Remembering to breathe

One last posting before I move home

Check in

I’m moving. On Tuesday I will leave my crow’s nest of an apartment at Rose Schnitzer Manor in Southwest Portland to return home to Robert and our duplex on Southeast Main Street (not Wall Street!).

Sunset

Day is ending as seen from my western window at Rose Schnitzer Manor. My new home won’t offer any sunset views. Photo © Fran Gardner

Like most partings, this one is bittersweet. I have determined after several years in assisted living that I am pretty well able to take care of myself, with some assistance from Robert.

So I’m going back to my downstairs apartment with its golden oak and fir floors. Sunny rooms, each with windows facing two directions. A bathroom where the tub was tanked in favor of a walk-in shower. A new sunroom where the back deck had been, a place to park my wheelchair. With three big windows and glassy French doors, it too has a surfeit of sun.

What is lost

Of course I will miss my friends, the food (excellent salmon and all the lox you can eat), the activities. The trees, the forest, the quiet, the frogs.

But I will be back living with Robert, able to talk to him anytime I want without the annoyance of poor cell coverage. I’ll lose the view of sky, birds and treetops, but our house is in a picturesque part of town. Say hello to our pretty flowering quince, the massive maples next door and the towering catalpa across the street. Sometimes lovers pose in front of the giant, profusely blooming camellia near our front door.

I’ll be cooking, of course, and also writing. As always, I will try to do too much.

Maybe I will write a book. I know I will ride the bus.

Packing up

Where did you put it?
That thing you need now.
Brown cardboard boxes
And clutter and mess.

No one likes moving,
Chaotic disruption.
Again you are wondering
If you need all those books.

Soon you'll be sleeping
In your old bedroom,
In a new bed with
Rails to help rise.

Like a little old lady,
You bought a recliner— 
Put up the feet
And watch some TV.

We built a sunroom,
A home for the wheelchair.
A new place to spy
On neighborhood cats.

Sitting while waiting

Bus shelter benches are all very well, but sometimes riders encounter extra amenities.

Someone left a chair in a shelter on Southeast Belmont near 26th Avenue. One of the arms is dangling off (attached by a strap), but you could sit in it.

Photo © Fran Gardner

More substantial is this shelter on Southwest Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, also with funky seating.

Photo © Fran Gardner

It’s next to Jack’s Tap Room and Quarterback Bar and Grill, which offered prime rib and halibut every day until it closed for good on February 2, 2024.

“It was just time to sell,” the owner, Jack Stanley, told me. “Thirty years in that location was enough.”

The bus shelter was already in place when he bought Godmother’s Pizza in 1994 and opened an establishment called Cactus Jack’s. The name was changed to Jack’s Tap Room in 2017.

Stanley says the bus stop structure was built by Boy Scouts as a service project. It will remain. Stanley said he sold his building to a neighboring business, which will use it as warehouse space.

From the lake to the gulf

Lake Itasca, in north-central Minnesota, is the headwater of the Mississippi River. The rivers described in this poem are more from the mountains, but I like the title.

Itasca

How many rivers rush to the sea,
Pulling down mountains, boulder and stone.
Rushing, concussing, brown was silt, green with slime—
Eternally changing, no second the same.

Bears wade in the water, footsure on sand.
Herons caress it, wide-striding birds!
There is no beginning, a river forever.
Unceasing, brave, elemental, alive.

Fish, frogs and minnows skim through the water.
Sucking and chuckling, it crouches and bends.
Roiling in rapids, calm in its stillness,
Dark and mysterious, flowing and clear.

I am the river, the flow of my body
Salty, majestic, unceasing, secure.
Seconds to decades, heart beating, unceasing.
Run through me, river, my hope and my cure.

From breath to holes in the ground

One of my favorite self-help books is The Healer Within, by Roger Jahnke.

It is such a favorite that I have never finished reading it. I will read a few paragraphs about movement, or massage, or deep relaxation. Then I go off and apply the practice.

Recently I dipped into the book and found a reference to the Remembering Breath.

Breathe in, breathe out

I’ve never been too comfortable with the yoga/meditation practice of concentrating on my breath. It makes me lightheaded when I want to focus on emptying my mind. I’m more at home with integrating breathing into a routine. For that purpose, the Remembering Breath works.

For each Remembering Breath, fill your lungs completely, then relax totally as you exhale.

As Jahnke expresses it:

Notice that when you take a really full breath, you must adjust your posture and shift your attention. The posture shift, the attention shift, and the breath itself combine to become a dramatic self-healing tool.

Remembering to remember

I needed a trigger to make me remember to breathe deeply from time to time during the day. I could take a deep breath every time the phone buzzed or I thought about chocolate. I could place sticky notes or bright dots on surfaces around the house. There’s an app that invokes the tone of a Tibetan bowl at an interval of your choosing, but I didn’t like it.

Instead, I decided on the color yellow. It’s relatively uncommon in the daily environment, but it grabs your attention. I wrote about noticing yellow last November, with lots of fun photos.

So now, when I see something yellow, I remember to breathe. In theory, at least.

On the bus

The bus is a good place to breathe—deeply, that is. Look out the window and see yellow prompts.

• The bright safety vest of a traffic flagger.

• The yellow plastic protectors that cover guy wires anchoring telephone and electric poles.

• Yellow cars. There are more than you realize, once you start looking. Few of them are taxi cabs in this town.

• Buildings and businesses with yellow signage, like Subway, Einstein Bagels, Planet Fitness and the Tango Crab Chinese restaurant in Hillsdale.

