Gary Peterson

My dear friend Gary Peterson died suddenly last Monday.  Barb and I traveled to Sacramento  to attend his memorial service Friday.    My thoughts...My eulogy

Myself, Gary, his brother Alan, and their father, Pete, 1967

Alaska fishing, 2016

.  Hosea 10:12     Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap the fruit of steadfast love.

Look around the room today.  It is clear that Gary sowed righteousness as the love for him is evident today. 

As you developed as a youth, I hope you too have some true and entrusted friends who share deep and life developing experiences and milestones with you.  Gary Peterson was one of those for me.  He is a true friend.  How can one be a deeper friend than one who comfortably roomed with you in a college dorm; probably a 10’ x 18’ room and when the bunks were pulled out, our sleepy heads were probably no more than 4 feet apart.  Our junior year, 1967-1968, was transforming.  Gary was deep into his business classes, me in my education classes.  Then there was the escalating war in Viet Nam and our possible draft into military service if we didn’t perform well in class and still there upon our graduation.   Martin Luther King Jr was murdered in April of 1968 and in June Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Police and antiwar protestors violently clashed outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer.

Throughout that school year Gary and I entered into new territory.  Gary knew early that Diane was the one and I had found my Barb.  As our junior year progressed, with the academic demands increasing, the Viet Nam war escalating, Gary and I plunged into the world of romantic love to a level that we had never known.  I can’t count the many nights, our heads just feet apart, we shared the new territory that we were entering with our new found loves and the question of our life after graduation, just a year or so away.

Gary had visited my home in Lacrosse, Washington and we’d hunted pheasants and lived our family life together there.  I had visited his home in Astoria and we had dug clams, baked them with his mother’s recipe, and eaten them together with his family that included his Aunt Gert, who shared my March 16 birthday although about 50 years my senior.  She shared many stories of her family history.  My family was Gary’s family.  His family was mine.

Experiences that junior year included the four of us driving down to the Centralia (about half way between Seattle and Portland, Oregon) area and visiting Gary’s dying grandmother in a convalescent center.  She, ravaged by diabetes and a double amputee, lay at death’s knell.  But Gary, tending to her lovingly, bid her comfort, attention and then goodbye, his last.  We then traveled out to her nearby home, overrun with weeds and forest, and in the spring sunshine, mowed and cleared away the debris, as if his grandmother would return.  She didn’t. 

As our lives changed that 67-68 school year, the profound relationships with what would be our life mates developed.  Gary and Diane were married the summer of 1968.  Barb and I first talked of marriage the night of their wedding. Over the next year, we often visited Gary and Diane in that small apartment over the garage at the Howard Morgan estate on nearby American Lake.  They were so happy.  Gary and Diane so projected a lifestyle that Barb and I wanted to emulate.  It took Barb and I another year as we were married the summer of 1969.

It’s been 50 years since that pivotal year of 1968.  The Petersons and the Aunes have traveled many different paths.  But no matter how those paths have gone off into many directions, they have many times come back to intersect.  Those intersections were grounded in shared experiences.  Those heartfelt discussions of our junior year, as our heads were so close in proximity and in common experience, as we developed from those shared experiences from faith and family to envisioned future, gave root in shared values that lead us to this day.  As it was in 1968, it still is today. 

Barb and I bought at RV in 2003, Gary and Diane soon thereafter.  We traveled together to Yosemite and Glacier and too few times into Gary’s old stomping grounds around Astoria.  The shared experiences were evident again in 2016 when Gary invited me to accompany him and his colleagues to the fish camp in Alaska.  Again, Gary and I slept in the same room, our heads just feet apart.  I brought home 100 lbs of salmon and halibut fillets, but I also brought home a whole lot more of memories.

So my dear friend and roommate, thank you for your insights.  Thank you for the shared experiences from PLU to Lacrosse, to Astoria, to Yosemite, to Glacier to Alaska.    Thank your sharing your faith and walking your walk.  Well done, good and faithful servant.  Well done. You have blessed me richly.