mail

All of my adult life, which began in earnest at about forty or so, I have been plagued by mail. It comes, every day, unsolicited piles of it, each piece demanding my time and attention, neither of which I have to spare. Avoidance, however, is more time consuming, mentally and physically, shifting uneven piles of shit from one place to the next, purchasing yet another plastic box to store it in until I have time to deal with it. The illusion of organization, always just out of reach.

Now, "dealing with it" just isn't that hard. I know this. I know I know I know. All I would have to do is to hold each piece in my hand, identify it, open it, scan the contents, and ususally, toss it. but do I do this? I do not. I wait months, years even, to go through boxes and bags marked "later" and "even later than that."

I'm exaggerating, as usual.

But I used to. I used to have mail bags big as the Pony Express. Great heaving sacks of unopened mail: bills, notices, refunds, advertising... you know. At one point I asked my old friend Vivian to sit with me while I opened all of it I was so scared of what I might find. There were bills, of course, but I remember one check for 85 bucks that I really needed, a refund from the electric company of all places. But the thing about the electric company is that if you don't open their bills, they'll just eventually come to your door and bring it to you in person. That was a pretty long time ago, but it was, for me, disincentive to open my mail. Or pay my bill for that matter, but that's another story for another time.

I have always been good about reading letters. And writing them. I love letters. I like email okay, but really, I miss 13 page letters from Lorretta on scraps of paper and beautiful stationery. It was kind of like a competition to see who could find the most interesting paper. I was a good letter-writer. So was Joyce, my sister in law. We wrote piles of letters back and forth rather than picking up the phone. Now, all I get is an email from time to time. And the rare phone call.

What's the point? I do have one. I just plowed through a pile of mail and it was all just crap, and I'd been avoiding it for two years, just moving it here and there, dedicating a drawer to it, a nice wooden box. But I couldn't just throw it away. I had to do my time, give it its due. Because in my piles, there are bits of writing, some of it good; there were 100 dollar bills with GW Bush's face on them, and old photographs of my neice's kids, and a great recipe for lemon curd, so I can't just toss the pearls out with the paper.

Finally getting through the pile always makes me feel like cleaning house. Freedom. but instead of cleaning, I saved my gardening overalls for another year. I sewed on about ten more patches over the patches from last year, so they should be good for awhile. They are my favorite pants. I actually wore them out of the yard today and got a few looks, but who cares. They have character.

Gardening update: Tomorrow is fuschia saturday at Freddy's. I'm taking five pots. I'm being somewhat conservative because I am also taking pots from work. I don't want to seem over-eager.

The big bowl I made last year -- the one with spring bulbs, didn't make it through the winter. I think they froze and rotted. Truth be told, they didn't do all that well over the summer. When I dug into it, the bulbs were all just gooey white muck. I replanted it with these trailing flowers, kind of a cross between evening primrose and petunias, only smaller. Orange and purple. Should be pretty. And although I built a handmade pea trellis, I found a nicer one for pretty cheap, so replaced it. It is bamboo, stretchy, and not so tall.

death of scrabble

He is gone, Alfred Mosher Butts, the creator of Scrabble, whose name, anagrammed, spells: "board flusters them". I learned this on the Sunday Morning Show and called my friend Madonna -- my scrabble partner for years. Although I know "q" words that don't need a "u", am damn good at triples and am known to pull out of a slump and make an eighty-pointer late in the game, I am not a tournament quality player. I do miss the game, though.

mmmmmmmmmmmmm

I made kabobs, or, more accurately, kebabs, for dinner. I also made white sticky rice with almonds and green onions and little individual cheesecakes for dessert. Tiny little cheesecakes with a vanilla wafer for the crust and white chocolate on top. (see previous post). I love kebabs because in the mix were 3 vegetarians and 3 carnivores and the veggies each at a different level of dedication. I just cut up bowls of marinated shrimp, beef, zuchinni, cherry toms, red onion, peppers, mushrooms and pineapple and let them go at it. The grill is big enough that the beef can stay on one side and not contaminate the other.

Grilled fresh pineapple is candy.

It was good to see my neice. She is, by far, just about my favorite family member. Just enough of a mess to feel the kinship of common suffering. We were talking about days at the beach -- the beach at McKee Bridge in Southern Oregon. Her mother and I so hammered we couldn't find the gearshift knob to drive home. We'd lay there all day, drinking cheap whiskey, smoking good weed and eating whites. We were so tan. It was our job to get dark. As an afterthought, we'd feed her two children (my son was not yet born). Their sandwiches were layers of white bread, sand, bologna, sand, butter, catsup and white bread. I made it very clear that the catsup was not my idea. Or the butter, for that matter. Then, having done our duty, we would lay back in the blistering sun, moving the blanket eastward as the sun went behind the mountains. The drive home was braille and blind luck. All of our children are lucky to be alive.

hypochondrial suicide

I give up. Now, in a long line of ailments, add a pinched nerve in my cervical spine that is causing my left arm to go numb. At least that's what I think. Again, I await diagnosis and relief as my left arm hangs at my side, buzzing like it has fallen asleep and can't get up. It isn't a heart attack. this much I know.

