"Is your life not enough like a Portlandia episode already?"

Asked a friend last summer, when I told him I was working part time at a food cart.

We met for lunch on the patio of Holman's, with tatooed women in black eyeliner, smoking like chimneys, smoking like it was a perfectly healthy thing to do in 2015, and I was eating bacon at the time.
 
He's grown foreign, having moved to the east-coast after law school.
 
Portland was even a little cliched for him, a native.

I still like Portland, despite the traffic, which has grown insufferable, and the demolition of old charming houses and ratty charming buildings. 

I guess I do, maybe I don't so much anymore, but where to go?

I really like working at the food cart, I explained to him and many people after him.

I really like the people, and I am good under pressure. 

I like to cook.

I like to keep order.

I like a challenge.

I like getting a little dirty and frazzled.

So I continue.

I go faithfully each weekend and it pleased me very much.

I help by training new people, which also pleases me.

In general I am pleased.

Last Sunday, I was standing at the counter cracking eggs, 48 eggs, cracking and cracking, waiting for a new girl. 

I'd left the door open for the breeze.

People walked by, several stopped to see if I could make them breakfast, but I was not quite ready. 

I heard someone mumbling, so I said in my cheery breakfast lady voice "I'm not quite open yet, I can help you at 9:00, maybe a little bit earlier!" and turned to look and saw a disheveled fellow, but I was up high and rushing and not looking closely, and he was leaning on the back porchlet of the cart, chin to chest.

When he looked up, I saw that his mouth was bloody. 

Like someone had lined his lips with black Sharpie.

He moved his lips, but no words were coming out.

I said "WHAT?"

And then he started crawling over the edge, pulling himself up onto the platform, but slowly, like the zombies in The Walking Dead.

He slurred "I just want to come home, I am not in love with you!"

I realized that he was just wearing underpants. 

Maroon boxerbriefs, and one sock.

He was quite dirty, but not the kind of worn in dirt that people that live on the street usually have.

"You need to get OFF of there RIGHT NOW!"

"GET THE FUCK OFF NOW!"

I screamed at him, but he kept crawling, like someone pretend swimming.

I locked the door, but I couldn't tell if it was locked, or not.  It was one of those handles, that UNLOCKS when you jangle it from inside.

I bolted the top of the Dutchdoor, and fastened the chain.

I ran to the front and locked the windows. 

I looked out and not a soul was on the street. 

He'd climbed down and was embracing the ATM machine, which stands right next to the backdoor.

Sticking his hands in the slot, and hugging it over and over, like a weird ritual.

"I'm going to call the police, you need to leave!"

And he wandered off down the street.

My heart was pounding, not so much that I thought he might harm me, although I thought he might, but mostly because he spoiled something I like so much. 

I got a huge splinter in the palm of my hand from the top of the Dutch door, and my nerves were badly jangled. 

I am grateful he didn't touch me, his bloody hands. 

The idea of that made my skin crawl.

My friend Doug came down later and just sat outside and kept me company.

It got busy right at 9:00 and I don't think anyone could tell I was feeling woozely inside.

When I got home, I told Mark about it.

"Why didn't you call!"

I didn't want to wake him.  I didn't want to spoil his Sunday. I didn't really want to talk about it, very much.

Merle Haggard died today, and I have been listening to his lowdown country music all day, and I just thought of the time my grandfather and I went looking for one of his old foster daughters in old town.

He called me, which was unusual.

I used to call my grandmother everyday, just to say "hi", and when she died I started calling him, because frankly I couldn't imagine what he would do without her, but after a while I called less. 

We'd had a disagreement in the mid 90's and neither one of us was one to back down. 

Ever

It was slightly improved when my baby was born. 

He came to the hospital, when he heard I was very ill, and held newly born Maxwell. 

It's hard to convey to people with normal families, how deep and hard things are when they are deep and hard, but I knew that he must really need my help, if he called me up like that.

The last of my grandparent's foster children had aged out of the system in the early 90's, but they never became self sufficient. 

