I delay going to Costco as long as possible. But requirements of life, purchased inexpensively, make the trek unavoidable. Let’s face it, bulk toilet paper and laundry detergent and printer cartridges are essentials.
Judging from the overflow crowd today, lured partly by the approaching expiration of coupons, the economy isn’t shattered quite yet. That said, I did overhear several couples arguing about what was the best deal.
Savings aside, the experience was existential. A few times as I negotiated the crowded aisles and endured the food sample ladies reciting their scripts like robots, I wondered whether this was what life has become: a feeding frenzy of consumerism in a cavernous warehouse. Read More
Sometimes you see something over and over without really seeing it. Then one day it registers more vividly and emotionally. The scene, static and benign before, comes alive.
That was my experience today at the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland. I had popped in to check out a book. A library employee, whose makeup and attire and attitude reminded me of a surly Boy George, had to retrieve the book from storage. So I had fifteen minutes to kill and wandered the second and third floors. The tables and PCs were jammed with men wearing the scruffy, weathered look of the homeless. Read More
Anyone doubting the grassroots power of online social media should consider this story, which I wrote for today’s edition of The Oregonian.
Without Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, a son’s heart-warming attempt to help his mother’s financially ailing bookstore would have never reached and connected with so many people so quickly. Read More
My day began with champagne and two friends, Benjamin Alexander Clarke and Kelley Burke, at an elbow-to-elbow cafe, Krakow Koffeehouse, where we watched President Obama sworn in. It ended with a neighborhood potluck dinner and never-to-forget, flag-waving march with 40 other people through the streets of Portland. Read More
An email promoted tonight’s showing of vintage film footage from the civil rights movement. The location: a pizza place on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Northeast Portland.
It seemed a fitting way to spend the evening with wife and little boy. So we sat with about fifty people we didn’t know — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian — in the perfect prelude to tomorrow’s presidential inauguration. Read More
Not far from my house is a big faux Santa Claus butt. It’s actually a painting of his butt made to look like it’s sticking through a tire. The painting hangs from a tree like a, well, tire swing.
A nearby peace sign I understand as a year-round decoration. But whatever clever humor the butt might provide faded weeks ago. Read More
My intense bias aside, it’s hard to imagine John McCain providing the depth and quality of leadership that our soon-to-be new president has demonstrated. Clearly Barack Obama’s first priority is leadership, not ideology. That means elevating pragmatism over politics and candidly communicating often with the American people: Read More
Hard to correlate these two disparate ideas: airplane crash victims lost high in the Andes resorting to cannibalism, and stark humanity imbued with love.
But that’s what played out on the movie screen tonight in the documentary Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. After the plane carrying the Uruguayan ruby team went down in October 1972, sixteen of the forty-five passengers survived for more than two months. Had they not eaten from the bodies of their dead companions, they too would have died in the aptly named Valley of Tears. They were rescued when two team members trekked for days through towering peaks. Read More
I find myself drawn to people who embark on solitary adventures far from the helter-skelter of cities. Contemplating them is an escape from the mundane and predictable. Seriously imagining myself in their roles induces tinges of exhilaration — and panic.
In August last year, I wrote about and began following the blog of teenager Zac Sunderland, who continues his quest to sail around the world. Now I’m also following John Wells, who moved from New York to the Texas desert where he’s “living off the grid.” John blogs daily about experiences. And not just about the overwhelming challenge of building a self-sufficient enclave in the middle of nowhere. Read More
I worked on a book about a world-famous rodeo for 18 months with another writer, Ann Terry Hill. I also did extensive digging for old photographs. Recreating events from decades ago based on historical research was exhilarating. Nothing motivates me like the thrill of the hunt for hard-to-unearth information.
At the outset, most of what I knew about rodeos I learned from TV as a kid. The deeper into the project I went, the more I was moved by the triumphs and travails of cowboys, cowgirls, and Indians — notably those in the early part of the last century. Read More
On yet another snowy Portland night come this news in a flier left on our front porch: neighbors up the street are holding an Inauguration Night Party and Parade.
Besides dinner, patriotic songs, and apple pie for dessert, we’re invited to carry President Obama signs and American flags, and bang on pots and pans in a march through our Irvington neighorhood. Of course I’ll be there with Suzame and Atticus and our Obama painting in hand.
If there were similar grassroots gatherings after other presidential inaugurations during my life, I’ve not heard of them. As the flier says, “It’s time to party! We’re taking back these United States of America!”
Looking at my junk email folder, I feel unloved. Normally jammed with obnoxious, fraudulent, and salacious offers, it’s received only eight spams in the last fifteen hours.
That’s a shockingly small number, even with the typical weekend slowdown in such traffic. It’s also low considering that spam has rebounded since a dramatic drop worldwide in November. That drop came when a cybercrime-friendly Internet service provider was shut down. Read More
New Year’s Eve feast at Simpatica’s communal dining tables. Suzame and I sit across from each other. A couple takes the seats next to us. Strangers, but not for long.
He’s a musician, she’s a pediatric nurse practitioner. Outgoing and warm, they’re scheduled to wed in June. Talk turns to politics, and they describe an African trip last November to work for a charitable medical group:
They’re in a remote Kenyan village. They crowd with other people around a small television in a tiny house. Dawn creeps through the windows. The house has no electricity. Car batteries power the TV. Barack Obama is giving his victory speech.
Tears, disbelief, jubilation. And, suddenly, respect for America and its people.
Thanks, Lee and Madeleine.