Whoever said getting old ain't for sissies wasn't kidding. And here's the thing -- in my mind, my body may be aging, but I'm not. The line I draw between my body and my mind is a serious problem. In the immortal words of Bob Earl: "My mind thinks it can kill my body and go on..." In my world, I can continue to live a sedentary life, eat anything that strikes my fancy, gain weight, compromise joint after joint -- knee, shoulder, neck... and the only thing that seems like a serious problem is the sad fact that I can't wear my favorite spring clothes. I remember the quote from Postcards From the Edge, as the main character is hospitalized for a suicide attempt. "Well," she said to the admitting nurse, "My behavior may be suicidal, but I'm not."

Amen.

I apologize to my friends, my readers, the gang of women who encourage me, who love me anyway; to my husband, who is blind to my many defects. This has become the diary of a fat housewife, an aging woman who has lost control of the wheel, whose body had tipped some magic balance and is sliding headlong for disability. I joke about this shit, but I do not change. I am hostage to advertisers and appetite, to fast food and excess. To the fourth meal. And the fifth.

It is a beautifuld day in Portland. I planted pansies and grace ward lithodora and coral bells. My neice and her family are coming for dinner and my husband is fishing. I am alone with the refrigerator. A deadly situation.

breaking news

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I hate the news. If I hear one more tagline that goes something like, "...and all that remained was the sound of lapping waves, and they aren't talking." I swear, I'll puke.

Since when is Victorian prose a requirement? Since when are sappy metaphors a substitute for information? Somebody kill somebody quick, or pass healthcare. Something. Anything. Give the morons something else to do.

duffy's baby picture

Is this a cute puppy or what? Now, five months later, chew marks on every table leg and piss spots on my Pottery Barn carpet, he is still a little cute.

Now where was I? It has been a long fucking winter. Not weather-wise, just gray and dreary for oh-so-long. Kurt says he thinks he has SAD. I said maybe its more like MAD. But we knew this going in.

My only complaint is probably the opposite of the rest of the country: I'm sick of working. I don't want to work. I never did. Review my life. But I have worked, and consistently in the same dreary field that inspires dismal prose the likes of which I rarely compose anymore. A list of who has died would be long and pointless. Right now, on the unit, they are relatively wellish, up and walking (or ambulating, as we say in the trade) and never a day passes without a good laugh. I think my favorite was when I was applying my skills redirecting a man who was confused. He thought he had lost his car (hasn't driven in years) needed to go to work (likewise) and I said, with a certain amount of professional brio, "Are you feeling anxious?"

Then, he answered, "Not until you started asking."

Well, flattened and humbled, we went for a walk, which is what I should have done in the first place. How would he know if he was anxious? He doesn't know who he is, let alone how he is.

(My husband just started playing the youtube of Janis singing Summertime live, arguably one of the finest musical moments in my life. Her life. Our lives. Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Yes.)


We just got back from seeing Alice in Wonderland in 3D. It was pretty fun. Still haven't seen Avatar and have no real desire to. Not a sci-fi buff. And I'm not a Johnny Depp fan except for his Keith Richards interpretation, but I do love the classics.

As I was sitting in the movie, I thought about my life -- it IS all about me -- and the rabbit hole of my decision to move to Portland. There are times when I look back on the life that was: my eternal, unstably-stable first-half, and the wonderland that is my life today. I know it is a sappy thing to say, but who gets to start life over at 50? Anyone who wants to, I suppose, but I did. And although the bumps in the road have required some heavy lifting, we have done it together. And the question is, who is the real Alice?

I am.

A side note: Wouldn't it suck to be known as the chia pet bandit? I mean really. Is his hair green? Is his head shaped like a hedgehog? I'm just wondering.

oops

I blog along in relative obscurity, happily assuming my exaggerations and blathering go unnoticed but for the loyal few.

Not necessarily so. Enter Blogger alerts.

In the previous post I reviewed a Valentine's Eve performance by a female singer and noted that she looked like a librarian. Imagine my surprise when her comment posted. Apparently this was not the first time she was referred to as more studious than hip.

Not that studious isn't hip. That's not the point.

What is the point? Well, if you've been following this mess, you'll know I rarely have one. So, I found her website and emailed an apology and she forgave my faux pas. I had said that she was worth the price of admission, and that was definitely true. She was great. I was embarrassed, but happy to add another reader to the short list.

vd

I used to try to think of clever -- or at least germane -- titles for each post. At one point I began numbering them. That didn't last long. I'm now down to initials.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Last night we went not dancing, (see previous post) but out, nonetheless, to listen to some blues. My favorite thing to do other than a drive through the gorge, which isn't as fun at night. Last weekend, still in knee denial, we drove through the gorge and hiked down to Bridal Veil Falls. I love that. My knee, on the other hand, did not. I paid dearly for that little 2/3 of a mile. Duffy pulled me back up the trail.

