Adding a stitch

Fall is in the air here in Oregon, as it has been since April. In just a few weeks we’ll find ourselves in September, which is, with one glaring exception, one of my favorite months. This September, I fear, will be considerably worse than the nine that came previously. I am preparing myself for spectacles that truly redefine tasteless. So, without further ado, let’s get it started.

First, a very good friend of mine had an experience at an airport recently that I think warrants some consideration. She was waiting to board a flight when the invitation was issued via the P.A. system that various groups were welcome to get on the plane, including “active military.” I had no idea that such a practice was in effect. Since leaving the ever-toiling, put-upon private sector, I’ve only flown on Southwest. It’s odd, though, that if this particular manifestation of our country’s vulnerability to uniforms is now standard operating procedure that Southwest – a Texas company, after all – would not partake.

Anyhow, my friend told me that when the “active duty” call was made, a uniformed government employee went to board the plane and a woman shouted out “Thank you for serving!” The response of the other passengers, my friend said, was tentative at best, as if most people weren’t really sure if automatically applauding the nation’s killing agenda was still part of the script or not.

That’s a great sign, I think.

But the following morning – a Sunday – I was brought back to the reality. I got on a bus to go do some grocery shopping on the other side of the river. Scattered about on the floor toward the rear of the bus were several sections of The Oregonian. I picked up the “Community News” section. As an aside, I assume that it was the Sunday paper, but I cannot say for sure, because evidently the dates are no longer printed on each page. Instead, at the top of each page appeared the following (and to me meaningless) words: “Volume 711, Issue 4 E.” A lame attempt at timelessness, perhaps? I have no idea, but I do think it’s strange, not to mention sloppy and irritating.

Anyhow, one below-the-fold headline caught my eye: National 9/11 Flag stops in Portland, by Anne Saker The Oregonian. Here’s the first paragraph:

On its way back to New York City for the coming 10th commemoration of one terrible September day, a large American flag lay in the lobby of the U.S. Bancorp building so that Portlanders could add a stitch to help bind up the wounds.

That’s where I stopped because I’d read all I needed – or wanted – to know. We were wounded one terrible day in September, I learned, just in case I’d forgotten, and now we’re stitching shit up to “bind” those wounds … at a bank. Man, that may be the most honest paragraph I’ve read about that terrible day since it happened.

The white lighter

Although it would not even register on the scales used to define and measure dicey in places like New Orleans, Memphis or Saint Louis, my neighborhood is sketchy. The prostitutes who peddle their wares out on 82nd Avenue use this area as a staging ground. I wouldn’t object to that so much if they’d stop flinging used condoms into the street. The drug business, which was dormant for many years, is making a comeback. The deals go like this: Two cars arrive from different directions within seconds of each other, goods and money are hastily exchanged and then both cars depart abruptly, in different directions.

The apartment building across the street is a big problem. One of the residents – a woman who shot her boyfriend two days before Thanksgiving, which prompted at least 15 Portland police cars to arrive, along with the local Fox affiliate – runs a mini-mart of sorts. I don’t spend a lot of time peaking out the window to keep tabs, but when the traffic reaches a certain volume it’s hard to not notice. People come and go constantly, walking timidly down the sidewalk, looking back over their shoulders and then bolting for her door, from which they emerge a minute and a half later. She and various other drivers squeal in and out on a very regular basis as well, on errands that are either completed or aborted within four or five minutes at most, at which point the car returns. It is entirely possible that she is feeding the destitute or handing out and delivering batteries for cell phones out of the goodness of her heart. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, harbored no such doubts when, as he lay in the courtyard bleeding beneath a limestone-colored November skyscape, announced to the law enforcement brigade and the entire neighborhood “Every mother fucker she sell to is on that mother fucking computer!” All that, and so much more, without a microphone.

In addition to the entrepreneurial, pistol-toting grandmother – she is a grandmother, this much I know – there is another problem over there. Two or three young men moved into the apartment at the end of the building most directly across the street from my living room. They’re loud. Their friends are loud. They keep odd hours and they drink. And one of them – the black one, unfortunately – is dealing. Every morning at a few minutes after 8, he charges out of there and walks quickly past my house on his way to the market down on Glisan Street, the one that’s owned by the Lebanese family and that has a payphone in front. My neighbor walks with his head down, texting the entire way.

There is something abrupt and unfriendly about him. He shuffles along, head down, scowling. On cold mornings he wore a navy blue wool pea coat and a wool cap pulled down almost to his eyebrows. He’s scowly. As it got warmer, though, he started wandering around in tank tops and shorts that flowed in such a way that they could have easily been mistaken for skirts. (Basketball shorts, I believe.) And instead of hustling down to the corner to do his business, he’d chuck his skateboard out the front door and then – in what must require multiple motions but appears to be just one – jump onto the damn thing while closing the door behind him. It made me think, that’s the same dexterity you’d need to jump off a bridge and land on a moving train without killing yourself.

One morning I was sitting on my front porch having my coffee and smoking a cigarette when he skated past. Seconds later I heard the sound of a lighter that’s either dead or close to it. It sounds like a little corner of sandpaper rapidly rubbing a small block of wood. I have a big outburst of ornamental grass beside my front stairs so that I can sit there without being completely on display, but the grass is not soundproof: I heard the wheels on asphalt, coming my way. Great, I thought. He appeared in front of the gate, facing me.

Mercy.

