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.

Scenes from a Marriage

One thing I never wanted this blog to be about was my domestic life; another damn daddy blog.

For one thing, I don't really have the ability to extract pithy or enlightening tales from my family or my marriage; we're just not really all that entertaining, I'm afraid.

For stuff like that you need to go over to Sweet Juniper! or Une Envie de Sel or the Salsa family's blog. They have the gift for making their daily lives seem unique, lively, and interesting to the casual visitor.

As Salieri says in Amadeus, from the ordinary they make tales of timeless magic, while I from gods and heroes can craft only the ordinary.

For another, why the hell would you be interested in the boring doings of a North Portland guy of no particular distinction?

But the thing is, the vast expanse of my days is taken up with the commonplace; sleep, working, kids, wife, home...all the small change of an ordinary life of a middle-class family in this corner of the Pacific Northwest. I try and write about the big things; love, war, death, taxes, soccer. But the actual life I live often contains very little of those matters outside the walls of my own skull. My days as they pass by are actually quite different.

So, for a change, I thought I'd take you through a couple of those days.

Last week the kiddos were on Spring Break, the bizarre anachronism left over from...what? There's no real reason for a week off from school in mid-spring - what would my employers say if I suggested we shut down the firm for a week because...well, just because?

Yeah, you're damn right they would.

But Spring Break it was, and fortunately my spawn are too small to want to swim upstream to Seaside or Fort Lauterdale and attempt to find adventure between mojitos and partial nudity. Instead my bride and I decided to take the famdamily over the Hill to the desert.

The first stop - because long drives and small children are listed as one of the things filed in Dante's Fifth Circle of Hell right next to simony and unnatural relations with breakfast foods - was partway up the Gorge; Bonneville Fish Hatchery.

Now fish hatcheries in general are one of those ideas, like Paul Ryan's budget and privatizing prisons, that sounded better in the concept than in actuality. But this hatchery has one ginormous attraction, and I do mean ginormous - Herman the Sturgeon.This being Oregon, where we understand that there are only two real irreducible elements for Life, sunlight and coffee, Herman has his own barista.The day was already drizzling rain - more about which later - so we paid just a brief visit to the hatchery and Herman the star sturgeon. He was a big 'un, alright. Remind me to tell you about the time Herm got fishnapped.We loaded back into Bob the Subaru station wagon and bored further up the rainy Gorge. I wanted to take the fam on the pretty drive along the old highway, so we got off the interstate in the little town of Mosier......with a bathroom-coffee-and-brownie-stop at the wonderful little 10-Speed Coffee Shop before heading up into the high bench to the east......and the Nature Conservancy's small reserve just west of the Rowena Loops.This gentle plateau was washed over - probably many times - by the great Ice Age floods that ripped through the Gorge throughout the Pleistocene. Dick Waitt has estimated as many as 60 of these "Missoula Floods" crossed the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, and many of them must have flowed over the top of the bench at Rowena, stripping the soil off the old Miocene basalt surface.

The rock forms an impervious surface, so in the spring the plateau is strewn with small ponds known as "vernal pools".The cold hillsides were also beginning to show the first wildflowers of spring, a hopeful color of the warmth to come. I walked slowly, as men with failing joints will, as my family ran on ahead of me into the chill showers. If you look carefully you can see them, far in the middle distance.Soon enough I was alone with the textures and sounds of the plateau in spring; the wind off the river, the cold smell of the dark rock, the liquid song of the meadowlark and the bree-donk of the blackbird warning intruders away from his pond below.Reality intruded soon enough, though with my little outrunners returning; the Boy, sullen, because his mother had forbidden him to dance along the edge of the cliff, my Bride, flustered and furious because of her son's defiance, and Little Girl, getting whiny as she grew tired and wet from a tumble. Definitely time for a rest.

So I carried her back to Bob, and we headed East; stopping first at the Dalles and then turning south - through Madras and Bend - to our destination at the cabin in the pretty little state park in La Pine.Up to this point it had been a pleasant enough trip, if one that included more than a hap'orth of driving. But Thursday night the weather closed in.I've spent a fair bit of time over on the dry side of Oregon in twenty years, and I don't scruple to say that the rain that arrived that night and continued on into the following day was as heavy as I've ever seen east of the Cascades.