There was no place for them to go, so they stayed.

One became a crack addict and a prostitute and came and went.

During one of her times out in the world, she got mixed up with what my grandfather called
"a real bad feller"
and called to say she was being held against her will.

Which prompted my eighty year old grandfather to call me up and ask me to go looking for Charlotte.

Off we went into Portland's seedy Old Town, him in his gray Stetson, me in my wooden clogs.

We went into all of the seedy hotels, the day centers, the homeless feeding programs.

We talked to the cracked out folks milling around the Charlotte's last residence.

We found exactly nothing.

He never said thank you, or my goodness you are such a kind and selfless person, for walking the piss stinking streets looking for a girl who has robbed the house more times than anyone in the family can count.

He didn't say anything other than to affirm that he could not fathom my desire to live in the city, and that my coffee was too dang strong.  

It went without saying, of course, that it was my duty as a decent human being and someone raised in a Christian home, to help the less fortunate. 

I should just be grateful that my mind was sound and my body worked well. 

At one point I told him I felt like Doc in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the joke was not welcome. 

He was worried sick, and so was I in some ways. 

She eventually came back, and left many more times. 

She stole and stole and stole.

At his funeral, she wept, and hugged me. 

My grandfather would have said

She ain't bad, she just ain't right in the head. 

Easterly

When I was a child, Easter meant bonnets and dresses and maryjanes. 

We aren't religious, so there is no reason for church clothing, and this year, I have been working both Saturday and Sunday at the food cart, so I didn't even do a dinner. 

On Friday, I happened to think of eggs, so Freyja and I tinted a few, six, with what we had on hand- beets, turmeric, cabbage.

And that was that. 

Mark and Freyja went to see a play, I worked the cart and made decent tips, despite the hail. 

Food Cart Easter lady

5-7-5

I belong to this absurd online haiku group, an anti-poetry band of misfits, who write silly haiku about found objects.  In January, in a fit of despair and existential angst, I invited a group of the Portland  haiku folks over for dinner, and we had a fabulous time  Every single one of us had social anxiety and bad nerves, so it made for a fantastically sensitive and festive evening.

liver pate, cucumber salad, deviled eggs

haiku PIE, with a not so subtle nod to Portland's free sidewalk couches, which are sofa king gross!

and then I did it AGAIN, in March! Ten amazing creative women came for dinner and laughed.  I think we forgot to talk about haiku, but we laughed and laughed and had a fabulous time. 

February is a hard month.

It the the gray cold month my friend Leo died in, in 1985.

When it rolls around it I remember.

Like it is my job to be the keeper of his memory.

I remember differently as an adult, as a parent, as a middle aged woman with life experience.

In my twenties I was so angry.

I am much less angry now.

Now my memories are snapshots, a slide show in my mind.

I stand in the hallway of my high school, my friend Brooks wraps me in a hug, picking me clean off the ground, and whispers the news in my ear.

"but he's ok, right."  

I  ask, perplexed.

I sit on a church pew beside a leather jacket clad friend, who is sobbing and writhing.

I am stone faced in my fancy black dress.

I shoo my new boyfriend away at the memorial and leave, drunk, chain smoking, with an old boyfriend.

We sit in the parking lot of Powells in the pissing rain, smoking and crying and sobering up.

My mother screams "WHAT ARE YOU ON?" when I walk in the door, and lectures me on the selfishness of suicide, as if knowing Leo is a gateway drug, that puts me at risk.

"I'm on melancholy and self loathing."

Was my punchline for years, when I told this story.

As a mother, I have a more compassionate heart.  I understand irrational fear better.  I understand powerlessness, more.

Our home burned down, just before my 5th birthday.

It was a pink trailer, in a park in Sherwood, Oregon.

We weren't at home at the time thank goodness.

My brother and I were at my grandparents house, and my mother was at a rehearsal for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and my father was working the night-shift at Dammasch State Hospital, where the play was set, which was just a coincidence.

My parents came to pick us up the next day, and told me about the fire.