“Can I get a light from you?” he asked. I’d describe his voice if it weren’t for the fact that all of my attention was focused on his face. I said sure and got up and went to the kitchen to get my lighter. And when I came out with it he looked at me with an expression of dread. “I … I cannot use that lighter,” he said. I must have looked puzzled, because then he said, “White lighters are bad luck. They’re cursed. Every time I use a white lighter it’s just before something bad happens.” I held my cigarette out and he leaned forward and inhaled my fire to create his own. I said, somewhat clumsily I think, that I guessed I could have just offered him my ciggie in the first place rather than going after the lighter. He asked me if I had anything I thought brought bad luck. Other than charming and sexy young men, I wanted to say, no, nothing much. Instead I told him, while silently hoping I was not jinxing myself, that since I was born on the 13th, I have always felt immune to superstitions for the most part.

There are two things about his face that are compelling. The first is that he is clearly not black. This may be a minor point but calling this guy black is like referring to the family two doors down as Chinese. They aren’t Chinese at all: they’re Korean. My superstitious neighbor obviously has some black blood in him, but there is something else – from what country or continent I do not know – but it’s clear when you look at him directly. The races mix and match around here in a way that reminds me of riding the subway in London or going to the farmers market in Los Angeles. With the exception of me and very few others, the racial demographics are unclear. Perhaps I am overemphasizing this point, but my patience for sloppily shouted matters of fact without a single thought (apparently) is all but gone.

And then there’s the duality issue. Looking directly at him, for me, is like looking not only at a composite of the races but a quiet collision, if you will, of the genders. It’s as if two negatives were used to generate one print. His face is a map of stern and sharp and unforgiving angles one second, and the next an almost musical grace that is utterly, unapologetically and magnificently female. When his face switches from one gender to the other it takes a little bit of what it left behind with it, so sometimes he looks mostly male with a remnant of female and at other times he’s almost all woman with just a trace, a hint, of scattered maleness. It is mesmerizing to watch, the back and forth of it.

It wasn’t until a number of weeks after he asked me for a light that it occurred to me that perhaps he was hoping I’d just walk to the gate and, with my cigarette in my mouth, lean into his face and connect mine with his. Then we could stare into one another’s eyes and agonize for moments that would be recalled and recounted, over the years to follow, as entire hours before we each …

He is polite but not in a way that is gushy or particularly encouraging. One of the things I’ve noticed about him is his size. There is something grand about his face and his voice but when I look at him from a bit of a distance it’s shocking to me how compact he is. He isn’t more than five feet and eight or nine inches and, although the pounds are distributed and arranged in a way that seems damn-near perfect to me, he is slight. And his walk is ungracious, almost clumsy – as if the ground beneath him is not quite reliable.

There’s another thing I noticed about him recently. One morning a few weeks ago I was getting ready to go downtown to meet a friend of mine who I had not seen in a while. As long as I was downtown, I decided to take care of a bit of banking, pick up a few birthday cards and run some other errands. As I was washing the coffee grinds down the drain my neighbor hustled by, head down, scowling, as usual.

A couple of hours later I saw him again, not in our neighborhood, but downtown, where he – as usual – had his head down and was wearing a frown on his beautiful, beautiful face as he squinted down at a page of a book, standing beside the shelf where they display the new arrivals at the Multnomah County Library. I looked at him, then looked again – I had to remind myself that even though we were downtown, it was still him, and it was still me – and then looked quickly away, and as I was doing that I think he may have looked up, or started to, but my mind was too busy processing, in a few short seconds, where I know him from, where he was, why he was there, why it was strange that he was there, why it was strange that it was strange that he was there. The simple explanation for the strangeness is that, according to the very loud and utterly certain narration in this neighborhood, my neighbor should not even know where the library is. Me thinking his presence there was strange was jarring: I pride myself on rejecting – with great fanfare sometimes – every single utterance of neighbors whose areas of knowledgeable authority are without borders or boundaries. I reject it, and yet the confusion knocks at the door of my awareness, softly at first, then not. At any rate, I am unable to speak when the logical sequencing part of my brain is at work, so rather than stop and smile and say hello, I kept walking.

Quitting while you're ahead

“You should just quit while you’re ahead,” my mother used to say. I’m sure she said it to me a time or two but I do not recall the circumstances because it was not sufficiently traumatic. Recently, though, I quit a couple of things and it is the most perplexing thing to me. I quit watching a movie before it was over and I quit reading a book a little beyond the halfway point. I felt defeated, and guilty and more than a bit sloppy.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was my pick for the book group I do with my sisters. While one of them said she would have preferred a more conclusive ending, I thought the ending, though horrifying in so many ways, was perfect. Right after we finished it I put it on my Netflix queue and when the movie arrived I sat through about an hour or so and then turned it off, thinking I would finish it in the morning. Only when morning came I wasn’t really interested so I tucked the disc into the envelope, sealed it and sent it on its way. I felt like I was cheating. I read the book, I know the ending, and yet. It wasn’t a bad movie, by the way.

Steinbeck’s masterpiece is perched at one end of my spectrum, and unfortunately, at the other, is a novel called Until I Find You, by John Irving. I made it to page 480 – which is just barely past the halfway point – before I pulled my bookmark out and put the book back on the shelf, where it will sit until it’s thrust back into circulation via a donation.

It is horrid.

