About tgapen

I'm a photographer, editor, designer, art director, writer, webmaster and Photoshopper and arguably, a guitar player. I used to commute 10 hours a week to and from various jobs at L.A. newspapers. Now I'm chilling in the Pacific Northwest. My wife is amazing, we have two amazing cats and zero kids. The moon is my planet, I love rain, good, strong coffee and a Gibson ES-335.

September Soundtrack

SEPTEMBER NIGHT

I started by Googling September songs.

No surprise that search returned hundreds — maybe thousands of results. The most prominent was, of course, September by Earth, Wind and Fire. The other results ranged from Green Day to Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Fiona Apple and the Happenings among others.

I did that search because this September, 2025 has an abundance of connections that tug me in various directions. And the main reason for doing that search, and writing this piece, was to honor my two brothers, Terry and Tim, who left this mortal coil one year ago. And, as I often do, I wanted some music to pair my emotional state with the tenor of the text. A September soundtrack.

While the EWF song seemed obvious, it was too joyful. So very weirdly,  I landed on this song, for the anniversary of their passing, 52 days apart, one year ago.

I’ve been thinking about this the whole past year. I knew I would write about it but it was just too distressing. I still don’t think I’ve come to terms with it.

Last July, Tim and I were contemplating what to do as Terry, who had suffered another fall was experiencing life threatening low blood pressure while on a ventilator. Terry had told me before that he did not want to be intubated. His caregiver gave us zero hope about any kind of recovery. Terry’s wife Kay knew better than any of us where the end was.

Terry crossed over later that day.

Fifty two days later, virtually the same thing happened to Tim. And when he left this world, one year ago today, he left me, finally, alone.

It’s impossible to describe what that means, but it’s kinda like when the Titanic sinks and you’re clinging to a chunk of a shattered grand piano with one or two others and then they succumb to the icy water and slip beneath the surface, and the sun rises and there’s nothing left around you.

Just white caps and churning sea.

That’s ridiculously hyperbolic. Our nuclear family, the five of us, were never really that close. Not like some people I know whose brothers are like — brothers to them. I didn’t really have that. Before last year, the last time we were all three together was for a half day in 2010. Before that it was probably the summer of 2000. And before that, 1980. So we were not close but we knew that unmistakable blood bond. We knew how we were supposed to act but because in our advanced years, we all turned into cranky, ill-tempered curmudgeons, that just annoyed us.

But when they both finally left me alone, in that frigid turbulence, I felt the loss, the mortality, the ephemeral impermanence and the inevitability of all things.

HELLBOUND TRAIN

Last spring I was acutely aware that the days were numbered for those two men. Both had been diagnosed with some form of lung cancer, among other afflictions that were never identified. Tim underwent torturous chemotherapy that basically hospitalized him. Terry was in and out of conciousness and the hospital. Both were having problems staying upright. Both were predicting the worst. Both continued to smoke 2 packs a day, and several joints.

At that point neither one had spoken to the other for something like 15 years and neither one could remember why. Terry had to ask me for Tim’s phone number which he finally did use and they managed to reconnect, over the phone, daily, sadly for a few last weeks.

The clock was ticking.

On the phone Tim said to me, “I just wish you would come back here.” So on June 11, I jumped on Delta, flew to Detroit and rented a comfortable SUV. I picked Terry up at his house at Algonac in southeastern Michigan and we drove 8 hours to Tim’s home in Brampton, in Michigan’s upper peninsula where the three of us spent the next few solemn and splendid days together.

On a couple of those days Tim drove us around the UP in his somewhat ragged Mercury Mariner with me in the back seat, Terry riding shotgun unable to stay awake, both of them chain smoking in the car, me petrified we would all die in a firey crash on US Highway 2 or M59 because of Tim’s casual driving style, where looking at the road wasn’t necessarily required.

We went to the picturesque town of Marquette on Lake Superior, drove around Presque Isle Park, we bought a half pound of high-quality, home-grown weed from a guy who lived deep in the woods (everybody in the UP lives deep in the woods.) That dude was not home but Tim knew to retrieve that package from the cab of his rusty pickup leaving $125 cash in a zip lock bag on the seat, while his two young daughters sat on their bicycles and watched uncomfortably, quizically. We had chilidogs at a car-hop style A&W in Iron Mountain. We visited the Superior Carpet, Tile and Hobby store where the MAGA proprietor had everything imaginable in the way of hobbies but not many brain cells. And we tried to find the place, miles down a two-track, into the Hiawatha National Forest, near the Jack Pine Lodge in Manistique where Tim had spread the ashes of our father Glenn Gapen back in 1995. Glenn wanted his remains to be near the spot where he slaughtered the last deer of his life and we, his three sons, wanted to commune with that deer and that forest and Glenn E. Gapen’s lost spirit, one final time.

We never found it.

This area was one of  Glenn’s favorite places to hunt deer. I’m sure he and my mom Ester, along with my uncle Bob and aunt Jean, warmed their bones and threw back some Blatz lagers, dressed in all red, woolen deer hunting attire in the rustic, log cabin Jack Pine Lodge in the 1950s and 60s.

So for those few and last days I kinda took care of them. I picked them up off the floor when they fell, made them coffee and cooked for them. Even though they ate almost nothing I made them omelettes and turkey sandwiches and bbq’d New York steaks and baked potato and ice cream. I washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen. We explored the three-bay garage/shop, which Tim told me he built by himself, where he kept his toys and enough tools to erect a modern skyscraper. A nice Chevy Impala, a convertible 2000 Corvette, a classic two-tone, 1969 VW Beetle, a Harley softtail. With the exception of the Beetle, which was a work in progress, all were nearly imaculate.

On those few nights we talked about the neighbors on Fairground St. where we grew up, how amazing the cherries were on the tree in the Fulton’s yard next door, we railed about Trump and I listened a lot while they talked about the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. And welding. And how cold it gets spending a 10-hour shift on top of a powerhouse in the middle of the Michigan winter. And what an asshole Post Malone is.

