I don't know why I even bother, since somebody always gets it on the first or second try, but I suppose I'm the eternal photo-optimist. For a free drink of your choice next time you're in town, be the first one to correctly identify the subject of the following image:
The homeless guy plucked at my coat sleeve. "Hey, you're not thinking of going to the farmers' market right NOW, are you?" "Uhm...yeah. Why?" "Didn't you check the Doppler radar? Huge storm coming this way--you'll get soaked to the skin. I'd wait until maybe after 2:00 if I was you." I thanked him, musing on the excellent quality of homeless folk you get around here: Friendly, polite and up on their meteorology. But missing the market wasn't an option, given my current mission: To put Portland in a box.
The northwest rains have begun in earnest--last night the rain hit my bedroom skylight so hard that for a moment I thought I was back east--and we're starting the glorious slide from autumn golds and reds to winter's cool grey mists. One of the nicest parts is when the rain stops and the sun spears out, hard, brilliant and golden, completely changing the landscape. It happened early this morning and I just couldn't resist going out back and snapping a few shots. (I think my neighbors have resigned themselves to living next to a crazy woman who grunnies through the mud in her bathrobe and slippers at all hours, taking pictures.)
I smelled my grandfather tonight. Since he's been dead for more than 20 years, it kinda caught me off-guard. Grandpa Morgan was an extremely intelligent, sometimes intimidating man who didn't say much to grandkids (although he obviously got a kick out of us). He took his dog outside for walks a lot because Mom and Dad wouldn't let him smoke his pipe inside. When he'd come back, sweet autumnal smoke trailed him throughout the house.
Remember that bit about all the blind men trying to describe an elephant by touch? Sometimes I think the media is like that. Anyone who thinks that news reporting is always objective might want to glance through the headlines describing the recent exchange between SecState Clinton and the Palestinians: CNN: Palestinians blast Clinton for Israel praise Jerusalem (CNN) -- Palestinian [...]
"Sometimes when I read your blog," an erstwhile friend wrote, "I realize that I don't speak Cynthia very well." OK, I will admit that I take the title "wordsmith," i.e., one who makes words, more seriously than many and on rare occasions actually do kinda make up words. Like, oh...Castuary. Or glassist. Or weirdicle. Or frittery. Or...never mind.
Effie Hayes was 90 years older than God, crotchety as hell and mean as they come. Or at least, that was my impression. Since she liked my sister better than me--a LOT better--I may have been biased. Still, if anybody in Spencer ever needed a candidate for a storybook wicked old witch, they didn't need to look farther than Effie's spotless front stoop.
Boy. Monica Huggett sure strokes a mean fiddle. Mom and Dad and I went to hear her (and the rest of the Portland Baroque Orchestra) tonight, playing Mendelssohn. I have a soft spot for a good fiddler, having played violin in my youth. Well, I should qualify that: I massacred violin in my youth. Along about the fifth grade I took up the violin with ambitions of being first seat, first violin in the school orchestra.
"Hi, Cynthia!" Andrew calls gaily, as he pounds up my driveway, "Can I come in? Wow, cool!" He gazes around my studio with wide eyes, taking in the art hung on the walls, the pendants pinned to the black velvet drape suspended from Oliver Wendell Kiln's gantry, and me, covered in plaster, making a mold. "Grandpa said you were doing some kind of art show and I wanted to see."
There are undoubtedly ugly parts of Portland but they're hard to find; this has to be one of the prettiest cities in the US, especially in fall. I keep taking the long way 'round to see my favorite mist-shrouded trees, trembling on the verge of fall color. It's not very efficient of me--the freeway would be faster--but who cares? The sugar maples are glimmering with that incredible, near-neon vermillion, the house-dotted hillsides look like a folk art painting..and I'm so absorbed in driving the city that I miss three phone calls.
