Travels, tastes, discoveries

What’s with the big skeletons? Are they a meme?

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Resilience

An early spring viola finds a foothold in a tiny patch of dirt in pavement. Life flourishes where it can.

Fran Gardner photo

Dedication

A shout-out to Mama Marla, a fellow wheelchair rider whom I met on the 14 bus today. She was on her way home to St. Johns from her job in Lents, and here I have written a posting about that neighborhood. She works in a bakery but also sells Street Roots newspapers. When she talks, her hands flutter with ASL symbols.

If days had flavor

What does your day taste like? Mine is sour today. Yours could be bitter or salty, but I hope is is sweet.

You might try working some creativity into that sweet day. How does it play out in voice or song or sport? How could you couch it in words, a sonnet perhaps, a trail of syllables? Sweet syllables. Perhaps you could illustrate it, in soft pastels or bold primaries.

A bitter day is better kept in memory. A day when you are scrunched and bunched and maybe punched. How does a bitter day play out in dance or drawing?

A salty day may be one spent on or near salt water. Or it could be marked with salty food, salty fun, salty language. How could I embroider salt? Show it in a quilt pattern? I like salt. Bring me a salty day.

And finally, umami day! The precious one where depth of flavor mirrors the depth of your soul, the depth of you caring, your being, you essence, your experience.

I want every day to be an umami day!

Better yet, all flavors, all days, all the time! Life your fullest life!

Flavors of the day

What flavor is today?
A sour one, that is sure.
When people turn their shoulders
And I just miss the bus.

It could be bitter, also,
A day like kale or dandelion
Not entirely a bad thing,
Just a little bit on edge.

A sweet day, maybe
Full of hearts and promises
Birthday cupcakes, petunias,
Or good things in the mail.

Salty, a day of whispers
Of tears, potato chips
And warmth. Savor salt
On days it doesn’t rain.

Make all my days umami,
The deepest, darkest taste,
Days when I lick my lips
And drink deep, deep of sacred wine.

Finding skeletons

I see it from the bus. A skeleton towering over a garage on César Chávez Boulevard. How tall is it? Five feet? Six? Seven? I have no way of knowing. It’s just — big.

Plastic skeletons are easy to buy and pose. They are popping up in many places. Fran Gardner photo

A few day later, I see another oversized boneman from the bus, and that sighting turns out to be twins. They are on North Oswego Avenue in St. Johns.

Two skeletons here, plus pieces of another one. The big guys look like they’re kicking the garbage bins. Fran Gardner photo

Then I find another, just a few blocks away. This one is really tall!

Maybe this fella is supposed to be a scarecrow for the crops in the raised beds at his feet. Fran Gardner photo

Small town life

St. Johns, where I took these last two photographs, is an enclave in the far north of Portland that was once a separate small town and still seems like one. Legend has it that some residents of St. Johns never set foot in downtown Portland. They like where they live just fine.

Getting there

I’ve traveled to St. Johns many times in the past weeks. There are at least four ways to get to this neighborhood from my home in inner Southeast Portland by bus. Three of them are old favorites:

The 4 line

The Fessenden bus works its way through many neighborhoods on its way to St. Johns. It travels north on Williams, the dividing line between North and Northeast, then on Fremont, Mississippi and Albina before wending down many small, intimate streets. It slips alongside the new row houses surrounding McCoy Park and the Charles Jordan Community Center. There’s a stop at the evocative intersection of Alaska and Chautauqua—one name connoting untamed wilderness and the other high-minded culture. On Kilpatrick near Denver, it passes the World Famous Kenton Club (motto: “Music, Booze, Regrets”), a biker bar made famous by its appearance in the 1972 movie “Kansas City Bomber” with Raquel Welch. The bus continues on busy Lombard and Fessenden, where the bus gets its name.

The 44 line

The scenic Mocks Crest route follows Rosa Parks Way to Willamette Boulevard, overlooking the Willamette River with the hills of Forest Park in the distance. It edges past the University of Portland campus before continuing through St. Johns to Pier Park, close to the convergence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers.

The 75 line

The César Chávez bus travels up what was once 39th Avenue and 42nd (residential) to Northeast Columbia Boulevard (industrial) and Dekum (houses again) before following Lombard into St. Johns. It goes to Pier Park, too.

A new route, 16

This week, I discovered a new and exciting way to get from downtown to St. Johns, the 16 Front Avenue/St. Helens Road bus. It rattles—fast!—north along Naito Parkway (once Front Avenue), a route that parallels the Willamette River and affords vast glimpses of the Port of Portland: Miles of warehouses. Big ships. Huge cranes. Long, long trains of tanker cars. Acres of parked automobiles. And beautiful, faraway vistas, first from the Kittridge Avenue overpass over rail yards, and then from the St. Johns Bridge, a gorgeous suspension structure over the Willamette. Look east to the towers of downtown and west to the cloudy ridges of Forest Park and Sauvie Island.

Too bad this fabulous bus runs only about once an hour. Not many people ride it.

A vehicle for discovery

For many, the idea of riding public transit is annoying, inconvenient, déclassé or downright dangerous. But I am a lover of transit. I ride almost every day, taking long routes just to see what’s out there. I ride buses and streetcars and the Max light rail all over town and to suburbs like Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Milwaukie, Gresham and Oregon City. Lately I’ve been exploring St. Johns in far north Portland.

