Regina Quondam et Futuram

My son ran headlong into an odd bit of Portland history last week; Queen Thelma.A group sponsored, I believe, by an outfit known as the Royal Rosarians turned up at his class to tell the kids about the history of the Rose Festival.

Now - as I've mentioned before - Rose Festival is a very odd sort of Portland thing in a place that treasures its oddity.

First of all, it's not really a "thing" at all; there's no real theme or purpose behind it, and it's span is so vague as to be almost meaningless. No one knows exactly when it begins, or ends, or what is or isn't part of it.

We know that it's not a purely musical event like, say, SXSW or Sasquatch, but there is music in it. It doesn't celebrate a historical or national event, like Cinco de Mayo or Fourth of July, or an event of significance to any particular group of people, like Kwanzaa or Christmas or Ramadan, but it has a sort of a history.

It does have parades, of several different types, and times, and themes. It has races, human and vehicular. It has an airshow, and dragon boat races, and a nasty carny (which is always held along the downtown stretch of the Willamette River and for years was known as the "Pepsi Fun Center" until one of our local weeklies published a story titled Face-down in the Fun Center, pointing out that the goddam centerpiece of the Rose Fest was a nasty carny filled with drunk frat boys and girls from fucking Beaverton and Gladstone gatoring in a vile mix of mud and used lager. I don't know what they called it after that, but it sure as hell wasn't the "Pepsi Fun Center") and several god knows what.

There's also a weekend when a small group of military and coastguard vessels turns up and ties up along the waterfront, adjacent to the whatever-they-call-what-used-to-be-the-"fun-center". This used to be entertaining for the locals, who got to visit the ships, and for the crews, who got to visit a liberty port not expressly designed around separating a sailor from his or her cash in the most nastily expeditious way possible.

That was pre-2001. Now security is so damn tight that nobody but invited guests get to tour the damn ships, which in return for very little entertainment value tie up traffic for several hours during Monday rush hour causing the bridges to raise when they head downriver. So sorry, sailor, you can stuff your "Fleet Week", in my opinion.

In fact, most Portlanders I know fall into two categories; those who sorta-kinda know that there's this "Rose Festival" thing that happens every spring but don't really care or take part in any of the events, and those who have some deep and passionate connection with one specific event that is part of the whole magilla but don't really care or take part in any of the other events.

For example, I have two friends who race in the dragon boat competition every year.

But that's all. They don't go to the parades, or down to the carny-formerly-known-as-the-"fun-center", or the air show, or the concerts. They don't know who the Queen of Rosaria is, or what the theme of the Starlight Parade is.

They do the dragon boat races, and nothing else.

And that's the way a LOT of Portlanders take this rascal.

Some get excited about one of the parades. Or the airshow. Some love the ships. Some - mostly young men from Gresham - come to get shitfaced at the carny and fall face-down in the mud and spew of Waterfront Park. But I honestly cannot think of anyone I know who gets all jiggly looking forward to "Portland's Official Festival".

So I got a kick out of my son - who has never given a rip about the thing other than the time that we got caught downtown in the middle of the Grand Floral Parade and the float caught fire, which he considered genuine quality entertainment - coming home stuffed full of information about Queen Thelma and W.J Hofmeister, her "Prime Minister", and Silas Christofferson, the ragtime aviation freak who rocked the RoseFest 100 years ago by flying off the roof of the old Multnomah Hotelin his Curtiss biplane and then, pioneering the tradition of Oregon residents fleeing to Clark County to avoid our income tax, landed fifteen minutes or so later at the Army airfield in Vancouver.

I find it mildly amusing that nowhere in the Rose Fest publicity for the centenary of this stunt is there a mention of hos insane it was and that this poor mook had only about four more year to live because of his enthusiams; like a lot of early aviators, he augered in - in his case on Hallowe'en Day, 1916;

"Silas was flying several hundred feet over the aviation field on Halloween 1916 in Redwood City, California when his engine went dead. He ‘volplaned’ but could not regain control of the aeroplane and was hurled to the ground. His plane overturned in a 100 feet fall during a trial of a new military biplane with a new innovative control system. His wife and two brothers watching the flight with a pupil of the Silas Christofferson Aviation School rushed to his aid; he was taken to a hospital were he died from his injuries."

