fuschia saturday

How it really went was not quite so nice as expected. It was a perfect morning. K went fishing, I dinked around the house, all that. When he came home it was time to go do the free dirt thing. So off we went. Earlier in theday I had run out to buy sphagnum moss to line three of my baskets. In case you didn't know, moss turns to peat after awhile and is not so great to line the baskets anymore. (But is great for soil, so saved it all and gave asia a bag of it. As I was out looking for moss at the local overpriced garden store, I found two divider trellis pieces and although they had "sold" signs on them, the signs were not convincing. They looked like they had been sitting in the same place for quite a while. I found a garden store worker and asked what the story was. She found out that somebody had said hey I want those I'll be right back with the money and never came back. So the story was that I could have them for half price. Yay. So home I went with my moss and two wooden dividers to place between our backyard and the homeless shelter next door.

It isn't really a homeless shelter, and truly, anymore there is little to complain about since the mad dogs who used to live there got kicked out. Now, there are just poor crazy people who need a small place to hide out in. They don't talk much at all, don't open their curtains, don't own vehicles, and don't stay up late, so why am I bitching? Anyway, the wooden dividers are really nice and clean up the fence line well.

So, back to the story... K gets home and off we go to Freddy's. We find a parking place clear across the parking lot and load a basket to the hilt with all of our pots and truck them over to the garden department. All the fuschias are gone.
GONE? This can't be. Last year I had to settle for petunias in my back yard pots and I never really got over it. I have nothing against petunias, but they are kind of leggy and sticky and I wanted fuschias and that is that. So we had the Hawthorne store call the Hollywood store (not the real Hollywood, it is a section of portland which doesn't resemble Hollywood in the least so I don't know what the story is there) and they had TONS of fuschias left. Hooray. We hopped back in the truck after re-loading all of the pots, and making sure the moss wouldn't blow out as we travelled beyond our neighborhood. As we pulled into the Hollywood Freddy's, the skys parted and a torrential downpour began. Ah, springtime. Ah, April showers. But it was still March. We charged through the rain, sidestepping rivulets and near washouts in the parking lot. These are the kinds we got:

8 bright purple (white with purple center)
4 royal airforce academy (pink with purple center)
4 blue eyes (magenta with dark blue center)
4 pink marshmallow (white with hint of pink)
3 lena (creamy white with pink center)
and two others I can't remember.

I'll post pictures as they bloom. I usually fill the pots with other hangy things like trailing lobelia and allysum.

I understand that by not linking to other blogs that I am not doing my part for blogland. I feel bad about that. Will mend my ways in two weeks.

houseboats

It is a dream of mine to live on a houseboat. Simple. Work would get in the way I am pretty sure. It already does. My sister-out-law is moving to town from Alaska and we looked at one for her. I would do that. I would. I know two women who live on them, one in Vancouver and one on the Channel. One single, one married. We talk about it, husband and I, and it may, like so many other of our dreams, become reality.

It is Saturday morning on Clinton Street, my favorite time. I woke up to a blog by my best friend l. about closing all of the libraries in Jackson County. Tragic. A beautiful commentary that I hope she sent to someone else. Orwellian. End of civilization.

I am not doing what I had planned to do this morning. K went fishing and it felt so good to just be home that I didn't get dressed and go out at the butt-crack of dawn like I usually do. I am home, drinking coffee and typing. My favorite.

It is a big day in my world: Fuschia Saturday at Fred Meyer. WooHoo! So I empty the dirt out of too many pots and stack them in my truck ready for the free dirt. Free dirt! Can you imagine? They are always a bit disconcerted to see us roll up with our piles of pots. In line in front of us are ladies with flower pots they can hold in their hands. Little painted things, all porcelain and fragile. Mine are industrial types: Huge vats of dirt and moss ready for the planting. It has been such a dark winter that it seems early, but here it is! Fuschia Saturday is upon us. I must find sphagnum moss to line three baskets and a few accompanying plants to fill in between the fuschias.