It piss-poured.

The Bride and I looked at each other with the grim understanding of what it would mean to lack outdoors entertainment for two under-tens in a rustic cabin with the nearest toilets 200 feet away in the pouring rain.So, for the first time in many, many years, I bailed on a camping trip.

We repacked the car and headed back west. Stopping, mind you, for some adventures along the way; first, at the small "Nature Center" in the freakishly bizarre artificial "community" of Sunriver.Sunriver is hard to explain if you've never been there. It's completely planned. There's nothing organic, spontaneous, unregulared or natural about it. Even the lodgepole pines seem to grow less crooked within its confines.

It's entirely appropriate, to my mind, that it is located on the site of the old Camp Abbot, the WW2 Corps of Engineers combat engineer training post; the thing is an engineering artifact, all right.

The odd thing is that it's very scenic, in its plasticine way. I just wouldn't want to live there; it's all waaaay too much the sort of place that appeals to a litigator from Bend or a real estate broker from Salem. I'd got berserk eventually and do something deranged - drag-race the golf carts out at the Tiger Woods Golfateria, reverse all the signs at the Sunriver Shopping Plaza - just to upset the nice, orderly, well-organized smugness of the place.We left Sunriver and drove north through Bend - I'm always glad to bypass the hectic business of that place because it reminds me of what a pleasant place Bend used to be - to Smith Rocks outside Terrebone.

Mojo loves this twisted hoodoo, and so she and the Boy galloped off in the lessening drizzle as little Miss and I sat in the docent's yurt and talked about arrowheads and wild lands and civilizations vanished long ago.Then the hikers returned, we all took a last look at the wet and chilly desert, and then returned home.So there we were, back in Portland instead of out exploring the wilds; what were we to do?

Well, I'll tell you.

First, after a slow sort of morning - and at home on weekends or holidays most mornings are slow; the Boy and the Bride are late, late risers, so Miss and I usually sit and chat or watch her beloved Little Ponies - I took the kiddos out for an indoorsy sort of adventure so Mojo could exercise, read, and sew.

We went to Guardian Games for Pokeman swag, got some lunch, and then played arcade games at our old standby for rainy days, the "Wunderland" arcade down on Belmont. That afternoon the Boy got to stay home and play his PS2 video game - a rare treat for him - while Mojo, Missy and I went to the kid yoga class at our Kenton library.This was a bit comic because young Miss is cultivating the whiny attitude of an older kid. She fussed and bitched about going to this thing from the moment we told her we were going until the moment we went into the little room at the back of the library.At which point she frolicked like a young lamb. Contrary child.

My bride then returned the favor; she took the kiddos so I could go to the Timbers match against Real Salt Lake.It was a chill, spitty night, and the Boys weren't really on form; after an ugly and pointless first half our young midfielder Darren Nagbe slotted home two lovely goals - the second really was a gorgeous thing, real highlight-show stuffto put the home side up 2-1 with no more than 20 minutes to play. We thought we would take the full three points at home.But we couldn't hold.

The visitors drew level a minute from time, and then a third goal deep in injury time sent them off winners and left the Timbers, and us supporters, gutted. It was a brutally ugly end to a tough match.I've said this before - soccer is a cruel, cruel game. We stood stunned in the rain, still singing, but with the special twist in the heart that comes from watching a win carelessly booted away.

And what made it harder is that we'd seen it before; in fact, we'd seen almost this exact scene before the previous season when the loathsome New York Red Bulls came back from a goal down to win in the dying minutes.That kind of match is the kind that mirrors all the other disappointments, large and small, in life itself; the broken heart, the broken bone, the broken promise. Every damn time life kicks you in the ass, from the trivial to the wrenching.

