Lisa
March 6, 2010
Right around lunchtime I heard a quiet tapping on my front door and sighed. (door to door peddlers famously interrupt my Saturday afternoons) I opened the door to a woman about 25, slim, vivacious and smiling.
“Hi!” she said brightly, “I’m Lisa, and you’re going to think this is really weird, but can I take a picture of your tree?”
Pancakes in Coos Bay
February 21, 2010
You know you’re in Oregon when you walk into a dockside pancake shack and the sign on the wall says, “Gluten-free pancakes with organic chai tea.”
I’m down in Coos Bay this weekend, about five hours south of Portland, working through a casting problem* with Hugh McKay of Cast Glass Forms. Hugh’s in Port Orford; Gigi the iPhone led me a merry GPS dance through cow pastures and abandoned farmland to get here.
“Geeeez, that’s hours out of the way,” said Hugh, “Don’t you computer people ever look at a map?”
Toadbutt
February 10, 2010
Yesterday a girl ran headlong down the aisle at the Container Store, skidding to a halt about five inches from my belly.
She was maybe 17, a blue-eyed brunette dressed like a tree. (Typical glasslander costume: Nondescript fabric in grey, brown and moss, none too clean, shaggy so you’re not quite sure there’s a girl in there and a couple of holes thrown in for spice.) She took a deep breath and opened her mouth all the way back to her tonsils.
Surges, Henry and Darryl
February 4, 2010
There’s something seductive about working from home, whether it’s in a studio or behind a computer. You can be as unwashed and floppy as you like and wear things the Goodwill wouldn’t accept if you paid ‘em (even in Portland).
What you can’t do, however, is drop everything and get to your next meeting on time. Too often I look up from whatever it is I’m doing and realize I have 15 bloody minutes to shower, blow-dry, make-up, dress, print out whatever it is I need and drive across town.
Michelle
January 27, 2010
“I just need $14.50,” the woman said anxiously, “And I’ll have enough for a room for the night. That’s all, and I’m not lying! It’s only so I have a place to sleep.”
I’d run into the beggarwoman outside Powells’ bookstore in Portland’s Pearl District. I’d had a rare hour to spare before my next appointment and so was doing my favorite thing: Drifting the streets and watching.
Flying fish
January 25, 2010
Then there was the time I drove through a perfect storm of fish…
Dunno what’s prompting me to keep diving into memory lane, except that I’m swamped with work and sculpture and friends and not finding a lot of new stories. When you’re not listening to strangers on a train or a park bench, the storytelling muscles tend to turn inward.
Anyway, the fish.
Brewskiville
January 22, 2010
I don’t drink beer.
Nothing against it, just don’t like the taste, not into the foam, don’t see the point. In glassland, that makes me a very odd duck indeed.
I’ve been told that glassland (Portland, for those of you who don’t speak Cynthia) has more artisan breweries per capita than any city in the world. Could be true for all I know, and there sure seem to be a lot of them, but like I said: I don’t drink the stuff.
The art of ignorance
January 20, 2010
“I just LOVE your collection,” I gushed, “Absolutely incredible. How long have you been collecting?”
My host looked puzzled…
Lemme backtrack a bit: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with art, but it’s rarely played nicely with my other obsession, technology. Since technology pays the bills, art has almost always taken a back seat.
I treasure the rare moments when they’ve combined, as in computer animation, or the heady time I was asked to join a tech corporation’s selection committee for buying “positional” art (which, as it turned out, was because they wanted me to write nice things about their products, not because they really wanted my artistic opinion).
Limo ride
January 15, 2010
The important dude sat opposite me in the limo, confident and just a tad patronizing, flanked by his PR handler and the most amazingly beautiful woman I’d ever met.
He was the CEO of a big multinational and I was covering his company’s new product line. His only available timeslot was the early-morning drive to the airfield, so here I was, scooted in next to his grownup son.
Mary and lonely
January 6, 2010
Dug this one out of mothballs; I actually met this lady in May but just haven’t had time to post until now. Enjoy.
The train was delayed–they didn’t say why–so Mary and I talked about lonely.
“The thing is,” she began, “as long as you don’t know you’re lonely, you’re not. But once you realize it, you’ll always be lonely.”
I blinked at her logic. “So if I just don’t think I’m lonely, I’m not, but if I do, I can’t be anything else?”
She smiled. “Exactly. Once you find out you’re lonely, it’s a permanent condition. But you learn to like it–being lonely isn’t the worst thing that can happen.”