I remember thinking that this surely must be a joke, that it could not possibly be true.

This is one of the few memories I have of my parents together.

My birthday is January 12th, just after Christmas.

We lost everything in the fire.

I was most upset about my Christmas gifts, notably a Mrs. Beasley doll, just like the one that Buffy, on Family Affair had.

Later the firemen would give me a brand new one.

I still have her.

The fire destroyed everything, except for my mother's hope chest, which was later sanded down and used for a toy chest.  Her wedding china, a set with pink roses and silver trim, from Wards, was inside.

My brother has the china. 

As the following Christmas rolled around, I had a grave concern that we would not be able to have a tree, since our ornaments had burned the year before.

I'd made a giant paper Santa at school, which I hung up in the living-room with scotch-tape.

By this time, we were living in the same trailer park, again, this time in a larger trailer, that was yellow, and had three bedrooms.

My mother in all of her infinite resourcefulness, set about making decorations for the spindly noble fir, that we cut in the woods.

This being Oregon, we had our pick of trees, but our taste is for spindly noble firs with spaced branches, and it remains so.

We covered dixie cups with foil, to make silver bells, we strung popcorn and cranberries and my mother painted balsa-wood ornaments from a paint by numbers kit.

The bells and the berries are long gone, but I still have little hand painted the wooden shoes.

I made paper chains from construction paper and taped them around the windows.

My mother made stockings out of green felt, writing our names in glitter, stuck on Elmer's glue.

Santa found our house, and filled our stockings and left loot under the tree.

Today I bought a tall skinny tree from my neighbor, as I always do and we will decorate it with my collection of ornaments from my 6th year forward, and some things Rolf and I bought from Germany and things friends have gifted me, and a few strings of cranberries for good measure. 

 

 

I went to see my doctor today, because it is my day off, and I had owed her a visit since summer.

She broke her leg badly in summer and had to postpone a surgery that I had thought I would have, but have since sort of changed my mind.

She phoned me yesterday and suggested I come in.

Linda has been my doctor since 1999, and she is pretty unusual for a surgeon and medical doctor.

Today, for instance, she was wearing those LL Bean style rain bootlets, the ones with the rubber toes and leather ankles, with a long floral dress, and green woolen socks.  I could see the socks, because the dress had a dramatic slit, on one side.  It was a sort of slinky number, something you might wear to a garden cocktail party in 1988.

How ARE you?! 

Man, am I ever a sucker for people that appear to care about me.

I told her I was much, much better, now, with my new low stress job, that doesn't include HR, or bookkeeping.

Linda laughs a lot, and swears, and has a very messy office, all of which makes me feel comfortable, but Mark hates her.

Two years ago, I had a little surgery with her, to remove a polyp, and Mark was completely freaked out, trying to talk me into rescheduling with someone else, right in the pre-opt bed.

She is totally WEIRD, you can't let someone that weird put you under!

The anethesiologist will put me under, she will be doing the surgery! 

That might be WORSE. 

I  l i k e her.  She always remembers little details about me, and she laughs a lot. 

Linda is a radical feminist doctor, that preforms abortions, and has a little side business, treating people like me, with complicated female problems, and nervous constitutions.  Her office looks like a Home Beautiful spread from the 80's, with wicker, and inspirational quotes and antiques, you hardly notice the doctor officey element.  

Her files are a mess.  I have considered offering to clean the place up more than once, but thought better of it.  

I told her about the terrible sinus problems I had been experiencing since late September, and she looked in my ears, and tapped on my forehead.  

I told her about the amoxicillin from the nurse practitioner at Zoom Care. 

HA! Ha ha ha! Oh, those clowns, ha ha ha. That is not strong enough to kick a true sinus infection. 

She wrote me a prescription for something stronger, and suggested drinking fenugreek tea to thin the mucus. 

 

Elephant meat

I woke up this morning thinking of Beechnut baby food.

When I was a child, too old to eat baby food, but young enough to still be charming, I loved the jarred meat, in all of it's graypink fineness,  and my grandmother would buy me the tiny jars, for a treat. 

