The Universe has a sense of humor

The Willamette Valley is a special place. On New Year’s Eve we took a walk up at Mount Tabor, an extinct volcano a short drive from our house. While there, as we walked through trees on the summit shrouded in a dense fog, an alert went off on my phone.  A big X-class solar flare. I’m sensitive to solar flares and geomagnetic activity and all day felt the reverberations through my body. What a perfect place to take it in.

 I like to take the drive across the river and into the West Hills above Portland, up through the twisting curvy roads that remind me of the drives in my childhood that took us several miles above Kingston to Cooper’s Hill where my father and several other family members had houses. From Cooper’s Hill you could see much of Kingston and the old capital Spanish Town and all the ships coming into Kingston Harbor.

The road up through Portland’s West Hills leads to my favorite place. Council Crest.  Atop Council Crest you can see the Columbia River, the Willamette River, downtown Portland and four snow- capped majestic mountains. To the northeast is famed Mount Saint Helens whose eruption I heard back in 1980 all the way from 350 miles north on a camping trip in British Columbia.  On a clear day, if you’re lucky Mount Rainier will show itself behind Mount Saint Helens.  Then there’s Mount Adam and finally Mount Hood, the grandest and tallest of beacon of them all.

Moving here was easy. There have been so many gifts and synchronicities in moving here 19 years ago that have me reflecting this past week about how the universe has a sense of humor.

 The latest being a couple nights ago when a friend of my husband’s dropped over. His name is Desmond, my father’s name.  Desmond started telling us about his telescope and his love of astronomy. I shared with Desmond that my father had the same name as him and was an avid astronomer and President of the Astronomical Association of Jamaica back in the 1960s.   Desmond could hardly believe it. What are the chances of that synchronicity. The Universe has a sense of humor. 

My father passed away 20 years ago on November 9, 2003, and on the anniversary in November I marked the occasion with doing a little ceremony for him while in Kauai at the writer’s conference. But it was after the evening with Desmond where I really felt his spirit around me as if he dropped in to say a little hello.  Particularly when I watched Ricky Gervais’s latest show, a comedian my father would have appreciated… having the same sort of irreverent sense of humor that could make fun of any and everything, including all the topics that are normally subjects considered too taboo to joke about. 

On those long drives up to Cooper’s Hill as a child, my father used to make up what he called ‘parliament jokes.’ This was post-Independence Jamaica and politics was a topic on everyone’s minds leading up to the 1970s when The Prime Minister Michael Manley famously told those upset with the direction the country was going in that there were “5 flights a day to Miami.”

My father had a joke for everything.  I was thinking what he’d say about our circumstances we find ourselves in this year.  I think he’d say something like:

“Some TV network should give Trump a new reality show. This would be a patriotic gesture… Throw some money at him and a way to get the attention he craves. He doesn’t care about the country. We know that.  So get him away from any possibility of being near a nuclear code because you know he might just decide to set one off because he was bored on a Sunday morning.  Maybe a network could help us avert armageddon.

You could name the show something like: “Celebrity Dictator 45: The Leavenworth Years.” 

Cause you know that’s where he’s headed after Jack Smith is done with him.”

Anyway, that’s the type of parliament joke Desmond would say. 

This is the year my thesis gets completed.  I’m going to need all the whispers and humor in the ear the ancestors and the Universe have to offer. I can’t think of a better place to learn how to think like a mountain.