Filed under: Home, Posts by John | Tags: Dave, Ilwaco, Molly, Oregon, Washington
Portland, OR :: I spent a few days last week camping with my friends Dave and Andrew in southwest Washington, just across the Columbia River from Astoria, Oregon, and 100 yards from the Pacific Ocean. We made regular trips into the little harbor town of Ilwaco, where we discovered the region’s best clam chowder at Harbor Lights Motel, Restaurant, and Lounge, and the world’s best waitress, Sweet Ann, who moonlights as a stand-up comic.
I hung out on the beach with Dave for a couple hours on Thursday afternoon. Sitting in camping chairs, trying to read but frequently distracted by the magnificence of our surroundings, I decided I wanted to get wet – but not too wet. I rolled up the legs of my jeans and waded out into the water. I hopped over the first few waves, which were higher than I thought, but then I got pummeled. Soon I was completely soaked. I looked back to Dave, warm and dry on the sand. Those days camping were some of the last I’ll be able to spend with Dave before leaving Portland in October. I will be glad to carry that memory with me of my best friend doing exactly what he is supposed to do – reading a book, writing longhand on a legal pad, and laughing at me.
I returned to shore, stopping just beyond the reach of the waves, and I turned southeast. It was a symbolic, if predictable, moment. With nearly the whole country spread out before me, I was reminded of how very far from home my family will be traveling in the next year.
I also realized that since moving to the West Coast in 2001, and especially since we moved from California to Oregon in 2005, I am constantly taking my bearings relative to the Pacific Ocean. I may not be able to calculate precise distance, but I am always aware when I am getting closer, farther away from, or running parallel to it. Most often this is a subconscious awareness, but it is always there: my desk faces south; the ocean is to my right.
This internal GPS is useless for physical navigation, but my realization seemed significant. What does the Pacific Ocean represent for me – hope? home? the end of the line? I can’t say for sure, though it’s worthy of further reflection. What I know with certainty is that for five months, from October through February, the narrow roads my family will travel will run mostly north to south. But in late winter we begin to explore unknown longitudes. Americans instinctively range west. To turn east is to head into the past. Maybe that is where our country – and my family - are meant to go.
I’m reminded of the notation medieval cartographers used to fill in blank spots on their maps: “Here Be Dragons.” The United States is moving out of adolescence and into adulthood. Kate and I are parents now, thinking a lot about legacy and the world Molly will inherit. And so we look back. Our history is the next frontier. Who knows what we’ll find out there.
My new glasses are made by the same guy who created my daughter’s favorite bedtime book, “Only in Dreams” (Molly calls is “Monkey Dreams”). Apparently Paul Frank is kind of a big deal. Now that I’m wearing his glasses, I am too.
Portland, OR :: Kate’s mom bought this plate in California for Molly before we told her (Kate’s mom) about our plans to travel around the country. A lovely coincidence.
P.S. Portland, OR :: I cross-posted yesterday’s post about evangelical myths over at the BWC blog. There are sixteen great comments so far. Check them out.
Filed under: This Week in Listening, This Week in Watching | Tags: Dancing, Flight of the Conchords, Kate, Libby, Molly, YouTube
Sitting in Starbucks this morning I watched a man outside the window briefly dance his heart out with the little one year-old boy he was babysitting. It was dazzling: he was black and spoke with an accent I couldn’t place; the little boy was wide-eyed and red-headed. They stomped their feet and threw up their hands and laughed and had great fun, and all as cars whizzed by on NE Glisan and nosey coffee patrons started writing blog posts in their heads.
Libby posted a couple great dance videos on her blog yesterday, both set to “Lisztomania” by Phoenix. The first video, which you can watch below, is a Brat Pack mash-up. The second, which you can watch here, is an updated version by a group of friends calling themselves the Brooklyn Brat Pack.
And I suppose this post is as good an excuse as any to post a video of my favorite scene from “Flight of the Conchords.”
Now, dancing around the living room with Molly is one of the great joys of my life. She’s going through a pop phase. Her favorite song right now is “Lost+” (featuring Jay-Z) from the Coldplay EP “Prospekt’s March.” Her favorite line is from Jay-Z’s third verse:
So it’s tough being Bobby Brown
To be Bobby then, you have to be Bobby now
And the question is, is to have had and lost,
Better than not having at all?