My brothers were lifelong Democrats and saw themselves as progressives but failed to recognize the hypocracy in their verbal expression when they spoke about the plague of crime and squalor in the inner-city while puffing a blunt watching YouTube on a giant flat-screen in the comfort of a Lazy Boy recliner. I didn’t judge them or protest when the N word was spoken, by these two dying men. Not this time. There was no point now.

When I could get their attention I convinced them to play a drinking game that Linda and I often play when we’re just killing time at home, although I was the only one swilling the bourbon that I brought along. The game is where one person chooses any song they want to play on YouTube and we all listen and then they pass the phone and the choice on to the next person.

Terry’s first choice, Hellbound Train by Savoy Brown from 1972.

Hellbound Train driving slow Move on down to the Hell below Conductor please won’t you lend a hand? Got to get on board take me to your land

Yes I know I’ve been so wrong Too late now I’m moving on Hellbound Train I’m on it’s track Moving down I can’t look back

 

The irony.

Tim’s first pick in the drinking game was Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

For the record, when it was my turn, I predictably got the groaning, “Oh, now we get to listen to your music.” I expected that. I think they presumed I was going to force them to listen to some obscure Japanese prog outfit or maybe speed metal from Mexico or Lady Gaga or, heaven forbid, Post Malone. Afterall, I was the slick brother who lived in California for the past 45 years, doing blow backstage in Mettalica’s dressing room. Tim would sometimes mockingly call me “flash.”

I played Zeppelin, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.

Terry Lynn Gapen — 1952-2024

I think most of us are still just kids in our own heads, but Terry was like a ten-year-old inside.

He loved cartoons. He loved Rocky and Bullwinkle and Boris Badanov. He loved magic tricks, and knot tying and tomato soup with a sleeve of saltines. He was also an artist and he liked working with industrial materials particularly stainless steel. He loved the purity and power and beauty of stainless.

I said above that I wasn’t very close to my brothers which was true once we all became crotchety, disagreeable adults, but for a while, Terry and I were literally super close. We shared a small bedroom with two single beds for about 7 years in our teens. We sat facing each other, taking pulls off the water pipe that he built into the small cabinet that was between our two beds. We listened to A Saucerful of Secrets, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, Hendrix on repeat on our little, Panasonic, mini-stereo record player and FM receiver with two speakers that took up the entire top of the lone dresser in the tiny room. While mom worked the night shift at Detroit House of Correction (DeHoCo,) we had most of our friends over almost every night where we would fill the house with weed smoke and play records on her GE console stereo. Grand Funk, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter.

When we were little kids we would park ourselves in front of the black and white TV after school and while away the afternoons watching reruns of The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and the animated series Supercar on UHF channel 50 out of Windsor, Ontario. When a commercial came on we would immediately ‘rass, our word for wrestling, rolling around on the carpet, gripping each other in ‘head locks’ until the commercial was over when we’d simultaneously exclaim, “Movies on!” and resume our positions on the couch.

Terry always had trouble staying awake. He managed to crash more than a few cars as a result of drifting off while behind the wheel. On a nighmarish night around 1972 or 1973 Terry was headed north on I-75 enroute to anywhere “up north,” probably to his brother Tim’s place in Midland. He had Debbie Reed, a great-looking southern gal from the old neighborhood with him in his ’67 Mercury Cougar. I think he hoped to impress Debbie with his slick ride and the good dope he had but somewhere jut north of Flint he just fell asleep at the wheel. The Cougar drifted off the road and onto the shoulder where a man had stopped his car to check on his purebred Dobermann Pinscher dogs that were in a special trailer he was towing. In a horrifying and catastrophic instant that plagued him for the rest of his life, he plowed into that rig. The man and his dogs died at the scene.

Horror.

Terry never got over that. He even said something about it last June when we were all together. More than 55 years later.

He was an ornery, cantakerous geezer, set in his ways with little tolerance for anything or anyone. He loved all animals and his pets and his wife.  And I loved him more than I even knew. And I miss him immensely.

Terry was a lifelong Democrat and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union. He is survived by his wife Kay and me.

Timothy Glenn Gapen — 1948-2024

Tim Gapen loved cars. He also loved racing. He loved anything that raced. Cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats. I think if you could coax kangaroos to race each other, he would love that. He loved all things cars. Race cars, muscle cars, funny cars, dragsters, rails. In the 1960s the popular race lore in Detroit was built around magazines that featured The Little Red Wagon and Color Me Gone. But I think his favorite thing that had to do with racing would be top fuel. I’m not really sure what that is but I think they put alien blood into ethanol and light a match to it.

Also Rat Fink was cool.

When we were kids assembling model cars was a huge thing. We all got our model cars and accessories at Jerry’s Hobby Shop and Shoe Repair on Main st. at the corner of Wing st. I remember Tim meticulously built several model cars and swapping them out on his dresser as if they were in a race. I always thought his models were the best I’d ever seen, with perfect spray paint jobs and the decals placed perfectly.

Tim got his girlfriend Kathy Lewis pregnant with their first child Nick in 1967, when they were just kids themselves and he left home, got married and became a boilermaker. I rarely saw him for the next, forever.

I remember one day when he came back with his ’68 Road Runner, 426 Hemi, 450HP. Probably his dream car. He loved the Mopar. He took Terry and I to Detroit dragway.

I definitely did not give a fuck about “the drags.”

One night the parents went out of town and left us three to fend for ourselves with Tim in charge. He was probably 15. He threw a party with about 10 of his buddies and they all brought cases of 16 oz. cans of Colt45. The way I remember it, Tim drank 14 of those in pretty quick succession. That story sounds legendary and in my 7-year-old mind it may have some embroidery on it, but whatever the actual number was, he was lucky he didn’t expire from alcohol poisoning.

