Sunday, March 8, 2015
Timberland Sky
Timberland sky to the east at sunset. The soft pastels of Gauguin or Seurat. Right here in Cedar Mill. Someday this open field will site the Beaverton School District's newest Middle School. But today it's a masterpiece of light and color. For moments. Then the beauty vanishes, swallowed up in twilight.
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Bucket of Good
Five years ago, my cousin Trish died. She was 50. The first of our generation to go. A year ago next month, cousin Dennis passed away at age 46. October first, it was Paul who left us after the quick onset of illness. He was 57. Then Bruce died of leukemia at age 64. Weeks after Bruce, my cousin Mary's husband Paul passed away. We are middle aged - too young to leave this life. Yet some do. And all will.
So I think of the concept of the bucket list. What is important or desirable to accomplish on this earth? In this short life? This moment that is mine? Before eternity dawns.
My bucket list won't have trips to Nepal, sky-diving or professional achievements. Here are some of my aspirations. Wants, not necessarily needs all. But that's what a bucket list is.
So I think of the concept of the bucket list. What is important or desirable to accomplish on this earth? In this short life? This moment that is mine? Before eternity dawns.
My bucket list won't have trips to Nepal, sky-diving or professional achievements. Here are some of my aspirations. Wants, not necessarily needs all. But that's what a bucket list is.
- Seek God.
- Experience romantic love.
- Develop your natural talents.
- Use your body; feel the rewards of moving, of doing, of pushing yourself. Breathe in pure air. Feel your heart beat from exertion.
- Experience parenthood. Recognize it as one of life's most precious gifts.
- Sacrifice for someone other than yourself.
- Help someone who can do nothing for you. Then do it again. And again.
- See the masterpiece that nature is around you.
- Learn the lessons animals can teach.
- Work hard. Be thankful you can.
- Love others.
- Explore the world through travel, through reading, through curiosity and questions.
- Be a good steward of all you have been given: your family, your health, your place in life, your talents, your years on this earth, your mind, your body, your soul. Realize that one of these will last forever; none of the others was designed to.
- Experience the joy of music.
- Seek peace. Understand you won't find it outside of yourself before you find it inside.
- Fail, and try again. Develop strength.
- Help others. Give. Be generous. Forgive.
- Appreciate art: natural, man-made, formal or accidental. Whether done by a master or a child.
- Let your greatest triumphs be triumphs of the spirit.
- Express your love to others. Love is everything. God is love.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Symphony at the Schnitz
Friday the Oregon Symphony played Beethoven's famous 5th Symphony at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. We sat near the front. Close enough to see the twinkly barrette in Sarah Kwak's hair. Close enough to see that Stefan Jackiw's bow broke a string twice in the intensity of his searing, soaring, poetic performance. Close enough to see Christoph Konig's kind smile as he rebuked the upper balcony for clapping after Beethoven's second movement. "There are two more! Just wait!" Close enough for Son to record the work of the maestro on his iPhone.
The music was exquisite. It echoes yet today. The plaintive strings, delicate piano, rousing percussion; the masterful dynamism of loud, soft, silence, and noise. Antonin Dvorak's Romance for Violin and Orchestra brought swirls of cadence, rich layered melodies, and Konig's mesmerizing energy embodying every nuance of the music; now loud and powerful, now quiet, impossibly soft. His hands and body became the very notes and kept the orchestra perfectly one.
As I sat in Arlene's ornate hall, memories flooded my mind.
In college I heard the Oregon Symphony a number of times under James DePriest. His charisma filled the hall as amply as the music filled the air. In the 90s we waited outside for a glimpse of Bob Dylan before his concert's start. He jumped off the tour bus dressed like a roadie, a hoodie pulled over his head, and disappeared into a back door before anyone recognized him. Several years later Hubby and I rocked and swayed to The Cure's loud luscious beat. I was pregnant, Baby Son kicking to Fascination Street in my womb. One year we got tickets to the Symphony's Christmas Concert and I gave away a pair to one of my teachers as a prize. I remember waving to her and her husband seated about fifteen seats behind and above us. Son was younger then and he called the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall "that place with a cantaloupe skin ceiling". Its embossed pattern looks just like a melon rind. One year I took young Son to a kids' Symphony concert on a Saturday afternoon. The naughtiness and noise horrified me. Kids, yes. But what were the parents thinking not to teach them better manners? We were at the Schnitz, in an upper balcony, enjoying 1964, a Beatle's Tribute band when I got the call that Beaverton School District wished to offer me a position as principal. In 2012 we were at a Morrissey concert at the Schnitz when Son called to say Nephew was having a seizure. We raced out of the earsplitting noise and hailed a cab on Broadway, flying fast to get home. For Mothers' Day in 2013 we saw Bill Cosby. (Before his recent shaming.) He sat onstage in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, drinking from a cup of water on a side table beside him. The Cos was hilarious - Nephew and Son loved him. In February 2014 we picked our way gingerly through sidewalks iced with snow to hear the Oregon Symphony play Beethoven's 7th. Its strains serenaded my thoughts for weeks.