Anyway, last night we went out to Oregon City to this crappy little bar we like (Trail's End Saloon) and a woman named Mary Flower opened the evening. She looked like any librarian in any real library (not the wanna-look-like-a-betty-page-librarian-black-hair -short-bangs-hornrimmed-stripey-socks-se portland girls) but she played acoustic muddy waters type blues. Old Mississippi real blues. What gets me are the cover bands, the bar bands, that bill themselves as blues bands but really just play the same three chords and wear sunglasses and red fedoras. That's what came after Mary Flower. Boogie Bone. Well, since my bones cannot boogie just now, we went home early, but well past our bedtime. But Mary was worth the price of admission, which wasn't much. She even played bottleneck slide.

This morning it was red roses and breakfast out with my sweetie.

mri

This coming Monday I am having an MRI to establish, to my surgeon's satisfaction once and for all, what is wrong with my knee. Again. Still. He kept saying the things that Dr's say to me. You know, the eat-right-get-more-exercise shit. Then he said it was probably gout. But I'm not a rich man so it can't be that. The things they say to fifty-something overweight women like me. He kept saying, I think this is a soft-tissue situation, which, interpreted, means something like this: "You're too fat and you've ruined your knee but if you want to do some physical therapy which I know you won't follow through with, you're welcome to waste your time. Eventually you'll be the obese lady in the Jazzy in Winco with Doritos and HoHos in the basket, but go ahead, try to change your fate." Or something like that. In November -- November. That's three fucking months ago -- My regular MD sent me to a physical therapist who charged me three grand to put ice on my knee and ultrasound it while he told me stories about celebrity sightings in Vegas and how really nice Jerry Lewis was to some guy he knew. Three grand. And he told repetitive jokes, like: What did the salmon say when he ran into a rock while he was swimming upstream? Dam.

Yeah. Three grand.

Anyway. I saw this surgeon again on Wednesday and he said, "I could try one more thing to figure out what the problem is." I said, I don't care if you stick pins in my eyes. I'm over it. My knee has hurt for so long I can't remember what its like to have two legs.

So he says, "I'm going to stick a (huge) needle full of novocaine in your knee. If it stops hurting, the knee itself is the problem. If not, its a soft tissue injury and (see above)." So I say, okay. Fine. Needles and me go way back.

So he does and it stops hurting, like immediately. Like completely. Like for about two hours I had both legs actually working. Oh it was so nice.

Now this is both good news and bad. Good that we can find out what is wrong. Bad that surgery may be in order. I don't much care.

Wasn't that interesting?

ghd

asha is in town and because asia is in the midst of home revival, we were allowed a slumber party at my house last night. What joy to sleep in and spend the morning with my friend. I am sick, and home at my doctor's bidding, but still and all, it was a timely visit for us both, I think. The chatter was wonderful and welcome and so so missed. There is nothing like a good girl friend and lots of catching up to do. That she is a writer, and prods me to produce, is icing on the cake. We all need a push. I was invited to join a writing group, but you have to pay to be in it, and there is a leader or someone who is the identified "writer" and I can't imagine paying. That is, beyond the bzillion dollars for that oh-so-useful master's degree. There was that. We had a late breakfast at Cup&Saucer on Hawthorne. I had french toast. I'm sick. I can have whatever I want. After breakfast, asia arrived and took my friend away to babysit her adorable grandaughter Thea.

I always try to post something on Groundhog's Day. It has been an important event at different times in my life, when I needed a reason to celebrate in the middle of a long, gray winter. Today, the hog must have seen his shadow, although I was not in Nebraska or Kansas or wherever flatlander's find prairie dogs. I think that's what a ground hog is, isn't it?

Today, the view up and down Clinton Street was bright, my home embarrassingly unprepared for the legions of walker and bicyclists. My dogshit yard and naked chickenwire fencing stood unadorned, absent summer's tendrils of tomato and nasturtium, ripped from the sodden ground after freezing, seeds falling here and there, willing to endure winter's face-slap, that scolding time that ensures a certain reverence for days like this, even if the shadow promises another six weeks. We delight in these fickle days that remind us of times to come, times to prepare for. The liar days of winter, where the light is not warm, but reminiscent of it; where the dark comes too soon anyway.

reuben

Tonight, its dinner with Haley at the Barleymill Pub on Hawthorne and 21st. He's bringing me home a reuben. Sounds fine. I feel like I may live after all. Today I spent half the day in the Drs office and had a chest xray. I'm fine. Just sick, as usual.

It is Friday night and I want to rent movies. Instead, we went to a Hollywood Video store that is closing and bought 65.00 worth of old movies. Watching "The Morning After" with Jeff Bridges and Jane Fonda. Next, the Stones new documentary by Scorsesi and "Love in the Time of Cholera" and Little Miss Sunshine and Mystic Pizza. Then maybe I can find the strength to go back to work.

boredom

I was watching Rachel Ray make fish tacos after watching Paula the Southern Belle make five dishes out of cheese after watching four consecutive episodes of House Hunters International, and having decided a move to Bali was a great idea, I saw the mandatory mosquito nets and decided to stay put. After being sick this long, the mindnumbingness of daytime TV is evident. I am paralyzed, coughing fit after coughing fit, sick of the dogs, sick of myself.

