By Anne Scheck

So many of my childhood recollections seem locked in a mental registry, unretrieved for years and usually only by a triggering event.  Is everyone’s memory like this? Forgotten images flash, then unfurl, at a reminiscent touch or sound.  
 
We are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. I go for walks now, every morning. It is the best way to see people -- from a distance, in the open air. One recent day, I heard the collision of glass chimes on a porch just as I stood near my house and watched a field of grass waving in an uncharacteristic Oregon wind. It was a time-traveling combination. I heard the clang of a Coca-Cola bottle in a hardware store on a windy day when I was eight or nine years old – the day I met my first farmer. The hardware store had a wooden floor and a counter that looked like it was cut from the same lumber; The farmer looked strong and thin and old. 
 
I was there on an errand. I’d completed my mission, but I had a dime. I held this tiny circle of silver tightly. Money was scarce. I looked around the store. There were many things for sale. There were seed packets, which I thought would put pretty plants in our yard. Unlike neighbors who had old tractor tires repurposed as floral planters, our small front lawn lacked flowers. But in the corner, a red refrigerated contraption with a coin slot beckoned. It contained bottled soft drinks that slid down into a slot after money was inserted. It was a Coke machine. The day was hot. And I stood for a long time looking at the seed packet and at that big red soda-dispenser. Coca-Cola was uncommon in our household, and, even when we had it, it was poured by measured amounts into drinking glasses, to ensure my sisters and I received equal amounts before the bottle was empty.  
 
The farmer saw me looking. “How ya gonna decide?” he asked me. I shook my head. I stared at the seed package. I looked across at the red machine. Finally, I looked up at him. “I am not sure I can grow things,” I said. “But I know these flowers will look pretty if they come alive. I want to taste the Coca-Cola. But it will be gone after I drink it.” I realized I’d come to a conclusion from his question, and I took the seeds to the cash register.  
 
I saw the farmer turn. I saw him go to the Coke machine. I saw him put in a dime. I heard the rumble of a bottle as it was freed. I saw him pick it up. I saw the gleam of the green glass that held the dark liquid. I saw him place the top under the bottle-opener on the machine. I heard a pop, then a whisper, from the bottle as the cap was removed. Then he walked toward me  and he handed me the coldest Coca-Cola I’d ever touched. “Here,” is all he said. 
 
Farmers aren’t always lovable. Often, they are stubborn and territorial and judgmental. But they are the most honest, hard-working, generous people I have ever met. And, by now, I have met plenty of them. I have admired them all. None more than the man in the hardware store. Those seeds, which ended up being grown in pots, turned out to be wildflowers, the same as I’d seen grow in meadows and alongside roads. 
 
They put me on the path to loving land, even though I am no gardener. Once in a while, when I was young, my parents would pack us in the car to make a trip to farmland that had been in our family for generations. The farmer who rented it from my grandmother wasn’t friendly to me. But I was always thrilled to the results of his work, anyway, whether soybeans or corn, it was row after row of the same kind of vegetables that I would also see in our grocery store. 
 
My sisters always seemed to dread these trips, which meant hours in the back seat of a car without air conditioning, but I loved the look of the agricultural countryside. There was never a time in which I didn’t spot a tractor with someone at the wheel, kicking up a cloud of dust while the sun beat down on a field that, soon enough, would give rise to food. 
 
When my grandmother died,  my mother inherited that farmland. When she told me she sold it, I astonished her with an uncontrollable crying fit – a daughter who’d weathered some painful incidents in life without shedding a tear. So she sold me a piece of the land no one was interested in buying. It was hilly, with a creek, and covered in trees. It is completely perfect. 
 
I took my own children there when they were young, which meant a long flight back to the Midwest, and an equally long drive to this small acreage. My son, whose blood relationship to it made me think he would one day be its caretaker, showed no interest. But my daughter, who is adopted, braved countless mosquito bites and shook off ticks exploring the property. She loves it, too. 
 
Two years ago, a farmer from the area, Mr. Mack, offered to scout this little piece of land with me, which I am determined to build upon – he and I discovered the remains of a cabin, where I hope to put a small house. I promised him the job of clearing it, and I explained to him how much it meant to me. Mr. Mack, burly and good-natured, with a no-nonsense approach to all conversation, disabused of me of the notion that this sentiment required any explanation. My penny loafers, however, which I was using for a hike around the acreage, were mystifying to him. “Next time you come here, you should have boots,” he said, noting I didn’t seem to fear snakes. Lifting one finger, he pointed to one of the reptiles sunning on a rock. I promised I’d have different footwear the next time. 
 
Mr. Mack seemed pleased I valued the heritage of my property – farming on the land around it was still largely through family bloodline, he explained. I nodded. I understood. But right before he climbed in his truck to leave, I told him I had something to say. “My daughter is the one who seems to cherish this land,” I said. “But she doesn’t have this same family tie. She’s adopted, so I want you to know that. I think this small piece of history, here on this land, should go to someone who loves it like I do.” Mr. Mack showed no hesitation. “That is exactly right,” he said. “The land should be in your blood, not the other way around.”
 
With the onset of COVID-19 this year, in a pandemic that has curbed air travel, I’ve had to cancel my plans to return to my land, and I don’t know now when I will get back. I do go there, in my mind, from time to time. I see the cemetery plot of my forebears, I watch the snake on the rock, I see Mr. Mack wave goodbye from the window of his truck. 
 
