Chapter 22: The Voice of Silence—A Requiem for the Class of ’73
On the turning away / From the pale and downtrodden / And the words they say / Which we won’t understand…
We gathered under the banner of survival—a fifty-year congregation of the Rex Putnam Class of 1973. We wore our name tags like badges of endurance, proof that we had navigated the gauntlet of time, biology, and gravity. But as I walked among the living, shaking hands and hearing voices that had dropped an octave into the registry of age, I realized I was not there just for the survivors. I had not come to celebrate the continuity of high school connections, but to commune with the silence left by the deceased.
I left that reunion with no renewed alliances among the living, and few fresh Facebook acquaintances to add to the digital periphery of my life. Instead, I departed with a heavy, shimmering narrative wrapped around those who no longer possess a voice—those silenced by death, by the fog of dementia, or by the crushing weight of disinterest.
It is a peculiar phenomenon of the human condition that we celebrate presence while ignoring the deafening roar of absence. We turn away. We avert our gaze from the empty spaces in the room because they remind us of our own impending dissolution. But as one who has spent a lifetime tracing the currents of the universe, I know that the circuit is not broken simply because the bulb has shattered. The energy of their stories remains. The frequency hums, waiting for a receiver sensitive enough to pick up the transmission.
In the narrative of our shared history, there were friends that burned out from living too hot and too fast, lives that failed under intense overloads, and unrecognized geniuses lost to oversight.
The Short-Circuited Geniuses
I think first of Charlie Davalos and Craig Salter, the architects of my youthful yearning to escape gravity. We were not merely boys playing with fire; we were cosmic refugees attempting to build a vessel to take us home.
Charlie never made it to the high school corridors. He perished in the summer preceding our freshman year, a casualty of our ambition. We were crafting homemade rocket engines, mixing volatile chemicals with the reckless precision of alchemists. When that experimental cylinder exploded, severing his artery, it did not just end a life; it severed a timeline. Charlie, Craig, and I were disciples of Tom Swift and E.E. Doc Smith, living vicariously through the Lensmen series, convinced that the stars were our birthright. We were trying, with all our might, to get off this rock.
When Charlie died, the physical rocket was destroyed, but the trajectory of grief launched us into a different orbit. His spirit, a kinetic burst of unfulfilled potential, still lives within me. I still possess the Doc Smith books and the rocket launcher—relics of a space program that ended in our youth. My heart still yearns for the stars, and I suspect I shall rejoin Charlie there soon enough.
Then there was Craig Salter. If Charlie was the fuel, Craig was the guidance system—a true ultra-genius with an IQ soaring beyond 142. In the eighth grade, while the rest of us were grappling with the mundane, Craig was designing electronic circuits and building underground fortresses. He once handed in a freshman book report written entirely in a Middle Earth language he had mastered, illustrating a book that existed only in his mind. He was a creature of high voltage living in a low-voltage world.
But this world is cruel to those who see beyond its veil. The mundane reality of high school bored him into detachment; teachers mistook his transcendental drift for stupidity. I hold a heavy stone of regret regarding Craig. In 1973, at my father’s basement bar, I introduced him to alcohol. It was a catalyst introduced to a volatile compound. The tragedy that began to unfold around 1993, leading him to a long-term care facility where he resides in the twilight of consciousness, breaks the heart. Craig was a silicon-valley-level mind born before the valley existed to catch him. His spirit—creative, frantic, brilliant—is alive within me, and alive within him, regardless of the failure of his short and medium term memory..
The Traumatized Brothers
We are all shaped by the fathers who forged us, often with hammers that struck too hard. Jeff Tobin was a “traumatized brother” in this fraternity of pain. In the seventh grade, we were co-conspirators in chaos, a defense mechanism against the rigidity of our upbringing. I recall the humiliation of a teacher taking a tennis shoe to my backside while the class listened—a public tuning of my behavior—followed by my father’s “precision” beat-down at home.
Jeff carried that heat his entire life. He treated his pickup truck like a race car, driving with a terrifying disregard for mortality, perhaps testing the boundaries of his own existence. He was a man of intense, paradoxical loyalty. Years later, when we worked together at the USPS, he was a machine of accuracy and speed, yet the internal wiring was fraying. I witnessed his descent, failing him after his first suicide attempt because I was too burdened by the wreckage of my own first marriage. Concurrent death wishes do not synchronize well; they create destructive interference patterns.
Jeff left this plane by his own hand at fifty-five. But before the dark consumed him, he showed me a compassion that defied his torment. He sacrificed his dignity to protect me once, a loyalty that blows the fuses of my understanding even now. I hear you, Jeff. The frequency of your pain has not diminished, but neither has the resonance of your love.