Yes, the good old Schnitz.... the rococo lobby with endless intermission lines and pale pink frescoed walls. Its wool carpet, elegant bubblers, and stylish eccentrics. It is to us the music that is Portland.
The music was exquisite. It echoes yet today. The plaintive strings, delicate piano, rousing percussion; the masterful dynamism of loud, soft, silence, and noise. Antonin Dvorak's Romance for Violin and Orchestra brought swirls of cadence, rich layered melodies, and Konig's mesmerizing energy embodying every nuance of the music; now loud and powerful, now quiet, impossibly soft. His hands and body became the very notes and kept the orchestra perfectly one.
As I sat in Arlene's ornate hall, memories flooded my mind.
In college I heard the Oregon Symphony a number of times under James DePriest. His charisma filled the hall as amply as the music filled the air. In the 90s we waited outside for a glimpse of Bob Dylan before his concert's start. He jumped off the tour bus dressed like a roadie, a hoodie pulled over his head, and disappeared into a back door before anyone recognized him. Several years later Hubby and I rocked and swayed to The Cure's loud luscious beat. I was pregnant, Baby Son kicking to Fascination Street in my womb. One year we got tickets to the Symphony's Christmas Concert and I gave away a pair to one of my teachers as a prize. I remember waving to her and her husband seated about fifteen seats behind and above us. Son was younger then and he called the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall "that place with a cantaloupe skin ceiling". Its embossed pattern looks just like a melon rind. One year I took young Son to a kids' Symphony concert on a Saturday afternoon. The naughtiness and noise horrified me. Kids, yes. But what were the parents thinking not to teach them better manners? We were at the Schnitz, in an upper balcony, enjoying 1964, a Beatle's Tribute band when I got the call that Beaverton School District wished to offer me a position as principal. In 2012 we were at a Morrissey concert at the Schnitz when Son called to say Nephew was having a seizure. We raced out of the earsplitting noise and hailed a cab on Broadway, flying fast to get home. For Mothers' Day in 2013 we saw Bill Cosby. (Before his recent shaming.) He sat onstage in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, drinking from a cup of water on a side table beside him. The Cos was hilarious - Nephew and Son loved him. In February 2014 we picked our way gingerly through sidewalks iced with snow to hear the Oregon Symphony play Beethoven's 7th. Its strains serenaded my thoughts for weeks.
Yes, the good old Schnitz.... the rococo lobby with endless intermission lines and pale pink frescoed walls. Its wool carpet, elegant bubblers, and stylish eccentrics. It is to us the music that is Portland.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Wriggling Through By Subtle Manoeuvers
The UK Guardian ran an article about the daily rituals of famous creatives. Morning larks and night owls alike, exercisers and unrepentant louches, those with day jobs and those without, each had in common a daily iron-clad ritual.
I dream that someday I shall be free of working and able to write. Many of literature's finest wrote in spite of other full time employment, and some made the case that their writing came because of full time jobs.
Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive and poet, wrote that "I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me. It introduces discipline and regularity into one's life." Thought provoking. Compelling.
But I think my favorite quote is from Franz Kafka, who also worked in insurance. "Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straight-forward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvers."
Three cheers for subtle manoeuvers!
https://podio.com/site/creative-routines
I dream that someday I shall be free of working and able to write. Many of literature's finest wrote in spite of other full time employment, and some made the case that their writing came because of full time jobs.
Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive and poet, wrote that "I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me. It introduces discipline and regularity into one's life." Thought provoking. Compelling.
