Monday, September 08, 2003

A Message For Mrs. Kurtenbach I moved to Western Washington from Arizona 20 years ago, a transition not to be undertaken lightly.  Dude, where's the sun? I came here in autumn, and I was surprised to find it waiting for me.  There are only two seasons in Arizona, February and Summer, so it was a change. I became a fallophile, then, a lover of orange leaves and crisp days.  Fall is six weeks away by the calendar but I check every day just the same.  Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones, and autumn has a way of sneaking up on you with 55 degrees and a breeze.  Autumn is the check in the mail, and I wait for it. Spring is when a young man falls in love, but fall is when he gets serious about it.  He knows that winter looms and his heart heads for commitment, for comfort and warm bodies and long nights.  I have a lovely story to tell you about this, but first I have to explain about sponge puppets. A sponge puppet, oddly enough, is a puppet made out of a sponge.  You tie a rubber band around the top third to make the head, slip a piece of fabric under the rubber band to form a cape or a dress, then draw on facial features with a marking pen (nothing will stick to sponges; not glue, not tape, nothing).  You then punch through two holes for your fingers, which become the puppet's arms.  If you leave your fingers in the holes long enough, they will turn blue and then fall off. I was making sponge puppets a while back with three five-year-old girls, whose spiritual care had been entrusted to me for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning.  The plan was to use the puppets to act out the story of Noah and the Ark, but the idea of God flooding the world to rid it of wickedness seemed a little dark for these sunny faces, so we mostly just tried to name all the animals in the world and worked with sponges. The conversation wandered a bit, from "The Little Mermaid" to dogs that chewed up Barbie dolls, and then to their schools and kindergarten teachers.  "My teacher is Mrs. Kurtenbach," one of them said, and after a few questions I walked to the blackboard and proceeded to draw a really ugly map of the United States, which the girls found hilarious.  I was happy to be entertaining, but what I was attempting to do, pretty unsuccessfully, was demonstrate how far away Washington was from Arizona, and how long ago 20 years was, and how it suddenly didn't seem that way at all. I like coincidences.  They make me wonder about destiny, and whether free will is an illusion or just a matter of perspective.  They let me speculate on the idea of some master plan that, from time to time, we're allowed to see out of the corner of our eye.  So I had fun explaining to this little girl that in the fall of 1982, in a small town 1400 miles away, her kindergarten teacher and I had played out a little drama on a college stage, and a bigger one off it. The show was "Camelot."  She wasn't yet a Kurtenbach then, but Mary Beth was a wonderful actress and singer, and she and I were cast as, respectively, Guinevere and King Arthur.  The director had decided to double cast the main parts and the other guy playing Arthur was fairly short.  Mary Beth is a tall woman, so she put her foot down and got me as her partner.  My girlfriend at that time would show up occasionally at rehearsals, aware that unplanned love or lust can be kindled in a play and keeping a watchful eye.  This is sad and funny now, looking back.  She had nothing to fear from Mary Beth, who I believe suspected that I was falling in love all right, but with the other Guinevere.  Our romance had been simmering for a while, this other woman and I, but given the right circumstances frustration can be fuel for love, and the fact that we were thwarted in our desire to perform together somehow provided the spark.  Ten months later we were married and had moved to Seattle, and six years after that my wife, very pregnant with our second child, was visiting a local Presbyterian church.  She was standing in the crowded hall when her mother nudged her.  "That tall woman over there is trying to get your attention," she said, and a neat little circle closed. We see Mary Beth and Jeff Kurtenbach from time to time, and when we talk of our college days it's mostly just to laugh at how impossibly young we were and how funny it is that we all ended up in Washington.  What a coincidence. "I have a message for Mrs. Kurtenbach," I told the little girl, but a five-year-old's attention span is fleeting and it would have been complicated, anyway.  It had to do with autumn, and theater, and romance and youth.  It had to do with a mythical kingdom and real people's lives, and how chance plays a part in everything, and how there is always one brief, shining moment when we sort of understand that. 12:41:53 PM    comment []