And Alan Crouser—the gentle giant. There was a melancholy to Alan that sang in the key of Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles,” a song that looped in his mind like a mantra of fragility. He was a massive force who could pick me up and throw me over a car when the alcohol—Mad Dog 20-20, the nectar of our destruction—took hold. I recall driving him and his bride-to-be to Vancouver at speeds exceeding 100 MPH, a reckless dash toward a future that would eventually unravel. Alan loved deeply, but he was a receiver picking up too much static from a broken world. His death notice popped up on a screen years too late for me to say goodbye, but the vibrations of his life still shudder through my own.
The Hollow Echo of the Party
Randy Olson was the man with ten thousand friends. In the 1970s and 80s, we were the kings of the night, closing down rock bars, partying with bands like Sequel and Rising Tide until the sun exposed our sins to the waking world. Randy was the charismatic center of gravity around which hundreds of us orbited. He introduced me to my first wife; he gave me shelter when my relationships collapsed. He was the social lubricant of our generation.
Yet, when I attended his funeral in 2013, the room was cavernous. The man who knew everyone was sent off by thirteen people. He died at fifty-eight, the exact age his father had succumbed to the same vices. It was a stark lesson on the bandwidth of shallow connection versus the deep grounding of true presence. Randy spent his life moving from relationship to relationship, terrified of the stillness. But in the end, the silence won. His spirit, however, remains a loud, infectious laugh in the quiet corners of my memory—a reminder that popularity is often a mask for a profound solitude.
Dan Dietz, too, haunts the frequencies. We survived the “Faucet Tavern” years, where knives were drawn and adrenaline was the drug of choice. We had an excruciating falling out in 1980, the kind of severance that leaves live wires exposed. Years later, after I had grounded myself and found sobriety, I tried to make amends. I drove to the coast, met his son, left a note. Silence.
Then, the day after he died—before I even knew he was gone—I heard his voice in my car. A distinct, auditory hallucination of his famous laugh: Hey, hey, hey. It was a transmission from the other side, a final signal to let me know the circuit was closed. He is gone, but the echo remains, bouncing off the ionosphere of my grief.
Don Bain was a study in contradiction—a chain-smoker with the lungs of a marathon runner. In our freshman year, he ran a sub-5:30 mile while consuming packs of cigarettes, a biological defiance that fascinated me. He was edgy, damaged, yet possessed a protective streak that saved me from a bully of the schoolyard who sought to crush me. He felled that soon to be lumberjack with the same casual intensity with which he inhaled smoke.
Don inspired me to be a better runner, and eventually, a protector of the bullied. Decades later, when I ran a 5K in the very park where we once gathered, clocking a 5:20 pace at age forty-five, I felt Don’s rhythm in my stride. He taught me that broken things can still move with incredible speed.
This lesson was reinforced by Gary Westfall and a horse named Dobi Pay. Gary and I used to handicap races, wading through the mud of track paddocks (and the metaphorical mud of Gary’s “happy mushroom” pastures). Dobi Pay was a nine-year-old gelding with one eye—a discard, a glue-factory candidate. Yet, I felt a resonance in that animal. He was a slow starter with a heart like a nuclear reactor. Against all odds, he began to win, beating thoroughbreds worth fifty times his value. I modeled my life after that one-eyed horse and Gary’s reckless optimism. I was comparatively old, I was nearly blind in one eye, and I was frequently physiologically damaged through overtraining and excess racing, but I learned to close fast on the finish line. Gary and the horse are gone, but the lesson of the “kick”—that final burst of energy when all seems lost—propels me still.
Grief is the tax we pay on the bandwidth of love. It is the resistance in the wire that generates heat, and eventually, light.
I walked through the reunion, a ghost among ghosts, realizing that my connection to these people was not severed by their deaths. If anything, the static has cleared. When we are young, we are insulated by our egos, our fears, our “coolness.” We turn away from the weak, the weary, and the strange because we fear their condition is contagious. We join the “dream of the proud,” ignoring the “coldness inside.”
But now, stripped of the insulation of youth, I see more clearly. I see Brad Oberstaller, whose tragic family life broke my heart in grade school. I see Mark Parsons, the redhead with the deep thoughts who fell from a trail and vanished. I see Martin Stratton, the gentle soul who needed help with multiplication tables but knew more about kindness than any mathematician.
I see Mark Constans, a friend from the “Oakey Doaks” square dancing days. Our parents danced while we swam across Detroit Lake, oblivious to the sun burning malignant melanomas into our future skins. Mark evolved into a magnificent human being before tragedy took him and his brother Danny. That memory—the sun, the water, the ignorance of danger—is a treasured file in my internal hard drive.