The label pictured a jaunty cartoon elephant, wearing blue overalls and a striped train conductor hat.

One hand was thrown up, as if waving. 

I thought that the jar contained elephant meat, which my grandmother thought was funny. 

So when we went shopping, I would ask for elephant meat, and she would oblige by buying it, and then feeding it to me with a small silver spoon, even though I was much too old. 

I can peel an apple in one long strip, almost perfectly, with a paring knife.

This is something I watched my grandmother do hundreds of times, seated, peeling away, creating springy piles of peelings.

When I think of her, this is often the picture that pops into my head.

Grandma seated in a rocking chair wearing an apron, handing out thin slices to children gathered around her.

My grandparents cared for many children, for many years.

They ran an emergency foster home, and would accept the most profoundly special needs children.

Growing up, I thought it was completely normal to have children arrive in the middle of the night, in the back of a police car, with nothing.

When I was a small child, the house was full, sometimes with teenagers, and sometimes with children my age, and usually at least one baby.

When the children arrived during the day, they looked scared and lonely and sometimes battered.

They were unkempt and often unruly.

My grandmother would write their names and dates of birth in her gray blank book.

She didn't do a whole lot of talking.

Sometimes she washed the children, or treated them for lice.

Sometimes she fed them, even if it wasn't a meal time.

She was a straightforward, no nonsense and practical woman, that kept new crib mattresses in the rafters of the barn, and barrels of children's clothing in the basement.

I liked the babies best, and the teenagers least.

The children my age were sometimes nice to play with.

Sometimes they were scary, or terribly damaged.

Joan, who had been burned from the chin down, with scars that looked like a doll that had melted.

Oskar, who's mother had thrown him from the car window, who was blind and severely brain damaged.

I knew that I was never to comment on these things, or be unkind.

I knew that I was lucky to have a family that loved me and a brain and body that worked well.

My grandparents judged the parents of these children harshly in private. I would hear my grandmother filling my grandfather in on the newest arrival.

A 2 x 4 upside the head, would serve that creep right- you would do a dog the way he beat that baby

An alley cat would have more mothering instincts

  

My grandfather would leave the house in the dark, wee hours of morning, to work his job at the dairy, arriving home around 2:00.

He always came in the backdoor, removed his hat and shoes, washed up, greeted everyone and laid down on the sofa for a little rest before supper.  

How he slept in a tiny parlor filled with children, I have no idea, but no one was ever shhhhed. 

At suppertime everyone gathered around the huge round table that seats 15 comfortably and 20 if you squeeze in. 

Mealtimes are when you could really see which children were worst off, may had been in bad times for a long time. 

There were ones that would pocket food, or wolf their meal down and ask for more. 

There were the ones that were too afraid to take any food at all. 

One time the sheriff brought three children that had been picked up at the dump, out past Oregon City. 

They'd been living there for a while and they were filthy.  

Celeste, Sergy, and Harlan ( who was a three year old girl, which I thought was outrageous, since my that was my father's name!). 

Grandma was making ice cream cones, scooping one for everybody, and handing them out.  Those kids just stood there, and finally, the littlest girl stuck her hand out, palm flat, like she had no idea in the world how to take hold of the cone. 

That just about makes you sick, when a little kid caint take an ice cream cone.  That ain't right. 

That family stayed quite a while, and were eventually brought back into care three more times over the years.  

Sometimes my grandmother would tell the social workers not to bring a child back anymore.  It got to hard, to see them bounced back and forth, when she knew the birth parents were not going to be able to get it together to keep their child permanently, yet they kept right on sending them back.  

There was a photo of a toddler on my grandmother's dresser, a little boy with black hair, named Stephen John, that I knew was dead.  

He was dead and it made my grandmother terribly sad, even though he had died in the 60's long before I was born, I knew his story. 

My grandparents had fostered him, because his mother was mentally ill and couldn't care for him.  