I haven't worked since last thursday and couldn't if I had to. This is a bad one.

But I'll live. I always do.

Kurt is out, taking his children to dinner one by one. I think that is so nice. Each night he brings me something from wherever he ends up. Tonight he is taking Nicole to Authentic Thai on Division. They have the best shrimp salad rolls I've ever had. Or maybe its the best peanut sauce. My friend Cameron says to dilute the peanut butter with a coconut soda found only at asian markets to make good peanut sauce. So, if yours turns out anything like mine, a hint would be helpful.

With this much time on my hands, I sleep and shop online. Right now, I'm after a pair of red velvet flats by Blowfish. Wish me luck. Right now I could really use some Ruby Slippers.

weather and family

Well, "a little under the weather" has turned into a bit more like a hurricane. I am sick.Bronchitis again. But happily, it is the first time I have been sick since May, and with my track record, that is fabulous. I'll take it. One bad spell. I'm waiting it out, hoping my body and the various supplements will put up some kind of a fight. I'm rooting for the C and D combo.

Changing the subject -- back to Arcata and funerals and such...

My aunt who passed in November, I think I mentioned, was a genealogist, even before computer databases were easily accessed. She had populated Ancestry.com with much of our family tree, both of her sides, her husband's side and my father's end of things. It is difficult to tell this story without some kind of a recap of who's who, and that will take a minute. Bear with me. I'll limit it to one side for now.

There were four Forster children: my mother, her sister (the one who just passed) and two brothers. Both uncles were interesting: one a Marxist, the other schizophrenic. The Marxist had one child, Darla, who I knew when she was tiny, but family fracturing being what it was in my family, I'd heard nothing from or about her since she was about four years old.

Well, one of the grandsons decided to pick up where my aunt, his grandmother, left off, and after the funeral, he took a bunch of information and entered it into the database at ancestry.com.

So... a few weeks pass, and one of the cousins gets this email from Darla asking are we who she thinks we are. We are. So, long story long, she lives five minutes from me and we decided to get together for dinner.

So... good for the internet. Good for the mormons. (who run the database, I'm assuming.) She seems like family. We seem to have alot in common. She loves camping and she knows all the stories about her end of the famly and why things were the way they were and went the way they went, from a Marxian-schizo perspective. She knows, for instance, that my uncle stopped drinking port and started eating a little bit of dirt each day in penance to remember how much he loved god. This, clearly, was not the Marxist. Anyone listening to talk radio back in the sixties and seventies would have remembered him. He was an opinionated man.

It is always fascinating to me how truly fractured a close family can become, and even so, no matter the disconnect, how much family is still just family. Darla, (which is not her name, but in fairness, why would I drag her into this mess?) is a manic gardner and understands that there are many shades of not-quite-white, and the difference between purple and, say, periwinkle or cornflower. My husband kept saying at dinner, "She's just like you." We were both nervous, Darla and I, that we would have nothing in common, that our husbands would feel alienated from this happy little reunion. Turns out they both fish and were able to talk about that while we started catching up.

So, we shared old photographs (you know how I am about those things) and in among the bad Kodak shots was one of my grandmother sitting in the east-facing window with her dog on her lap and my mother's african violets sitting in the window. Seeing those small pots of flowers in a winding wrought-iron stand, a fixture of my childhood, was like reaching back forty-seven years in time. I could feel the velvet of their petals, hear my mother telling me they don't like to be touched. My grandmother, my favorite person in the whole of my life, was sitting in the corner just where I'd left her.

So we will try dinners, and camping, and maybe knitting the clan back together in a few odd places.

mommeries

I am home from work today, feeling a little under the weather, a little happy to be home. Probably happier than I should be, but not going to work is exhilarating, even when it is legit.

My blog suffers from my busyness, my consumption with the need to make a living. I wish I was one of those women who could live simply to simply live, but I don't know how to not work. (Today being a notable exception...) and I don't know how to live on less. I live on more. and more. and more.

