pupdate

Duffy only looks innocent.

Westie 1, Pitbull 0.

duffy

Duffy was born July 20th. He's a West Highland White Terrier. He is so much fun. Sid even thinks so, if he could just keep him from winding in and out of his legs.

flying

...by the seat of our pants. It is a travel style I am accustomed to, road tripping, planless, mapless, questless. And it used to be fine. It still is, I suppose, but we are getting a little old to be past our bedtime and not knowing where bed is.

We were scheduled, by many, to be in Southern Oregon for the Jacksonville yard sales this weekend. We do it every year. But last night we got home from work, checked the weather report and simultaneously said nooooooooooooooooo. Not 102 in Medford. Not again. Sid would be in the back of the truck, and that just wouldn't work. I nearly killed him the last time we were down there. So, adults that we are, we changed our minds. It has been our custom for several years to have breakfast at the Mustard Seed in Jacksonville, a crappy little hole in the wall with outdoor seating for family and friends. We'll do it again next year, weather permitting.

Instead we went crabbing in Netarts, where someone has grafittied an R over the N, and a d over the last t. So, we were in Retards all day friday, crabbing our brains out, frying in the reflection off the water. It was a beautiful day, but I am baked. Seriously. We crabbed with fishing pole butterfly traps. I can't explain it, except to say that crabs are tough to pull up when they dig into the sand.

When the bait was finally gone (chicken legs and delectable Willamette-beneath-the--Burnside-Bridge catfish) we headed south to Pacific City to find lodging. Well, much like Joseph, when we were working without a net a couple of weeks ago, there was an international wake boarding or jet ski competition and not a single room in the whole area. So we made it down to Lincoln City and the Sea Echo motel. As we began to fill the ice bucket, we found a syringe in it.

"How thoughtful," my husband said. "They thought of everything!"

"Damned diabetics," I countered. "Always leaving their equipment laying around for the children to play with."

So, with some trepidation, I look forward to some aloe lotion and a good night's sleep. The Pakistanis are having pizza two doors down, and the ocean laps against the shore too far away for me to hear, but I'm too tired to care.

bonnie

One of the very few things I've missed about the Rogue Valley since moving to Portland is the Britt Festival. Britt and my son. And my girlfriends.

Not only did I move far away from Jacksonville, but my hookup for tickets doesn't even work for Britt anymore, so it would have been pay as you go had I stayed, which I wouldn't have. Anyway, I bought tickets to see Bonnie Raitt at McMennamin's Edgefield, not knowing what the venue was like. Happily, it was just like Britt. Outdoors, sloping grass, blankets and boozing yuppies.

We were pretty much on time. The tickets said 5:00. We figured it was an early concert so all of us aging boomers could be in bed by nine. But it was only the gates that opened at 5:00. Being a first-timer, I didn't realize it was really almost completely like Britt, even in the not-so-great ways. Like the line. And line-sitting behavior. I'm not sure how much space I've taken up in this little diary discussing line behavior and my attitudes about it, but really, there are certain types, and they can be irritating. And concert behavior. That too. Anyway, as we approached the venue, it was clear we would be standing in line. Way way way back in line. Bucking up, we trekked past the people who had been sitting all day, earning their places, wishing we had known. But we have these pesky jobs. So there wasn't much we could have done except the Britt-inspired idea of paying someone to sit in line for us.

No need.

I heard someone shout, "Judy!" I just kept walking because I am invisible. No one knows me. I'm a stranger here. "Judy," the voice called again. I turned. "Hey, its Bob." I said. And it was. This guy we hardly know, who hardly knows us, knew my name. "We can't take cuts," I said, taking cuts. It was blatant. Sue me.

We got a great place right on the cusp of the lawn with a great view of the stage for "The BonTag Roulet," a Louisiana inspired tour with Taj Mahal. He seemed less like I remembered. It was only when he sang with Bonnie that he became again the old Mississippi blues man.

At concernts, I often notice drunk people. I sometimes envy them, but this evening, a woman who seemed to be having more fun than I've ever had, came tripping back from the outhouses with a two-foot long tail of toilet paper hanging from beneath her skirt. Laughing it off, she shouted to the crowd, "I'll never wipe again." A nice image.