The back yard is shot. We are going to have to try sod. I guess the ground stayed too wet and drowned the new grass we planted back in October. It was a wet one. so there is just mud, and it has to dry out a little before we can sod it. Fortunately, due to all of our last summer's projects, there is little square footage to cover. Sod should be easy, but I've said that before. It is all easy for me: he does it and I watch and hand him things. Like this Thursday morning when the sink fell off the wall in the bathroom: he just gets the stuff and fixes it. Me? I make a little island for bathroom stuff by the kitchen sink and expect never to have one again. I adjust easily. I remember when my heating stove started leaking in my house on 4th and Oak in Central Point and I couldn't fix it and nobody else would and I heated the house by pouring cups of diesel fuel into the heat box and it leaked on the floor and my whole house smelled like diesel all the time, and my clothes, and I just lived in it and lived in it. Helpless as a newborn duck. And it isn't that I was unwilling to fix it, I just couldn't care about it enough to get it done. Paralyzed by poverty. I came to expect so little. Deserving is a powerful thing. Expensive.

I hate it when I feel like I am reporting instead of writing...when poetry leaves me and I am stuck with the facts. It is a barren landscape and I cross it with uncertain steps, each footfall hoping to land on softer ground.

Ah, there it is.

When my sister-out-law was here we went to the Japanese Garden. Oh. I want to go back when the irises are in bloom. It was perfect, silvered clouds in broken blue sky, cherry blossoms postcard perfect. But alas, too many humans. Ants on a hill. It was the height of cherry blossom time, so to be expected, I guess. We (me and K) talk about going to Europe, and I think, okay, okay. A couple of thoughts recur: I am terrified to fly. Sincerely. And second: If I could just get everybody out of the Sistine Chapel and take a private tour, that would work for me. Or Ireland. Or Greece. My husband wants me to get to those places, but again, the flying... and the people. I hate crowds. I don't go to parties. I don't have fun. It scares me. It always has. The amount of whiskey it took for me to have a good time at a bad party(and that by rumor, second hand reporting, and public record) was obscene. And knowing my social phobias, I always had to get a head start on the party favors so that by the time I got to the party, it was over for me. I have literally fallen face first through the door on my way into a party. Over before it started. By design or default? Who can say?

So home I am and home I'll stay. OH! we are planning a long (2 week) vacation this summer. We will head out from here east to Wyoming then North into Canada. A tour of the Rockies. (low numbers of humans, I'm hoping) We will camp and fish our little hearts out. We may hop place to place, or find somewhere we like and hang out. The Odell lake thing is off. I have trouble dreaming quite as large as my honey. All I want to do on vacation is not work. Really. That's good enough for me. We looked at renting a Hummer, but seriously, talk about obscenely conspicuous consumption. I hope we just take our truck. I bought an atlas of the US and Canada and am obsessively planning. I don't mean to follow the plan, but we'll have one. It passes the time.

tour guide

I have spent the better part of this weekend being a tour guide. Yes, me, the one who couldn't figure out why she kept winding up at the airport. My sister-out-law is moving to town and suddenly must find a house to buy. I am voting for the houseboat in Scapoose, but that's me. She is a country girl, moving from Alaska. She is the only quasi-family member I would not be horrified to have around. She is a grown up, and therefore, okay with me.

Portland is a big city, but a small town. I drove her around my neighborhood, and some others I am semi-familiar with, and we found some houses that people didn't want anymore. We drove through felony flats and showed her why she isn't interested in all that. After, we had dinner at Salvador Molly's. I love their food although it is very noisy in there.

Why is it that semi-hip restaurants get to be so noisy and dirty with so-so service? And why is food that is too spicy to eat and enjoy, enjoyed by some as a sort of masochistic rite of passage? I don't get it.

Later same month: Addendum to all of this... my sister outlaw didn't get the job after all. I am disappointed. She is disappointed. We are disappointed. I miss the people who know me. Not that there is so much to know, but there is so much to tell. She has the backstory. She has the goods on me. We killed and ate rattlesnake together (kind of a cross between scallops and chicken, in case you were going to ask), did a road trip with two cases of good wine, listening to only Roseanne Cash and Carole King's Tapestry. I wore this black, beaded antique top with hand painted roses and danced the beads off and woke up in Charleston with two bikes chained to the back of the van. I never did like wine.

Ah, well. Another life.

cardboard rosetta

Rosetta is dying. She is, perhaps was, a socialite, a fainter of victorian proportion, hand to forehead, grasping for balance as each ripple shakes her well-heeled world. We will keep Charlie, her 25lb cat, who comes to sit on my desk when Rosetta is not feeling well. He spreads his bulk across my paperwork and makes himself clear, staring at me until I go check on her. I don't seriously believe in the whole cat-as-medium thing, but I believe in Charlie.