But I think my favorite quote is from Franz Kafka, who also worked in insurance. "Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straight-forward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvers." Three cheers for subtle manoeuvers!
https://podio.com/site/creative-routines
Happy Birthday Oregon
Happy Sweethearts' Day. Happy 156th birthday Oregon. Happy sunshine in the damp northwest.
My thoughts go to yesterday's big news. Governor Kitzhaber resigned before his fourth term had really much begun. He's been called a durable and ubiquitous Oregon politician. The controversy surrounding his resignation has been described as bizarre, unprecedented and sad.
One could say it was love that brought him down. But love was just one element. Cylvia Hayes played a role. Her carelessness with the truth, craven ambition and missing ethics proved the undoing of them both. But had JK not somehow begun to slip, he would have never fallen. What happened to his sense of right and wrong? Four terms may be too long a time to surround a person, anyone, with the kind of deference and power we grant celebrities of many kinds. My sense is that he had begun to take it all for granted. He started to believe he really was the big man that could never stumble. He'd been hoisted so high up on that pedestal that a tumble was due. Cylvia, lovely, beautiful Cylvia provided the romance that brought him down.
Happy Valentines' Day. Cupid's arrow has brought equal parts tragedy and bliss since the dawn of time. John and Cylvia are just today's star struck lovers.
The Google doodle quotes ee cummings. Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.
We'll see how that works out for them.
My thoughts go to yesterday's big news. Governor Kitzhaber resigned before his fourth term had really much begun. He's been called a durable and ubiquitous Oregon politician. The controversy surrounding his resignation has been described as bizarre, unprecedented and sad.
One could say it was love that brought him down. But love was just one element. Cylvia Hayes played a role. Her carelessness with the truth, craven ambition and missing ethics proved the undoing of them both. But had JK not somehow begun to slip, he would have never fallen. What happened to his sense of right and wrong? Four terms may be too long a time to surround a person, anyone, with the kind of deference and power we grant celebrities of many kinds. My sense is that he had begun to take it all for granted. He started to believe he really was the big man that could never stumble. He'd been hoisted so high up on that pedestal that a tumble was due. Cylvia, lovely, beautiful Cylvia provided the romance that brought him down.
Happy Valentines' Day. Cupid's arrow has brought equal parts tragedy and bliss since the dawn of time. John and Cylvia are just today's star struck lovers.
The Google doodle quotes ee cummings. Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.
We'll see how that works out for them.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Les Romans à Clef
Over the winter break I read two excellent books. Christmas presents from Hubby. Not eBooks or iBooks or any-other-vowelBooks. One paperback and the other hardback, solid, lovely real books with the scent of paper and ink.
First I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. She starts in the middle. The only way to tell this story.
So there she is, the narrator, meandering through college in 1996. On the first page she drops the bombshell that her brother left her life ten years earlier, and her sister seventeen. The once middle child now a de facto only child. We are with her in the lonely center of a mystery from the start. With just that hint of the beginning and the question of how it will end.
Fowler captures the nuances of family dynamics and human relationships. "My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family." And like that, we're off.
Beside Ourselves is a book to read on vacation. Rosemary lands in jail within the first couple of pages. From that point on, the drama, twists, surprises and mystery pull the reader in. I sat on the sofa, knees tucked under a blanket, and lost myself in the story. There is humor, great kindness in the writing, and tragedy. Tears snuck up on me before the end. The story looks with raw honesty at the complex relationships between humans and animals. No preaching. No answers really. But it raises some painful questions.
We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves stayed with me for days.
I let it soak in. And then, after a decent time lapse (so as not to be disrespectful), I picked up Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin.
By comparison, it started out slow. The reviews on the back cover said "the kind of novel that you just can't stop reading... just one more page, you tell yourself, just one more page..." Yet compared with Fowler's opening madcap ride to jail, Franklin's story began as imperceptibly as a sunrise.
Oh, he mentions the missing Rutherford girl, and a monster - in the first sentence. But then leans back into a slow Mississippi drawl about nature, the landscape and the weather. He paints with a fine-tipped brush. "At the edge of the porch several ferns hung from the eave, his mother's wind chime lodged in one like a flung puppet. He set his coffee on the rail and went to disentangle the chime's slender pipes from the leaves." Chicken pens with "speckled droppings and wet feathers", "storm clouds like a billowing mountain" to the north, "tapping the razor on the edge of the sink, whiskers peppered around the drain more gray than black" and we, the reader, slowly, ever so slowly, filling with a sense of quiet empathy and dread.
