The name stuck, so much so that once when I introduced Fred at a book-signing on Whidbey Island, a man shook his hand and said, “Fred? And here I always thought your first name was The.” Just a few weeks ago, a reader recognized me in the Palm Springs Airport and asked if that was The Sainted One at my side.

That’s how he’s been perceived all of these years: The Sainted One, operating with an unruffled, Zenlike calm, staking claim to a tranquil island in a sea of fluctuating hormonal tsunamis, cool, composed, beloved by all. But now I know better.

He wasn’t Sainted. He was deaf.

For years, I was the one who complained about the yippy dogs, the unidentified squealing and moaning from the new refrigerator, and the mysterious and nameless plumbing and house-settling sounds. Our interchanges were like an auditory version of the old movie “Gaslight,” where Charles Boyer makes Ingrid Bergman believe that she’s crazy by denying reality. In our own personal Gaslight, I began to believe that I was nothing more than an edgy, impatient witch who was just one step away from taking a brickbat to anything that made noise. “What was that?” I’d snap in alarm, and The Sainted One’s response (unless there was a 747 landing in the driveway with a convoy of wailing fire department vehicles to support it) was “Huh? I don’t hear a thing.”

Turns out he wasn’t kidding. He couldn’t hear a thing, but since he got fitted for his hearing aids several weeks ago, he’s been as acoustically alert as a Cairn Terrier on methamphetamines.

I feel a certain smugness now when he asks me why I must crumple the newspaper so loudly. I smile serenely when he wonders aloud at the popping sounds that he hears when he stands (his knees), or when he questions the volume of the fax machine or asks if the front door squeak was always that obnoxiously loud.

I ask you: Who’s The Sainted One now?

You can reach the new Sainted One at patdetmer@aol.com.

File
Dennis Yarnell and Beth Widseth, the owners of the Newcastle Shell, organized the station’s first golf tournament in 2012 to raise money for U.S. military veterans and the Fisher House Foundation.

But something occurred recently that reminded me of what truly makes a place special. It’s the people: the folks who check you out at the store, the restaurant owners who greet you, the waitresses who seat you, the librarian proud to be in a new home, the faces you see again and again as you go about the business of living. When you’ve been in one place for a long time, these human beings become woven into the fabric of your life, and in early February, that fabric was torn.

I backed out of the garage at the end of January and my side mirror hit the wall. No damage to the house, but plenty to the mirror and my accident-free ego. I immediately headed to Newcastle Shell and found Dennis Yarnell, the owner. The conversation was pretty typical for us, short and to the point, and because he thought I was funny, I would always try to say something humorous or self-deprecating for his amusement. I told him that I had hurt my car and now he had to fix it. I said that I drove it so rarely the month when I was sick that it was possible I’d forgotten how to back out of a garage. I also told him about a disconcerting squeal coming from the right front.

The new mirror came in on Wednesday and I made an appointment for Friday. Dennis greeted me when I got there and asked if I needed a ride home. I thanked him but declined since The Sainted One was right behind me. Dennis called later when the work was done and also gave me his thoughts on the squeal, which he said was nothing to worry about at this time. He patiently explained why there was no reason for concern in terms simple enough for a toddler to understand, and as soon as I hung up, I forgot the details. His advice to us was always golden, so it was sufficient for my husband and I to advise each other of automobile issues by simply stating, “Dennis thinks it’s OK for now.” Nothing more was needed.

That weekend, a mutual friend reached out to tell us Dennis had died in a car accident.

We were devastated, and we’re just two people on a long, long list of family, neighbors, friends, employees and customers who have been impacted by his loss. He was an outstanding human being, a man who gave second chances to those who needed them, who had high expectations of the people who worked for him but no higher than the expectations that he put upon himself. He was fair and generous, supremely knowledgeable in his chosen field and unfailingly cheerful. For a thousand reasons, he will be sorely missed.

Dennis had a little stand for displaying and selling the Newcastle News in his gas station and always mentioned this column. If I pulled up to the pumps and he spotted me, he would come out with a wide grin and tell me how much he loved the last one.

