Dare I compare atmospheres at different high schools forty years and three thousand miles apart? Such comparison seems sure to illuminate nothing surprising and elicit a chorus of yawns. It would be like examining life on planets in different solar systems populated by different life forms and declaring, “Eureka! They’re not the same!”
But after visiting a small Portland high school Tuesday and Wednesday to research a freelance newspaper story, I can’t resist.
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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? Read More
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Florida, 1973: I’m trudging through a Panhandle swamp on an August day with four other guys. Country Boy leads the way. Everyone on the land survey crew calls him this because his molasses twang sounds like gibberish half the time.
Country Boy wants to kick my ass. My machete nicked his hand not far back as we hacked through a hammock of hardwoods and cypress knees jutting from the water. But seeing that I still hold the machete, he only cusses me. If Country Boy knows my name, he never uses it. He calls me College Boy.
The sun is high, but it’s dusk beneath the trees. We push through calf-deep water and curtains of vines. Turkey vultures stare down from high branches. Ahead is an island of damp sand. We collapse there, water seeping from our boots. The heat presses down. I stick my machete in the sand, kneel, and drink from the swamp, the water tannic red but clean. My reflection looks up at me, a ghost. Someone whispers: snnnnnake. Read More
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Our small backyard goldfish pond in Northeast Portland sparkles from its annual cleanup today. The pond is compact: eight feet across at the widest point, thirty inches deep in the deepest spot, and nine hundred gallons. Just large enough that I can zoom in on a Google satellite map and spy its blurry roundness, as if I’m watching over it from space.
The pond came with the house when we moved in nearly five years ago. But (he boasts!) I transformed it: super-duper pump and filtration system with ultraviolet light hidden discreetly away and, more important, the addition of two marsh areas and many types of aquatic plants. Wild enough in summer that a heron swooped down into the urban landscape last year and feasted on a few unsuspecting fish.
A clump of cattails wagging in the wind reminds me of my boyhood lake in Florida. Red-wing blackbirds constantly flitted in and out of Sybelia’s cattails. Their song never varied but, depending on my mood, sounded like a greeting, a question, or a lament.
I find a recording of the song online. The sound rockets me back through more than four decades. I’m deposited in Sybelia’s bath-warm waters, where scene after scene of memories play unbidden. None is more vivid than this: I’m underwater, far beneath our two Labrador retrievers, Rogue and Sadie, swimming at the surface. Seen through a lens of deep water, they move in flickering frames of film faded with age. The dogs advance nowhere, passing each other in looping arcs.
They’re waiting for me to surface.
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Tom Jones haunts me. The well-preserved and über manly entertainer, whose twitching hips persuade otherwise demure women to part with their panties,
has gyrated into the sacred halls of my bedroom.
Last night, for the third consecutive day, my wife Suzame sang snippets of “She’s a Lady.” We were in bed. This the woman who rolled her eyes at the prospect of taking her mother to see Jones in Portland as a Mother’s Day gift. And I the husband who agreed she should spend a bundle to get good seats, ensuring her mom would have a memorable evening.
Before the concert, Suzame spoke as if it was impending drudgery. Not her thing, she said. Her favorite music, like mine, veers from the mainstream. Our concert tastes don’t include Vegas-style entertainers. At the time, I doubted Suzame could have named one of Jones’ signature songs. I warned her women go ga-ga over him. She seemed only vaguely aware of the underwear-throwing zealotry that Jones incites. Read More
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How strange to stumble upon photos of my childhood house of the 1960s on a movie web site. I was searching Google images for a picture of Lake Sybelia in Maitland, 
Florida. Once a quaint hamlet of citrus trees and lakes, Maitland was long ago consumed by the tourist monster that ate Orlando. During my search, up popped the house — white columns, veranda, and canopy of live oaks — under siege by a phalanx of movie cameras and crew.
Interlopers! was my first thought, irrational given that my family rented the house and moved out thirty-eight years ago. Then the movie title tugged at me: The Way Back Home. Read More
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Nor am I prone to paranoia. But I also recognize that we rarely understand what’s happening around us.
Those caveats are an introduction to a story that should give everyone pause, no matter their politics. It’s received too little attention, perhaps because the idea seems so outlandish: the Bush administration has a plan for granting itself sweeping dictatorial powers in the event of a natural catastrophe or major terrorist attack. As part of the plan, a list of eight million people has been created, people who might be questioned by authorities or even rounded up and “detained.” (A once benign word, detained is now ominous and foreboding.) Read More
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Hyperbole was among my mother’s traits, especially when I was a kid. Before issuing a warning or threat regarding my behavior, she would foreshadow her pronouncement with squinted eyes, like a gunslinger telegraphing lethal intent. Then she might let loose with the cliché of clichés: “It will go on your permanent record!” I’d respond with a look of mock horror.
Mom, if you can hear me from the hereafter, I say this: you were right.
I’ve learned that a blot besmirches my permanent record, and anyone with a computer and Internet connection can see it. And Google is to blame! Read More
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I learned today that a high-school friend died over the weekend. I last saw Jeff Schofield nearly ten years ago at our thirty-year reunion in Florida. He was frail as a twig, victim of personal excesses that claim so many.
The news naturally conjured up memories of Winter Park High, class of 1968. I remembered parties at Jeff’s house, wild by our standards back then. But what came back more urgently was a trip he and I took our senior year.
We both were considering going to the University of Georgia or Mercer University and decided to take a road trip to check out the campuses. Read More
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A dreaded Sunday morning excursion: stocking up on household staples at Costco in outer Northeast Portland. Luckily, I only have to run this gantlet once every few months. Not sure I could take the crowded aisles and old ladies peddling samples of bad food any more often.
What eases my disorientation and general disgust with commercial excess isn’t the $15.25 in coupon savings. It’s what I see on the way home. Call them diversions. Perhaps they wouldn’t have registered at all had my errand been different or my mind occupied with something pressing. But what I see stays with me: Read More
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They’ve appeared before on the sidewalk across the street from my home office — grocery carts deposited like driftwood on an overnight tide. I noticed one this morning but paid it no mind. That is until I observed people react to this interloper in Irvington, my Northeast Portland neighborhood.
There was the boy clad in yellow backpack and cruising the sidewalk on a foot scooter. He wheeled to a stop and peered inside at an assortment of discards. Then a woman (his mother I presume), tugged along by a dalmatian, shooed him away. A few other pedestrians slowed and glanced at it, including a man who kicked at one of the wheels. Read More
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Stooping to a new low, the Clintons tried today to undermine my family’s support for Barack Obama. They dispatched Chelsea to enlist our little boy, Atticus, in a duplicitous campaign to persuade us to switch our allegiance.
While Atticus and his mother, Suzame, waited for friends outside the entrance to the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Chelsea swooped upon them from a white SUV.
Unfortunately Atticus, who is nearly 3, was too stunned to remember the chant he’s been forced to practice for hours on end: “Yes we can! Yes we can!”
In truth, by all reports, Chelsea was genuinely friendly and laid back. As she said goodbye to Atticus by name, he waved and announced: “I’m going to see the dinosaurs.” To which Chelsea replied, “I wish I was seeing the dinosaurs, too. That sounds like more fun.”
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