Today, after work, about 7:30 p.m., I drove down S.W. Sixth Avenue.

That would be unremarkable except that it's the first time in 30 years I've been able to do that. I walk across Sixth every day. he building I work in is bounded on one side by Sixth. But for the last 30 years, it's been a transit mall. You could only travel a block or two before big white turn arrows directed you onto a street with a name and not a number.

I rememmber when the bus mall was being built. I was pregnant with Lyza, so it was 1977. I walked carefully around the detritus of construction, picking my way past piles of bricks and broken asphalt. On Labor Day weekend, at the first ArtQuake, held to celebrate the marvelous new mall that was a-building, I had my first bite ever of sweet potato pie.

Now, driving down Sixth, I have a delicious sense of priviledge and entitlement. The lanes are clear, except where crews are working on replacing sewer pipes. The old "bus only" markings have been obscured. Everything is intensely familiar from all the times I've walked or taken the bus past these blocks. But it's strange and different, too. I feel like I don't belong at the same time I am exulting at rediscovering my city.

I parked downtown one day instead of taking the bus, which was important because had I not, I would not have seen the solitary seagull preening on the grass beyond a huge elm in the Park Blocks.

There was a cantaloupe vine growing at the edge of the parking lot. It had two perfect, immature fruits. Was it planted with intent? Or did someone eating a melon throw the seeds out the window of the apartment above with no regard? Or perhaps it had appeared just for me, spread out bravely between warm red apartment house bricks and parking lot asphalt.

I left the lot and took a route that was not my usual way and, rounding a corner, encountered a glassy-eyed, foreshortened downtown dog, one of the breed of small barrel-chested animals you see trotting around on a leash. This one had an outrageous ruff of fine, dark fur that made it as wide as it was long, a walking square with a face full of attitude. Like the other downtown dogs, it looked as if it was scowling, but that's a trick of those glassy eyes.

A few yards along, I found a scraggly, leggy bush with a single pink rose blooming in the narrow wasteland between two apartment buildings. Sunlight, which only shines directly into that slot for a few moments a day, picked out every detail of that solitary flower

Why was I chosen to see these things?

I passed workmen laying a sidewalk outside a church. We did more than just nod -- we chatted a bit about the weather, about the pavement. None of us had any expectations of that conversation other than to pass a few pleasant moments.

All of these things have fortified me for the day. Whatever else happens, there will be the memory those two melons, the scowling dog, the friendly workers, and that single pink rose. The memory sticks because I have chosen to write about them.

Synchronicities in September

Many of my posts on all my blogs are things I wrote a while ago. I am constantly writing new material, but if I can let it abide for a few months and go back to it, I have a better idea of its worth. This post is about an extraodinary day in September 2005.

Yesterday I asked the universe to send me something new, a sign, not really, but an indication that I was human, that I made a difference -- it's impossible to say what I wanted, not really validation, just something, you know?

So shortly after, I stopped at an intersection in a residential neighborhood, Northeast 30th and Everett, I think. On my left, a man carrying a black and white violin case came walking out of a house, looking purposeful. On the right, a Sikh came walking in my direction. He was smiling. Neither is unusual in itself; plenty of people play the violin and plenty of people are Sikhs. But the incongruity of both at once was startling.


So the universe had spoken. Yet it wasn't finished. Today, I took a walk at my lunch break (close on to 8 p.m.) and as I increasingly do, I tried to walk with no destination. Dusk was just over and the air was clear. The light had that improbable definition that seemed like an expensively shot movie. Everything was fine and polished. I wondered how people could think downtown was failing on a night like this.

My footsteps (I walk carefully now, slowly and deliberately, on the third week anniversary of falling and cracking my elbow) take me, in slow time, downhill toward the Pioneer Courthouse and Pioneer Place. I figure I can take the bus back to work -- buses being free in the downtown area and still running pretty regularly at 8 p.m. I notice many things -- the lines of buildings against an achingly indigo sky, the drooping larch on the courthouse lawn, the blue lights on the shopping center, the witch sitting on the bus bench. She was in full regalia -- the pointed hat, the cloak, both lined with pink-purple fur or feathers. I didn't want to stare -- that was what such an outfit called for and I wouldn't do it -- but I did notice she had eyeglasses and was smoking a cigarette. She also had black netted stockings and spiky heeled shoes. Her companion had a guitar.

Was it just a costume? Halloween is still a month away, and nobody with her was costumed. It was a small group, two or three. No, she was either the genuine article or some sort of performance artist. I considered going up and asking her, but really -- what if she was a witch? Could she curse me for getting in her face? Best to let some things lie.

And so I took the bus back to Broadway and Columbia, near my work. The universe wasn't done with me, oh, no. As I got off the bus, a bent-over old Asian man approached me. "Can you help me?" he asked in a heavy accent. I saw that he had a piece of paper and was sure he was going to ask about an address. But on the paper, in pencil, was written "olive oil." Yes, I told him, I knew what that was.