They had him from infancy until around his second birthday, and my grandmother loved him dearly.  

He had been sent back, and died from chicken pox that hadn't been tended to.  

My grandparents paid for his coffin.

That was before you were born Heididoll, poor, poor Stephen John 

I liked to read the gray book with the names of all the children.  

Sometimes there was a little story too.

In the late 60's and 70's there were lots of teenage girls that "walked off", went out for a smoke and never came back.  

 went off with the hippies I imagine

In my mind mind I saw flower children dancing away, to some magical place.  

Well you know Joanne!

I started working at a fancy European toy store, in the old Yamhill Market in 1988.

We sold all the high end stuff, that at the time you didn't see in department stores.

Brio, Playmobil, Seiff, Madame Alexander dolls, Gund stuffed animals, all kinds of fancy, beautiful stuff, that pleased me immeasurably to be around.

The store was right on the corner of 2nd and Yamhill, with windows on three sides.

I did the window dressing, which gave me a great deal of pleasure.

I had a lot of regulars, collectors and weekend fathers, buying gifts for their children.

I kept a note-box with cards, detailing which tracks their child had, and which tracks they might need, for their wooden trains.

We were a tight little family of folks, a gal named Alesha, who didn't know if she was going to be a lesbian, or not, me, a big guy named Barry,  who played in a rock band on the weekends, and worked in the warehouse and my friend Ruth, with her long braid, and serious face.

Among my regulars was a homeless man named Mr. Shirley.

He smelled terrible, and had one tooth that sort of dangled in front.

He was remarkably clever, and made puns with lightening speed.

Every single day, he would come in and shop.

He called me Joanne, and we did a bit of verbal sparing, before Ruth would grow weary of his stench and send him on his way, or spray Lysol in his wake.

Mr. Shirley was a poet, and would fill volumes of blank books, spiral notebooks and paper bags with his writing, which was sometimes not so bad, and often, just the words

preTTee pOnee 

over and over and over, filling pages.

One day I asked Mr. Shirley if he had any children, and he told me

Well, you know, Joanne! I like to think Jack Nicholson and Kurt Vonnegut are my children 

Which I thought was one of the best things anyone had ever said to me.  

Mr. Shirley had fallen in love with a diary we had in the store, that had a little embossed pony on the cover, and while I tried to just give it to him, he insisted on putting it on layaway, which consisted of giving me a few pennies every day.  

About a year into the layaway plan, Mr. Shirley stopped coming in, and I became worried, so being the nosy thing I am, I phoned up the residence hotel that he said he stayed at sometimes. 

The lady at the desk told me that he had been ill and was in and out of the hospital. 

I told her to let him know that Joanne was saving his diary for him. 

And then the store moved to the big, fancy, new mall, where they surely would not have let him in to browse and I never saw him again. 

I started working a little bit, this summer, at the food cart, that belongs to a former teacher, from the hippie preschool.

I worked through August, and grew attached to the flow and energy of cooking and serving.

I'd done catering and cocktailing and occasional bartending in college, and I was always good at it, but I never took it on full-time, because I know it's hard to transition to real work, from that work.

Having walked away from real work in June, I thought, what do I have to lose, and went ahead.

In September, I opened a teeny, tiny, little school close to home, but I have continued to work on Saturdays at the cart, and by golly, I may never stop.

Sitting in the bathtub yesterday morning, I was thinking of the notion of contentment.

I was actually thinking of my grandmother, and how she had always wanted to be an undertaker, which as a child, I found appalling, but as an adult, I can sort of see the attraction.

My grandmother was a caretaker, of people, but she was not a sweet, or even gentle person, she was complicated and could have used a bit of peace and quiet, and possibly a bit of tenderness, so I can see how the idea of caring for the dead would have had it's appeal.

In her life, she mostly never got to have a single thing she desired.

It was a life of sacrifice.

A life of struggle and giving.

I sometimes find myself in a similar mindset, and I try to dial back the martyrdom, because it doesn't really lead any place good.

When I was a small child, I often went to funerals with my grandmother.

