A milestone

This is the 175th weekly posting for Becoming. Maybe I’m on a roll!

Check in

Still life with curlicue

This shot of my neighbor’s front stairs fills me with a strange yearning. I’m drawn in by the oblique lines, the tattered red steps, the pink can and the orange pumpkin, its shape accentuated by the curves of the railing. These things, in this time. Why are they together? A mystery.

Whose boots those are I do not know. Fran Gardner photo

No. 175

This is my 175th posting on Substack. My very first entry was “Where I am coming from,” Sept. 5, 2022. I ended that post with these words:

Faith can call us to forgiveness, too. In fact, the first faith is that I can forgive. The second is that I can write about it.

Here are a few earlier postings you might like to review. Scores more lurk in my archive at Becoming, frangardner.substack.com.

• “Yellow,” from Nov. 11, 2023, is a meditation on early winter, suffused with surprising photos of yellow things.

• “End of Year” from Dec. 21, 2004, has a good poem about the solstice and a dissertation on creativity, randomness and letting ideas go.

• Need a primer on newspaper terms? “Newspaper memories and mangoes,” from Nov. 21, 2022, explains what “uppercase” means and shows you how to make a pressman’s hat.

Another 175th posting

Mason Currey has just posted the 175th edition of his Substack, Subtle Maneuvers. This post, called “Ghost writers in the sky,” is a beaut—all about where inspiration comes from. How the universe is stuffed with ideas that flock to us when we are receptive to them, landing on our psyches like gentle butterflies.

It’s worth checking out.

Doing nothing. Like, yeah

I have Terrell Johnson of The Half Marathoner to thank for this lovely sentiment:

Oh, how wonderful it is to do nothing and rest afterward.

Think about that one for a second. Read it again.

Terrell says he first saw the saying carved into a desk in his college days. An internet search brings up the source as a Spanish proverb: Que bello es hacer nada, y luego dormir.

I want to take this sentiment to heart. I have a rare few weeks coming when hardly anything is planned. School is out, so I can skip my semiweekly hours of mentoring at a school that’s one hour away by bus, each way. And Mason Currey’s two-hour Worm Zoom writing sessions, which I’ve attended religiously every weekday for more than a year, are on hiatus during the same two weeks.

Freedom!

I’ll still be posting on Becoming each week. But there should be lots more time to pursue other hobbies. Right?

Not so fast. I’ll be turning 76 in the middle of this time-off period, and one that thing years of experience have taught me is that I’ll never be able to completely knuckle down on projects even when there seems to be plenty of time.

I PLAN on tackling a mountain of mending, layering some quilt tops, baking keto scones and reading from the piles of books that are stacked everywhere.

The reality: I’ll play endless rounds of Yukon on my tablet, watch football, enjoy holiday movies, ride the bus on flimsy errands and spend too much time making dinner.

And I still try to be in bed by 9:15, because I sleep better when I go to bed early.

Piles of clutter

Things will get done, checked off the list
All but the tasks I can’t get to now.
Now? Never, more likely: to-dos pile up
My mind is a clear as my desk, which is . . .

Jumbled with papers, pens in a can,
Reading glasses under it all, somewhere.
Coffee stains covered with coasters my sister
Stitched in sashiko, a Japanese art.

See, now I’m deflecting, away from the clutter.
I don’t want to clean up or think about how
I can even unearth the ore from these piles—
Oh, yes, and there’s email. . . . 
And a blank line
[                                                    ]
For all the other stuff I’ve forgotten
That I “have” to do

One lesson of the past 76 years: whatever I do, it’s worthwhile to me in some way or other. So I just do what I can.

Tuba poems

On my way to the Tuba Christmas concert in downtown Portland last week, I was super attuned to the sounds around me. A man snapped a plastic bag, settling the bottles and cans inside it. A passing MAX train wailed woefully. I heard the big brass—tubas and euphoniums—warming up, and the excited chatter of the gathering crowd. An old woman’s cane tapped a frantic rhythm on the brick sidewalk.

I maneuvered my wheelchair through the crowd to the corner of the square where I had set up in years past. I donned my “Let me write you a poem—it’s free” placard and waited.

From my poem-writing vantage point, I saw the backs of lots of tubas. These players in orange and black are from the Oregon State University Marching Band. Fran Gardner photo

Sometimes I asked a passer-by if they’d like me to write a poem for them. The cowards said no, thanks, and the brave ones said “sure!” As I scribbled, more people approached me. I wrote a double handful of poems. Some of them I ran last week. Here are a few more.

Isabel’s chosen subject was growth.

Growth

Old growth, new young things,
Lambs in the meadow,
Staid mountains above.

Life force inside you,
Replenishing cells.
Making you new, instant by instant.

You are new, you are old,
Growth and senescence.
You blink, the world turns.
Go forth now, all fresh.

Lucie, who is in middle school, asked for a poem about the changing of seasons. It just happens that the solstice is tomorrow, Sunday, Dec. 21, at 7:03 am in Portland.

