Relax with me
Life is a tide pool, colorful and surprising
Check in
Hello, Dear Reader,
This is your relaxing time. No mental calisthenics required here.
Just a quiet read on a soft spring day.
And a photo to go with it
Want to get meditative? Try this:
Breathe in goodness. Breathe out woe. Breathe in kindness. Breathe out hurt. Breathe in stillness. Breathe out chaos. Unknot your shoulders, Relax your jaw, Smile with your eyelids. Hold my hand, walk with me. Breathe in goodness.
Astrological year begins
We are in Aries now, the sign of fire, rebirth, and great beginnings. My husband and both my grandchildren are Aries-born. In Robert, the extraordinary energy is tempered with compassion. Who knows about the children? Time will tell.
Baseball
MLB opening day is March 28, 2024. Have some Crackerjack on me.
Ball game
Drop a penny, Pick it up. Skip a stone across a stream. Toss a salad, Throw a pot, Three strikes on a windless day. Flags fall flaccid Without wind. Hurl the hailstones anyway. Hit or miss, Mostly misses. Keep ’em comin’—batter up!
Seen on the bus
Advice
“To thine own self be true.”
—Hamlet
“Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
—The Princess Bride
“Plastics.”
—The Graduate
Most advice I've gotten over the years I've forgotten or ignored. Sometimes I listen.
Here are two pieces of advice from 50 years and more ago. One of them was useful, the other misguided.
The plastic bag trick
Every time I have to open a new garbage bag, I remember the advice of a fellow customer at the Berkeley Co-op in about 1970: wet your fingers.
We probably did it then by licking our fingers, as the automatic produce sprinklers that moisten everything (and for a while spread Legionnaires’ Disease) were still a few years off. Now I would no more lick my fingers than sneeze into my hand.
No matter. A quick touch of water from a faucet or a sink moistens the fingers. Rub the edges, and the plastic parts.
The thread issue
Less useful was advice from my mom, who showed me as a child how to thread a needle. Use the end just clipped from the spool, she advised, as the other end might be frayed.
What she didn’t know and I didn’t tumble to until quite recently is that thread has a nap. Run your fingers down a strand, both ways, and feel the subtle difference. To sew with the nap, you have to use the thread’s leading end to thread your needle. If it’s frayed, just trim it.
All these decades I’ve been threading needles the way Mom taught me and pulling thread through fabric the wrong way, like petting a cat in the wrong direction. Of course this is an absurdly minor difference. I’m just glad I now know better.
Am I better off for knowing? Only that every time I thread a needle I’m reminded of Mom.
From the past
What a life, to be able to dredge up memories from half a century ago! When I was born in 1950, the Civil War had begun just 90 years before. The American Revolution was 84 years before that. The time spans were nearly equidistant.
Now the 84-year gap is the same, but the Civil War has receded to 164 years ago.
A clipping
Someone donated a book on Tutankhamen to the Rose Schnitzer Manor library. Folded inside was a clipping from The Oregon Journal dated Thursday, July 20, 1978.
It was a commentary about the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” art show that ran for four months that year in Seattle. I remember traveling to that show.
Under the jolly headline: “‘Tut’ art gloomy? Not on your life!” The Journal’s art editor, Andy Rocchia, suggested viewing the Tutankhamen trove as an affirmation of life.
“What Tut’s funerary objects and the circumstances of their location reveal is not so much a preoccupation with death, but an attempt to conjoin the pleasures and beauties of life with the facts of irrevocable death.
“Objects that comprise ‘Treasures’ are not dead in an aesthetic sense. Rather, they are vigorously alive and well—especially to a modern eye.”
Rocchia, a writer for The Journal who also worked as an editor for that paper’s Sunday Magazine, became a staff member of The Oregonian when it merged with The Journal in 1982. He was the garden writer.
He retired in about 1990, although he continued to freelance for Northwest Magazine (a longtime feature of The Sunday Oregonian) for several years.
Now 92, Andy lives in West Linn with his wife, Elizabeth.
Story photos
An image can tell a story. What do you think happened to the bumper that ended up here?
This is Cheryl and her dog, Bear. He has quite an underbite. She tugged his mouth open and showed me he has an overbite too. What do her possessions say?
I don’t know what this object is. The circle is about the size of a half-dollar. The figure at the top is an “S” with a dot below it.
Regrets and criticism
Why am I so critical?
I’m on a raft, leaving the desert island, setting out over the open water for land I might never reach. But I am leaving the regrets and criticism behind.
Can I turn my back on them? It’s so hard. They’ve been boon companions.
