OK, this photo was taken last Sunday, but it shows where Jim Ramsey and I also had coffee today, Father's Day — the covered area outside of the Urban Grange coffee house in West Salem.
Jim is an old friend in several respects. Like me, he is old. (Though his recently-added gray goatee lends him an air of mature mystery, much as I like to fantasize my gray beard does.)
More importantly, I've known Jim for a long time. How long exactly is an unknown, which shows how long it has been.
I met Jim at some point after moving to Oregon in 1971 to attend graduate school at Portland State University. Since both of us were members of an India-based spiritual group that had few members in the United States, our paths crossed at meetings of the group even though at the time I was living in the Portland area.
Knowing that Jim was a realtor with Ramsey Real Estate, a family business, he was chosen by my first wife and I to find us a house in Salem after I got a job with the State Health Planning and Development Agency and was tired of doing the Portland-Salem commute.
Before too long we'd bought a house on Hillview Drive in south Salem, which if you walked out in the middle of the street, had a marvelous view of the shining lights of the Fred Meyer store. It also was close to a park and McDonalds, with children close to the age of our five-year-old daughter, Celeste, living nearby.
Perfect!
Until we moved to another part of south Salem where Celeste went to Candalaria Elementary School, Judson Middle School, and South Salem High School. That was followed by a divorce, remarriage to my current wife, Laurel, and many other changes to my life.
Throughout, from circa 1971 to 2020, forty-nine years, I've kept in touch with Jim. For most of that time I saw him every Sunday at meetings of our spiritual group. Sometimes we'd meet up as part of a group. Sometimes it's just been the two of us.
Eventually I had a falling-out with the group, having lost faith in its teachings even though I'd written several books that were published or distributed by the group. No matter to the friendship Jim and I had. We continued to get together, talking about politics, movies, books, cars, home life, health problems, all sorts of subjects.
When the Covid crisis hit, a stay-at-home order prevented Jim and I from getting together in person.
We also didn't communicate by phone or Zoom. I thought of checking in with Jim, but neither of us reached out to the other. I'd gotten so used to talking with Jim face-to-face, talking remotely just didn't appeal to me. This could be one of those male-female differences.
My wife talks to her female friends frequently by phone. Me, I figured that when Jim and I could meet in person again, we would. Until then, we wouldn't. Pretty damn simple.
It's been good to resume our coffee conversations the past two weeks. I feel better now. Maybe I would have felt better sooner if we'd talked by phone, but that's water under the Covid crisis bridge. Today we each brought a chair to free up the Urban Grange outside seating for other people. I brought a small table last week. Jim brought one today.
In all the many years I've known Jim, I don't recall ever explicitly telling him how much our get-togethers mean to me. So, now I am. Of course, since I'm a man, I"m not going to say this in person. I'll send him a link to this blog post. In my defense, I wrote about this sort of thing back in 2005 in "Why men don't share their feelings."
To avoid messing up the warm fuzziness of this post, I'll copy in those 2005 musings as a continuation to this post.
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