Cracked Window

No one who’s eighty says, “The years have dragged on and on. When is this thing going to finally end?”

So I wasn’t surprised to hear my father say on his eightieth birthday, “I’m amazed at how quickly it’s gone by.”

We sit at long tables, nearly one hundred of us, amid fields of bounty. It’s Sauvie Island, ten miles west of Portland. I can smell the earth, fertile from Columbia River floods. The sun eases toward the hills, setting aglow acres of vegetables sprawling between guardian white oaks half a millennium old.

Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?

That, Thornton Wilder said, was the underlying question of his acclaimed 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book explores the lives of five people who fall to their deaths when a rope bridge in Peru collapses.

I don’t think about the book when I cross Portland’s river bridges. But I do when I pass one block of Northeast 33^rd Avenue. Several years ago I spotted two wooden bridges spanning small yards on opposite sides of the street.

No one will die if these bridges break, but I immediately linked them with Wilder’s work, which won a Pulitzer Prize. They’ve nagged at me ever since, something more than curiosities. But what?

Odd what catches one’s eye. In Saturday’s Oregonian, a story about a man’s death at the coast invited a quick read. Why I’m not sure. The story was terse, as such stories usually are and have to be because of limited space: a for-the-record summary of another tragedy, another person dying too young.

This morning I read a piece written by the man’s close friend, posted on an indispensable web site about Portland’s robust food and drink scene. (Both men are/were restaurateurs.) A dispassionate account with passion roiling beneath the surface.

The nation’s last charismatic political figure representing Hope was gunned down forty years ago today in Los Angeles. It was one week after I graduated from high school, and I was sleeping late. My summer job hadn’t begun. My brother David burst into my bedroom and woke me with the news.

At seventeen, politics interested me, and I was getting swept up in Bobby Mania. His impassioned anti-Vietnam War message had started eating away at the government propaganda I’d been force fed in civics class. But I was more drawn to his willingness to tell hard truths about our country. And I had succumbed to the strength he exuded. People felt it in his words. Some saw it in his eyes, including a Russian poet who described them as “two blue dots of will and anxiety.”

I don’t believe in the Rapture, though the concept intrigues me spiritually and intellectually. Perhaps that’s why a man’s suit caught my eye yesterday, abandoned on the steps of a downtown Portland church. A fine-looking suit with a subtle glen-plaid pattern. I considered inquiring at the Portland Korean Church, SE 10th and Clay. But if I knocked, what would I ask when the door opened? Is the suit only a test, like those we hear on the radio about the emergency warning system? If this had been a real Rapture. . .

I looked around, wondering whether the suit owner had zipped off on a practice spin for the June 14th World Naked Bike Ride. No luck. Was there really a Superman, and Clark Kent couldn’t find a phone booth? Had I missed an alien abduction? Or missed the Rapture itself, and this lone empty suit signaled bad news for Portland — the select few here are very few indeed?

Suzame, Atticus, and I wait for our food in the dinner-crowd din at Ken’s Artisan Pizza on SE 28th. I gaze out the window. People awash in early evening light pass on the sidewalk.

A young man comes into view. Hip-looking in that Portland style that anyone on the eastside under 30 wears like skin. Short-brimmed black cap, scraggly beard, messenger bag, and headphones — as in headphones so big they’d look nerdy on me but make him retro cool.

Then I see it. His yo-yo, dipping and rocking, then circling in a wide arc, the finale to a five-second show. All this while he walks, listening to who knows what on those headphones. And he was gone.