I had the wierdest dream. I dreamt that I had to share my office (recall that I don't share well, play with others, run with scissors)and it was like a secretarial pool with lots of desks, no dividers and lots of old and crabby social workers. ick. So I grabbed a chart and started leafing through it and in between the pages I found a doll, flat cardboard, tattered, long and thin, naked with godiva-long gray yarn hair and bright crytal blue eyes. As I held her in my hand, I realized she had a pulse. It was the strangest dream. I'm sure it was Rosetta.

sunrise on the island

It was an early morning on Sauvie's Island, water turned onyx in the dark, sunrise slow and persistent, under and between the clouds, layer upon layer of gray. Boats launched in the still night, small red and green lights the only evidence of their passing. As the dawn arrived, Sandhill Cranes flew overhead, giant pteradactyls, making a clicking noise as they fly. From what I hear, they fly upwards in a spiral formation until they are out of sight and head to Texas on the Jetstream. Sauvie's Island is a bird sanctuary. You can hear the geese gossiping in the trees clear across the Columbia, their numbers in the thousands, darkening the sky as they rise as one and head off to the next empty cornfield.

Barges pass, loaded with all kinds of cargo, so heavy and huge that they push the water, actually suck the water from the shore -- the river a thousand feet wide -- and as they go by, the water backfills and slaps the shore with wake after wake after wake. Occasionally, they pull out so much water that they ring the bells on the beach poles, novices running to hook a fish that isn't there. There was a seal out today, feasting on the fish we didn't, and boat people coming too close to shore for the comfort of the beach guys. Scotty throws weights at the boat people and shoots at the seals, but Scotty wasn't there today. Score one fish for the boat people.

Just as we were about to leave, one of the poles bent and hubby ran for it but lost this one. We had been napping in the truck, and I tried (valiantly) to leap out of the truck and reel in my line in case the fish ran for it and our lines got crossed up, but my foot was asleep and there was nothing I could do but shake it off and wait for the tingle to subside. By that time, all was lost.

Last night, the salmon was so good. Fried in butter with steamed rice and sauteed brussel sprouts. Best food I've had in a long long time. A sixteen pounder gave us enough steaks for 7 meals. At 9.99 a pound at Freddy's, that is a $160.00 fish. And I guess if you count fifty bucks for a fishing license plus salmon tag, gas to get out there day after day until you get one, season after season after season, Freddy's might be the better deal after all, but there ain't no sunrise at Freddy's, no cranes, no mighty columbia.

pearls

I want to write about the unit, the sadness, the insanity of it all, but the sun came out and I left work early to come home and move my tulip pots into the light, and rake dead leaves sitting too long on the back patio. I wanted to be in it. Inside Spring. I don't want to miss another one. I missed too many, too many sunny days spent inside a bathroom stall, too many moments for planting and regeneration spent in dark bars and back alleys. Too many long nights spent talking about all those things I would if only I could. And I can and I do. But that is abstract, and God is in the details.... or the devil. You decide.

A string on my harp spontaneously broke. Just up and snapped. It is repaired now, and on with the music.

It is Saturday morning, and Haley is asleep on the couch and I am not alone in my home the way I like to be, but I know that it won't be long until these girls are grown and gone, and that they also like their time alone. They are women. They need to regenerate just like I do, and for this short time, this time before take-off, we share this space. I miss my son.

Pearl doesn't care what our names are. We are pretty much all the same to her. Servants. She calls us Mira or Bobby Sue or Gilligan if she's really annoyed. She doesn't care about much but her sister. Her sister lived on the "other side" and came over each day to have dinner with Pearl. She wasn't ill, only old, and she died in the night. Pearl's family doctor made an appointment to talk to her and wanted to be the one to deliver the news. A family doctor. She's said they set him up in business years ago, and she's 90-something.

Pearl's husband died a few months ago and like most widows she misses him like a body part. "I'm too young to be left alone," she says to me. I just nod. I'm not going to remind her that she's 90. Deep down, she knows it. At the moment she's somewhere back in the days when she and Joe were dancing at O'Conley's downtown. She has that look in her eyes. "I'm a ship without a rudder," she says, sitting in her wheelchair, her sunday-go-to-meetin' leopard print mumu spreading around useless legs like frosting on a cake. She says "sunday-go-to-meetin'" as a joke. She is a modern woman still, checkered eye-glasses, chewing gum, a wicked sense of humor and appreciation for servitude.

I am up early and heading out soon. Husband is fishing. I am not. Too early, too dark and too cold for me.