Dennis, this one’s for you.

If you’d like to do something in remembrance of Dennis, check in with the folks at the station.

It entered the house on Christmas Eve. There were 19 possible carriers. I’m betting on the baby. We ate, we drank, we hugged, we kissed, we exchanged gifts and germs, and then went out and infected everyone else we knew as well.

We were sick for a week and a half and then went back to work, congratulating ourselves on our general hardiness. Then, we relapsed. This time, it took us down like a pride of starving lions takes down a feeble wildebeest. Gone was a long-planned trip to Palm Springs, our appetites, our ability to breathe, our dignity and any misguided notion that we had control of anything in life. This is what I learned:

• You can lose weight on an I-Can’t-Taste-Anything, Food-Has-Lost-Its-Meaning Diet, but I wouldn’t advise it.

•  Visiting the Y is not necessary, because coughing up a lung = 1,000 sit-ups. I now have abs of steel but am too exhausted to care.
•  You can miss a lot when you’re deaf, not a bad thing when your sizeable husband has a cough with decibel readings that rival rock bands at The Gorge.
•  At the medical center, I felt like I was on the set of the movie “Contagion.” It made me wonder if there was a well person on this side of the Cascades. When the cheerful nurse noted that I hadn’t been weighed since October, I said, “I don’t give a s*** what I weigh. Fix me.”
• Anything that they give you to fix you will make you sick as well. Stomach ache? Check. Diarrhea? Check. Yeast infection? But of course! Check.
•  If you’re too ill for reading, or doing Sudoku or crosswords, there’s only one option: television. In my journey through that vast wasteland, I discovered that Seattle-based “Here Come the Brides” can be seen at 3 a.m. on some channel that I’ll probably never be able to find again, there are more versions of “Pride and Prejudice” than there are wads of tissue in our wastebaskets, and the British version of “Antiques Roadshow” has some seriously old stuff on it and no one gets excited when they hear the value. Stiff upper lip and all that.
•  If you’re far enough under the weather, things that normally have meaning lose their place in line. Chin hairs, frozen hummingbird feeders, whether the word “its” is used correctly in a text, the fact that we failed to take apart our bubbling water features before the freeze … all of these become distant whispers not worth noting.
• If you are sufficiently afflicted, it doesn’t matter if the Seahawks win or not. But you have to be really, really sick for that.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who has plans to never, ever get sick again — through patdetmer.com.

Besides, I don’t consider the dead of winter the optimum time to foster a new and better attitude. That kind of bright promise is for September — the start of the school year — when clean lined paper and sharpened pencils speak of fresh starts and new beginnings.

At my age it’s ridiculous to come up with resolutions that I know will fall by the wayside. It’s high time, I think, to provide myself with goals that I know I can reach. Why put unnecessary pressure on myself? With that in mind:

1. I resolve that I will not watch a television show with the name “Kardashian” in the title.

2. I resolve that I will not spend time on Facebook. Perhaps I should amend that to say that I will not spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook. I do check it periodically. Like once a quarter.

3. Ditto Twitter. I swear that I will not participate. I’ll amend that with a sub-resolution that I’m not sure that I can keep: I will cease asking, “What is it? I don’t get it.”

4. While attempting to meditate, I resolve that I will note things like spider webs, dust bunnies and spots on the carpet, and I will utter very un-Zen like things like “What the hell?” but vow that I will resist the urge to get up and make those things right, although their loud shouts for attention will break every meditation rule in the book.

5. While struggling to do things that used to be mindlessly easy for me — like threading a needle or putting a little button through a tiny loop or affixing earring backings — I vow to stop, exasperated by the task, and announce loudly to no one in particular: “Seriously?”

6. At least twice a year, I promise to take a tumble. And not just a little trip, but a huge belly flop, always on cement, likely to trigger UW seismic equipment. This year, I did it while walking to lunch in Seattle with a critical client, and again with The Sainted One while hurrying to the entrance of the King Tut exhibit.