I am a retired electrician. I know that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form. My classmates have undergone a phase change. They have moved from the particle to the wave. They are no longer localized in bodies that break, livers that fail, or minds that cloud with dementia. They have become part of the universal bandwidth.
I nearly died multiple times between 1980 and 1987. I have no business being here, serving as the historian of the dead. But the Great Spirit gave me a unique opportunity to ground myself, to fix the faulty wiring of my traumatic childhood, and to become a conduit for these stories.
We must stop turning away. The conspiracy of silence that surrounds the deceased, the disabled, and the “different” is a failure of our collective imagination. We are all a unique combination of frequencies in the same infinite bandwidth of the universe. When one falls, the energy shifts to the rest of us. If we do not remain open to their narratives, we risk further limitation of ourselves.
My story, and theirs, is written in the stars—not as a metaphor, but as a literal truth of atomic recycling. We are stardust contemplating stardust.
So, I ask you, as I asked the wind at North Clackamas Park: What stories are aching to be shared? What frequency are you blocking because it is too painful to hear?
Do not turn away from the weak and the weary. Do not turn away from the coldness inside. Listen. The signal is faint, but it is there. And it is the only thing that matters.
Chapter 66: The Silent Reunion—Resonance of the Departed
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won’t understand
Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is a case of just another’s suffering
Or you will find that you’re joining in
The Turning Away
I attended the fifty-year class reunion of Rex Putnam High School in 2023 accompanied by my wife and a heavy satchel of memories. I arrived seeking connection in the faces of the living, yet I departed not with renewed friendships or digital acquaintances, but with a profound, vibrating narrative surrounding those who no longer possess a voice.
The reunion hall was a tableau of the present, filled with chatter and the clinking of glasses, yet the loudest presence in the room was the silence of the absent. It was the silence of death, of dementia, of the disinterest that serves as a veil over the uncomfortable truths of our shared history. While I exchanged pleasantries with the living—brief, ephemeral sparks of recognition—my spirit was drawn inexorably toward the shadows, toward the empty chairs, and toward the stories that ended abruptly, leaving jagged edges in the fabric of our collective timeline.
We live in a culture that excels at “the turning away.” We avert our gaze from the pale and the downtrodden because their suffering acts as a mirror to our own fragility. But in this chapter of my existence, I refuse to turn away. I choose to sit with the ghosts. I choose to let their frequencies resonate within me, for they are the silent teachers of what it means to be human, to be broken, and ultimately, to be whole.
The Echoes of the Lost Brothers
There were ten of them—ten classmates whose physical vessels have shattered, yet whose spirits remain inextricably woven into my own neural pathways. They are the phantom limbs of my youth.
Jeff Tobin was a soul I vibrated with on a frequency of chaos and pain. In the innocence of the sixth grade, we were co-conspirators in mischief, stripped of titles and dignity by authority figures who sought to break us rather than understand us. We shared humiliation—the public shaming, the corporal punishment, the cold, precise wrath of fathers who knew only how to tune their sons with violence.
Jeff carried the burden of a “traumatized brother.” Later in life, when we worked together, I saw his brilliance—a mind that moved with the speed and accuracy of a finely calibrated instrument. Yet, beneath that efficiency lay a death wish that pulsed like a dark star. I failed him after his first attempt to leave this world, overburdened by my own drowning. Concurrent death wishes do not synchronize; they collide. Jeff possessed a loyalty that was terrifying in its intensity, a compassion for my own deteriorating life that shamed me. He sacrificed his peace to protect mine. I last saw him on a hiking trail, the month before his fatality, a man of fifty-five looking for a path through the wilderness of his own psyche.
Jeff’s pain is no longer a sound I turn away from; it is a frequency I honor.
Alan Crouser was a gentle giant, a man-mountain whose physical imposition belied a melancholic interior. He was a paradox of strength and fragility. I recall the madness of our youth—the night he uprooted light poles in a drunken stupor, the time he tossed me over a car as effortlessly as one discards a wrapper. Yet, this was the same man who loved “Tiny Bubbles” by Don Ho, a song of simple, effervescent joy. I drove him at breakneck speeds to a wedding that couldn’t save him from the eventual unraveling of his heart. He loved deeply, and perhaps that was his undoing. He was a traumatized soul I lost to the drift of time and geography, but his spirit remains—a towering, gentle presence in the landscape of my memory.
And then there was Randy Olson, the man with ten thousand friends who died alone. Randy was a chameleon of the night, a navigator of the social dark who introduced me to the woman who would become my first wife, and later, to the chaotic solace of rock and roll bars and midnight confessions. We danced on the edge of the abyss together, closing down establishments and opening up wounds we thought we were healing with substances. He offered me shelter when my world collapsed, a savior in the guise of a party-goer.