So we tossed out our blankie and my low chair and got all set up. It was McMennamins, so the food was bound to be good. You can't bring in your own picnic like at Britt, so we had pulled-pork sandwiches with coleslaw. Yum. And two dollar water. God that pisses me off. We spent six bucks on water and that is the one thing you CAN bring in. Next time.

So, we sat down in our perfect place, on a school night, under the rising full moon, the audience a sea of gray hair, and like good white people, did not get up to dance until the bitter end. It was also like Britt in that if you DO get up off your lily-white ass and move, some dried-up schoolteacher behind you will tell you to stay seated so she can see. She will explain to you ad nauseum the decorum of open air seating. Amy-fucking-Vanderbilt. She was there. I saw her in action, Eddie Bauer long-shorts, waving her pointy little finger in Liz's face. Liz could have kicked her ass easy, but it just wasn't an ass-kicking kinda deal. Which begs the question: was there ever? Or were we just out there kicking ass for no reason?

I should clarify that I never specifically kicked anyone's ass. That I remember.

But come the bitter end, we danced and danced and danced. Listening to Bonnie sing "Angel from Montgomery" right there. Oh boy. That was a spiritual experience for me. She didn't do "Love Me Like a Man," but you can't have everything, can you?

quilt update

Not to be outdone, I went to Fabric Depot and bought two rotary cutters, two plastic grids and a self-healing cutting mat. I am a real quilter.

the quilt

Without going into agonizing detail, I am working on a quilt. Its a work thing. The finished quilt square will be 8 feet by 8 feet and will be part of the Alzheimer's Quilt to Remember. Like the AIDS quilt, only not.

So, I've gone to great effort to design this quilt, to purchase the fabric at Fabric Depot on the first day of their 40% off sale when every seamstress in the metro area shows up to stock up. I spent hours selecting fabric, another hour standing in line. I solicited photographs of Jan, the woman we are honoring in the quilt, a woman who has lived with the disease for probably 15 years, has been in a locked unit for eight, has been bed-bound three of the eight.

Tough woman. Tougher disease.

So, I get my husband to make digital photos of the originals of Jan as a baby, a child, a beautiful young woman, a bride, a wife... and print them, magically, from my computer right onto fabric squares.

Now, it is time to cut the fabric.

This is all happening at an assisted living facility, old women with fading eyes and shaking hands cutting fabric and trying to follow a pattern, saying things like, "This is old hat to me." and "Where's the line? I can't see it." I kept telling them, "Hey, no big deal. If it isn't perfect, we'll sew different sized seams and it will all come out in the wash." Me and Jan's daughter marked the lines on the fabric and the old women did the cutting. I was working without a net, as usual, nervous about letting the project get away from me, cutting the fabric badly, having to find more, or god help me, different stuff if they wrecked it.

But they didn't. They did great. Just great. That is, until the REAL quilters arrived. Real quilters, equipped with rotary cutters and transparent plastic grid-sheets. My handmade, tape edged templates were no longer enough.

I started hearing things like, "Some of these squares are a quarter-inch off!" It made me nervous. We kept on cutting, thanking the old women, encouraging them, telling them its fine, don't worry. The real quilters kept complaining about our inaccuracy, finally saying, "Its the markers, not the cutters." And the final blow, "You're honoring your mother with this quilt, I'd think you'd want straight squares."

We were the markers. It was our fault. We had ruined the project. We had dishonored Jan.

Not really.

No, the real quilters stayed on and straightened every single edge of every single square. I was impressed. I did not even mention medication or OCD. Not even once. I thanked them profusely and know they will hang with me to the end of the project, because that's what real quilters do.

visitation

A white dove settled on the air conditioning unit outside my office all morning yesterday. It was so beautiful, pure white with a black tail. I wonder where she went? I wonder what it means?

weezer

We been drivin' for days.

