Why I DON'T despair

I think I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating; while I look outside my home and family and the Northwest I despair for my country.

But my life with my home, family, and my city in the Northwest is pretty damn good. We had a fairly typical weekend this past Saturday and Sunday and it goes a long way to show why I hesitate to throw that domestic contentment to the winds of political strife.

Saturday was rainy and cold, so we didn't drag out everything we had planned to try and sell to the curb. Instead we played indoors and then went to the Nickel Arcade where both my wife and son utterly spanked my ass at various racing games. The sight of my bride hunched over a pretend motorcycle made the losses endurable; nothing like having one's Fast and Furious fantasies lived out. Mmmmmm.

That evening we watched a film and read another couple of chapters of Ella Enchanted. It's been fun taking in part of both kids' increasing interest in reading, and the Levine "Princess" stories have played a big part (even for the Boy though he prefers Tolkien...)

The next day dawned clear if cool, so we set the yard sale debris outside. We were just bit players in the big production our neighbors and our friend Christine from SW Portland (who returned to her old neighborhood to hawk her junk) had planned.



Business was light enough to give us lots of time to visit with our friend and our neighbors, and for the kiddos to make s'mores on the firepit that warmed the cool morning:



It was a truly pleasant way to spend the morning. We visited with our neighbors all up and down and across the street, chatted with the thin stream of people who stopped off to look. And occasionally buy; our friend Christine sold her kid's bike and well as several pieces of furniture. We didn't make any money but at least got rid of the old black plastic compost bins the City handed out way back before they started curbside composting.



Even Fat Nitty Kitty got involved, doing some crucial sniffing and meowing.



This, by the way, was my favorite item:



And, no, that's NOT Mojo's wedding dress (if your wife's wedding dress turns up at a yard sale should you take that as a good indication that the magic is leaching out of your marriage? A cautious husband might well think so...) but a thrift-shop dress she picked up to cannibalize for the fabric and never did. I suspect that there's a sad little coda to someone's fairy tale there, but...

Mojo and Missy also experimented with tinfoil kite-making. This didn't seem to work well, despite the feather attachments that would seem to provide some sympathetic-magical lift (since birds fly, right?). Seems that there's a problem there somewhere.



Mid-afternoon Mojo and I left for Date Night; first, to watch our Portland Thorns women's soccer club play; you can read my observations here. Even the weather cooperated, breaking into a sunny Sunday just as our team won the match.

One of the things L love about Portland is...well, Portland. Everywhere else the new women's league is having tough times as all women's soccer leagues in this country have since the Nineties. Even the good teams have trouble drawing more than five or six thousand people and in places like Seattle and Chicago they're pulling less than 1,000 as often as not.

Here we may not give our gals quite the love we give the Timbers. But to pull 12,000 people on a sunny Sunday? That's pretty terrific.



After the match we headed back to North Portland to have dinner at our favorite little Korean-Japanese bistro Miho Izakaya. Getting there just before opening we strolled down to Overlook Park and found that the two little 1920's bungalows that had occupied the northeast corner had been Raptured, leaving just the basements and random stonework behind:



The effect was truly rather creepy. The garden that the former owners or tenants had kept up was still there out back full of spring fecundity, the old concrete stairs now leading up to nothing. The stonework was clean and crisp and utterly pointless without the surrounding houses. It was like one of those stories you read about Hiroshima where the people are vaporized and a pair of empty sandals or a shadow on a wall remain. Weird.

Still pondering this little mystery we enjoyed the pork belly and sweet egg, the yaki-imo, and the calimari salad at Miho, all rounded off with the firey nip of the imojōchū (sweet potato shōchū).



And discussed the sort of marital small change long-wedded people enjoy; domestic arrangements, future plans, kid quirks, local oddities. We wondered if anyone would buy anything we'd offered for sale. We agreed that we should do something about the old Ford pickup but not what. We talked of the trivialities that are the daily bread of love.

When we got home we were informed that we hadn't sold anything but that someone had taken the wedding dress off the tree and walked away with it.



What can you do?

Well, we went and played with the kiddos. I made a chorizo omlette for dinner. We watched some kidvid, and read some more Ella. And went to bed.