I don’t remember when he had some kind of accident and had to wear a Frakenstein device that kept his head still with braces under his chin and the back of his head and down to his waist, for several months. I don’t remember because I was being born when that happened. The story was that after the accidnt he was in the hospital and made a friend there named Tom. At the same time my mom was having me in a different hospital and Tim got word to her that she should name me after the nice boy he made friends with there. That would have made him eight years old then.

Tim was the only one of the three of us who was ever a cub scout. He loved chocolate milk, fishing, the outdoors and Michigan’s upper peninsula.

He never really seemed to have time for me. Growing up Terry and I both looked up to him and admired him, glorified him and craved his attention and his praise and his love. But Tim never learned how to express love. Terry got to experience it some off and on over the years. I never did. He just ridiculed me. But he finally admitted to me at his son Jason’s wedding in Phoenix in 2019 that he was always intensely jealous of me. He said that because he thought I got everything handed to me and because I escaped and moved to California and and I was a professional photographer and I played piano and guitar. I think that’s how he dealt with his envy, was to treat me with indifference and even mockery. But to this day, even though he’s gone now, whenever I do something I think, “I wonder would Tim approve?” Or, “What would Tim think of this, would he be impressed?”

I’m still seeking his approval.

Tim also loved his dogs. He always had at least a few, mostly Yorkies. Sadly in the last few years of his life, he lost his beloved Yorkies one at a time. I think one to a coyote. And every one of them devastated him.

A couple of years ago, Tim lost Rita, his lifelong friend and his partner for his last years. He spoke of how he came home from the hospital the night Rita passed and found his last little Yorkie had died on the same day.

He never really recovered from that trauma and was inconsolable for the rest of his days.

Tim was, by his own account, a highly respected welder and could lay perfect beads on aluminum in overhead positions with a heliarc torch.

To me he was always pedantic, sardonic and jaundiced but I also thought of him as a craftsman, a perfectionist and a purist.

I now know what I didn’t before, that I loved him beyond words.

Tim is survived by his four kids, Nick, Tomi, Jason and Sunshine. And me.

TWENTY TWENTY FIVE

This month, of this year, is haunting and resonant to me for a few reasons.

My father Glenn was born September 2, and my mother Ester was born on September 25, both in 1925. They’d have celebrated their 100th birthday this month had they not died more than 35 years ago.

Today, September 17, 2025 is exactly one year since the passing over of my oldest brother Tim.

Also, 25 years ago on September 7, 2000, Labor Day, Linda and I went on our first date to a bbq and picnic at a park in Simi Valley. We didn’t get married until October 8, 2006 but we never remember that date. We consider Labor Day to be our anniversary. So having stayed together for 25 years this month marks the longest thing that either one of us has ever done.

When we “retired” nearly four years ago and moved to Oregon we thought we were going to spend our days hiking and kayaking and snowshoeing and exploring the Oregon coast and the forests and lakes of the Cascade Range. We did for a while until it became clear to us both that we could no longer recreate while the world was on fire.

Now we give most, but not all, of our free time to political activism.

THE WATER HAS NO MEMORY

Every year when summer breaks and gives way to September, I’m invariably spellbound by the magic of autumn. The equinox is so distinct as the sun passes directly over the equator resulting in nearly equal hours of day and night. The environment explodes with color for a fleeting moment before the flora succombs and lays down, the fauna goes underground, the air vibrates as the rhythm of the crikets chirping slows and dies away. There is something beautiful in things passing. Sometimes shocking and frightening but beguiling and exquisite.  The river flows by with no regard for the observer.

The water molecules have somewhere else to be and nothing to say.

SEPTEMBER NIGHT

I started by Googling September songs.

No surprise that search returned hundreds — maybe thousands of results. The most prominent was, of course, September by Earth, Wind and Fire. The other results ranged from Green Day to Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Fiona Apple and the Happenings among others.

I did that search because this September, 2025 has an abundance of connections that tug me in various directions. And the main reason for doing that search, and writing this piece, was to honor my two brothers, Terry and Tim, who left this mortal coil one year ago. And, as I often do, I wanted some music to pair my emotional state with the tenor of the text. A September soundtrack.

While the EWF song seemed obvious, it was too joyful. So very weirdly,  I landed on this song, for the anniversary of their passing, 52 days apart, one year ago.

I’ve been thinking about this the whole past year. I knew I would write about it but it was just too distressing. I still don’t think I’ve come to terms with it.

Last July, Tim and I were contemplating what to do as Terry, who had suffered another fall was experiencing life threatening low blood pressure while on a ventilator. Terry had told me before that he did not want to be intubated. His caregiver gave us zero hope about any kind of recovery. Terry’s wife Kay knew better than any of us where the end was.

Terry crossed over later that day.

Fifty two days later, virtually the same thing happened to Tim. And when he left this world, one year ago today, he left me, finally, alone.

It’s impossible to describe what that means, but it’s kinda like when the Titanic sinks and you’re clinging to a chunk of a shattered grand piano with one or two others and then they succumb to the icy water and slip beneath the surface, and the sun rises and there’s nothing left around you.

Just white caps and churning sea.

That’s ridiculously hyperbolic. Our nuclear family, the five of us, were never really that close. Not like some people I know whose brothers are like — brothers to them. I didn’t really have that. Before last year, the last time we were all three together was for a half day in 2010. Before that it was probably the summer of 2000. And before that, 1980. So we were not close but we knew that unmistakable blood bond. We knew how we were supposed to act but because in our advanced years, we all turned into cranky, ill-tempered curmudgeons, that just annoyed us.

But when they both finally left me alone, in that frigid turbulence, I felt the loss, the mortality, the ephemeral impermanence and the inevitability of all things.

HELLBOUND TRAIN

Last spring I was acutely aware that the days were numbered for those two men. Both had been diagnosed with some form of lung cancer, among other afflictions that were never identified. Tim underwent torturous chemotherapy that basically hospitalized him. Terry was in and out of conciousness and the hospital. Both were having problems staying upright. Both were predicting the worst. Both continued to smoke 2 packs a day, and several joints.