Sucked to be him, but those guys had the life expectancy of caddis-fly larvae. It's pretty amazing when you think of how blase' we are about flying. A century ago it was like combat diving or panther wrestling, a sport only for the truly mad...

Imagine; 50,000 people stopping to watch an airplane fly overhead; it makes sense when you think that it had a damn good chance of falling ON their heads. It was a very different time

And that was not the only difference in the times. I get the sense that back in the teens the Rose Festival really WAS something. Certainly it seems to have been everything to young Thelma Hollingsworth; she spent the rest of her life connected to the thing, and appears to have had a splendid time living in the corona of the year she reigned as Queen of all Rosaria. What I find intriguing about her is how difficult it is to find her; do an Internet search for her picture; all I could find was the Oregonian shot of her "court" I have at top, this one, from about the Fifties or late Forties;

which seems to have been taken at some sort of Rose function; you'll note the skimmer-sporting Rosarian squiring Her Majesty.

The strange part about this is that all the articles about her talk about how the Queen and her court of pretty young ladies toured all over the Portland area and much of the Northwest that year, drumming up interest in the Festival. Photography was quite the rage in the Teens, and I cannot imagine that any young Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco camera-nut passing up the opportunity to get some snapshots of a pretty girl in fancy clothes amid a bevy of other cuties; men may have changed since 1914 but not in that respect...

My personal favorite, though, is this enlargement of the Oregonian photo;

It is the only one that I could find that gives you an actual sense of the young Miss Hollingsworth as a person. It's worth looking closely at her; go ahead. I'll wait.

So physically she seems to be a conventionally "pretty girl"; oval face, straight nose, dark eyes. She has a bit of a full chin, suggesting that she was pleasantly rounded in the fashion of the times, before the brutal modernity of the Twenties demanded a woman's figure lose all its womanly curvature.

It's hard to tell, since the background around her head appears to have been retouched, but she seems to have had a cloud of dark hair in the Edwardian style. The rest of her is buried under the pile of clothing she's been dressed in as her robes of "state".

But the worthwhile part is in her expression. Look at her again.

She's looking at something or someone down to her left; she's cocked her head a bit, and her glance is slightly hooded, as if she's trying not to be too obvious about not staring. But what- or who-ever it is seems to be providing her with a certain amount of amusement, given the traces of her smile.

And the smile is the good part; Queen Thelma seems to have a lovely, subtle smile, the corner of her lips tucked neatly away in a wry little curve that floats up from the old silver and black salts like a fragrant curl of smoke from snuffed candle.

It seems to contain a good deal of sense, and a good humor that bolts across the divide of nearly a century, jolting me into thinking that I would have enjoyed a lazy afternoon's company with this woman, hearing her talk of her work, and her excitement at her celebrity, and thinking up ways to provoke that fleetingly adorable smile.

I am not one of those who long for the past. For a person of my class and age 1912 would most likely have been an generally drudging and occasionally (e.g. typhus epidemic, financial panic, labor-management war in which I was beaten by strikebreakers or shot by the National Guard...) fearfully frightening time. I am very glad I live in 2012 and not 1912.

But looking at Thelma's smile I cannot but stop and think that there must have been something worthwhile about the then that made this young woman and her beloved Festival; for all that we cannot and I would not if we could, return, I wonder; what was it that has changed so that we are ourselves so much alike in so many ways, and yet in so many others so strange?

Rubes

Portland is a funny place to live sometimes.(This, by the way, is something called the "Urban Iditarod" and is best left further unexamined)

One of those times is whenever we turn up on the electronical television or in the glamor of the Silver Screen^TM.Other cities accept that they are, well, cities; notable places where many people live, work, and play, and that the notion of such a place appearing in a movie or a television show is not inconceivable or even unusual.

But for all that we live in a city - the largest in our state, and the second largest in Cascadia - a lot of us are rubes about getting on camera.

For one thing, we are utterly foolish about our contributions to film despite our track record as the location of some of the most craptacular shite ever to curl down out of a projector.

I'll sort of give you "Goonies", although I'm not a fan and have never managed to make it through the entire thing in one sitting. And there are several Portland locations in a very sweet and funny little film called "The Favor" with one of my favorite comic actresses, Harley Jane Kozak; it's silly and clever and well worth a look in my not-so-humble opinion. But...Madonna's "Body of Evidence"?