Update!! first springer salmon of the season: 16 pounder, Sauvie's Island, 9:00 a.m. I don't have to figure out what we're having for dinner: salmon, rice, roasted veggies.

impermanence

We went for a drive today, out to Astoria and on up into Washington. I've never been to the places we went. I like Oregon better. I love Astoria. I'd live there. But throughout the drive, I was struck by the deterioration of wood homes. The great old houses of the 21st Century are falling apart. I mean really falling apart. The closer you get to the coast, the truer it is. What the fog and salt air doesn't get, the blackberries do. If you stand still long enough in Oregon, blackberries will consume you. Its a fact. I saw house after house slowing sinking into the landscape, becoming one with nature, tilting, sliding, gravity exacting her payment for time spent. I lived (a relative term) in this house (another relative term) in Inglewood or Inglenook or something. A small coastal town. The house was sinking into Shinglehouse Slough (thus the affordable rent) it did not have windows to speak of, black plastic covered the windows, and we had to hop across log rounds to get to and from the back door. Electricity was questionable. On an incoming tide, water would reach the floor, short circuit the kitchen, and you couldn't stand on the floor and touch the countertops at the same time. So, undaunted, we hopped chair to chair, my four year old son's memory inspired by ECT. But that was a lifetime ago.

We drove through Rainier, the town of, and I asked, innocently enough, where is Mt. Rainier? My husband laughs, is still laughing even now, and says, "Seattle." Well, why the fuck would somebody name a town Rainier if you couldn't even see it from there. And maybe on a non-cloudy day you can, but that is hardly the point. I mean, Portland is a port, and there are other more aptly named places, Ashland, for being at the base of a volcano, maybe. I can't really think of many examples, but I was a little embarrassed. And because we drove past the old Trojan nuclear plant and I said, "I thought that was in Washington," and again, the laughter. But really, if you think about it, when you're driving down I-5 from Seattle and you look off the side of the freeway and there it is, and you know damned well that you're in Washington, and that in a few miles you'll cross the fucking bridge into Oregon, well, anyone would conclude that Trojan is in Washington. But it isn't. Its in the Oregon bump. I will admit to being somewhat geographically challenged. I am easily disoriented. I hardly know where I am most of the time and have no sense of direction, but I always have enough gas and I know for sure that given enough time and petrol, that you can get anywhere from anywhere else.

And back to the impermanence of wood, why is it that eventually, once a house really begins to decompose, the owners paint it purple? I don't think it is a good house color under any circumstance, but when the shingles are rotting, the cattle have long since broken through the fences and gnawed off the windowsills, that a person would think, hey, I know what will give this place a fresh look: purple paint.

But I do love farm country. I love rolling up to a breakfast joint at about ten-thirty on a saturday morning and watch the last call babes having breakfast with Mr. Lucky. I'm mean. I admit it. Only in a small Oregon town would you see the sign: Tanning, Toning and Saw Sharpening. nuff said.


All the way out, a radio station was playing Beatles A-Z. I know this guy who picked Ringo Starr up hitchhiking outside of Vegas. I happened to mention this to my husband who knew Sherman. Sherman Parker was, and may still be, Ruch Oregon's most inert individual. He lived in a shack with a dirt floor, not because it was hip, but because he didn't notice. He did not bathe, that I know of. My husband found it far more difficult to believe that Sherman had ever left the Applegate Valley than the rural legend that he had rescued one of the Beatles from car trouble. Or that a Beatle would have car trouble at all. Sherman is alot of things, but he is no liar. He won't even drive a red, yellow or orange vehicle becasue he thinks those colors are "of the devil." He didn't always think this way, and in fact at one point was so loaded on PCP that it took him 12 hours to crawl from the garage to his house -- a total of maybe 100 feet. Usually it only took him half an hour. :)... but the Ringo story is that Sherman drove to Bakersfield -- for car parts, the only thing that motivated him-- and on the way, passed a blown up van and stopped to help. There was Ringo and some Vegas dancer and he gave them a ride into Bakersfield. It could be true. I, myself, have never seen a Beatle, but I loved them. George most of all. When I was young it was important to say which was your favorite. You had to commit.

So, that was my day. It was good to get away.

frankie

I know that I am still a young whippersnapper to Frankie. Frankie grew up in the south and is named after Frank James. Story has it that they had their last stand on her grandmother's porch. And I figure what the hell, it had to happen on somebody's porch and it could have been her's and its a good story. And I'm a liar too. Nothin' wrong with that.