At that point neither one had spoken to the other for something like 15 years and neither one could remember why. Terry had to ask me for Tim’s phone number which he finally did use and they managed to reconnect, over the phone, daily, sadly for a few last weeks.

The clock was ticking.

On the phone Tim said to me, “I just wish you would come back here.” So on June 11, I jumped on Delta, flew to Detroit and rented a comfortable SUV. I picked Terry up at his house at Algonac in southeastern Michigan and we drove 8 hours to Tim’s home in Brampton, in Michigan’s upper peninsula where the three of us spent the next few solemn and splendid days together.

On a couple of those days Tim drove us around the UP in his somewhat ragged Mercury Mariner with me in the back seat, Terry riding shotgun unable to stay awake, both of them chain smoking in the car, me petrified we would all die in a firey crash on US Highway 2 or M59 because of Tim’s casual driving style, where looking at the road wasn’t necessarily required.

We went to the picturesque town of Marquette on Lake Superior, drove around Presque Isle Park, we bought a half pound of high-quality, home-grown weed from a guy who lived deep in the woods (everybody in the UP lives deep in the woods.) That dude was not home but Tim knew to retrieve that package from the cab of his rusty pickup leaving $125 cash in a zip lock bag on the seat, while his two young daughters sat on their bicycles and watched uncomfortably, quizically. We had chilidogs at a car-hop style A&W in Iron Mountain. We visited the Superior Carpet, Tile and Hobby store where the MAGA proprietor had everything imaginable in the way of hobbies but not many brain cells. And we tried to find the place, miles down a two-track, into the Hiawatha National Forest, near the Jack Pine Lodge in Manistique where Tim had spread the ashes of our father Glenn Gapen back in 1995. Glenn wanted his remains to be near the spot where he slaughtered the last deer of his life and we, his three sons, wanted to commune with that deer and that forest and Glenn E. Gapen’s lost spirit, one final time.

We never found it.

This area was one of  Glenn’s favorite places to hunt deer. I’m sure he and my mom Ester, along with my uncle Bob and aunt Jean, warmed their bones and threw back some Blatz lagers, dressed in all red, woolen deer hunting attire in the rustic, log cabin Jack Pine Lodge in the 1950s and 60s.

So for those few and last days I kinda took care of them. I picked them up off the floor when they fell, made them coffee and cooked for them. Even though they ate almost nothing I made them omelettes and turkey sandwiches and bbq’d New York steaks and baked potato and ice cream. I washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen. We explored the three-bay garage/shop, which Tim told me he built by himself, where he kept his toys and enough tools to erect a modern skyscraper. A nice Chevy Impala, a convertible 2000 Corvette, a classic two-tone, 1969 VW Beetle, a Harley softtail. With the exception of the Beetle, which was a work in progress, all were nearly imaculate.

On those few nights we talked about the neighbors on Fairground St. where we grew up, how amazing the cherries were on the tree in the Fulton’s yard next door, we railed about Trump and I listened a lot while they talked about the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. And welding. And how cold it gets spending a 10-hour shift on top of a powerhouse in the middle of the Michigan winter. And what an asshole Post Malone is.

My brothers were lifelong Democrats and saw themselves as progressives but failed to recognize the hypocracy in their verbal expression when they spoke about the plague of crime and squalor in the inner-city while puffing a blunt watching YouTube on a giant flat-screen in the comfort of a Lazy Boy recliner. I didn’t judge them or protest when the N word was spoken, by these two dying men. Not this time. There was no point now.

When I could get their attention I convinced them to play a drinking game that Linda and I often play when we’re just killing time at home, although I was the only one swilling the bourbon that I brought along. The game is where one person chooses any song they want to play on YouTube and we all listen and then they pass the phone and the choice on to the next person.

Terry’s first choice, Hellbound Train by Savoy Brown from 1972.

Hellbound Train driving slow Move on down to the Hell below Conductor please won’t you lend a hand? Got to get on board take me to your land

Yes I know I’ve been so wrong Too late now I’m moving on Hellbound Train I’m on it’s track Moving down I can’t look back

 

The irony.

Tim’s first pick in the drinking game was Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

For the record, when it was my turn, I predictably got the groaning, “Oh, now we get to listen to your music.” I expected that. I think they presumed I was going to force them to listen to some obscure Japanese prog outfit or maybe speed metal from Mexico or Lady Gaga or, heaven forbid, Post Malone. Afterall, I was the slick brother who lived in California for the past 45 years, doing blow backstage in Mettalica’s dressing room. Tim would sometimes mockingly call me “flash.”

I played Zeppelin, Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.

Terry Lynn Gapen — 1952-2024

I think most of us are still just kids in our own heads, but Terry was like a ten-year-old inside.

He loved cartoons. He loved Rocky and Bullwinkle and Boris Badanov. He loved magic tricks, and knot tying and tomato soup with a sleeve of saltines. He was also an artist and he liked working with industrial materials particularly stainless steel. He loved the purity and power and beauty of stainless.

I said above that I wasn’t very close to my brothers which was true once we all became crotchety, disagreeable adults, but for a while, Terry and I were literally super close. We shared a small bedroom with two single beds for about 7 years in our teens. We sat facing each other, taking pulls off the water pipe that he built into the small cabinet that was between our two beds. We listened to A Saucerful of Secrets, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, Hendrix on repeat on our little, Panasonic, mini-stereo record player and FM receiver with two speakers that took up the entire top of the lone dresser in the tiny room. While mom worked the night shift at Detroit House of Correction (DeHoCo,) we had most of our friends over almost every night where we would fill the house with weed smoke and play records on her GE console stereo. Grand Funk, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter.

When we were little kids we would park ourselves in front of the black and white TV after school and while away the afternoons watching reruns of The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and the animated series Supercar on UHF channel 50 out of Windsor, Ontario. When a commercial came on we would immediately ‘rass, our word for wrestling, rolling around on the carpet, gripping each other in ‘head locks’ until the commercial was over when we’d simultaneously exclaim, “Movies on!” and resume our positions on the couch.