Seriously, this may be one of the worst movies of all time. It's hard to make a film that makes sex look so unpleasant that getting a root canal or getting your legs waxed appears preferable, but this one manages. Come to think of it, there IS wax involved in the thing, and not in a good way.Yike.

Throw in some of the worst acting and worst dialogue ever filmed, and Portland should be ashamed to get hung with this dog. It's really awful. Beyond awful. Unspeakable. Eye-searingly horrible. Satan's stool sample.

It's BAD.

And the rest of our resume isn't much better, although I'd love like hell to get a look at "The Fisherman's Bride" from 1908 Astoria; it has to be better than "Kindergarten Cop". For "Jackass, The Movie", "Twilight", and "Mr. Brooks" we should ALL get a spanking; even "Coraline" can't save us from immortal shame.With that sort of record you'd think we'd shy from more public exposure, but, no; the latest Big Thing is the comedy series "Portlandia"and Portlanders, unquenchable, are once again in our silly swoon over all things cinemagraphic.

I've seen a couple of these. It's sketch comedy, so it's hit and miss; some of the little scenes work terrifically. Some fall flat, some are cringe-inducing awful. Some are just strange; the creators are getting better in their second season at nailing a certain type of Portland; hipsters, the earnest and twee, the ecoNazis (the sketch with the twenty recycling containers each carefully identified by color for every possible subcategory of material was perfect).

But the quality of the material seems...immaterial. What matters is that in the "Timbers Army" sketch the two comedians appear at CopyPilot - the copy store right down from our house! Squeeeeeee! - and at our soccer match with our very own Timbers Army! Squeeeeee!And the New Yorkers and Los Angelinos, used to seeing themselves on film and television, sniff audibly and pretend to find something interesting in the middle distance. They are the sophisticates, and we have just shown ourselves to be gormless, hopeless, shallow goofy rubes.

Not in anger but in sorrow

What can you say?

As years go, 2011 had its usual share of blessings and curses.For me and mine, well, I'm a father, so perforce my year was consumed by my children, and in that respect it was more blessed than not.

My Big Guy turned eight and started third grade, while Little Miss made five and started public school altogether, going to kindergarten with Peep's K-teacher from three years ago. They seem to be growing and thriving.

The Boy is smart and funny, and he even impressed me on Christmas Morning when, confronted by a ridiculously juvenile present from one of his aunties, he simply smiled and nodded graciously instead of rejecting the gift with a snarl. He has taken on a half-portion of preteen snippiness and attitude but seems to have mixed some maturity in there as well.He still seems to me to be myself at eight; determined to go at life the hard way. That's not an easy road to walk, and as a father it pains me to watch him insist on taking it. But all I can do is show him where he's going and love him as he goes there. And hope he chooses happiness instead of troubles.

As the girl gets bigger she's taking an interest in her condition as Chinese and American. She talks of her parents in China, is enthused about everything Chinese, and takes pride in the marvel that she can be Chinese AND American which, as she has told us whenever possible, is way cooler than being plain old vanilla caucasian-American.She is sweet and loving, the very avatar of the peacemaking little sister. So far she has yet to run up against anything she can't overwhelm with kindness and I dread the day she does. Until then I try and keep her in hugs, kisses, and lap chang (臘腸)

And I'm a husband. My bride Mojo continues to be the marvel that is Herself; she has continued her running program, including competing in several 5K fun-runs and getting her distances up to as far as seven miles. She looks wonderful, and from my selfish vantage feels even better - there's something about strong muscles under smooth skin that seems designed to provide delight to the male senses.Her sewing has improved to the point where she is actually making clothes (from "upgrading" existing clothing with appliques and frills). And perhaps the most exciting surprise she has brought to our lives was to learn - just this past week - that her contract with Northwest Natural has been extended six months.

I don't know how I managed to be so gifted with such a woman, but, trust me, I never forget how lucky I have been. I lost a good woman by selfish ignorance and learned from that loss; I hope I will never forget that my beloved is worth more than rubies.

And me?

Well, sadly, all I take with me from this year is the newly-won knowledge that I should have treated my body with more respect. I didn't, and it is finally punishing me for my carelessness with cruelty.In all other respects I hope I have earned another year's wisdom and another year's kindness in return for another year's journey away from the strength and fury of youth. If there is any justice in the world vieillesse should gain in savait what jeunesse can no longer pouvait.

