duet of mother and child’s love. From love, words follow sounds; words upon words follow us the rest of our days, as do the voices that speak them. We hear them and save them while we develop and hone our own voice, an entity as unique as our fingerprints and a much more conspicuous embodiment of who we have become. Do not our thoughts seem to us as a voice-over narrative of our life?

We talk to ourselves of ourselves.

I have stored the voices of my now long-dead parents, who speak to me in memories triggered so mysteriously, so fleetingly. So too my friends and extended family, the good priests and nuns, my colleagues, my students of fifty years, my grandchildren who live half way across the world — so very many voices.

What does it mean to lose your voice, to speak no more, to pass away?

What becomes of us, what remains?

For many years I thought that sound traveled forever, that the voices of all time floated out into the enormity of space. Mine would too, yes?

A physicist shattered my theory about sound. But I have recast my notion; now I believe that my voice will float on in a sea of other memories, a sea of those to whom I spoke, I taught, I sang my stories...

Louis Masson, professor emeritus of literature on The Bluff, is the author of three collections of essays, most recently Across the Quad.

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Dave Doe (Brilliant) University Carpenter He will retire next year, almost thirty years after answering an ad for “cabinetmaker, must be able to hang sheetrock” — but o, how very much more he turned out to be on The Bluff. Dave built everything — altars, kneelers, prie-dieux, chairs, desks, tables, lecterns, miles of bookshelves, processional crosses (“always in cherry; cherry looks the best”), chapel fittings, a whole television studio (in Buckley Center), custom shims for the wildly uneven floors in Waldschmidt Hall, on and on and on. Oddest task? “Nailing a hundred statues of Christ to crosses for offices and classrooms — that was a little tense”). Coolest colleague? “The amazing sculptor John Vo, a now-retired night janitor who is just a genius with basswood.” Plans after retirement? Surprise: working with wood, in his barn and woodshop in rural Oregon City. You never met a more cheerful gentle patient affable brilliant gracious man in your life. Travel in beauty, Dave. Thank you for your hard work and grace and humor.

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Gentlemen, Thank You The University’s Yellow Ribbon program, run by Dan Herman in the admissions office, offers thorough financial aid (more than a million dollars in the last four years) to veterans of the United States armed forces, and we recently asked several of these admirable souls to beam for the camera, so that we could in some inarticulate way express our gratitude for their courage and grace.

From left: former Army Specialist Eric Loo, who served two tours in Iraq and one in Pakistan. Highlight: helping victims of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Lowlight? “Iraq.” Graduates in May with an accounting degree and starts work with Price Waterhouse Cooper in the summer. Why accounting? “I like accountability.”

To Eric’s left: former Army Specialist Ragnar Hartman, medic, 82nd Airborne. Four years of service in Iraq.

Was a student at PCC when he decided to “try to do something about the

death toll in Iraq by keeping some guys alive.” Born in Canada; earned his American citizenship during his service. Wandered the University’s campus one day after he returned and was struck by what he says was “general and genuine happiness. I wanted to be here. I love it here. It’s been a dream for me. I was a wreck after the war.” Business student interested in operations management: “I’m very good at refining systems that are already in place.”

To Ragnar’s left: Air Force Reserve cadet Bryce Egan, who is majoring in mechanical engineering while serving in the Reserves; he works on C-17 cargo planes at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma while also being a student. Ambition?

“Officer Training School and airplanes. I love airplanes.”

To Bryce’s left: Air Force Captain Brice Virell, University of Portland Class of 2007, and now returned for Portland 10

an assignment as professor of aerospace studies and flight commander of the University’s Air Force ROTC detachment. Gifted engineer — he has worked on hypersonic reentry vehicles and the F-35 fighter jet.

Earning his master’s in engineering management while teaching on The Bluff. Lives happily with his wife and their two dogs not far from campus.

Happy to be home; he’s from Gresham.

Gentlemen, thank you. It seems to us that no says thank you enough. As U.S. Army Colonel Paul Staeheli ’98 said recently when he received the University’s Contemporary Alumni Award, his job is to put his job out of business, to make a world where war is a memory, to create a world where people of all colors and faiths and orientations do not get shot at, enslaved, abused, imprisoned, and oppressed.

For your work on behalf of that world, our most sincere and heartfelt thanks.

Editor

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Elevating the University’s Buckley Center art gallery recently: photographs of rural Oregon by Bobby Abrahamson, who lives a stone’s throw from the campus. Seen here: a boy shooting pool in Denio, Nevada (about 1000 feet from the Oregon border); a café scene in Halfway, Oregon; “riding shotgun” and a tiny church in Mitchell, Oregon; and “the visionary’s house” in Long Creek, Oregon. For more of Bobby’s work see www.bobbyabrahamson.com.

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also were named all-WCC. ¶ Both teams were off to the NCAA regional meet as we went to press; the men had the national NCAA meet in their sights, as usual.

Women’s Basketball New coach Cheryl Sorensen welcomes back allACC Jasmine Wooten (13 points a game) and Cassandra Brown (14) and Kari Luttinen (13), with new 6' 4'' center Sara Zaragoza from Madrid, where she played for Spain’s national youth teams. Speed and height — this will be a fun year. Schedule and ticket info: portlandpilots.com.

The Timbers The University’s glowing Merlo Field will be the home pitch for the Portland Timbers 2, a professional team one notch below Major League Soccer. T2 will begin competing next year, serving as a farm team for the big club.

Baseball The big news for the diamondmen is a new diamond: Joe Etzel Field goes Astroturf this winter, and will also get new fencing, scoreboard, grandstands, dugouts, lighting, and press box. ¶ The men open play in February; the first home game is February 17, against Seattle U. Other home highlights: Oregon State (March 4), U Dub (March 17), and Oregon (April 7). ¶ Just for fun we checked the highest batting averages ever in 112 years of baseball on The Bluff: .376, Geoff Loomis ’93, drafted by the Oakland Athletics; .364, Jason Geis, ’92, drafted by Cleveland; .and .349, Lenny Farrell ’57, who played

COURTESY OF ERIN DEES

Men’s Basketball Among the new faces for the Pilots this season: veteran NBA and international coach Herb Brown and former NBA video whiz and scout Tim Grass, who joined Eric Reveno’s staff in September. Brown coached the Detroit Pistons and has earned three NBA title rings; Grass worked for several teams, including the Trail Blazers. ¶ Former Pilot forward Ben Sullivan is now an assistant coach for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks; see class notes. ¶ Notably back for the men this year: all-WCC and Academic All-American center Thomas van der Mars. Tickets and schedule: portlandpilots.com.

Cross Country The men, ranked 7th in America, earned their record 34th West Coast Conference title, edging BYU by 3 points, and placing runners first (David Perry), second (Scott Fauble), and fourth (Reid Buchanan).

Perry’s 23:26 was a personal and course record. For the women, senior Tansey Lystad won the race (also in a personal best, 19:49), but BYU edged the Pilots for the team title. ¶ Rob Conner earned his eighth WCC coach of the year award, Perry was named the runner of the year, and Fauble, Buchanan, Danny Martinez, and Timo Goehler were named all-WCC. ¶ Lystad was also named the league’s runner of the year; her teammates Anne Luijten and Sanna Mustonen

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for six minor-league teams.

Soccer Tough year for both the women and the men; at presstime the women were 6-9-3 and will miss the playoffs for the first time in memory, and the men were 4-8-4. The women averaged a remarkable 3,000 fans per game, but Merlo Field was much quieter than usual. ¶ One soccer highlight this fall: the induction of the 2002 NCAA title team, and of legend Shannon MacMillan, into the University’s Hall of Fame. MacMillan gave a lovely speech about the late Clive Charles.

Yes, people wept.

Volleyball New coach Brent Crouch, who coached both indoor and beach volleyball at St. Mary’s in California, welcomes back all-WCC Makayla Lindburg; among the new faces are Marandah Boeder from Oregon’s state champion West Albany High, and allSouthern Arizona Emily Singleton, a star beach volleyball player.

Tennis The women spent much of the fall in California, finishing with a terrific day at the Matador tournament in Northridge; they open their serious season in January. Among the highlights: matches against Oklahoma and Oregon, before the WCC slate begins. ¶ The men open on the road in Seattle in January, and then play Washington and Yale, among other bouts, before WCC play starts in March.

ALL PILOT SPORTS INFO: PORTLANDPILOTS.COM

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O N B R I E F L Y

Joanne Warner Retires! We gnash our teeth. But we got ten years of the dean of nursing’s energy and humor and wit and vision, for which we will be grateful. She finishes up this summer, as the nursing school celebrates its 80th anniversary.

Top Ten U.S. News & World Report magazine again ranked the University among the best ten ‘regional’ universities in the West; this year eighth, of the 114 in that category. That’s 20 consecutive years of top ten. USNWR also ranked the University 12th in the West for value—the coveted bang for the buck award.

Father Mark Poorman was formally inaugurated as the University’s 20th president in September, after beginning his tenure on July 1; among the highlights of the hoopla was his mom and dad beaming from ten feet away as he delivered his eloquent Address.

See pages 24-25.

The Pilot House will be utterly renovated this year, and reopen in September of 2015 as a real student center, complete with pub, late-night café menu, an outdoor patio, and the existing bookstore. (A pub?! Yes, a pub.) We could sure use your help; call Dwain Fullerton at 503.943.8875.

Student Feats The student newspaper, The Beacon, made the national final four for weekly college papers (with Vanderbilt, DePaul, and Texas Women’s U), the highest ranking ever form the College Media Association. ¶ Social work students Rebecca Tabor and Yuri Hernandez won two of only three national Wahlberg Scholarships from Phi Alpha, the national honor society in their discipline. ¶ Mehling Hall turned fifty years old this year; it is absorbing to think that 10,000 women have rented rooms in that august tower.

Faculty Feats Christened at the Portland Opera Center downtown:

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the Roger O. Doyle Performance Space, celebrating the late great uproarious University music professor and raconteur. The space is part of KPBS classical radio station’s new digs there; Roger was a pillar of the station for years. ¶ Politics professor Gary Malecha earned the Spirit of Holy Cross Award, presented annually by the Congregation of Holy Cross in America to layfolk who have worked especially hard and well on behalf of Blessed Basil Moreau’s wild dream. ¶ The cheerful geophysics professor “Coach Bob” Butler earned the Fred Fox Award from the Oregon Science Teachers Association — an honor celebrating those who worked with all their might to develop and help new teachers. ¶ Among recent symposia on campus: a day pondering driverless cars, with Intel ‘futurist’ Steve Brown and tech ethicist Diane Michelfelder. ¶ Communication studies professor Vail Fletcher earned a national book award in her field for her Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland. ¶ Father Claude Pomerleau (politics) was in Chile, Cara Hersh (English) was in Iceland, Father Tom Hosinski (theology) was at Oxford University, Michael Andrews (philosophy) was in Turkey, Rich Gritta (finance) was in France, and Norah Martin (philosophy) was in Mexico, all on recent scholarly business for the University. The farflung glory and romance of the academic life!

Grants & Gifts Among recent generosities: $100,000 from Greg Shean ’69 and his wife Gloria for engineering scholarships; the Sheans now have $170,000 in their Shean Financial Aid Fund. Now there’s a great idea; a permanent fund that yields $20,000 annually in direct aid. ¶ Raised by this magazine last year: $99,000 in gifts from 1,366 absorbed readers.

Wow. Vaunted Visitors Among recent interesting guests: Father Kevin Grove, C.S.C., who spoke hauntingly of memory and Eucharist on behalf of the Garaventa Center for Catholic Life; the glorious English baritone William Berger, on campus to offer a master class; and His Honor Carlos Bea, federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals (speaking after the University’s annual Red Mass for legal folks).

Among the Coolest Classes on Campus, according to the Beacon student newspaper: Politics 391, the Sixties; Theology 391, Interpreting the Bible (“how ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality influence our present day interpretation of the Bible”); Psych 370, Personality (cultural, biological, and cognitive personality theories and research); History 351, Modern Japan; Theater 325, Acting for Non-Majors; Environmental Studies 162, Oceanography; and the hugely popular Communication Studies 301, Media and Society, ever applicable…

As a record 1,100 freshmen moved into their residence halls this summer, the University’s marketing office made a gentle moving funny brief film, asking parents what last advice they would give their new college kids, and recording many sweet tearful hugs (and head-rubs). See http://tinyurl.com/UPparents. You’ll cry for sure.

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Ladies and gentlemen, meet some of the University’s record fourteen Gates Millennium Scholars — more than any other private college in Oregon. The Gates program annually awards “good through graduation” scholarships to 1,000 American students; that’s free undergraduate and graduate education for, from left, Fatima Ruiz, Khalid Osman, Kevin Truong, Sabrina Mohammed, Brandon Zambrano, Martina Brown, Maritza Leon, and Monica Medrano.

The program, started in 1999 with a billion-dollar gift from Bill and Melinda Gates, is especially interested in helping outstanding minority students study and work in computer science, education, engineering, library science, mathematics, public health, and the sciences. Does the University have many other scholarships for kids who want to dive into science and math and engineering and health? Yes indeed. Do we yearn for and cherish generous gifts toward all scholarships, so as to jazz kids like these eight? Indeed we do. Call Melissa Harteloo at 503.943.8552, harteloo@up.edu.

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Some notes about these extraordinary young people: Sabrina, now a sophomore nursing major, came to the United States when she was ten, from Ethiopia; she is helping her dad raise her five siblings while she is enrolled at the University. Her mother died when she was fifteen, and Sabrina dreams of being a doctor someday. Monica, who has worked as a pharmacy tech since she was fourteen, is the first person in her family to go to college. Kevin’s grandfather spent five years in a Viet Cong prison camp after the war; his dream is to be a surgeon for Doctors Without Borders, and run for the United States Senate. Martina Brown, who moved to Alaska from the Philippines when she was eight years old, dreams of being a nurse in Ketchikan. Khalid, born in a refugee camp in Kenya after his family fled war-torn Somalia, is a civil engineering major who plans to start his own firm focusing on infrastructure. Whew.

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Save All of Yourself For theWedding

by Heather King

“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues, and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”

- FLANNERY O’CONNOR

F

or years I was a barfly: the lowerdown and dirtier the bar, the better.

I could tell you stories. So believe me I know purity is not innocence, but it’s also not some creepy snow maiden don’t-touch-me weirdness. Purity has juice at the center of it or it’s not purity; it’s repression, it’s fear, it’s withholding, it’s fossilizing one’s “virginity” in amber, it’s playing hard-to-get that’s veered off to pathology.

The erotic urge behind purity is more, not less, intense than the erotic urge behind sex alone. Authentic purity is fueled by procreative, erotic energy that’s been brought to a whitehot flame — and channeled.

I came into the Catholic Church in 1996. I’ve tried to remain faithful to her teachings, on sex and everything else. When I haven’t, I’ve availed myself of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and sincerely tried to do better.

I’ve stumbled, I’ve failed, but one thing this has given me is some rough purity of heart. I go to Confession because I believe that what we do and think matters. I go because I believe someone, somewhere, needs me to be pure. Maybe it’s the father of a tenyear-old girl who is contemplating molesting her. Maybe it’s an adult who was abused by a priest as a kid and is about to abuse his own kid. Maybe it’s the teenagers who are about to lynch Matthew Shepard.

We do not know the mercy of God. As we must, we make rules — because to have a free-for-all makes for a way worse bondage than rules — but at the end of the day we will be judged on love. For all the ways we’ve fallen short, aimed for pleasure divorced from joy, thought of ourselves instead of the whole world, we’ll be judged on one thing: how we treated the least of these.

We’ll be judged on whether we’ve woken up to the fact that the whole

joy of life is admitting our brokenness, falling to our knees in gratitude, moving our chair a little to make way so the person beside us can sit at the table, too. We’ve already been forgiven; are forgiven even as we’re falling short. I wonder if Confession isn’t so that we can forgive ourselves.

To strive for purity in this culture, even privately, is to feel oneself a laughingstock, grotesquely out-of-step, a freak. But as Catholic novelist François Mauriac observed, “We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear.” We don’t know the worth of entering into a kind of voluntary exile out of love. We don’t know the worth of the simple bodily presence of someone who lives by a creed that costs.