I have been thinking about my mother lately, about how hard she worked, and for so little. At one point she was a night-shift janitor at the Bear Creek bakery (Harry and David, now Jackson and Perkins), a huge warehouse factory orchard business in the Rogue Valley where everyone has worked at one time or another. I have. She swept their floors, washed gigantic and heavy pots and pans. She mopped -- three times every night: wet mop, damp mop, and dry mop. Its funny what you remember. She worked with a crazy person who thought a big black dog followed him everywhere, who had suffered more than one crib death in his family. She brought home tins of pineapple macadamia cake, and broken bits of fruitcake that we'd have for breakfast. She raised five children without benefit of welfare -- some of the "children" long beyond the age of maturity -- maturity being a somewhat ambiguous term in my family. I remember she saved anything left after bills very carefully and bought a dinette set: six chairs around a small, oval formica table with one leaf, upholstered in the latest mandarin orange and avocado green vinyl print. She was so proud of that little set, which I now know was a cheap thing, but it meant so much to her to make our house a home. Everything was mandarin and avocado, with chocolate brown accents, all of the wood pieces "antiqued" white with gold and avocado highlights. I think that was in the sixties. Yes. With Aretha playing in the background, one brother in VietNam, one passed out on the [avocado green] sofa and one playing quarterback for Medford, the best looking kid in school, my sister not yet on methadone.

As I go through my excess, attempting to put together a yard sale in the spring, and I continue to acquire more and more, I think of how hard she worked, and how little we had, and how much we appreciated small things.

Ah well, poverty follows me like a stray dog that just won't go home. Or is home.

long winter IV

I have been to seven funerals in three months. Too many, even for the angel of death. I should show some caution throwing words like that around, but so often, in the winter, it seems true. I look forward to spring and the promise of new life and green where there is mud and blue to overtake the gray. I wrote a line in a book once that went like this: the season progressed in a continuum of rain, from mist to downpour, and Ruby forgot the color blue. I'm feeling a bit like Ruby just now, cleaning up dogshit that is mush. There is an art to it that I won't bore you with, but leave it at this: frozen is good.

We were driving down 82nd today, and there are trailer parks in among failing restaurants and seedy motels. The urban version of Bolder City. I loved Bolder City. I don't know if I've said so before, but its true. A forested trailer park on a river. There is life in all of these places, many better lived drunk, I'll admit, and I was, but I never want to live in another trailer. Drunk or sober.

This evening we are planning (I am planning and my husband is nodding) our summer vacation. "Do we have to take both dogs?" he asks, as if I'd leave Duffy behind. "Yes. We do." We will take them with us to Yosimite where they will be eaten by bears.

I watched the series on National Parks and want to see some of them. Our trip to Glacier was amazing, and the Ho Rainforest and the Northern Cascades, and the Redwoods, and Crater Lake. It seems very American, but I'm American. so.

trees

Well, the Charlie Brown tree is out of the box and on the table -- the best I can do with Sid and Duffy tearing through the house playing tug of war. Sid doesn't wholey understand the game. He has spent five years sitting in front of us, waiting for us to throw the ball, toss the frisbee, hold one end of the rope. Now, with Duffy a more than willing participant, he is confused and territorial -- his goal to have the thing, then, once had, whip it into shreds and destroy it. Suffice it to say I've spent my wages on pull toys. More and more he allows a little play before consuming the thing. And Duffy has mastered the art of being a lower and slower dog: hiding under furniture. Drives Sid crazy.

At any rate, Christmas time is here. It doesn't feel like it yet, distracted as we have been by Nicole's accident, dogs and jobs and funerals. I should make a post about Nicole's trauma. On the 20th of November, she was hit in a crosswalk as a pedestrian by an 88 year old man. She's okay, but took quite a hit and will have a scar down the side of her face to remember the day. She was right and he was wrong, and insured, so she should benefit if carrying a facial scar on a beautiful face can be compensated.

So, happy thanksgiving, merry christmas and happy new year. There. Cards are on the way.

arcata

One of the worst things I do in this blog is generalize. My cousin Jimmy (always Jimmy, never Jim and certainly not James) said the broad strokes were basically right. My caveat is always that I am not a writer but a liar, and so keep myself off the inevitable hook of accurate historians (not Jimmy, he was great about reading my account of his family's history and mine.) Anne Lamott says she is careful what she writes about the living. As people pass, they fall under the pen, which we all know, is mightier than the pencil.

I am in Arcata tonight, attending the funeral of my aunt tomorrow, spending the days and the evenings with cousins I haven't seen since the last funeral. I look at thier children, some named for those gone before, everyone looking more than a little bit alike. I am the only one from my shrinking clan who is present this evening. Allegedly, my brother will be here tomorrow. I hope so. We say things like: We've got to stop meeting like this. But this is how we meet, we 50 somethings. This is the social calendar of an aging family. And I wonder if the younger among us understand what a family we were, what spectacular people preceded us in death, how blessed those of us left behind are to have been a part of this whole.

I talk alot about the differences between my side and their side of the family, but what I usually forget to mention is that it never mattered. For instance, when my cousin Gary showed up and I told him I had moved to Portand and he said, "That bastion of liberalism." I just said, "Yeah, buddy!" and we both laughed. What is true is that I have no idea the politics beyond those who make it my business.

On a different note, Duffy is learning to poop while leashed. He isn't very happy about ithe indignity of it all, but as I was about to give in and let him off-leash, four fat raccoons slipped under the fence and stood drooling, still as stone, awaiting a single moment of inattention and a late night snack. Duffy, a ratter by trade, was thrilled to see them, and wanted to attack. I'd always heard that terriers are big dogs in a little dog's body, but didn't realize what that level of fearlessness would look like in action. He does not seem to think taking on four adult size raccoons is imbalanced.

east meets westie

The therapy llama is Smokey. Duffy was impressed.