She was fond of the open casket variety, which I found (and still find) barbaric.

I would fuss, and cry, because I was, and I remain a crybaby.

My grandmother would shhhhhh me and say,

It's just the body, it's just the b o d y 

Which is something religious people say, to indicate that the spirit, the essence, the person, of the person is gone, is in heaven, but even as a three year old, I was terrible at religion, and terribly concrete, and in a fit of pique said 

but where is the HEAD!? 

which prompted my mother to forbid her from taking me to funerals.

Summerly Bakery and caking

I made cake for a friend's wedding.  It required a HUGE and silly amount of buttercream frosting, which I foolishly allowed the Decorette Shot lady to talk me into adding meringue to, which I never do, because I am essentially a lazy and wicked person, that likes to keep things simple, but I did this time, because I wanted it all the be PERFECT.  When you add the meringue, the frosting GROWS, like The Blob, and gets stuck in the motor of your mixer (let this be a cautionary tale!  It does yield a beautiful, shiny while frosting though.

Transporting many cupcakes

Add caption

Naked layers, five hours worth of baking and mixing, and worry. 

After much traffic and winding and worry, we arrived an hour later than I had planned for, to the wedding in the woods, and the caterers would give not one inch of space in the cool kitchen, and the florist had not left the right kind of flowers, and I was very panicked, but my dear assistant, was the voice of reason, and we just made it WORK! We frosted 60 cupcakes and a six layer cake in a HOT, dusty, lodge sort of place. 

Not perfect, but pretty, pretty.  

For the 4th of July, I made this patriotic pie. 

Also in July, I made this, goat-cheese and blackberry confection for a pie contest, that I lost. 

I worked a little with my friend Marta this week. 

She has a dreamy little school at the base of Mt. Tabor and we walked with the children up the steep hillside to the tip top playground each day. 

Playing away on the cool mountain side, reminding each other that this is a volcano, you know.

Today, as we made our way down, the steep grassy path, the smallest, and dreamiest child holding my hand, someone called "HEIDI?" from one of the houses.

"it's me, Joan, Joanie, Jonathan's sister!" 

And sure enough, it was Joan, Jonathan's sister, sitting right there, on the hillside, playing with three babies. 

"Are those your grandchildren?"

My mind raced to do the math, just in case I was making a giant faux pas.

" This littlest one is my granddaughter, and I care for the other two, I have been caring for babies for fourteen years." 

Fourteen years. 

"I'm still doing preschool!"

I raised the hand of the dreamiest of all, child, to demonstrate that I belonged to that group. 

"How on earth did you recognize me?" 

"I'm wearing my glasses!"

I did a quick inventory of my appearance, and even with glasses, I look a great deal different than I did in the 80's! 

I suppose she had seen me last in 1997.

The last time I spoke to Joan, was early March of 1999.

She phoned me, to tell me that Jonathan had died. 

He had been my mentor, my friend, my lover, my everything, when I was in college. 

When I was young and idealistic and ridiculously full of myself and hope. 

He had informed my world vision profoundly, and made me want to work with children in a more focused way. 

"How are Jacob and Sara?"

"They are well, Jacob is a chef, he has two children."

The last time I saw Jacob was at a birthday party for Jonathan's father, in 1997.

He was 12, or 13, and ecstatic to see me. 

We went to a movie, we ate pizza.

We remained friends, despite me breaking up with his dad, we all had FUN. 

The first time I met Joan, was at a Seder, at her home.

I was a bosomy, blonde 19 year old, scandalizing the whole family. 

Who brings a 19 year old to a family Seder? Is what I imagined the sisters saying. 

Who knows what they actually said.

Who cares. 

I ate gefilte fish, and drank the wine.  

"I don't give a shit what anyone thinks." 

Jonathan said often. 

"Fuck them." 

I didn't attend the memorial service, never got the details, couldn't bare to deal with all of those big feelings, and I had a brand new baby. 

I don't do well with crowds, with people, with curated events.

