Gnomes and mermaids
Portland’s own Brooklyn and nonstop sunflowers
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Here we are, basking in the present. The days are warm and sunny. Relax. Walking is easy on cool mornings. Relax. Greet the dogs. Relax. Sometimes there is too much to remember: Remember to breathe. Remember to be authentic. Remember who you are. Remember not to drop the ball. Or you could forget all that. Forget who you are. Let the world embrace you. The only thing you must remember is that you are loved. Relax into that thought.
Garden gnomes
Our landscaper, Ken Yates, calls his business Berserker Gnome Landscape LLC.
He really was a berserker when it came to cleaning out our backyard after the wheelchair ramp was built. He tackled the wild clematis, the overgrown grapes, the not-so-good raspberries and the tenacious volunteer elm trees.
I don’t happen to have a garden gnome, but I’ve spotted a few on my travels. The one is in distress, lying head down and face down amid the ferns. The green guy is in better shape, grinning from his perch near the hoses.
Just stop
The Brooklyn neighborhood of Southeast Portland is a modest enclave, not big and sprawling like the New York borough. As often in a new place, I found myself inhaling its presence, poking at its essence, peeling back layers of history, impressions and feelings.
Sometimes, those things can overwhelm. On this day, I was trying to do too much, writing down impressions, aching to capture the day in photos. I decided to stop writing, stop taking pictures. Instead, I relaxed and allowed myself to be moved.
What I found: sights common to all neighborhoods, but special in their interconnectedness: overgrown yards, banks of roses, rundown houses, well-tended houses, trash cans lined up by the curb. One driveway was covered with the first fallen walnuts of the season, wrapped in their green jackets, peppered with black spots where the birds or the bugs had pecked or tunneled in.
Tangled vetch overgrew in a parking strip. Dogs walked their humans. Pigeons strutted and stretched their iridescent pink necks.
Summer smelled mildly of dust and jasmine. Traffic sounded in the distance. Clouds stood aloof as a mounting breeze ruffled my hair.
Expressions and impressions surrounded me. Tibetan prayer flags. Black Lives Matter signs. A fancy piece of needlework tacked onto a creosote-soaked utility pole, where it will wear and weather away.
Trees seemed indifferent, sulkily shouldering their burden of summer leaves. Someone was cooking lunch, smell of hot grease. This street would smell of barbecue later. It was that sort of lazy day.
I later took a photo of vetch in another neighborhood. The plant is pretty, but many species are opportunistic and invasive. The roots are shallow and the plants are easy to pull up, but why not let beauty be.
Poem
Prayers
I offer you my heart, God. I have nothing else. We have been praying for millennia, Monks, nuns, little children. Yet, the world is evil, ignorant, willful. Rulers dine on delicate quail While subjects live and starve in squalor. All has been said, read, prayed before. The good of our hearts, well-meaning, benign, Is submerged in a sea of vanity and venality. We know the world, that hearts are not pure. This is what we have been given, A world of strife and wonder. Is prayer a gift or a responsibility? We can’t know. This is why we pray.
Mermaids
Portland hosted a Mermaid Festival on July 27. Folks in costume paraded from the Japanese Historical Plaza along the Willamette River to Poet’s Beach on the South Waterfront.
Where it’s @
Don’t pull out a piece of paper just yet. Stop and remember how you draw the “at” sign.
Now try writing it.
Chances are your effort will be close to the original. This is an easy glyph to draw.
But what does it mean?
The original use of the shift-2 symbol on keyboards was to denote a price per item, as in 3 oranges @ 25 cents each.
My MacBook keyboard doesn’t have a cent sign, but option-4 produces one. There’s a kludgier workaround for Windows computers involving the alt key and a set of four numbers.
Now I can type: 3 oranges @ 25¢ each = 75¢.
Categorical
The “at sign” has an official name, according to DuckDuckGo: the asperand. Or, to some, the ampersat. But Merriam Webster, the dictionary just adopted by the AP style gurus, has only one entry. That is “at sign.”
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a techie at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), pulled the little @ out of obscurity. He was working on the first email communication between computers. This was the ARPANET era, before the Internet got its name.
Tomlinson chose @ to be the bridge between the user’s name and the computer address because it was relatively unused, and besides, it fit the idea of an address.
That was easy
I just tried to draw an @, and my effort looks just like the symbol. I even made the circle in the right direction, counter-clockwise. Or anti-clockwise if you live in Britain. Or widdershins if you are a German or a Scot.
The @ has different names depending on where in the world you live. Wikipedia has a list, much of it possibly apocryphal.
