beautiful, funny, sad & true

For some reason, I’ve had like three or four e-mails this week from people asking why I’m agnostic. A couple of them were generic, from people who just did a search for people who are agnostic, and started contacting them. But a couple were from people who had actually read my blog, and shared their thoughts. That was surprising, and kinda put me off, quite frankly.

I’m not a fan of missionaries or proselytizers. For me spirituality is personal and not easily explained. I don’t get it from the places or sources that other people seem to get it from, but I do know how to tap into it, and I do so on a regular basis. No, I’m not willing to explain it to some random stranger who e-mails me once out of the blue.

And for the record, agnosticism is not atheism; there’s a big difference.

I used to go to my mom’s church until I was about eighteen years old. I will never forget the turning point. The preacher was giving his sermon, and suddenly, he came to the ‘point’ of it, which was this:

“We think too much.”

What the hunh? We THINK too much? Tell that to the Jewish people, I thought, who question every line of everything, and who still have huge faith.
I never went back.

And also, I’m a preacher’s kid, y’know? I’ve seen it from behind the scenes.

I don’t like writing about this subject–as Mark Twain once said, everyone’s opinions about religion and politics are second-hand opinions, and I’m certainly no theologian–but I felt I should share it because my spiritual life seems to be quite important to a few random people lately. Rest assured that this will probably be the only time I will discuss it here.

We now return you to your beautiful, funny, sad and true blog, already in progress.

I just heard two consecutive stories on NPR this morning.

The first was a story about a little town in Georgia where Oliver Hardy was born (but his family moved away when he was two months old!). The town has capitalized on this, and now it’s the home of both the first AND the second Laurel & Hardy museums. The first is the official one. The second is a labor of love created in a backyard in town. The guy who built it moved from Minnesota, and when the reporter pointed out to him that although Oliver Hardy may have been born there, his family was only there for two months, the guy replied, “It’s not where you live, but where you were born that counts. You can only be born in one place.”

Next story: Billy Bragg, the English singer-songwriter. He was asked about the song “England, Half-English”, about how England is becoming a multi-cultural melting pot, just as America likes to think of itself, and he’s a big believer in the importance of that. Society is much bigger than each respective piece of dirt we all live on, and the more ‘melting’ that goes on, the better, as far as he’s concerned. Because “it’s not where you’re born, but where you choose to be” that is so vital, and makes you who you are, and more importantly, makes the society what it is.

Such an interesting juxtaposition.

And for the record, I’m with Billy. It’s what you choose to make of your life, rather than a random spot on the earth–wherever your parents happened to be at that moment–that makes the difference.

I realize that’s a very American, Occidental attitude. Many people throughout the world don’t have that luxury. People from everywhere try to get to this country, so that even if THEY can never be citizens here, their CHILDREN can be born here so THEY can have the luxury to think these things.

That being said, I still believe it. :) If you have big enough ideas, it doesn’t matter where you’re from.

A line from the old Sting song “Englishman in New York” just came to mind, and seemed apropos to all this: “Be yourself, no matter what they say.”

One morning as I was driving home from Vancouver (Washington) to Portland, I found myself thinking about something Kelly and I had been talking about earlier that morning, which was, “Wouldn’t it be fun to drive around and visit the places that both of us have lived?” With this thought in mind, I decided to stop by Officers’ Row on my drive home, because that’s a place that my dad and stepmom had an apartment for a short time, when the City of Vancouver first converted Officers’ Row into apartments and condos back in the late 1980’s. Unfortunately, the streets down there were all blocked off for some sort of event, so I couldn’t get down anywhere near that part of town.

I decided to head out to my favorite place that we lived. It was along the old Evergreen Highway.

Here’s a picture of the house. It’s about a hundred years old, and it was owned by some family friends of ours who lived up the hill. They were in their 60’s at the time, and her mother (who was in her 80’s at the time) had lived in the house for decades, and she couldn’t really manage living there by herself anymore. They didn’t want to rent it to anyone they didn’t know, and they really didn’t like the idea of such a beautiful house sitting vacant, so they offered to rent it to my dad and stepmom for $400 a month or something insanely low like that.

When we lived there, there were no other houses but ours and that of the owners’, up the hill. The land that the two houses were on was all owned by the owners, since it was a gigantic hundred-year-old lot. The hillside was wooded, and next door to us there was a field, and goats who lived on the hill. We would feed the goats and walk down to the river. I haven’t been by the place in quite some time, so I thought I’d see what it looks like now.

Well, here it is now.

None of the houses in the picture was there when we lived there, with the exception of the one you can see at the top of the hill, which was the first one that the owners built and sold. But the hillside was all woods and grass, and no houses were between ours and the Evergreen Highway (which is where I was standing to take the picture).

Continuing the nostalgic feeling, I decided to take a walk and see if I could still get down to the river, the way my brother and I used to. Well, surprise surprise, I couldn’t anymore. It’s all private property and fences and signs now. So I drove up a few blocks, parked the car along the railroad tracks, grabbed my camera, and headed out to see what I could find.

Obviously, it’s much more built up with waterfront McMansions now. That was just starting when we lived there. These days, almost all traces of river access have vanished. There are, however, still some vestiges of history. There’s an amazing little A-framed shack, a handful of hidden streams, gates, and waterfalls that look like they’ve changed little over the decades. There are a couple or three abandoned houses, which I would have loved to explore–one in particular–but it was surrounded on all sides by a huge barbed-wire fence, so I decided to give that one a miss. One abandoned house looked fairly modern, like it was built in the mid 80’s, but it had fallen into disrepair, and there was even a vacant lot next to it. ‘How is this possible?’ I thought, as I walked down as close as I could to the edge of the grass, before it fell away toward the river. By way of an answer, a train rumbled by, and I soon got my answer. Look how close the train comes to these two properties! No wonder they’re vacant.