I have my work, which I enjoy and have learned to do well; I have my beloved and my children, who with me weave the strong cloth of "family" from the warp of love and the weft of obligation. Those of you who wear that fabric know whereof I speak; it's not always a comfortable garment, not always stylish or fashionable, but it's durable and a comfort in the cold and the storm. We don't always enjoy the weaving of it. But we often do, and the crafting is both an honor and a joy when it's done well.I have my Portland home and my Cascadian homeplace.

And I AM at home here. I have been a Portlander, an Oregonian, and a Northwesterner longer than I have been anyone anywhere else. Twenty-one years this winter.

I may not have been born here but in all other senses I am a native Oregonian with all the strengths and failings that entails.

In many ways I feel more strongly rooted here, in the dark and wet soil of the Northwest, than I do in the larger nation that calls me its own. I may have spent twenty years wearing the uniform of the United States, but in many ways the flag I fight for now is the green, white, and blue of Cascadia; if 2011 has brought me any revelations it is that while I'm resigned to watching my nation foolishly struggle to return to the Gilded Age at home and fritter away its substance in feckless adventures abroad I am unwilling to let that foolish fecklessness degrade the Pacific Northwest I love. Let the United States take its own road to hell, provided that the Republic of Cascadia prospers.Does that sound callous?

I think it does, and, yet, I cannot retract it. The end of 2011 finds me less enamored of my nation, and many of its people, than ever before. Don't mistake me; I understand that the United States has never been what has pretended to be, that the American people have never been as wise, as just, or as peaceful as we like to say we are. And I also believe that in both its promise and its practice the United States has been on the whole a good place to live and a force for human benifice both to its own and to many other peoples.

But this year, as it has for decades preceding it, my country seems to have grown a little meaner, a little poorer, a little more selfish and self-absorbed, a little less gentle abroad and a little more greedy at home. Sorry, America, you could have been a truly great nation. Shame you didn't really try to live up to your promises.

So.

Goodbye, 2011. You weren't much of a year; just another journey around the sun.Let's do better next time, eh?

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

~ Richard Wilbur

A Million Autos in the Naked City

It's always interesting to see a visitor's impression of your home.

This is a time-lapse film of Portland over (I'm guessing) a single night earlier this year by someone named Lance Page (h/t to "Dropping Timber" for posting it)The odd thing is the ginormous traffic in the first half of the flick. I never really think of my hometown as dominated by freeways and automobiles...but of course it is. It's just like a lot of Portlanders I have this image of us as crunchy, granola-fed, bicycle-riding hipsters.

Duh, no.

But no other real message here other than a nice look at Portland at night.

Wind and Rain

I was truly on a blogroll and then...

...I had to drill four borings in Wilsonville.

I've been up every morning since Monday at four and working long past dark. It's been effing cold, and today it's supposed to get worse - driving rain and temperatures in the low forties. I'm whacked, and so posting's been light.

And in all honesty the recent destruction of the Occupy sites in Portland, Oakland, and NYC has me truly, viciously depressed. Sucking-the-muzzle depressed. What-the-fuck-are-you-people-thinking depressed.

Here are people, committed people, concerned people, trying to tell you politicians and plutocrats that returning this country to the political and economic land of the Gilded Age might...just might...ALSO return us to anarchist bombings, labor riots, and the Upton Sinclair jungle of violent urban poor and rural squalor...and your reaction is to flex-cuff 'em and and ignore 'em?

Yes, they're annoying. Yes, they're all over your nice little parks. Yes, you'd rather not think about what they're talking about just bybeing there. But...instead of reflecting on the past fifty years of relative peace and prosperity they'rer trying to talk about returning to, you're doubling down on the Boss Tweed plutocratic fucking crazy?

Are you fucking insane?

You WANT to hand your country over to the sort of malefactors of great wealth that created and then destroyed the Mortgage Bubble Economy that landed us in the Lesser Depression?

And yet you can STILL find the time and money to chase some raggedy-assed muj around the hills of West Buttfuckistan?

As they say on Mandalore: Kaysh mirsh solus. Your fucking brain cell is lonely.

And speaking of Mandos, right now I'm feeling kinda all kinds of Mando about my "leaders" - in Portland, fucking Bloomberg in NYC, inside the Beltway...and not in a good way. Specifically, "Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur"

It's a good day for someone else to die. and I can think of a number right off the top of my head.

And now I have to go out in the wind and rain and make a living.