Yet, when his final curtain fell, only thirteen people gathered to witness it. He died at fifty-eight, mirroring the timeline of his own father, trapped in a generational loop he couldn’t break. Randy’s life was a testament to the tragedy of superficial connection—how one can be surrounded by bodies yet remain utterly untouched by understanding. His spirit, however, refuses to be lonely within me; he takes up volumes in the library of my heart.
Dan Dietz walked through the fire with me from 1972 to 1980. It is a miracle of probability that either of us survived those years. We faced violence—knives pulled in parking lots, the clumsy, drunken attempts at self-defense—and we faced the violence of our own egos. We had an excruciating falling out, the kind that leaves scar tissue on the soul. Years later, sober and seeking redemption, I drove to the coast to make amends. I met his son, I left a note, but the silence remained unbroken.
The day after he died, before I even knew he was gone, I heard his laugh in my car. It was a distinctive, echoing sound that defied the laws of physics. He spoke to me from the other side of the veil, a final reconciliation delivered not in words, but in energy. Dan is survived by a son, but he lives on in me as a reminder that forgiveness sometimes arrives only after the vessel has departed.
Don Bain was a mirror of damaged resilience. In our freshman year, he ran a mile with a speed that defied his smoking habit, a physical manifestation of his desire to outrun his demons. He was edgy, a raw nerve exposed to the air, yet he possessed a protective streak that saved me from the brutality of others. He felled a giant to protect me, winning my loyalty forever. He inspired me—not to smoke, but to endure. To run through the pain. Years later, I ran on the very paths he tread, channeling his youthful vitality, a ghostly pacer urging me toward the finish line.
The Tragedy of Unfulfilled Potential
The loss of Craig Salter is a wound in the fabric of the universe itself. In the eighth grade, Craig was already transcending the limitations of our curriculum. He was a true creative genius, an architect of circuits and dreams who found the mundane world unbearable. We built underground forts and nearly electrocuted ourselves in pursuit of a sanctuary. He disappeared into the lore of Tolkien, learning Elvish, creating worlds because this one was too small, too gray, too rigid for a mind like his.
Craig was an ultra-genius who, under different stars, might have reshaped our technological reality. Instead, tragedy befell him. A mental decline, a slipping away into a fog where I could no longer reach him. I introduced him to the numbing agent of alcohol in our youth—a mistake that haunts me. Craig’s spirit is alive within me, a testament to the fragility of brilliance and the cruelty of a world that often breaks its most beautiful instruments.
He is linked forever with Charlie Davalos, who never saw the inside of a high school classroom. Charlie, Craig, and I were a triad of dreamers, building rockets to escape the gravity of our lives. We looked to the stars, fueled by science fiction and a desperate need to believe in something greater than our suburban confinement. Charlie died when an experimental cylinder exploded—a literal combustion of his dreams. He was a traveler who left before the journey truly began. My heart still yearns for the stars we aimed for. I keep the rockets; I keep the dream.
The Great Weaver and the End of Silence
Grief is the exorbitant price we pay for the audacity to love in a transient world. It is an uneven, treacherous path that demands we walk through the valley of the shadow. But we do not walk it alone.
I nearly departed this plane several times between 1980 and 1987. I have no logical explanation for my survival, save for the intervention of a Universal Resonance—a Great Spirit—that saw a purpose in my chaotic existence. I was granted the opportunity to live long enough to peel back the layers of trauma, to reconnect with my heritage, and to finally understand the precocious, wounded boy I once was.
I am now a chronicler of the unspoken. I write to break the conspiracy of silence that suffocates our culture. We are conditioned to turn away from the ugly, the sad, the dying. But my journey has taught me that the light is found only by staring into the darkness until your eyes adjust.
My story, and the stories of Jeff, Alan, Randy, Dan, Don, Craig, Charlie, and so many others, are not separate narratives. They are threads in a single, shimmering tapestry woven by a Great Weaver. We are connected by the bandwidth of shared suffering and shared hope.
My story is moving toward a happy ending, written in the constellations long before I took my first breath.
But what of your story?
What of the stories of your dead?
What of the silence you carry?
Being willing to listen to the frequency of the departed may lead us in unexpected, magical directions. It is time to stop turning away. It is time to exit the conspiracy of silence and embrace the full, terrifying, beautiful spectrum of our existence.
The reunion was not in the gymnasium. The reunion is here, in the heart, where every name is remembered, every laugh is echoed, and every tear is honored.
No more turning away.
