Commentary

This week had the number two in it in a big way: Tue–no, Twos-Day was the twenty-second day of the second month of 2022. Two seems to always have had a place in my existence.

My two parents and my two siblings moved to the Two-shee Valley after a newspaper-scouting trip to Washington, and also to see the Seattle World’s Fair, which was in Nineteen Sixty TWO.

One of my most vivid impressions of Waitsburg at that young age of five was the prevalence of twos.

There were two Stan Peer-sons, one spelled Pierson, the other Pearson…but two Stans with the same-sounding names all the same. How about that?

There were two grocery stores on Main Street, each owned and operated by two brothers. They were Herman and Kenneth Gohlman, and Ben and Harold Bloor, proprietors of Gohlman’s Grocery and Bloor’s Market, respectively.

There were two streams coming in and going out of town: the Touchet River and Coppei Creek. As a kid, many an adventure was experienced splashing up and down those streams.

Sometimes pain came in twos. Before I was ten, a biking accident broke, guess what?, my two front teef.

One could even stretch this premise to suggest that the first white men to walk through the Touchet Valley was an expedition led by two–count ’em–two men, Lewis and Clark.

On those two first days in college, at Moses Lake and Cheney, I remember the sensation of being at a higher vantage point and at a distance, watching myself as if I were someone else and observing the “new guy” as he traipsed across campus. In the Philosophy 201 class I took, (not kidding) this sensation was called dualistic thinking. Academia per se!

The story is told by a pilot friend of mine about the time he was flying a warbird, the iconic P-38 Lightning. It was bucking and snorting, an engine was out and the other wasn’t playing nice, and he was nursing it back to Falcon Field in Phoenix. All’s well that ended well, but he distinctly remembers, during the stress and tension of keeping the irreplaceable antique aircraft from killing him, that he was sitting behind and above his left shoulder, observing it all as if detached. Stranger still, it was something he hadn’t put into words until another old pelican, who had survived something like it, asked: “Where were you?”

A couple (there it is again) times in my aviating, I’ve felt the same thing.

Later in life, I now have two sons. Both wore the number 22 when playing sports in high school. I think they are two cool!

Daughter Whitney, who passed away in 2020, (there it is again…) had a mysterious condition caused by an abnormal chromosome. Her deficiencies didn’t allow her to walk or talk, she needed a lot of help with activities of daily living, and there was a special way to interact with her one-on-one. Which chromosome had the anomaly? Twenty-two q.

At one time, my post office box number was 222.

Here we are on February 2, 2022, or 2/22/2022, and I just couldn’t let this single day in a lifetime go by without tipping my cap to the number two. Not doing so would be two much two bear!