Banners

Did you know that the City of Portland has a flag?

Yep. Here it is:Here's the thing about this version of the Portland flag; it follows all the "rules" of vexillology.

It's simple - just two lines or bars crossing with a diamond in the juncture on a green field. The pattern of the crossing bars mimics the junction of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers that dominate the Portland region. It uses no more than about three or four colors, doesn't use "lettering or seals", which the flag gurus consider too busy and fussy, and while it is distinctive it's bars and stripes are similar to the stripes of the American flag.

So by the ideals of people who "do" flags, the present Portland flag is just about perfect.

But...I don't like it as much as I liked the older version:Don't ask me why. I just like the '69 version better than the '08 version.

Yes, I know that it has the fussy little City of Portland seal in the canton, a big vexil-no-no. There's just something about that little bit of fiddly archaeism that pleases me. I LIKE that it has the Portland seal complete with Portlandia commanding her teeny little ships and plows.

But, then, I'm the sort of person who likes the old-school Prussian regimental flagsBECAUSE of all the fiddly little details - the crowned eagle, the scrolls with the battle honors, the various rays and flames and royal cyphers all over. I like fiddly details of that sort. They satisfy me immensely.

I like the fact that our Oregon flag has different images on different sides, and, yes, I like the fact that we have lettering AND our seal on the obverse:and our mighty Beaver on the reverse:(and we're the ONLY state that does this, perverse creatures that we are...) And I take an equally perverse pride that the vexillologists consider ours something like the 3rd worst state flag in the U.S. I have no idea who rates below us; probably somebody like American Samoa or Guam. I like the fact that the professional flag-wavers hate us for our dorky, fussy, un-vexillogical untidiness.

Not long ago the World's Worst Newspaper ran a contest to design a replacement for our vexillologist's-most-hated flag, and here it is:Does that or does that not look like the sort of thing that would win a newspaper design contest? All simple primary colors with the simple cartoon beaver minus his beloved log, and even a little star because...well, I have no idea because why. Because...stars are special or a reference to the Star-spangled Banner? Who knows? To me it looks perfectly idiotic.

Call me a curmudgeon, then; I like the little fussy touches on my city and state flags; in the archaic and unprofessional symbols you can see the people who came before us and their love of busy detail - living reminders that flags that stand for real people and real places are as imperfect as the people who create them both.

Hey, hey, It's a Sunny Day

Last weekend we had a sunny Sunday

Sunny.

Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is?

We're deep in autumn here, and in the Northwest that means rain. And the winter is fast approaching and that means constant rain.

Tomorrow, for example, we're set to have a typical Northwest late autumn-early winter day; sunrise at 7:25, sunset at 5:30, overnight low, 42F, afternoon high, 46F.

It's a wonder that none of Lewis and Clark's GIs sucked the musket muzzle after 184 days of THAT shit. I've lived here twenty-one years and by February I'm twitchy and tend to make funny noises when I hear the gutters fill up. I can't imagine what it must have been like to experience our Black Months with no warning.

But it was sunny Sunday. Sunny, I say!The thing is, I've been working a LOT of long days; early mornings, late nights. This means that Mojo gets stuck with a lot of childcare. And as adorable as our little urchins are, they're also the sort of hard work that five and eight also are, and so when I can I like to try and give my bride some refit time. So Sunday I stuffed the kiddos into "Bob" the white Subaru and took them away.

We did All Things Kid; went to Chuck E. Cheese, went out for lunch at McDonalds

(or as our friend the Poet likes to call it, the Icky Clown House, which I consider pure genius and far above the sort of nickname that I recall from when my college chums and I thought we were being witty - "L'Arc dOr" and "Chez Ronald's" and that sort of thing)

and then off to our local hobby store to look over Pokemon cards. We ended up in the Hollywood district of Portland so the Young Padawan could go to his jujitsu class, and that left just Little Miss and I to pass a couple of hours together.And so we did.

We sauntered across the street to the Whole Foods market where the Girl found a teeny shopping cart Just Her Size and proceeded to have a wonderful time pushing it about.These "Whole Foods" places - you may well have them, I think they're a national chain - have all sorts of oddities and quarks. We dove deeply into the Asian aisle for some of what Missy calls "seaweed" - the dried nori she snacks on - and into the juice aisle for fresh apple cider. We came across a "nice lady" who gave us some delicious plum jam (from Hood River to the east up the Gorge) on a vanilla cookie, so of course we had to find some of that jam and those cookies.