Purity is the conviction that we are all pearls of great price: not to be violated, tampered with, used loosely, or given away for less than we’re worth or to someone who’s incapable of understanding our value. Christianity is all invitation and all gift. To offer up my body also gives me a way not to die of the sorrow of the world; not to be crushed by my inadequacy, my seeming meagerness, my inability to “help.”

So this chastity — in my case actually, celibacy — which believe me, has not been entirely voluntary, nor always joyfully, wholeheartedly embraced, is a great mystery. I have often felt like a loser, an aging outcast, an exile. I have worried that I am incapable of giving and receiving love. I have of course wondered whether I’ve embraced the teachings of the Church or whether I’ve parlayed the fact that guys haven’t exactly been knocking down my door into some kind of crackpot “holiness.” Pop psychology encourages me to view my situation as “sexual anorexia” but I know that’s wrong bePortland 16

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cause I am more, not less, available to the world — and I am also less lonely. I’m alone a lot of the time, but I’m not plagued by loneliness, scourged by loneliness, as I have been for much of my life. I feel useful, needed, at my full powers as a writer and a human being, part of an adventure infinitely greater than myself.

My friends know I’m Catholic. They know I’m single. They know I care for them and for their spiritual well-being, and I know they care for mine. Beyond that, we don’t go. They don’t know the years of sorrow, of working through my neuroses and blocks, of loneliness unto death, of searching, of finding. They know nothing of my life in Christ and little of my sexual and emotional struggles.

I can hardly speak of them myself.

I remember lying on my bed one afternoon many years ago, in anguish over a man I loved and who did not love me. I thought I am either going to drink again or or I am going to kill myself. And I wouldn’t do either of those things. Drinking would be tantamount to suicide, and I would not choose death. Someone would have to kill me first; I wished someone would kill me.

My God, Lord, how long? I thought.

How much longer? Will this suffering that I had already endured for years never end? And I had a very short but very decisive moment of clarity. I thought, Christ never lied. He never said that following him was going to be easy. He said, “Narrow is the gate and few are those who find it,” and that’s because it hurts to go through the narrow gate. It hurts like hell. It hurt like hell for him. And he never lied.

So in the deepest part of my being I made a decision, and the decision was simply to trust, like Job, who said, “My God, though thou slayest me, yet will I put my trust in thee.” It wasn’t so much that I had to give up all hope of ever having a partner, of having sex, of being married, of bearing fruit with a man; it was a matter of giving up my whole self, my capacity for romantic and sexual love included, for Him to do with as he would. I’d tried going after what and who I wanted.

I’d tried it all my life. I’d never come to the deepest fulfillment and I also never felt I’d given my all, which I think is truly the deepest desire of the human heart. We want to give ourselves fully, to forget ourselves, of which orgasm is a foretaste, an emblem, an echo — and of course, why it’s so compelling.

I’m human. I’ll never be entirely free, nor entirely well. I’ll never know my

truest, deepest motives, which at best, remain mixed. But if I waited for my motives to be pure, I’d never take any stand at all. Lost sheep that I am, I have cast my lot with Christ, who said, “My sheep know my voice.” Not that kind of voice, not for me, anyway; not visions, not deus ex machina miracles. Rather the silent conviction, to the depth of my being, that we are connected: cell to cell, bone to bone, flesh to flesh, body to body, spirit to spirit, tiny flickering light to light. You don’t come to that conviction through philosophy or theology. Those things may lead you to the threshold but at some point you have to trust even though “thou slayest me.” And he does slay us.

You are worth more than many sparrows because you have lusts and longings and desires unto death and out of love...

He slays us, and then he brings us to life again: the same, but different.

Everyone has a body. St. Maria Goretti consented to be stabbed to death at the age of 11 rather than yield her virginity, not because she was some shrinking-violet Victorian who became faint at the thought of sex, but because she knew her full worth. She had taken the full measure of herself, her mind, her strength, her soul, her heart. And when you take the full measure of yourself, in Christ, you also know your infinite value to the rest of the world, even if the world never knows or sees one thing about you. Every hair on your head is numbered. You are worth more than many sparrows because you have lusts and longings and desires unto death and out of love, you consent to hold the tension of the conflict. And your infinite value doesn’t cease when you die. It lives on, into eternity...

Everyone can make the prayer of the body. “It is possible for everyone, always, if they have a body,” wrote Caryll Houselander. “It means offering our bodies as a sacrifice for mankind.

It needs no sweet meditation, no eloPortland 18

quence of words, no sensible fervor.

It can be made in aridity, weariness, dullness, boredom, pain, in temptation, in any circumstances at all, by anyone.”

To the world this is folly. That is because even we believers shrink from the radical call of Christianity, which is not only to give our whole selves but to be ridiculed for it, misunderstood for it; to be charged with a lack of compassion. I thought of Flannery O’Connor, who observed, “The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way. There is not much possibility of understanding between the two.”

In The Lord, Romano Guardini observed: “Every Christian one day reaches the point where he too must be ready to accompany the Master into destruction and oblivion: into that which the world considers folly, that which for his own understanding is incomprehensible, for his own feeling intolerable. Whatever it is to be: suffering, dishonor, the loss of loved ones, or the shattering of a lifetime oeuvre, this is the decisive test of his Christianity. Will he shrink back before the ultimate depths, or will he be able to go all the way and thus win his share of the life of Christ? What is it we fear in Christianity if not precisely this demand? That is why we try to water it down to a less disturbing system of ‘ethics’ or ‘Weltanschauung’ or what have you. But to be a Christian means to participate in the life of Christ — all of it; only the whole brings peace.”

That is what we call each other to as Catholics: the highest level of awakening, the highest level of sacrifice, the highest level of participation, the highest level of love.

So, we give all that we have. We are like the widow’s last two mites, and like mites, we are unseen, tossed aside, hidden, of no account in the ledger of the world. We give all we have anyway, in silence, scorned as bigots, ridiculed as nutcases, our hearts aflame with the hope that one day, perhaps not in our lifetimes, another human heart may catch flame as well.

“Save all of yourself for the wedding though nobody knows when or if it will come,” wrote Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade...

Heather King is the author of several books, among them Parched and Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux. Her new book Stumble: Virtue, Vice, and the Space in Between will be published in February by Franciscan Media.

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Astonished by Love A Catholic family, in Brooklyn, in the 1930s, and darkness, and light...

By Alice McDermott

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y father appeared at the corner.

Paused for his evening paper. Topcoat and hat to mark him as a clerk, not a laborer. I only raised my head above my knees when I saw him — although surely something, some sinewy energy, some delight, tensed and trembled itself through my thin back and shoulders as I gazed down the sloping street.

The boys playing stickball parted once again for a passing car: it was the ebb and flow of their game. I turned away from them, raised a hand to the balustrade to get ready to spring. My father was a thin, slight man in a long coat. His step was quick and jaunty.

He, too, wore shoes with a high shine.

My father smelled, always, of fresh newsprint and cigarettes, of the alcohol in his faded cologne. I caught my chin on his buttons as he lowered me to the ground. A brief, painful scrape that upset my glasses and made my eyes water. I walked the last few paces home balanced on his shoes. We climbed the steps together and into the fragrant vestibule — fragrant with the onion odor of cooked dinners and the brownstone scent of old wood — and up the narrow stairs and into the apartment, where my mother was in the kitchen and my brother at the dining-room table with his books.

The apartment we lived in was long and narrow, with windows in the front and in the back. The back caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon and evening. Even at this cool hour in late spring, it was a dusty, city light. It fell on paint-polished window seats and pink carpet roses. It stamped the looming plaster walls with shadowed crossbars, long rectangles; it fit itself through the bedroom door, crossed the living room, climbed the sturdy legs of the formidable dining-room chairs, and was laid out now on the diningroom table where the cloth — starched linen expertly decorated with my mother’s meticulous cross-stitch — had been carefully folded back along the whole length so that Gabe could place his school blotter and his books on the smooth wood. It was the first light my poor eyes ever knew. Recalling it, I sometimes wonder if all the faith

and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.

I followed my father to the narrow closet and held the newspaper for him while he hung up his overcoat and placed his hat on the shelf. He went to the couch in the living room and I went with him, fitting myself into his side, leaning heavily against his arm — “like a barnacle,” he said — as he read the evening paper.

The slipcover, also my mother’s handiwork, was a paradise of hummingbirds and vines and deep-throated flowers, the colors, if not the images, subdued by the thick brocade. Sinking into my father’s side, slipping under his arm as he patiently lifted the open paper to accommodate me, I entered that paradise via my tracing fingertip and squinted eyes, until he said, “Marie,” patiently, and asked me to sit up a bit.

He kept a long key chain attached to his belt, and perhaps to keep my bony weight from putting his arm to sleep, he pulled the keys at the end of it out of his pocket and placed them in my hands. There were two keys, small but heavy, and the metal disks with his embossed name and number from his time in the army, as well as a small St. Joseph medal tinged with green. I turned them over as he read, traced them with my fingers, tested the weight and the jingle of them. I wondered if Bill Corrigan, who had been gassed in the war, carried something of the same in his pocket.

When my mother called to me to get up and set the table, my father put his hand to the top of my head.

Slipping out of that first darkness, into the dusty, city light of these rooms, I met the blurred faces of the parents I’d been given — given through no merit of my own — faces that even to my defective eyes, ill-formed, you might say, in the hours of that first darkness, were astonished by love.

Winter 2014 19

We gathered for dinner, a piece of oilcloth spread across the table now, on an ordinary night — the last concession to my sloppy childhood, because in another few weeks, after my First Communion, we would abandon the oilcloth cover at meals and once again dine on starched linen, like civilized people, as my father put it. Mashed potatoes and slices of beef tongue and carrots boiled with sugar. Canned peaches with a tablespoon of heavy cream. Then the cloth was folded back again, and once again my brother spread his blotter and his books across the cleared end of the long table.

In the narrow kitchen, standing over the steaming sink, her hands red to the elbow, my mother was unconcerned. “Pegeen Chehab,” she said, “has big feet.” And girls that age, she said, were always tripping over themselves, looking for boys.

She handed me a wet saucer. I was not yet allowed to dry the dinner plates. The kitchen was warm and close, the one window was steamed, and the pleasant scent in the air was of soap and of the spring sunshine that had dried my mother’s apron.

For my mother, who loved romance — especially an American romance, which involved, for her, a miraculous commingling of lives across comically disparate portions of the globe — the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Chehab was a continual source of wonder and delight. She told the story again: The place where Mr. Chehab was born was called Mount Lebanon, in a country called Syria. A desert, she said. With a desperately hot sun and palm trees and dates and pineapples and sand and — she shrugged a little, her voice suddenly uncertain — a mount, apparently. She handed me a small drinking glass and said, “Be sure you don’t put your hand inside, just the cloth.”

His own parents, she said, wrapped him in swaddling clothes and carried him away from that sunny place. They crossed over the Mediterranean Sea. They scaled Spain.

She squinted at the damp tiles above the sink as if a map were drawn there.

They climbed through France,

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reached Paris, which is called the City of Light, crossed the White Cliffs of Dover — there is a song — got to Liverpool, no doubt, to Dublin, found Cork, as she herself had done when she was seventeen, wearing three skirts and four blouses and carrying only a purse so her stepfather, a terrible man, would not know she was leaving home.

At the harbor, Mr. and Mrs. Chehab found a ship that brought them to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, they put the baby into a cradle, in the cool corner

of a basement bakery on Joralemon Street. And all the while, my mother said — a trill of profound amusement rising into her voice — in County Clare, Mrs. Chehab — who was a McMahon then — was taking her own first breaths. And shivering, no doubt, in the eternal dampness of that bleak country’s bitter air.

My mother looked at me from over her shoulder, her hands still in the sink.

There’s a burned taste to the air at home, she said — not for the first time.

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A taste of wet ashes and doused fire.

It can make you believe, she said, that you live in the permanent aftermath of some nearby sorrow. Somewhere in the vicinity, you’re always thinking, someone’s house has recently burned to the ground.

In that damp and dirty country, my mother said, Mrs. Chehab grew to be a tall girl, a girl who would have no trouble getting up the steep gangplank that led from the dock at Queenstown — a climb my mother herself

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eyed man behind the counter.

I watched my mother move her hands through the water once more, searching for stray silverware, smiling her sly smile at the delightful oddity of it all. Then she pulled the stopper from the sink, and I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears to block out the terrible sound.

When I removed them and opened my eyes, my mother was swabbing the counter. “And after all that,” she said, “and after all that, along comes homely Pegeen, with her mother’s blotched skin and her father’s big nose and those great long feet, God help her.”

When the dishes were put away, my father went to the narrow closet for his hat and said, “Let’s take a stroll.”

We went down the stairs together.

Shined black tips of his neat shoes and perfect fall of his trouser cuffs over the smooth laces. A lilt in the tap of his step on the uncarpeted stair, the tap of our steps. Out through the vestibule and onto the sidewalk again.

We were in front of the Chehabs’ building when he dropped my hand and paused to light a cigarette, the smoke rising white from under the bowed brim of his hat. And then he threw his head back with the pleasure of that first exhalation of smoke. Made me look up as well to see the stars.

A thin handsome man, forty years old.

It was one of his shanty cousins, the McGeevers, who would later say that a body so thin was nothing more than a walking invitation to misfortune.

had struggled with, she said, because of the rain that fell on the day she sailed, because she was alone, with no man’s arm to hold on to and none offered across the whole trip, not until my father gave her his on the steps at the Grand Army Plaza.

But Mrs. Chehab would have had no trouble keeping those long feet steady against the slick and pitching floor of the ship that carried her here.

Where she stopped at the Syrian bakery one day and saw a small, dark-

He took my hand again. There was the sure familiarity of his grip, warm and firm, the palm broad against my small fingers. We walked to the other corner, away from the subway, although there was still the sound of it somewhere beneath our feet. There was as well the sound of a trolley on another street, the sound of someone calling to a child, someone shouting inside a building. Lights at windows were growing brighter, growing warmer, it seemed, as the air grew cold. There was the scent of metal, whiff of tar, of stone, of dog droppings left beside the wrought-iron cage that surrounded a scrawny tree. The soft gabardine of my father’s suit jacket against the back of my hand. At the corner, we turned and he tossed the glowing cigarette into the street.

“I’ll be only a minute,” he said. He put his two hands on my shoulders, as if to place me more securely on the sidewalk before another stoop, and then turned to push through a narrow iron fence that led down a dim alley.

The air was black, but the lights in Winter 2014 21

the buildings were warm and golden.

Only a few people went by, their coats drawn around them. One man touched his hand to the brim of his hat as he passed and I dropped my chin shyly. And then rose up on my toes after he’d gone, putting my face to the streetlight as if to a warm sun.

I squinted, and the light burst and stretched itself yellow and white into the darkness. I heard the squeal of the iron gate and my father was beside me again, the sharp smell of the drink he’d just had in the air about him.

He held out his hand. In the center of his palm there was a white cube of sugar, sparkling in the light. I plucked it up and slipped it into my mouth.

I turned it with my tongue. Watching, my father pursed his lips and shifted his jaw, as if he, too, felt the sugar on his teeth. Then he took my hand again.

We passed the Chehabs’ parlor window, where there was a lamp and a chair and the back of Mr. Chehab’s dark head and broad shoulders as he smoked a cigar and read the evening news.

In the vestibule, my father shot back his cuffs and put his warm palms to my face. He studied me seriously, smiling only a little — I was a roundfaced, narrow-eyed, homely, comical little thing — until my cheeks were warm enough, he said, to pass muster with my mother. And we climbed the stairs once more.

There was tea, with a slice of plain cake, while my mother, with one of his schoolbooks in her lap, put my brother through his paces: catechism questions, Latin declensions, history’s dates and names. He answered all without hesitation, breaking off pieces of the cake only after he had finished a round. And then, with a jagged line of cake still left on his plate and half his milky tea still in his cup, he pushed back his chair and walked slowly to the far end of the table.