I really like John Irving. I thought Cider House Rules and Hotel New Hampshire were outstanding (although I was much younger when I read them). This book, on the other hand. It’s the story of Jack Burns, who grows up to be an actor, and his friend Emma, who grows up to be a novelist. Really, though, from the very beginning (when Jack is four years old) the book is a story about his penis. Although I read little more than half of it, I believe the narrative – if it can be called that – is structured around Jack’s relationship with his mother, Alice, a tattoo artist, and their search, together at times, for his father, who abandoned Alice before Jack was born. Emma and Jack meet in grade school in Toronto, where she becomes the master, if you will, of his penis, which is referred to over and over and over again as “the little guy.” Every time Emma says something to Jack her quote ends with “honey pie.” Hundreds and hundreds of times, Emma calls Jack “honey pie.” And many, many sentences in this novel end with an exclamation mark, which drives me nuts.

I didn’t quit reading the book for those three reasons alone (although they helped). I quit reading because it struck me as a stupid story populated by really, really unimaginatively created characters engaged in one cliché-laden situation after another. To me, it was a amateur comic book without any illustration. Jack’s mother Alice, for example, pairs up with Emma’s mother, whose name I cannot even recall, and they become lovers. Lesbians! Where that one fell down is that for me it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on any of the situations or characters. That, I fear, is because “the little guy” kept getting in the way.

The last I read, Emma died as a result of her vagina being too small to accommodate someone she’d brought home from a bar (I am not kidding) and it is revealed that Jack’s mother had breast cancer many years while he was away at boarding school (he’d wondered why his mother hadn’t come to visit but again, the little guy … ). The last scene I read there was an envelope on the kitchen table that Emma’s mother was suggesting Jack open.

What really prompted me to abandon the book, though, was this: Until I Find You is, according to one reviewer, “a mass of lazy, unrefined writing.” I normally avoid reviews until I’ve experienced whatever it is that’s being reviewed, but I made an exception in this case because I needed, desperately, to confirm one of two things: Either it really is a bad book, or I was missing something, really missing something.

It’s the former that I found. I didn’t read a single review that really praised Until I Find You. The review that most aligned with my impressions appeared in the Washington Post and was written by Marianne Wiggins. The paper ultimately apologized for the review – which was scathing – an event that was explained in a competing newspaper like this: “Wiggins wasn’t the only reviewer to dislike Irving’s book, but she was likely the only one once married to author Salman Rushdie, a longtime friend of Irving’s.”

While I detest the critics club – their fascination with one another negates their reviews as far as I’m concerned – regardless of her marital history, I did not quit reading Marianne Wiggin’s review until I reached the end. Here are a couple of the better lines: “The story reads as if Irving woke from a recurring nightmare and started dictating compulsively.” And, even better, “I hope I’m wrong to read this as a cry for help that it appears to be. It does go on and on, and someone, somewhere in the production line at Garp Entertprises, Ltd., should have advised John Irving not to rush to print until he’d crafted pain into art, as he’s done so masterfully before.” On my list of things I think the Washington Post should apologize for, those lines are pretty close to the bottom of my list.

Fostering global monetary cooperation

It’s always interesting to me, and a bit disconcerting, when there’s a big, big story all over the news and then, as if by magic, nothing. Not long ago, a man from France was detained in New York because he’d been accused of sexually assaulting a maid at the hotel where he’d stayed. This man was the director, or leader, or president of an organization called the International Monetary Fund, referred to by the television people simply as “the IMF.” As if, I thought when I first heard the story, the term “the IMF” is as common to all of us, as automatically recognizable as, say, the FBI or the CIA or the DEA.

Even though I try to keep a close eye on the money people, I’d never heard of the IMF. And I’d certainly never heard of its leader, who was spoken of by the reporters as if he were an icon. It was said repeatedly that he was widely considered to be a strong contender to be the next president of France. I had no idea.

Anyhow, I looked up the IMF, and here, according to the Web site, is how the organization describes itself:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.

In those 36 words there is more wiggle room than you will find in the U.S. Constitution. Let’s start with the number. Though estimates vary, the number of countries in the world at the moment appears to be somewhere between 190 and 195. So what countries are not part of the organization?

Then we’re off to three fantastically flexible words: foster, monetary and cooperation. The IMF is working to foster monetary cooperation. What in the hell is that? When I pay my taxes is that a form of monetary cooperation? And by paying am I thereby fostering or is someone fostering on my behalf? I recently transferred some funds from a dormant retirement account in what’s known as an “IRA Rollover Account,” which is not only linguistically amusing but which also pays dividends quarterly based on a “Moderate/Aggressive” investment strategy. When my account is credited with those dividends, has monetary cooperation been fostered? If so – or if not – who makes the call? Who knows?

Financial stability. There’s a good one. Financial stability for whom? When thousands are laid off and then, six months later, what’s left of the news industry reports that the company’s CEO earned 22 percent more this year than he did last year, is that financial stability? I have a savings account – on paper anyhow. Is that financial stability? What if I withdraw all of it and move it to another bank? What if someone – singular or otherwise – decides to stop purchasing things that are, for the time being, unnecessary? Is that person or group a threat to financial stability? And if so, what’s to be done about it? What’s to be done, in other words, to “secure” financial stability? After all, that’s part of the IMF’s mission, according to its Web site. Secure is a very, very interesting word, I think.

I could go on like this for hours.

But back to the guy who was accused of raping the maid in the hotel. He was sent off to a pretty rough jail, which horrified many people. The maids came out in full force to demonstrate their disgust, which gave me hope, briefly: Minority women, some of them perhaps unsanctioned immigrants, on the television sets with banners and voices and fists in the air. The main question during that particular news flurry seemed to go along these lines: Do you think the French guy’s wife knew that he was screwing around in hotel rooms halfway around the world? Well, that’s a touchy subject. It’s understood, according to many of those quoted, that politicians in certain European countries are more likely than not to have something going on in addition to their marriage. This is offensive to many of us in the U.S., so I heard, but in places like France and Italy it’s not really a deal breaker.

