Cracked Window

Exercising while listening to music and watching tragic news on CNN is a collision of dissonance.

Picture the scene: two dozen bodies bouncing along on cardio equipment in front of six health club TVs. I’m on the elliptical machine. Music blaring from my ear buds drowns out all other sound, even my panting breaths. My eyes are fixed on the seige at Mumbai, playing out in video images and closed-caption text. But my thoughts careen from one unrelated subject to the next.

The Taj Mahal hotel shudders with explosions and belches black smoke set to an inadvertent soundtrack, Death Cab for Cutie’s “Your Heart Is an Empty Room.” The song doesn’t fit what’s on the screen, though one line jolts me: Burn it down, till the embers smoke on the ground.

Two barbershops, fifty years and three thousand miles apart.

At one I had my first haircut without a parent in tow. It was in Florida, and I was a young boy new to the South. The father and son proprietors were Alabama crackers. The only time they spoke more than a few words was when talk turned to farming. They grew corn outside my small town of Maitland. I could tell they wanted to be with their crop rather than mess with other people’s hair.

What I remember most was their only employee, a black kid about my age who swept up hair. We often exchanged glances that felt like long conversations between occupants of different worlds.

Some days some things jump out at me. This morning it was signs. I was traveling a familiar route, and three signs looked new to the urban landscape.

“Keep Portland Weird!” cried out from the west side of Music Millenium, the only place I buy CDs in person. I knew the store on East Burnside Street sold bumper stickers with the slogan. Until inquiring inside I didn’t know how many, more than ten thousand, or that the store had copyrighted the slogan. And had the sign painted a year ago. What fog have I been in?

A young man played bagpipes while riding a unicycle on one end of the Portland Farmers Market. On the other, protesters decried passage of the anti-gay marriage amendment in California.

In between on the Park Blocks amid the produce and other foods was scene after scene that made my Saturday morning. Maybe the brisk bike ride to the market with wife and son heightened everything, an endorphin rush of awareness. Whatever the reason, I want more of that drug.

Parents like to display schoolwork the kids bring home. At our house we put it in on the dining table and eat it.

To be precise, Daniel isn’t our kid. He’s my nephew and twenty-three. But he’s living with my wife and me for now. With increasing frequency he’s bringing home what he prepares at school — delicious food cooked at the Oregon Culinary Institute.

He lugs the food in plastic bags tucked in his pack. Slung over the pack in a case are his wicked-looking chef knives. All this arrives home after train and bike rides.

I was a human dynamo today. Literally. Working out on a specially outfitted exercise bike, I generated electricity while burning calories.

Sweat dripped from my nose at the Green Microgym whenever I glanced down at the flashing numbers showing how many watts I was producing. It’s too soon to call me Megawatt Man, but I helped power other cardio equipment, slightly reducing my carbon footprint.

In our yard, autumn turns elegant Japanese laceleaf maples into flashy look-at-me strippers. For several days each year, the tree hovering over the pond dons the color of the goldfish swimming beneath its branches. An exception is their recent offspring, little gray clouds that won’t brighten until spring.

Cold has already induced torpor among the big fish, which have lost their dart-hither-and-there charm. In fact, they barely eat compared to the thrice-daily frenzied feedings just two months ago.