And I think of the plane trip back from that time. I was seated next to a man in a polo shirt, trim and bookish, who was on his way somewhere important. I told him I was headed back to the west coast, after visiting the family’s old homestead, a farm remnant in Missouri. “So you’re originally from a fly-over state,” he commented. For reasons I still don’t understand, I found this hugely irritating. And later, when he purchased a snack box, I waited to strike up conversation till he pulled out the small square roll and began buttering it. “What is that you have in your hand?” I asked. “Oh, it’s a bread roll,” he answered. 
 
“No, it is not,” I answered matter-of-factly. “It is a hot field under a streaming sun. It is hours and days and weeks of care by a farmer who ventures out to that field to nurse the wheat, then again, to harvest it. It comes from making a living under the risk of weather and fluctuating price structures for wheat. It is the grain that comes from that wheat, providing nourishment all over the world. And, just to think, all of that comes down to families that live  and work in a fly-over state.”

By Anne Scheck

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not that stormy. It was just a typical Oregon rain. But it was really, really dark. And it was very late. 
I was at the Independence Post Office. I’d just moved up from Los Angeles and I’d grown accustomed in LA to making what I call “a mail run” any time of day. So, I parked by the drop box at the Independence PO. I was frantically searching for the stamps I knew I had in my car -- the interior of which always looks like a landfill – when I heard a soft knock on the window. I was surprised to see a police officer staring down at me. 
“What is it that you are doing?” he asked. I thought it was obvious. I told him I was mailing letters. “Okay,” he said. He observed that it was nearly midnight. We chatted for a few moments about why I would find this particular time a good opportunity for a trip to the post office. Then he wished me well and departed. I found the stamps, popped the letters in the box, and drove off.
 
I joked about this little event incessantly with my California friends. “I live in a town where the police track you down for mailing a letter after they roll up the sidewalks,” I’d say. It was only later, after a series of such encounters with local law enforcement, that I stopped poking fun and began singing praise. It became clear that I hadn’t seen an over-protective police effort, but rather, an example of an approach I’d learned had the potential for the most crime-fighting success: Community policing. And if you want to see it action, there is no place like Independence, at least in my view.
 
It did take me a while to reach that conclusion. There was the time I made a wide swing around a bicyclist on Gun Club Road. The officer who stopped me told me he saw my car crossing the center of the street; I told him I’d known someone who died in a bicycle accident, so it made me doubly cautious. “Yes,” he said. “That was Hank Bersani and I knew him, too.” We both paused for a long moment. It struck me that this would never happen in a larger community.

Then there was the time I’d rented a car for a trip down the I-5 to Northern California, and, on my way back home from Salem, I couldn’t figure out how to activate either the turn-signal or the headlights. In the dusky twilight, along Stryker Road, an Independence police officer pulled me over to point out that my headlights were off. When I explained that I was flummoxed by the modern dashboard, he leaned in and pointed out what he’d instantly determined was the right button to push. “You could have made that look harder,” I said with a laugh, knowing full well I probably seemed like a lunatic. I expected to get a ticket -- but I didn’t.
 
It began to dawn on me that I was experiencing from the Independence Police Department (IDP) the very thing I had written about, fairly early in my journalism career, which was taken from a document produced by a panel known as “The Christopher Commission.” It was released in response to the Rodney King case. Mr. King, an African American man, had been violently beaten during an arrest – an incident captured on video that went viral before such a word ever was termed. He was never charged with a crime.
 
Though I am not what anyone would expect as media coverage for law enforcement – I have two biology degrees along with a BA in journalism -- I started my career as a police reporter in a tiny, dingy office in Parker Center, the legendary glass-and-concrete building that once served as headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). With my educational background, I seemed destined to be the worst hire for the police beat that my employer, City News Service, ever could have made. But I was saved by the occasional, kindly help of a heart-of-gold veteran journalist, Nieson Himmel of the LA Times, who often corrected me before I had a chance to commit career hara-kiri.
 
Years later, when I was working for a different publication, I was asked to write an article about the Christopher Commission Report, and, ever the science nerd, I wanted to do so from a scientific perspective. Though I’d been steeped in the police beat by that time, I was still filled with a form of scientific wonder about why human beings behave the way they do.
 
Back in college, I’d driven my psych-major friends absolutely bonkers with my complaints about some classic studies in the social sciences, and one in particular – known as the Milgram experiment – was particularly frustrating to me. This was the study in the 1960s in which fake shocks were administered by volunteers who were unaware that the volts they were administering and the recipients they were electrocuting were actually entirely phony. Two-thirds of the people who agreed to send electricity into other humans did so at high levels – and the conclusion from this outcome seemed to be that we hurt each other when ordered to do so by an authority figure.
 
This didn’t square with the experimental designs I’d seen in biology, which usually asked why something didn’t work as well as why it did. A third of those participants in the Milgram test refused to partake in such an injury-causing set-up – and it bothered me that they never were investigated, or if they were, that message seems to have escaped even a footnote in textbooks.

The headlines about the Christopher Commission Report reflected the bad cops and the brutality, an unarguable finding. I’d seen it myself – people at traffic stops being treated by police like pieces of moving furniture. And if there is one result that came in loud and clear to me from covering the Christopher Commission Report, it was this: not only is such behavior outrageous, it is completely counter-productive.

The only time in LA I’d seen a true form of community policing up-close-and-personal was when an African American police officer intentionally stopped me on my way to cover a protest in South Central, to tell me I shouldn’t go there, that I could be putting myself in harm’s way. I pointed out that I was on an assignment, but it made no difference to him. He was clearly worried. 