Lamb, and some craft beer, and a couple of apples later we were heading out the door but stopped at the little tea kiosk (a coffee bar would be too...mainstream...for Whole Foods in Portland) for some savory oolong. Taking our paper cups we crossed back over the street and found a tiny parklet between the main road and Peep's gym to sit and enjoy the warm sun and sip our teas."This tea is spicy!" Missy reported. "I like it, but the tea at dim sum is better. Because it comes from China, like me."

So I had to tell her the story about her adoption, and how we met her. And she told me about how she knew Chinese words. And we looked up at the blue, blue sky through the saffron-yellow leaves above us. And talked about clouds, and dinosaurs, and why some birds are fat.And as I held her dear weight over my heart I felt the weight of the knowledge that this little girl was only mine for a moment.

And that our artless talk and random time together would slip away like the heat leaving the cup in my hand.

And I wanted to stop time, just stop it, and sit there forever in the slow autumn sunlight with my little girl on my lap, and hear her funny little voice, and stroke the anthracite sheen of her hair and just love her until the stars burnt to cinder and the world ended.And then we finished our tea, and I tossed her up on my shoulders, and she rode above my head all the way down to pick her brother up and go home.

Lost In Translation

There are probably a million dumb-ass stories in the Naked City of Portland. This is just one of them.

I moved to Portland in the summer of 1990. When the van loaded with household goods, me, and my ex-wife rolled to a stop it was way out in darkest Beaverton in the western suburbs of Portland proper. We lived there for almost a decade, so I didn't get to know the city the way I do now.

But driving about the town in that first autumn I noticed two things; that there were a LOT of homeless people in Portland for a place that gets something like 200 days of rain a year. And probably because of that every freeway underpass had big white signs that read "No Trespassing" in English and Spanish.

Sort of.

Because here is one of those signs;Now I drove past these things for what must have been several years without really "seeing" them. They were just part of the scenery, like the scruffy winos, the pierced hipsters, and the coffee kiosks that are "Portland". So I never really thought about them. And neither, apparently, did anyone else including the people who made and set them up.

Until the World's Worst Newspaper printed a letter that read something like;

"I'm bilingual in English and Spanish and just moved here from (blank). So imagine my surprise when driving on I-405 the other day to spot a sign that advises me that "Traspasan" is prohibited. Now I have no idea what "Traspasan" is, but I know what it isn't, and that's a Spanish translation of the word "Trespassing". Just thought that you might want to let someone at the Department of Transportation know that."

So you can imagine the result. A whole bunch of people at the City and the Oregon DOT had to go on record as saying, basically "Ummm...errr...gubaduh!"

The "No Traspasan" signs began to disappear later that year, without publicity, and it's been probably five years since I've seen one. I thought that they were all gone. Until I biked downtown with my bride (whose replacement of the woman I was married to when I first saw one, the woman we like to call "pre-mommy", is one of the great miracles and blessings of my life - you know that, right, honey?) who knew my love for the ridiculous No Traspasan story and saved this little sign as a special treat for me.

And indeed it was.

And now I pass it on as a special treat to you.

Portland; the City That Works But Not On Its Spanish Language Skills.

Nightfall

I'm sitting in the cab of the truck getting paid for sitting in the cab of the truck.

Not precisely. The part I get paid for happens every ten minutes for three hours, when I get out and read the water level in the plastic pipe stuck into the hole my drillers ground into the cobbly soil of Southeast Portland last night. The water is leaking sullenly into the ground, apparently no happier than anyone else in the neighborhood that it is slowly sinking into the outer southeast.

So I have a lot of time to get paid for sitting, or reading, or just watching the passing show as the warm late September afternoon fades into a chill early autumn night.

Southeast 122nd Avenue east of the Interstate is a glum assortment of run-down houses, shabby apartments, sagging shops and, increasingly the past several years, vacant storefronts. Many of the signs - almost all of the newer signs - are in a Babel of non-English languages; Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish. None of them look very excited about being here.

This is no boulevard of broken dreams. This is where you live if your dream never was, or will never be.

The lot I'm parked in was a filling station once upon a time. The pumps are long gone, the tanks yanked, only the old service island canopy remains a tattered and peeling reminder of the time when the southeast was the newest part of Portland, our eastern frontier, creeping out into the woodlots and farm fields of eastern Multnomah County.

