How to feel insignificant and awed at the same time: 23 stunning satellite photographs of Earth, courtesy NASA’s huge archive. Las Vegas looks more inhospitable than Antarctica. How would my city, Portland, fare from this lofty perspective?
Snow in downtown Portland is rare and scant enough to incite giddiness. Decades ago, however, blizzards buried the city. Doing historical research, I’ve come across microfilmed newspaper clippings from early in the last century that describe snowfall measured in feet, not inches. In some instances, the city was so paralyzed that food shortages occurred.
What arrived this morning may inconvenience some people but delights me. Not just the visual serenity but the joy in my little boy’s voice: “Daddy, it’s winter!” Or, “Daddy, snowflakes landed on my tongue!” Snowballs and a snowman are on the afternoon’s agenda.
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I‘m a terrorist. No doubt about it. I didn’t want to go over to the Dark Side, but some forces are too powerful to resist.
The Obama Fist Bump nailed me, or OFB as we converts call it.
It happened today on a Portland pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5. I was among throngs of people walking bikes across the Failing Street Bridge. We were part of Sunday Parkways, a trek along six miles of streets closed to cars for six hours.
Wheeling his bike toward me beneath a gray sky was a harmless looking dude. A skinny summer-time Santa with an Obama sign on his bike. Behind me, Suzame, my wife, saw the sign and yelled out the candidate’s name over the din of cars streaming past beneath us. Santa stopped next to me and held out his clenched fist.
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Portland being Portland, it’s not unusual to see pairs of shoes dangling from overhead wires. I imagine the fun some jokers had flinging footwear in the air until one of them got lucky. Somewhere in Northeast, where I live, I once saw high-heels similarly perched above the middle of a street, string looped around the heels.
Dangling shoes probably represent a secret code that I’m not hip to. . . an anarchist cabal’s communiques or a notice that on this block the really cool people reside.
Thinking about this prompted me to Google the expression “shoes dangling from wires.” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised a global shoe-dangling fixation appears to be spreading. Theories abound, as do of photos showing the creativity of this “art.” My favorite pictures are here and here. And, naturally, there’s a buzz word – shoefiti – and a web site by that name, featuring everything anyone would possibly want to know about the practice.
But what’s the meaning of a pair of black Converse All-Stars abandoned on a sidewalk along busy Northeast Broadway? A few days ago the shoes were positioned on either side of a metal pole, as if the wearer had been hugging it.
When I came back with my camera, the shoes were gone.