My father, at the opposite end, moved his own cup aside and leaned forward. I could see the reflection of his pale throat and chin in the table’s dark wood, like a face just beginning to appear in a still pool of black water.

Or disappear. n Alice McDermott, who will be the University’s Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer on Thursday evening, February 26, at 7 p.m. in Buckley Center Auditorium, is the author of seven novels, among them Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award. This story is drawn, with her generous permission, from her lovely new novel Someone.

Her talk on The Bluff is free and open to all; for details call Brian Doyle, 503.943.8225, bdoyle@up.edu.

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WHAT THE AIR CARRIES

by Brian Doyle

Q

uestion: what weighs five quadrillion tons but you cannot see hide nor hair nor hint of it?

Answers: Guilt, responsibility, fatherhood, sorrow, love, history — but here I mean that most crucial of freighted invisibilities, air, the atmosphere, our atmosphere, the incredible blanket we breathe, without which our sphere is only another among zillions of lifeless rocks let loose in the endless void. Five quadrillion tons! The parade of zeroes like a circus train behind the engine of the five: 5,000,000,000,000,000…

It heats and cools, expands and contracts, it is always in motion, and we have spent many thousands of years measuring its motion in words: British sea captain and scientist Sir Francis Beaufort’s 1906 scale, which describes winds in lines of terse poetry, from Beaufort Number 1 (smoke rises vertically) to 5 (small trees in leaf begin to sway, crested wavelets form on inland waters), to 6 (umbrellas used with difficulty) to 9 (chimney pots and slates removed) to 12 (devastation). Or the Smithsonian Institution’s 1870 wind scale, citing a light breeze which sometimes fans the face, and a wind that somewhat retards walking, and wind that sometimes carries light bodies up into the air.

Or the American physicist Theodore Fujita’s 1971 tornado scale, which lists the effects of winds between 113 and 157 miles per hour as mobile homes demolished, boxcars pushed over, lightobject missiles generated, and for winds between 261 and 318 miles, trees debarked, a chilling phrase. Or a 2002 emendation of the Beaufort scale by a wag in Savannah, Georgia, measuring wind power by its effect on lawn furniture: force 11, lawn furniture airborne, a riveting phrase.

Makes you want to invent your own scale for how air in motion shivers

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your heart in the prison of your ribs, doesn’t it? Breeze at the beach with sufficient salt to make your eyes water and give you an excuse for the tears that came as you were thinking about your mama’s last hours and the way she winked at you right at the end and made you laugh and sob, or bracing wind felt upon stepping out the front door of the hospital with new son clamped in your right arm like a moist mewling football, or wind tart and adamant enough to rattle spectacles in hugely distracting manner while you are down on one knee stammering out a marriage proposal, or breeze so gentle and insistent and pleasurable that you find yourself grinning and humming for no reason other than you are actually miraculously alive in this bruised and blessed world…

The roaring wondrous vocabulary of the air, all these words for wind, breeze to zephyr…There is the sirocco, which arises in Africa and blows west to the Atlantic ocean. There is the chinook, which arises in the Rocky Mountains and blows west to the Pacific ocean.

There is the monsoon, the wind rife with rain, that blows all over the world.

In Alaska there are winds called knik, matanuska, pruga, stikine, taku, and williwaw. In Asia and the East there are winds called aajej, arifi, beshabar, datoo, ghibli, haboob, harmattan, imbat, khamsin, nafhat, and simoom.

There are typhoons and cyclones, tornados and hurricanes, storms and squalls. There are the Santa Ana winds of California, the desert winds that, noted Raymond Chandler, curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch…meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen…

What the air carries: albatrosses, bullets, currents, dust, electricity, frogs, glances, hawks, hopes, iridescence, jets, kites, loss, moans, neutrons, owls, prayers, quail, regrets, sunlight, titmice, understandings, violence, water, x-rays, yammers, zeppelins.

Air is not made of air. It is a composition, a stew, a motley gaggle of gasses.

In general, in most cases, wherever you are on this particular rock, the air in which you swim is about eighty percent nitrogen and twenty percent oxygen. There’s a little argon (about one percent), and a shred of carbon dioxide, and infinitesimal traces of neon, helium, krypton, hydrogen, xenon, ozone, and radon, but most of what your body slides through and what slides through you is nitrogen, a gas hatched inside stars and mailed

to us through the airless void by an unimaginable postal service.

A woman I know breathed life back into her infant daughter. The baby stopped breathing and the father sprinted for the phone and authority and emergency and expertise but the mother bent desperately over her baby and locked lips and breathed, the air throbbing through the lungs of these two beings as joined as joined could be, and after a moment the baby’s eyes flickered and her lungs staggered awake again and she hauled in the holy air with a convulsive sob.

Talk about your resurrections.

What the air carries: airs, ballads, curses, darts, effervescence, flying-fish, guffaws, hilarity, hissing, irritation,

In Cities and with urban planners and developers, air is a commodity, a thing measured in footage and mileage and meters. jokes, kingfishers, longing, murmurs, nattering, nighthawks, opinions, passion, quarks, rhythms, sibilance, soil, tittering, ululation, vowels, whispers, xylophone parts flung in utter exasperation, yowls, zest.

You can buy air, sell it, rent it, lease it, lend it out, claim it, refuse and deny its use to others. Among nations and urban planners and developers, air is a commodity, a thing measured in footage and mileage and meters. Some air space is greatly coveted — the whirl of wind over what used to be Iraq, the haunted air over what used to be the World Trade Center in New York City. Seven months after the towers were destroyed and the thousands of men and women and children in and among them murdered, two artists and two architects arranged two banks of searchlights nearby and fired two towers of light into the air every night for a month. The lights rose a mile high and could be seen nearly thirty miles away.

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Question: Why is it that what we need most — air and water — is what we take most for granted?

There is air in water. There is air in soil. There is air in ice and in rock.

Sometimes air is trapped for millions of years in ice and rock or amber.

One study of air trapped in the amber of an extinct pine tree found air bubbles eighty million years old. The scientists who examined the air were startled to discover that it had twice as much oxygen as air does today.

Does twice as much available oxygen mean beings can grow twice as large?

Does more air explain dinosaurs? If we had twice as much oxygen would we be twice as smart?

There is air at the bottom of the sea, inside incalculable creatures six miles deep, viperfish and dragonfish, fangtooth and loosejaw, eelpout and bobtail. There is air in the bar-headed geese who fly over the Himalayas in their business travels. There was a lot of air in the largest flying creature ever, the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, three times bigger than your car. There is air in the bee hummingbird, smaller than your thumb. There are some two million species of creature on this sweet earth, and there have been perhaps ten million others, and every one swam in the invisible miracle, and needed it to live, and moved in it with grace and power and zest and thrum. Such a populous and generous thing, air.

How was air born? One theory is that sunlight and lightning acted upon water vapor in such a way as to elicit the first gases, on which sunlight and lightning acted to elicit more gases, and the gases acted upon each other in such ways as to allow for living beings made of gas and light and water.

The short answer to the question: no one knows. The long answer: there are more things mysterious and miraculous between heaven and earth than we will ever know in a million years.

Air is an endangered species, of course. We know this but we ignore it.

We nod in agreement when we hear or read or say something chilling and piercing about increasing poison in the air, but we do nothing. We know beyond the shadow of a doubt that cars and furnaces and factories belch poisons into the air, belch poisons into our children, choke plants and animals and birds and those we love, but we do nothing. We know poisons in the air are ferocious volleys of lead

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fired into us all, as the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano says, but we do nothing. We issue words in vast webs into the air, opinions and commentaries, white papers and web sites, debates and discourse, seminars and symposia, platforms and parameters, transcripts and testimonies, and we do nothing. If ever we all at once stopped fighting about the names of God and the color of money, and beamed our lasered arrowed attentions on clean air and clean water, we could make a new world as clean and brilliant as a baby. But we do nothing.

What the air carries: ants, baseballs, currawongs, damselflies, egrets, finches, gazelles, herons, ibis, jackdaws, killdeer, lariats, mutters, macaws, negativity, oaths, poems, queries, recriminations, swallows, thanks, Uruguayan writers, vocabularies, willets, yells, the crooning of zookeepers to the miraculous creatures they love.

I was once a basketball player, years ago, when I was young and supple, pliable and quick, and nothing gave me as much joy as floating into the air — which is maybe why I wasn’t a very productive basketball player. More than anything I wanted to soar to the rim, inventing a shot along the way, or sail into a play unexpectedly to snare a rebound or block a shot, and you never saw a guy so liable to pump fakes. On the break with the ball, one defender to beat, a quick crossover dribble to mess up the defender’s feet and then bang! away up into the air where anything and everything was possible, where bodies were verbs, unrooted, closer to the light…

I was asthmatic as a boy. I spent many nights as thirsty for air as a fish is for water, gasping in the dark, trying to stay calm, trying not to call out for my dad. One of my sons is asthmatic.

I have spent many nights listening to his lungs. He hauls in the ragged air with a desperation so intense I think my heart will explode. So many of us so hungry for the wild food of the air.

The air has no end, atmospherically speaking; no one knows quite where the air ends and airlessness begins, which pleases me for murky reasons.

Above the earth is the troposphere, about eleven miles high, and then the stratosphere, about thirty miles high, and then the mesosphere and ionosphere, together more than two hundred miles high, and then what is called the plasmasphere, or hydrogen cloud, which sails off into space for thousands of miles. No one has ever

been able to measure officially where it ends and where outer space as we know it begins. Isn’t that cool? We think we know so much but we really know so little.

The first gasp and gulp of air from an infant in any of the million species on our planet. The last exhalation of those returning to dust and salt and starlight. Gasps of shock and surprise.

Laughing so hard you have to bend over and gulp air. The propulsion of air in annoyance and exasperation.

The deep gulp you take before plunging under water. The steady throb of breathing in sleep. The whistled exhalation in amazement: wheeewwww.

Children leaping into pools, surf, sandboxes, puddles, predicaments, puzzles, passions. Swimming through the air windmilling their arms their

The air has no end, no one knows quite where the air ends and airlessness begins, which pleases me for murky reasons.

hands cupping air like water. I never tire of watching my kids and all kids at the beach, in playgrounds, in games, leaping into the air as easily and unconsciously and lightly as leaves. A man or a woman works at getting into the air, and needs a reason for flight — despair, destination, destruction, decoration — whereas a child is at home in the air, and will leap off a branch or a bicycle or a bed for no reason whatsoever but sheer mammalian zest. Remember that as a species we are just recently down from the trees, says the great American writer Peter Matthiessen, and I wonder sometimes if we thirst unconsciously for breezes against our bodies, winds in our teeth, air in our hair.

Winter 2014 25

What the air carries: arrows, bees, curlews, ditties, ethereal melodies, flickers, golf balls, hurrahs and huzzahs, ibex, jacaranda petals, kestrels, lances, merlins, noises, olfactory misadventures, paradelles, quivers and shivers, rubaiyats, sonnets, terzanelles, the shudders of udders, villanelles, wails, xenophobic rants, yips, the rumble and grumble of zebras as they bed down for the night.

Air in words: I inhale great draughts of space, the east and west are mine, and the north and the south are mine, says that greatest of American poets Walt Whitman. Drink the wild air, says Ralph Emerson, our worst essayist and greatest aphorist. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air, says Carl Sandburg, a fine poet forgotten. I just put my feet in the air and move them around, says Fred Astaire, who flew. This land, this air, this water, this planet, this legacy to our young, said the late quiet Paul Tsongas, son of a Greek immigrant, candidate for President of the United States. Do you think that we will ever listen?

A friend of mine who is a musician says that the reason so much popular music is in 4/4 time is because that is the harmony of the heartbeat, we have a natural rhythm, an interior melody, and he estimates that hominids have been making songs to that beat for maybe half a million years, and he further estimates that there have been maybe a hundred billion hominids in these last half million years, and that every one of those hominids, male and female, have hummed and sung and warbled songs aloud to that beat, so that if you estimate that every man and woman and child of every evolutionary stage along the hominid highway has sung a thousand songs, which is a totally reasonable guess, considering that everyone whether they can sing or not sings a song or snatch of song every week, then we arrive at a sextillion songs, based on the beat of the heart, launched into the holy air by our species and its forebears since we took it upon ourselves to totter up on our back legs some years ago, which is pretty cool.

My calculations could be off and it could be more like a quattuordecillion songs, but you get the point. n Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine. A collection of essays called Children & Other Wild Animals was published in October by Oregon State University Press.

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“There is something that happens when people are joined and shaped by a shared purpose. Our ideals are only abstractions until we come together, until we accomplish things with one another, until we can be and become what is beyond our reach when we are alone. And here at the University of Portland we believe that when we are together the Spirit is with us, right here, in this very moment, informing our engagements and interactions and inquiries, breathing life into our mission...”

FATHER MARK POORMAN C.S.C.

The University’s 20th president, with his beaming dad Robert Poorman… who also was a college president, at Lincoln Land Community College, in Springfield, Illinois.

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The

Inauguree

PHOTO BY ADAM GUGGENHEIM

N

ot every day does the University inaugurate a new president, so I made sure to catch every moment of the hoopla, on general principle, and also because I savor the way genuine human moments force their way through high theater; and I was rewarded with three such occasions of grace, all within minutes of each other. Let me tell you about them.

The first was at a crowded celebratory dinner the night before the formal inauguration ceremony. A mistress and master of ceremonies spoke, and a cheerful priest offered a loooong prayer before the meal, and then an articulate professor spoke at some length. All spoke well, all spoke sensibly inauguration and inauguree, all spoke comfortably from their scripts and texts; indeed, as a man at my table observed quietly, you had to admire the way all four were able to refer to their texts casually with a dropped glance, and then deliver two or even three lines to the congregation without seeming to have read them; excellent public speaking technique, as my tablemate whispered, and he knew whereof he spoke, after forty years as a legendary salesman.

But then a student climbed the steps to the podium, and stood behind the lectern, and spoke for a few minutes.

A tall young man who looked older than his years, perhaps because of the very beginnings of a scruffy beard, which still looked a bit shy about appearing in public.

He had a text, too, this young man; I saw the pages of it on the lectern, and I would guess he had spent long hours on it, as long or longer as he had on his term papers. And I suppose he glanced at his text, too, like the other speakers, though I don’t remember him doing so. What I do remember is that he meant what he said with every fiber of his being. You know how some people give talks, and other people speak from their hearts? How some people deliver lectures and sermons and homilies, and other people get up and open their mouths and out soar their deepest most honest most genuine feelings?

He spoke of how he had met the inauguree, in his residence hall, where the inauguree was the resident priest charged with listening to the tender hearts of students. He spoke of how he had come to admire the humor and

patience and grace of the inauguree, and how the inauguree somehow was able to connect to every single resident not matter how shy or dismissive or flinty the resident. He talked about how the inauguree somehow was able to be charming and genuine at the same time, about how he seemed to be accessible at all times although that was not possible according to physics as we understand it, about how the residents were both proud and saddened when the inauguree was chosen to be the university’s new president; they were thrilled for their man, and for the university community, but sad that they would no longer see him grinning in the halls, and sitting in the corner of the basement with someone whose heart was bruised.

As this young man finished his brief and heartfelt remarks, and stepped down from the podium, clutching his rolled-up text in his hands, I noticed the inauguree’s mother, sitting at the front table, weeping. Even from where I was sitting I could see the sheen of tears on her face. Something in what the young man had said pierced all the way down to places where she perhaps hardly went any more, now that her son was sixty years old, and accomplished, and gleaming; but for a moment, there at the head table, she must have held her baby son in her arms again, and bathed her wriggling toddler, and prayed over her sleeping teenage boy, that he would grow up to be loved, to be an honest and genuine soul, that he would not be swayed by glitter and power, but find and shape and wield the gifts the Mercy gave only him, among all the other men ever born from the sweet seas of their mothers; and perhaps what the young man with the shy beard had said was a way the Mercy was speaking to her and saying that her prayers had been answered.