In St. Johns

I visit a trap line of good coffee shops in St. Johns, including 2 Stroke, Affogato and Cathedral, but on a recent trip I am enjoying coffee with a burger at the Wonderwood Springs Cafe on Lombard when a kindly older woman approaches. Don’t I want to sit by the window, where it’s sunny? She is so friendly. I try to give her my business card so she can find her way to Becoming, but she says she and her husband aren’t using their computer. They can’t remember how. “He has Alzheimer’s,” she confides. “So do I.” This could explain her cheerfulness.

Maybe, I think, Alzheimer’s can be a blessing in these days. Here’s hoping they forget how to turn on Fox News.

All is weird

Not upside down, 
More sidedown up,
No reason, no breadsticks,
No calmness is coming.

We stand on our heads,
Looking askance.
Nonsense becomes us
And we can’t parse it.

Don’t make sense of this song
There is no raisin here.
I mean, reason, stay on beam—
No can do, can't balance.

Bring me a banana,
Something soft and squishy,
Then I can overcome,
At least, that small resistance.

Streets of St. Johns

In Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood, where I stopped to photograph these last two skeletons, I had some time to kill before another bus came by. So I wheeled around the block, from North Fessenden down Tioga Avenue, dodging the potholes on unpaved Seneca Street and journeying back up on Polk. I discovered an eclectic mix of small houses, run-down houses, neatly kept houses. St. Johns is appealing that way. On Polk, I found a neat Little Library set amid the daffodils. Little Libraries can be found all over Portland.

Fran Gardner photo

Why am I telling you this? Because even a simple jaunt around the block brings wonders, insight and charm into my life. I see things I’ve never seen before, and things I think I know all about turn out to be different.

Halloween in March?

As I’ve mentioned, my neighbors leave their skeletons in the yard all year, occasionally switching outfits to fit the season. I’m still encountering pumpkins, too, months after fall’s harvest. It’s amazing how well they keep.

Pumpkins on a St. Johns porch in late March provide splashes of insouciant color. Fran Gardner photo

Sparkle

I’m on a Zoom call and can see myself on camera. I should smile! Listen and smile. I’m lost in that sea of tiny camera shots. Dozens of other participants are listening and smiling and thinking about what they will say next.

“Sparkle!” I tell myself. Sprinkle some happiness behind my eyes.

I should sparkle, not just on Zoom, but in everyday life. At the store, on the bus, in the library. It has to do with putting myself out there and approaching everyone as if they are the most important person in the world. Which they are.

Charm school

I had to learn charm from my daughters. I saw how they sparkled and how people reacted. I’m more the dour sort, thinking long thoughts and absorbed in myself.

Except when I sparkle! I’ll try to remember to do that. Listen and smile. Leave my sad self behind.

This is not easy for me. What’s easy is to sulk and swear, to take umbrage, to choose to be offended. I’d like to think I’m above that sort of behavior; instead, I’m appalled that it happens so easily.

There’s nothing for it but forgive myself.

How am I doing?

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Robin and Yoko and Robin and Yoko

I had lunch recently at the Ikoi No Kai program at Epworth United Methodist Church, just across the block from my house. Ikoi No Kai serves Japanese-Hawaiian style lunches four days a week. Most of the diners are seniors, but anyone can eat for $9. I recommend it.

There I met a couple named Robin and Yoko, who were waiting for their friends, Robin and Yoko.

When Robin and Yoko Young moved to Portland from Philadelphia a few years back, one of the first things they explored was Portland’s venerable Portland-Sapporo Sister City Association. Yoko is from Sapporo, Japan.

When Robin and Yoko went to an association gathering, they were surprised to find another couple with the same names, Robin and Yoko Gulde. Yoko Gulde is also from Japan.

Now Robin Young and Yoko Gulde are on the board of the association, which was the first sister city organization forged by the city of Portland, dating back to 1959.

Good luck. Or not.

A man was passing by when I took this photo of a horseshoe, nailed the right way up over a door on North Willamette Boulevard in St. Johns. Having the prongs point upward keeps the luck from flowing out.

“Well, yeah,” the man said when I explained this. “We had a cabin on the mountain, and we hung a horseshoe like that.”

But then, he explained, the cabin burned down. “So I don’t know how lucky that really was.”

Nosmo King

Every once in a while, a disembodied woman’s voice on the bus warns passengers that “smoking is not permitted on Trimet property, including shelters.” Sometime I’m so tired of hearing that that I dream of taking up smoking cigarettes just so I can smoke one in a shelter. I’m contrary that way.

This would be a good time to smoke in a shelter, actually, because many bus shelters in town are missing their panels. An agent at Trimet Customer Service said new panels are on the way. It’s been months.

There’s shelter from rain from above, but no windbreak, and sideways rain is blown right inside. So smoke shouldn’t be a problem.

A shelter at the Foster Road/Lents Max station is missing all its panels, letting the wind blow in as it will. It can be chilly up here. Fran Gardner photo

Last poem

I wanted to write something in trochee rhythm—DAH-dum, DAH-dum, DAH-dum, DAH. I was just fooling around, and this is what appeared.

Yawn

Open wide and face the day
Fuzziness within your skull.
Nothing ventured, nothing forged
On the anvil of your dreams.

Striving artist’s corner

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