Some deal, though, was broken because two really strange things happened next. The first is that the guy from France was excused from the court room because it was revealed that the accuser had some serious character issues. (This story is full of loaded phraseology, and there’s another one: character issues. What that’s supposed to mean I cannot begin to say because my energy for digging around for what should be on every headline page across the land appears to be waning.)

A couple weeks after the alleged incident in the hotel room, the treasury secretary (of the U.S.) was on the radio throwing his – and the country’s – support behind a woman, who is also from France, to become the new head honcho at the IMF. This move, according to radio, in effect blocked someone from a Latin American country from taking over the organization. I’m not sure why that’s important, but something clicked in my mind when I heard this particular detail, and I did a very tiny bit of digging around on the internets and discovered that where I had heard this woman’s name before was on the goddamn Charlie Rose show, where he had salivated over her “for the hour.”

I still don’t know who these characters are, or where they get their power, or what their power is. I’ve spent less than a minute on the IMF site because there is only so much PR writing I can read (or write) on any given day before my eyes and my soul start to ache. As is almost always the case when the money people put their plans into action, I think two things. First, I think it’s strange that there aren’t more headlines about it. And second, I think it would make an interesting novel.

I’m comfortable leaving my questions right there, but I am starting to wonder about all this rehearsed foolishness about the debt ceiling, and the deficit, and the country’s soon-to-tank credit rating, and the people at Moody’s (whoever they are) and Ben Bernanke, who is so spazzed out he can barely focus on his audience during hearings. There was a report on The PBS Newshour last week on the theatrics concerning the debt ceiling, not the IMF (not explicitly anyhow). Among other things: Wall Street is alarmed, as is China.

Well, in that case, I thought, it can’t be all bad.

And then, fairly quietly and over the weekend, Barack Obama threw Elizabeth Warren right over the cliff. The dutiful journalists reported that the Harvard law professor who thinks the fine print at the bottom of credit card statements ought to be checked against the rules and regulations, is simply too controversial to survive a confirmation process. Then, since their paychecks are signed by the people who think forcing the money people to obey the law is a bit extreme, they dutifully reported that the man who will be put forward to lead the consumer-focused agency that Elizabeth Warren has been constructing for at least two years now isn’t really such a letdown for progressives because he is one of her protégés. And – get a load of this – he sometimes takes his shoes off at work and walks around his office in his socks. While all these tidbits come to us courtesy of the people who have the password to the checking accounts, I have no idea if they’re connected. Still, I feel better already. I mean, socks at work.

Pardon the oversimplification, but when news is reported questionably, if it’s reported at all, there is no protective barrier solid enough to prevent certain questions from having a seat right beside me on the couch as I watch the news. And since hospitality is in my blood, I refuse to kick them out.

Safeway

Although I know better, I feel another wave of community-ism coming on.

Like all the waves I’ve been hit by before, this one started with a slow, quiet brew and was then amplified by a single incident. The incident came in the form of a Facebook posting. A woman who I am friends with on Facebook posted yet another of her loud and boisterous status updates. An article from a business newspaper in Portland reported that Wal Mart is seriously considering making a more aggressive move into the local grocery biz. The article listed a number of locations the company is considering. So the Facebook friend posted the article along with her comment: “I hope they’re considering 82nd and Burnside!” The way I know this woman is that she’s a member of the neighborhood association board, and she apparently thinks Wal Mart would be a mark of progress.

The Safeway located at 82nd and Burnside is a relic. Since I began shopping there in 2002, the order of the aisles have been switched so that the light bulbs and index cards are now on the south side of the frozen food aisle – which has remained in exactly the same spot, an anchor – and the canned beans and hot sauce, which used to be on the south side, can now be found on the north. Other than that, I don’t think anything’s changed in almost nine years, including the hands-free clock above one of the doorways. In fact, if the structure itself has ever undergone a significant renovation, it’s well hidden, and that’s what I like most about the store. It has a 1950s vibe about it. In fact, when viewed from 82nd Avenue, the arching roofline reminds me of the main terminal at the Saint Louis airport.

Another relic-y aspect of the Safeway is the people who work there. Many of them live in the neighborhood. They may not be the edgiest people in town (and for that many of us are grateful), but there’s something nice – for some reason – about seeing the people who ring up my groceries walk by my house on their way to and from work. As if they know me, they say hello. It’s the strangest thing. Like the building itself, it reminds me of the 1950s (even though I didn’t experience it personally). And if we’re going to draw conclusion based on skin color – and that’s exactly what we’re going to do, so I’ll go ahead and get it out of the way – the workforce at the Safeway at 82nd and Burnside either meets or exceeds any EEO “metrics” imaginable. We love diversity in Portland, we cannot stop talking and dialouging about how turned on and titillated we are by diversity here in Portland, and it is there, ladies and gentlemen, at the intersection of 82nd and Burnside.

And that’s all without even taking into consideration the people who shop there, and I have come to believe that that’s where it all breaks down. The store is full of people who are on food stamps and people who are on drugs. There are black people there, and Asians and Latinos. There are lots of people who go there to turn in their cans and bottles and then take their receipt to a register, where they’re handed their cash. There are old ladies there who walk slowly and wear coats and jackets in the middle of the summer. There are people there with many small children who do not always respond to their caretaker’s commands. I’ve seen people there who are clearly drunk or high on one thing or another. I’ve gone there quite lit myself, actually.

