Thank You, Sharon

Sharon Nettles


One of the reasons I took up blogging was as an outlet for my frustration. Some of it was a way of letting off steam from the constant pressures that life placed on me. I chose the title (Hypocrisy) for a reason, the more I lived the more hypocritical people seemed to become. To say that there are a lot of things in life that frustrate me would be an understatement. But there were also other reasons. It was difficult to find like-minded individuals that I could 'communicate' with. Communicate in a way that I could exchange and bounce ideas off of others. In a Socratic way, where questions were asked and positions were challenged in an effort to learn from the other person.

I first came across this form of communication when I was in college. I attended Oregon State University in the late 1970s. A time that seems light years from where I find myself today. My memories of Oregon State are ones of youth, wet winters, lush springs, green summers and articulate friends who were hungry for knowledge and experience. In many ways it was the best time of my life although I didn't realize it back then.

I was fortunate enough to have a close knit bunch of friends that I hung out with for almost 5 years at Oregon State. We usually always had a large rented house, with old beatup furniture, no heat, a small black & white television that was seldom watched, and a lot of books laying around. We partyed a lot, young people often do, but we also talked. We talked a lot about politics and the world view. About ecology, anthropology and other cultures. It was the time of the "Carter Malaise" and the "Reagan Doctrine". The cold war still raged and back then it was the Soviets that were still in Afghanistan.

One winters night, a group of us were hanging out, drinking and playing music. Eventually my friends Arthur Dingle and Dave Pakula left and it was just me and Sharon sitting there drinking beer at 10pm. Sharon was Arthur's on-again/off-again girlfriend and I knew her pretty well. She was smart but had a troubled past. She had come from a broken home (her dentist father had run off with his dental hygienist) and left her and her mother high and dry. There were scares from that breakup as well as some other trauma that had never really healed.

I don't recall what started the conversation, but Sharon and I ended up talking. As we sipped Henry Winehard's beer, 'The Clash' and 'Joni Mitchell' were playing on the stereo. We slumped in the old tattered sofa and chatted away. I don't recall what we talked about specifically, but I recall that we talked for hours. Through 10 or 12 beers and well into the wee hours of the morning. We discussed all those things that we were passionate about. We spoke of the things that troubled us and we railed against the injustice of the world and the things we all needed to do in order to right those wrongs.

The discussions became so passionate that we resorted to taking notes while the other one spoke so we wouldn't interrupt each other's train of thought. We would stop talking and jot down points and counterpoints while one of us got up for more chips from the kitchen or went to the bathroom. It was a marathon of mental sparing where both of our brains were emptied of knowledge and stress. I learned more about a woman's point of view that evening that I had in my prior 20 years of living.

By the time exhaustion finally started to take hold, it was close to 3am in the morning. I bundled up and walked back to my apartment in the midnight drizzle. As I shuffled home in the darkness my mind had never felt so alive. Someone had actually listened to me and vice versa. I had held my ground, modified my views and saw the world in a much different light . I loved it, and I wanted to do it again. I wanted to learn. Not from books or in a classroom. I wanted to learn from others. To understand what they felt and what they had been through. I wanted their different perspectives.

It was this sort of interaction that I sorely missed when I left college. After that golden time in academia, I found that the rest of the world just wanted to make money and collect toys. My ability to find those that I could relate to and learn from decreased over time. After many years of trying to find others that were looking for the same stimulus that I was, I started blogging. After searching through a lot of blogs that were less than interesting, I started to find the diamonds in the rough. Those that cried out in the Internet wilderness about their lives, their loves and their frustrations that make up this comedy called the human experience.

Several years after we had all scattered from Oregon State University, I got a letter from Arthur Dingle. He wrote that Sharon had committed suicide. I guess the demons that haunted her from her childhood finally caught up with her. I know that if she was still with us, she would be blogging......and she would have been a damn good blogger.

My wife recently asked me how will we know we made a difference in this life. How will we know we have done something that was good and noble. I told her that we just have to keep trying and that the smallest 'good' deed will make ripples like a peeble cast into an ocean....and the smallest ripples can become a mighty swell far beyond the horizon. Sharon cast a peeble back on that cold night in Oregon and it continues to ripple across the ocean of our lives...long after Sharon was gone.