Ulmus Americana & The Henry Moore Pillow

“ I can live without latte’s.”  she said to him. 

She wasn’t being grumpy.  She was just stating a fact. 

Her home-brewed coffee was just fine for her.   He himself liked to wander over to the new place called BOYDS for coffee, for his latte. 

BOYDS was the place right next to the great big American Elm tree that cast its long shadows onto the old four storey brick YWCA building, just down the street.  

No, she wasn’t being grumpy, although she probably had a right to be.  She told him that he was snoring at night and disturbing her sleep.  He felt badly about this and knew that, even though he could not really be aware of it ( because he was ASLEEP, right? ) it was very probably unfortunately true.  His father had snored mercilessly. 

And now, as his own life-counting red marbles clicked down from one container to the next,

the memories of his father’s snoring thunder rolled out from the dim past.  

When that had happened, over five long decades ago, it was not dim, nor quiet ……….….but very, very loud.

His father’s snoring had reverberated through the small house with both the lowest of deep rumbling base sounds and the highest of sharp cutting-edged treble sounds too.  The overall combined sonic onslaught demanded one’s attention.  This would usually be apparent to him only when his father was “sleeping in”, which was very rare.  Normally his father would be up before dawn, to head out into that still waking world of Old Detroit, to make the money to feed the family.  But on those weekend days when the father got the chance to “sleep in” the sound of loud Armenian-nosed snoring blasted through their wood framed lath and plaster walls.

As a boy he remembered first his own fascinated listening to the sound, then as it wore on and on, moving in  closer to the source to see and hear more carefully what could physically create such a demanding, obnoxious, repetitive, rhythmic  noise.  By this point in time, it would usually be about 9 or 9:30 in the morning.  Everyone in the house was already up, everyone in the neighborhood was up, everyone except his still slumbering father…………who slept deeply as he shook the house like the Big Bad Wolf had, in the story of the 3 Little Pigs.

So, she was most probably right.  He probably was snoring now.  And if he was, he was sure that it would not only keep her awake, but either frighten or terrorize her too.So he agreed to try things.  Try things to minimize or eliminate that which he might noisily be doing in his sleep at night.  After a brief attempt at some useless ‘nose-strips’, and several other discussions about how he felt that she should just push him out of bed to wake him, they (he) attempted the

now legendary HENRY MOORE PILLOW.

He called it that.  But that was not its real name. 

  

Its real name was The Brookstone SONA PILLOW.  http://www.brookstone.com/store/product.asp?product_code=572966     

He looked at it in the store.  The Sales Lady looked at he and she standing there looking at the aisle end-cap display of SONA PILLOWS in their smartly designed clear containers.  She asked if they were interested in it.

“Well, I guess I am.” he replied.  And they bought one and carried it home.

It was significantly different from other pillows he had known.  It almost immediately reminded him of the large arc’d and curving organic sculptures of HENRY MOORE that he had seen with her back in Toronto. ( maybe with a touch of Egyptian Pharaoh Headress too )   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore 

 

The next morning she said it worked.  So, as he tried finding various new ways of laying his head into this HENRY MOORE PILLOW he came to know its compound curves, protuberances, and recesses very well.  Within a week he had memorized every curved surface and attempted to adapt his face and head and neck to that which felt most natural ( staying as far away as possible from the big central and uncomfortable BULGE, gravitating instead to the two outer concave slopes ).   It was not entirely natural, but then the whole use of pillows by the human race was not entirely natural either. 

From hard rigid bocks in China and Egypt to soft mounds of field grass in peasant areas all over the world, humans seemed to need SOMETHING to help them with their sleeping braincase…..to rest….to dream.

So the pillow worked.  But to test it out thoroughly, he did not take it on their trip to Toronto.  They were traveling to Toronto for her sister’s birthday and to see her mum for the first time in a long time. 

 

Even before they had left for Toronto he had been staring at vehicles to find one to replace his leased car.  While they were there in the largest city in Canada they attended the AUTOSHOW.  But no luck, aside from a grand touring R8 that he could not really afford, there really was nothing that he liked better than his now-old 2004 Audi TT.

 

They stayed in a hotel they did not know, right in the heart of downtown Toronto. 

 

Lots of color light treatments. 

Very convenient, and a good price in the dead of Winter.   ( with nice soft ‘normal’ pillows that unfortunately did not mitigate the deep night snore )

And even though February was a harsh time of year in Toronto, he wandered the streets again, as usual.

 

Then he drove out to the car dealer just outside Toronto, to buy out the old Audi lease. 

He would drive the old TT until 2010. 

Maybe by then he could get one of these? 

After seeing family and friends and partaking in the birthday party for her sister

they left Toronto, flying back to Oregon.  To Portland again.

   

There was that growing pleasure of returning to Portland. 

 

They both continued to enjoy the city.  The mixture of civility,

 

eccentricity, and political forth-rightness sat well with him.

While they returned to Portland, Oregon, his sons met up with each other in Baltimore. 

While one son trained in Baltimore, the other made his moves on the first house he and soon-to-be-wife would own…….back in Connecticut. 

 

The two sons had come a long way from those small boys that pressed their hands into that German dough called Salzteig.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFd9BVWxRUM  ( 4 minutes of moving salzteig! ) 

And then there was that tree.

 

That tree in Portland.  Downtown Portland.

The Portlandians had labeled it with a sign. 

 

They called it ULMUS AMERICANA, The American Elm.  It was planted there in 1870. 

Ulmus americana, while generally known as the American Elm, was also less commonly called the White Elm or Water Elm, and is actually a species native to eastern North America, occurring from Nova Scotia west to southeast Saskatchewan, and south to Florida and central Texas. It turned out to be an extremely hardy tree that can withstand winter temperatures as low as −42 °C (−44 °F). These trees can live for several hundred years. A prime example of the species was the Sauble Elm [3], which grew in Ontario, Canada, to a height of 43 m (140 ft). When that particular tree was felled in 1968, a tree-ring count established that it had germinated in 1701.

These Elms just seemed significant here.  There was even an artistic assembly of an Elm Shadow in the South West Park Blocks near their home in Downtown Portland. 

  

The same South West Park Blocks that hosted the recent anti-war protest.  http://iraqbodycountexhibit.org/   

But that Elm, that singular American Elm from 1870…….he could swear it talked to him when he walked over to the coffee shop next to it.  It required his attention. 

Whether he was walking across the sculpture court toward it,

 

or just passing by the café and the YWCA, it always made him stop. 

Stop and look.  130 years old since its planting.  He knew he would never last that long.  And he had the red marbles to prove it. 

But it did not matter, he was GLAD he was alive now.  He was glad that he had lived on this earth when he did.  Not just because he knew things would get a lot harder later, but also because he knew he was about to live through a period of tremendous change, both intentional and unsuspected. 

                  

As the Curve Of Change steepened and headed for the skies, he was glad that it was just about Time.