Coming to winter

There go the leaves, the berries, the pinecones.
Leaf blowers send all the dead leaf dust away.
The streets are clear now, clean as new notebooks,
Where you write on white paper, white as new snow.

Feasts and celebrations,
Halloween and Hanukkah.
Old friends, new adventures—
As each season turns new.

Jon asked me to write something his son, David, age 8, could relate to.

PB&J and an ordinary day

Dagwood never made a PB&J.
No, he was more a ham and cheese guy,
But David and Jon like their treats simpler, 
Just basic bread, nuts and fruit.

What happens on an ordinary day?
Only the most unexpected:
Flowers decide to bloom, dogs walk backward,
Clouds fly by like wisps of dirty lace.

What do you do in ordinary time?
Watch TV, read a book—take a walk!
The world is panting to show you new wonders,
Although sometimes it just offers PB&J.

White space

Pantone, the US company that regulates and standardizes colors, has announced its color of the year, although this year’s choice is not really a color. It is a white shade called Cloud Dancer.

After some initial dismay about the whole societal trend to drain color out of everything, I’ve come to appreciate Cloud Dancer. It’s not simply stark white. It has a billowy, soft edge. Under Pantone’s CMYK system, it contains 0% cyan, 1% magenta, 3% yellow and 6% black.

It appears so insubstantial against Substack’s white background that I can’t reproduce it here. Check it out on Pantone’s website.

Pantone says the color “reflects the zeitgeist,” that it represents “clarity and focus,” “new beginnings,” “inner peace” and “mindful living.”

Cloud Dancer (PANTONE 11-4201) is not just a lack of color; it is a profound statement. It represents a clean slate, a new chapter, and a collective exhale. In an era defined by information overload, digital noise, and global uncertainty, this choice reflects a universal yearning for simplicity and peace.

Our bleached lives

I’ve written before about how pale tones have taken over our culture, essentially since 9-1-1. From the bus, I see street after street of suburban homes and apartments painted in dreary sand-like colors. Websites and magazines feature interiors so white and monochromatic you wonder how anyone could inhabit them with children or pets. Cars come in all shades of white, black and gray.

More than one red car at a time is a rare sight these days. Fran Gardner photo

Cloud Dancer isn’t dreary, but it isn’t colorful either. And I think we need more color, not less, in our lives, our surroundings. Paint something red!

Primary colors and pink flamingos. Fran Gardner photo

Celebrate color! The yellow building below, in Southeast Portland’s Sunnyside neighborhood, used to the Aletheia Bible Church. Now it’s Social Good Place, offering workspaces and venues for community groups.

Social Good Place, at 45th and Main Street, has livened up an old church building. Fran Gardner photo

Sloppy

Merriam-Webster’s editors have chosen “slop” as their 2025 Word of the Year.

I like how they define the word on their website.

[Slop is] Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. . . .

The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time . . . and lots of talking cats. . . .

Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch.

Runner-up words (chosen by the number of searches): “gerrymander,” “touch grass,” “performative,” “tariff,” “conclave” and “six seven” (which was meme of the year at dictionary.com).

Webster’s also got a lot of hits for Lake Char­gog­ga­gogg­man­chaug­ga­gogg­chau­bu­na­gun­ga­maugg. This body of water on the Massachusetts-Connecticut border is also known as Webster Lake. It has the longest place name in the US, and the lake is a feature of the Roblox game Spelling Bee.

Check out

Surprised by UPS

It’s 7:50 am and I’m waiting outside the UPS store, which opens at 8, and this guy drives up in a UPS van. He’s wearing a UPS uniform under a yellow safety vest. He asks me if this building is 4110 SE Hawthorne. That’s his delivery address.

Wait. He’s a UPS employee driving a UPS vehicle and is at a UPS store. So this is probably where he is supposed to be.

Next, he asks when they open and I say 8 o’clock. Like it says on the door. And then he asks what time it is. Maybe he doesn’t have a watch or a cell phone.

A holiday based on a pun

December 23 is celebrated by some, if only in mirth, as Christmas Adam. That’s because Adam comes before Eve.

Maybe this is the day to break out the fruitcake.

You do like fruitcake, don’t you?

Old days gone by

This sign greeted me every year at Puzzle Tree Farm outside Newberg, Ore., where Harold and Winnie Hughes operated a tree farm. My daughters and I came to pick out and cut down a fresh Christmas tree.

Harold was a long-time editorial writer at The Oregonian, and Winnie was just one of the finest women I’ve even known.

Harold and Winnie are gone now. I haven’t visited the farm since my children grew up and left home. That was decades ago. You can tell from the prices.

So long, farewell

Thanks for reading post #175. Thanks in advance for clicking the “like” heart and commenting. If you have any cash left after the holidays, you could invest in a paid subscription. The little secret, though, is that you will always be able to read Becoming for free. I’m having too much fun writing it to quit yet, and the idea of putting up a paywall that only lets in paid subscribers hurts my soul.

Here’s the PayPal link where you can donate a freeform number of dollars in increments of five.

Merry holidays to all, and to all a good night.

Love,

Fran Gardner

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