I don’t know why he issued such an ominous warning because though I am white and though the crowd of protesters clearly was not, I made my way in and interviewed several of them “without incident” – the phrase I once used in police briefs. I seemed to be the only person of my particular skin tone in the entire area, but nobody used any of the pejorative terms applied to my race that I’d seen on TV dramas featuring minority characters. This neutral, even welcoming response, would prove predictive of all my trips back then into what is still called “the black community.” 

So, when I wrote about the Christopher Commission Report, it was with the aim of finding out what was working well in the LAPD, and why it did, not just the abject failure. Right there, in words incredibly easy to understand, the commissioners found that women police officers had demonstrated the road to success -- they used “excessive force” far less than many of their male counterparts, and their arrest records and other standard measures of job performance were the same. This was true of men on the force who employed the same non-confrontational tactics, of course -- but they weren’t given support for it by many of their peers. Women, it seemed to me at the time, hadn’t really learned the art of swagger that can be an expectation for men. As sexist as that sounds, it was the conclusion of a much-younger version of myself and, even now, I see no reason to revise it. 

I had some help interpreting the report, thanks to one of the most remarkable interviews I recall ever having; It was with the dean of an LA medical school, a physician who served on the Christopher Commission. He was an unforgettable man, both in terms of intelligence and demeanor. Dr. Robert Tranquada was genteel but candid during our interview, and I remember thinking that I’d never meet anybody quite that memorable for a long time. And, for a long time, I didn’t. Some people are such outliers, just so infrequent. 

But one day, at a meeting called the Oregon Peace Officers Association in Grand Ronde, I met someone who put me in mind of Dr. Tranquada. He was a lawyer who had served as a police officer, and he seemed happy to answer questions. I told him I was working on a story for The Independent about community policing. I thought I’d seen this approach widely used in my adopted hometown of Independence, I explained. I was looking for some well-informed background. 

This is how I met John Kilcullen, who couldn’t have been nicer or more informative and who, after speaking with me at some length, finally informed me that he’d lost a son, police officer Chris Kilcullen, in the line of duty. He told me this without transmitting a trace of bitterness or rancor. I promised Mr. Kilcullen I would send a copy of the story I was preparing. 

The article finally ran. It led off with IDP Officer Grant Hedrick learning de-escalation techniques at a regional law enforcement workshop held at the Independence Event Center. Officer Hedrick had gone to high school with my daughter, and he was a star quarterback there and in college, and I remember thinking I was never so impressed with him as I was that day in the basement of our city hall.
 
The article, which appeared in what has to be the smallest newspaper in Oregon if not the entire world, became the most-requested issue of The Independent ever printed. Former IDP Chief Vernon Wells, who is widely credited with initiating community policing here in town, wrote an editorial; IDP Chief Robert Mason, who provided details on how it’s carried out, kicked off a Q-and-A about emerging mental health issues with other respondents: Sheriff Mark Garton, Fire Chief Ben Stange and Deputy Fire Chief Neal Olson. 
 
So, when the protest marches about George Floyd began, I finally sat down to write the essay about policing that I’ve wanted to chronicle for so long. And, in this time of COVID-19 pandemic, I know our police department isn’t perfect – citizens here have emailed me when they believe they’ve seen an attitude wholly inconsistent with community orientation. I’ve pledged that I’ll take an unvarnished view of the IPD and write about it in a critical-eyed way, when the occasion calls for it.
 
Months ago, when I first thought about my essay on this issue, I got the photo for it exactly the way you might expect: from a traffic stop by a friendly officer, in this case the one who travels by motorcycle, IPD Officer Lance. He’d stopped me because I was driving erratically on a curve, I think. Did I look impaired? I was late for an appointment. I explained this is a terrible thing to do to people waiting for you. Then I asked to take his picture. He said OK. When I handed him my business card after that, he seemed stunned our town has a media enterprise like mine, a perfectly understandable reaction and sadly for me, even a somewhat common one, after four years of its operation. 
 
And I am now reminded there’s a promise I need to keep. It is to Mr. Kilcullen. I’d forgotten that I’d assured him I would mail the article that ran in The Independent. I’m ashamed to say it had slipped my mind, until recently. I was driving down the highway near Eugene. I saw a road sign posted in memory of his son -- a police officer who left behind a wife and two children. He died while attempting to stop a car, from a shot fired through the window of the vehicle. I was all the way to Grants Pass before I stopped thinking about passing that sign and meeting Mr. Kilcullen and interviewing Dr. Tranquada and so many of the other things. And I was reminded of an often-used phrase, that it takes a whole village to raise a child. It takes the same thing to have a healthy, supportive, rule-abiding community. 
 

By Anne Scheck
 
To a group of lovely young women at a wedding shower nearly five decades ago, I must have seemed exactly like what the bride-to-be had called me – a Martian. My college chum was dropping out of the university. She had gotten a longed-for marriage proposal from her boyfriend back home who had, as they say, finally sown his wild oats. He’d stolen her heart in high school, then clinched a job in construction, and she’d departed for the campus a few hours away. 
But she never seemed happy in the role of co-ed. As we walked along a path between buildings named for historic alumni on those first days of a golden autumn -- kicking up red and yellow leaves that soared like tiny kites in the Kansas wind – she confessed to me that she was homesick, very homesick. I found this hard to believe -- I felt as airborne as the leaves I was liberating skyward, onto a gusty breeze. 

“I am so ready to have a home of my own,” she told me. I went quiet, so quiet. Suddenly, the rustling leaves sounded loud. “Everybody seems to understand this but you,” she finally said. “Sometimes I think you’re from Mars.”  