We took off Friday night for Weiser to watch Haley graduate from a Northwest Youth Corps back country session for the fifth or sixth time. We stayed the first night in Baker City at a crappy motel and left early for Weiser. This time the ceremony was outside in the blazing eastern sun near Mann Creek Reservoir. I've always wanted to see Weiser, home of the fiddle championships. It isn't much, an old Idaho town, old houses, no money for paint.

I also love Weezer's song Island in the Sun.... we'll never feel bad anymore. hip hip.

The drive over was pretty much how the drive is from Portland to LaGrande: beautiful at first as we drove through the gorge, then fascinating as we approached The Nothing--that great flat quilt of parched land rolling out beyond the turn in the river where the Mighty Columbia heads for the ocean at Umatilla or Hermiston or something and leaves Oregon to die of thirst. From then, well, staying awake was the task. New wind farms have sprouted up along either side of 84, strange plantations, the Washington windmills visible only from Oregon and vice versa. They are cartoonishly large, with generators the size of a schoolbus sitting atop towers well over two hundred feet tall. Occasionally we came upon one visible from the road, shockingly white against the perfect blue sky, propellers twirling slowly in a steady wind in a 154 foot swath. It was hard not to stare.

Once we were done in Weiser, we headed for Caldwell Idaho to visit my neice. They have a lovely small farm on the outskirts. Idaho looked like I expected Idaho to look. I've seen the panhandle, but never south. Rural. White. Republican. Cassie explained all that to me in advance. But being from Southern Oregon, and lily white, I would have been right at home.

After visiting Cassie and Mike, we took off for northeastern Oregon, home of the beautiful Wallowa Valley, which seems a generous reward for enduring The Nothing. We passed through part of Hell's Canyon and into the green green grass of Joseph at sunset. Because this was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants road trip, no advance reservations were made and there was a big ol' bike rally in Joseph and no lodging in the entire county except Minam. We'd heard it was a Bates Motel, so we drove all the way back to LaGrande to get a room.

So, we came back home along the Washington side, stopping only at the pretend Stonehenge which is actually a WWII monument with an inscription on the sacrificial altar that read something like, "blah blah blah...and the fire of patriotism that only death can quench." What -- really? Only death? Not even an Original Reed's Ginger Brew?

And what does stonehenge have to do with WWII?

And now my husband, doomsayer that he is, is looking at video clips of windmills exploding in flames and coming apart in a stiff wind. Geez. It is good to be home.

on blackberries

After two days of blackberry picking, netting probably five gallons of berries, enough for five gallon-size freezer bags, ten jars of freezer jam and two gigantic blackberry milkshakes, I have a few observations to share.

Is blackberry picking a lost art? Where are the blackberry pickers? In this economy, its a no-brainer. In Southern Oregon, where people still realize that berries actually grow out of the actual ground, there are people lining the roads in 110 degree weather, boards underarm, going to their favorite spots.

Seriously. You pay five bucks for a teaspoon of blackberries at Freddy's - and I'll admit, they're fat and pretty and you don't have to change clothes to get them and you're typically not wounded in the process unless you cut in line or use the parking lot of the 39th and Hawthorne location, but really, why NOT pick blackberries? They're free. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before, but I knew a guy once who planted blackberries in his front yard. Now that is begging for trouble if you ask me. Hand in hand with cockroaches, blackberries will suvive human occupation. I've seen them consume houses, cars, neighborhoods.

And there is significant difference between country picking and city picking. If you see previous posts, you'll learn about the first time I picked blackberries in Portland. It was an event. I got lost in Oaks Bottom. It is my husband's second fondest wish to have blackberry pie for his birthday and I didn't know where to look. The next year, I took my husband with me, and it was a little scary down in there with homeless folks that were napping or dead, but the berries were great. Then, we found this place way down at the far end of front street in the industrial district way out toward Linnton and it was good, some evidence of homeless folks, but not like being trapped in Oaks Bottom in the damp and dark. So we went back there this year and they'd mowed or poisoned all the berries and they were gone, and the people were gone, too. This year we picked out in Hillsboro along a forgotton road, kind of a perverse Lover's Lane/slash/city dump, with old sofas and porn magazines. Nasty. But the berries were great and easy picking what with my knee injury and being like standing on a pegleg pitching headlong into the briars.