He pointed to another line: "extra virgin" and a third: "extra light." Which one should he cook with? I told him I'd prefer the extra virgin. He said he had tried both but that the extra virgin was "too black," meaning darker. Well yes, I said, but it was of better quality. He thanked me for helping with his cooking and set off in the direction of the Safeway.

Southwest Broadway and Columbia. This was the same intersection where by chance I had encountered the East Indian who was looking for Swagat restaurant and I was able to give him the exact location and directions -- NW 21st and Lovejoy. He was looking for 7th Street, probably because the address was in the 700s of 21st, and would have been totally lost without advice.

I've also been asked for help by German tourists, and a couple of people have wanted to know whether the DMV is close by (it is). There must be something to the intersection of Broadway and Columbia. Perhaps some day, I'll sit on the seat of my walker by the bus stop with a sign that reads, "Your questions answered." I could take donations or not. My answer could always be "I don't know." But maybe I could help people. You never know.

9/30/2005

Eternity

In the neighbor's yard, there is a dogwood tree. It is lovely in all seasons, dressed in white in spring, green in summer and purple russet in fall, a lovely vase of branches in the winter. From my backyard, I watch the birds fly into its depth on mysterious missions. Winds bend its branches and ruffle its leaves but never dent its dignity.

Today, the tree is caught half naked, the leaves starting to fall from the top branches first. I want to look at that tree forever, watching the fine branchlets scrape against the clouds. Just so. I could spend eternity with that tree, and I do, because the tree is part of my eternity, just as every moment ever lived, every experience, every emotion, every gasp of a dying child, every turn of a dragonfly's wing are part of this moment. This is now, and there is no other time.

The sky behind the tree, if there is indeed a behind or a before in the great melding that is manifested consciousness, is the bruised, brooding black and white of October weather. It reminds me of skies of before, the great tristesse of the waning season seen over scores of Octobers. But the memories are not the vision. How can I see this tree against this sky without remembering other trees, other skies? Looking at those clouds gives me a frisson of familiarity, of recognition. They are the clouds I saw when, at age 10, I stopped my bicycle and stared, transfixed, in a late Minnesota afternoon.

Those clouds, in 1960, framing a decrepit old barn, are my first memory of life imitating art -- I was reminded strongly of a painting of a windmill on a Guild jigsaw puzzle I had worked. I didn't like the Guild puzzles much, because not all the pieces interlocked, but I remember that windmill. And the barn and the trees and those painter's clouds, with their texture and their smudged, smoky edges. They were the essence of romance, of expectation and power, of something grand and delicious and unattainable.

How could I not have these memories? It is impossible to be merely present in the present, the now. ... Unless the now is every now -- my everynow -- all of the clouds on all of the days brought together and made manifest by the dogwood and its branches and the sky behind them.

10/19/2005

Witches'-brooms

Fantastical creatures and strange growing things inhabit the gardening book I have been editing. House crickets, gophers, anthracnose, aster yellows, flies that look like bees, grasses that form yards in some places and are treated like weeds in others. Caterpillars that live in webby tents, bugs that form spittle at the nodes of stems, insects that live underneath hard, impenetrable scales.

Especially intriguing is something called a witches'-broom. I've never before heard of this phenomenon, a dense growth of twigs in a tree, caused by a hormonal imbalance which itself is caused by disease, which may be the result of insect damage.

I've taken to looking for witches'-brooms. Out the windows of the bus, I scan trees, but see nothing extraordinary. It's late winter, and the trees are bare, so odd growths should be easy to spot. Some trees are naturally bushy -- no brooms there. I see an occasional bird's nest, but many of the ones that were visible when the leaves first fell last autumn have been blown away by stormy winter winds.

Then today, as I am out walking and the season's first budding cherry trees are forming a misty swirl of pink against the stark black branches and the soft gray sky, I find one. It's on a small tree in the parking strip on Northeast 28th Avenue. It's a witches'-broom for sure, and it's right at eye level, so that I can examine it easily. A dense, almost clawlike knot of twigs crowds on a branch.

It's the only such growth on the tree, which seems to have a normal shape, buds beginning to form on the branches. When I look up, I see a few pine cones silhouetted against the usual slate-gray sky of Portland in March.

Pine cones? In a deciduous tree? Maybe they fell from a neighboring tree. I look about for likely suspects. None. There's a stubby palm-like tree growing in the front yard of the house, adding a disconcertingly Caribbean note to the landscape. The porch of the house has some trailing potted plants and a brashly colored wreath, flowers so bright they are likely fake, hanging near the door.

Nothing fits. Not the witches'-broom, the pine cones, the palm tree, nor the out of place wreath that looks like it belongs on a powder-room wall. Some sort of enchantment is in progress on Northeast 28th Avenue. Change is in the air. Connectivity is scattered.

I walk on, and the spell closes behind me.