But it's also a reminder that Portland has always shoved its unloved and unwanted out east in front of it, the dirty foam edge of a slow-moving wave. The Russian kids working the tire store that occupies the old filling station are just the latest detritus. I saw them in the classroom at the community college where I taught bewildered by their incomprehension and sinking in debt, in the down-at-the-heels East Portland parks playing soccer in their tight shirts and leather, smoking in the drizzling rain.

I wonder if they think they're in the Land of Opportunity?

I wonder if they care?

A highballing Portland police car speeds down 122nd to the bar on the second corner down with a fire truck close behind. The casual anger in the cop's body as he goes inside says a lot about what he expects to meet down here, as do the bored looks on the fire crew as they follow him; another barstool crash down at the Peanut Farm.

Another night of hard drinking amid hard lives.

They barely give the pregnant girl in the parka jacket and miniskirt a look, even though the wheeled suitcase she's tugging along, the tiny dolly wheels skittering and hopping over the rough pavement, is almost as heavy as she is.

Three kids, out way too late on a Thursday night, dodge past all of them in a little flock as noisy and heedless as starlings.

I sit in the truck cab with my reading glasses perched idly on my nose and look out on this part of my country, my home city, like a lost tourist in a land as alien as an Asian desert and as bleak.

Girls in their Summer Dresses

Sunny day down on the South Waterfront part of Portland.This area is trying desperately to be the new chi-chi urban district in my City of Roses. It was bankrolled during the height of the real-estate bubble, and a whole bunch of chumps figured how smart they were by throwing up some huge condos in this badly-accessed former industrial dumping site.

It even has a ski lift - one of those ginormous gondolas you see taking loads of perky ski-bunnies in Sixties spandex tights up to the Piz von Spitz in the old James Bond movies - that runs up to the Oregon Health Sciences University on what is universally known around here as "Pill Hill".

It's been pretty rainy the last week or so, but this afternoon the sun came blazing out which meant that all the Portlanders did, too.

One thing I noticed is that amid the pale skin and rip-stop poplin that are part of the Portland woman's special charm there were some truly electric toenails.

Fingernails? Not so much; the usual tame shades from pale pink to dark crimson. But the toes, suddenly free from their dark winter prisons, didn't just flower...they buzzed! Electric blue, Stearman orange (like ten little cropdusters...), highlighter yellow, and even more exotic varieties with little flowers, leaves, stars...

What's the deal, gals? Is this some sort of secret winter pick-me-up? Are these vivid toes your way of fighting off the rainy-day blues? Do you combat Portland's everlasting rains by shucking your shoes and socks to bask in the light of those luminescent polished toenails?

I dunno. They ARE pretty. And sunny and bright. I enjoyed the newly-freed colors passing by in their tevas and flip-flops, glinting and gleaming in the frolicsome sun.

I took the picture below because it was such a perfect illustration of the day.

The woman is probably either a doctor or a lawyer - this IS a wealthy part of town and the big hospital is nearby - and she had some sort of report or brief to review, but the day was too nice to stay in her office, so she walked down to the park along the river and kicked off her shoes and read her paperwork.Nothing particularly special about her or the picture, I just enjoyed the sight of a pretty woman relaxing and working on a sunny day.

But...did I mention frolicsome..?

I was there drilling some soil borings right down along the public path at the edge of the river, a very popular place to walk or run. And, sure enough, around midday along the path comes a youngish woman jogging.

Now she wasn't doing anything especially distinctive, except that she was an extremely healthy young woman, very...womanly...in her physique. And she either couldn't afford a lot of running clothing or she just liked form-fitting attire, because her spandex top and running tights didn't hide much, and there was...ummm...a LOT to hide.

Her frontispiece was positively heroic, and her curves lavishly architectural. Her nipples, like two perky little point men, scouted her progress along the sunny asphalt. She was bright, and blonde, and when she jogged she was a masterwork of parabolic motion, and I have to say honestly; I stopped working for a moment to just watch her go past.

Now I adore my wife. She is helpmeet, lover, friend, wise counselor, sweet confidant, brave companion, tender bride. I find her every part winsome and desirable, and consider her in all respects but not least of those in her physical pulchritude the utter Acme of Womanhood.

But I'm also male. And human.

And so I watched her go past.