Her fiance had recently built a house that he was going to give her as a wedding gift. And when we ooh’d and ah’d over pictures of it during her bridal shower, I must have looked quite disappointed. Someone hissed at me to “knock it off,” that this was no place for a show of envy. 

But I wasn’t jealous. I was confused. How did all those messages get lost on me – messages from dressing up Barbie dolls, from seeing Disney movie princesses saved by the hero’s kiss, from viewing endless television commercials on female fulfillment so simply achieved by sparking kitchen sinks and from providing husbands with crisp white shirts free of “ring around the collar”?

After all, I hadn’t yet discovered Gloria Steinem. I’d never read Betty Friedan. I hadn’t even objected when told I had to take Home Ec in high school – all the girls did, and I would have found it absurd not to learn the basics of cooking and sewing.

The conclusion I’ve reached after all these years is that other silent, stronger forces were at play – steady but unconscious influences, a natural response to the legacy of … “the pioneer woman.” There she was, all around me in Kansas, and you didn’t have to look that hard or very far. She was a large part of the history of how my home state came to be: Out there on the prairie by a shanty made of sod, cooking in a kettle, laundering clothes with a washboard, drawing water from a well. How could so many little girls not see her?

She was in our history books and, in some ways, all around us, even in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the doctor’s nurse with all the knowledge, the special teacher with all the answers. She was the woman at the farm stand who could tell you the sweetest ear of corn because she’d grown it. She was the neighbor lady with a wrench in her hand who never needed to call a handyman when the washer went on the fritz or the car needed a new battery. 

Singer JP Richardson, aka the “Big Bopper,” may have sung ceaselessly on the radio back then about the pony-tailed girl with a “wiggle in her walk, and a giggle in her talk,” but I certainly saw what made “the world go round” -- and it wasn’t someone dressed in Chantilly lace with a pretty face. Perhaps because I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, these working women were more visible to me. 

Later in life, when I had professional colleagues, some told me they had to battle sexism because there was a time when women weren’t employed outside the home; I would counter that maybe they just didn’t see the females who were in the job force. Men were in charge, that’s for sure. But who sold dishware and dresses? Women. Who waited tables at the coffee shop? Women. Who let you sneak a free donut at the bakery or have a taste of cookie batter at the school cafeteria or sold you a tootsie roll at the A & P? Women, that’s who. 

In one way, the curse of a childhood on a different side of the tracks can be its biggest blessing, yielding a clearer lens on life. As I grew, I began to be invited to what I call “truly suburban” homes, with high ceilings and sunken living rooms. They had crystal ash trays and shiny pastel drapes. And, almost invariably, they had sad mothers. 
I wasn’t wise enough to absorb the cause of this, of course. To me it looked like ingratitude for upward mobility. But something began to seep in. There was the time I showed up to a friend’s house, and her mother was asleep in the middle of the day. 

“It’s the medicine she’s on,” my teenage acquaintance explained. “It’s supposed to make her feel better about her life, but it doesn’t.” When I asked why her mother needed to feel better about her life, which seemed superior in all ways to those of parents in small houses behind the highway where I lived, my friend told me in an exasperated voice typical of adolescence: “I don’t know! She wasn’t like this. She had to work behind the counter of a drugstore and then my dad started making some more money and we moved here. It makes no sense!”

It didn’t make sense, and not just because this was taking place in a big house with two cars and a dishwasher, so unlike mine. The hardship of our Kansas past had been drummed into us, and weren’t we lucky it was so far gone?
In local cemeteries across our Kansas plain, there were signs of the tragic plight of the women who came before us: Old gravestones of mothers who lost young children to plague and whose husbands had died long before them. There were archaic photos, too -- women with a hoe in one hand and a baby in the other, looking out from bonnets in the blazing sun. Their diaries, some of which were required reading in elementary school, never seemed to reflect this misery, though. The women wrote of harvests and spring rains and of children getting “good marks” in school. Mostly what they seemed to lack was long-term melancholy. 

And if I needed proof that women benefited from work, I had only to read more recent accounts in my Kansas history texts: Amelia Earhart from Atchison was born to fly; Hattie McDaniel from Wichita became the first African American to win an Academy Award; Lyda Conley, of the Wyandot tribe in Eastern Kansas, passed the bar at an impossibly young age, becoming the first female lawyer in the state.

I don’t know how much it helped me to see statues of pioneer women wherever I went in my early years, but it was a good match for the stories of dreamy kitchens, shopping-mall clothes and other promises of the non-stop satisfaction that lay beyond my house, in the far reaches of fancy suburbs. 

From the state capitol in Topeka to the flint hills of Council Grove, those early pioneer women stand at so many points, cast in bronze or chiseled from limestone or carved out of wood. They are testament to the state’s motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, “to the stars, through difficulty.” That difficult trail was blazed by women whose hardship never defeated them. They came in search of a better life, and they helped to build it. 

So maybe I seemed like I belonged on Mars to my more tradition-minded peers those many years ago, but I was reaching for the stars, not a planet. Even today, I’m inspired by knowing that I’m from pioneer stock, from women who moved so unflinchingly ahead and worked so hard to get there. Pioneer Women, you more than deserve your midwestern monuments.

By Anne Scheck

Amid the coronavirus pandemic of 2019, the death of a little dog seems small and incidental. But it was my dog, and it was killed by a pair of other dogs, and I was there to see it. Though I am haunted by the scene of my tiny cockapoo being torn apart by two brutes, both on a neighbor’s leash, the image is not without a mental picture that will always make me feel better. It will forever be accompanied by a feeling of gratitude. 
 