Because the people there are not, generally speaking, reflective of Portland’s preferred image of itself, and because the store suffers an inordinate amount of theft, the Safeway in my neighborhood is not like the Safeway stores in many other neighborhoods. I want to preface my complaints about the produce at the store by acknowledging that it feels almost criminal to be complaining about it. If I lived in Bagdad or in any major city in Africa or in Haiti, looking at the stacks of vegetables at my Safeway would be a hallucination in the direction of a much more fortunate way of life.

That said, comparing what’s available at the Safeway at Burnside and 82nd with the stock at the Safeway in the Pearl District or the store close to the art museum makes one thing clear: Whomever does the distribution gathers what’s left after the stores in better neighborhoods have been supplied and sends it our way. It makes sense from a business perspective – sending your best quality to the place where it’s most likely to be stolen would be foolish – and that leads to my next question. Why, I wonder, are the prices for a pound of tomatoes the same at my Safeway as they are at stores in other neighborhoods that are clearly higher on the quality list? The city of Portland does a fantastic job at ignoring this neighborhood – if I hear one more bureaucrat absolve himself of any responsibility for 82nd Avenue by repeating that it’s “technically speaking” a state highway I may start screaming. So as the city pours funding into its favorite neighborhoods, Safeway follows suit by selling higher quality in those same neighborhoods but at the same price it charges for the rejects. So those of us who live here not only pay the same city taxes for fewer amenities since development projects don’t tend to come this way (nor do the abatements that go along with them), we also pay the same price for our food. Is this an example of what’s called a public-private partnership? Is it a form of class warfare? I don’t know.

The day after a member of the neighborhood association blew her horn for Wal Mart on Facebook, I was on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland, a trendy little stretch of well-funded sanctimony where everything is as green and alternative and locally sourced and sustainable as can be, and I noticed that within 10 blocks – and the blocks are short here in Portland – there are three – three – pretty showy grocery stores. There’s a brand new New Seasons. Then there’s the recently renovated – with green building methods! – Fred Meyer. And at 30th and Hawthorne, where the Safeway store I used to shop at stood not long ago, there are bulldozers and mounds of dirt and no more trees out by the curb. That’s because Safeway decided that the existing store was no longer sufficient for that neighborhood (I have endless questions about that but I’ll spare you, as a way of thanking you if you’ve read this far) so it knocked the building down and is putting up a new one.

Recently a sign was taped onto one of the glass doors at my Safeway announcing that that particular entrance is no longer being used and, although we apologize for the inconvenience, please head over to the south entrance, which actually faces east. That just screams ghetto, in my opinion, but what’s worse is that our answer to the Safeway in this neighborhood is to go shop somewhere else. For all the passion about community and inclusiveness and all the rest I am really surprised that the best we seem able to do is form a committee of community-minded folks to open a food co-op, which would charge people an annual membership fee to buy more expensive groceries. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? After nearly two years of meetings and ill-advised fundraising events, this is what the group has: less than $10,000. The neighborhood association seems more interested in yard signs and sign-in sheets and painful public reviews of the grammatical errors in the bylaws and how to best correct them. And Wal Mart.

Wait, wait: Is it possible that in spite of all our talking and twittering and Facebooking about how important community is to us, and what a critical role food plays in the community, and how inequitable it is, and how the “lack of diversity” is a crime, do you think that maybe we’re not really interested in rubbing elbows with people who do not look and smell and talk and earn like we do? That cannot be! Not here on the east side of Portland! No way!

I have a few ideas but I’m not sure what to do with them. First, the pressure needs to be organized in such a way that Safeway will do anything to avoid ever hearing from anyone in this neighborhood for as many years as possible. Forever, if possible. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the employees at the store would gladly sign on to this effort because my guess – again, a guess – is that they don’t like working in the reject bin any more than I like shopping there. Then there’s the parking lot. It’s huge, and from what I hear the store owns it outright. I think there should be a weekday farmers market there, and, since 82nd is technically under state jurisdiction, let’s forget about the chefs and wine experts and cookbook connoisseurs and “the foodies” and get a nutritionist with the state health department out there to do some demos about the amazing things you can do with shit that comes straight out of the ground.

Here’s my final idea (I promise). If shoplifting is a big problem at Safeway, rather than going into lock-down mode, I think the neighborhood association should step in and help out. There’s some sort of program where people awkwardly walk through the neighborhood every now and again dressed in bright orange vests, as if on patrol. Until further notice, that effort would have a greater impact, I think, in the aisles of Safeway.

The most visible Republican feminist

It was because of Betty Ford that I asked my mother the meaning of the word prosthesis. It’s a new body part, she told me. Why, I asked, did the president’s wife need a new body part? Because she had cancer. Where, I wondered, do you go to find a new body part? I pictured a store of some sort, but in my imagination the inventory at the store was mainly legs, standing on end, toes pointed toward the ceiling the way they were in the pantyhose displays at Famous Barr. There were lots of amputees roaming around my childhood for some reason, so once I learned the meaning of the word prosthesis, every time I saw a picture of the country’s first lady, I focused on her legs. You could barely tell that they were not the ones with which she’d been born. I was impressed.

Betty Ford died last Friday at the age of 93. I thought it was odd that I knew nothing of this until yesterday morning. I click on and off of MSN dozens of times a day on my way to and from the Internet, and I didn’t see a single banner headline. Nor did I notice anything on the section where the other, less urgent headlines linger. There wasn’t a word on Facebook. There’s probably a lot that could be read into the lack of instant fanfare over her departure – the most persistent of which in my mind is that she bled and blurred into and out of a few too many categories for the technicians who have taken over the newsroom to wrap their heads around.