Crooked Letter cast its deep magic. It built up slow but full of power. Eventually it overtook my waking thoughts. Two boys, one black, one white. Tragedies unrecognized from a child's eyes. Just the way it is, something to make into a playground of some kind. Kids will find a way to learn about the world. The two boys played together in the fields and wood, and did not acknowledge each other at school, the place where their race mattered.
Then a girl disappeared. The last known person to see her was 17 year old Larry, the awkward white boy. The odd kid, the guy who was always a little strange. Decades passed. Decades without a body or any solid evidence. Decades of solitude for Larry, ostracized by the small community. Year after year of chicken tending and clouds rolling in, daily rituals and long silence. The black boy did a stint in the Marines and eventually returned to the community to serve as deputy Sheriff. To serve as deputy and to solve the winding, twisting, mesmerizing mystery. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Indeed.
First I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. She starts in the middle. The only way to tell this story.
So there she is, the narrator, meandering through college in 1996. On the first page she drops the bombshell that her brother left her life ten years earlier, and her sister seventeen. The once middle child now a de facto only child. We are with her in the lonely center of a mystery from the start. With just that hint of the beginning and the question of how it will end.
Fowler captures the nuances of family dynamics and human relationships. "My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family." And like that, we're off.
Beside Ourselves is a book to read on vacation. Rosemary lands in jail within the first couple of pages. From that point on, the drama, twists, surprises and mystery pull the reader in. I sat on the sofa, knees tucked under a blanket, and lost myself in the story. There is humor, great kindness in the writing, and tragedy. Tears snuck up on me before the end. The story looks with raw honesty at the complex relationships between humans and animals. No preaching. No answers really. But it raises some painful questions.
We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves stayed with me for days.
I let it soak in. And then, after a decent time lapse (so as not to be disrespectful), I picked up Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin.
By comparison, it started out slow. The reviews on the back cover said "the kind of novel that you just can't stop reading... just one more page, you tell yourself, just one more page..." Yet compared with Fowler's opening madcap ride to jail, Franklin's story began as imperceptibly as a sunrise.
Oh, he mentions the missing Rutherford girl, and a monster - in the first sentence. But then leans back into a slow Mississippi drawl about nature, the landscape and the weather. He paints with a fine-tipped brush. "At the edge of the porch several ferns hung from the eave, his mother's wind chime lodged in one like a flung puppet. He set his coffee on the rail and went to disentangle the chime's slender pipes from the leaves." Chicken pens with "speckled droppings and wet feathers", "storm clouds like a billowing mountain" to the north, "tapping the razor on the edge of the sink, whiskers peppered around the drain more gray than black" and we, the reader, slowly, ever so slowly, filling with a sense of quiet empathy and dread.
Crooked Letter cast its deep magic. It built up slow but full of power. Eventually it overtook my waking thoughts. Two boys, one black, one white. Tragedies unrecognized from a child's eyes. Just the way it is, something to make into a playground of some kind. Kids will find a way to learn about the world. The two boys played together in the fields and wood, and did not acknowledge each other at school, the place where their race mattered.
Then a girl disappeared. The last known person to see her was 17 year old Larry, the awkward white boy. The odd kid, the guy who was always a little strange. Decades passed. Decades without a body or any solid evidence. Decades of solitude for Larry, ostracized by the small community. Year after year of chicken tending and clouds rolling in, daily rituals and long silence. The black boy did a stint in the Marines and eventually returned to the community to serve as deputy Sheriff. To serve as deputy and to solve the winding, twisting, mesmerizing mystery. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Indeed.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
18 Degrees and Clear
Drove the highway to Mount Hood on Monday with Son. Cold, clear and frozen.
December 29th was one day before his 18th birthday. He kept all limbs intact. (Prayer of thanks.) Watching a carefree pack of teen-aged boys enjoy the slopes was a joy. Ruddy cheeks, the clank of ski boots, sweaty hair under the ski caps, and stories of double black diamond and wipe outs. Cool.
December 29th was one day before his 18th birthday. He kept all limbs intact. (Prayer of thanks.) Watching a carefree pack of teen-aged boys enjoy the slopes was a joy. Ruddy cheeks, the clank of ski boots, sweaty hair under the ski caps, and stories of double black diamond and wipe outs. Cool.
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