Sign of sorrow

There is a big yellow “for sale” sign in an empty lot on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard at 13th Avenue. The yellow makes me remember to breathe. But I’m also assailed with sadness.

Photo © Fran Gardner

That lot is where Riyadh’s Lebanese Restaurant perished in a three-alarm blaze in 2021. The fire is thought to have started in the Lounge Lizard furniture store, and it also destroyed the Really Good Stuff vintage shop and a Thai restaurant.

Robert remembers eating at Riyadh’s right when it opened. It was the first day of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in January 1981. He struck up a friendship with Riyadh, the original owner (the name Riyadh means “gardens”). They were born the same year and had many views in common. The restaurant was not named after the city in Saudi Arabia.

The end of that restaurant scarred our community. One of our neighbors moved away soon after. The heartbreak of losing Riyadh’s may have had something to do with her decision to leave.

Other places

Around town, I see from the bus, other familiar sites are being destroyed and rebuilt. Downtown, just a block from the old Oregonian building at 1320 SW Broadway, a lot at Southwest Columbia and Park has been fenced off. 

Photo © Fran Gardner

It took me a couple of weeks to remember it used to be a surface parking lot, even though I walked past it every day for years. The Portland Business Alliance reports that it will be a seven-story apartment building with 73 units, perhaps a third of them affordable.

A few blocks away, at Southwest Market Street and Park, there’s a big hole in the ground where Portland State University demolished a vast student housing building.

Future dog park? Photo © Fran Gardner

It will soon be a dog park. Maybe. According to the university’s website, decisions are still being made.

I roll by in the power chair, ignore the signs and barriers that want to keep me off the street, snap a couple of pix, and admire the earth-moving equipment.

Maybe I remember to breathe.

Goodbye, friend

One victim of my move back home was the sweet little 15-drawer library card catalog bequeathed to me by the family of a former resident at Rose Schnitzer Manor.

Helen Rogaway was a school librarian for the Beverley Hills School District, and the cabinet was a reminder of past times when all the book info was stored on index cards.

One drawer of the cabinet included several hundred of those old cards. They are for children’s books, beginning with beloved Portland author Beverly Cleary. They were all typed by hand.

I was using the other drawers to store quilting supplies, mainly thread.

Alas, there was no place to put the card catalog in my old/new digs on Main Street. It’s hard enough to find a place for the recliner I bought after moving to Rose Schnitzer Manor.

Second chance

I listed the card catalog on Craigslist a few months ago, only to (nearly) fall victim to a scam. Last week, I re-listed it during one of my marathon sleepless nights, posting it about 4 am. By 7, I had a taker, a young man named Paul, who came right over and took it away.

Paul is using the card catalog to store his Magic: The Gathering cards.

That game has been around since 1993—31 years!—yet is stronger than ever. The New York Times reports that about 50 million people play it, and Hasbro rakes in more than $1 billion a year from MTG sales.

One of those 50 million players is my grandson, Augie, who turns 10 οn Tuesday. I sent him some money, but it might not be enough to buy a pack of MTG cards, which The Times says retail for about $50.

About thread

The thread I stored in the drawers was dozens of spools in all colors, some of it new but most of it decades old, collected by my mother and myself.

Old thread becomes brittle and is not supposed to be used, but I keep the spools for nostalgia’s sake. I sometimes use the old thread for hand piecing, since I’m going to quilt the block anyway, and that will hold the pieces in place. And the old Dual Duty—cotton-wrapped polyester made by Coats and Clark—is still good. The Dual Duty sold in fabric stores now is all polyester.

Catalog or catalogue?

The spelling is “catalog,” according to AP and Chicago style. In Britain, you might encounter “catalogue.” The confusion may be with “dialogue,” which is always spelled with the “gue.”

Checkout

Erasers

All of a sudden, I can’t find any erasers. Except on the ends of pencils, and those are useless. The pink ones get dark and gummy and cause black smudges.

All the pencils I use now are Palomino Blackwing Pearls. You can buy them at JetPens, and they really are superior. They write and draw cleanly; they don’t smudge. I can write journal entries with the pencils, they are that good.

Their white erasers do a good job, too, but they are small. I could buy packet of replacements. Something to try.

Going, going . . .

I am erasing a part of my life this week. Already, little smudges cover my memories of Rose Schnitzer Manor. The movers come on April 16. That reminds me: taxes are already covered. I had to cadge an envelope from the front desk to send the check to the IRS; I had packed my own envelopes.

I’m all set for change. Except I’m never ready.

When are any of us ever ready?

Anytime

I can eat pickles
Anytime
Or read an obituary.
I can watch minnows
Or lie on the floor. . .

No. Wait. I can’t do that.
When down I can’t get up.
The floor is forbidden,
No leverage in the legs.

But anytime else
I can do everything. 
Even an earthworm
Finds comfort in soil.

Eat crackers. No, keto.
I can’t climb a tree,
Walk without holding
A walker or wall.

One thing I can do—
Pile words upon words,
Words up to my elbows,
Pristine ideas.

I can write anytime,
Some of it matters.
As for the rest . . .
I can eat pickles.

Final shot

Here is a sunrise from a south-facing window in my apartment. A new day  is dawning.

The windows on this side of the apartment face south, but there’s some eastern exposure as well. Photo © Fran Gardner

Thank you for reading. You are appreciated! Have a jolly week and see you next Saturday.

—30—

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