I miss picking berries on the Applegate River. I miss knowing the places of fat berries near water. Berries that are firm and juicy and don't fall apart in your hand. I miss the winding road, the sound of larks and sandpipers protecting their nests along the beach, flat stones perfect for skipping; the low August river rolling warm over tumbled rocks; the absence of fear and imbalance.

Youth.

You do have to know what to look for. For instance, there is a gloss to berries, and if the gloss is gone, the berry is over-ripe. And fatter is not always better. And there is an art to just picking. My husband tends to look up and over the tops of the bushes, to places he could never reach if he was seven feet tall, always in search of the perfect spot. Me? I just pick along the road, slowly, deliberately, going after low berries and the forgotten ones at waist level. You should not have to pull on them, but to gently roll them off the vine and into your hand. And don't get greedy. Don't drop a handful trying to fit just one more into your palm. Put them in the bucket. And don't set the bucket on uneven ground. Trust me on this. I use a cut out milk jug that has less chance of spilling.

There are a couple of things to bring: a board, a long sleeved shirt and wet rags. The board is to lay down and walk into deeper berries (once you've exhausted all the low berries.) The wet rag, well, take my word for it --when you're done picking, you'll know what to do with it. The shirt, for protection. But I think you can go faster if you don't wear a shirt and are careful. The shirt hangs up on the thorns and impedes the whole process. I don't mean shirtless for god's sake. Just sleeveless. And brave.

So, if you want some pie, say so. I have enough to make a few.

posting blues

Well, you'll have to take my word for it. My garden is luscious. It is bursting with squash and tomatoes and peppers and peas and cucumbers and lilies and pansies and nasturtium and morninglory and sunflowers and these red things that asia knows the name of and my veggie table is full of free food, but the photo posting thing won't work so you'll just have to wait.

thanks for waiting.

picnixed

In my former life, in my former town, I knew how to have a picnic. I'd hop in the truck, grab some cheese and crackers and reed's ginger brew, original, and head up the river. I knew the good places where nobody knows, private land, deep green holes like bathwater in August. But I don't know these rivers. I can't find a private place for a picnic. Now, it is my mission to figure this out. I don't want to go too far and I don't want to hang out with the throbbing metropolis. I just want to have a picnic. Period.

Today I drove out to Oxbow Park in Gresham. I'm not sure, but I think it was the Sandy River. It was alright. I found a nice table overlooking the river and read for awhile. I don't know, right now, if you can achieve privacy here in the big city. But on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm giving Oxbow Park a lukewarm 6 for a couple of reasons: number one: it is my first graded park and I wouldn't feel right giving it high marks when there is nothing to compare it with. I won't even consider Lewis and Clark or Blue Lake Park or Dabney Park which were packed with young drunk people who couldn't drive well and the grass is brown. And two: you can't even bring your dog. And truthfully, I don't care if you can't bring your dog, I care that I can't bring my dog. My dog is at least entertaining and not mean.

So there you have it: Park #1 Oxbow a rating of 6 on the picnicable scale.

My knee is better, for those of you keeping up. Torn meniscus. No dancing.

heat wave

The pool is up. Isn't it blue?

blown

For those of you who have been so kind and supportive during this plague of a year, I am here to report that it isn't quite over. I know I know: think positive.

So there I was, thinking positive, accompanying my husband on a birthday ride down to Todai, the asian buffet, where he gets a free birthday dinner and I get to pay a fortune for mine. I was getting off the motorcycle, still thinking positive, and made the little hop I usually do when climbing off the back of the bike. I'd done the same thing just this morning. But something went wrong. I heard a tear and a snap, kind of a ripping sound accompanied by severe pain and screaming -- well, it was actually yelling and pissing my pants. Now, I love my new white pants which I should not have been motorcycle riding in anyway, and was more concerned with needing to rinse them out and what will people think? but my attention was quickly and brutally yanked from vanity to pain.