The third occasion of grace came from the inauguree himself. He strode to the podium to speak last, and of course everyone applauded, as you would expect, and of course he was eloquent and witty as he thanked everyone, and he memorably began his remarks by saluting and celebrating his calm wry utterly efficient secretary, which you hardly ever hear powerful executive chieftains do, but then he looked down at his text, and he slowly read out the names of all the men and Winter 2014 27

women and children in his extended family, the people who had collectively made him who he was and held him upright through thick and thin, and here came the third occasion of grace, for his voice cracked and wavered, and it was no act, it was no theatrical trick, it was no deft practiced emotional quiver, but an utterly honest shiver in his soul as he spoke aloud the blessed names of those he loved, beginning with his mother and father.

He is a remarkably self-possessed man, the inauguree, never rattled, never a hair out of place, never a loose thread, never an instant of sharp temper or sigh of despair that I have noticed, but he cracked open there for a moment at the podium, and he stayed shaky for another minute or so, until he got it together again, and proceeded on. But for a moment we saw the real man beneath the gleam of his office; we all did, all the hundreds of people in that room; and I would guess that many of us will remember that best, of the many things that happened during the days when he was inaugurated.

The bearded boy who spoke with absolute honesty of the man he admired without reserve; the mother proud and sobbing, sitting a few feet away; and the real Father Mark Poorman, dangerously close to tears himself as he spoke of those he loved.

He was formally inaugurated the next day, in a beautifully choreographed production, savored by those who love the frippery of academic regalia, the pomp of procession, and the meticulous fakery of high theater.

I watched every moment of the event, from the wings; I listened to every word spoken; I was proud of the university, at such a tidal moment of its life; I found myself harboring the quiet hope that the inauguree will actually lead us in stunning ways toward humility and honesty and creativity and peace; but as I shuffled home I thought of the day before, and those three occasions of sudden blunt grace, moments when something deeper broke through the glitter, and I heard and saw a thing for which we do not have words, for which we have to invent names and euphemisms; like, for example, the Mercy. n Editor

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L

Writing

SONGS The impossible joy of catching songs that were never in the world before.

By Jennifer Crow ’03

ast year I lived in Galway, Ireland, and one day a local music shop owner who knew I was working on some songs said I could come in and use one of the baby grand pianos any time I wanted. So I’d go in there every now and again to hear the new songs a bit better. I usually used headphones, so I wouldn’t disturb any shoppers. But on one day, the headphones weren’t working properly, so I took them off, and played quietly, singing lightly singing over the piano, trying to fit the words to the line, when I noticed a small boy, maybe eight years old, peeking around the corner. I kept playing as he stood there for a few seconds, and then vanished. But a minute later, I heard him exclaiming to his mom: “Mammy, I thought that was the radio!”

Which made me all the more inspired to write songs.

“All you need is something to hang an idea on and you’re off,” said the fine songwriter Phil Collins. Yes, that’s right, Phil Collins. And yes, I see you sneering, but I don’t care — that man can write songs. I used to dream about singing a duet with him, headphones on one ear, “We Are the World” style.

Well, him and Steve Perry. And Peter Cetera. And I love Ella Fitzgerald...

Anyway, see what Phil Collins does with the antonyms on and off? That’s where songwriters live.

Woke up this morning with a melody and words in my head! Nine syllables, fused with notes. Both together! I love it when that happens. I could hear it, sure, but it’s as if all my senses were at play…this thing was soft, and I could see the arch and shape of the line. It was also a bit blue and silver somehow.

It had a kind of sad hope to it, and almost conjured up an image of snow.

I felt it was the last line of a phrase, like I could hear a comma before it. But then my alarm went off, and I lost it.

It was dust in the air. I tried to get it back, a fast cat out the front door. And by thinking hard, I was yelling and chasing it down the street in my pajamas. That, not shockingly, doesn’t often work. So I tried to stay in the mood of my head, tried to focus on being quiet. Then a few minutes later, while brushing my teeth, I started to hear it again. Sometimes you have to chase it down by being still. I got to the piano, toothbrush in my mouth, and found its key: E flat. It doesn’t always happen this way, but some days it does. You have no momentary plan to write a song, but the song reshuffles your plans for you.

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an idea. One thing leads to another, circles back, and nudges you in the right direction until you’re at the last line of the last verse. Then other times, you have to roll up your sleeves and find the counterpart. Maybe you have the chorus and you need the verse, or you have a somersaulting motif, but you have to break it in order to return.

You search for two sounds in dialogue — like a spouse, maybe. Sometimes you stay in the key, sometimes you look around outside of it. In these cases, I play what I hear over and over, usually with a nondescript feeling in mind, but not the notes. Then I hit the right chord, key, combination of something, and I’ve found it. It’s often surprising. Once I have two good shapes for each other, I get it down and usually walk away. I’ll go back later, because I’m just too close to it at first. I’m too proud of it. Too satisfied to be objective. The feeling? Like remembering the name of an actor in a movie, the one you were struggling to recall during a whole conversation.

And when you get it, finally, you want to sit back in your chair with a grin on your face and let your brain breathe happily.

I usually write in two parts — a creative child and an adult revisionist.

There’s often a kind of frenzy, taking notes on the sounds, mumbling words until I hear some I like. I scrape it up as best I can, jotting on torn pieces of paper, glad there’s tape left in the cassette recorder. I make what I can, a kid mixing paints. Sometimes hours, sometimes days later, I see what we’ve got. Then, this grown-up version of myself does some Musician Thinking — editing and expanding, hearing it with fresh ears. It’s a kind of like collaborating with myself.

I have lyric notes and half-songs everywhere — the bottoms of purses, inside folders of travel brochures, on pub coasters from Ireland, in the margins of my day planner, and it’s all very unsettling. Drives me crazy, actually.

I long for simple, orderly, contained, clean creativity. But that doesn’t seem to be my reality. When a lyric or a melody flutters in front of your face while you’re driving, or baking cookies, or brushing your teeth, you grab for what you can to tack that idea down.

It’s an imperfect process. It takes me much too long to clean off my desk, just in case I wrote half a line on the ripped envelope of a random medical bill. Sometimes you can combine the stand-alone lyrics with each other, like the remnants of sugar cookie dough — weird shapes to be squished

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together and rolled out again, flour all over the countertops. I also have many cassette tapes of song snippets; sometimes I get a chord progression going, hum a line over it, play it over and over, then record. Some are just awful and dear God nobody ever listen to this ever ever, but some fit, and need words folded inside the music.

With those snippets, you’re on your way to a song.

I work in grief and bereavement care, so the theme get your life in order swirls around me often. It’s not gloomy for me; it’s more like a constant motivating factor, reminding me that time is not certain for anyone. Maybe that pushes me to write songs somehow.

The process of writing a song is different for everyone, I know. Maybe it’s something beyond tangible explanation. I’ve heard other songwriters and writers talk about chasing an idea — like it exists outside of yourself and you’ve been nominated to snag it. In this take, the song is a pre-existing thing that gets channeled somehow through the writer. The Greek concept of a muse, something other than one’s self, is guiding you. I’ve felt this way, as if a song is a bit beyond even my own will. It can feel like...an otherness sometimes. Some part of the atmosphere, within a foot or so of your body, has tapped you on the shoulder and threatens to cause anxiety if you don’t channel it through somehow. Either you get going and listen, or the feeling that you forgot something important will haunt you. “Every block of stone has a statue inside it,” said Michelangelo, “and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” I feel that way, at times, with music. There are occasions when the whole thing makes me want to throw up my hands and shriek, and other times when it works and I whisper to myself that maybe I am an artist. At least, I’ve often thought, I can do something about the urge to create.

I’ve written some terrible songs. Well, partial songs, because after hanging out in the schmaltzy cheesy world of a bad song long enough, I quit. I like to think none of the songs I’ve finished are awful, but that’s possible. I guess that’s when you have to laugh and hope those songs are piles of earned stripes to get to the better stuff.

I have moments of which I’m proud in songs I’ve written, but I am not completely proud of any entire song.

Not yet. Maybe someday, when either my songs get better or my standards get lower.

The older I get, the more I admire restraint in songs. The openness and space between notes, the left-unsaid or unsounded. Really talented musicians don’t have to play something just because they can — they do it if the song calls for it. I think it’s the same with lyric writing. Sometimes you just describe the cigarette she’s holding in one hand and the pacifier in the other. You don’t get all heavyhanded and write about how the stress of being a single mom made her revert to her smoking habits. If it’s done well, it’s beautiful. There is such reverence and grace in concise descriptions, sung. I’ve practiced writing this way, which is to say I try and try.

I’ve trained for it — studied how to

piece music together at the University of Portland, listened to amazing song lyrics over and over. I’ve got the equipment (throat, piano, pen, paper), I observe things all the livelong day, I’ve logged my time in the heartache gym...and there’s a hope that I can write these moments in songs myself.

Because wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing possible? To create something that is somewhat like something you really love?

There are so many ways to be an excellent songwriter, so many separate categories in which to excel...weird and cool and sometimes-irregular rhythms, tall and dissonant and complex chords, amazing lyrical images of storytelling, a melody line you feel you’ve known your whole life... Some musicians have strength in a category or two. But if you can nail all of them, well, then you’ve got The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. And even they share the load between more than one songwriter.

One time in college, I was taking notes Portland 30

in astronomy class. This was in the basement of Franz Hall. I was frantically taking notes on the professor’s long detailed monologue about the various planets and each of their specifications, and he was talking so fast, and there were so many details, but I am a perfectionist, and I was going to ace this class, and I was writing with lightning speed, and I got all the numbers and facts about this particular...oh, man...what planet is he talking about?! Which planet is he on? Asking which planet he was talking about seems embarrassingly out of the question, so I continue to write, try to keep up, but then I suddenly realize the song “Hey Jupiter” by Tori Amos is playing in my head, and I am writing. “Hey, Jupiter, nothing’s been the same, so are you gay, are you blue?

Thought we both could use a friend to run to...”

Another time I was driving along a highway in rural Oregon, listening to James McMurtry, the man who wrote the immortal line I don’t want another drink, I only want that last one again.

I had just bought his album, and the songs were unfamiliar. I kept repeating one of the songs, which seemed to trigger something creative in me to start working: I heard more lyrics than he was singing. I pulled over and wrote seven or eight more verses to the song.

“This might be cheating,” I thought to myself. But, then again, there they were, four scribbled pages of words that were original and my own, somehow. They weren’t hinging on a melody line, so I could twist them or slow them down or speed them up — find their place in a sound for a song. But I’m still pretty sure it’s cheating.

Random thoughts: n Do I seek to emulate amazing songs I’ve heard in life? Or am I pulled naturally to write amazing songs, and that’s why I appreciate the ones I’ve heard in life? n My poor little sister, who I forced for years to sing background and fake harmony lines to my constant melodysnatching, is now better at harmony lines than I am. Should I be saying, “You’re welcome?” n The estimable Professor Ken Kleszynski once asked us music theory kids, “How do you know in which key to put a song?” Various answers: the best range for the singer, whatever’s easiest to play, to vary the key from other songs written, etc. But the correct answer was this: “Because that’s the key you hear it in your head.”

I’ve never forgotten that. n The late great Dr. Roger O. Doyle —

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the man who called us little freshmen “colleagues” from the get-go, and grounded his classy self in an openness to hear anything we wanted to play for him (including Radiohead), and conducted an Aaron Copland piece in front of Aaron Copland, God bless him forever, once yelled out during a University Singers rehearsal, “Where’s my baton? Where’s my baton?! You can’t make music without a stick!” n I once heard a melody line while wandering around the Vatican during my Salzburg Program year, and I wrote it on a torn piece of paper with dashes and vertical slashes. It looked like old weird chant mixed with Sanskrit mixed with numbering days on the wall of a jail cell. But still, I could later go to a piano and recreate what I heard. n Sometimes the things I hear people say sound like familiar song lyrics.

Only, I realize, I’ve never heard the song. Then I think to myself that I’d better make them one. Maybe they are the unwritten lines to the songs I have yet to write. It was foreshadowing, when I thought it was a memory. n A good song is more like a tiny country than anything else. It is a place, and it can be visited and revisited, absorbed and wandered around, taken in. n An early memory of mine: diving across my bedroom to hit record on the buttons of my little cassette boombox every time a song I wanted to know came on the radio. I have boxes of old cassette tapes, each one full of songs without the first few seconds — an exact measurement of my reaction time. I’ve always loved music, loved songs, loved memorizing them, loved singing them, and that’s always been twisted together, without the possibility to separate. n There’s a line in the great old movie Mister Roberts when Jack Lemmon’s character yells, “I’m lookin’ for marbles all day long!” That’s me with words. n I don’t know how to write a song.

But I’ve written songs. So...

fast occasionally. Maybe it’s on par with dreaming — a complete synthesis of things going on beyond your consciousness.

Sometimes you can search for two, three, four hours, a few days, before you find a word that fits. Sometimes you’ve got a complete song in 20 minutes, and you question its quality because it was too easy. I wrote and recorded six songs in Ireland. And after hearing them back in the light of America, the strongest one took me the least time to write. I had these blurry images of Portland and Galway, and I wrote a song that mixed the two...

Willamette River & the River Corrib, Division Street and the Claddagh, lots of water and rain...along with a sad story and a handful of chords. I don’t know why songs can come at you so

I’m in love with words, I think. And you can write a song focusing on the words, the shapes of them. How is something said? Elongate that, build a line from that. Or, do the opposite, but do it for a reason. The lilt of the word, the phrase, is in the way it’s spoken, and you can fold the melody into that. The direction is in the words if you need it. Or if you want to flip it and go in the other direction, just be aware you’re doing it and the word will be peeved and not quite fit. Which maybe is what you’re going for right there in that song. I like when lyrics and sounds are juxtaposed and unexpected, like a whispered threat in a

There’s no feeling quite like the feeling of sneaking a brand new song into a set, playing it for the first time in a crowd. No announcement, just doing it. The moment is commonplace for everyone listening (or not listening), I’m sure. If you’re in a bar, you can hear clinking glass, the usual din and murmur here and there, but it doesn’t matter — at the end of that song, you open your eyes, and man. The completion of a whole process, something new and creative. When I was with a band, we all made the songs better, each of us, like that game when you’re a kid and you put your hand on top of a hand, on top of hands, on top of hands. My hand helped make that.

One time when I was about six years old, I was sitting on the couch in the living room of our apartment in Ketchikan, Alaska. I had a thought about something, and I wanted to tell my Mom, who was in the kitchen doing the dishes. But I didn’t want to get up off the couch and walk all the way over there to tell her. And it slowly dawned on me that I didn’t have to, which meant...I don’t have to say everything I think! This was shocking, amazing, mind-blowing! It was such an incredible discovery that I jumped up off that couch and ran to the kitchen to tell my Mom. “Mom!” I yelled, wideeyed. “I don’t have to say everything I think!” And I remember her looking down at me and saying, “That’s right, Jenny.” With solid adult confirmation, I returned to the couch and thought about this for a while. Which means I have the hilarious luxury of being able to pinpoint exactly when I became silently introspective. Which is certainly necessary to be artistic at all, let alone write a song.

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movie. It’s counterintuitive to go quieter instead of louder. It often makes something creepy or important, those positive lyrics with minor dissonant chords and a low melody. Or the tragic lyrics conveyed in positive sounds... is she in denial or trying to give herself a pep talk? Conversely, you can hear a line and the sound of the line can shape a word for you, or even dictate which one you use. Really, it’s just a hyper-awareness of the subtleties of words and sounds and how you are matching them together. But, wow, if you can blend the melody line with the words with the meaning of the song with the chords, then throw in a best tempo and choose which timbre is best where, don’t overplay it, don’t underplay it, and juggle this while spinning a plate of passionate conveyance on your head, well, what is better in life? Maybe only one thing...that someone is listening. If, beyond that, someone actually gets something out of it on some level, well, then — I’d give a lot of money and time and sacrifice a lot of life for that. And the songwriters I admire the most do.

Limitations make me creative. I think choices are less overwhelming that way. I can write a song if I pick a stance and write a monologue, like a character. We all play many characters, often even within the same relationship (friend, sibling, protector, threat, significant other; coming or going, ruthless enemy...), so I can take that and run with it. Sometimes I will see an image and just describe it into a song. Other times, little games, like, “must be in this key” or “fast harmonic progression, slow-moving melody line” work for me. And by games, I suppose I mean temporary rules and guidelines. Deadlines most definitely get me moving. I’m almost convinced that I do better when the rules are harder. Ultimately, I’d rather have the smaller box of crayons.

