SPEAKING OF THUNDER

September 9, 2019September 12, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

The extraordinary lightning strikes began while we were at dinner and continued for hours. Strange to be visiting in Puget Sound when such a storm began. The photo of the large group of ten is taken at a restaurant just a short distance from where Gary and I graduated from high school—that’s Gary and me on the right. Gary’s brother (gray beard) is moving to Tennessee and this was the goodbye party hosted by his youngest sister (right at top).

It was an interesting weekend, if by interesting you include skipping our morning walk to drive north, shopping for yarn and tea on Bainbridge, a flat tire, meeting the lovely couple who bought my childhood home from my mother (a highlight—they really were delightful and thanks to Gary for insisting we drive by), checking into a split-level house converted to an overpriced hostel (mold in the bathroom, but we stayed less than 12 hours), dinner with family, storm, early rising just after two in the morning, getting lost in Woodway (turn right, I said, but he always turns the wrong way), and driving south on I-5 (the first time for us on that particular route in well over a decade, and then I drove from Longview to Seaside—my longest drive in a long time) to arrive home by breakfast time. Excellent leftover tomato pie waited in the fridge.

Glad we went, glad to be home again. I think it will take a few days to recover.

VOLUNTEERS

September 5, 2019September 5, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

This is the chair that eventually traveled south all the way to the end of our beach, and then was tossed up on the basalt inner shore by the tide. Our Adirondack chairs are locally made of wood.

Looking west out over the ocean this afternoon, I can sometimes see Castle Rock, point-six nautical miles offshore. Then the fog folds it back into invisibility. We are both fond of this, I think, the cooling fogs, the way fog signals a very hot day someplace else but not here, at least not yet. Overhead, even when we first went out for our walk this morning, the sky shows blue, whisked by thin clouds, but north, south, east, and west over the ocean, the mist makes a pale mask on the landscape.

This morning we picked the plastic remains of (illegal) fireworks—some pieces are quite sharp—and four golf balls, our fourteenth Bic lighter of the season, plastic packaging and trimmings from cord and twine, candy wrapper, broken cutlery, unidentifiable objects lost off boats, broken beach toys. It’s what we usually find. I found glass melted and sharp from a beach fire. (Glass does not burn and neither does plastic.) Just as we turned for home, I found a sand-frosted disk of clear glass.

There are many dead birds. It is the season of juvenile gulls following after a parent, heads ducked in a vain effort to appear small when they are fully grown. Peep, peep, peep! they cry. Sometimes their parent leads them to food and walks away. Sometimes you can almost hear an adult gull sigh with exasperation. Get a life. The sea lion’s skeleton has finally come apart, and we saw a dead otter, which may have fallen victim to the unusual surf.

Yesterday, Gary went out and retrieved four beach chairs that had been caught up by high waves on the day before. The tide had not been especially high that day, but before the people picnicking on the sand south of us had to move, twice, he was already saying there was a danger of sneaker-waves. A true sneaker rages up fast and far beyond where you might expect. “Sneaker” because of that and because it is often silent.

The surf went from a single breaker in the morning to ten foot swells and many rows of breakers almost a half mile out on that day. It was a roaring sea with lots of plankton washing in from the recent heat and upturned colder water. The first sneaker swept up over the onshore sand bar that had been dry and untouched for weeks. A hundred-yard sweep of rushing saltwater. The next waves swept higher, all the way into the rocks bordering the green—the sort of massive sweep we expect in November not in summer. It was not yet even high tide.

This brings me to the chairs. A drunken party of tourists staying in one of the rentals a block east of the beach brought them down onto the sand early last month and then never bothered to return them. Four plastic chairs, two pistachio-green plastic Adirondack chairs with rounded backs and two tan plastic Adirondack chairs with fan backs. We hoped for a long time that someone would retrieve them or steal them, but no one did. Some visitors used the chairs and some pretended they were not there. The owners of the rental house closest to the chairs ignored them.

We certainly didn’t want them.

However, when we we discovered that one of the chairs had been swept a quarter mile south and then up onto the rocks, Gary went out again. He carried each of them into the front yard and hosed off the plankton. We have gathered up broken plastic chairs in the past. One way or another, he decided, we would be carrying these chairs up—either whole and still useful or broken into pieces.

At top, violets we did not plant in our front garden. They are what gardeners call volunteers, like the little spruce growing in the center yard and the salal coming up everywhere. Nobody planted it, it just grew.

When we had our ocean-side deck removed earlier this year, most of what was revealed was bare, empty sand. The naturalized crocosmia (the orange montbrecia) came up immediately and the wild rabbits like to lift up on their hind legs, bite a montbrecia leaf halfway up, and then eat from there to the tip. They nibble dandelions down to the ground. Good bunnies.

Lately other plants have sprouted: lamb’s ears and wild roses and violets. The roses are prickly and I pluck them out with care, but the others are a lovely surprise. So far the rabbits have left the violets and lamb’s ears alone. We like to think they are gifts from the rabbits because we never shoo they out of our yard.