Time was I could cut quite the rug. But I don’t dance in public anymore. The picture at the top of the post is from my trip to Malawi last year. At a party a couple weeks ago some of my friends tripped the light fantastic. Kate was in there mixing it up too – the party was for her. I stayed on the margins smoking the rare cigarette and watching with amusement.
Watching these videos, and then seeing the man and kid dance this morning outside my window, it occurred to me that I need one good dance party like a thirsty man needs water. My style of dancing involves some of this and some of this and a lot of this. Next time the conditions are right – that is to say, next time I am around friends who tolerate (or even encourage) this kind of foolishness – I hope I go for it.
Filed under: Food, Home | Tags: Agrarianism, Ellen F. Davis, Family, Food, Gardening, Health, Kate, Molly, The Bible
Some scholars find the poetic description in Proverbs 31:10-31 of the so-called “Proverbs 31 woman” demeaning to women. Joseph Blenkinsopp says the biblical passage is “the petit bourgeois portrait of the ideal wife…, or perhaps…an unattainable, male fantasy of the perfect spouse, who does her husband proud and brings up a clutch of perfectly adorable children while engaged in a daunting range of managerial tasks.” But I don’t think it’s the description in Proverbs that is demeaning; the problem is the ultra-conservative interpretation of it used so often by Christian men to enforce control in the home.
Ellen F. Davis, a professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School, helped me see this. Davis has in her book “Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture” a great essay that profoundly reinterprets Proverbs 31 through an agrarian lens. Proverbs 31, writes Davis, set an ideal “before a whole people living on the edge of subsistence: women householders deprived of the benefit of adult male labor, perhaps for months; men conscripted for [military] service away from home.” The Proverbs 31 woman possesses an “intelligence bred through generations of work done in particular places, with particular materials, in response to concrete and immediate problems.” These practical skills are protective of the life of the community. They are also deeply subversive of the claims of the imperial economy, which dominated Israel in the post-exilic period and dominate our society today. Thus the “capable wife” of my conservative upbringing becomes the “valorous woman” (a more accurate translation) undermining empire and the economic status quo.
My own beloved embodies this tradition. “She plans a field and takes it; by the fruit of her palms she plants a vineyard.”
While Kate and Libby were away last week – Kate in Denver, Libby in L.A. – I spent some time with Molly in the garden. We’ve expanded the garden this year; it now extends along the entire western side of the house. We planted lettuce, broccoli, carrots, beets, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and some other herbs and things I can’t remember because it’s getting late. We worked with our landlord to construct a pea trellis that is at least three times the size of last year. (We also moved the peas across the driveway. They were too close to the house last year. They were hard to reach and we think the heat radiating from the brick walls reduced the quality and quantity of the harvest.) The squash we planted in front, and we have twelve strawberry plants blossoming beneath the fir trees out back.
Walking with Molly through the garden, spraying her with the hose as I watered the plants, watching her smell all twenty marigolds and tweak the nose of the gargoyle our landlord installed in the garden for good luck, watching the peas wrap their tendrils around the trellis as if in real time – I thanked God for the sun and rain, the air and the wind and the bee. I sang with St. Francis, “Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”
I thanked God also for Kate who helped transform concrete and Oregon clay into a prosperous patch of life. Kate has put the most time, energy, and creativity into the garden. Earlier this year she recycled an old bookshelf and an antique window to create a cold frame so we could prepare our own starters. She planted most of the garden while I was on a business trip. She is out there most every day weeding, watering, and some days I think just playing in the dirt like she is seven years old again and back on her parents’ Northern California homestead.
Kate is equipped with the skills of practical and sustainable living. (My talents are more cerebral and, let’s face it, less useful.) If we ever have a chance to escape urban life, Kate will really thrive. We’ll all thrive. When Kate was in the garden with Molly today, Molly reached out and picked a bunch of broccoli, which is just beginning to flower, and she ate it. Later in the evening, the three of us sat down to dinner, a salad made from lettuce that had been growing on the stalk just minutes before. Molly looked skeptically at the lettuce. We told her it was fresh from the garden. She ate it then and she loved it.
Filed under: Family | Tags: Garrison Keillor, Holidays, Kate, Molly, Mother's Day, Poetry, The Writer's Almanac, Wendell Berry
If Mother’s Day is a holiday created by the unholy trinity of the greeting card companies, florists, and multinational confectionary conglomerates, good for them. They have unwittingly used their powers for good. It is right for a man to set aside time (ideally more than once a year) to reflect on and respond to the great acts of love shown to him by his mother and by the mother of his child, and also to give his child some extra special attention, because she kind of made this day possible.