I believe there is such a thing as a perfect song. Even though music is so crazy subjective, I think certain songs just nail the meaning, the mood, the situation that someone attempted to capture. We can debate and dispute whether a song is to one’s tastes or not, but there is no denying the translation of something specific into sound. That can be done perfectly.

I could list my thousand candidates for perfect here but this is why God invented pubs. n Jennifer Crow ’03 is a singer and songwriter in Portland;see portlandsinger.com.

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The County Nurse Text and photographs by Steve Hambuchen

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hea Neal ’12 walks and drives hundreds of miles a month from her office at the Umatilla County Public Health in Pendleton, visiting first-time low-income moms in their homes to help them have healthy pregnancies, healthy babies, and in general healthier lives. Prenatal care, dealing with the health provider hurdles, dietary counsel, how to deal with anxiety and postpartum depression, types of strollers, how to deal with reluctant or untrustworthy new fathers, seething emotions and mood swings, blunt discussions of smoking, drinking, and drugs, blunt discussions of the importance of a stable, responsible relationship...everything, says Neal.

How did Neal get here? Largely through two years as a Peace Corps health educator in the village of Mubiza, in Namibia, where she learned to love the immediacy of one-on-one nursing and teaching; such immediacy, she believes, is the essence of the national Nurse-Family Partnership project, which pays Neal’s salary in Oregon.

She gets to know her clients much better, she says, if she can see them not in clinical settings but in their own homes, where she can meet extended clans and take an almost-mom through the steps of caring for her baby in her own home, often with the help of ‘Mimi,’ Neal’s training doll – named for a baby who died of malaria just after Neal arrived in Namibia.

Neal never expected to be a nurse, though her mother is a public health nurse back home in Minnesota; but now she wishes more young nurses were encouraged to consider the front-line efforts of public health, where the preventative and advocacy work done in the field has big payoffs in keeping health care costs down, and in making genuine connections with families and communities – a depth of contact often missing in clinics and hospitals. n

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NEW ALUMNI RELATIONS DIRECTOR: CRAIG SWINYARD ’98 Craig Swinyard ’98, loyal Villan and esteemed UP math professor, has been selected to direct the alumni relations office. A leader in developing networking and engagement opportunities for Villa alumni and a driving force in bringing back the annual tradition formerly known as Blowout on The Bluff, Craig aims to provide new and exciting engagement opportunities for the University’s 34,635 alumni.

CHEF’S TABLE DINNERS Hosted by Bon Appetit’s Kirk Mustain and his coterie of skilled chefs, our Chef’s Table dinners continue to be wildly popular, necessitating the addition of more dinners to the spring calendar. Enjoy eight to twelve mini-courses with wine pairings from your table at the center of the Bon Appetit kitchens.

If you’re interested in attending a future Chef’s Table dinner, contact alumni relations at 888.872.5868 or alumni@ up.edu to reserve a spot.

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will also be honored. We’ll be busily adding events and making plans from now until, well, Reunion, so if you’re interested in planning your honored year celebration or anything else to make Reunion a success (we could use the help!), please contact alumni relations at 888.872. 5868 or alumni@up.edu.

Reunion 2015 will take place this summer on June 25-28.

This year’s celebration will mark the 50-year anniversaries of Mehling Hall and the Class of 1965, the 80-year anniversary of the School of Nursing, and the 25-year anniversary of the Class of 1990.

Class years ending in ’0 and ’5

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Alumni: Pilots Guiding Pilots.”

You can then connect with students/alumni who share similar career, academic, or cultural interests and set up a time to meet over coffee, email, over the phone, or Skype! This is just one of many resources available to University of Portland alumni through the Office of Career Services.

For more information contact career services at 503-9437201 or career@up.edu.

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NATIONAL DAY OF SERVICE: APRIL 18 The National Alumni Day of Service is coming on Saturday, April 18, 2015. Alumni across the country are encouraged to volunteer in service to their communities with the organization of their choice. National Alumni Board members will also be organizing volunteer efforts in their regions.

Contact alumni relations at 888.872.5868 or alumni@ up.edu to find out more or to suggest service projects in your area.

BLUFF BOXES A BIG HIT WITH STUDENTS More than 200 alumni helped welcome students back from October Break with a Bluff Box—a care package filled with cookies, teas, or a gift card sent by alumni to current students living in their old dorm rooms. Bluff boxes included notes with words of encouragement as well as sage advice including this bit from 2014 grad Jordan Lueras: “Enjoy Villa life! It is amazing.

However, if you get a bit Villaed out (too many guys), do not forget about the eight floors of ladies across the quad in Mehling. They might like some cookies too.”

Visit www.bluffbox.com to read more great Bluff Box notes from alumni.

READY TO UPDATE YOUR INFORMATION? Alumni can update their contact information and more by using the University’s brand new online update form at www.up.edu/update. You can submit updated contact, marital, or employment information, and as a bonus, each time you update your information, alumni relations will enter you in their monthly drawing to win a prize pack full of Pilots swag. It’s easier than ever to stay connected with your alma mater.

2015 WCC BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS The WCC basketball championships are scheduled for March 5-10 at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas, Nev. As in years past, Brendan’s Irish Pub at The Orleans will serve as a gathering place for alumni one hour before and after the games. Longtime and recently-retired women’s basketball coach Jim Sollars will be inducted into the WCC Hall of Fame on Saturday, March 7.

For more information contact alumni relations at 888.872.5868 or alumni@ up.edu.

2015 STATE OF UP ADDRESS, MARCH 17 PILOTS GUIDING PILOTS: HELPING CONNECT STUDENTS, ALUMNI

START PLANNING FOR REUNION, JUNE 25-28

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The Office of Career Services has an online tool to help connect current UP students and alumni with UP graduates for career guidance, networking and support. Guidance may include an informational interview (informal career conversation), job shadow or externship, internship, graduate school advice, and more. To start participating in Pilots Guiding Pilots, create or update your LinkedIn Profile, and join the LinkedIn Group “University of Portland

The 2015 State of UP address takes place on Tuesday, March 17, at 11:30 a.m., at the Grand Ballroom of the Sentinel Hotel (formerly the Governor).

Newly inaugurated University president Father Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., will speak on the University’s continued growth and hopes for future endeavors.

We will also celebrate the three winners of the 2014 Alumni Awards as well as the student recipient of the Tom Gerhardt Award for student leadership.

Contact the alumni office with any questions at 888.

872.5868 or alumni@up.edu.

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CHRISTIE HALL ALUMNI EVENT The men of Christie are hosting an alumni event on Saturday, April 18, for an afternoon of stories, food, and fellowship. Mass will be celebrated at 3 p.m. in the Christie Chapel, followed by an early dinner and poker tournament hosted by Fr. Pat Hannon, C.S.C., ’82. Spouses and significant others are welcome to join in on the fun.

Please send RSVPs to Christie Hall director Joe Burke at 503.943.7575 or burke@up.edu.

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The new director of the University’s alumni relations office, as of October: the wry crewcuttish University mathematics professor and former Pilot student basketball manager Craig Swinyard ’98. He is, in rough order, a husband (to Shoshawna), a dad (to Mia), a marathoner, a Villa Maria nut (he lived there all four years and led the efforts for a Villa reunion and Villa scholarships), and a math teacher beloved by students. He’ll continue to teach one course, but he’s intent on reaching and engaging the University’s 34,635 alumni in new and creative ways — “much more contact with and help for students looking for jobs, for example, and much more direct contact between alumni and their favorite professors,” he says. “This is a tremendous opportunity to involve and serve our alumni in deeper and more innovative ways. The University is much bigger than just the campus and its denizens; it’s a community of people all over the world bound by the ideas and dreams that are the University’s essential energies. There’s got to be new ways to gather and focus the creative energies of alumni, even as the campus community finds new ways to engage with those men and women who also lived here and loved their experience.” You have ideas for Craig? Want to wish him well on a whopper of a job? Send him a note: swinyard@up.edu.

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C L A S S We lost one of the UP Old Guard when Elroy “Roy” Bergquist ’49 passed away on October 13, 2014, at the age of 91. He came to Portland in 1942, and worked as a skilled carpenter before serving in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

After his return he enrolled at UP and graduated in 1949 with a degree in accounting.

Roy worked for Georgia-Pacific for 20 years as a chief accountant and controller, and his six years as treasurer and controller at the University of Portland came after his retirement from GP. He was a member of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Milwaukie and was a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus. Survivors include Roy’s wife of 67 years, Peggy (Connor) Bergquist ’44; sons, Timothy ’71, Michael, and Brian ’79; daughter, Kathleen Bergquist; grandchildren, John, Jeff, Matthew, and Andrew; and great-grandchild, Connor. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

FIFTY YEAR CLUB Carol Ruth McEwen Lawson ’44 passed away on September 20, 2014, at her home in Portland, Ore. She spent many years teaching nursing at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center. Survivors include sons, Larry and Wally; daughter, Barbara; and grandsons, Eric, Miles and Sean. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Dorothy (Curry) Wiederhold ’46 died on July 24, 2014. She was born, raised, and spent most of the life in Portland.

After earning a nursing degree at St. Vincent/ University of Portland, she worked in vari-

ous positions as a registered nurse. Survivors include five children. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Charles Leveque ’47 passed away on August 2, 2014, at his home in Bend, Ore., with his family by his side. He led a full life with stints as a fisherman, hunter, millwright, U.S. Navy pharmacist mate in World War II, Cantonese chef, trumpet player (numerous dance bands, drum and bugle corps, One More Time Around Again Marching Band and White Salmon Jazz), and dentist. Our prayers and condolences to the family. Memorial contributions to SnowCap Food Pantry, Portland.

Helen Pienovi, widow of Andy Pienovi ’47, passed away

N O T E S on October 1, 2014, in Portland, Ore. Helen met Andy after joining the U.S. Navy, and they were both WWII veterans. They were married for 66 wonderful years. Survivors include her brother, Bud Garrett; children, Silvio ’71, Dave, Brian, and Andrea Baffaro; 11 grandchildren; six greatgrandchildren; and many nieces, nephews and cousins.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Jerome Sherman ’49 died on May 7, 2014, in Portland, Ore. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Paul Jacob Schwerdt ’49 passed away on September 12, 2014, with his family by his side. He served in Australia, New Guinea, the Netherlands and East Indies in World War II, and participated in the invasion of Morotai Island. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his service.

His wife of 58 years, Pauline, preceded him in death in 2006. Survivors include his daughter, Beth Sprouse; son, David Schwerdt; grandchildren, Brian, Allison, and Traci; great-grandson, Jacob; brothers, Alvin Schwerdt and Victor Schwerdt; and sister, Angeline Sander. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Richard W. Bradley ’50 died on July 3, 2014, at the age of 93, in Central Point, Ore. He served in the U.S. Navy Air Corp during World War II, flying in raids on German power stations and submarine pens at Ijmuiden, Holland, and the D-Day invasion. While at UP, he met and married Patricia H. Klein ’44, in November of 1947. He served in the Korean War, and then had a long career as a test pilot for the F-100 and F-104 series jets. After retiring from the Air Force, Dick started up his own company, Rogue Air Freight. He was preceded in death by Patricia in May 2001, and is survived by his son, Stephen D. (Sheila Baker) Bradley; daughters, Theresa Leffmann, Rebecca Bradley, and Susie Bradley; and granddaughter, Megan Leffmann. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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Please keep Gene Feltz ’50 and his family in your prayers on the loss of his daughter, Carol Lee Feltz Blum ’85, who passed away on September 25, 2014, after an eight-year battle with cancer. Survivors besides Gene and his wife Betty include Carol’s husband of 26 years, Jim; children, Paul and Molly; brothers, Dan, Joe, and Steve; sisters, Marianne Gunderson, Sharon Schlechter, Laura, Maureen Cortopassi, and Diane Slaughter; 24 nieces and nephews; and too many friends and relatives to count.

Remembrances may be made to the Blanchet House of Hospitality or charity of your choice. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Fr. Bede Partridge OSB ’50 passed away on July 8, 2014, at the age of 93. After serving in the Navy, he earned a chemistry degree from the University of Portland before entering Mount Angel Seminary in 1950. He became a monk of Mount Angel Abbey in 1954.

Father Bede served as chaplain for the Benedictine Sisters at Queen of Angels Monastery, taught chemistry and mathematics in the seminary high school at Mount Angel, and earned a degree in library science so he could as librarian and cataloguer at Mount Angel Abbey Library until 2009. Our prayers and condolences his family and religious order.

Mary H. Blachly ’51 died on October 30, 2011. She was 82 years old. She is survived by her son, Dan. Mary worked as a registered nurse for many years. Our prayers and condolences to the family Robert “Bob” McQuiggin ’51 passed away on October 13, 2014, at the age of 93. He was preceded in death by his daughter, Ann; and wife, Rose.

He is survived by his daughters, Jean, Donna, Patty, Kathleen, and Mary; and son, Michael. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

John Garren ’52 died on July 23, 2014, in Portland, Ore., at the age of 87. He grew up in Hubbard, Ore., and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. John was a bridge engineer for the state and federal governments. Survivors include his sons, Jon Garren and Jeffrey Garren; daughters, Susan Garren and Sidney (Garren) Johnson; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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C L A S S Richard Z. Welle ’52 passed away on September 11, 2014, in Molalla, Ore. Richard graduated from UP with degrees in teaching and philosophy, but found his true calling with Copeland Lumber, where he worked as a manager for 34 years. He is survived by nine children (Patt Taflelig, Sue Beutz, Rick, Michael, Lori Chase, Dennis, Bob, John, and Tom); 21 grandchildren; and 17 greatgrandchildren. See more about his life at www.canbymolallafuneralchapel.com.

Anton “Tony” Bogdanovich ’52 of Kennewick, Wash., died on March 4, 2014, at Life Care Center of Kennewick. He was 85 years old. He was born in Portland and lived for 51 years in the TriCity area.

He was a retired shoe sales man, and owned Davids Shoes in Richland, Wash. Survivors include nieces Victoria Suckow, Linda Olsen, and Sue Säfve.

He was a member of the Hooyboer Club. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Virginia Engel ’52 passed away on April 15, 2014. She met her husband Edward Engel ’49 at UP, and they were married on June 6, 1952, at the University chapel. Edward passed away in 2006. She worked as a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital and after raising her children she worked as a mental health nurse practitioner at OHSU. Survivors include her daughters, Susan Muller, Mary Engel, Kathleen Engel, and Janet Engel; grandchildren, Heather, Jason, and Aidan; and sister, Barbara Clark. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Bernard Mandich ’54 died on September 18, 2014. Survivors include his grandkids, Andrew, Gracie, Davis and Abby; and his children, Elaine McManus, Caryn Keeney, Susan Mandich, and Paul Mandich.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Richard Doumitt ’54 passed away on October 22, 2014, after a long illness. Survivors include his wife, Alice Joyce; sons, Casey Richard and Rhett Philip; and sisters, Minnette and Leanore. Richard dedicated his life to serving his country, state, and community, completing two tours of duty

in the U.S. Navy in Japan. He was later recalled during the Korean War. He spent 35 years with the Oregon State Department of Revenue, was a member of the Knights of Columbus, and volunteered with St. Vincent de Paul and St. Joseph’s churches. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Madalyn Antonette Utz ’55 passed away on the morning of June 16, 2014. She graduated magna cum laude from the University with a bachelor’s in education. While attending UP, she met her lifelong love, Frederick Raymond “Ray” Utz Jr. ’50, ’55. They married in August 1955. Survivors include Ray, her husband of nearly 59 years; son, Mark Utz; daughter, Maureen Utz ’99; three grandsons; two great-granddaughters; and many nieces, nephews, cousins, and dear friends. The family asks that donations be made to Oregon Dog Rescue, www. oregondogrescue.org, or the American Heart Association. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Harry Bresnahan, Jr. ’55 passed away on August 24, 2014, at his home in Hermiston, Ore. Harry worked as a Mail Carrier for the U.S. Postal Service for 24 years. Survivors include his wife of 59 years, Barbara (Shroder) Bresnahan ’58; sons, Harry III ’80 and Jim; granddaughters, Crista Bresnahan and Nicole Bresnahan of the University of Portland’s human resources office; sister, Norma Hertling; and his beloved, 4-legged, ever-faithful companion, Josie. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Ronald “Ron” J. Miller ’56 passed away peacefully on October 3, 2014, in San Diego, Calif. He was 83 years old and had been battling Parkinson’s disease and dementia. He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Shirley Miller; three daughters, Pamela Miller, Laura Pulizzi, and Madelyn Aiello; four grandchildren; two great-

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N O T E S Representing the Class of 1949 at Father Mark Poorman’s inauguration in September: Carl Deiz, who with his late brother Robert served in the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black Air Force fighter group during the Second World War, both as second lieutenants. Carl then spent his career with the Bonneville Power Administration.