So I kept walking, remembering how my brother and I used to sit in our upstairs window and look out over the river, at the boats and the airport, and I got a little nostalgic for being able to look out and see those things every day. I kept walking, and came to someone’s little bench they’d set up, apparently to watch trains, because whoever was sitting on the bench would have their back to the amazing view, and would be staring at the train track, its access road, and the ugly hedge that was just across the track. :) But I found that the bench made an ideal spot for a moody self-portrait.

So FINALLY I came to this beautiful little wooded area, whereupon I was greeted by this non-threatening sign, so I walked through. Once inside, it was too overgrown to really go anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be a trail down to the river, so I went as far as I could, and it looked like this was pretty much it. I mulled this over, thinking about how not so very long ago, this entire part of the country must have looked like that. Around this time, the sky started to look like rain was on its way, so I decided to head back in the direction of the car. I poked my head into a few more places that I’d missed on the way in, and it was a good thing I did, too, because there was a really amazing sailboat that was hidden behind a thick clump of trees at the river’s edge. I also managed to get a picture of Government Island, which really shows how much rain we’ve had lately, because the Columbia river has risen so high that there’s not really much of an island at the moment; it’s almost completely submerged!

The thing I kept thinking was that not only did I want to be able to have the experience of going and sitting by the river again (and not in some public park, either), but I wanted OTHER people to be able to have that, and it seems like that time may pretty much be gone now. My brother and I knew how rare it was, even then, to be able to have that luxury, which is why we went down there so often. Today I kept thinking that the only people who could have the experience we had NOW are the ‘few and the proud’ who can afford to buy the waterfront properties, proximity to railroad tracks notwithstanding. :)

I also wondered if there was a way to reverse this trend of using up every square inch of space on the planet. The little tiny strip of ‘resource conservation area’ wasn’t even that nice, because all the ‘good’ parts of the land had been bought up long ago.

Well, it may not be much, but I’ll sure take it over another McMansion any day.

I hope you had as much fun reading this as I did making it. My goal is to do more like this. My life is crazy, though, so I don’t know how often it’ll happen, but it WILL happen.

. . .until I heard them mentioned as a headline story on NPR. The demogogic, “WindStorm ’06!!!” local news is one thing, but national news is different.

I mean, sure, a handful of people died, or got lost in the mountains, and our airport had to turn away a few flights, and the power’s still out in some parts of the state (which, incidentally, is why I’m here right now instead of recording up in Welches). . .but, hunh. Now that I think about it, I guess it was that bad after all.

I had a few people write or call, hoping everything was okay over here. Yes, everything’s fine.

When it was in full effect, I was at Trader Joe’s coming home from an hour-and-a-half drive to K-mart–which would normally take about twenty minutes–to get a car headlight (it’s way too long and uninteresting to tell that frustrating story).
In fact, I want to take a minute to talk about the traffic situation in Portland. There are only two main north-south freeways in Portland. At rush hour, there’s only one way east out of the city, and one way west too. If anything happens to one of them, and something almost always does, traffic is difficult and slow. If something happens to more than one of them, the town comes to a standstill, and everybody’s screwed. That night, something happened on every single one. Dead stop pretty much everywhere.

But I digress. :)

I was at Trader Joe’s, and the checker asked how it was going, and I said, “It’s inSANE out there. Wind and rain and traffic is nightmarish.”

She said, “I know! I heard that the power’s out in a bunch of places.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, all down through Lloyd Center and Broadway, it’s been out for a while now.”

“Oh great, that’s where I live!”

We finished up, she wished me good luck, and I headed home, down Sandy and onto Broadway. When I got to about 28th, something felt different, and as I got closer, I noticed that all the lights were out in a huge section of town. It wasn’t just Lloyd Center, it was the entire Lloyd *district*. At 20th Avenue, the traffic lights were out, and it was dark as far as you could see. I wanted to take a picture, cause it was so eerie, but traffic was too crazy, and I just wanted to get home and crash. (note to self: If I really wanted to get a good picture during a power outage, Mt. Tabor would be a great vantage point. )

I turned onto 15th, and power on my side of 15th was out, but the other side (where my friend Alyssa lives) was on. I pulled up and parked on 13th, and saw the flash of what looked like a downed power line at the end of the street. Kelly called and I told her what was happening. She asked, “Do you want to come over?” “I would LOVE to come over, but I don’t even want to THINK about driving any more tonight.” I texted Alyssa and hung out at her place for a little bit, and after maybe a half hour got a text from Susan saying that the power in our building was back on. I decided to go home and crash, since I was exhausted anyway and not very sociable, and A was feeling kinda crappy too.

Just walking home, there were tons of tree branches down, and the power crews were out and about. Lots of sirens everywhere too. I hardly slept at all that night with the wind (even though it sounded beautiful) and the sirens and all.

That was my night, but for lots of people it’s still not over. I heard yesterday that a hundred thousand people in the Portland metro area were still without power. I hope everything’s OK where you are!

* * *

p.s. – “taking a picture of a power outage” reminded me of a time when I was looking through a friend’s photo album and came across a completely black picture. I asked, jokingly, “What’s this, lens cap?” “Nope,” I was told, “that’s San Francisco, taken from Twin Peaks, during the rolling blackouts of the 90’s.”

It was stunning, in a way you wouldn’t expect.