Later today, I hope to post something about Kate specifically. In the meantime, here is a poem by Wendell Berry entitled “To My Mother.” The poem was featured on yesterday’s episode of The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
To My Mother
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of italready given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
Filed under: Music, This Week in Listening | Tags: Asleep at the Wheel, Country Music, Molly, Prairie Home Companion, Willie Nelson
Kate told me a cute story about something that happened yesterday.
She was at home with Molly. She was also babysitting Brendan, our friends Matt and Grace’s son. Brendan is five weeks younger than Molly, and they love each other very much. The four times a week they get to see each other usually involve three primary activities: Molly stealing Brendan’s toys, Brendan stealing Molly’s juice, and the two of them chasing each other around the living room or yard to give hugs (as in this video taken by Grace last month). Yesterday, our friend Andrea came over to go on a walk with Kate, Molly, and Brendan. Rather than take the double stroller Kate and Andrea decided to use the backpack-style child carriers. Kate wore Molly. Andrea wore Brendan. Well, partway through their walk Kate and Andrea realized that Molly and Brendan were holding hands, and they continued to hold hands for several blocks.
Now I’m not one to play matchmaker – I think my record is pretty clear on this one. But there was a moment after Kate related all this to me when I flashed forward to Molly’s and Brendan’s wedding reception where I will re-tell this story during my toast.
This week’s musical surprise is Willie and the Wheel (2009), a collection of classic western swing songs handpicked by the late great producer Jerry Wexler and performed by Willie Nelson (who just turned 76) and Asleep at the Wheel. The fiddles, saloon piano, and lap steel guitar, the shades of New Orleans jazz, the way Willie’s vocals slide around the beat like condensation on a cold beer on a hot Texas night (that’s right), or the way he sometimes chants the words like a caller at a square dance – evoke images of the rodeo dance I’ve never actually seen: cowboy boots and hats, embroidered shirts (tucked in), and circle skirts in full twirl. And, for this city boy, not a little Prairie Home Companion. (Has your family tried ‘em, Powdered Milk?) The last track on the album, called “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon,” is about young love.
To make a life in Portland – that is, to settle in here, to give yourself over fully to the place – you have to submit to the weather. You have to make peace with the 222 cloudy days each year, and find a kind of pensive beauty in the nine months of rain. You must adapt to the rhythms and eccentricities of the weather, and learn that the rhythms of temperature and cloud-cover and precipitation are themselves eccentric – like the way the sun comes out at 3 p.m. nearly every day, but only for an hour.
These things are not easy to do. Business Week recently named Portland the “unhappiest city” in America due to its high rates of depression, divorce, and suicide (respectively ranked 1, 4, and 12 nationally). According to the magazine, the high levels of unhappiness are due at least in part to “lousy weather.”
I happen to love the weather here. As a kid, I was convinced that all great adventures begin in the rain. And so Portland awakens youthful dreams of thrilling deeds (mostly laid away in books), while satisfying my grown-up conception of rain as a metaphor for renewal (itself a great adventure) and serving as the set and soundtrack for my carefully-cultivated melancholy.
Kate, on the other hand, has a harder time of it. The rain and the clouds, the cold, hail, ice, and snowstorms are personal affronts against her. The lack of sunshine inflames her eczema (and Molly’s too). Raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, she grew up tromping through the forests; given a choice, she might prefer to live in a tent and cook over an open fire. The last 18 months have been especially gloomy in Portland, and Kate has been kept too much inside.
To thrive in Portland, you also learn that weather like we’ve had since last Sunday – sunny skies, temperatures fifteen degrees above average – is an absolute gift. I’ve spent the last few days riding my bike and walking, driving with the windows down, making the transition from jeans and hoodies to shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. Kate, who hurt her foot running last week, has been homebound, but she spends hours each day in the garden, or playing with Molly in the front yard, or reading on the lawn chair. The weather returns to normal tomorrow, with a twenty degree drop in temperature, clouds, and even rain on Thursday. But at this moment, this morning, the sunrise through my living room window is a revelation, and the sky is so blue it must be received like a blessing.