Talk about your heroes. It was an honor and a pleasure to welcome him back to campus. grandchildren; sister, Sally Covert ’86; brother-in-law, Jim Covert ’59; two nephews, and three nieces. Ron Miller was known as a man who was unfailingly loving, devout, generous, loyal, kind, and selfless.

Add to that affable, upbeat, and inquisitive—he put everyone at ease with his gentle charm and genuine interest in, well, everything. An engineer by trade, he worked and lived with his young family in Houston helping NASA put the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon, moving later to Cupertino, Calif. One of his great passions was flying small aircraft, and trips with his daughters are remembered by them with great fondness. He was a strong Catholic and in his better days visited nursing homes in Cupertino, leading Catholic residents in saying the rosary, a service he provided quietly and without fanfare for many years. He will be missed. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

John William Bobzien ’59 died on June 19, 2014. He married Anita King in 1957, and taught at Robert Gray School for 30 years before retiring in 1989.

Survivors include his wife, Anita; children, Lisa (Paul) Griffiths, Lori Kemper, Phillip (Coleen) Bobzien, Paul (Valeri) Bobzien and Kenneth (Cathy) Bobzien; sisters, Florence Klein and Dolores Huwaldt; grandchildren, Sophia, Natallie, Katie, Dakota, Claire and Allison; greatgrandchildren, Finn and Ellie; and many nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the Oregon Food Bank. Our prayers and condolences to

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the family.

Franklin Jones ’59 passed away on October 6, 2014, at his home in Cedar Hills, Ore., at the age of 82. In his career as a C.P.A., he worked his way to a partnership with Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., before moving to Mercer Industries and then PowerMaster, all in the Portland area. His greatest joy was his family and he also had a great sense of humor—he enjoyed telling and hearing a good story. Survivors include his wife, Patty; children, Doug, Greg, Jeff, and Sandy; nine grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and sister, Mardel Lovely. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Stephen Moreland Jr. ’59 died on September 14, 2014. He was a tech sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1950 to 1952 and a Korean War veteran. He joins his wife of 54 years, Tessie Moreland. Survivors include his brother, Thomas Gorman; special companion, Kathleen; children, Stephen III, Sean, Casey, Michael, Jimmy, Tessie III, Mary, Molly, Shannon and Anna; a veritable army of grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. In lieu of flowers, do something kind for another person, or donate to the Histiocytosis Association for HLH syndrome. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Patricia Knecht ’60 passed away on May 20, 2014, in Gresham, Ore., at the age of 76.

She was born on March 28, 1938 in Los Angeles, California. She was a school teacher for the Beaverton School District. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

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C L A S S We can say of Queenie (Wilson) Samuel that she earned her degree in nursing on The Bluff in 1973, and spent many years as a community health nurse in the Multnomah County Health Department, and those would be true things to say, and admirable things, too.

But we could also celebrate the deeper courage and endurance and persistence and wit and humor of this brave soul; born in Louisiana, raised in Vancouver; one of the first AfricanAmerican women at the University, “a place that gave me the courage to face life’s challenges”; cancer survivor; mother of two boys now gracious men; a force for witness and hard work who refused to be cowed by inequities, and never lost her humor. She recently visited the campus again, for the first time in years, and her quick laugh and wry wit lit up the day here for everyone she met. Our regards and prayers.

Bonnie Walden ’64 has been elected president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) Western States Region. She oversees 11 states.

The General Federation of Women's Clubs is an international organization dedicated to community improvement by enhancing the lives of others through volunteer service.

We got a nice note from Franz Schneider ’63 recently, included with his contribution in generous support of our mission. He writes: “My wife and I met as freshmen in 1959 (Fr. Wheeler’s biology class, appropriately enough). We both transferred to other schools before graduation. In August we celebrated our 50th anniversary.” Thank you so much, Franz, and congratulations on your anniversary.

Prayers, please, for former UP administrator Hal Westby ’63, ’67 and his family on the death of his wife, Geraldine “Jerri” Westby, on October 22, 2014. She and Hal married in

1959, and they celebrated their 55th anniversary in July of this year. While Jerri worked at a variety of careers, her true calling was volunteer service, most notably with the March of Dimes, the Cancer Society of America, Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Goodwill Industries, and St. Joseph Catholic Church and School in Vancouver, where the Westbys have lived since 1959. Survivors include Hal; children, Mark ’83, Gregory ’85, and Monica Jochim ’86; twin sister, Josephine “Jo” Butler; grandchildren, Taylor, Briggs, Chase, Madison, Alex, and Rebecca Westby and Jake and Sarah Jochim; and countless family and friends whose lives she touched in meaningful ways.

“In the end, cancer took her life, but could not take her spirit.” Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Jane Marie (Shults) Nakayama ’64 died peacefully in her childhood home on October 8, 2014, of gall bladder cancer.

Her children remember her as a kind, nurturing, loving and

N O T E S dedicated mother who supported them unconditionally.

Jane is survived by her children, Timothy Nakayama, Amy Nakayama, and Molly Nakayama ’94; siblings, Mary Lee Palmer and Ann Radich; and grandchildren, Eleanor, Porter, Katsumi, and Ruby.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’65 TOGETHER FOR THE LONG RUN Sergio and Betty Silva ’66 will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in Atlanta, Ga., on January 31, 2015. How about a hearty round of applause for the Silvas?

’69 OUR SINCERE THANKS The Shiley School of Engineering has received a $100,000 gift from Greg and Gloria Shean of San Antonio, Texas. Greg received a bachelor’s degree in engineering and earlier had established the Greg Shean ’69 Engineering Endowed Financial Aid Fund, which now totals more than $170,000. Following graduation, he was an Air Force officer for 23 years and retired as a lieutenant colonel. His career included working with large radar, computer acquisition and computer security.

He later taught high school math for 12 years in San Antonio, where he and his wife both retired. “My high school, Bellarmine College Preparatory, started me on the way, and UP got me there,” he said. “At UP, I learned how to learn and where to find information. I want to support other students’ involvement in engineering activities, especially in combining teamwork with technical knowledge in robotics competitions.” We are most grateful for the Sheans’ generosity and support of our mission here on The Bluff.

’71 PRAYERS, PLEASE Richard Swee passed away on September 17, 2014. A veteran of World War II, he was discharged in June 1945. He soon reentered the military and served many posts both in the U.S. and overseas, including two years in the Korean War. He retired from teaching in 1986, and served with the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa, where he helped train teachers, in 1988 and 1989.

Survivors include his wife, Joan Swee; daughter, Cynthia Skoe, sons, Richard and Bradley; four grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; brothers, Frances and Raymond; sister, Doris Townsend; stepchildren, William Shaffer

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and Marie Cole; four stepgrandchildren; and three stepgreat-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Philip A. Smith passed away on September 30, 2014, at his home in Milwaukie, from complications due to a diagnosis of MSA-C, an incurable neurodegenerative condition.

Phil found his true professional home at Oregon Iron Works in 1976, and worked there until his condition forced his retirement in 2011. Survivors include his wife, Julia; son, Stephen R.; brothers, Ronald P., George A., and Gregory L.; sisters, Loraine Flatters and Mary Sue Ehrhardt; and 14 nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made to MSA research in memory of Phil. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’72 LOOKING OVER US ALL Please remember Diana Foran and her family in your prayers on the loss of her father. She writes: “My father Francis ‘Frank’ B. Foran passed away on September 27, 2014. He was 88. It was almost a year after the passing of my brother Richard Foran on October 25, 2013. They are together now looking over us all. Sadly, my father was not able to meet his first and only greatgrandson, Jaime Francis Calderon, born on March 14, 2014. However, through the marvels of technology, they shared many moments via Skype; of course, Jaime still has a wonderful great grandma to inspire him. I am now a retired university professor. I guess I deserve it after 40 years of marking papers, writing exams, and dealing with students! At least now I can be with my family during these difficult times.” Our prayers and condolences, Diana.

’73 A LASTING IMPRESSION We heard recently from Charles C. Charles, who writes: “My freshman year I had the privilege of having Dr. Sigurd Christensen [pictured below] for music theory, basic piano, and choir. I was saddened when I found that he had left the University after that one year. Today, I googled him just to see what had happened to him. I found an obituary from Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas,

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C L A S S where he had finished his career; he died on January 29, 2012. I have been teaching music in Oregon for the last 42 years. It was the career that I chose in high school and I have loved every minute of it.

I thank all of the professors who helped me to be able to do what I love.

Dr. De La Mare, Dr. Vance, Dr. Norwood, Dr. Barclay, Mr. Porto, Mr. Dietz, Mr. Cammack.... I still remember them all. I also thank the University as a whole. I met faculty, staff, and students who have helped to form my life and character.

During my career I have made a practice of doing a music recital during each decade. I am currently preparing my fourth and final recital of my career. That is the passion that I still have for music and teaching. I owe it all to the University of Portland and the music faculty from 19691977. Thank you!”

’76 GEORGE WILL BE MISSED George A. Maney passed away from cancer on May 27, 2014, in Stockton, California.

George was an electrical engineer and founder of TechScour Systems, where he held nine patents. He will be missed by stepsisters Wendy Black and Shelley Rafilson.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’77 ELIZABETH’S LEGACY The University received an additional $293,477 from the estate of Elizabeth James, which brings the total gift from her estate to $1.64 million. A portion of the gift, more than $1 million, was dedicated to the renovated Clark Library, where a stateof-the-art conference room was named in her honor. In addition, the Elizabeth A. James Endowed Scholarship Fund was established and has received the remaining portion of the estate’s gift. The scholarship fund goes to help students enrolled in the Pamplin School of Business. Elizabeth was director of finance for Providence Health Systems in Portland when she passed away in 2012 at the age of 57. She was a longtime supporter of the University of Portland, and volunteered extensively for numerous organizations and causes she sup-

ported. Our prayers and thanks to Elizabeth and her family for their continued support of our mission.

Marilyn McDonald (Smith) writes: “I have my fifth printon-demand book, Read. Reflect. Respond. Rest. 366 Daily Reflections on Random Selections from Scripture, at CreateSpaceAmazon Kindle for formatting, printing, and eBook availability. The soft cover book has been available since midOctober.” Thanks Marilyn, and keep those books coming.

’79 A LIFE OF SERVICE Victor Calzaretta passed away on June 27, 2014, with his family at his side. He served as a police officer for the Chicago Police Department, and later as a Clark County deputy in Vancouver, Wash., rising to the rank of chief criminal deputy.

He attended Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College, earning his J.D. in 1982. He practiced law in Portland from 1982 until his retirement in 2012. During his years as a lawyer, he helped many people, particularly in the law enforcement field. He is survived by his son, Richard Calzaretta; daughter, Diane Miller; brothers, William Calzaretta, Robert Calzaretta, Rich Calzaretta and Joseph Schechla; sister, Patricia Schechla; and grandchildren, Anthony, Katie, Kylie, Coleby, Thomas and Alisha. He was preceded in death by his second wife, Anita Huffman Calzaretta; and son, Daniel D. Calzaretta. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’80 A FIGHTER TO THE END Kathleen Maag Stone passed away on August 1, 2014, in Evergreen Hospital with her family around her.

A nonsmoker, she died from complications of non-small cell lung cancer. Survivors include her husband of 24 years, Roger

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N O T E S Inducted into the University’s athletic hall of fame in this fall: soccer star Shannon MacMillan ’97, who went on from an All-American career on The Bluff to, among other feats, a World Cup title and an Olympic gold medal.

Today she is director of club operations for San Diego’s Del Mar Carmel Valley Sharks, after coaching stints on The Bluff and at UCLA. A pleasure to have her back on campus even for a brief evening.

Stone; twin sons, Matthew and Daniel; and siblings, Fr. Ron Maag, Regina Pontarolo-Maag, Doug Maag, Maureen Maag, and Brian Maag. Her career as a nurse took her to many facilities in Washington, most recently Evergreen in Kirkland.

Kathleen was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, but she never let cancer define her remaining years. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Lewis & Clark College women’s soccer head coach Jim Tursi won his 300th career game on Saturday, October 4, when his Pioneers defeated the Pacific Boxers 4-3 in double-overtime. Tursi spent three seasons as head coach at UP before heading to Willamette, where he coached the Bearcats for 15 seasons. He helped the Pilots to 35 wins, while winning 237 games with the Bearcats. In his fifth season at Lewis & Clark, Tursi’s October 4 win put him at 300118-40 in his career, making him the 10th winningest Division III women’s coach of all time. Congrats, Jim!

’83 A TRULY REMARKABLE WOMAN Prayers, please, for Juliann Johnson-Weiss and her family on the death of her mother, Margaret Juanita (Payne) Isaacs, who passed away at home in Portland, Ore., on July 23, 2014.

Margaret attended St. Vincent School of Nursing affiliated with the University of Portland in 1947-48. She held the

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distinction of being hired as one of the first of four African American nurses on the medical floor at Emanuel Hospital.

She also served as a member of the NAACP, Urban League of Portland, Model Cities Community Board, National Council of Negro Women, Church Women United, Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Multnomah County Election Board, Loaves and Fishes, and Volunteers of America. Survivors include her daughter Julianne and her son-in-law, Karl Weiss ’82; brother, Isaac S. Payne IV; grandchildren, Andrea and Paul Tillman; nieces, Kimberly Carter and Nora Lyn Clemmons; and three great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband, Robert S. Isaacs; daughter, Benita L. Payne; and parents, Martha and Isaac Payne III. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’85 A FONT OF LOVE AND ENERGY Carol Lee (Feltz) Blum passed away on September 25, 2014, after an eight-year battle with cancer. Survivors include her husband of 26 years, Jim; children, Paul and Molly; parents, Gene ’50 and Betty Feltz; brothers, Dan, Joe, and Steve; sisters, Marianne Gunderson, Sharon Schlechter, Laura, Maureen Cortopassi, and Diane Slaughter; 24 nieces and nephews; and too many friends and relatives to count. She worked for

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Pearce Art Scholarship c/o Adna High School, PO Box 148, Adna, WA 98522. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Just married in New Yawk City: the actress, filmmaker, and writer Holly Ellis ’01, to Brendan Spiegel, and here are her ’01 classmates Patrick Rafferty, Jennifer Goff, and Ricardo Delgado, with Holly and Brendan at the reception. (Those who know the rules of the Circle Game line up for your punches.)

Holly’s film Prairie Love played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, and she contributed a hilarious diary of those frenetic days to this magazine. Best wishes, Mrs. and Mr. Spiegel!

KGW, Price Waterhouse, and Consolidated Freightways, and spent many hours volunteering. Remembrances may be made to the Blanchet House of Hospitality or charity of your choice. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’88 OUR SYMPATHIES Please keep Brian Boag in your prayers on the loss of his father, Elmer Boag, on October 12, 2014, in Portland, Ore..

