Tonight on NPR’s “Philosophy Talk” I heard this declaration referring to death: “The world as I know it will cease to exist,” and then there will be nothing. When I heard this somber reminder of what everyone fears, I was in the car on the way home. I had been drinking wine at a downtown […]
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He looked familiar. Not his rumpled clothes. Or red blotches mottling his face. The man on the sidewalk reminded me of a close friend’s older brother. So striking was the resemblance that he could have been a down-trodden other brother. The guy looked done in, as if he’d recently had but lost the financial wherewithal […]
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Four street scenes all within fifty yards of NE 15th and Fremont, expose Portland’s big beating quirky heart: The first to catch my eye in a thirty-second span is a hand-painted sign on a rickety weathered fence: We Love People. Another sign, this one on a post outside a Starbucks, had read: No Skate Boarding. […]
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My morning email trek began with discovery of a story that pushes aside all the world’s troubles. Even with NPR blaring about economic travails and bitter presidential politics, I was transported to the East Oregon mountains and into a stranger’s childhood memory. The 1,004-word evocation of a father’s love for his son isn’t a story […]
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Thirteen years ago, a mountain lion looked at me. I still see clearly its long sleek body, two hundred yards away on a bare hilltop. Suzame and I were hiking at Point Reyes National Seashore in California and had reached the highest point, Mt. Wittenberg. At first I thought the mountain lion was a big […]
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Excitement of the moment sometimes clouds my judgment. That’s the inescapable conclusion from a phone conversation with a Portland police dispatcher yesterday. I called the cops while standing next to our friends’ house up the street. They were out of town, and another neighbor had told me that a solicitor tucking a business card in […]
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In the examining room, I waited for the dermatologist. Framed on the wall was an information sheet about melanoma. The doctor entered. Tall, thin, and past retirement age, he shook my hand as one would expect an ex-Marine to shake it.
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Everyone has a bad neighbor story. Few have bad neighbors who are pirates. The people who rent a house two doors down could even be pirate vampires, judging from their cadaver-like skin and habit of emerging only at dusk.
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I stand in the rain. The Avett Brothers are about to take the stage in Portland at the Oregon Zoo amphitheater. So miserable is the weather this night that wife and little son fled for home after the opening act. Everyone is soaked and cold. While I wait, tunes from “Emotionalism” play in my head. […]
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“How old are you, Jimmy?” I ask. He’s sitting behind the wheel of his thirty-year-old, faded blue Cutlass Calais, fiddling with hearing aids in both ears. I’m standing in the street next to my home office, leaning down to talk to Jimmy through his open car window. For years I’ve wondered about this gaunt man […]
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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.
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