A note of context: I played ultimate competitively for a long time, and this newsletter began as an effort to examine life through the lens of the sport. You’ll pick up on a little of that in this post.
For anyone missing more than just a person.
We’re coming up on a year since I was last there. After my dad died in early February, we flew out in a frenzy, posted up at an Airbnb on Beacon Hill, and spent a week and a half sorting through both his White Center apartment and his 64 years of life. It was circus-like, the rush in which we got there, unfurled this giant operation, and packed up and left. The whole time, I was zooming around the city, seeing places and eating food and smelling trees that told me I was home.
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Dad moved to Seattle when I was 10, in the late 90s. He had received a new kidney and pancreas a few years prior, and he always said he relocated because the post-transplant care at UW was the best. That may be so, but it’s also true that Seattle didn’t have many Southern Baptists. In Seattle, there would be a new life, and he was convinced that would make him whole.
Our first visit was in the summer, a time when the weather there is more perfect than perfect. We slept in at his place on the Interbay side of Queen Anne, near the QFC. We ate fish and chips at Fishermen’s Terminal. We saw Ken Griffey, Jr. play at the Kingdome. Dad really worked to make it feel like home for us, and all three of us put our faith in the place.
For a while, it was Christmas and spring breaks, and claiming the Mariners and Sonics as my own. Then I moved there for high school, and Seattle became the stage for those brilliant teenage years, when the world started to open up—it was home to my first love, along with my first car, my first car stereo, and the first time my car stereo got stolen. Since moving back east for college, I’ve returned once or twice a year, sometimes for more than a month at a time. For 25 years, I knew I wasn’t a guest there.
Seattle is where I found out about ultimate and where I learned to care about my writing. So much of who I am and what I’m sharing is rooted in life taking an unexpected turn toward the Pacific Northwest.
I miss it now, and I’ve missed it all along, all the way back to the glow of that first visit. With my dad gone, I’m missing it all over again.
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If I could go back and make changes to my frisbee career, one thing I’d do is snap a picture of every field I ever played at. I’d have a book of photos from the foothills of the Rockies and beaches in California; the top of a school building that looked out at Manhattan, and stadiums in Montreal and Medellin and Amsterdam and Prague; clearings in the woods near Charlottesville, city parks in DC, random soccer complexes in suburban Minneapolis and Cincinnati and Atlanta. Playing competitively meant a lot to me, and I think it’d be so cool to have a catalog of all the places that hosted that time in my life.
We bond with the people we meet, and we hold dear all the joy and heartbreak that’s part of our journeys. We also carry so much capacity to love physical space.
The Seattle I love is grocery stores and street corners and houses where friends used to live. It’s the view of downtown from Kerry and a baseball stadium they blew up so they could build a new one. It’s Lotus Thai on 45th, and Dick’s and Beth’s and Spud and Piecora’s.
Seattle is the winter my brother lived above Molly Moon’s, and me crashing there with my sister. It’s the days we took some of my favorite pictures of us, at Gas Works and Deception Pass.
Seattle is pebbly beaches and all the sailboats, both docked and out dancing. It’s Blue Scholars shows and the Folklife Festival. It’s wet pavement on Aurora or the 520 bridge or Broadway, and monorail rides to Seattle Center.
It’s the Eastside—Outback Steakhouse in Kirkland and the Marymoor dog park and reading The Stranger while riding home on the 255. It’s a house on 117th Way.
Seattle is night time walks where you can feel the expanse of the Sound, the mountains, and what’s beyond, huge in the darkness. It’s the jarring vastness you glimpse when flying in over Mt. Rainier or hiking on the peninsula. It’s a knowing fear that whatever’s beyond those clouds of fog could be anything, any kind of magic, any kind of distance away.
Seattle is the YMCA downtown, where I first made a frisbee fly in more ways than just straight, and it’s Bobby Morris Playfield, where I realized it’d stay true in the wind if I got low before I threw it. It’s idolizing those Sockeye teams not just because they were the only team with a real website, but also because some of them taught me to throw. It’s DiscNW camp at Magnuson, days and nights at Potlatch, and the Safeway fields (which I guess are now turf instead of grass?).
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Last night, my siblings and I looked through a box of old photos that spanned our years out there. It reminded me how badly I want to go back to conversations and bottles of root beer and tones of voice and songs on the radio—to touch points in time that weren’t as frozen as the pictures make them seem.
