There Was Also Joy

Pam loved puzzles. No, I mean LOVED puzzles. Early in our marriage we used to spend hours working on large puzzles of outdoor vistas. I think we even knocked off a 10,000 piece monster of a view in the Italian Dolomites. We had at least 20 puzzles in the closet, including a several-thousand piece one of cheeses. Yes, cheese. She was from Wisconsin. You’d expect different because… ? Pam’s puzzle passion changed when we started having kids. Turns out having thousands of tiny cardboard pieces around drooly, grabby munchkins isn’t a recipe for a calm play time. So we traded those monsters in for kid-appropriate puzzles and continued on. We were always happy to find a vacation spot that had a pile of puzzles for us to play with. Not sure where Pam’s love of puzzles started, but I did find this great photo of her in her high school days…

August 6th, 1993. Pam and I had been apart for a year as I finished out the last year of my enlistment in the US Air Force. We'd waited a long time, roughly 18 months, and now the Big Day was finally here. We were married at my family's cabin on Echo Lake in California. It's a serene, beautiful place that's been in the family since my Grandpa Holmes secured a lease on the national forest land back in 1938. Somehow we ended up with a Scottish-themed wedding, although I recollect it was Pam's idea as a part of linking to my family's heritage. Pam's mom made her dress, and I'd ordered my kilt from a small shop in Edinburgh. (There's a good story for another time about me trying to work through comprehension of a thick brogue over the phone.) We had 25 people at our ceremony, including the photographer and the bag piper. Today I'm sitting on the balcony at our home, doing some writing and a lot of reminiscing. It was a beautiful day all those...

For those of you who knew Pam: Duh. For those who didn't: This is her natural, happiest state: surrounded by pets. Yes, yes, yes, she loved people, but her bond with pets was just incredibly deep. When I met her she had two cats: Carmen and Little. 22 years later when we moved from Ohio to Oregon we took two old cats, two one-year old kittens, and two 13-year old dogs. Yes, that's six pets. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are several photos: Pam with Ed the cat, Grace, and Gus Pam with Bugsy, her office mate Napping with Bugsy and Grace A lap full of kittens

Neither Pam nor I have been fans of heights. Despite a love of mountains and hiking, we weren’t the kind who enjoyed scampering along narrow trails at the edge of a cliff. Neither of us were incapacitated by heights, but the feeling was far past mere discomfort. During out time in southern Germany (Pam was assigned to a NATO aircraft modification plant in Bavaria from 1995 to 1998) we took a number of vacation trips to Tiers, Italy. Tiers is right in the middle of the glorious Südtirol region, and is chock full of great hiking and climbing trails. During one of our trips Pam thought we should drive to one of the ski lifts and hop a ride to mid-way up the Rosengarten ridgeline. We’d save a couple hours of hiking and get to the most beautiful part of the trail straight away. We parked our car at the lift’s parking lot and walked up to the base of the ski lift. We paid for the ride, then were directed around a corner to the entry point for the lift. We rounded the corner and ran in ...

Pam and I met in Anchorage, Alaska, some time in 1990 or '91. We were both stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base as we served in the 962 AWACS squadron. I don't remember how we grew together. I do remember a bunch of games of racquetball and some other activities. Our time together was pretty stilted at first because she was a commissioned officer and I was enlisted—relationships between officers and enlisted was extremely verboten in those times. Moving past that took a long time, and a lot of my cooking to win her over. We secretly courted for months in Alaska, then another year apart while I was in Oklahoma. I remember sneaking out to Palmer, AK, from Anchorage for a movie date. I can't remember the movie, but I do remember slinking down in the seats to make sure nobody saw us. Mind you, Palmer is roughly an hour away from Anchorage, and not really a date night destination for most people. I also remember a halibut fishing trip out of Homer. Pam always had modera...

It turns out you lose some perspective on life when your loving, kind, empathetic 12-year old son wakes up one morning and murders your wife and attacks, horribly injuring, your 16-year old daughter. It turns out you lose some perspective on your relationship with your formerly alive wife when you spend six months digging over every horrible negative, troubled aspect and event of that relationship with defense lawyers, police, and other law enforcement as everyone searches for some reason why your son snapped and did the awful things he did. This blog is an attempt to bring back some memories of the many wonderful times my wife Pam Wolosz and I had during our courtship and life together. Because in the depths of the horrors of the last six months, it's easy for me to lose perspective that there was also joy. A lot of it.