Terry always had trouble staying awake. He managed to crash more than a few cars as a result of drifting off while behind the wheel. On a nighmarish night around 1972 or 1973 Terry was headed north on I-75 enroute to anywhere “up north,” probably to his brother Tim’s place in Midland. He had Debbie Reed, a great-looking southern gal from the old neighborhood with him in his ’67 Mercury Cougar. I think he hoped to impress Debbie with his slick ride and the good dope he had but somewhere jut north of Flint he just fell asleep at the wheel. The Cougar drifted off the road and onto the shoulder where a man had stopped his car to check on his purebred Dobermann Pinscher dogs that were in a special trailer he was towing. In a horrifying and catastrophic instant that plagued him for the rest of his life, he plowed into that rig. The man and his dogs died at the scene.

Horror.

Terry never got over that. He even said something about it last June when we were all together. More than 55 years later.

He was an ornery, cantakerous geezer, set in his ways with little tolerance for anything or anyone. He loved all animals and his pets and his wife.  And I loved him more than I even knew. And I miss him immensely.

Terry was a lifelong Democrat and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union. He is survived by his wife Kay and me.

Timothy Glenn Gapen — 1948-2024

Tim Gapen loved cars. He also loved racing. He loved anything that raced. Cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, boats. I think if you could coax kangaroos to race each other, he would love that. He loved all things cars. Race cars, muscle cars, funny cars, dragsters, rails. In the 1960s the popular race lore in Detroit was built around magazines that featured The Little Red Wagon and Color Me Gone. But I think his favorite thing that had to do with racing would be top fuel. I’m not really sure what that is but I think they put alien blood into ethanol and light a match to it.

Also Rat Fink was cool.

When we were kids assembling model cars was a huge thing. We all got our model cars and accessories at Jerry’s Hobby Shop and Shoe Repair on Main st. at the corner of Wing st. I remember Tim meticulously built several model cars and swapping them out on his dresser as if they were in a race. I always thought his models were the best I’d ever seen, with perfect spray paint jobs and the decals placed perfectly.

Tim got his girlfriend Kathy Lewis pregnant with their first child Nick in 1967, when they were just kids themselves and he left home, got married and became a boilermaker. I rarely saw him for the next, forever.

I remember one day when he came back with his ’68 Road Runner, 426 Hemi, 450HP. Probably his dream car. He loved the Mopar. He took Terry and I to Detroit dragway.

I definitely did not give a fuck about “the drags.”

One night the parents went out of town and left us three to fend for ourselves with Tim in charge. He was probably 15. He threw a party with about 10 of his buddies and they all brought cases of 16 oz. cans of Colt45. The way I remember it, Tim drank 14 of those in pretty quick succession. That story sounds legendary and in my 7-year-old mind it may have some embroidery on it, but whatever the actual number was, he was lucky he didn’t expire from alcohol poisoning.

I don’t remember when he had some kind of accident and had to wear a Frakenstein device that kept his head still with braces under his chin and the back of his head and down to his waist, for several months. I don’t remember because I was being born when that happened. The story was that after the accidnt he was in the hospital and made a friend there named Tom. At the same time my mom was having me in a different hospital and Tim got word to her that she should name me after the nice boy he made friends with there. That would have made him eight years old then.

Tim was the only one of the three of us who was ever a cub scout. He loved chocolate milk, fishing, the outdoors and Michigan’s upper peninsula.

He never really seemed to have time for me. Growing up Terry and I both looked up to him and admired him, glorified him and craved his attention and his praise and his love. But Tim never learned how to express love. Terry got to experience it some off and on over the years. I never did. He just ridiculed me. But he finally admitted to me at his son Jason’s wedding in Phoenix in 2019 that he was always intensely jealous of me. He said that because he thought I got everything handed to me and because I escaped and moved to California and and I was a professional photographer and I played piano and guitar. I think that’s how he dealt with his envy, was to treat me with indifference and even mockery. But to this day, even though he’s gone now, whenever I do something I think, “I wonder would Tim approve?” Or, “What would Tim think of this, would he be impressed?”

I’m still seeking his approval.

Tim also loved his dogs. He always had at least a few, mostly Yorkies. Sadly in the last few years of his life, he lost his beloved Yorkies one at a time. I think one to a coyote. And every one of them devastated him.

A couple of years ago, Tim lost Rita, his lifelong friend and his partner for his last years. He spoke of how he came home from the hospital the night Rita passed and found his last little Yorkie had died on the same day.

He never really recovered from that trauma and was inconsolable for the rest of his days.

Tim was, by his own account, a highly respected welder and could lay perfect beads on aluminum in overhead positions with a heliarc torch.

To me he was always pedantic, sardonic and jaundiced but I also thought of him as a craftsman, a perfectionist and a purist.

I now know what I didn’t before, that I loved him beyond words.

Tim is survived by his four kids, Nick, Tomi, Jason and Sunshine. And me.

TWENTY TWENTY FIVE

This month, of this year, is haunting and resonant to me for a few reasons.

My father Glenn was born September 2, and my mother Ester was born on September 25, both in 1925. They’d have celebrated their 100th birthday this month had they not died more than 35 years ago.

Today, September 17, 2025 is exactly one year since the passing over of my oldest brother Tim.

Also, 25 years ago on September 7, 2000, Labor Day, Linda and I went on our first date to a bbq and picnic at a park in Simi Valley. We didn’t get married until October 8, 2006 but we never remember that date. We consider Labor Day to be our anniversary. So having stayed together for 25 years this month marks the longest thing that either one of us has ever done.

When we “retired” nearly four years ago and moved to Oregon we thought we were going to spend our days hiking and kayaking and snowshoeing and exploring the Oregon coast and the forests and lakes of the Cascade Range. We did for a while until it became clear to us both that we could no longer recreate while the world was on fire.

Now we give most, but not all, of our free time to political activism.