Raising a puppy on a dementia unit (a "memory care community" for the faint of heart) has its plusses and minuses. My spelling may be called into question in that last bit. Anyway, Duffy can hardly be to blame for all of the, shall we say, leavings, here and there. Today, for instance, somebody pooped in the tea room and somebody peed in one of the trash cans. We didn't know about the latter until Duffy had rooted around in it and came out smelling like some old bum's jockey shorts. Bums may not wear jockey shorts but I'm sure you get my drift. So I grabbed Duffy, stuck him in the sink and washed him with quarternary disinfectant. Nah, not really, but I did use good soap. Not baby soap. Not for THAT smell.

So being a puppy is relatively easy. You can blame the little round wet spots on Nate and nobody is the wiser.

The dogs are blissfully asleep, Duffy has learned to sit and that fact alone gives me hope for the future. He can learn.

My aunt died and I'll be making a pilgrimage to Arcata soon, me and the pup, back to one of the places of my youth, rich with time-twisted memories, to the place where my father died. I'm not sure if I've told the story or not, but I'll go ahead and spill it here.

My aunt was married to a logger. His name was Earl and he used to throw us up in the air, scaring the crap out of my mother. He drove to work on the old Oregon Mountain Road to and from Arcata through the Smith River Canyon during the days when they were logging the redwoods. Bad. I know. Anyway, one June morning before the crack of dawn, he drove off the skinny little road and plummeted to his death, leaving behind my aunt and seven children.

My father was between jobs at that time, so he and my mother and us five children moved to Arcata so my father could run his business (the Shadow Lodge in Trinidad). This was in the days before welfare and that's what families did. We were a close family, spent summers camping together, all that. So, we got Earl buried and my dad began working at the lodge. Mid July, my father laid down to read the newspaper and never woke up, leaving my mother and her five, and my aunt and her seven children to fend for themselves.

Twelve children and no welfare. I don't know how they got through the next months, but they did. Eventually, it was clear that there were too many people in one space and we moved back to Portland, I think, to be with my grandmother while my mother grieved my father. I think what really happened was that my aunt moved on, went to school, sold the business, made good financial decisions; my mother cried until she found whiskey some five years later, then her problems took a backseat to alcoholism.

The house in Arcata was an old, Spanish style stucco castle, with inlaid tiles, near Humboldt State, a block from downtown Arcata, heart of the Emerald Triangle. I spent a summer there when I was thirteen, I think. My aunt was an intellectual. A republican intellectual, which must be harder, don't you think? She travelled far and wide to follow genealogical threads of the Morris and Forster clans. And now she is gone, the last of the Forster children, at 91.

People who want to live forever haven't taken the time, I think, to talk to very many 91-year- olds. I have never met one that wanted it to go on indefinitely.

mama

Duffy is nearly four months old now, and I am able to employ my hands in things other than taking him out to pee, cleaning up pee, picking up poop, or monitoring dog-dog combat. They are getting along fine, the pup and the pit, for those of you who worry. Duffy is alpha and Sid is basically gay, so it works.

I don't know if I wrote about it or not, but vacation a couple of years ago brought us through Arcata on our way south to Mendicino. My favorite aunt lives there, lived there, and when we visited it was clear that dementia had done its handiwork on a once-fine mind. She was a brilliant woman, a genealogist with an attitude, racist about phone voices "Can I get someone who speaks English, please?", and politically just to the right of Atilla the Hun. This last according to her right wing children. My family swung far left, artists and alkies all.

So, my aunt was placed in a dementia unit, much like mine, I suppose, and her house recently sold. Her children, much more organized than my clan, cleared out her house and brought me some photographs and documents they thought I'd like to have, and because I am currently the most responsible person in my family still living (I know, scary) they thought I'd be a good steward for the family treasures.

I exaggerate. There was no treasure. But there were letters, which are treasures to me. Letters from my mother to her sister.

I know I've characterized my mother as a madwoman in these pages. I know. And to be fair, she was. But she was my mom, so I get to say that stuff, just like my son is the only one who can say it about me. And he's welcome to say what he will.

The letters are precious, and reveal a hopeful if not an optimistic woman, badgered by poverty she could never see her way out of, even when the opportunity presented itself. They tell of job after job, hovel after hovel, where she scratched out a life lived without money for stamps or long distance or gas money or dental care. Of a belief in the goodness of her children even when anyone could see we were pure shit.

Once about twenty years ago I did a sort of life review, a sort of therapeutic retrospective, and found that by the time I was 33 I had moved 48 times that I could remember.

Let's just say I know how to pack.

So reading my mother's letters was like watching a movie of my late childhood, and the years after I left home, too early, where the comments about me are scarce but hopeful.

