Dale and Me

I met Dale Kegley about 20 years ago, outside the WOW Hall. I was having a social moment with a friend, sitting on a bench under a tree on the Lincoln Street side. My friend and I were both Community Village people at the Oregon Country Fair, always interested in connection, so he introduced me to Dale.

We discovered that our birthdays were just one day apart. He was a west coast guy, though, and I was born in New York. We wondered if our stars were guiding us to similar destinies nevertheless.

He told me he had a ten year old daughter who lived with her mother, and a two year old son who lived with his current wife, from whom he was separated. You've probably heard this story before, but to me it was just one way that our stars diverged, since I thought of myself as a permanently childless sort of person. I worked in a cooperatively owned natural foods warehouse as a bookkeeper and truck driver, and I worked almost all the time.

I took him home, and the next morning his wife came by, after recognizing his car on the street outside my house. Their conversation ended with his assuming custody of his son for the day. Dale took us both up to Fall Creek, where I had a great time.

After a few weeks I left for a long-planned trip top Nepal with my friend Snake. I remember we camped at Cougar Hot Springs, and that he wanted to drive me to the airport in Portland, but I'd already arranged to be with one of the women I worked with for this emotional event.

Snake and I climbed and trekked with eight other women in the Everest region for six weeks, providing many of the personal experiences I've written about for other classes, and when I got back Dale and his wife were trying to get back together.

My warehouse had a lot of personal and financial ties to the Hoedads, who were a large forest workers cooperative. I met John Cloud at their annual meeting that fall, and we had a lot of fun, and at the next year's meeting I met Ed Farren, who told me he wanted to settle down and have a family. "I can't do that," I explained. "I work all the time." He said he was tired of planting trees and was willing to stay home and take care of a baby. "You're making enough to support three of us," he pointed out.

Calling his bluff on having a baby reminded me of when I'd decided to go to Nepal. I stopped smoking, got a passport, arranged to take that huge hunk of time off from work, and sure enough, nine months later I was in Katmandu. Ed and I became parents in a sort of similar way, which was another great personal experience.

Time passed. I changed careers and became a teacher. Ed and I broke up, after a valiant struggle to stay connected through our mutual enthusiasm for Forrest, our son, and Ed moved to Eastern Oregon.

Four years ago, John Cloud called, in town for the Country Fair. Hoedads had gone out of business, but a complicated financial situation had resulted in their starting to meet again to divide up some money. In 1983 Vic Atiyeh had balanced the state budget by transferring funds from SAIF into the general fund and everybody's workers compensation rates had gone up, John Cloud told me. Several large Oregon employers had sued the state, and Hoedads had joined them. Now they'd won, and had about $83,000 coming, of which a third was what they'd been overcharged, and the rest was interest. They were having difficulty deciding who to divide it among. Should it be the "class of 83" Hoedads I knew, Ed's and John's fellow workers, who'd made less money because they'd had amplified workers comp expenses? Or the "class of 95," mostly younger workers, who'd gone out of business without getting their equity back?

Meetings were rancorous, and, according to John, poorly recorded, which made things worse. He said they needed someone who was unbiased to take notes, and I volunteered.

Ed was in town for one of the largest meetings, for which they'd rented the WOW Hall. I sat up in the bleachers and wrote everything down. One noteworthy Hoedad down on the floor wanted to be very sure we all understood that Hoedads owed him money, he wanted that money now, and any decision we made that resulted in his getting his money sooner rather than later was the right decision for him. Any decision that resulted in more meetings was the wrong one. Ed went down to have a chat with him during lunch. "What's his story?" I asked him later. "His name's Eric," he said. He says his ex-girlfriend took their daughter and moved to California. He's on disability and this money's the only way he can get down there. She told him he could do childcare for her while she goes to school." I was touched.

They elected Eric to their committee to figure out how to divide up the money, since he wasn't working anyway and had such strong opinions, so we spent a lot of time together in meetings. I thought he was clever and funny, if sometimes a little alarming in his tirades. They paid me way less than I was making as a teacher, but I was so entertained by their process I would have done it for free. When they finally reached a compromise everyone could live with we were all relieved.

That summer I was surprised to run into Eric out at the Country Fair. Like many former Hoedads, he works on Security Crew. We fell in love, and then his share of the money came through, and he moved to California. Where he moved, where his daughter Jahciel and her mom Kaishea had moved, turned out to be 20 miles from where Snake lives, so I went to see her over winter break, and Eric and I got to know each other better. He told me more about Kaishea. They'd met at a Grateful Dead show when she was 19 and he was 30, and were drawn together by a mutual interest in having a child, among other things. "She gave up on me when she realized I was never going to be able to support them, though," he said. Now she was married to Thomas, and they had two more kids, and Eric took care of them during the day while Thomas worked and Kaishea went to school. They'd a had a similar arrangement when they'd all lived in Eugene, where Eric had been a regular classroom volunteer at Whiteaker School. They'd lived in Eugene because Kaishea's father lives here. "You may know him," Eric said. "His name's Dale Kegley."

So now I'm part of an extended family. Dale and his wife Lisa are Grandpa and Grandma. Eric moved back to Eugene last summer, just before the Fair. He misses the kids a lot, but they were all here for Christmas, and Jahciel plans to spend the summer with us. Dale's sending her to Camp Cleawox for a week, and I hope we'll all find some time to play in the woods together, once this class is over.