And tried not to be a total boor as she jogged by, her brave vibrations each way free. And very nice vibrations they were, I must say. So I appreciated the view as she passed, from stem to stern, front to rear, top to bottom. And even that was positively...well, I don't think bottoms can be "perky" so let's call hers "jaunty". And as those jaunty haunches went bounding past I caught a look at the back of her black jogging tights, on which was written, straining valiantly to span that surging fundament, to skywrite across that cloud-puff expanse of derriere;

"Love Pink".


And for the life of me, I still can't think of anything to say.

Cracked Pane

Well, it had to happen.And two weeks ago it did.

(Here's where I admit that I'm SO far behind on my blogging. I wish I had a good excuse. But the ugly fact is that I have a job I love, and a wife I love, and two kiddos I love when I'm not wanting to choke them senseless. So all of those things tend to come before blogging. I'm sorry, but that's the truth, and I can't pretend differently.)

What happened is that my Timbers lost at home.

You might remember here, when I talked about the feeling of singing the team on to win, of being part of the crowd, and the evening, and the Game, of

"...the almost-frightening power of the voice of that love that rose up over the darkened city, over the streets and bridges, over the rivers and the wooded mountains and the cold peaks glimmering under the stars until the daylight returns to awaken us all to our daily lives again."

Well.

The team was there, and we were there. The songs were there, shaking and roaring through the old Shed End, and the Game was there in all its terrible, heartbreaking beauty.But the victory was not.

D.C. United came into the House of Pane and broke out our windows; escaping with a 2-3 road win. The match was possibly one of the oddest I have ever watched, or played in, and in amateur soccer in this country you see some very odd things. Perhaps the strangest was a series of penalties all taken from the same foul. Portland's Cooper was pulled down inside the D.C. penalty area and the referee very correctly pointed to the penalty spot. The teams lined up along the edge of the area, Cooper spotted the ball down, the D.C. keeper Hamid set up, Cooper approached the ball, shot...and Hamid saved the PK.

But he didn't.

Lost amid the initial rush and roar was the far-side linesman, standing on the goalline with his flag up to signal that Hamid had moved illegally. The D.C. players went wild, but the referee upheld the call, the ball was respotted, Hamid again bounced on his line, Cooper again stutter-stepped up to the ball, shot...

...and Hamid saved. Again.

But he didn't.The linesman - a hell of a courageous man, in my opinion - had his flag up again. Hamid had moved forward off his line too soon - again.

This time the D.C. players REALLY went apeshit. Hamid received a booking for his protest, the teams milled about for a while, Cooper had an ugly little spat with Jack Jewsbury over who would take the PK, the old barn went quiet again...

...and then erupted, because Jewsbury slotted the kick home and the Timbers were tied 1-1.

It didn't last.

D.C. got themselves a penalty, scored it, and then took another goal from the run of play. The Boys got a late goal, but not enough. The unbeaten home run was over. The House of Pane was just another soccer stadium again.

So we sang our anthems (Timbers Army tradition is to sing "You are my Sunshine" on the 80th minute, and "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You on the 85th). We chanted, and roared abuse at the bastards in black, and at the officials, and dared the handful of cross-continent visitors to sing US a song. But the clock ticked up, and finally the long whistle went, and we had lost.The team took a slow walk around the pitch, applauding their supporters. They slowly filed out through the gate, leaving the pitch to a dwindling crowd, and the groundskeepers emerging to bed the place down for the night.

But in the North End we sang, and chanted; the Shed thuttered with the stamping of hundreds of feet. Jack Jewsbury and Jorge Perlaza emerged to receive their log slices for scoring, although they looked as subdued as you'd expect. But long after they returned to their lockers, we sang for them, and the team, and ourselves, and our city. We roared our pride, our disappointment for the loss, and our hope that we would all be here together again.

Soccer, by its cruelty and caprice, reminds us that Life itself is a cruel joke; that all our plans, all our hopes, all our wishes and dreams, will, in the end, come back to the grass.

But that until then there IS hope, and life, and love. And that you may lose today, your enemies may confound you, and yet you may still find yourself halting for a moment, your hands on the door of your locker ready to close it on the dregs of defeat, and hear far above you the thunder and the glory of that hope, and that love, becauseWe'll sing for you Timbers,'Til you finish the fight.There's a party in Portland,No one's sleepin' tonight...