And, really, you only have two choices; to give up, to carp and whine, or to continue to hold up the emblems of your faith and sing, sing in your faith and in hopes of a brighter day to come.And, of course, the next day does come, and with it, small girls debating frilly dresses with their mommyor kiddos having cart-pulling fun at the bounteous Portland Nursery garden storebringing home their mom's green shoots; curry and basil, flavored with - what else - the rich dark elixir that warms up a rainy Portland day.And we had done all we needed, so we went home.

To spend the closing hours of Sunday reading, to play games together, to plan garden beds (my bride and I), to do laundry, to sweep the floors, to watch television, to cook dinner, and then to read bedtime stories, and tuck in to beds.

And that's the sort of thing that the main of my life consists of.

That's it.

Nothing grand, nothing dire, nothing great, or picturesque, or memorable. No deeds of note or acts worthy of record. Just the pattering of the passing days, family life played calmando, sometimes in a minor key, perhaps; sometimes strident, sometimes dull, at times very little, at times overmuch, but always a song that sings of my work, and my home, and my beloveds, and the place on Earth where they all come to rest.So when this place remains unchanged for a day or so...that's where I am - in that other world, singing that other song, passing the quiet days in unexceptional ways behind the white picket fence off of McKenna Avenue, where the streetlight casts it gibbous light on the sleek black night-street outside.

The Rains Come To Stay

Fleer and snark the "holidays" as you please - and I do please, and thank you, I have little truck with the fatuousness of the "holiday season" as it exists in America circa 2009 where, like a mackerel in the moonlight they doth both shine and stink - they are bright and cheery with light displays and the public celebration.But now we enter the Dark Ages, that long slog between the New Year and the Vernal Equinox, when the days are short and cold, the weather dour, wet and uncharitable. Every year they kindle a spark of pity in me for the troopers of Captain Lewis's expedition who spent 106 winter days near what is today Astoria, Oregon, and saw the sun for only a dozen or so. "All wett and disagreeable" wrote Captain Clark, and I know how he felt. Monday this week I spent drilling in the cold rain and wind, topped up with cold medicine and feeling generally mean and griping.I truly dislike this time of year.We're also trying to wean the kidlets off the electronic babysitters - computer and television - which means that the day starts before six and doesn't end until the last little has been settled in, around eight thirty. THEN we can make lunches, read, talk, watch television or play on the computer. It makes for a very long day, and the short daylight doesn't help. The day seems more drudging when you begin and end your workday in darkness.

But it's eight weeks or so. We can do eight weeks. Right?

I think.


C'mooooon, sun.

In the meanwhile, enjoy a visit to "Married To The Sea" for some funny-ass cartoons.I'm serious. Joe Bob says check 'em out.

Good night

Bad evening.

Mojo is sick, and even tho I've been trying to take most of the childcare she overdid herself at work this afternoon and was shot by dinnertime. I had several crises blow up at work, didn't get out on time, Mojo had to pick up the kids, who were tetchy and fussy. Thank god for Thai Ginger! At least I could get some hella good Pad Thai instead of fish sticks and mac-and-cheese (the Stearman-orange out-of-the-box Kraft variety, mind you - the tykes refuse anything remotely natural or wholesome). Frigging wireless goddam printer kept kludging up, going offline. Pissed me off, partially at Mojo, who insisted on the thing and then bought it at damn Staples. Fecking barsteward. I'd like to drop-kick the thing into the street.Then little girl wouldn't go to sleep, and had to have her toys replaced in the toybox and her little head gently laid on the pillow twenty minutes after bedtime with a stern admonition that Nine Thirty Is Too Late For Baby Girls To Be Up.

Then the Boy had some sort of emotional hissy about sleeping with his mom - it's Mom-and-Peeper Tuesday. Finally got him in bed with her and asleep after a twenty minute gabfest. That child is the King of First-Grade Drama.

So I had the house alone to myself. Tidied up a little, did the dishes, and got around to cooking the cabbage rolls I'd been meaning to for the past couple of nights. Mmmm. Some for the fridge for tomorrow, the others to freeze for cold December nights. Finally a moment here in front of the laptop, to record just another weekday evening, another in a seemingly endless string of them. Get up, kids to school and daycare, work, home to pickup kids, dinner, playtime/computer/TV time, bedtime.Wash, rinse, repeat.

