Month: August 2023

GOOD NEWSs

/ janpriddyoregon / 18 Comments

Yes, I will count both fiction and review as two even though in the same publication.

Issue 34:1 of CALYX Journal has gone to press and my story “The Promised Hour” is featured on the announcement page where you can read it. In the same issue is my review of the marvelous and award-winning short story collection by Wendy Wimmer. I was most fortunate to be sent a review copy of Entry Level: Stories. Those stories have stayed with me, digging around in my subconscious and sending me off on wild flights of discovery. Just to mention one story: A wry entity sends dreams to sleepers. After an unpleasant dream the dreamer tries to lock dreams out by using sleeping pills. Oh, dear, that’s not going to go well.

Brown pelicans have been fishing right out front all this month. I am, of course, not close to this bird but using my camera zoom. Sometimes, when I zoom out all the way, I struggle to hold the lens steady.

Shall I consider these two publications due out next month recompense for being cussed out this morning? Yes, yes, I shall. Plus a reminder of my podcast introduction to All the Daughters Sing. That novel is making the rounds. Two full MS requests so far.

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Oh. DEER.

/ janpriddyoregon / 11 Comments

It happened again. A deer in the surf and a dozen people crowding the shore. The last time, the deer drowned. This morning it’s an outgoing tide and I was repeatedly called a “b—” (and other things) for shouting “Back off!” at the top of my voice. I am so mean.

[Have no fear reading on. No one dies in this story.]

Going in the right direction. I can only assume he knows what to do because he’s done it before a few times. The fact that the doe resisted him, was actually a really good sign. Still some fight left.
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ANNIVERSARY

/ janpriddyoregon / 14 Comments

Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of our wedding. Gary and I were married under the pagoda tree in my parents’ backyard. We wrote our vows, a friends officiated, I made the wedding cake, a fruit cake, from a 100-year-old recipe, Joyce brought lasagna, The Chieftains sang on a record, and my dad toasted us from Shakespeare as his “warrior children”.

The nice man from Gresham who we talked to last week was horrified by the plankton bloom. He kept calling it “terrible”. What’s shown here is entirely gone, with a narrow line of fresh plankton at the tideline. It’s not terrible or bad in any way. It just is. I will run the beach tomorrow!

Our anniversary rings, more about goldsmithing, the Hood to Coast relay, and my preferred running conditions.

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FEARLESS fear less

/ janpriddyoregon / 12 Comments

On being scared and eventually… working again in a metal shop. I ran two miles this morning and my first four-miler this year the day before yesterday, building toward the 10k Bridge Crossing in October. Sometimes life is like running: you just have to keep doing it.

The pale amber foam is from a plankton bloom, which is neither harmful nor common. It is sticky to remove from shoes. Three mornings in a row we went out early and were unable to see Castle Rock offshore because of heavy fog. Fog is really not common on our shore, but I have always said that fog in Arch Cape means it’s a hundred degrees in Portland. That was certainly true this past week. Temperatures were in the 100s this past mid-week while we were home walking the shore.
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TIMES CHANGE

/ janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

Temperatures rose well over 100° in Portland yesterday (105-107°) but we are at the coast, and I am reminded of why my mother’s childhood was spent at the beach in her great aunts’ home. Portland is hotter in summer and colder in winter, and now the heat is higher. Temperatures here are stabilized by proximity to ocean. During the past forty-four years we have gone entire winters without frost, enjoyed summers with temperatures that never rose over 70° (that has changed). There was no electricity or running water during my mother’s childhood at the shore in the 1920s and 1930s, and the house was surrounded by mature spruce. Now we are surrounded by rental home.

Last night we were fussing about a daytime high in the eighties and the internet being slow.

Times change.

Other weather has changed, but ordinary standards of behavior are changed. Bragging to someone about violation, bragging that we could commit an act of violence without altering voter loyalty, threatening violence—these are the acts of schoolyard bullies writ large. In my mother’s lifetime, such behavior on the part of a public person in America was unthinkable. In my own youth, even accusations of such behavior was enough to force resignation and shame.

Times change.

I always feel obligated to offer some beauty. Because it’s here, all the time, if we remember to look. It’s easier to point to the bad stuff, what isn’t working, what makes us angry or bereaved. But the black oystercatchers raised at least one baby this year, and that is a good thing.
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GETTING IT RIGHT

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I spilled these flat-smooths out of a tea bowl also found on the shore, and I played with them for a while. Even as a child I gathered stones. My mother refused to replace the metal lunchbox I ruined by carrying rocks home. And all these years later I am still carrying rocks home.

Rocks, cougars, the Tortilla Race, ordering online, and typos.

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running@70

/ janpriddyoregon / 14 Comments

I began running in 1994, nearly thirty years ago. I was not a runner before. (Every time I have to figure out the year I started. My older son went along with his faster buddies as an eight grader running with the high school cross country team in fall of 1993. I was so impressed by the camaraderie that the following spring I started running myself. That fall I ran with my son’s team.)

It’s been a long time and because I spent six years coaching that same cross country team, I am judgmental about runners I see on the beach even now. I want to coach them. I want to share my hard won wisdom, such as it is.

Seventy is not dead. Not yet. But it is old as this underlit and unretouched photo makes clear.

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Helen is back

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

As of a couple of hours ago, Margaret and Helen is back. I agree with a recent comment: “Welcome back. So sorry you need to be here.”

What the hell is wrong with the Republican Party?  I mean, fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me for three indictments and 78 felony counts… and we haven’t even heard from the Georgia DA yet. Surely I am not the  only fat lady dying to sing. 

—MargaretandHelen.com

Helen Philpot is a determined old lady who won’t stand for nonsense. She’s funny, smart, and right. Today she explains why “Trump is a hemorrhoid.”

Thank you, Helen. I missed you like crazy!