So I'm leaving for the day, and I hear her yoohooing from her room, "Honey!" So I'll be Honey for a minute and I go in there. She's blind. I'm not sure why that matters, but I'm sure it matters to her.

She is crying. I sit next to her on the bed and stroke her face. "I'm old," she says, the pink satin quilt her son brought is pushed to one side and the old wool blanket is up around her chin.

And that's the thing. Was a time, many many times over, that I looked in an old woman's milky eyes and said, "Hey, you're just a spring chicken. You're lookin' good. Nothing stoppin' you!!" Only the arrogance of youth would deny what an old woman knows for certain.

This time I just said, "I know," and I held her hand. Its what I would want. She prefers the old wool blanket, but the pink satin makes her son feel better.

the dream

This morning I was reminded of my house dreams, the ones where I awaken within the dream and find that I am in the process of moving, and that somewhere along the way I have given up my home, my long time residence, for a place that seems at first glance extraordinary. It is furnished with beautiful antiques, which admittedly are a little baroque for my current tastes in furniture, but there I am wandering room to room, until it seems that all the rooms are really connected, and there are no whole walls, just unfinished framing in places, and it is dark, and the further I get into the back of the house, which seems to go on forever, I find things that belong to people: an antique hair brush and mirror set, clothes in the closet, a razor and toothbrush. And I am not alone. I come to a back room and an old woman is sitting in a rocking chair with red long-johns and I know she is the other tenant, and I have given up my privacy to live here and I can't go back.

So that is the dream.

I am working too much. I am tired. I am hungry. I am dealing with too much. But I am finally alone this weekend, and I went out this morning to find squirrely bread, which I like alot, and frozen blueberries and frozen cherries, and two perfect white long underwear shirts. I bought two because I can.

So my sweetie is fishing and I am not. And I have a day to myself, yay, to practice my harp, and straighten my world, and wander through antique shops to my heart's content. My heart's content. Yes. I will do my laundry, and not just throw the million dollar lingerie in the dryer because I'm too lazy to care for my things. Work takes on too big a piece of my mind, and I get home, and it takes a minute for things to settle back to where they belong. Home.

porch

It wasn't really warm enough, but it was a morning for cleaning and rearranging, and the overstuffed chair ended up on the porch to make room for guitars and harps and other assorted items. Nobody sat in the chair anyway. It was just a collector, something like a butler who holds out his arms for your coats, but unlike a butler, never puts them away. A catch-all, which seems to be what any semi-flat surface in my home becomes under my lack of survellience. And the only way I ever clean my house is if I rearrange it: thus, the chair moves to the porch sort of like one of those little square plastic toys with moveable squares, precursor to the rubiks cube, where you have to move the squares around in sequence, but you never get rid of anything, much like all of my acquired treasures. I've thought about this, and wondered at the underpinnings of my lack of domestic skills, the causes and conditions that have made me the crappy housekeeper I am. I've honed it to one narrow point of light: poverty.

I have moved so many times, and so quickly many of them (I once thought I'd start a company called Midnight Movers), that I may never feel permanent. I was always moving in or moving out, so cleaning always involved moving furniture. Stay with me, this may make sense eventually. That, and bad furniture. I always had free sofas that were on the verge of un-useable, consequently the sofa turnover rate was high, and I'd be replacing the last gasp of upholstered charity as the next item, often stolen from a goodwill box, was brought in (middle of the night, big men, low light), Then and only then, would I clean the space left by the old one, not out of necessity, but opportunity: There was the vacancy, full of dust bunnies (dust rabbits) toys and lost socks, begging for attention. Even I couldn't deny it.

Okay, poverty and laziness. I'll concede the point.

But that's not the point. The point is that we had breakfast on the porch and although my feet were cold, it was good to breathe the late winter air. I am a porch sitter by custom, and love to watch clinton street from my perch high above the sidewalk. I love the snatches of conversation: "...can you believe that for a family of four?" and "...pushing her bike up the middle of the street with no lights on." And the morning-after girls, in outfits that must have looked better in the dark, with uncomfortable shoes they no doubt had not planned on walking home in, uphill no less, bed-head and smeary, wishing they hadn't. I think. But I would think this.

So my love and I had breakfast on the porch, bacon and eggs and flourless, flax toast for me, potatoes and an english muffin for him.

the water is wide

Tiger Lil was humming.

Wait, let me back up.