"Not good," I said. "This is very very bad." I think I kept saying this because my husband sort of kept looking at me. I suppose I was in shock. So, I asked him to get off the bike (the passenger always gets off first and then the driver) so I could throw my good leg around and get off the bike. I made it and off we gimped into Todai, my loving husband offering to walk something like quasimoto so I wouldn't feel alone. I couldn't eat, really. I finally know what it takes to make me lose my appetite. And they were out of vanilla soft serve and hardly had any creme brulee so whatever.

As we left, I had to take three flights of escalators down -- up hadn't been so bad -- and that was terrifying. I couldn't commit easily. The little stairs seemed to be going at mach speed and I had to choose one. Just one to put my one good leg on. And if I put my weight on the handrails, they'd jerk me forward. Jeez.

So, finally I made it down. I could see out on street level some homeless people begging on the street. One of them, I thought it was a young boy, had a cane. "Hey, let's knock over that kid and take his cane," I said, altruistically. When we got through the double doors, I saw it was a woman. She asked us for money. My husband said, "Let us use your cane to get across the street and I will." So Sharon Moore, aka "Little Mama" let me use her cane and her shoulder, which was about 4 feet high. She went on and on about helping each other and I couldn't disagree. She saved my ass tonight and he gave her some money.

So, I managed to get back on the motorcycle and made it home, off the bike, up the stairs and into my house where I am happy to be at last. I will find out what is wrong on wednesday when I see the orthopedist if I live that long. Think positive.

So, there you have it. The update from the sickroom. Although to be more precise, I am not sick. I feel terrific thanks to vitamin D, my knee is just really really painful right now. I know now what people mean when they say "I blew out my knee." That is exactly what it feels like.

brother, interrupted

My eldest brother told me that in the early days of television he and the next eldest brother would sit in front of this test pattern for hours waiting for programs to start. "Once the show came on, we were lost." All of my life I remember him watching TV, keeping it on for noise, for company. I remember complaining about how he kept it on all the time almost no matter what kind of crap was playing, sleeping through days and days of tv. I didn't know about the test pattern. I wasn't there yet.

I started out with three brothers. I was the first girl born after them, all in a row, and I'll admit, I wasn't much of a girl - that frilly stuff was left to my sister. I was a tomboy, my formative years spent in tree houses, walking along moss-lined ditches fishing for muskrats, jumping from haylofts and chasing errant cows that wandered into the endless field that was our backyard.

I admired my brothers, each one different: the architect, the vietnam vet and the fisherman. Only the fisherman remains.... A stroke nearly took him last year but he survived it. Most of him, anyway. He is/was/will always be a fisherman, a storyteller, a notorious drunk, a politico, a basket weaver and a painter.




He and his wife and the other artists from Port Orford have a show at the Jacobs Gallery at the Hult Center in Eugene. We drove down to see the show last night.

When I crossed the entry to the gallery, he did not recognize me. This is the first time in my life that this has happened with a family member. I deal with this every day at work and just now it seems a curse that I know what it means, what is required of me now, that I introduce myself to my brother as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Now, he knew me, of course, once I got closer, but it was unnerving just the same, all the more for my experience. I sat down next to him, claiming my territory, my family. I wanted to wring the old stories out of him-- me the scribe, him the teller-- as though they were so many grains of sand slipping through my fingers. I wanted him to talk and talk and talk and regale us all with tales of the sea, of pulling out of Astoria in a fifty-foot steel-hulled boat in dense fog, radar beeping so wildly he thought it was broken, and when the fog lifted, finding himself surrounded with hundreds of small boats in the middle of some kind of regatta day, and the boats wouldn'tcouldn'tdidn't get out of his way. I wanted to hear the one about the last tuna trip of the season when he almost didn't make it back in. I wanted to hear stories of my father because he's the only one who knows these things now, he is the only one with the memories of my family. And he is beginning not so much to forget as to stop talking. He was so quiet. So so quiet. I have tried to write down as much as I could, as I can, but there is so much, and I am so much younger than him.