7. I pledge that I will think a lot about starting a humorous memoir entitled “They Could Only Afford to Feed One,” but I’ll do little other than move some pertinent Word docs from one file to another and berate myself for the balance of the year for my lack of action.

2013! Bring it on!

You can reach Pat Detmer — who had no plans whatsoever to add “lose weight” to the list, even though she knows she should — at patdetmer@aol.com.

It’s property that’s not ours, and yet by osmosis and proximity, it is. Let’s call it our “fakerage.”

When we moved from the Midwest to Bellevue 40 years ago, we were surprised by the notion of greenbelts since there were none on the Illinois prairies. We’d lived at the edge of small farm towns a few blocks from cornfields and hedgerows, so communing with nature took only desire, 10 minutes and a decent pair of boots. Now — as we watch the Pugetopolis population climb eastward and up the hills — we understand and appreciate the notion of green space in ways that we never did before.

Some Newcastle fakerage is flat, and some surrounds unbuildable mountaintops. Ours is a basin, and at the bottom of it there’s a seasonal pond. Frogs and ducks make noise and offspring there. Snakes and skinks slither out of it and find drier places to lay in wait — like our garage — because they clearly enjoy the excitement of being discovered. We’ve spotted bald eagles, green herons, pileated woodpeckers, and great horned owls. While sitting on our back deck, we’ve been surprised by passing families of deer and raccoons, and a bear once left a deposit of fresh scat near the bird feeders, confirming that not only do they do that in the woods, but they also do it along the periphery.

If you visit Google Earth (My advice: Don’t do it. It’s a fabulous time-suck like none other) and look down on Newcastle, you’ll see that more than half of us either edge up to fakerage or live within sight of it. My niece and nephew’s fakerage is a cliff that drops at the end of their deck. Dana the Cartoonist has one that wraps his house in a half-embrace.

I write this in early in November, and can now faintly see the homes on the other side through naked branches. The greatest upside to having acreage that’s not yours? You don’t have to rake the leaves.

You can reach Pat Detmer, who considers herself the Japanese Knotweed Sheriff of her fakerage, at patdetmer@aol.com.

Those who know me well are laughing out loud as they read this because they’ve been witness to my fuzzy nerve endings and resultant misfires for years, and my actions at a recent business meeting finally made me face the fact that I no longer have the gray matter of a youngster, although I do still have plenty of fatty insulation, unfortunately none of it attached to neurotransmitters inside my skull.

Case in point: The Sainted One and I traveled to Eastern Washington to talk to a business owner about helping them sell their company. The owner’s wife/partner was at the initial meeting, and as we got acquainted she said that she was very familiar with Whidbey Island where we’d had a second home because of the work she did picking up partridge there to bring to Eastern Washington for a company called “Feel Free to ….”

She said a word. I didn’t hear it clearly, but I could tell that it started with an “H” and a “u”. As the conversation continued around me, I was lost in thought. What had she said? Feel free to … what? Why would anyone transport birds from western Washington to the other side of the mountains? Is it possible that birds were hauled from one place to another — like pandas or Siberian tigers in national zoos — to procreate? Was there a shortage of partridge in coulee country that I was unaware of?

If that’s what she was referring to, it would be a mighty unconventional name for a business, but I’d encountered odd company names before. I might have saved my question for a more opportune time, but I was dying of curiosity, so when there was a brief lull in the meeting I turned to the wife and said:

“Excuse me. Did I hear that correctly? Did you say ‘Feel Free to Hump?’”

Yes. I said it out loud. “Feel Free to Hump.” I said it to two lovely people who didn’t know me or my husband from a hunk of basalt, in our first meeting ever, the most important meeting of all. After a silence as deep as the Dry Falls, she said, “Umm … no. It was called ‘Feel Free to Hunt.’”

Of course. “Feel Free to Hunt.” My vision of happy, horny pheasants running around making baby chicks and replenishing the population was gone in a puff of smoke, smoke that I believed I could almost smell given that I could picture the sizzle and burn of another dying, overloaded synapse in my brain.