THE WATER HAS NO MEMORY

Every year when summer breaks and gives way to September, I’m invariably spellbound by the magic of autumn. The equinox is so distinct as the sun passes directly over the equator resulting in nearly equal hours of day and night. The environment explodes with color for a fleeting moment before the flora succombs and lays down, the fauna goes underground, the air vibrates as the rhythm of the crikets chirping slows and dies away. There is something beautiful in things passing. Sometimes shocking and frightening but beguiling and exquisite.  The river flows by with no regard for the observer.

The water molecules have somewhere else to be and nothing to say.

I missed the kitties

For the very few of you who may have been here before you might have actually viewed the overall “design” of this site and its navigation bar.

Second from the left in that nav is a less-than-clever link to fb. That used to be how I directed readers to my Facebook content. If you click that link now, you’ll probably see something that says “content unavailable right now.”

That Facebook content is definitely unavailable right now and will be forever.

There’s a shitty reason for that.

On May 25, some miserable, loser 20-something — who I imagine is an obese, conceal carry permit wanna-be, sitting in a broken-down, single-wide trailer with a 2001 PT Cruiser with 2 flat tires parked in front, who, when not fantasizing about “being with” Marjorie Taylor Green, is hacking into progressive or otherwise enlightened Facebook users accounts on a beat up Dell laptop running Windows 7 using code he bought from a 15-year-old Russian on Telegram for !0,000 rupee or the equivalent of $125.99 — hacked into my Facebook account and posted horrific child porn there knowing or not knowing that within 5 minutes Facebook’s AI would disable my account.

If you don’t already know this, once FB disables your account you have 30 days to “disagree” with their decision, which means that nobody will ever see your FB content again.

So, after waiting out those 30 days plus a few more in despair over losing 15 years of content and memories, I decided to start over, not to post regular life events and what I’m having for lunch, although I can’t not do some of that, but to try to stay connected to several dozen people from my entire long-ass life that I never would have known were still alive if it weren’t for Facebook.

So yeah, Facebook is addicting and an amazing resource to stay in touch with humans all over this blue marble.

It’s also fun and futile and full of ideology and idiocy and cats and conspiracies.

When I first joined in 2007 people used to “throw sheep” and “poke” one another.

Now they post child porn on your page because they don’t agree with you saying that we need reasonable gun reform.

I know, to all this you say, “Who cares?” Well, I wrote all of the above so that you can know if I reached out to friend you, even if we were already FB friends, that I’m not a bot with like 2 friends

I just missed all the kitties.

We Are Stardust …

Tomorrow, June 22, marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece “Blue.”

There’s been so much attention brought to this musical event that Joni’s own archive site crashed due to the sheer numbers of people wishing to pay tribute.

I was fortunate enough to have my friend Leslie Kasperson take me to see her at the tiny Gene Autry Museum Theater at Griffith Park around 1995, but I really only came to truly appreciate this record in the last few years after I heard Morgan James’ cover of “Case of You.” I fell so in love with MJ that I had to drag Linda to Oregon to see her at Mississippi Studios in Portland.

My dear friend Jodi does a beautifully stirring version as well.


… The Act You’ve Known For All These Years

1967. 1968. 1969. 1970.

1971.

Formative years for me. I was 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15.

Coming up in Detroit in the late 1960s we played baseball all summer, hockey in the winter and records all year long. Everybody I knew bought, sold, traded, borrowed and stole vinyl. When something significant came out (Beatles White Album, Zeppelin 1, Tommy, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs) we carried the album with us wherever we went, along with a frisbee and a bag of weed.

At my house, which because my mom worked nights was the gathering place for degenerates, dope fiends and guitar-god wanna-bes, we played records on a General Electric console stereo. On any given night 10 or 12 kids would show up with 2 or three albums. Grand Funk, The Stooges, Allman Bros, Johny Winter, Edgar Winter, Ten Years After, Savoy Brown ~ Jimi.

We would fill the house with bong smoke and play those records over and over until they were so scratched that you could barely listen to them. Then we would all pitch in to air the place out, empty the ashtrays and mop up the spilled bong water before mom got home.

Ester never knew any better and all that music got embedded in my DNA.

Now, 50+ years later many of those albums are being re-mastered, re-issued as box sets and celebrated as relics of a simpler time, when music was the only art form that mattered.

So significant was the era that Apple has created a docuseries called “1971: The Year that Music Changed Everything,” which is pretty good by the way.

I’ve actually been reliving the music of that time for the past few years. I think I started with the “White Album” which came out in 1968 and still holds me in a hypnotic embrace as what I think of as the best musical recording of all time in any genre. I played all four sides again and again, just like we did in 68-69. Then I did the same thing with Tommy, by The Who. Then The Soft Parade by the Doors. Let it Bleed. Electric Ladyland.

All these albums are tattooed on my brain. I still have them all mostly memorized yet, I’m discovering new aspects of them at the same time.

Lately, for a few weeks actually but I need to stop now, I’ve been playing Tumbleweed Connection. I always knew that the record album was a concept album with an American West and South theme. But I never knew about Bernie Taupin’s obsession with the Civil War. I didn’t pay very much attention to the poetry behind what I knew were beautiful melodies brought by Elton.

I realize now what a masterpiece that record is.

So many others from that era that I would characterize that way as well. Aqualung, Layla, Live at the Fillmore East, A Saucerful of Secrets, All Things Must Pass, A Question of Balance, John Barleycorn Must Die, After the Gold Rush,Tea for the Tillerman, Love it to Death, Who’s Next, the list … goes … on.

And possibly, above them all is Joni. and her prize, Blue.

I like what David Crosby said recently about the album in the LAT, “Blue” is the best singer-songwriter record ever made. I think it’s better than the Beatles. It’s better than anything Bob Dylan did, better than anything from either of the Pauls, McCartney and Simon. It’s better than anybody, anywhere. This record, this batch of songs, is the pinnacle of singer-songwriter ability. Hands down. No contest.