These moments of transition, of sinking awareness that we are all little more than that box of photographs at a yard sale who nobody knows, unkept memories, unrecorded history. I am torn between becoming a genealologist and knowing this didn't save my aunt from forgetting when I visited her and she walked me around her dining room that had not changed in fifty years and we looked at the pictures on the walls, her life's work, and she said, "I used to know these people."

In the punctuated equilibrium that is my life, seeing Doug not see me was a moment of some weight. These times come, and for a short time I am acutely aware of my mortality, of the passage of time, the transient nature of it all. My brother has settled with characteristic grace into his new incarnation largely due to his remarkable wife who seems to float through life without judgment or expectation. The heaviness of the moment will pass, and I will return to my day to day passage, forgetting that I, too, am temporary.

Life is good.

lulabelle

I don't know why I call them these silly names. But I called her Lulabelle to her face. She passed today at about noon. It was pretty calm and quiet and her sister came to sit with her. She called me her pet. She loved my husband and said she would steal him from me if she had the chance. He came by on his motorcycle once, at her request, and she was smitten. She referred to herself as a bigshot, a successful business woman who never married, never had children. She was tall, thin as a communion wafer, and she loved pills -- never had any trouble getting her to take her meds.

I say these things, tongue in cheek, but Lou was my friend. I'll miss her. I'll miss talking to her about work, about home, about her life and mine. She had lost her memory but not her mind. big difference.

glory 602

I plant the flowers, he takes the pictures. This one is spectacular. Spent backyard time with a a &t. There's nothing like girlfriends.

601

Maybe I'll just start numbering them.





I am painting the honor table and looking forward to coffee with the a's tomorrow. two a's and a little t.







I really need to finish the table because the zuchinni is happening and we can't possibly eat it all. People walk by all day with comments such as, "Lovely harvest." Things like that. I'm from the country. People used to say stuff more like, "Whaddya gonna do with all that shit?" Farm lingo. Good ol' country folk. This urban gardening will have its own language, I'm sure. Everyone is thrilled that I will singlehandedly feed the homeless with six squash and two tomatoes and a few spiny cucumbers, but what can I tell them? I don't want people out in my yard, thus, the table. Isn't it pretty? It isn't quite done yet, but tomorrow...

600th post

Bluesky celebrates 600 posts since its inception in january of 2004. So, five and a half years, that's, let's see, about 110 posts per year on average.

What I can and do celebrate is doing something continuously, like keeping the same phone number or address. My 600th post is further evidence of stability, something I both seek and detest. I tolerate the absence of chaos like a skinless animal in hot sun. I know it is a nasty image, but this is how I'm feeling this morning. I see homeless people wandering my street and think they have it made. When I moved every six months or so-- no notice, outstanding bills-- life was so difficult, but I knew what to do. I knew how to do poverty with flourish. But this nice life? Ah, retrospection. Everything looks better in the rearview mirror. Remember those station wagons with the seat facing backward? I liked sitting there.

garden update

Yellow lily along the center of the house.

Squash and sunflowers

Green tomatoes

One fine pink lily, the photograph nearly as impressive as the flower.

Thought I'd post some midsummer pictures of the urban garden. We are dining from it each evening: squash and lettuce, jalapenos and peas. I made basil oil today by blanching the basil and drying it, then blending it with olive oil and freezing for use in soups and sauces. Yummy. I'm working on the honor table, as asha calls it. It will be a thing of beauty, strapped to the raywood ash tree in front of my house in the event someone doesn't fully grasp the concept of honor. Heaven knows it eludes me from time to time.

alaskan food

Okay, so I've included a shot of The intersection of the Seward Highway and the road to Soldotna; downtown Homer; Kurt's dad on the boat; overlooking Cook Inlet; Kurt with the big(gest) fish; a Russian Orthodox church in Ninilchik.

So, with a freezer full of halibut and salmon, our choices are unlimited. Unafraid of failure, we take chances. He takes chances. Grilled halibut and salmon with currants and lemon pepper.

Wow. The halibut was amazing. The salmon was good, but the steak a bit too thick to cook properly on the grill. But the halibut, and veggies from our garden and brown rice..mmmmmmmmmmmmm. It was a very very good dinner. Rice and fish, fish and rice.

We eat well.