Luckily, they laughed. Then I laughed. Then I overheated as I laughed and needed to fan myself with our company collateral.

Believe it or not, they decided to work with us. Or maybe just The Sainted One …

You can reach Pat Detmer — who believes that stuff like this is a sign of genius — through www.patdetmer.com.

When I questioned the wisdom of that, she said that she wanted to make sure that everyone felt included, even though this meant that we wouldn’t be seated for three hours and that some of my tablemates would actually be in Missouri and I would only be able to converse with them if I had binoculars and a bullhorn.

We’re planning another family trip to Quincy this fall, and with it will come the feeling that I’m part of a never-ending census-taking process, one that I consistently fail as I attempt to slip through the counting bonds and sprint from the pack to freedom. If I leave a room without announcing my intentions, all eyes will follow me even if that room is filled with a roiling mass of cousins and their children and their children’s children. Aunt Joan will call out to ask me where I’m going, and if gone for more than 15 minutes, the alarm will go out: Where’s Pat?

There may have originally been an excellent reason for this mentality. Out on the prairies in the 1800s it would have been critical to keep count, because if Jonathon went out in a howling snowstorm, it made sense to ask “Where are you going?” or “Why isn’t he back yet?” because there are probably some Jonathons who tragically lost their way while heading out to the barn to milk the family cow.

I broke free of the pack when I moved to the Northwest 40 years ago. Gone were the Giant Book of Rules, the family members squeezing my cheeks at weddings and saying, “You’ll be next,” and the need to always be present and accounted for. A closet introvert, I had escaped and found the right place for me.

Now in her 80s, my aunt seems to have finally forgiven me for my insurrectionary ways. While we’re there, my sisters and Newcastle Niece and Nephew will stay at Aunt Joan’s place, while the Sainted One and I — with my aunt’s blessing — will stay at the family camp on the Mississippi, miles from nowhere.

But I’ll admit that even though I am way past middle age and should have worked through my neuroses by now, I’m still a little anxious about facing the census-takers. Don’t get me wrong: I love it there, and it was a great place to be a kid and a great place to grow up. And actually, I would move back there in a heartbeat if the continental landmass cracked at the Mississippi River and everything west of it slid into the sea.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who counts, but doesn’t like being counted — via www.patdetmer.com.

Then came the alerts from helpful friends letting me know that it looked like I’d been hacked, because they had received emails from my address with no verbiage in the subject line and only a suspicious hyperlink in the body. I tried to stem the digital bleed by sending out an email to my entire address book telling people to ignore it. That act was only marginally successful, and I was buried with ominous MAILER DAEMON messages into the night, advising me that these people or addresses no longer existed.

I get these kinds of emails from friends all the time, and I simply ignore them. I’ve come to believe that most folks are fairly Internet savvy and realize that if Aunt Maude in Peoria, who usually asks for the latest baby pictures and provides a list of the recently deceased in exchange, sends an email and it only shows a link that includes the words “babes+boobs” in it … well, then something is afoot and it’s probably not really an email from Aunt Maude in Peoria after all.

Given this recent experience, I realize that I need to prepare for the eventuality of a reoccurrence. I have decided to use this forum to provide a pre-emptive disclaimer:

•  I have never sent an email without a Subject Line. Usually, it’s “Detmer here” or something equally mundane. And if I’m sending a link, I would never send it without explanation. I’m a writer, a word-lover, and would never think to let a hyperlink float by itself in a sea of white. And if I’m sending a hyperlink, it will usually be accompanied by something apologetic like, “I rarely pass these things along, but this is pretty funny.”
•  I have not now, nor have I ever, been an agent of a company who provides any of the following:

— Products that enlarge any body part.

— Products that reduce the size of any body part, usually belly or thigh.

— Advice related to money-making schemes or working from home.

•  I do not now, nor will I ever, email anyone at 1 a.m. unless I happen to be tipsy in Tuscany.