It comes from a stranger, whose car wheels ground to a sudden halt by the curb that day. In fact, that’s the only sound I remember, as my limp dog was the object of a tug-of-war between two sets of opposing jaws. I couldn’t hear anything else -- someone was screaming so loud it drowned out everything. it was the loudest scream I’d ever heard. It just wouldn’t stop. It went on and on. The person screaming was me. 
 
But a woman had exited the car by the curb, and grabbed a towel, and, placing herself in harm’s way, and shouted at the two big dogs long enough that they loosened their grip on their dying prey. She placed my dog in a towel on the sidewalk, and she began to stroke his head. She spoke softly, with words of comfort -- and she offered me hope, asking if we could take him to the vet. But I knew it was too late. And I think she did, too. Because as she hunched over my dog, stroking and talking … a few moments later, on that blood-covered cloth, he took his last breath, his eyes suddenly far away, like he was already on his way somewhere else. The little heart of our dog, big enough to love everyone, had come to a stop. 
 
I told the man with the dogs that I wouldn’t sue him – that this vicious act wasn’t going to change who I am. But I told him I never wanted to see those dogs again, and that he should do what’s right. My husband called the Independence Police Department.
 
It must have looked like calmness had settled over me, as I asked for the woman’s name and phone number, and I produced a reporter’s notebook for her to write it in, which had notes from some city meetings scratched across the page. But I was not calm. I was numb. 
 
With the coherence I had long had to muster at car wrecks and accident sites when I was a  young journalist, I recounted to the police officer what had happened: Someone sent me flowers, I’d opened the door to the man delivering them. It is a small town here. I knew the man. I’d begun speaking with him. I saw our dog slip out but didn’t try to stop him. Usually, our little furball jumped up and down at the arrival of a new person—so friendly that he had never learned to bark at strangers. When I looked up a fluffy stuffed toy was being bitten by two other dogs, and it took me at least a second or two to recognize the ragamuffin was my dog. 
 
We buried our dog far away from our house, on another property, and before we lowered him into the dirt, I took him out of the box where he lay on that towel and told him how sorry I was that it was someone else who had offered comfort, when it should have been me. “I am so sorry” I said over and again, and I stroked his fur, and felt the beginning signs of his stiffness. I thought of the woman who had helped. And I told my dog we needed to thank her. 
 
Our world is so full of heroes who win Super Bowls or Hollywood Oscars or other golden trophies, but where are the awards for those people who intervene, who help, who make a difference every day? Who change lives with simple but difficult acts of kindness? They aren’t limited to the part the New Testament included as “Good Samaritan.” They are all around us. I know because I met one the day my dog died. She altered a recollection that would have been far more horrific without her. She helped nurse my dog into a peaceful death. She gave me a memory of care and assistance. Where would I be now without that? 
 
I bought her a monetary gift-card and took it to her home. I never could seem to find the right words to thank her, which is inexcusable for a person who made a living by writing. But this is the thing with true heroes – they seem to understand bungling human nature in a way I probably never will. She asked me to pass on the gift card, to where it would do some real good. 
 
So, one day recently we sat on my back porch for a talk. She’d decided the place where it should go: The Marion County Animal Shelter. So, on a rainy afternoon a few days later, I called to let the shelter know it was coming by way of me, and I met a volunteer in the vestibule. She thanked me, but I wasn’t finished. “This comes from Cathy Porter,” I said, “it was Cathy Porter who …“ But words failed me once again, as I was offered another round of thanks. 
 
In a famous essay penned more than a century ago near my birthplace in Missouri, these words were written about a farm dog named Old Drum mistakenly shot by neighbor: “He was as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.” 
 
That was our little dog, too. A bundle of constant love. But this applies to so many dogs, doesn’t it? And so sometime, when the pain of loss no longer cuts like a knife, we’ll adopt another small shelter dog, just as we have always done. 
 
And I know where we will go to find one – to the Marion County Animal Shelter. And I know what we will name our dog., too It won’t matter whether it’s male or female. We already have the name picked out: Porter. The name will be Porter. Thank you, Cathy. We will never forget you. 

By Anne Scheck

The most famous quote ever written about families came from Leo Tolstoy. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But, in my opinion, the great Russian writer didn’t take that brilliantly perceptive comment far enough. So, here’s my follow-up advice: if you find a happy family, grab on like superglue. Because imitation may be the only way to wriggle out from the hard shell of a challenging childhood and break the bad habits of the past. I have been finding good examples for better living for nearly the past half century, since I packed my bags and headed off to college. And for instructional purposes on how to create lightning-in-a-bottle love, nobody -- and I mean nobody! -- ever demonstrated it like the Cusworths of California. 
         
By the time I met, Nellie, the matriarch of this family of five children, I think I’d become a pretty good wife. But my parenthood was still in question. As a spouse, I was earning a decent income, and I never complained about working. Mostly this was because I was from a generation in which outside employment was still being frowned upon by some and I was just grateful that I could go forth into a job I found soulfully satisfying. But as a mother? I wasn’t so sure. My two school-aged kids were being raised in a household that a district administrator once described – in writing! – as “chaotic but stable.” Also, I was at such loose ends most of the time that twice I was mistaken for the school custodian because our faded-sweatshirt attire and harried manner made us look, from a distance, like twins. In fact, I once told her this while she was scurrying with a big stack of brown paper towels. (I don’t think she saw it as a compliment.)
         