But it strikes me, most persistently, as tasteful. The politicians are busy with their own summer stock theater production, and the celebrities are desperately looking for a new disaster with which to affiliate themselves – Haiti is getting to be old news, after all – and the rest of the country seems occupied with the Casey Anthony verdict. So the woman who apparently did a lot of the heavy lifting toward inserting the word “breast” into the everyday vernacular died out there in the California desert and was, for the most part, left alone. The ghouls, for once, were too busy with other things.

Of the very few remembrances of Betty Ford that I heard, there’s one comment that wrote itself in ink: Betty Ford was the most visible Republican feminist. And what, asked the reporter doing the interview, could today’s Republican women learn from the legacy of Betty Ford? Like a bottle rocket shot into a drizzly evening, the answer sort of collapsed on itself. Which is fine with me, really, because even though I don’t know any of these people personally, I have a hard time even imagining the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann even … you know, there’s really no point in even finishing that sentence, so I won’t.

My favorite part of the Betty Ford legacy is her mission to help people dry out and sober up. It’s interesting to me that at some point the mere mention of her name – Betty Ford – came to mean that the battle against the pills and the drink and the smoke and the needle was on. Talk about effective brand strategy. What strikes me about it is that it must have been really, really scandalous back then for someone to publicly acknowledge a substance abuse problem. Today, based on what little I know about it, it seems to me that Betty Ford’s issue was the most normal thing imaginable, and for descandalizing that particular area of human frailty I thank her. My husband’s been running the country, she seemed to say, and now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to rehab. What sane person wouldn’t be?

New wheels

Last week, on Friday afternoon, I received one of those invitations via e-mail (an “evite”) to an event I really want to attend. It’s my friend Amy’s annual barbecue, which is always a good time. I got up at about 4:30 on Saturday morning to use the bathroom and as I was drifting back to sleep I started running through the various ways to get to Amy’s barbecue and back. I could walk, of course. Or I could take the bus, but it would require at least two buses, one on a line that I believe has been severely cut back. Or I could take the light rail, stop at Trader Joe’s, and then either take a bus or walk up Sandy until I reach her neighborhood. Or I could invite someone to go with me for no other reason, really, than to hitch a ride. I went back to sleep but when I got out of bed a few minutes before eight, it was with a mission, and at a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, after “thinking about it” for more than two years, I got on my new bicycle and glided through downtown Portland on SW Salmon Street.

The first time I rode a bike through downtown Portland – or any other downtown for that matter – was in May of 1995. Though it quickly became a way of life, I never considered myself a bike activist or a competitive cyclist. I never bought any “gear.” Once, I did load my bike onto a rack and went off to some trail somewhere south of Portland with a group of people whose main priority seemed to be standing around sizing up one another as they noisily gulped water from logo-ridden water bottles, and it struck me as so out of synch – putting the bike on a car and then driving somewhere to ride it – that I never did it again.

I simply used my bicycle for what I believe it was intended: I rode it from where I was to where I wanted or needed to be. And along the way I found something that I believe was in the realm of religion. Riding across the river on the Hawthorne Bridge was, for me, a cathedral on wheels. There was a measure of mystery on that bridge, and in the river below, and in the mountains off to the east. I saw things on my rides, I felt things that were not accessible anywhere else, particularly behind the wheel of a car slogging down the interstate toward an office park on a dead-end street so scrubbed of what I consider life that, even though you are nowhere when you’re there, you could, at the same time, be anywhere.

Thus far, that move was the most damaging thing I’ve been through, which I believe puts me into the lucky category, because here I am, eight years beyond (or behind?) the days that I regularly rode the bike I bought in 1995, and I can still get on one, nervous at first about riding in such close proximity to traffic (as I was so many years ago) but quickly find myself woven into the sky and the traffic and sounds as I pedal my way toward the entrance to the Hawthorne Bridge. What a day I had.

It's a conversation

In September of 2008, I did something that had ramifications then and has ramifications today. With one hand I poured several cans of beer down the drain, then rinsed the cans out and dumped them into the yellow “Portland Recycles!” bin, which I set out on the curb. And with the other hand, in what I consider part of the same gesture, I picked up the remote control for the television set.

For many years I had heard rumors. I did watch occasionally – I was aware of 9/11, for example, and I’d endured the election night coverage in 2000 and 2004 – but other than that I hadn’t watched anything regularly since 1992. I’d heard that things had gotten bad out there. Many people I knew and whose opinions I respected said that what used to be the news had deteriorated to the point where it was almost painful to watch. As I learned in the fall of 2008, that was no exaggeration.

Every morning on the Today show one of the top three stories concerned the disappearance of a little girl in Florida, an unfortunate member of the clan that appeared to be a serious contender for the title of the country’s First Family of Trash. The significance of the story baffled me. The trashy mother of the disappeared girl, aware that her daughter was missing, had apparently been out at the clubs and at parties and so on and so forth. Her trashy mother and her trashy father had lots to say about one thing and another. At one point, in fact, another child went missing in Florida – it does not seem to be uncommon there – and the trashy father managed to get on the television to talk about that situation as well. There was a boyfriend as I recall, or an ex-boyfriend, who would chime in periodically. There were lawyers and forensic experts and psychics and religious people and family therapists and as baffled as I was by the prominence of this story on the morning airwaves, I was blown away that it made the evening news, which was hosted (I will not use the term anchored) by Katie Couric.