I miss Seattle, but I also miss the lives it held in 2013, 2002, and 1999. It’s the same way that I miss my dad as he was the last time we spoke, but I also miss the man who threw birthday parties for me in the basement and who was there on our first plane ride. Going through boxes of his stuff after he died, I pined for the person he was 5, 10, 30 years before I was born.
Nostalgia hurts, but it’s not news. It’s part of loving something. What I’m grappling with in a new way is that when my dad was alive, Seattle wasn’t a static place. A few years ago, he moved pretty far south, and I learned how much I loved Lincoln Park, a little coffee shop called Dubsea, and the nondescript sidewalks around his apartment. The very last time we went to visit him, we stayed in South Park, which I don’t think I had been to before. There’s a bridge there that, since I can’t climb up on the roof of our old house, is now the first place in town I’d go to watch a sunrise.
Life always continued there; there was always something new to love, from a different angle. Him moves a whole city into the past tense.
I’ll go back one day, when I’m ready. I’d like to go to a game if the Mariners make the playoffs before I die, plus we didn’t get a chance to spread some ashes at Snoqualmie Falls, and we owe him that. But in whatever parallel universe is closest, I’m still there. I never left.
For now, I just want to tell this place: I love you. I miss you. I’ll never be without you. Please remember me.
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An old friend was traveling during the final days of our trip, and he let us stay in his apartment in between Fremont and Ballard, where 36th turns into Leary. As time drew down, it occurred to me that goodbye is something you feel more than something you say.
Once we had whittled it all down to a single room with just one thing remaining—his chair, which none of us were going to take out—we piled into the rental and started driving south.
A few minutes in, I realized we weren’t even in Seattle anymore. We were in Sea-Tac, by the airport. Soon we’d be in Portland, then Santa Rosa, then Fallon and Moab and Denver, Omaha, and Louisville. Eventually, we’d be home in DC, except we don’t even live there anymore, either. I hadn’t noticed the city limits sign. Goodbye had happened a few miles back.
A note re: old Subaru station wagons
I’m hosting a new writing group starting this week— it’ll be Wednesday nights, 6-8 EST, from 1/19-2/9. I’m also close to the numbers needed for a Friday afternoon group. Info/the sign-up form for both are here.
A few people have told me they’re interested but hesitant. If you’re in that boat, I definitely get it. Here’s my gentle nudge: I think you’ll love it.
Making space for free writing is one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever given myself. And to be clear, I’m not just talking about the heavy, difficult stuff. In group, we write about anything that comes to mind. Everything from to-do lists to what we remember about our first jobs is fair game, as are incomplete sentences, thought fragments, and scribbles all over the page…
…and stories about cars we used to drive. I recently had some fun with that one, and I thought I’d share it as an example of what goes down during a session. If you’re interested but need a little encouragement to sign up, I hope this does it.
I’m still wondering what happened to that Subaru. The last time I saw it was on the shoulder of 1-5, just before the ramp for 520. Between downtown and UW.
I had been sitting there for what was probably two hours, waiting for my dad to come and get me. This was well before smart phones, but I did have a cell, so at least I could call him. I wonder how long I’d have sat there if that weren’t the case. It’s sort of funny to think of me just stuck in the car, hoping.
Another at least: at least I was driving in the right-hand lane or the next one over, so it wasn’t a problem to coast out of the way when the engine died.
This wasn’t the first time this kind of thing happened. Junior year,, I had to put it in neutral and roll backward down a huge hill because there just wasn’t enough juice to summit.
That car cost $600. Money well spent, even if all I have now are the stories. There were two posters in the trunk when I got it, one of which is still on my wall and one of which I wish I hadn’t left when I moved out of a house I hated in college. On the sun visor, there was a metal pin from a national park, probably Rainier. I really wish I still had that, too, though maybe if I did it wouldn’t mean as much.
Like I said, pre-smart phone. And it’s not like I could go anywhere with all those cars flying by. I may have had a Sunday Seattle Times, but I don’t remember. When my dad pulled up, I got out and got in. We drove off unceremoniously.
One more time: there’s a session starting this Wednesday, running for four Wednesday evenings in a row, and I’m also hoping for a few more people who want to do Friday afternoons. You can sign up here.
Help me spread the word?
The whole point of this newsletter is to share my experiences in a way that might resonate with others. I’d really appreciate a hand in boosting the signal.
You might consider passing a link and some encouragement to subscribe along to your team’s Slack/GroupMe/listserv. You could share the same on social media. This week, maybe send it to someone you know who also loves Seattle, or some other place. Or something else might feel right! Whatever the case, I appreciate the conversations and the love.
Have a wonderful week.
Jonathan