So you see, that despite my conviction that my country is going to hell in a handbasket, my own little world; my home, my family, my city, even my state are pretty damn fine. I live with good people and I know and am befriended by other good people. Our own little community - bar the occasional wedding-dress thieves - is a good one, a kind and generous one. This, then, is what I live for, to "tend my own garden" as Voltaire's Candide would have said. And perhaps it is there that I can do some good in turn.



But you'll have to excuse me; I need to go out looking for a vagrant wearing an old wedding dress.

We need to talk.

For Whom the Excavator Tolls...

Once upon a time, away back in 2007, I wrote a post about the sidewalk corners here in North Portland and how cool they are.

The coolness, what there is, comes from the metal curb covers, artifacts of the horse-drawn wagon days when a sensible municipality provided some protection from the hard wear of the metal wagon-wheel rims at the most likely place for those rims to run up over the softer concrete curbs.

But in these gentler days the need for protection from steel wheels is much less than the need for people who can't walk to get up and down from the sidewalk to cross the street. Hence the gradual replacement of the old steel-rim corners with ADA-standard ramp corners.

The City of Portland has been working its way northwest over the past several months, and just last week we saw the first indication that our old corners are not long for this world.

My kiddos, slaves to the wheel that they are, are very excited about this change for the ease it will provide for cycling and scootering.

I'm resigned but still a trifle saddened. I understand why the change is a good idea but will miss the steel guards, a piece of the physical reality that was Portland in the Teens and 1920's, a steel-and-concrete artifact that have seen almost a century of the people and their passage that make up the city I love.

Cool Things in North Portland; Marching

Busy weekend.I won't bother you with the playtime at the pool, or the lawnmowing (although the new electric mower kicks ass like a crazy monkey) or the terrific Saturday evening I spent with my friends Brent and Julie - and about 400 other Timbers Army supporters - down at the Thirsty Lion to sing for our Boys in Green (who came away from Qwest field with a hard-earned point thanks to Futty Danso and his brilliant header).

There's just too much there, and it's mostly home and kiddo stuff, anyway.

Nope, the highlight of the weekend was the 49th edition of the St. Johns Parade.

First, if I may, a bit of local history.

The only source I could find for the history of the Parade was the May issue of the "St. John's Review", a ridiculous local fishwrap news and advertiser that serves primarily as the ego-polisher of one Gayla Patton, who is the notional editor of the birdcage liner. Whenever I glace at it it seems composed largely of advertisements for local businesses and whatever oddball local news Gayla and her friends can drag in.A fellow named Speirs writes local history, including the piece from which I siphoned most of the following information.

Jim Speirs has never met anything made, born, or thought of after 1971 that he's enjoyed or approved of, and most of his writing is a slavering paean to the wonders of living in North Portland when men were men, women wore pumps and pearls, cars ran on real gas, and all these damn dirty hippies, ungrateful college punks, noisy negros, and scary wetbacks lived somewhere else.

But aside from that the man knows his North Portland history.According to Brother Speirs, three residents of the North Portland area, led by the manager of the local Savings and Loan, got the idea of a "a parade and neighborhood cleanup" some time in the late fall of 1962 or early winter of 1963. Apparently the notion was connected with removing "mounds of trash" which, again according to the redoubtable Mr. Speirs, "...was spewed throughout the neighborhood with careless abandon by private citizens and public municipalities..." (which is a pretty good sample of the guy's prose. I said the man knows his North Portland history - he just doesn't write it worth shit...).You see, since early in the 20th Century, St. Johns had the only landfill in Portland city and there seem to have been a lot more people who had trash to dump than had the buck to pay to put it in the landfill. So the northern end of the St. Johns peninsula, including what are today Chimney and Pier Parks, and several now-vanished locations such as the old Kaiser shipyard housing areas near Marine Terminal 4, had become, again in Jim Spiers words, "a huge mound of stinking trash".These North Portland civic boosters managed to get the then-Mayor Strunk (who lived up here, perhaps the last Mayor to do so) involved in the project, "Operation Cleanup", which consisted of a week in which the dump was free to all, and a concerted local effort to clean the illegal dump areas around St. Johns.According to Speirs, the entire business woke the rest of Portlanders up to the mess that was happening in St. Johns (he claims that garbage trucks came from as far as Kalama, Washington, to creep into the side-streets like North Taft to illegally dump their loads) and the resulting furor eventually resulted in closing the landfill.