I've been practicing my harp and am actually learning to play it. It matters to me to learn this, and surprises me (the arrogance) that there are still things I want to learn. I'm not sure if stasis is my goal, but save that thought for another day.

I am learning to read music. Rather, I read music, and am learning to play the harp correctly, not by ear. So I am actually able to play music I have never heard before. But learning this way, I am never really certain if I get it right. I have been practicing a song called "The Water is Wide" for two weeks. Because I have never heard the song played by anyone but me, I'm not really sure what it sounds like.

So there I was, getting some lunch together in the dining room, Lil singing in the background. She's a soprano. A really good soprano. But she no longer knows the names of things if you ask her. She could say it outright if it came from her stream of thoughts, but if you interrupt it, there is no recall. Just generalization.

I am filling my plate with salad and I hear this tune, this haunting melody, and I think, because I am self-centered, because I too live in my own world, that the song is in my head, that I am just hearing the notes together because I play them over and over again, day after day, and this song has become part of me. Because I don't know this song, really. I just know these notes together, and how they sound when I play them. And Lil sings on.

So I rise to consciousness, aware of the tune, and look around me. I realize Lil is humming, and I look at her and experience the frustration of knowing she is unable to answer a straightforward question, but I must know. I must.

"What is that melody?" I ask her.
She looks at me with wide nordic eyes, "I'm..." she can't even find the words to say she doesn't know.
I try to bail her out. I have to know, but I accept that she will not be able to find her words. "Is it 'The Water Is Wide'?" I ask.
Her eyes light up. "It's wonderful." She exclaims, hand to her heart, eyes seeking more information from me, begging me to tell her something she can hold for just a moment.

Because moments are all we have.

Any of us.

So we hummed the tune together, and I confirmed what I knew. And she sang a few of the words, but not many, settling for da da da da da in the loveliest soprano range. And I promised I would bring in my harp the next day, and did, and we had another moment together. And it is selfish of me to have wished that when I showed up with my harp the next morning, that she bounded across the room (at 93) to greet me, but she didn't. She just hummed, and it was another day... another moment.

But the thing is, I recognized the tune, so that means I was playing it right. I am learning. She is unlearning. I am grateful for forward life.

oscar day

We watched Babel last night. I'm sure it was great. It was certainly truthful and disturbing. The story of one gun. But I don't think I will ever like the post-modern chop of moving making. I don't like having to start and finish a minimum of three different story lines in one movie. I just love a good story. I loved Little Miss Sunshine. One story, well told.

I love the Oscars. Love the dresses and the hair. Love to see who shows up and hwo doesnt'. We've seen The Departed, but not the Queen or the Last King of Scotland. I'm not a big history fan. Just entertain me. I'm superficial. I haven't seen Blood Diamond or Dream Girls, but not for lack of trying. Just haven't found the time. We did see Pan's Labryinth, which was unexpectedly dark. We thought it was a fairy movie and took the girls. Oops. Glad they weren't five and six.

So, today is Oscar day and I will dedicate my evening to it. Today, I will look for leather furniture. I'm sick of mine. Not really sick of it, but it needs to be re-upholstered, and it would probably be cheaper to buy new. Brown leather. yummmmm.

long time gone

Brother Martin turned 82 yesterday and told me I was a treat. I love treats. He has been a monk for 55 years and pitched his last game of softball the day before he went into the monastery. He said if he would have had a better job he probably wouldn't have. I like that about him. No agenda. No big entrance fee. No drama. Just a monk. I would make a shitty monk. I hate to think of myself as high maintenance, but if my black turtleneck sweater isn't clean, I'm fucked. What I look like is way too important. Way. Consuming. Brother Martin has no look good. He carries around his hearing apparatus in a worn cardboard box, the pick-up aimed toward the audience. And I have little regard for staged simplicity: for simple shoes that cost a bzillion dollars and simple not-quite-white cotton towels that cost 28 dollar apiece, for that just right hemp bag that creates the illusion of simplicity when in fact it is high democratic costuming. I remember when I made most of my own clothes out of muslin that was 38 cents a yard. Now, the simpler the fabric, the more it costs. I'm certain there are excellent reasons for this, that slave labor and transportation isn't cheap, but it is a sellers market, and in se portland, we are so fucking homogeneous in our uniquity.

That isn't a word.