Survivors include his wife of 64 years, Olga; daughters, Pamela LaMar, Brenda Burk, and Connie Boag; sons, Peter and Brian; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’89 PRAYERS, PLEASE Please remember Scott Rempel and his family on the death of his mother, Madeline Rempel, on September 29, 2014. Survivors include her sons Mark and Scott; daughter, Mary Ann Rempel-Hester; brother, Robert Reed; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’90 HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF Michael Guasco writes: “I am an associate professor of history at Davidson College in North Carolina, where I have been living since 2001. My wife, Suzanne Cooper Guasco (another history professor!) and I have two kids: Joseph, 14, and Amelia, 12. In spite of those two glorious distractions, I finally made full use of

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’93 GONE TOO SOON Thomas H. Daws passed away unexpectedly on Sunday, February 17, 2014. He worked in Los Angeles and Chicago as a digital effects artist in the film industry. Survivors include his father, William Daws; five siblings, and 12 nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Doctors Without Borders at www.doctorswithoutborders.o rg/donate/tribute.cfm. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

’94 THE WRITER’S LIFE

that degree in history and political science I earned from UP when Penn Press published my book this year: Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. I still think back fondly on the roles Dr. Jim Covert and Fr. Art Wheeler played in getting me to where I am now.” Thanks Michael, we’ll pass along your compliment to Fr. Art and Dr. Covert.

’91 PRAYERS FOR NICK John Nicholas “Nick” Pearce ’91 passed away on August 4, 2014, at home with his family after a five year battle with dementia/Alzheimer’s disease.

Nick taught art and photography at the Adna Middle and High School for 33 years before his retirement in 2009.

Survivors include his wife of 39 years, Corinne; daughters, Amber Nichol and Elaine Corinne; four adoring granddaughters, Sage Corinne, Hazel Lourdes, Scarlett Mae del Rosario, and Quorra Jaye Pearce; sister, Kathleen Basinger, and numerous nieces and nephews. Donations can be made to the Nick

Cynthia Ley published two collections of short stories over the summer, and is now a bestselling author on Amazon.

Perfect & Other Stories and Tales of a Twisted World are available as e-books. A third set, Underfoot: Two Ghostly Tales, was released in early October. All of her titles are carried by Solstice Publishing.

Excerpts may be found on her blog at www.authorcjl.wordpress.com.

’00 GREAT TEACHING! Jonathon Medeiros was selected as a Hawaii State Teacher Fellow with Hope Street Group, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding economic opportunity and prosperity in America.

He was one of 17 outstanding teachers selected from a pool of highly competitive candidates to help elevate teacher voice and improve student learning outcomes in the state of Hawaii.

We got the best kind of news from NAB chair Pat Fennessy,

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who writes: “The twins arrived on August 1, 2014.

Joseph Taiwo and John (Jack) Kehinde; their middle names are Nigerian, in honor of my wife’s ancestry. All twins in Nigeria are given the same names, regardless of gender.

The first one out is Taiwo; the second Kehinde. That said, they consider Kehinde the first born and more important.

In their lore, Kehinde sends Taiwo out to be the canary in the coal mine. If everything is kosher, Kehinde follows. Cool, right?” That it is, Pat, that it is.

Thanks and congratulations!

’01 MAKE THAT SISTER JENN Jennifer Schaaf professed first vows as a Sister of St. Dominic of Blauvelt at an August 2014 liturgy at the motherhouse in Rockland County, N.Y. She taught music at St. John Fisher School in Portland after graduation; later she moved to Columbus, Ohio, and served as a member of the campus ministry team at Ohio Dominican University. She began her discernment process after moving to New York in 2008. Prior to her entrance in 2011, she served as communications director for the sisters. She currently serves as assistant chaplain at St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale University.

Prayers, please, for Kristin Cochenour on the death of her father, Gary Cochenour, on October 7, 2014. Survivors include Kristin and her sister Amber; brother, Ron; sister, Dona; and sister-in-law, Pam. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Emmy Kellow-Graham started a school (what a phrase!), the Klahanie Montessori School, on Vashon Island in the Salish Sea near Seattle.

How crucial and brave, working with small children.

Thanks for your note, Emmy.

A note from Daoud Chaaya ’01, ’03: “I came to UP as an international student, and after graduating I started work at Daimler Trucks North America—Freightliner at that time— down on Swan Island. Recently I accepted an expatriate assignment with Daimler and moved from Portland to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to be regional head of after sales for Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation.

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C L A S S “This summer in Lebanon, I married the love of my life, Rita, after a two-year long distance relationship between Portland and Dubai, and now we are in the process of settling in Dubai. Attached is a picture from our wedding in Lebanon that was followed by a much needed honey moon in the exotic island of Mauritius.

“The wedding was also attended by a number of fearless UP alumni who made the trek from the U.S. to Lebanon: Karen Shea, Eugene Mesa, Amer Diab, Pojanee Diab ’03, and my Best Man, Dany Chaaya ’07, ’10.” Thanks for the update, Daoud, and blessings to you and your radiant bride.

’02 CREATIVE SISTER AT WORK Wendy Malcomson was featured in a story in the August 21, 2014 edition of the Sherwood Gazette. The title will give pause— “Business owner sells upcycled products while fighting brain tumor”—but Wendy’s story is one of incredible grace, bravery, faith, and optimism. See the story at

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http://tinyurl.com/oowavt4 or go to her business’s Facebook page at SherwoodCreativeSister.

’04 SPRING NEWS, SUMMER NEWS, ALL GOOD NEWS Carrie (Cherney) Tischendorf and her husband Thomas (and big sister Natalie) are proud to announce the arrival of baby Olivia Rose to their family on April 19, 2014, in Seattle, Wash.. Carrie and TJ also celebrated ten years of marriage on August 14, 2014.

’05 ONCE A PILOT, ALWAYS A PILOT Angela Parker graduated recently with a masters in crises and disasters from the University of Portsmouth in Portsmouth England, according to her aunt, Evelyn Brush. “As it turns out the University of Portsmouth colors are the same as the University of Portland and they, too, are called ‘The Pilots,’” says Evelyn. “She was excited about the similarities. She hadn’t even mentioned that UP is bordered by Portsmouth Street!” Thanks Evelyn, it truly is a small world.

’06 WELCOME, GABRIEL! Nikki (Chalupa) Czisny writes: “Gabriel Christopher Czisny was born at 2:46 a.m. on Monday, September 29, 2014. He weighed 8 lbs., 15 oz., and was

Great news and a cool photo from Kaeleen Hylton ’08: “I thought you guys might be interested in this photo of five UP graduates (all class of 2008) at my wedding in July: (l-r) Ashley Alred (Overstreet), Meredith Jaeger, me (new last name is Kirkpatrick), Janet McElligott, and Erin Terry. There were nine alumni there altogether. It was such a fun day. My husband Kevin and I got married at Hornings Hideout outside of Portland.

Lots of babies in attendance, including our own baby, Rowe, who was six months old at the time—a future Pilot! It was a camping wedding, and it was perfect!”

We heard recently from Michael Rittman ’08, who writes: “Attached is a picture of my new wife Linda Rittman ’09 (formerly Linda Collins), myself, and many of our friends from UP, ranging from the classes of 2008-2011. We met at UP in 2006 and have been dating the 8 years since. UP still holds a very special place in our hearts. My grandfather and sister both graduated from UP. We met many of our friends that we hope to include in the rest of our lives at UP. We also received a great education at UP that has led to our lives here in Seattle. Linda is an RN at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, and I am a teacher at St. George School in Seattle. I’m also working on my masters in teaching here in Seattle and should graduate in Fall of 2015. Many thanks to UP, which is the place that brought Linda and I together and has meant so much to the both of us!”

21.5 inches long. Everybody is doing well and so far Gabriel seems to be a very happy baby!”

Lauren Canfield writes: “I started work at Standard Insurance Company in Portland on the actuarial career track a few weeks after graduation in 2006. I completed my FSA credential (Fellow of the Society of Actuaries) in fall/winter of 2009, which is also when I met the man who is now my husband. Jeff and I got married this spring, in March 2014. In July I was promoted to director and assistant actuary in the corporate office.”

On campus recently to be inducted into the University’s

rector of the Anaheim Surf Soccer Club, the beaming Lindsey Huie, here with her two daughters.

Here’s some wonderful news from Alicia (Bolster) Debevec: “My husband, Jake Debevec

(Notre Dame ’05), and I welcomed our first son, Henry David, this year on January 21. He has quickly become one of the youngest fans of the magazine! We are all doing well, currently living and serving at Edwards Air Force Base in California.” Thanks for the news and word of our newest fan, Alicia, and thanks and prayers for your service.

’07 HEADED FOR THE SHOW athletic hall of fame with her 2002 Pilot soccer national champion teammates: the di-

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We have a great success story to share, compliments of Benjamin Gleisser: “Ben Sullivan dreamed of an NBA career when he played basketball for

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Dan Meyer ’01 passed away on September 21, 2014, with his family at his side, after a long, strong fight with Cystic Fibrosis. He was a career firefighter and paramedic with Redmond Fire & Rescue. Never one to let his disease stop him from living a full life, Dan played rugby at UP, loved to hunt, and traveled the world. He married Jessica (Wilken) Meyer on May 14, 2005. Survivors include his wife and five-year-old son, Jackson; parents, Chuck and Martha Meyer; maternal grandparents, Bud and Alice Sizemore; and four siblings, Patrick, Katey, Stephen, and Cheryl Palmer. He was preceded in death by his brother, Jeffery Meyer, and paternal grandparents, Nel and Vernon Meyer. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to his wife and son. Contact Redmond Memorial Chapel for information at http://www.redmondmemorial.com. Our prayers and condolences to the family. the Pilots; and after working as a video coordinator and player development intern for the champion San Antonio Spurs last year, he is now an assistant coach for the Atlanta Hawks.

Ben played pro in China, Germany, and Chile after graduating, then returned to his home in Lake Oswego to work for a construction company. But

his former high school coach connected him with a sixthgrade traveling basketball team. ‘My wife Bailee encouraged me to take the job,’ he remembers. ‘From the first five minutes I was on the court, I knew coaching was something I wanted to do. I loved feeling like a mentor and teacher, influencing kids in positive ways, helping them improve their lives on and off the court.’ Soon thereafter he was back with the Pilots for a season as director of basketball technology; a year later he was coaching at Lewis & Clark College; and then, in 2013-14, he made the NBA, when the Spurs hired him. ‘Working for them was like earning a mas-

N O T E S ter’s degree in basketball,’ he reflects.”

Retired from her pro career, after two years and a National Women’s Soccer League championship with the Portland Thorns: midfielder Angie (Woznuk) Kerr, who also played for the league’s team in New Jersey and for the U.S. Women’s National Team. Pilot fans will always remember her slight stature and unflappable calm on Merlo Field. All best wishes on your new roads, Angie.

’08 INSANELY AWESOME Let’s just let UP social media whiz Joe Kuffner ’05 take this one: “Just wanted to pass

along a little tidbit in case anyone wanted to share on social media or for class notes. Allison Ritchie Maxson, a former Pilot cross country runner, placed 15th at the Chicago Marathon and qualified for the 2016 Olympic Trials with an insane time of 2:39:16! That’s her in the middle of the picture.” Thanks Joe, and congratulations to Allison, we’ll be watching those Olympic trials.

’10 WELCOME, JULIA ROSE! Jennifer Lofft has some wonderful news: “Joseph Lofft and I had our first child, a girl named Julia Rose. She is absolutely perfect! We are so incredibly blessed. Of course, we would love for her to be a future Pilot. Currently I work as a trauma RN at Stanford Hospital and Joe works as a mechanical engineer at Air Systems. As for other exciting news, my little brother William Goolkasian will be a freshman at UP this fall!”

We just can’t help but share this wonderful note from Ann L. Bates, mother of Nancy Bates: “Portland Magazine is one of the few written works that makes me want to identify with my Catholic upbringing, and the campus climate is a true reflection of the humanitarianism that is

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portrayed humbly, eloquently, and humanly in the magazine’s stories, profiles, artwork and notes. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of positive, compassionate projects being delivered by individuals in this faith practice, I know there are… but, they are often portrayed and carried out in an exclusive light that highlights differences. There is so much printed about this faith practice that focuses on choices and behaviors that exclude me, and people I love. Brian Doyle and his staff however, put together articles that speak to inclusiveness and similarities in human faith practice, and celebrates the depth of people as they already are, not only for what they strive to become. In this way, the articles make me feel that with my regular daily adventures where I am humbled, thankful, imperfect, and aware of grace and gifts from others, I actually belong in the company of the faithful. The messages in the magazine’s stories are powerful indeed, but more than that, I’ve seen first-hand how the University of Portland actually radiates these principles. My daughter arrived as one of those frightened, talented, and nervously ambitious students who knew her professional passion, but needed a place that surrounded her with opportunities to care for, and with, others in a school-wide and lifelong sense of service, and that to me is holy and worth supporting!

Thank you.” It is we who should be thanking you, Nancy, not only for your lovely message but also for entrusting us to welcome your daughter into the UP family.

Katie Beaubien took time to write the following in October: “After finishing my master’s in organizational leadership in August (I won't say through which school *cough*Gonzaga*cough*), I moved six days later from Oregon (where I had been a youth minister for the past three years) to Wisconsin, where I am now serving as part of SPIRITUS evangelization teams. SPIRITUS is made up of 16 young adults throughout the country who come together to serve the Church in Wisconsin, primarily through student retreats to grades 2-12.

As part of my specific ministry, I live in Green Bay (yes, I have been to a Packers game) and work in youth ministry at Resurrection Parish, which is under the direction of Bishop Bob Morneau. A few days ago after morning Mass,

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C L A S S a parishioner who had read my bio came up to me to talk about UP. Turns out he’s a fellow alum who also has a communication degree, although he graduated several years before I was born. We may be few and far between here in the Midwest, but there are still some of us here to cheer on the Pilots (and the Packers).”

’11 KRISTA & NIC We heard recently from Krista (Morasch) Mather, who writes: “I hope all is well on the Bluff!

I wanted to send you my updated contact information along with a class note about

my recent wedding! I’ve changed my name to Krista Mather (formerly Krista Morasch), and am now living in Alexandria, Virginia. I have attached a photo from our July 26 wedding of all the Salzburger UP alumni who were there to celebrate with us. From left to right: Baby Elijah Mitchell—future Pilot!— with his parents, Aundréa and Patrick Mitchell; Robyn Bruton; groom, Nic Mather; bride, me; Maid of Honor Katie Chapman; Brian Walsh; and Shannon Smith.”

More wedding news, this time from intrepid UP student activities director Jeromy Koffler: “Former student activities student worker and nursing

major Janelle Otsby got married on September 26 to Jim Hart. Janelle works as a registered nurse (RN) at Minneapolis Children’s Hospital.”

’12 RACHEL & DREW Married last December, at Saint James Church in Vancouver, Wash.: Providence oncology nurse Rachel O’Reilly and Drew Ellingson, with the cheerful Fr. Gerry Olinger, C.S.C., presiding. In atten-

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dance were, among other holy creatures, bridesmaids Sarah Klemsz and Nina Baio, also Class of ’12, and a whopping large Saint Bernard dog named Sage. Best wishes and prayers.

’13 TREVOR TIES THE KNOT Trevor Webber, who now serves as an Air Force 2nd Lt. from UP’s Detachment 695 and stationed at Langley Air Force Base, married AF 2nd Lt. Abigail Fredericksen on July 12, 2014, at the Langley AFB Chapel, followed by a reception at the Langley AFB Officer’s Club. The Air Force sent them both to Offutt AFB following their freshman year and they continued their cross country courtship since. Several fellow UP students attended including Mairi Rodriguez, Jon Smith, Kevin Ratuiste, Philip Stenberg, Jordan LeBrec, Brian Frattali, and Timothy Higginbotham.

Thanks to Trevor’s mom, Jeannette, for sharing this information.

Kathryn Capps started a new job as an account coordinator with Wicked Creative, a public relations and marketing firm in Las Vegas, Nevada. “As an account coordinator, I work with various clients on teaching others about their story,” she says. “I engage the community through social media and strengthening online presence; by reaching out to journalists for news relationships and new opportunities; and by drafting media alerts and press releases for distribution.”

Sarah FitzGerald is serving with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, specifically with the Northern Plains Resource Council in Billings, Mont.

Also serving in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at the Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia, Pa.: Sarah Wong.