Time to take Duffy out.

beauty and the beastie

Thea meets Duffy.
Duffy, one ear up, one trying.

Duffy, once again
Thea swinging under Duffy-power

Wow. Motherhood is demanding. Sorry. I think I can take my eyes off the little darling long enough to post something. I'm referring, of course, to Duffy. Thea only came over for a little while. Duffy is staying forever.

He is the devil. Sid is full of holes, my carpet in dire need of shampooing. I am learning the inestimable value of the dreaded crate. God bless the crate. It has saved Duffy's life and my sanity.

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.

ac

Why is it, on the hottest day of the year when my husband is in Alaska, the AC breaks down? Why? AC is entirely too important to me. I don't think I'll die of the heat like Sid almost did in the back of my car in southern oregon last week. Not really, but he was pretty hot and mad at me the rest of the way home. I thought I'd killed him, but turns out he had eated a bunch of dry grass when hanging out on the Applegate and it had failed to make it through the pipe and he finally puked it up two days later, a bale of straw on my living room rug. I'm saving it for Kurt, for when he gets back from Alaska with two halibut and a 48 lb king salmon. Whoopee!

It was my honest intention to stay home tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, to be cool. I hate being hot--me with the vitamin D deficiency. So, invited as most people are to various picnics and potlucks, now I don't know what to do. I guess I'll have to find coolness elsewhere.

So, I'm bring salad wherever I go because I have to use up my lettuce which is taking over everything, although I can't really figure out if the spinach is working out right or not. As I've mentioned, the spinach knows what to do. I picked my first two zuchinni today, and will use it in a marinara-based ragu of hot sausage, peppers, purple onion, italian green beans and my little zuchinni. I will bring left overs and salad wherever I go.

Because I am an urban gardener, I am going to set up a vegetable stand for people walking by. Colleen Russell, an old spiritual advisor of mine, used to have a can for money and an on-your-honor policy which I don't think would do as well here as it did in Talent, Oregon. But who's to say. I don't really care (theme) and will have an abundance of food, so am happy to contribute to the wellbeing of my neighbors and passers by. I will paint a small table in cheerful Mexican colors leftover from my garret and put out a can with a $? on it and see what happens. I don't picture it filling up.

I need to confess that yesterday I at two pounds of cherries and I feel like the church lady in The Witches of Eastwick. I may die.

west east south and north

In that order. East to the coast, westward home, south to the Rogue Valley and North back home. Husband in Alaska, I am fending for myself. So far I have made coffee and eaten nothing, this first day back home.

I am working on an old manuscript for the bzillionth time and have nearly finished the first red ink go-through. Then a retyping of the whole thing. It has been sitting for six years, and I think I can be more objective for this revision. Its funny... when this thing was nearly published, I was so sure I was finished with it. Now, it feels so bland and immature. I'm so relieved it didn't go out in the current state. I couldn't see it for what it was -- couldn't see those [many] places where I had written well rather than told the story. I can do both, I am certain. An education in writing kills the gift if there is one -- at minimum buries it beneath cleverness and flattery in my case. Say what you mean, mean what you say.

So, if my blog seems thin these days, it is because I am actually writing. Imagine that.

treatise

Campsite

Depot Bay

The dock at Waldport and row of seagulls

Heaven

We camp, therefore we are.

The evolution of my camping experience, like other parts of my life, has much to do with poverty. I have camped-out on porches--screened and unscreened, beside railroad tracks, next to rivers, lakes, oceans (ocean. one.) I have camped-out alongside creeks in many areas of Oregon while on the run from one bad act or another. This was not actual camping. This was avoiding responsibility, adulthood and inevitable consequences.

Growing up, my father dropped us off for the summer at McKee Bridge park and would visit each weekend and we camped the summer away in 110 degree Southern Oregon weather, renting painted orange innertubes that I was allergic to, but floated on anyway, covered with the beachtowel of the season, trying to keep my rash at bay. I learned to swim there, at McKee Bridge, when my schizophrenic uncle threw me out in the middle of the river thinking I knew how. I didn't know then that this would mimic my life to come. Was I afraid? I was. Did it stop me? It did not. I was neither brave nor courageous. I simply didn't die, and this has been my barometer. Set your standards low, I say. Nobody dies, its a good day.

So, the first legitimate camping had to wait until I had a job, because it isn't really camping unless you are on vacation, right? I mean, otherwise its just being homeless. Am I wrong? So when I was finally gainfully employed long enough to be paid to not be there for a week, I went camping. I knew nothing else. Its what you do. Its what we did, therefore.... So all I had was a car with a plywood backseat (see previous posts) and we had to camp in that. I don't remember the first year I actually had a tent, but I couldn't stand up in it, I know that. I cooked over an open fire using pots and pans from home and spent hours scrubbing the black off them when I got home.

The next evolution was the coleman stove. I never did like the pump up stove. I've never liked or trusted white gas. I knew too many hippies who didn't get it, who would blow up the camp and never be able to boil water on the damned things. Having learned early how to build a good fire and stack rocks to level the grill, I pretty much cooked that way, even when we had a coleman stove. Besides, wood was free and I could afford matches.