In fact, this is how I met Nellie. I dropped off a bunch of books one day for the school library, with my pajama top tucked under my windbreaker, and an energetic woman became intrigued by some of the titles, which apparently seemed a little high-brow for a bunch of grade-schoolers. She thanked me profusely nonetheless and informed me that her two youngest children were the same ages as mine. She had three more. And she worked at the district pre-school. 
Does this make you want to go lie down? That’s the effect it had on me. 
              
In all honesty, I don’t think our friendship bloomed until the great-mom checklist could no longer be ignored. There was the time my son’s art project was shown in the school cafeteria along with others, and the museum-like display was created by upending the tables – a “Nellie” idea. Music from a brass ensemble played a nice background, courtesy of Nellie’s second daughter, who had brought along some friends from the high school band. It looked like a mini-Met event. 

Then, as a co-leader of the girl scout troop that included both of our daughters, I decided to have a holiday dinner for the homeless—only to have the troop leader pitch what I remember as an alpha-mom fit. To placate her, I said I would call someone knowledgeable about the process and was given a phone number that I thought looked familiar. “Hi, this is Nellie,” came a voice I knew. And this is how I ended up in a community center one night serving soup to about a dozen men who seemed to appear out of nowhere, as I acted as an apprentice for the girl scout version of a similar dinner scheduled a few weeks away. 
         
The Cusworth family, including dad Harvey, interacted in a way nothing like the family I’d grown up, where empathy seemed to be considered a sign of weakness and barbs often flew fast and furious between siblings. As a child who was an avid reader, I’d comforted myself in knowledge I gleaned from science books, which showed that from snow monkeys to ground squirrels, it was normal in the animal kingdom for mothers to prefer younger offspring. 
As the oldest of four sisters, what seemed normal for me appeared to be the extreme opposite of what occurred among the four Cusworth girls, who never lobbed razor-sharp criticisms at one another. Their second youngest, a son, helped his sister with math, for goodness sake! Spending time with this family was like being happily marooned in our suburb with Disney’s version of Swiss Family Robinson, everyone pulling together and beating the odds. 
         
And maybe that’s the thing to know about great families. They beat odds they don’t even know they’re up against. One Christmas season, I began arriving home to find presents on my doorstep. I couldn’t figure it out, until it finally dawned on me that a gift-giver was anonymously helping our family celebrate the 10-day lead-up to Dec. 25, without actually delivering maids-a-milkin’ and pipers piping. I knew who it was – the girl scout leader who had been so persnickety about the homeless dinner, feeling badly about her reaction. But when I confronted her in an aha-like way, she convincingly assured me … nope, not her. 
         
So, I sat down to make a list of all the people for whom I had done a chore: looking after a pet, providing spur-of-the-moment babysitting. It took me a while to go through it. And then I thought of a second category. Not people who owed me a favor, but people most likely to have carried out such a kind act. And I got out a piece of poster board and tacked it onto plywood, and it said: “THANK YOU” and “MERRY CHRISTMAS” and my family and I planted it on the Cusworth lawn on Christmas eve. I don’t know about my husband and children, but those Cusworths gave me the best Christmas I’ve ever had.
         
Over the years, Nellie and I have had our share of differences. She finds my lack of competitiveness vexing at times. Once, our families split into teams to navigate a corn maize, agreeing that the losers would pay for burgers at In-n-Out. But I got interested in our botanical surroundings, and while trying to identify a plant, Nellie urged me to hurry along, with the reminder that this was a contest! We needed to win it! Lunch was at stake!
         
As our children grew, we shared the milestones of both families, weddings and births. So it’s no surprise that when our son finally got married, the Cusworths were first on the guest list, even though we now lived so many miles apart between our home in Oregon and Nellie’s and Harvey’s, in Southern California. 
         
I mailed my own family individual invitations to my favorite Portland spot: The Tilikum Bridge, a feat of cabled engineering that spans the Willamette River and bans cars, allowing only mass transit, bicyclists and pedestrians. It is a thing of beauty, with million-dollar views and a coffee shop at one end, where a nice gathering of my sisters and their families might provide fodder for a family portrait after the wedding. 
I sent emails; I mailed postcards of the Tilikum bridge; I gave directions to Tilikum Crossing; I advised where parking would be best. 
         
There was no happier morning in my life than the one where I saw my son exchange vows with his new wife. And, once again, the Cusworths proved an underlying reason why the day remains special for me. I remember mentioning Tilikum Bridge to them, but I don’t recall emphasizing it in the way I did to my own sisters. Yet, as I waited at the crossing site on the bridge that day, it finally occurred to me -- after one by one, the Cusworths arrived – that none of my family was going to be there. My husband had predicted this outcome. 
         
We walked across the bridge, with the newest little Cusworth, baby Glen, sleeping all the way and one of the Cusworth canines, Bill the Bulldog, trotting along. The sun was casting diamonds the river below. Portland stretched toward the horizon on both sides. We reached the coffee shop and got bubbly soft drinks. We sat and sat as the sparkling river roiled beneath. 
        
And when we all walked back, I had a fleeting moment of sadness for what my sisters had missed. But it was gone in an instant. I can’t think of a better family to have walked with me over the bridge I love so much. So, take that Mr. Tolstoy. Even if all happy families are alike, some are singular, too – with a special brand of generosity that welcomes other folk warmly into their fold. -end- 

There is really nothing else like the airpark where I live. People may live on big lakes or golf courses or with acres of piney woods behind their homes, but an airpark is a place where many people have airplanes, not a set of golf clubs or a sailboat or hiking gear. And they don’t just have airplanes, they have beloved, cherished airplanes in candy-apple colors. So, when my husband and I moved here, it was naïve to think that as non-flyers – the name given to people who aren’t pilots – we would seamlessly fit in with residents who fly off into the clouds on a regular basis. 
 