FREE ADMISSION

September 4, 2019September 4, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

When we were children the zoo in Seattle was free. There were no tickets, no guarded gates. You could walk in the main gate or by the elephant exhibit or from Lower Woodland or over by the rose garden on the south side. The Seattle Art Museum (then at Volunteer Park on Capital Hill) was free. I have photos of my brother and me on the backs of stone camels. The Seattle Aquarium was privately owned, but for a time my family had free passes because my dad worked for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and he knew the owner.

Writer Sandra Cisneros spoke about visiting the museum on the free day in Chicago as a girl. Access to such cultural sites without paying admission was a critical aspect of her childhood. Mine too. These places were beautiful and free.

It was what her family and mine could afford.

The Asian exhibit on Capital Hill is still perfectly clear in my mind’s eyes though I have not been there in over forty years. The elephant walking across clouds carved into pale jade. That spectacular collection has been undergoing renovation and will reopen next year. It will not be cheap to visit. Nearby is the brick tower I climbed in my teens and a conservatory where I recall the overarching tropical foliage, volcanic rock just inside the door to the right of the entrance, the cactus and rows of potted flowers. That glass house costs money to enter, a relatively modest $8 for the two of us if we went today because we are seniors. By contrast, The Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus, a place we used to wander in and out of without a thought, would cost us $40. The Museum of History and Industry, which was a favorite haunt in my childhood would cost about $36. The Pacific Science Center would cost us $48 for entrance but another $70 if we wanted to see everything. There are free days, usually once a month, for many exhibits, though not that one.

If we drove to Seattle (which Gary absolutely resists doing), the museums (some of them free one day a month) and conservatory (except on the first and third Saturday) will cost admission. The zoo has been on lockdown since Gary worked there in the 1970s. It was free when he started as a volunteer in the aviary, but admission was added while he worked in the commissary. This was particularly controversial at the time since admission fees did not go to maintain the zoo but into the general funds for the City. It costs $42 for a pair of seniors to visit today. Cheaper than the Pacific Science Center, more than the Burke. I don’t know where the funds go for all these attractions. I use Seattle as my example only because we once knew the city so well.

More recently, when passes were on sale, we bought a family pass to the Portland Japanese Garden. We took our oldest granddaughter to these gardens several times when she was little, and she loved the “big fish” though she says she doesn’t remember anymore.

The gardens are crowded when we drive by, as we sometimes do on our way into town. For $110, we can purchase a senior family ticket to the Japanese Garden, and after concentrating on our house for the past couple of years, perhaps we will. Though it seems expensive, we can afford admission. Many families cannot.

I understand that people object to taxes and to paying for venues they never visit . . . and I think about the billions allocated for sports arenas, which are all about profits and competition and ritualized violence. And I think about the gilded screen with dozens of crows I saw as a child in Seattle, the science experiments, the wave machine, the Tiffany window—all those shared human cultural experiences I enjoyed as a child.

Public parks and museums should be free to the public, not restricted to those who can afford to pay. I wish everyone, every child, could experience what I did through public access. Very few can.

GARY’S PARTY

September 2, 2019September 5, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

We almost always walk north. We went out before 7am for our walk this morning, before a quick breakfast and heading for home. But later in the morning two of our grandchildren and a friend’s son played in the tide pools, looking at hermit crabs. (Thank you, RO, for sending this.) Our three grandchildren enjoyed the party. The youngest stomped her feet and grinned. Such fun!

It was Gary’s 70th birthday Sunday, yesterday (it was also Lily Tomlin’s 80th and John at the Post Office had one and Barry Gibb became 72 and the guy at the market in Lincoln City turned 29). We drove down the coast in the morning, stopped at a farmers’ market, took our time. We didn’t have all that far to go.

We have been to the Sylvia Beach Hotel a half dozen times, staying in different rooms and enjoying the peace. We bring books or read what is lying about in this literary inn. I bring knitting. We walk on the beach and sit watching the ocean from the topfloor “Library.” Gary gets into the guests’ kitchenette before dawn and makes a pot of extra strong coffee. Not quite routine, relaxing.

We had made our reservation for the Emily Dickinson room and planned to have a meal across the street. No internet, no television, the Sylvia Beach is a peaceful Victorian on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Across the street is a great restaurant. Gary is particularly fond of the chef’s wife and had a photo of the car her dad drove in Australia. That was the surprise he planned. He had no idea people were coming until we came out of his favorite hotel to go toward his very favorite restaurant Ove Northwest. There was a friend in the doorway across the street. What is Rick doing in Newport?

We celebrated with our sons and their families and some friends. It is amazing that I managed to keep the secret for six months.

Gary’d never had a surprise party. He was stunned. He kept saying, How did you do this? In fact, I’m not sure Gary had ever had a proper birthday party before this one. He never had a proper party as a child. He claims I threw him a party forty years or so ago when we were in college, but I don’t remember.

Gary is a self-effacing person, patient and kind under most all circumstances. He doesn’t ask for much or complain often. He loves cards and phone calls on his day. He smiles all the time but almost never for the camera. He was mugging for me this morning on our walk.

We’ll call this his first party. The very best. He could barely function when he began to understand what was happening. He just sat and looked stunned for at least an hour and Margaret kept his beer glass full. He was so surprised.

He says: Thank you. I love you.

[Gary has read this now and complains that I have failed to detail my craftiness. Okay, I was pretty crafty. I am so very grateful for the people who were able to attend or who called or sent cards. He deserved this.]