When the body of the missing girl was found – her name was Kaylee, I believe – the networks interrupted their programming to make an announcement, and when the remains of the unfortunate child were put to rest, I recall hearing that a woman from Texas had driven to Florida to attend the funeral not just to leave some plastic shit sitting around but to “pay her respects” to the departed.

And I thought, man, this is not good.

For many years the most brazen PR whores I worked with added their voices to the chorus about the “death of print” by blaming it on the newspaper reporters. They don’t get it, they would sneer. It’s no longer about forcing the news onto people – it’s a conversation.

It sure is. It’s a conversation that we apparently cannot stop having (just writing this makes me guilty as charged, I’m afraid).

In the fall of 2008, among many other travesties that were taking place, billions of dollars were changing hands in ways that were poorly explained if explained at all, millions of jobs were evaporating and people were being thrown out of their homes. And this country, in its infinite illness, could not get enough of the Anthony family. As if on cue, as if following a script, the whole country seemed to participate in a group hug that extended from sea to shining sea. I watched with a sense of heartbroken horror, and wondered, is this what it is like to not drink a lot of beer?

This week, when the jury acquitted the semi-literate mother, MSNBC blared the non-news across the Internet with one of its red “BREAKING NEWS:” banners. Seconds – and I do mean seconds – later my Facebook page lit up like Christmas in July. People were shocked and horrified and offended and on and on. “When the justice system fails, karma will prevail,” wrote one tech PR know-it-all. “She’ll have her day in God’s court!” blathered another. I finally gave up writing responses with this: One of my adamant Christian Facebook friends wrote something vindictive about the jury, so I responded by writing that as of today, the television screen is not an extension of the court room, and for that I am thankful. Then someone else, Missy someone or another, or perhaps Mindy, wrote, below my comment: “You’re right Yvonne! She should have her tubes tied!!!”

And I thought: You shrill, officious, uninformed bitches should all have your tubes tied. But I didn’t write that, of course, because I’ve kind of given up on it.

The funny thing about it, to me, is that the only way these loud mouths could be so sure of their stance on the whole thing is if they had been there themselves – and by there I mean at the scene of the murder. But they weren’t, and that doesn’t seem to stop anyone, and I guess what that means is that we are all connected to stories that are not our own, that we all participate in lives that are not our own (because we are lonely? Desperate? Horny?) that we’re all part of the conversation launched by news outlets that are owned by pretty big, pretty powerful companies, and isn’t it interesting, really, how little we hear about what the CEO’s are taking home as thousands of people lose their jobs, and if the Anthony family foolishness is any indication, that’s a tactic that seems to work pretty well.

Reading through the underworld

Don DeLillo is one of those novelists whose name and whose books I’ve been vaguely aware of for years, but with no idea why. I just finished reading Underworld, published in 1997, and my understanding of him and the significance of his work remains as vague as it was prior to reading page one.

I found the novel at one of the book sales I troll from time to time and put it on the bottom shelf with the rest of my collection of recent finds. When Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was published late last summer, I could not help reading the reviews, which I usually avoid until after I’ve read a book. The reviews of Freedom, I believe, were the result of an orchestrated PR campaign. One – in the New York Times – declared Freedom “the novel of the century,” which is a strange comment given that the century was only 10 years old when the book was published. A gush like that, of course, must be followed with a bit of brutality, referred to by the PR team as “David vs. Goliath,” and it was. A review in The Atlantic criticized Freedom for its childish writing (I disagree) and the novel’s lack of movement, of progress, of development (I really disagree). These characters and the landscape they occupy, the reviewer of Freedom wrote, don’t evolve. It’s like they’re all living in a world created by Don DeLillo. Don DeLillo and his books, it seems, are prone to being included in sweeping statements about the state of literature, the state of the American novel, the state of what we think of ourselves and what we’ve become and so on and so forth. Though rarely explained, he is frequently mentioned.

Here are some things from Underworld. The Giants beat the Dodgers in 1951 and went to the World Series. A homerun was hit into the stands. Many lives were arranged, more or less, around the ball itself, searching for it, paying for it, snatching it, stealing it, worshipping it, tossing it, accidentally, sort of, into the trash. Getting rid of trash is an enormous challenge, so much so that you might call it a theme (I am not good at themes, themes are my weakness, so forgive me for not being more definitive). There is nuclear power, and Vietnam, and all those retired B52s parked out in the desert somewhere (California or Arizona). J. Edgar Hoover is involved in much of this, as are Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleeson. A boy sits on a roof in the Bronx and listens to the baseball games on KMOX, which is, oddly enough, “the voice of Saint Louis.” Another boy reacts in horror as his genius manifests itself in his ability to beat any and all, it seems, at chess. A grainy movie of the Kennedy assassination is shown. A nun becomes obsessed with a graffiti artist. A woman beads sweaters to earn extra money, although there’s much more to it than that. A man begins shooting people at close range on the highways of Texas and becomes a celebrity of sorts. The number 13 rises to the surface over and over again, as does the Lucky Strikes logo. A father disappears.

Underworld is 827 pages long, and on each and every one of those pages there was at least one sentence that was so captivating – to me, for various reasons – that I read it again. Here, just for fun, are a couple of my favorites:

“There’s always a clock somewhere that’s stopping,” Marvin said morosely. [page 306]

And: She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after. [page 804]

The prologue of Underworld is 60 pages of the most engrossing writing I’ve read in a long while. It’s the baseball game, recalled and reenacted through the eyes and souls of several characters, the most intriguing of whom is a black boy named Cotter, who has skipped school and jumped the turnstile to get into the game. It is Cotter who actually gets the ball. Cotter has a breathtaking understanding of motion, of color and class, of the roles he plays and how to bend and meld them to his advantage. And after those first 60 magical pages, he is never heard from again.