But I made things worse. First, I am terrified of flying. Second, we bought our house in the airpark because it was the most affordable craftsman-style home in the area at the time – and it’s here only because this is where the original farm family lived. It’s 100 years old.

Can you see where I am going with this? We were out of sync from the get-go. 
 
Also, since I didn’t know the lingo of pilots, I offended many of our neighbors right away by telling nearly everyone else I met in town that most of the pilots were also campers. “You may think everyone flies,” I’d say confidently. “But many love the outdoors. There are RVs everywhere.” Why had I never seen that many RVs? This never crossed my mind. But RVs were referenced constantly. One day, a man I’d met in our airpark told me he’d heard I’d been misusing the term. “RVs are aircraft,” he explained. They are hand-built. From a kit. Then flown. They are otherwise known as EABs. I was stunned I could have gotten this acronym so wrong. 
 
But this wasn’t the end of my faux pas moments. In an effort to be welcoming, one of my neighbors invited me to an airpark-wide spring breakfast, to be held in a big hangar at the airport itself. “They’re going to launch balloons, you’ll love it,” she said. 
 
I told her I’d be there. But, back in my days as a reporter, I’d covered events with balloon launches for promotional purposes – and nothing seemed so environmentally unfriendly to me as people holding party balloons on a string and releasing them into the sky to mark the opening of a car dealership or a political rally. “I’d love to go to the breakfast,” I told my neighbor. “But I am going to skip the balloon thing. I am not a fan. They can drift into telephone wires and trees and really be a nuisance.” It was only later that I realized these weren’t the kind of helium balloons you buy at a store; They were big, beautiful hot-air balloons, which would ascend from our small airport. Even as a non-flyer, I knew I was being a total dunce. 
 
Help came in the form of the Ninety-nines. This is an international organization of women pilots, and Amelia Earhart was a founding member. It has a wonderful chapter here. One of my favorite neighbors, Deb, who was an air-traffic controller for many years, is a “99.” She told me about a half-day informational meeting at the Independence Library for people like me. It was called “The Flying Companion Seminar,” and it was designed for non-pilots who go up in planes as passengers and who don’t want to be useless pieces of protoplasm while the plane is in the air. That actually isn’t the way it was described, but I think that pretty much nails it, based on the attendees like me I met that day. I found it amazing – I saw so many of the women I’d met at our airpark book club, social events and even at our annual craft fair here … and it turns out they are pilots! They knit, they sew, they make to die-for brownies – and they fly, too. 
 
The main speaker, Marilyn, was a woman I’d long admired because she’d been a school administrator, which I put right up there with storm-chasing meteorologists in terms of stress. 
 
In fact, right away, Marilyn was placed under some duress when the audiovisual equipment failed, ironically, just as she was instructing us on the reliability of aviation technology. She handled it very well, at one point extending her arms to explain how a plane behaves at a certain altitude. She added that onboard paper charts could be effectively used to assist any pilot, should they ever have a failure of the dashboard or whatever-you-call-it on an airplane that’s needed to view surroundings. 
 
The charts then were passed around, for all to see. If you’ve ever seen a map of crowded geographic features written in a foreign language, this is pretty much how they looked to me. So, I did what I always do in such a situation and started asking questions of the woman sitting next to me, who was a pilot. She had a deep voice, and before long Marilyn, the former educator, came back to reprimand me for talking in class. 
 
I told Marilyn, right after she shushed me, that I couldn’t fathom these charts and that I’d actually managed to pass organic chemistry in college, so this was concerning. It was making me worry about people like her. What if there was trouble in the air? Do these confusing poster-sized things really help? 
 
“Of course they do,” she said. What astounding precision Marilyn showed, pointing out things on that chart like a talking Rosetta stone. “And if you need to do a quick landing, there you are! Safe and sound, perhaps at some airport where you’ve never been, but then you may find a new restaurant.” 
 
What calmness. What control. I was considerably reassured about flying, if I could have a woman pilot at the helm. But what was this about discovering a new restaurant? It sounded odd. Later, I asked Deb about this. “Oh, that’s what we call the 99-dollar hamburger,” she explained. Was this because it was bought by a 99 who touched down? “Oh no,” she said. “A lot of small airports have their own restaurant, and when you take into account the fuel and all the other things that it takes to get to one of them, that’s the term to describe what the hamburger probably really costs.” 
 
Well, here is the good news for anyone in my small town who wants a $99 hamburger for less than ten bucks. You can get a delicious sandwich with a side of your choice at our very own restaurant, The Starduster, just by walking, bicycling or driving over to the Independence State Airport. 
 
And while you’re there, you are fairly sure to see a 99 if the weather is good. Look up into the sky. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yes, and it’s superwoman! A high-flying female that, even though I am way past my 60th birthday, is teaching me that there’s always time to look up to new role models, and certainly not just when they’re overhead in the wild blue yonder.  

TEACHER GREATNESS: Miss Bergland and the Oranges
 
I heard from a teacher today, a friend who has mastered the so-called distance-learning technology now needed to carry her students through this coronavirus crisis of 2020. Since I still haven’t mastered the basics of ZOOM, which is becoming our nation’s go-to form of communication, I was surprised at her upbeat attitude about it all. In fact, it’s the parents she feels sorry for – they’re trying to instruct their own kids, which is difficult to do, and many simply don’t know how to be a good teacher. I thought about my friend. I thought about good teachers. And I thought about where my life would be without good teachers because I got some not-so-good ones along the way. But the one great teacher I had early in life helped me appreciate all the good ones to follow, and that teacher is why I am where I am today. 
 