In Italian, it’s called a snail’s tail
Russian: little dog
Taiwanese: little mouse
Danish: elephant’s trunk
Greek: duckling
From @ to herring
My favorite description of @ comes from Czech and Slovak: rollmop. That’s a piece of herring rolled around a tasty nugget, like a pickle.
I still remember the jar of pickled herring in the fridge when I was a child in Minnesota. We never had the kind with sour cream. Just the unadulterated fish pickled in sweet brine.
I never saw a rollmop in those days. In Portland you can find them at the Edelweiss Deli on Southeast Powell.
Some folks don’t like herring, but I took to it like a fish to water.
Herring aside, the @ symbol itself looks fat and happy. That and the fact that I can draw it easily could make my day. I’m very easy to please these days.
If you draw
Perhaps you can make something of the @. It looks a little like a squirrel. Like an acorn. A Danish pastry. A whirlpool. A child’s fancy lollipop. A maze.
Or, it could be a pizza. One with anchovies, not pickled herring.
Supersized
Pastries keep getting bigger and bigger. This overloaded display case was at a coffee stop in a medical facility. There were no “healthy” alternatives. I bought a black coffee.
Hair today
Some hair-related anecdotes have filtered past me.
1. A repairman told us that he has been getting his hair cut by the same woman for 40 years now. She was 19 and he 20 when he was her first client. Now he’s 60, and she’s still going strong in Beaverton.
2. I needed to have my hair trimmed a few inches. Nothing fancy. So I walked into a barber shop on Hawthorne, where a woman named Heather cut my hair. She has a varied career, working as a paralegal, writer, copy editor and cosmetologist. She finds that if she stops doing any of those things, she doesn’t feel complete. So I let her work on the hair part of her calling.
She fiddled with my hair, feathering it in an idiosyncratic fashion that is either very au courant or the worst haircut I’ve ever had. I’m leaning toward really great.
3. My husband, Robert, got a haircut. He’s doing this less often, as he’s taken to trimming the temples and the comb-over on his own. But as the back hair starts creeping over his collar, it’s time to seek professional help.
His hair, by the way, always looks good.
And a jingle
Here’s a children’s rhyme with a hair-raising denouement. Kindergartners love this one. Stop me if you’ve heard it already.
Little Bunny Foo Foo hopping through the forest,
Scooping up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head!
Down came the good fairy, and she said,
“Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don’t want to see you
Scooping up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head!
I’ll give you three chances, and if you don’t behave
I’ll turn you into a GOON!”
And she does give him three chances, as the kids chant the same verse for the next two days of field mice boppin’. Children love repetition.
Finally the good fairy has had enough.
So the next day…
Little Bunny Foo Foo hopping through the forest,
Scooping up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head!
Down came the good fairy, and she said,
“Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don’t want to see you
Scooping up the field mice and boppin’ ’em on the head!
I gave you three chances and you didn’t behave,
so now I am going to turn you into a GOON!
Which she does. And the moral of the story is: Hare today, Goon tomorrow.
Stop sunflowers
Sunflowers do what sunflowers do, and that includes ignoring the sign. It’s high summer and sunflowers all over town are reaching for the clouds.
Creativity prompt
A new essay by me has been published by Juke. The subject is weight and weightlessness.
Check out
Backpedaling
If only our lives came with backspaces. A way to put things back the way they were. A second ago, before we blurted out those unconsidered words.
An hour ago, when we hit the “buy now” button.
A week ago, when we got off the phone too quickly with a friend who wanted more from us than we could give.
A lifetime ago, when we made a choice—spouse, career, city of residence—that set us on a particular path.
If I could do it all over again . . . I would take better care of my teeth, one old guy said. For myself, I would eat less sugar. I would treat other people as humans, not objects. I would think before I spoke. All the time.
I would stick with playing in the community orchestra despite the difficulties with childcare and practice time.
Regret
These thoughts, the things undone, the words spoken in haste, the procrastination, have everything to do with regret. And regret is my most hated emotion. It’s fruitless, for one thing. And it makes me feel bad.
Can we move on now? I’ve had it with wallowing in the past.
We can’t rewind. Not until we figure out time travel. And that is sure to be fraught with unintended consequences.
We’re stuck with the present. Good thing it’s such an interesting and exciting place to live.
I invite you to live in it this week. Pull back from the past and the future. Your life is now, it’s immediate, it’s where you belong.
Always say never
Shelves of boxes at Never Coffee on Southeast Belmont.
—30—
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I think the Mermaid Festival would be a really fun thing to see! Great discussion of @
Great post and love all the pics but especially the merpersons and the sunflowers. I miss pickled herring and summer barbecues!