As I was reading the last 20 pages of Underworld, I started wondering after the novel’s main point, and for me it came in the form of a question. Nick Shay, who is the closest thing to a main character, is an executive in the waste disposal industry. He does some terrible things, of course, including dirty dealings with an outfit in the then-collapsing Soviet Union. At the same time, his heart, for the most part, is in his marriage, in his relationship with his children and his grandchildren, in his life-long struggle with the disappearance of his father, who left him, his brother the chess player and their mother the beader, to fend for themselves. So here’s the question I was left with: Do his good traits soften the edges of his bad, or do his bad traits chip away at his more honorable characteristics?

It’s a worthwhile question, to be sure, but here’s the end of what I have to say about Underworld. Good writing is worth its weight in gold as far as I’m concerned, but if you’re going to invite people along for 827 pages, speaking only for myself, I need a bit of connection, some coherence, something, anything really, that sustains. Those elements, for me, never presented themselves.

Woven in Italy

Believe it or not, I have an opinion on fashion. While it might surprise anyone who knows me in person, I do have a bit of a system when it comes to clothing. My goal is for me – not what I wore – to be what’s recalled. I am not interested in updated, or current, or fashionable or – God forbid – trendy. I like solid colors that have some depth. Stripes are okay as long as they’re on the subtle side. Plaids and other busy patterns – particular geometrically inclined sweaters – are forbidden. I like simple forms and very little (if any) adornment. If I had to pick a single fabric it would be linen. I like the way it feels, and I like the way it looks. Because my association with it is primarily weddings and funerals, I refuse to iron shirts, which would seem to be incompatible with my fondness for linen. But linen, along with cotton, is meant to wrinkle. Wrinkled shirts, in my opinion, are not a sign of carelessness or sloppiness. What they’re a sign of is that you’re not wearing fake fibers.

My color wheel is a bit limited. I own a lot of black clothing. And I have a distinct weakness for blue, especially pale blue. So a couple of weekends ago, I did something I haven’t done in years: I bought a white shirt.

Once a year, the moneyed liberals in the Eastmoreland neighborhood of Portland – which is a comfortable stroll from Reed College – get together and have a yard sale. This is no ordinary yard sale: There are refreshments and toilet facilities and scheduled entertainment and walking maps and a Web site. For one weekend out of the year, it’s okay to wander aimlessly through the neighborhood, wonder at the beautiful yards and the enormous homes and paw through the shit that the rich folks no longer want.

I love the concept of yard sales. Based on what I’ve seen, there is really no reason to buy much of anything brand new. But this year I did show more restraint than usual. I bought one book – Angela’s Ashes – and three CDs. The CDs I found on a deep, sturdy table on sale for $3.00 each, which seemed high to me. So I asked the woman sitting in the rocking chair whose music collection she was selling and she told me that it was but a fraction of her father-in-law’s inventory. Her father-in-law, she went on, was a doctor, and he used to come home and listen to his jazz music to clear his mind of the operating room. That’s a bit of a cliché, I thought. A retired doctor’s beneficiary doesn’t need $3.00 per CD – I give myself permission to be unusually scornful at yard sales, especially those held in the driveways of the ostentatious – so I held up what I wanted – Carman McRae, Diane Reeves and Sarah Vaughn – and offered her $3.00 for all three. To which she said, “Deal.”

A few driveways later, like a flag of some sort, once the white shirt caught my eye it didn’t let go. It was all clean lines and quality seaming and well-pieced fabric, hanging there on an enormous wheeled, chrome-plated wrack. I ran my fingertips over it and turned it inside out. Banana Republic, according to the tag, 100 percent cotton, made, according to a tiny, oddly placed tag, in Hong Kong but, so says the third and very prominent tag, Woven in Italy. The problem with white shirts, in my experience, is that they never stay that way for long. In the past, if I’ve managed to avoid spilling or splashing to dribbling something onto the whiteness, over a very short period of time the edges of the collars and the cuffs begin to fade and smear. I don’t use bleach.

I held it up and examined it from various angles. I’d probably only wear this a few times, I thought. This is beautiful, I thought, but even though it only cost $1.00 – it was everything half off by the time I arrived at this particular sale – it goes against my general guideline of buying clothing only if I’ll get a long run out of it.

I’m not sure what word I’d use to describe how I felt when I put the shirt on after a bath and a shave. Noticeable, perhaps. Pristine, maybe, although that may be too strong of a word. It fell perfectly just beneath my hips. It was loose without being tent-ish. My complexion and my hair and eyes looked somehow more pronounced. If the shirt had ever been worn before, it didn’t reveal it. I wore it with a pair of pale tan pants and black shoes. I wore it downtown to a birthday gathering held 40 floors above the pavement. I wore it as I chugged down at least a gallon of ginger ale, as I ate wonderfully spiced and fried calamari, a sloppy cheeseburger and a desert that was more or less deep-fried doughnuts, coated with sugar and served up with a cup of melted hot fudge on the side. In a departure from what I usually experience when I wear a shirt for the first time, the white shirt was a shock at first, a source of self-consciousness. But after a bit of time passed – 20 minutes? An hour? – I forgot that I was wearing it and returned to my more familiar self. Forgot, that is, until I came home, took it off and hung it neatly on a hanger in the bathroom. Later, as I was brushing my teeth before bed, I took a closer look at the shirt and noticed that in spite of the colorful and greasy food I’d scarfed down while wearing it, it still does not bear a single stain.