Brother Martin speaks about god with a familiarity that comforts me.

silver bullets

We went to the Bob Seger concert. What sticks in my mind now is that he seemed so happy. And not like he was happy about making a comeback, which he didn't really seem so much to be doing. He just seemed glad to still be making music and giving all of us what we came to hear: old Bob Seger music. He played everything. I danced my ass off to his music. He was never someone I followed to any degree, for instance I don't know when his birthday is like I do Paul McCartney. I never thought about him as a great musician. I don't even think he sees himself that way. But really, to consider Bob Seger with any depth of interest is to miss the point. He played really good dance music during a period of time when I danced alot. So, as he played to the gray-headed and the bald, I was just happy to be in the audience. He played a few new songs, but really, he played for us, the many for whom his value is reminiscence, not current acclaim. And there were a bunch of us. Grown ups, NPR listeners, voters, homeowners, grandparents, come for a look back at our long drawn-out, collective adolescence.

bladdered

I am so sick of this. I am so sick of having a human body. I guess the alternative is not to, so will press on. I am on the second course of antibiotics, this one with the complementary yeast infection. I am more fragile each year I live. I have done things, years of bad things, that have taken their toll. Exacted the price. Paying the piper. But generally, if I quit whining long enough to consider those in sincerely bad condition, I would feel bad for complaining.

I tore my kitchen apart yesterday. I took the bookshelf from upstairs and brought it downstairs, took all my jars of beansricenoodlesandseeds, cleaned them and arranged them nicely, one jar deep, on narrower shelves. I took the other bookshelf back upstairs the hard way. Alone. My goal, other than Martha-like organization, was visibility. I have a jar of tabouli, for instance, that I never think to use because it is hidden among the lentils. I love tabouli and may make some. Yes. I think I will. There was that era, back in the seventies, when mason jars of grain, stacked knee deep on fruit boxes, was the height of hippie organization. Well, I still have the boxes and the jars. Stuck in the 70s, that's me. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, baby.

So it is Saturday in the middle of a three day weekend. We are going to see Bob Seger tonight. Should be good. Should be a pretty gray crowd. I just want to hear "Turn the Page" and "Against the Wind." I love those songs. Drivin' music.

23rd

I drove to NW 23rd today and walked into and out of each of the shops that I was certain would have exactly what I wanted. They didn't. Not at all. There were fake sock monkeys (not made of cotton socks) and some nice things, but all in all, it was a bust. I will go upstairs and take a picture of my actual sock monkey for comparison. Or you can go online and see for yourself. Now that sock monkeys are a big freakin' craze, they've improved them. I demand authenticity. Well, most of the time. I got that sock monkey for Marky when he was barely born. He reminds me from time to time that it is his, after all, not mine. I won't give it up until I am certain he won't lose it. I traded salt-dough christmas ornaments I made for a Christmas bazar to get it. One of the women at the bazar was selling her homemade sock monkeys and we bartered. It was the in the days before money. The relative value of things has changed.

Well, without pictures, without poetry, there isn't much more to say. I am unable to describe my world.

harbinger

I heard the chirping out my window this morning, a robin, I'm sure, as happy to be closer to spring as I am. I love spring. I want to plant more stuff, get my hands in the dirt and dig in. I am never as happy as early spring and the promise of light. I am an Oregonian, and while I can endure the long gray months without complaint, and the rain with acceptance of what it takes to be green, I am always as relieved at the first sign of spring as though it might never come again, as if the seasons might just change their order and start again at fall, skip the warming for this year.

I wasn't always like this: jubilant, hopeful, peering around each corner with gleeful anticipation. Nope. Used to be the sound of birds intruded into my long day into night into another day.... That sound, that sweet one finger melody, plucking away at the robin's vocal chords, would bring daylight crashing in, reminding me of a life I had lost sight of, of unmet responsibility, a child that had to be off to school, a job I had little ability to perform; a house that needed tending, dishes still in the sink, unused broom in the corner, dust rabbits -- not bunnies -- big fucking rabbits, lurking beneath things that hadn't been moved in years.

It was a long run.