Brandi Carlile said of A Case of You, “The remarkable thing about this poem is that Joni has convinced us all to live inside of it while never sparing us a single detail. “I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet” is the most beautiful and unique declaration of love I can think of. It can mean many things to many people. I think of my wife and daughters when I hear or sing it. My love for them is insatiable and yet I can keep my feet underneath me because, for me, true love has been stabilizing. I’ve been known to find myself on the floor a few times too, though.
This song has met many of us in our darkest moments and walked us down the aisle, even sent us to the other side of existence. We’re so lucky to have it with us.

Joni Mitchell is a national treasure of both Canada and the U.S.

We are lucky to have her.

“I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel”

He’s standing on a dilapidated dock that barely reaches into a mostly frozen lake surrounded by forest. His hands are deep in the pockets of baggy trousers. He wears a light, checkered jacket over a white, button-down shirt and a stylish fedora cocked slightly to the side.

He also wears a bit of a villainous grin that belies the fact that he probably just eluded the authorities by crossing the Canadian border and is now safely beyond the reach of the law in Detroit, who may have been pursuing him for any number of crimes ranging from bootlegging to solicitation to failure to appear to unpaid restitution to delinquency of child support.

BLUE, BLUE WINDOWS BEHIND THE STARS”

The photograph is affecting. The location feels surreptitious and Fargo-like. The dock, so shoddy that it would not likely hold his weight were it not for the frozen lake surrounding it.

The mysterious grin.

The man in the photo has many names.

William Myrl Estel Postlewait-Gapen, born September 29, 1902 in Iola, Kansas. My grandfather.

I wish there was somebody still around who could either confirm or deny the myriad stories I’ve been told about his escapades. My dad and all of my aunts and uncles are gone and they took their secrets of Myrl with them.

He died a young man, it’s unknown when but before I was born, almost certainly in a plane crash that he was piloting. That disappearance may or may not have happened in the Bermuda Triangle while flying a couple to the Bahamas or maybe it happened over Lake Huron or Lake St. Claire while enroute to rendezvous with a Canadian bootlegging partner or a favorite prostitute.

Very little is known about Myrl in my family. There are some stories but despite having at least 7 children that we know of, nobody ever wanted to talk about him. My aunt Elsie, his third known child, just said, “He wasn’t a very nice person.”

My father Glenn, Myrl’s 4th known child, worshipped him, even changing his name from Postlewait to Gapen when Myrl decided to do that for unknown reasons in 1942. None of us knows where the name Gapen comes from but the story I remember is that it was from a favorite hooker in Oklahoma.

Perhaps this photograph was taken by my wide-eyed, 17-year-old dad while visiting Myrl at his home on Harsens Island near the St. Clair river that separates Michigan from Canada before heading out for a perch dinner and Carling’s Black Labels at Snoopy’s Dog House on M-29 in Algonac.

Maybe it was taken by Lillian Martin, my grandmother, who he married in Perth, Ontario at age 19 and with whom he had all those previously mentioned kids.

More likely, the photographer was an under-age Canadian runaway standing on a suitcase full of cash that Myrl managed to take receipt of after an exchange of a pickup truck load of Canadian whiskey or Russian mink pelts or African ivory or Mexican children. I think he liked to think of himself as being in the import-export business.

When I look at this photograph, I see a man I never met — that is me.

“I REMEMBER WHEN YOU COULD STOP A CLOCK

I discovered this picture while digging through dozens of boxes of prints I have in the rafters of my garage. I’ve been carrying this stuff around for a few decades. Over the years I’ve occasionally rooted through the outtakes of 10 years of working in a tiny black and white newspaper darkroom in downtown Oxnard. But recently someone posted something on Facebook that prompted me to get up on a ladder in search of a specific picture that I knew was buried in there.

But this time, within a few minutes I was distracted by boxes of photographs that were once carried around for decades by my parents.

Of course I’d been through these boxes before but somehow, I was seeing these images from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in a different light, as if I was dreaming. I was dreaming that I stumbled on a collection of priceless art by Vivian Maier or Mary Ellen Mark or Dorthea Lange at a garage sale or swap meet. I was moved by every print. I was looking at photos made by a range of cheap cameras available at the time but a fair amount was exposed on 120 film with simple box cameras like a Kodak Brownie Flash Six-20 or maybe a Kodak Duraflex. There was something about the square format, the scalloped edges of the little black and white prints, the faces of post-WWII Americans, recovering from the war, building their lives and their families. Deer hunting. Ice fishing. Picnics.

It was like looking through spacial or temporal boundaries, a worm hole, and it slammed me back to the distant promise of the American dream, now almost out of sight in our rear view mirrors.

Staring into these images I’m transported back to a time when my parents were half the age I am now. Back to the house on Fairground Street that my mother’s father bequeathed to her, that I spent my earliest years in, playing in the basement coal bin, peaking through the polished, maple bannister staircase at the twinkling Christmas tree at 4 a.m., sitting on the front porch spitting watermelon seeds in the dead of summer.

The house my mother sold in 1966 for $15K.

I can smell the lilacs in the yard. Taste the iced tea and Swiss steak and rhubarb. I can hear the Tiger game coming from the car radio and feel the bitter, biting winter wind that numbs your fingers and ears and freezes the mucus in your sinuses.

Or, maybe it’s this.

“… WILL YOU STILL FEED ME

Sitting at a dime store Dell computer in La Cañada, CA last week, running 11-year-old Windows 7 for drinks and tips, a colleague asked me, as part of regular office banter, “… Well you and I are probably around the same age huh?” Probing me, the old man who’s the new guy in the room, “I’m 58,” he said.

Obviously, that question was really asking, “Just how the fuck old are you, anyway?” Which commands a response, and that moment — with the 25-year-old, asian, genius girl behind me but just 6 feet from either of us — was for a split second, the first time in my life that I thought about lying about my age. Ridiculous.

“I’m 64,” I said, emphasizing the I’m part in an effort to sound boastful about how startlingly well-preserved and virile and talented and valuable and, relevant I am.