It's now a nature trail.Seriously.

Anyway, the first one of these parades kicked off on May 25, 1963. I have no idea what it looked like or who marched in it. I suspect that it wasn't that different from this years, with various politicians, bands, civic organizations, car clubs, and rodeo queens.It was preceded by a "Talent Show.

And a "Cowboy Breakfast" served in the parking lot of the local Safeway.

I swear I am not making this up.

What the fuck this public feed had to do with cowboys I have no idea; there couldn't have been an actual cowboy within the municipal limits of St. Johns, and I doubt if the meal consisted of cowboy, either. I've been to that old Safeway, and other than smelling vaguely like a very old cow it wasn't remotely Westerny or cowboyish. Not so much as a cowgirl or cowkid. I don't get it.

We'll just have to chalk that one up to the Sixties' fascination with all things wild and woolly but they did serve a pantsload of hotcakes and sausage that morning.Thinking on the entire business I find it funny as hell that the entire idea of the Parade has absolutely nothing to do with...well, anything, really, other than cleaning up great heaping mounds of nasty shit. It neither commemorates nor celebrates anything, has no historical regional or local basis. Although it's sparsely advertised as the "first event of the Portland Rose Festival" I don't know of anyone who really knows this, or really cares much if they do. There's supposed to be a "theme", although nobody lining the street could tell you what it is or gives a shit about it.Come to think of it, tho, it's perfectly North Portland that the entire Parade is the brainchild of a freaking St. Johns Rotarian bankster who specialized in home loans for St. Johns. I especially love that he had a weekly radio show called, ingeniously, the "The Bob Hazen Show" (the man was a fucking marketing genius), which, according to our scribe Mr. Speirs "...broadcasted weekly programs extolling the desire and benefit of North Portland properties." I know the feeling; I've felt the desire of North Portland properties myself.The whole early Sixties Parade farrago and the stalwart worthies who ramrodded it sends our boy Spiers into an orgasmic paroxysm of suckupitude. I can't reproduce it; you have to hear it from the man himself;

"What these heroes of North Portland couldn’t have known is what an incredible gift they were giving to St. Johns. They couldn’t have dreamed that their efforts would forever change their community; that they were at the cutting edge of history and would help give residents a new sense of pride.

They never thought in terms of getting credit, nor did they think they were in any way special. They were giving to the point of exhaustion, selfless in their efforts, and unaware that the hours and days that they toiled over would forever and permanently change the face of St. Johns. Like so many heroes from other situations, these people simply shrugged their shoulders when you expressed disbelief at their efforts. They responded with words that are seldom used in today’s world...words like “it was the right thing to do,” or “North Portland needed our help,”...or something so jaw dropping and amazing as “anyone could have done it”...and they never failed to give praise and credit to others!"

Well, okay then.Now in all seriousness, Hazen, Dunn, Benshoof, the Levetons, and the other organizers of the original Parade did do a hell of a good thing; it sounds like North Portland really WAS a hell of a nasty mess back in the day, and they got up and helped make things better. Whether they used all those words seldom used in today's world...well, I guess we'll have to take our man's word on that. Home loans might just possibly have been involved.We may never know.But last Saturday's St. Johns Parade would probably have appalled them. The marching bands were all from local middle schools or even elementary schools, and their "uniforms" were matching T-shirts, at best. The Boy Scouts straggled along in a gaggling clump that would have had them and old Baden-Powell weeping bitter, bitter tears at the state of the former sons of Empire.

