Cracked Window

A small story, courtesy of my home office window in the Irvington neighborhood of Northeast Portland:

Many evenings a woman rides past on a recumbent bike with her two leashed Weimaraners striding behind her. Many mornings another woman drives a sedan slowly and close to the curb while her dog – a fox terrier, I think – scrambles along the sidewalk.

The second woman represents in microcosm a significantly larger story that preeminent environmental writer Bill McKibben told Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. The jist: we’re all in big trouble unless the woman starts emulating the Weimaraner owner or at least parks her car and walks with her dog.

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My mother never made it west of the Mississippi. Until now. As I write, countless specks of her are in San Francisco Bay and the Pacific, bound for who knows where on the lunar whim of tides.

She’s used to the water. When she died in 2003, my two brothers and I scattered some of her ashes in Apalachicola Bay a few steps from her house on St. George Island in the Florida Panhandle and in the lake where we grew up in Central Florida. The rest she wanted deposited in San Francisco. But she waited patiently in Portland, a protracted layover in a plastic container hidden away in my office cabinet. Atop the cabinet rests her senior class photograph (class of 1948, Bosse High School, Evansville, Indiana).

My mother – her friends called her Joanie – loved sentimental songs. When I was a kid, she played Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” over and over. This was her only connection to the city, and the images and emotions evoked in the 1962 song touched her in ways I don’t claim to understand.

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They’re coming out of the woods for Barack Obama.

As my wife, Suzame, and I drove Saturday along a winding, tree-lined road in Marin County, California, en route to Point Reyes, she shouted: “Turn around and go back! You won’t believe what I saw.”

And there he stood, a majestic creature at the edge of the forest, the most super delegate of them all.

Art is man’s nature; nature is God’s art.

– Philip James Bailey, English poet

More photos of Chaiten volcano eruption in Chile here and here. News here.

“Is your birthday really Friday?” I ask the wisp of a man leaning against the Post Office wall in Northeast Portland and panhandling for money. Thickets of wiry gray hair spill from beneath his maroon stocking hat. A beard partly hides sunken cheeks. His clothes are faded but clean.

It was our second encounter. I’d given him 30 cents a few minutes earlier as I left the building. He called out to me in a raspy voice that he needed money for his birthday. A clever line, I thought, more original than most I hear from street people. So I gave him my spare change. Call me uncaring, but I don’t usually give money to panhandlers for fear they’ll spend it on booze or drugs.

When I handed over the change, I was unintentionally brusque. Or I couldn’t hide my skepticism, I suppose, and strode off to my car a half-block away. Without thinking why, I walked back to the man and asked him my question, knowing we might share something in common—if he wasn’t lying. But to what end?

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“I used to live on Prescott,” acclaimed singer and songwriter Josh Ritter tells me on the phone. I tell him I live nearby in Northeast Portland. We’re chatting like people who might have passed in the grocery aisle and nodded a hello but now are finally getting to know each other.

I’m trying not to come across as a blithering groupie but probably failing. It’s 10:30 Saturday night. I’m at home, and Josh — were buds now, right? — is in a parking lot outside a bar in Athens, Georgia, where he’s just performed. According to a reliable source (my daughter, Erin), Josh is sipping a drink and still sweat-drenched from another signature electric performance. For an hour he’s been greeting fans, posing for pictures, signing autographs, and doing a lot of hugging. And reveling in it.

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I stop for coffee this afternoon at the Goldrush Coffee Bar because it’s near my house and an all-time favorite song pops into my head whenever I enter: Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.” (Prophetic lyrics here.)

Coffee black for me, but “Tutley’s Triumph” catches my eye on the chalkboard menu. I’m told it’s a blend of white and dark chocolate, cinnamon, and vanilla syrup. In other words, a surprise sure to please Suzame, sissy coffee drink aficionado.

“Who’s Tutley?” I ask the barista, assuming it might be him and the drink his crowning achievement. “A dog,” he says.

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