Former Beacon news editor Laura Frazier got herself a nice promotion at The Oregonian: “I have picked up a newly minted K-12 Classroom Instruction position as part of The Oregonian’s Learning and Family team. Myself a lover of education, I am thrilled to bring my readers more news directly from the classroom.

My hope is to find good stories analyzing and profiling what’s working and what’s not in classrooms and districts in the Metro region. I’ll also focus on

We heard recently from Elle Hoxoworth ’11, who writes: “Thank you for the UP shirts from the University of Portland to the fifth grade class at Galapagos Charter School in Chicago. Today we finished our end-ofthe-year testing to measure growth. My scholars grew 2 years in math an 3.7 years in reading. With any luck at all they will be studying at U.P. in a few years!” We look forward to seeing them, too. Thanks so much Elle. early childhood education and alternatives to public education, including private schools and online programs.” Find out more at http://bit.ly/ 1zKHHTV.

’14 WEDDING BELLS Nilsa Gabrielle Gibson and Mason Alexander Hodnefield were married on June 21, 2014, at Hanley Farm in Central Point. Nilsa works as a registered nurse, and Mason works as a line cook at Giorgio’s Italian Restaurant in Portland.

The newlyweds are now living in Portland.

Jordan Mattson, Micaela Capelle, and Corey Hubbard are now serving with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Jordan is with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Ga.; Micaela is with BronxWorks in Harlem, N.Y.; and Corey serves at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston in Houston, Texas.

’15 TWO OUT OF THREE, NATIONALLY Two University of Portland social work students, seniors Rebecca Tabor and Yuri Hernandez, have won competitive

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national scholarships through the Phi Alpha National Social Work Honor Society. Three students are chosen each year from a national pool for the Patty Gibbs Wahlberg Scholarship based on a student’s service, scholarship, and leadership. Rebecca won first place, which comes with a cash prize and a trip to the national meeting of the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors, where she will speak to an audience of students. Yuri won third place, which comes with a cash prize. Last year, UP social work student Sophie Anderson ’14 won third place. Congratulations to our nationally recognized social work students and faculty!

’17 SAD NEWS Prayers, please, for Matthew Coffey and his family on the death of his father, Dean Coffey, on September 8, 2014.

Survivors include his wife, Deb; his children, Ashley, Andrew, Matthew, Chase, Addy, and Cameryn; granddaughter Audrey; his mother, Karen Christensen Coffey; brothers John and Peter, and 12 nieces and

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Two bright smiles, two bright futures, both taken too soon: 2014 alumna Kaitlyn “Katie” Chale, pictured at the 2014 commencement with her friend and mentor the late Kate Regan, died on September 17 after a tragic accident near her home on Vashon Island, Wash. For a community still reeling from the loss of Dr. Regan on July 23, hearing of Katie’s death was especially hard.

The outpouring of emotion and memories was remarkable, befitting Katie’s no-hold-barred readiness to make her mark in the world. She hoped to work in the medical aid field in Central and South America, where she had traveled many times to work in service to others; her close relationship with Kate Regan came about through her double majors of Spanish and biology.

Survivors include her parents, Dolly and Jeff; brother, Tyler; grandmothers Gertrude Manly and Betty Chale; and many loving family members. She was blessed with wonderful friends from her communities at home, the University of Portland, and abroad. She will be missed. Our prayers and condolences to the family and all who were lucky enough to know her. nephews. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

FACULTY, STAFF, FRIENDS Marietta Arjavac, widow of Anthony “Tony” Arjavac ’49, passed away on August 30, 2014. Tony, her husband of 67 years, passed away on December 4, 2012, at the age of 95.

Marietta and Tony lived for many years a mere stone’s throw from the UP campus, where they raised their boys Paul and Chuck. She is survived by her brothers, Pete and Ralph; son, Charles; grandson, Vaughn; and Vaughn’s mother, Jennifer.

She was also predeceased by her son Paul. Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Susan Stillwell, associate dean for graduate programs in the University of Portland’s School of Nursing, has been

recognized nationally for her work in the nursing field. Stillwell is the 2014 recipient of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Excellence Award, presented to one nursing educator annually by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). The award recognizes an experienced faculty member who systematically investigates questions related to student learning and the conditions under which it occurs in order to improve outcomes. Stillwell, who joined the University of Portland staff as a professor in

N O T E S 2012, was praised for her lifelong commitment to nursing education.

Jeanette Giusti, widow of Al C. Giusti ’41, passed away on Aug. 2, 2014. Jeanette and Al worked together in Al’s family business and from the “The New Italian Wine Company” they built the Al C. Giusti Wine Company that became one of the largest distributors in the Northwest. She is survived by her son, Laurence Giusti; daughter, Victoria Giusti; son-in-law, Ted Walton; and granddaughter, Evalani Walton. She is also survived by nieces and nephews in Oregon, California, and Saipan.

Our prayers and condolences to the family.

Our very own Thompson Faller hasn’t fooled anyone with this whole “retirement” ruse—he’s as busy as ever, and while he was in Rome attending a meeting of the International Board of Regents of

Bethlehem University, Dr. Faller got to meet Pope Francis. He was part of a delegation of the Reunion of Aid Agencies for the Oriental Church, which aids Christians in the Holy Land.

Communication studies professor Vail Fletcher has received the 2014 Outstanding Edited Book Award from the National Communication Association.

The book, Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland, was co-edited by former UP professor Renee Heath, now at the University of New Hampshire, and Ricardo Munoz, University of Colorado, Boulder. Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland uses economic insights and contemporary theories of communication to better understand the Occupy Movement. Fletcher teaches courses related to interpersonal and intergroup communication, international development, eco-feminism, gender, and social media and culture.

Her research focuses on the

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intersections of culture, conflict, and identity with an emphasis on romantic and interpersonal relationships. She’s been a professor at UP since joining the faculty in 2010.

We keep getting photos of the late Kate Regan and wish we could run them all, especially since each seems to be accompanied by the bearers’ fond memories of what Kate meant to them.

This one speaks volumes for itself—our Kate at age 18. Sigh.

School of Nursing dean Joanne Warner has decided to retire effective July 1, 2015, and while we here on The Bluff are happy for Joanne as she launches this new season of her life, her daily presence will be sorely missed. She came to the University in 2005, and took on the duties of interim dean after the death of Terry Misener in 2007.

Joanne was a natural fit and become dean in February 2008, after a national search no less. She has worked with great devotion to the connections of peace, social justice, and health in advancing the human condition, serving always as an exemplar of the UP mission and her beloved Quaker faith. A few of her accomplishments: Guiding development and advancement of the Dedicated Education Unit; enhancing simulation in the role of nursing education through expansion of simulation labs; developing new graduate programs, including the Doctor of Nursing Practice; driving national policy in nursing education, especially advocating for nurses’ political activism and solid policy work; and much much more.

She is known for her gracious and quiet leadership style, her deep empathy for others, her love of community, and her infectious sense of humor. A national search for her replacement is under-

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C L A S S way. University provost Tom Greene will head the search committee.

Congratulations to UP political science professor Gary Malecha, who received a 2014 Spirit of Holy Cross Award, given annually to lay collaborators of the Congregation of Holy Cross, United States Province of Priests and Brothers. The award recognizes lay collaborators who devotedly work to make Blessed Basil Moreau’s vision and mission to “make God known, loved, and served” a reality at the Congregation’s education, parish and mission apostolates. Malecha was one of six award recipients announced on Sept. 15 by Rev. Thomas O’Hara, C.S.C., provincial superior of the United States Province of Priests and Brothers, to mark the Solemnity of Our Lady of Sorrows. Malecha, who has been a professor at the University since 1992, served as chairman of the Department of Political Science for 13 years and currently serves as the NCAA faculty athletic representative for the University. His animated lecture style is a thing to behold, and his knowledge and love of the field of political science is unsurpassed. Malecha was nominated by Rev. Jeffrey Allison, C.S.C., who points out that Gary won the Becky Houck Award for Excellence in Advising and the James Culligan Award, the highest award a UP faculty member can receive. “In many ways, Gary embodies the Spirit of Holy Cross. His concern for educating the whole person is evident in his genuine concern for his students both in and out of the classroom.” We couldn’t agree more.

Environmental science professor Robert F. “Bob” Butler has received the Fred Fox Distinguished Service to Science Education Award from the Oregon Science Teachers Association.

The award honors individuals who have made outstanding

contributions to mentoring and developing new teachers, based on career longevity, breadth of influence, enthusiasm for science and the profession of science education, and the demonstrated ability to motivate. Butler has been a professor of geophysics at the University since 2004. He teaches earth system science, natural hazards, and oceanography and is known locally as an expert in the field of earthquakes and earthquake preparedness. Butler is also the project director of Teachers on the Leading Edge (TOTLE), a K-12 Earth Science teacher professional development program featuring Pacific Northwest geology and geological hazards. Among his many other awards, Butler was named the Oregon Academy of Science 2013 Outstanding Higher Education Teacher in Science and Mathematics.

DEATHS Carol Ruth McEwen Lawson ’44, September 20, 2014, Portland, Ore. Dorothy (Curry) Widerhold ’46, July 24, 2014.

Charles Leveque ’47, August 2, 2014, Bend, Ore. Helen Pienovi, widow of Andrew Pienovi ’47, October 1, 2014.

Jerome Sherman ’49, May 7, 2014.

Elroy “Roy” Bergquist ’49, October 14, 2014.

Richard W. Bradley ’50, July 3, 2014, Central Point, Ore. Fr. Bede Partridge OSB ’50, July 8, 2014.

Mary H. Blachly ’51, October 30, 2011.

Robert “Bob” McQuiggin ’51, October 13, 2014.

John Garren ’52, July 23, 2014, Portland, Ore. Richard Z. Welle ’52, September 11, 2014, Molalla, Ore. Anton “Tony” Bogdanovich ’52, March 4, 2014, Kennewick, Wash.

Virginia Engel ’52, April 15, 2014.

Bernard Mandich ’54, September 18, 2014.

Madalyn Antonette Utz ’53, June 16, 2014.

Harry Bresnahan, Jr. ’55, August 24, 2014, Hermiston, Ore. Ronald “Ron” J. Miller ’56, October 3, 2014, San Diego, Calif.

John William Bobzien ’59, June 19, 2014.

Franklin Jones ’59, October 6, 2014, Cedar Hills, Ore. Stephen Moreland, Jr. ’59, September 14, 2014.

Patricia Knecht ’60, May 20, 2014, Gresham, Ore. Geraldine “Jerri” Westby, wife of Hal Westby ’63, ’67, October 22, 2014.

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It’s a fairly well-known fact that the University of Portland was originally named Columbia University, and that in 1935 University president Rev. Joseph B. Boyle, C.S.C., changed the name to more closely reflect its relationship with the city of Portland, and to remedy the problem of confusion with the venerable university of the same name in New York. But first, a slight problem of copyright had to be ironed out. This note granted permission to use the name “University of Portland” by one Mark Paulson in 1936.

Which begs the question: Who was Mark Paulson, and why did he own the name? Not even the deft UP museum coordinator Carolyn Connolly and inimitable archivist Fr. Jeff Schneibel, C.S.C. have been able to find that out. Anyone know? Early brand name poacher? Patent troll? Please enlighten us at mcovert@up.edu.

Jane Marie (Shults) Nakayama ’64, October 8, 2014.

Richard Swee ’71, September 17, 2014.

Philip A. Smith ’71, September 30, 2014, Milwaukie, Ore. Francis “Frank” Foran, father of Diana Foran ’72, September 27, 2014.

George A. Maney ’76, May 27, 2014, Stockton, Calif.

Victor Calzaretta ’79, June 27, 2014.

Kathleen Maag Stone ’80, August 1, 2014, Evergreen, Wash.

Margaret Juanita (Payne) Isaacs, mother of Julianne Johnson-Weiss ’83, July 23, 2014, Portland, Ore. Carol Lee Feltz Blum ’85, daughter of Gene Feltz ’50, September 25, 2014.

Elmer Boag, father of Brian Boag ’88, October 12, 2014,

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Portland, Ore. Madeline Rempel, mother of Scott Rempel ’89, September 29, 2014.

John Nicolas “Nick” Pearce ’91, August 4, 2014.

Thomas H. Daws ’93, February 17, 2014.

Gary Cochenour, father of Kristin Cochenour ’01, October 7, 2014.

Dan Meyer ’01, September 21, 2014.

Kaitlyn “Katie” Chale ’14, September 17, 2014, Vashon Island, Wash.

Dean Coffey, father of Matthew Coffey ’17, September 8, 2014.

Marietta Arjavac, widow of Anthony “Tony” Arjavac ’49, August 30, 2014.

Jeanette Giusti, widow of Al C. Giusti ’41, August 2, 2014.

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R O A D S Grace and Love There are so very many things we could say admiringly of Alide Chase ’70, who devoted her entire career to nursing and health and care and making all sorts of systems leaner and cleaner and more efficient and effective so that more people could get better care. She was a maternity nurse. She was a nursing professor (here on The Bluff, from 1972 to 1981).

She was a nursing administrator for Bess Kaiser Medical center, and CEO for Kaiser Permanente Sunnyside and then for 16 more Kaiser centers, and then finally three kinds of vice president for Kaiser.

She has been invited to speak about what she knows and loves in Qatar and Norway and England and Sweden and Brazil and Denmark and to the United States Department of Defense.

She will happily spend the rest of her career counseling various entities around the world about health care and administration and systems. But nothing we can say about her stellar career says as much as deeply as this photograph of her at age twenty, in a ward where children recovered from surgery, and they were lonely and terrified and the best thing in their shivering days and nights was when a brave gentle young nurse picked them up and held them close. Whatever else we can say about nursing, and there are many admirable things to say, first we say the words grace and love. Then maybe we will whisper the words nursing scholarships, and hope for the best.

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PHOTO BY STEVE HAMBUCHEN

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Here’s a story that will make you laugh. It begins in the fall of 1974, on The Bluff, when nursing students Lynda (Bernardino) Bredleau, Gail (Thomasen) Wylly, and Janet Nickolaus met. Soon they were friends with two more nursing students, Linda (Browning) Bletko and Jane (Millot) Rouse. Through classes, clinicals, labs, and laughter their friendships deepened, until graduation loomed; but they all put their signatures to a napkin, swearing they would meet annually and laugh and drink celebratory margaritas, no matter what. All five wore their stethoscopes to Commencement, earning the famously icy glare of the late nursing dean Pat Chadwick. But indeed they did meet again, a year later, and then again every year since – riding horses in Nevada, ballooning in Arizona, canoeing in Canada, gondolas in Venice, mud baths in Napa, boating in Idaho, leaf-peeping in Vermont – and every year they sign a napkin again, in love and solidarity. Through the joys and pains of five lives they have met annually, and quietly done charitable work together, and mentored University nursing students, and never stopped laughing and savoring each other as the dearest of friends. And this year they returned to campus as a clan, and posed for the magazine for a moment by Waldschmidt Hall, and showed off an actual no kidding Margarita Five tattoo. It was hilarious.

Want to celebrate such affection and camaraderie among nurses, those glowing beings among us? Want to help us educate and send forth more glorious sweet funny sinewy nurses? Yes? Excellent! Call Melissa Harteloo at 503.943.8552, harteloo@up.edu, and start a scholarship, or chip into one of the many nursing funds we already have, or whatever else you can imagine. We would be most grateful.

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(YET ANOTHER) SAINTLY WOMAN

BLESSED ISABELLA OF FRANCE Remarkable soul, Mademoiselle Isabella; the sister and cousin of earthly kings, she early proved to be no mere prancing prissy preening heiress.

Fluent in Latin, a legendary artist in cloth, she founded a monastery, was utterly devoted to the Franciscan order, gave away gobs of money to the poor, spent much of her time visiting the sick, considered fasting a lovely form of contemplation, and finally retired herself to the monastery she built. By all accounts a patient, gentle, riveting being.

This entertaining painting of her is by Hannah Walter, a student at O’Hara Catholic School in Eugene, Oregon; the University’s art gallery recently hosted a show of paintings by that school’s sixth-graders. See page 5 for more.