The straw skimmers and ice-cream suits of the Royal Rosarians, our very own Kiwanis-Lions-Rotary Club would have reassured them.But what they would have thought about the marching pregnant mommies from the Children's Relief Nurseryor the yoga float, or the piratesor the steampunks..?Well, the reassuring thing to me was the very slack, chaotic, unmilitary lassitude of it. There was no danger of being energized to go invade something or fight someone; this was as far from massed troop units and the regimented splendor of a military parade as can be imagined. Even the leading color guard was a packet of shambling sheriff's deputies who seemed consciously out of step, like children deliberately defying their father's attempts to make them walk like grownups.There may be many things about today that trouble and discourage us. We may have wars abroad and unemployment at home. We may be a society as divided by wealth, and ideals, as any time in our history.But, for me, to sit on the lopsided trash can savoring the fine greasiness of the Signal Station Pizza's bounty and to watch the richly odd, untameable, freakishly unique, foolishly serious little parade pass by was to feel myself sink deeply into my community, into the workaday hours that are St. Johns, that is the North End, that is Portland, that is my home.And was to realize that this is my home. That for all the many lands and many seas I have passed over, all the places I have lived and the people I have lived them with, it is here that I have come home to; here is my heart of rest.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

No story: just liked the toppling wall texures, and shapes, the particolored lichen, the dessicated mosses dry and dormant in the hot afternoon sun.

Dunno why I thought of the Frost poem: it always speaks to me of cool woodlands and New England spring. But I did.

Enjoy.

Dusk walk

It's been a busy, wierd week. China returned our Travel Authorization (yay!) but there's trouble with our 171-H (shit!)...and it won't be resolved - if then - until Monday, so I don't want to say any more about it.

And I am working on the second installment of my ruminations on the parallels I see between our time and the end of the Roman Republic; this about the populares - We, the People. But with all the home-improvement and adoption crises I haven't been able to get all that excited about it. I promise I'll push on and finish this weekend.

No, what I wanted to do was just a little gentle recollection of one of the few slow, happy, peaceful times this past week: Wednesday night when Peeper and I went for a walk abound our block.

The sun was already sinking when we turned right, past the big dogwood in the front yard. Our objective was the new houses - the "construction site" - being built at the corner of N. Yale and N. Monteith. A wonderland of preschool boy adventure.
Along the way, everything has to be checked out. We looked for chickens at the Hippie House on the corner of Amherst & Monteith (no luck - I tried to explain what a "chicken nugget" is, to no avail). We looked for fallen walnuts from the many black walnut trees around our block.

Once at the construction site there were countless delights: lumber to climb, nailgun nails to pick up, walnuts (again!) to toss onto roofs, framing to slither through.

Here's the boy on top of the world. He's much better at climbing up than climbing down, BTW. I had to lift hi down from this one...

We scurried around - okay, HE scurried around and I leaned on framing or sat on stacks of lumber - and enjoyed a pleasantly aimless period in the unfinished houses.

There's a lot of this going around. When we moved here near the turn of the century (funny, to say that...I wonder if people in 1900 felt the same way?) there were still quite a few little houses on standard Portland 50' x 100' lots, or double lots with larger houses on them. We've already had two lots on the N. Yale side of our block subdivided. Now this one. It's the Future, I'm afraid...

Once we'd done enough clambering and nail-picking, Peeper took the camera for his own auteurisme. Here's the resulting photoessay I've called "Peepics"...

I call this one "Redwoods";

Here's "Underfoot". Note the sandal on the wrong foot.

Even the greatest of photographers has to do portrait snapshots sometimes. This is "Daddy"

This is "As the World Turns; a study in concrete". Still on the wrong feet, Peep...

Here's "Falling Dark";

"Study in Concrete and Leaves II";

"Sign of the Times"

At this point I took the camera back.

Three-quarters of the way around the block we turned up our alley. These curious mews are a North Portland artifact. I used to believe them an oversight - public streets never paved and often vacated. But while searching our plat for the new deck permit application I came across the tax lot maps and realized that they're platted public alleys, sub-streets, vestiges of the horse-drawn Portland when you couldn't park your horse on the street overnight. We still turn up remnants of the old stable/garage in our back yard.

I'll have to write about the alleys of North Portland some day.

But not this evening. This was just for strolling, for finding treasures hidden in the long grass behind peoples' houses.

We checked out the plum grave, pulled some more of the nasty deadly nightshade growing along our back fence, and looked to see if we'd caught anything in our powder trap.

By this time evening had truly come: the dragonflies were alight, and it was time to go inside and find our tub, and stories, and sleep.


Today we have lots of plans, friends to vivist with and chores to do, a deck to seal and house to paint. But what a lovely moment to have, last Wednesday evening, to just do nothing and be.



And so...