Jonathan would have understood.



 

In the grass is always greener news, I put my husband on a plane for Comic Con, for work, which after two decades he finds annoying, while to me it sounds much more exciting than shuttling small people to soccer camp and making toasted cheese sandwiches and walking the dog. He has been warned not to return home without making some kind of contact with Norman Reedus for me.

We only signed up for two camps this year, because camps are expensive and Freyja is doing some traveling and my mom is in town and it seemed like a good idea.

The camps are soccer camps and she is going with her really, super good friend.

The first one was at a Catholic school in North Portland, which seemed like a no brainer, except Portland has become a traffic nightmare, and you can't drive across town in less than an hour anymore, and once my mother got lost and was a half hour late picking up.

This camp this week was attractive, because it is at a local school, just over on 15th!

HOORAY!

So we picked up the good friend and drove to the school with the name posted on the camp sign up, and waited. 

We waited and waited and waited.

No one showed up.

At 9:46, I looked at my phone and googled the name of the school and "fields" and sure enough, there is a lone soccer field with that EXACT name, across town, in NE.

I was already moderately annoyed, because the camp never sent a confirmation, or any additional information, and that sort of lack of communication is really irritating to me.

On top of that Freyja had thrown the mother of all tantrums over putting on sunscreen, which made me want to rip out my hair.

So off we went to find this mystery soccer field.

Naturally there was no direct route, with Burnside and Sandy now being one way, and a giant delivery truck blocking Davis.

We drove and drove and finally found the place and ran to meet up with the soccer guy.

I told him what had happened and he said

"Yeah, we get that a lot."

Hmmm, perhaps a clarifying e-mail would be in order?

On the way home, I felt a twinge of guilt over getting so hot under the collar over the sunscreen, and decided to stop at Whole Foods, to buy some of the insanely overpriced juice pocket things that Freyja lives for, and I never buy, for her lunch the rest of the week.

As I pulled in a giant delivery truck pulled along side of me, blocking me, to I couldn't move, for about 15 minutes.  

I went into the store and the greeter asked me. "HOW ARE YOU TODAY?" brightly.

"I feel like punching someone in the face."

I went to Lit Hop last evening, with my friend Karen, who is down for Rolf's birthday.

I know a fair number of writerly folks, and I'd hoped to get to see more than one reading, but the night was oppressively HOT, and the friend I'd come to see was from out of town and it felt tacky to listen and dash off, so we stayed for the last reader, a bombastic fellow with black curls and a LOUD voice.

His poetry was catchy.

He may have a future in advertising.

He writes hooks.

My friend is eloquent and smart and humble and he mumbled.

Way more writer, than reader, I suppose.

I sat at the bar between my oldest childhood friend, Julia, a woman I adore, but see rarely.

She has children.

There are women for whom motherhood builds community.

For me, and maybe for Julia, motherhood has shrunk us.

Boiled us down to the barest of bones.

Tony read a poem he wrote for me.

He read it last.

It wasn't sentimental, or lovely.

It was sturdy and a little homespun, I suppose the way he may see me.

The crowd was two hours into drink, and craved bombast and volume.

My poem with it's water, trees, and small town, was a little flat.

I had to drive, so I sat soberly, sweating, my arm touching Julia's cool bicep.

A glass of water would have been welcome, but I would have lost my seat, if I got up, so I sat, blocked in by a very tall woman, who was waiting for space to walk up the stairs.

A woman, who gave not one fig about poetry, or courtesy, her pointy elbow, nearly touching my face. 

Manifest like a mother

 I often say "it's proof of God's love", even though I don't believe in God in much of a way that you would think that he, or she would be proving their love to me, but one thing I do believe in with all of my heart and soul, is the power of goodness and generosity and kindness, I've seen the abundance so often in my life of all of these things not to be a stone believer.

 I belong to a couple of silly Portland groups on Facebook, and a couple of them revolve around found objects.  I am a sucker for found objects, having been poor as an underemployed church-mouse for, well forever, and when not totally broke, let us just say that austerity measures are needed to continue to live in my hella expensive home town.