Hard parting
I sail away from regrets But they cry from the beach: “Take me! Don’t leave me!” In thin, whiney voices. I try to abandon My critical nature Alone in the forest As I ride away. But critics are creatures, With thick, waxen wings. They fly, they pursue me. There’s nowhere to hide. All my worst traits Are ranged before me. Knock them down, they arise, Unbeaten, unbowed. Darkness within me... One little candle. That’s all I ask, Spirit, To lighten the gloom.
Spiraling out from a movie mention
“Little Wing” is an odd duck of a movie. It’s about pigeons, actually. The improbable plot has a couple of tweens stealing a valuable bird and selling it to the Russian Pigeon Mafia for $25,000.
This absurdity is a product of impending adolescence. The child in the main character, Kaitlyn, thinks the scam will work, saving her home from being lost as her parents divorce. The wakening adult in her must navigate an encroaching reality, where of course you don’t sell things to the Mafia.
This is not a perfect movie, but it is fresh and affirming. Plus, it’s set in Portland, my fair city.
Strange, but another movie aimed at youngsters shot and set in Portland, “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” also has Russians portrayed as bumbling bad guys.
There are many Russians in Portland. All the ones I know are fine, upstanding people. Perhaps moviemakers think the accents are funny. Most Russians I know don’t have accents.
In “Little Wing,” children bike across bridges (including the Steel Bridge) and learn to love birds. A stirring scene shows the release of hundreds of homing pigeons from a rural road far from the city.
Streaming service
“Little Wing” is streaming on Paramount+, the outlet for CBS. A subscription, about $6 a month, will also allow you access to all six seasons of my favorite series, “The Good Life” (a spinoff of “The Good Wife”) featuring the ever-watchable Christine Baranski. You can stream “Blue Bloods,” if that’s your thing (evidently the series is popular with old folks), “Murder She Wrote” and all 271 episodes of “Perry Mason.”
I love PM, shot in crisp black and white. I love the dresses, the cars, the LA vibe, the casual cigarette smoking. I love how Della Street, while “just” a secretary, is part of the team.
More on Perry
Episodes of “Perry Mason” ran on Portland television station KPTV every weekday at noon for 42 years, from 1970 to 2012. Whenever I had a vacation day or sick day at home, I’d tune in.
While perusing the Wikipedia entry on Perry Mason, I learned that William Hopper, who plays that dapper detective, Paul Drake, was the son of Hedda Hopper, once a prolific actress and later the notorious Hollywood columnist. She helped blacklist Hollywood figures during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
Hopper mère was a genius at self-aggrandizement and viciousness, foreshadowing the current Republican nominee for president. Paraphrasing what the lawyer Joseph N. Welch famously said to Sen. Joseph McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, madam? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Hopper fils, the actor, almost didn’t get the role because of his mom, but saner heads prevailed. He was, of course, perfect for the part.
Check out
I think the last time I visited the Oregon coast was with my mother, and she died in 2012. So, yes, a long time.
Part of it is, I don’t drive and Robert doesn’t enjoy driving very much.
Back in the day, you could take the train from Portland to Seaside. Families would live at the beach for the summer, with dads commuting out from the city on weekends. The “Daddy Train” ran from 1888 to 1938. That’s the year U.S. 26 was finished and folks could just drive.
Amtrak still offers a train from Portland to Cannon Beach. It runs just twice a day from Union Station or the Sunset Transit Center near St. Vincent Hospital.
The thoughts of youth
I love the ocean. When I lived in the Midwest, I yearned for the sea. As a 12-year-old, I started a collection of poems with maritime themes, like “Roll On, Thou Deep and Dark Blue Ocean, Roll” from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by Byron.
Or John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever”: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky . . .”
I think I included “Crossing the Bar,” by Tennyson, but I wasn’t ready, at 12, for Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”
In a successful attempt to teach myself how to touch type, I typed a lot of poetry. But the manuscript of the sea poems is long lost.
If I went to the beach today, I wouldn’t be likely to explore tide pools, which I used to enjoy. One can rent or even buy wheelchairs with big balloon-like wheels to run on the sand, but they wouldn’t get close to the low-lying pools.
So instead, I wrote a poem.
The shallows
Fish glint in the shallows, Tadpoles and ichneumons in a pond. Anemones float in a tide pool, Tentacles sensitive to prods. All of this life continues Far away from our touch. We think we are the masters Nature knows we’re not much. Destroyers or builders? Which should we be? Inch away like the anemone Tiptoe past the tide pool. We’re busy with starshine, Exploring new worlds. Still we dive down, down in the shallows Bumping our chins on the gravel. Then we glide on the wind, Our wings outstretched, Strong in the shoulders, Strong in our vision. We want so much, so much. We destroy to build up, Too easy, we forget the fish That slip away through the shallows. I wish you a good week of splashing about and exploring the shallows and tide pools of your life.
Housekeeping
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