THE NEWS YOU HATE TO HEAR

Roz Brown, 1962

I’m sitting here looking at a photograph in the “album of childhood memories” my mother collected and sent to me 40 years ago, a permanent reminder that she often had good intentions, though her execution wasn’t the best.

There are two women on a brick front porch of an older house, on their knees holding up two very young babies who obviously are too young to stand on their own. A boy and a girl. They’re smiling at the camera, neither exactly certain what’s happening.

The woman holding up the boy is my mother, and I am that baby. The woman holding up the girl is Edith Brown, my mother’s sorority sister from college and lifelong friend. The little girl is Rosalyn Brown. I’ve always known her as Roz.

She’s my oldest friend, from before either of us knew what friends were.

We knew each other all through school, up to high school graduation, when our paths took different directions. Her mother was my “Aunt Edith.” Both my parents were only children, so the “aunts” and “uncles” I had growing up were adults who were their close friends, who were willing to be adoptive “adult relations.”

My sister and brother and I often spent time at Aunt Edith’s house, when mom had things to do. I remember one Saturday we were dropped off and there was a strange man at Aunt Edith’s, who she introduced to us as “My friend, Allen Ginsberg.” Yes, it was that Allen Ginsberg. The first famous person I ever met and I didn’t know of my good fortune till about ten years later, when Roz mentioned that day, and told me who he was. Aunt Edith was a poet in her own right; not as well-known as her friend, but good enough that her friend Allen considered her a “contemporary.” He visited her whenever he came through Denver. After Roz told me that, I found a book of his collected poems the next Saturday down at the Denver Public Library and read “Howl” for the first time. I didn’t know that much about poetry (still don’t), but I knew enough to know it was pretty damn good. Still is.

We were both always “just there” in each other’s lives through elementary school and junior and senior high. Good Friends. I didn’t have that many, so I valued what we had.

After graduation, I went in the Navy and she went to college. We ran across each other again in October 1966. I was going to school at Colorado State College, where I was the only “antiwar Vietnam veteran” in a Colorado college or university. That summer, I had discovered Phil Ochs, and had gotten a wild idea that he could be invited to come to Colorado and do a tour of CSC and Colorado University and Colorado State University and Denver University, so the antiwar and civil rights movement groups at the schools could raise money. So I wrote a letter to him care of his record company and - lo and behold! - I got a letter from his manager saying yes, that could be done. And it happened that October. I did it. And after the concert at CSU there in Fort Collins, Phil and I and my girlfriend (we were driving him from concert to concert) went to an after-concert party, and there was Roz.

She was amazed to find out that - of all people - I was the one who had put the event together. “I would never have thought you would do something like this.” Which led to a long evening’s conversation about how my life had been turned around by Vietnam.

And then we didn’t see each other for 36 years.

In 2002, I got back in touch with my second-oldest friend, David Faris - of whom I have written here - and he happened to mention Roz. I asked if he was in touch with her and he was, and I said I’d be interested in getting back in touch with her. He told me he had thought that might be the case, and he’d already given her my email. As it turned out, the next day there was an email from Roz McCain - her married name - in my inbox.

That led to a phone call later that day and a four hour conversation in which we caught up with each other. It was like the last time we’d talked was the week before. To me that’s always the sign of a relationship that’s different from all the others.

She’d been dating Jim McCain, a fellow CSU student and artist, the last time we’d met. After they graduated in 1967, they got married, and ended up seeing quite a bit of the world over the next ten years.

Roz’s degree was in education. They ended up in Uganda just after Idi Amin overthrew the previous dictator. He was a different Idi Amin than the one we later knew. His coup was seen as a good thing, and people thought he would be the modernizer the country so desperately needed. He met Roz and when he found she was working for a charitable organization (what we’d call an NGO now) teaching poor rural children, he asked her if she would come to work for him to set up a program like the one she was running, for the whole country. She did, and it was successful. And Idi Amin was sad to see her and Jim leave three years later, but she told him that there were good Ugandan teachers who she had worked with who could now take over the program, and it should be run by the people who knew the problems best, the ones who lived there.

They went to Afghanistan and hitch-hiked through “the most beautiful country I ever saw”. It was the early 1970s, and itinerant Americans like Roz and Jim could find a place to stay for a night in any village they ended up in, because that was the way Afghan Islamic culture worked; the stranger was to be made welcome.

They ended up taking a bus from Kabul to Paris. It took two and a half months to make the trip. The bus was an old GMC bus - what we call here a “school bus.”

They came back to Colorado and settled in Walsenburg, buying a ranch outside the town up in the San Juan mountains. Jim became a well-known sculptor, and Roz spent 30 years as the journalism and creative writing teacher at Walsenburg High School. Two of her students write for the New York Times. It’s a long trip from Walsenburg High to the editorial room of The Gray Lady.

She has a son, who grew up on that ranch and became a now well-known naturalist (well-known in his field, at least).

After that call, Roz and I have stayed in touch. One or the other of us calls every month or so. If she had regular cell and internet service there in the San Juans, she’d have been a good contributor here.

Aunt Edith lived to be 98. I once told Roz the real circumstances of my childhood. The next time we talked, she told me she’d told her mother what I had told her. Her mother wasn’t surprised. She’d always thought “something was wrong” from the way the three of us acted when Mommie Dearest was on the way over to pick us up from Aunt Edith’s house. In those days, of course, no one said anything about such things. But the fact that Aunt Edith had known, and had worried about me particularly, was proof to me that my childhood really happened. There was an independent witness to the truth.

And so this past New Year’s was my turn to call. Only the line didn’t work; it was dead. Three feet of snow on the cell phone tower will do that. It took three calls over the week before the line connected today and the phone rang and she picked it up.

“Hi, old friend.”

She had news.

She’s been diagnosed with Alzheimers.

It wasn’t a surprise. Over the past year, she’s talked about memory problems, and they’ve shown up in our conversations. But getting it directly - “Yes, you have Alzheimer’s” - that’s different.

It’s not the news you want to hear. Ever.

Particularly not for someone like Roz.

All those amazing things she did. I’m the one who now has to remember them.

It’s moments like this, when people like Roz get this kind of news, when an artist like my wife can no longer paint, that I know there is no “loving god.” If there is a god, he’s a sick fucking insane psychopath who likes to stick pins in people just to get off on being a sick fuck. If you’re looking for rhyme or reason, you’ve come to the Wong Foo King Universe.

There aren’t any lessons for me to learn that have to come at this cost to people I love.

My oldest best friend.

She’ll always be that adventurous woman. Always.

Murals at South High, Denver

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THE NEWS YOU HATE TO HEAR