I love birds.

urban myth

I'm sure Portland has a bunch. The Rogue Valley has a couple: the Gold Hill Cemetery is haunted by a female ghost, and this: We were trying to figure out the name of a little hamburger joint in the Rogue Valley that was around 30 years ago. It was on Riverside and Edwards, and I can't remember the name. But I do remember the name of Dell's. Dell's Hamburgers made cheap, greasy little burgers with chopped lettuce and onions, mustard and dill pickles. The buns were shiny with grease. They used to be ten for a dollar, then 5, then 4, then 2 for a buck. The story, the urban myth, goes that the cook had a heart attack and died on the grill. I have no idea if it is true, but it could be.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to share that, but now that I'm gone from the valley, it concerns me that no body is going to tell the tales anymore. Nobody is going to care that the fat old lady who flipped burger at Dell's died doing it. I guess I imbue (is that a word?) myself with the abilty to immortalize via this verbal vehicle (alliteration ain't for sissies). How much wood would a wood chuck chuck? Or would I be imbuing them with immortality. Who cares? Not me.

We had a dance today on the unit. It was spontaneous, as things must be without benefit of memory. There was nothing going on so the girls put on some oldies and they just started groovin'. Since there are almost all women, and finally, women wihtout egos, they danced like women will when faced with a world without men: tapping their little white shoes to "Wait. Oh yes wait a minute Mr. Postman. Mr. Postman look and see oh yeah if there's a letter a letter for me e e" And when one of them, we'll call her Dolores, looked up and said, "Me too," it was so surprising to see her want to join in. She had a ball. We all had a ball. Egos be damned. I danced with them, three little women and me, dancing in a circle, Tiger Lil' with her head back, eyes closed, rockin' and rollin' hips remembering just what to do.

change

I bought new undies today, and pink pajama pants, and all in an effort to make me feel better. Nicole got her first job after filling out her first application. She needed shoes and stuff to start, so the shopping was on. I am still sick, although the wireless connection up here is better since moving the router a bit, and while that has little to do with wellness or illness, I am happier for it.

Here is my current list of distractions:
Harp practice
Reading mysteries
Food
Meetings about what is wrong with me
Romance
Step children
Making a yo-yo quilt
Money and how to get rid of it quickly
Work, to keep the money rollin' in

See, writing isn't even on the list.

Writing. There. I listed it. The odd thing is that I don't feel as though my writing is alive unless I post it here. I used to be of the mind that writing had to be on yellow paper (see previous post), that anything not handwritten was simply absent the Hemmingway portent. And that may be true. But I like my blog. I like this venue. It has allowed me to let go, for the most part, the notion of editing (some of you will bemoan this aspect) but really, releasing the inner editor is exhilarating. Kill the fucker. He never lets me finish anything. He has the muse tied up in the closet, duct-taped to the vacuum cleaner that never gets used in the winter, and we may not hear from her until the weather changes. She's not even fighting it. I don't think she cares any more than I do.

hmmm.

Sick as I am, I practiced my harp this morning. It is very specific--harp practice: certain fingers on certain strings at certain times in certain orders in certain arrangements of wrist and knuckles. I got through my exercises. Now I only have to do them one more time today.

Haley wants to be a fire dancer. Last week it was the banjo and a washboard. She wants those flaming things for her birthday. I'm sure we'll find some for her. A girl's gotta work.

I dropped out of the writing group. Did I already say that? I did. I just simply said, "I'm dropping out." And I got a nice letter from the nice person who kind of organized it saying she wanted to stay in touch.

sicker

No workie today. I am sitting on my sofa with Sid staring at me becasue if I am home and the sun is out, he must walk. The "W" word. We spell it or he is a pest. Truth is, it is winter and he doesn't get enough exercise chasing the ball in the kitchen. Poor Sid.

First harp lesson from Elizabeth. Very good. I hesitate to make snap judgements, (Ha!) but a better instructor, I think, than Jewel. Very descriptive of fingering style with good exercises and clear directions. But every teacher is different. I learned this about writing instructors: use a pencil and yellow legal pad only.... use the computer only for editing.... write only using an outline.... just let it fly, no outline if you are a real writer.... blah blah blah..... Jewel was the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-type, which I often prefer, but not with the harp. I want to learn it right, then break the rules. But you should see the harps. These harp teachers have a minimum of 6 harps each it seems. But Elizabeth's concert grand pedal harp is spectacular. I just hope I don't have to own one someday. It will be like my husbands bikes, boats and guitars. He is always on to the next one, always saying this is the last one I'll ever need.... but I know better. That concert grand harp is huge, and it is a pedal harp. Mine is a celtic harp, looser strung and easier to play. I was happy to learn that after buying it. So much I didn't know. And looser strung is always preferable, yes?

Maybe I will take some tylenol, bundle up and take Sid for a walk. He deserves it and I want a cup of K&F coffee to start my motor. How bad could it be? It couldn't be worse than daytime TV.