And after having stated, so publicly and with such a healthy amount of hubris, my pronounced advantage of having successfully completed 64 trips around the sun and as such acquired the infinite wisdom that only decades of experience affords us, genius girl said, “Well, you both look great.”

Paul McCartney wrote the song “When I’m 64” when he was 19. Despite being a prodigious Beatles fan this thematically unconnected song, included for some reason on the 1967 album Sgt. Peppers, was never a favorite. For me, ragtime doesn’t mix well with psychedelia.

Still, the iconic album kept the otherwise unmemorable song from sinking into blank unconsciousness. In fact the song has itself become a milestone that pronounces if someone is still bringing you a bottle of wine on your birthday, then “Who could ask for more?”

This past June Paul turned 78. I turned 64 and nobody brought me a bottle of wine.

However, I did receive no less than 5 liters of assorted Irish whiskey. I feel like that transcends the requisite payoff.

So no, I couldn’t ask for more. Most of the people that I knew when I was growing up on Fairground Street did not make it to 64. Many didn’t make it to 24.

MAKES YOU THINK ALL THE WORLD’S A SUNNY DAY

I knew it was time to let a large amount of this stuff go. Did I need thousands of prints of seagulls and beaches and mountains and zoo animals? If I don’t care about this stuff, who ever would?

Sitting in my garage, in 90+ degrees, surrounded by boxes of photographs and negatives from my past, my parents past and even their parents past, and creating a pile that is bound for the landfill there had been a reckoning of sorts.

Coming to terms with a range of emotions, liberation, as I’ll be traveling lighter for all further rotations, and nostalgia. But also, grief, regret, melancholy as well as exhilaration, contentedness, euphoria.

Among the boxes that belonged to my parents, and sprinkled among photos of my grandparents with a huge sheet cake and pictures of my mom and dad giggling in the dining room of our house on Fairground Street, and images of me and my two brothers lying on the floor in front of a giant, wooden cabinet that housed a 12-inch black and white television, there were photographs that my mother had saved through her life. A lot of them were prints of seagulls, beaches, mountains and zoo animals.

Mortality is a funny thing to contemplate. We occupy this planet for such a blip. All the sheet cake moments and zoo animal memories are buried beneath 4.5 billion years worth of cosmic dust spinning around in infinite blackness … while the moon keeps a watchful eye.

I love the final scene in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer, who plays the replicant Roy Batty, delivers what critic Mark Rowlands described as “Possibly the most moving death soliloquy in cinematic history,’

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

Magic feather

Oddly, I collect weird organic materials from animals. Cat whiskers, deer antlers, bird feathers. I find these things to be magical. I even saved some dreadlocks from my long-time kitty companion Spooky. I like sea shells too but I don’t have a lot of them because I feel like that’s common, even cliche.

I keep these things, maybe in case I ever need to make a potion.

On Tuesday I spent a good part of the day digging in my backyard, fighting with 30-year-old tree roots and heavy, wet clay while trying to expose the entire manifold to my underground sprinkler system.

Actually I spent the better part of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and today breaking my back digging up and repairing that aging sprinkler system, which has leaks in several locations, and then burying it again.

But at the end of the afternoon on Tuesday, as I was putting shovels away in the garage, I heard the distinct warble warble warble of a dove that had, unseen by me, come in through the open garage door and was now up in the rafters. Actually, there were two of them up there.

Ever since we put feeders in the yard we have a variety of birds and squirrels that come and go and a dule of pudgy doves are among them.

Once I started looking up in the rafters for the cooing dove, one smart dove bolted out through the garage door, wings whistling as he darted across the street, while a second one just tried to fly toward the light coming in through the whirlybird vent in the roof.

Now, this fat and fragile little bugger was stuck in the spinning roof vent and terrified trying to force his fat self though the way-too-small slots in the vent. That was never going to happen and the more he tried the more likely it was that he would shredded by the spinning aluminum blades of the roof vent.

I knew it was a matter of time before a gust of wind would accelerate the spinning and at high velocity would lop his tiny head off splattering dove blood all over the Christmas decorations and boxes and boxes of black and white prints that are essentially outtakes from years spent in a newspaper darkroom in the 1980s.

I knew I had to rescue him, pretty much now.

I also knew that the only ladder I had was a 6-foot step ladder that even if I stood on the absolute top of I’d still be 3-4 feet short of being able to reach into the whirlybird. And even if I could reach it there was not much chance I’d be able to grab the panicked peeper. Plus there was always a possibility of leaving my fingers in there as well.

But, hero that I am, I managed to get my 64-year-old ass on the top step of the ladder and wrap my arms over the 2x4s that make the trusses that hold up the roof. From there I swung my legs, gymnast-like (think Kurt Thomas on the parallel bars) over the lower braces and hoisted myself up to where I could stand, straddling two sections of the truss.

Then, since the wind had died down, I managed to stop the spinning of the vent with one gloved hand and, while balancing on two 2x4s, 12 feet above the concrete garage floor, reach up into the vent with the other gloved hand.

If you’ve ever had a budgie or other pet bird then you know the feeling when you present your hand, horizontally to the birds breast. They’ll usually just hop on. That’s what pet birds do.

Much to my amazement, this little dove just stepped down and right onto my hand.

For a minute.

As soon as I began to lower my hand with the little peeper on it, he decided he’d rather take his chances back up in the whirlybird.

I knew I was going to have to more aggressively just grab his fat ass and on the first try I got hold of his tail and started to lower him out of that predicament. Once I got him to about my shoulder level he freaked and left me with all his tail feathers as he made his way to another part of the garage, lighting on another rafter.

At least he was out of the danger of that buzz saw of a roof vent.

Then, it only took one try. Safely reaching up from the garage floor with a broom he hopped on the bristles and after lowering him further he saw the wide-open garage door and, wings whistling, bolted in the same direction his partner had earlier.

Clearly, he could still fly but I’m not sure how well he could change direction.

And he left me that gift of his tail feathers.