Next came a tent I could stand up in. Still, the bed was on the floor and year by year, getting up in the morning became progressively more difficult. From there: marriage and the combining of assets. Now, we have every conceiveable real-camping item: good tent, camper shell on back of truck for the bed, a small folding kitchen stand, folding tables, permanent camping-only pots and pans -- you know, the blue spatterware, and a two-burner propane stove. This year, a Mr. Heater was added to the mix. This little gem is a stand alone propane burner that blows hot air in under the pop up gazebo with a net enclosure. Did I mention the pop-up gazebo or the trailer we have to rent to haul all the shit? Ah, camping. The simple life. Back to nature. Turns out the only thing that got trapped in the net enclosure was me. With the bugs.

So there we were, in Beverly Beach, more of a Californian campground than I am accustomed to. Very organized. A nice campsite right on the ocean, and because it is right on the ocean, it is also right on 101. I didn't care (theme of blog). In fact, as I made the long trek to the bathrooms each morning (and hourly thereafter) and watched the little old ladies strolled by as I stood at my little camp kitchen doing dishes outside, I began looking at the smaller travel trailers, envy in my heart. Unfortunately, we don't have room to park anything permanent.

I've figured it out, the transition from tent camping to rolling home. It isn't only increasing financial capacity, it is physiological: as the female bladder gives way, the need for a self-contained camping unit increases. Men? They will piss on trees as long as they can walk upright, but women? We are condemned to the long walk -- the long cold rainy walk at five in the morning.

I'm thinking: rentals.

seattle

Daytrippers, that's us. We (he) drove up yesterday morning and had a ridiculously expensive and so-so lunch at the Crabpot, but it is what I wanted to do, so I did it. They bring a huge pot of boiled seafood, red potato and corn and dump it on butcher paper and give you a crab fork and a mallot and off you go. Barbaric.

My husband said next time, we'll walk over to Clay's and have them dump my salmon platter right on the table. That way, we'll save money and gas and the food will be better. But they did give us a huge piece of mud pie for my birthday.

Then, we walked straight up the five flights of stairs without stopping to Pike's Place and after I was hospitalized for cardiac pain (no, not really, but I did begin to get a sense of the "elephant sitting on your chest" that you hear so much about) we strolled on down to the market and looked around.

The guy driving the rainbow school bus was allegedly out to save souls, ranting about how you marry some person you don't even know and you go to church on Sunday and you still don't know anything about that person and how he just wanted "someone who's 100%." So, truthfully, I'm not sure he wasn't just going to extreme lengths to find a date.

The peppers were gorgeous, and paper cones full of sweetpeas and flowers and flowers and thousands of people crushing through narrow markets of perfect produce. We would have taken the ferry to Vashon Island like we did on vacation, but Sid was home alone.

It was a beautiful day in Seattle. See?

not sick

A blogger outage on my birthday??? Arrgghh.

Well, I'm not sick. I guess that's the good news. I haven't felt sick for two or three weeks now. I can hardly remember being sick, although I called asia and when I told her I wasn't working today, her first question was, "You're not sick again are you?" A reasonable assumption. Long freaking winterspring.

Nope, I'm fine. My garden is growing, I'm out supporting the economy for all I'm worth which is more than it used to be, and all is well with the world. I say these things when I'm not working. I was listening to some guy on NPR talking about how much he hated working and he's an actor making 35K a week for a sitcom and two lines and he doesnt' wanna. Doesn't, like me, wanna do anything. She asked him (Terri Gross. I can't stand her interview style. Gross.) Anyway, she asks him, "What is it then you'd rather be doing? Sitting home all day watching TV?" And his answer was, "No. I just would rather shoot heroin." Now this is a guy I understand. If there was only enough.

Anyway, not to wax darkly, but it WAS something to do on a sunny windy rainy snowy day.

So, the sun is sort of out. It is my birthweek and I want to go to Seattle for my birthday dinner. I want to go the the crabpot where they just dump out a bunch of boiled seafood on butcher paper and hand you a bib. Cave style.

Then, time for camping. We will start out at the coast and depending on the weather, move camp as desired. We pretty much have it down to a science. I own everything camping related. Today I bought a screen liner for our QuikShade. We can keep the bugs out ala West Nile. Swine, Westnile, Birdflu. Jeez. Its a dangerous world, and that isn't even talking about the maniacs. But given recent trends, the age group that should live in mortal fear is the fetal to seven range.

That was bad.

Well, Lula broke another hip. That's two. That's it. Still she wants to get up and go. You can't keep her still, but I will try. One more time.

dinner

My husband caught a catfish out of the Willamette and we had it for dinner.

There. That seems like a complete post. Bring on the digestive advice. I'll be sitting here glowing in the dark. It is a tiny bit scary, but damn good eatin'.

I only get one day off this weekend. This makes me cranky.