You can reach Pat Detmer — who would like to be tipsy in Tuscany — at patdetmer@HeyOhHell.

My mother was my trainer in thrift: Scraps of material could become a braided rag rug. Clothing and socks could be mended. Soap could be used until it was so small that it was in danger of being inadvertently lost in a body cavity. She never tore into a wrapped gift with abandon, because if one was careful, the paper could be used again. And again. And speaking of paper, it has two surfaces, which means that Mother’s recipes have stories from the past on the backs of them: mid-century letters from her mother, church bulletins and school announcements.

As we explained Mother’s child-of-the-Depression prudence at her funeral, my sister Susie held up a rubber band ball that we’d found while clearing out her kitchen drawers. Why buy a rubber band new, Mother believed, when they could be saved and re-used? Susie accidently lost her grip on it, and the ball fell from the podium and bounced across the floor towards the attendees, spewing dust and spent, wimpy rubber strips all the way.

That reminded me of my mother’s mother (the Obi Wan Kenobi of Frugality) who always walked us through the neighborhood cemetery when we visited her. While there, we got the free thrill of viewing the fenced burial sites where hair-raising explanations for group extinction were carved in granite (and really, what child far from home doesn’t want to read about 21 innocent school kids perishing in a roaring classroom fire?) As payment for this thrill, we were forced to collect the rubber bands that careless newsboys had dropped while wrapping their papers.

True to my bloodline, I re-use foil if meats haven’t previously been involved with it, I scrape jars, I take the useless pump out of the lotion and shake out the unreachable balance, I print on the back of my Simon & Schuster Royalty Statements (it’s all parenthetical numbers anyhow), I nuke stale oyster crackers to crisp them, and as I brush my teeth, I mourn the fact that the old toothpaste tubes were stiffer and stronger, making it possible to more efficiently squeeze out the last precious dollop of paste.

Nature, or nurture? Genetic or learned? I’m not sure, but I know that when I win that medal in the Frugal Olympics, I’ll proudly fasten it on the workout suit that I’ve worn for the past five years using the straight pin that I kept from the corsage that The Sainted One gave me for my 47th birthday as I play “The Star-Spangled Banner” on our record player.

That’s right. You heard me: record player. I am soooo gonna win this!

You can reach Pat Detmer, who has also won a silver in Lazy Gardening, at patdetmer@aol.com. 

When my little sister Barb was in high school, the hill I live on was in unincorporated King County and was covered with alder, traced with jeep trails and littered with abandoned mattresses. She tells me that this is where local high school kids drank and made out. She knew about it, but never went there herself. Or so she says.

Not long after Barb didn’t go up into the hills, The Sainted One and I did. We were into orienteering at the time, and one Saturday we registered and drew our map at what is now Renton Academy, and then hiked on trails that took us up into the hills. We found one of the control point flags a hundred yards west of where we now live. We noted the fresh bulldozed trails and the tree trunks X’d with paint and wondered what was in the offing.

It was Olympus that was in the offing, and we end up moving here almost 22 years ago.

They pretty much scalped the hill at the time, and with the exception of greenbelts — one of which merges with our back yard — Olympus was denuded and treeless, with lots of fresh bark to cover all the bare spots. Now bare spots are hard to find — at least in our yard — and trees planted by early owners have reached 60 feet tall or better. Now it looks less like a new home sales brochure and more like a place with history, a place where trees and families grow, a place that’s been around for a while.

I’m currently on the Olympus Homeowners Board, and we’re planning a 25th anniversary celebration that will take place during National Night Out. I look forward to comparing notes and old pictures with other residents.

I wasn’t around for the naming of where we live, but I assume that the origins were in Greek mythology, where Mount Olympus was the home of the Olympian Gods. Homer said of it: “Olympus was not shaken by winds nor ever wet with rain, nor did snow fall upon it …”

D’oh! Clearly, Homer never spent a winter in my home on the hill!

One of the Olympian Gods was Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, which is really close to “Detmer,” who you can reach at patdetmer@aol.com.