GOOD CRY

February 28, 2022February 28, 2022 / janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments

My mouth fell open the first time someone asked if my newborn was a “good baby.” How do I answer that? Of course he was good, but people really weren’t asking about goodness. On any scale of goodness, all babies are good.

What they really wanted to know was whether my baby cried or slept. I got the same question when my second baby was born. By then I knew to answer simply: Oh, yes!

My mentor during the final term of my MFA program warned that he didn’t much care for crying in stories. No tears, please.

I have generally been what people call a “good student” because I will almost always do what is asked. So I cut tears from my stories in 2007. I literally went through my fiction and delete, delete, delete.

***The way I like my blues. Reflected back from the sky.***

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COLOR

February 27, 2022March 1, 2022 / janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

I think about color. I think about color often.

I am sitting up in bed as I write, and before me is an abstract expressionist painting by a friend of my aunt Marcie (Marcia Smith Aron). Marked 1959 and “Floral Growth” on the back, it is tied to memories from my aunt’s house in Berkeley when I was a young child, and later to her San Francisco house. Bright with egg yolk yellows and intense pastels. Mom said the painting had been held by her sister for safe keeping. After my aunt died and the painting came to me, I traced the artist. By then, she lived just a few blocks away from where Gary and I first lived in Big Pink in the U District of Seattle. She had turned to calligraphy, become famous for it. Midori Kono Thiel was sorry to hear my aunt had died, delighted her painting was still alive, but no, she didn’t want it back. So that colorful oil, flush with memory, hangs across from our bed in Portland.

How art travels when we are having fun.

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LOSS

February 21, 2022February 21, 2022 / janpriddyoregon / 13 Comments

Blue skies and pouring rain have alternated all day today so we did not get our walk. We were too busy yesterday and needed a break that not involve wind-driven rain. It was meant to be a peaceful day. Driving rain and sunshine pouring past my window at the same time. And then… the news.

Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder’s most famous book Mountains Beyond Mountains, has died. I taught that book for years, linking it to the Pacifica Projects that all students at my high school were required to complete for graduation. Service and research were significant aspects of that project.

Dr. Paul Farmer grew up in poverty with a huge family and bullying father. Nevertheless, he attended and graduated from top universities, slept on a cot until he married, became a world renowned disease specialist, and devoted his life to serving the “least of these.” He was a good man.

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ASCOB

February 17, 2022February 20, 2022 / janpriddyoregon / 20 Comments

Hardly anyone will recognize the letters I used to title my thoughts today. “Any Solid Color Other than Black” is a class in AKC shows for American Cocker Spaniels (ASCOB is pronounced ass’ cob). For the record, I have never owned or shown American Cocker Spaniels of any color, though I do have a scar on my upper lip from being bitten by one when I was a small child.

This is not a post about bites or even dogs. There are no assignments or exercises. A few crows. Trees. Our condo news.

We like crows. Above is a tree with over a hundred crows, but there might have been a thousand nearby when I took this photo. (HINT: this was not the only tree, and most of the birds were flying.) There are “local” birds, but they gather as a massive flock (“murder” seems unkind), usually in late afternoon but on their own schedule.

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EXERCISE

February 4, 2022February 5, 2022 / janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

I got in a couple of running miles this morning. We have pretty much nailed down our weekly routine but I still have to think when I first wake: Where am I?

We found nineteen pieces of sea glass yesterday, seventeen the day before.