Her name was Miss Bergland. She was tall, and had a strong voice and dark hair, and had won some educator awards. That is what they said. She came to our school for two years, and playground gossip said she was there to set an example for other teachers. Whether that was true or not I don’t know. She set an example for me. Forever. 
 
By the time I met Miss Bergland, I was in academic trouble – as a first grader. Dim-witted would have been what they called it then. I’d learned early in my life to tune out troublesome thoughts through elaborate daydreaming, and I was employing this tactic in school. I was about to flunk the first grade, which would have meant I’d be “held back.” Someone, perhaps one of my parents, pointed out that this likely wouldn’t stop the daydreams, and in fact might make them worse since I’d already sat through the starter book “Tip and Mitten” by drifting off into space. My first-grade teacher was dubious about my mental abilities, so one day I went to the principal’s office, a place of dread, and met with the man we all feared, a man who roamed the halls in a white shirt and skinny black tie and said things like: “I saw that!” 
 
The principal put before me a set of pegs and blocks to be placed into corresponding openings, which were cut into a wooden box. Then he got up to close his office door, and, when he returned the blocks and pegs were in proper placement. I remember this because the man who ran the entire school, the man we all revered like a deity, then asked me one of the most obvious questions ever uttered to me in my life: “Did you do this?” There were only two people in the room, and he was one of them and so was I, and he’d been closing the door. 
 
I don’t know if this was what landed me in the second grade, and, more importantly, in Miss Bergland’s class, but that year proved to be my all-time favorite school year ever. Miss Bergland conducted her own test on me, in which I had to immediately identify what was wrong with a picture on a flash card. These were easy to do. There was a bicycle drawn with missing spokes in a wheel; There was a table without a leg. Every time I nailed it, Miss Bergland would say in a booming voice: CORRECT! 
 
Sometimes, even Miss Bergland found me confusing. When we were asked to draw a scene of snow on a day when the cold and ice prevented us from going outside for recess, I grabbed a green crayon, then a brown one. Miss Bergland, who was roving from desk to desk, saw me working away. “Are you trying to draw something else she asked?” sounding mildly alarmed. “No,” I said. “I am drawing the green grass, then I will color it over with brown for dying, then white for winter.” My snow scene looked psychedelic by the time I finished, but Miss Bergland quite literally got the picture. 
 
She gave me books beyond my grade level and noticed that I couldn’t verbalize them very well when asked to read aloud. I had a stammer back then, and it must have been irritating to hear me stumble. So, Ms. Bergland let me read by myself, then asked questions about the content. Where did Jack go? How much money did he make on the lemonade stand? What was his little sister’s name? It was actually hard to shut me up, once I got talking about stories. 
 
The way students in Miss Bergland’s class were rewarded was unconventional. She had all kinds of objects from her international travel, stashed at the back of the classroom. I was able to use chopsticks to eat my lunch while sitting in a kimono. There were berets from France and a huge clunky camera on a tripod, which a pair of children could use – one pretending to be a fashion photographer, the other a model, and any twosome there was encouraged to talk with hokey French accents because Paris was the seat of high couture at the time. Today, a teacher who allowed kids this politically incorrect liberty might risk a heavy reprimand, but to me it was the best make-believe outside of a carnival funhouse.
 
One day, an expert came in to test me. I don’t know why. But I think it was because Miss Bergland made my first-grade teacher mad by rescuing me. How could I end in the top reading group when I couldn’t even say the words written on the page appropriately?
 
The lady expert had a no-nonsense manner and a rapid-fire way of talking. Miss Bergland insisted on being present. The lady put some oranges on Miss Bergland’s desk. She asked me to count them. I did. Then she took some of the oranges away – I think there were 13 because I remember it was that unlucky number. She tucked four oranges into a drawer in Miss Bergland’s desk. “Now how many oranges?” she asked. “Thirteen,” I replied. A frown crossed her face. She picked up each of the oranges on the desk. “Let’s count together,” she said. We arrived at nine. She looked pleased. “So, how many oranges now?” I looked up at Miss Bergland. “There are 13,” I said. The lady seemed exasperated; she reminded me that she was conducting the test, not my teacher. She took away two more oranges and put them in another drawer. “Now how many?” she asked. “Thirteen,” I said. She then said to Miss Bergland: “I believe we need to have a talk after we conclude.” Miss Bergland was having none of it. 
 
Miss Bergland asked: “How many oranges are on the desktop?” I told her seven. “Why do you keep saying 13?” she continued. “Tell us why.” I said there were 13 oranges, two in one desk drawer and four in another. There were 13 oranges. 
 
I don’t know for certain, but I believe this is how I finally got school-provided speech therapy. Although I didn’t give the answer the lady expert was looking for, there were 13 oranges that day, after all. And maybe it seemed like I needed help with my way of thinking and my way of forming words, but those oranges – thanks to Miss Bergland – showed I had the means to process information, which apparently had been in some serious doubt. 
 
I think of Miss Bergland whenever I see oranges. She left our school the year after I had her for a teacher. She was on loan, I was told, like a library book. But she wasn’t like a library book at all. She was exactly like the hand prints she had us make in plaster, as presents for our parents. “We are not going to draw around our fingers on construction paper,” she said. “We are going to pour this like cement, so whatever impression is made it will last a lifetime.” And so it has.
--Anne Scheck