[MD] Loyalty to Philo

[John Carl]

This seems like a story I've had on my mind for some time, but could never
find the right time, or tenor, but Marsha gave me a push, as usual, and so
I'll begin the story of my friendship with Steve Marquis, the most
introverted person I even knew and what happened to that friendship.  How it
was helped, and how it was harmed by the MoQ.

Part of the difficulty of telling this particular story, is that I don't
know how it ends.  That does make for a certain dynamic interest, I admit,
but also a great deal of existential angst.  It's  possible to envision the
end of the story evolving in many ways, as influenced by the telling of the
story.

How weird is that?

So hang in there if the going gets tough.  I'll try and leave spaces for
breathing room.  But dang it, if I'm gonna tell it, I'm gonna HAVE to tell
it right.  We've gone too far down this road to pussy out now.  You don't
even wanna know how much love I have blown off in the name of wisdom in my
life.  More than I can even bear to look at, much less recount for your
amusement.  Ending relationships.  Drinking the poison.  Just for the sake
of some  "righteousness".

But then asking if that's the "right" thing to do, just makes the matter
more complicated.

Sigh.


What makes it hard to begin, is when you care too much on what you say.

Like Ken Kesey talked about in his Magnum Opus, *Demon Box*, the
overwhelming guilt that's felt when you look around yourself as an old man
and ponder, how much was signified.  And how short you fell.

We all fall; so short.  All the time.  One reason I treasure that Thoreau
quote about "youth and their staircases to the moon; old men and their
woodsheds."

I'm rambling.

Ever notice that sometimes you just don't know which brick to describe?


 I met Steve, the most introverted person I ever knew,  in 1976, our
nation's bicentennial year and a summertime break between my freshman and
sophmore year at Monterey Bay Academy - a Seventh Day Adventist Boarding
School that kept me out of Grass Valley area most of the year, and only home
on homeleaves and summers and such.

  I remember his horses.  In  a golden field, standing at the fence, eager
for apple handouts.  A late summer's afternoon, when I was fifteen or so,
and I'd come up with my mom to help an old codger who lived out on the Ridge
handle them. Move 'em from pasture to pasture. Put halters on them.  Do
something besides what  Old Joe did with them, which was feed them apples
and pears and garden scrap treats.

I wonder sometimes at all the idiots out there in the summer, sweating over
weedeaters, when bioengineered cellulose / horsepower converters are ready
to be unfenced and fully utiliized.  Damn barb wire has ruined the world.


Old Joe had one son - Steve.  He'd been born sorta late in life to Joe, who
was 40 when he finally got around to procreating.  Unlike my dad who'd
gotten started as soon as possible.


Steve, it so happened, was heading for the same boarding school I was
attending.  Steve was actually known to the local church pretty well, but I
wasn't.  I was a newcomer to the area for one thing.  And a non-church goer
for another.  I'd probably have gone to the local high school, except it was
really screwed up with over-population and going to a year-round schedule,
and thus a poor choice, as well as the fact that I actually knew kids,
faculty kids, who'd gone to the SDA school in Santa Cruz, and who now were
going to MBA, and thus I'd have some social contacts in high school, rather
than starting all over again like I'd been doing most of my life, uprooted
by a  contractor father in pursuit of the more recent boom, and fleeing the
just-passed bust.


Plus they had an airstrip, and my dad an airplane.'


Plus they had stables and I could keep my horse.


That's how I ended up at MBA, while living in Nevada County.  Steve's story
was slightly different.


Steve started out at Rio Lindo Academy.  Where my girls are going now, but
ended up transferring due to an incident in the dorms, which I'll have to
defer till tomorrow, since my lunch break is almost over.