I wonder if George Clooney's life is like this?

Oh - and I should note for the record that little man and I played a cutthroat game of Microarmor...which he won. Yes, the former infantryman with twenty-some years in was waxed by a six-and-a-half-year-old with the emotional range of an operatic diva.Jesus wept.

OK, I'm ready for tomorrow already...

Someone Had Blundered

Yes, yes, I know, I should be blogging; I've got a "Yorktown" piece about half finished and I should chase it down and stab it to death with a keyboard. But Mojo and Missy are off ballet-ing and I HAVE to take The Boy to Chuck E. Cheese and then to the grocery store.

And it's sunny out. Sunny! In late October!

Sorry, I have to go.

Uptown Saturday Night

I know that you must imagine our life here in North Portland as a sort of Noel Coward-like round of parties and scenester hipness, an opening here, a gala there, a cocktail soiree' everywhere, with Mojo and I lending cachet and tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar NoPo menage.

But in fact, we are a sadly domestic little pottage. Today, for example, we went down to the Build-a-Couch place in Sellwood to pick up our new ottoman and then to the freakishly huge Goodwill Outlet on SE McLoughlin. The Bins.This place is...well...it's...

Hard to categorize, is what it is. There's a great story about it in the Portland Mercury here, which I'll just excerpt a bit from:

"...an ancient warehouse on the desolate McLoughlin highway. The Acropolis strip club resides across the street and rickety trains rattle by daily, filling the air with piercing whistles. Inside this warehouse, the floors and walls are concrete, and the windows are painted over so that no natural light can seep through. Flickering fluorescents cast a yellowish hue over the already pallid shoppers, who sort through piles of dusty discards with fierce intensity and hollow eyes."

No, we didn't find a stuffed monkey in a clown outfit, syringes, cash or a pair of pants full of diarrhea. We found a couple of clothing items (a little snowsuit for Missy, soccer shorts for the Peep, a Cruz Azul jersey for me), some books, including an awesome Young People's Guide to Celibacy from the Sodality of St. Mary circa 1961, fake flowers and this terrific souvenir coconut from Hawaii.It was also filthy in a kinda skanky way, and as advertised, smelled unfresh and featured a truly outstanding selection of beater vans in the parking lot. We retreated back up to North for treats and lunch at the Grand Central Bakery on North Fremont. Everybody got their cookies (sandwiches for the grown-ups) in order to regain enough energy to go run and play on the playground over at Boise-Eliot Elementary next door.

Kids, little and big, enjoyed playing in the last warm sun of October. Mom and Dad enjoyed lazing like cats in the sunlight and stretching out on the picnic table.

Finally we got back in Bob the Subaru to get home and nap (for Missy) and relax (for Daddy) and to head out for yet another Goodwill - this one our little neighborhood GW - for Mom and the Peep. Who returned with two nearly-new IKEA armchairs! Score, Mom and Peep! (oh, and the Peep also tracked down a wooden sword, all the better for smiting sisters with...)At which point I was struck with some sort of kitchen madness. So as Mom and Boy played with the computer or played chess......I went into the pantry and started hauling out stuff and cooking it. We had a lovely rump of "Honeybaked Ham" which was cut up and made into a quiche Lorraine. And since there was then a leftover pie crust...and it is October...it was time for pumpkin pie, of the classic "made-with-evaporated-milk" variety. I'll be the first to say that evaporated milk is Satan's bile duct drippings, but the one thing it IS good for is making pumpkin pie.After the hambone was flensed for quiche, here I was with the lovely bone itself...and there was a carrot...and split peas...and an onion. So there had to be rich, savory and smokey-ham split pea soup.Mmmmmm. So the house is quiet now, and the only remains are the litter of little Miss' "art project" on the floor by the television, where juice and quiche and pizza and art and Kai-lan had made for a perfectly wonderful evening.Hope you, too, had an uptown Saturday night.