I also just really like old things.

I like used things, with the exception of underwear, almost always, more than new things.

Last week was a shitshow of a week.

An emotional disaster. 

I'm feeling better, getting back to myself, but geez.

A member of the Facebook group mentioned finding a birdcage on the side of the road.

It was a real beauty, and at first I mistook it for a plant stand, which I had been on the lookout for, to get my collection of Christmas Cactus (cacti?)  off the little side phone table, they had been hogging for months. 

The very next day, the lady with the birdcage tells me she found me a plant-stand.

She finds things for people. 

I also find things for people, so it made perfect sense.

Her finding me this perfect, beautiful plant-stand made perfect sense. 

Her plant-stand went perfectly with my other found plant-stands, and by golly, it could not have been more perfect.

I met her this evening and she hugged me, in the warmest and most kind and sincere way, and I was so deeply moved and humbled and touched and lifted up. 

"Even though we don't have money, I'm so in love with you honey..."

So things got complicated and I quit my job.

Mark says "*&^% those guys" because he loves me.

"You are not good at doing stuff that you can't believe in"

and I say

"thank you for loving me"

and he says

"quit saying thank you, it's my job."

and then I cry and he says

"I hate it when you cry, I just want you to be happy"

 and  that makes me cry about ten times more.

Then I sing the chorus from Danny's Song and Mark says

" I will cut you a check right now, if you stop singing."

and we both laugh like crazy, because, if you don't laugh, you cry.

I scrapped the last of the fancy raspberry jam out of the Maman jar today, and immediately started to imagine what I would do with the jar.

It's a real beauty, as jam jars go, with it's embossed label along the rim and it's handsome gingham lid.

I, who am so strong, against material goods and advertising, can be sucked right in by a jar of jam and the possibilities of it when empty.

I have been this way for as long as I can remember.

A collector.

A hoarder.

An imaginer of potential.

My grandmother was that way, only not as tidy, which I suspect is what made both my mother and her sister something of minimalists.

As a child I was horrified by my mother's lack of sentimentality, these days, as she fills our house with doodads and sundry objects, I see that she probably simply lacked the time and money to accumulate a lot.

I thought about throwing it straight away, into the trash.

Be done with it!

Out of sight, out of mind, type deal, but it's sitting in my sink, soaking.

"You're growing up." 

I heard my Grandma Betty's voice in my head congratulating my feeble attempt to be less of a pack-rat.

I'm growing up, but slowly. 

 

Hippie Salad Hooray

We're headed to a birthday party for one of my old friends.

He is a musician and so are most of his friends.

It is a potluck and bring your instruments sort of thing.


"You better make enough food for us to have dinner, you know those fricking hippies never start on time and there is never any food. there's always that guy that shows up with like one small packet of seaweed, or some bullshit."

Is what Mark said.

He boiled eight eggs.

We made a lot of coleslaw with Moroccan herbs and dill.

I made pasta shells with sweet peas and homemade mayonnaise, Russian horseradish,capers and kale.

He bought a watermelon at the farmer's market earlier in the day.

I don't know if he intends to bring it with him, or eat it at home, tonight, after the party, while we watch a cooking show, or a movie.

That's our exciting Saturday night, most times.

Last year at this same friend's party, I brought shaved brussel sprouts with bacon and maple, mustard vinaigrette, and this stoned girl kept picking the bacon pieces out with her dirty fingers, and exclaiming

"IS THIS BACON? "

and sort of swooning and smearing it around her mouth,

Until I said

"keep your hands out of my salad!"

My friend's mother, who has known me for more than twenty years, laughed out loud, and the girl sauntered off, only to return with a friend and resume her pickery.

My friend said,

"Yo, don't mess with Heidi's p r e s e n t a t i o n." 

but by then I was satisfactorily annoyed enough to leave.  I only really came to see his mother and say happy birthday. 

I don't really enjoy those kinds of parties now that I'm a cranky old lady.