Best of Beth Ashley: The wonderful web of long lives

Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2012.

What amazing webs we weave if we live as long as I have.

Three recent weekends have left me marveling at how many people I know, how many lives have touched mine.

Rowland and I drove to Grass Valley in late July to a memorial service for Bill Earle, a long-ago reporter and colleague of the Marin Independent Journal.

I remember the day he came to the IJ for an interview.

“Hi,” he said, offering his hand, “I’m Bill Earle.”

We were friends immediately; when his wife, Andy, joined him in San Rafael, I loved her, too. The Earles became part of our newsroom “gang,” five or six couples that got together for parties most weekends. Sigh. That was back when we were young and indefatigable and intent on having a good time.

Bill and Andy lived here for years; he moved from the IJ to the old San Francisco Examiner, but eventually the Earles left for Grass Valley.

Missing the Earles, I visited them often, usually in the company of two beloved friends: newswoman Alice Yarish, an outspoken reporter for the Examiner, and Virginia Franklin, a fearless social studies teacher at San Rafael High School. Both — alas — are gone now.

One of the Earles’ daughters, homesick for Marin, left Grass Valley to move in with me and, one Christmas Eve, she met my son Peter and before long they got married. Marcia was impossibly beautiful. They had a son, Byron, and they lived with me while Peter began teaching at Branson.

The marriage lasted many years but was eventually abandoned; all of us remain close. Earlier this month, several members of my clan, including Peter, attended a memorial service for Bill, who died of cancer in his late 80s. Happy memories were aired, and tears shed.

Being in Grass Valley brought back a flood of memories. Byron played one of Bill’s favorite songs on his saxophone. Despite years when we rarely saw each other, the love and the friendship was intact.

The following weekend, we hosted a party on our Greenbrae patio to honor my grandson Ross, who will marry in September. The goal was to introduce his fiancé to the family she’s marrying into. In a way, it was to touch base with Ross, too: his father, my son Jeff, died five years ago, and in the intervening years, we have not seen half enough of him and his mom, who both live in Concord.

His mom and her mother, her sister and brother-in-law came for the party. It was a great joy to see them; why don’t we do this more often? Jeff’s widow and her son often attend family festivals, but sometimes the drive from Concord is too far.

We resolved to get together more often. After the wedding? Let’s hope.

Another weekend, another web of relationships and memories.

My great-niece Jessica was married at a remote winery in the grape fields near Hopland. Finding the wedding site was a triumph itself.

Jessica’s father is my nephew, Guy Hallman, a brilliant science teacher and musician. In the crowd of guests I found dozens of people I had known long ago, some of them relatives I rarely see.

Time, distance and divorce had separated our lives. The last time I had met Jessica she and her brother Tyler were maybe 8 and 10; now both have graduate degrees in ornithology and work on Kauai.

After the wedding ceremony amid the grapevines, I watched the picture-taking. Who was this person? Who was that?

Aside from the bride’s grandfather (my brother) and his wife, my niece Debby and her son Christian, my sons Gilbert and Peter, and my niece Charlotte from Rocklin, I was surrounded by a raft of young people I barely remembered — a nephew who lives in Santa Cruz, two great nephews and a great-niece from the Sacramento area, at least 10 young relatives of my brother’s first wife, to all of whom I had once been close. In the gathering dusk one young woman introduced herself: “Remember? I used to stay with you in your Greenbrae house.” Yes, yes, I remember.

But my life has wound through so many years, I no longer keep track.

Life provides us with many relationships, many encounters. They may not endure on an everyday basis, but the connections are there, giving strength and meaning to our sense of self and to our place in the world.

Once more I feel blessed by the treasure of friends.