An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
“Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em,” They told my dad when he was training in Arizona for WWII.
In January of 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States announced in print that tobacco smoke was dangerous to health. Cigarette caused lung cancer. The announcement was a political risk to the SG, and a blow to a valuable American industry, which had known of the danger for decades and kept that to itself. The warning was timed for a Saturday so that the stock market would have a couple of days before shivering, and to allow for Sunday newspapers to cover the story in detail. People read newspapers then.
The bull Roosevelt elk are sparring. The Roosevelt are the largest elk in the world, weighing up to 1200 pounds. Neither of these 4-point elk are likely to die or even suffer harm shoving one another across the sand. Twenty minutes after I took this photo, they were both grazing in a neighbor’s yard. It’s early in the season, their velvet is just dropping from their antlers, but in another month or so, local bull elk will not be safe to be around.Continue reading →
Our 52nd anniversary is coming up in twelve days. We’re going out for an early dinner that night because I have to be home for a Zoom meeting of a nonprofit. That’s okay. We are nearly always together. He’ll probably go for a walk during my Board meeting, and return in time to watch a show and the next day we’ll drive back to the beach. We figured out long ago that no one else will make time special, that’s on us. We tried for a “special” vacation for our 50th, and when we discovered our favorite restaurant had closed and our favorite hotel had new owners, we laughed and drove home. We spent at least three anniversaries in the ER with my mom. Those special days are unreliable, I’d say. It’s my husband I rely on.
Every time.
Two old people who still love one another. Gary’s straining not to pull another face, and look! Our hair is the same color. I tease him because when his hair was as long as mine in the early 1970s, women used to cross the street to pet it. He needs a haircut.Continue reading →
We don’t know for certain who composed The Odyssey, which is generally and perhaps inaccurately ascribed to a single bard, Homer in the 8th century BCE. Most modern experts, including Emily Wilson in her otherwise excellent introduction to her recent translation, routinely comment that one person could not possibly have memorized the entire epic poem. Most assume one person could not have written those two book-length epic poems much less remember them. They suggest that both The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed over a period of time with adjustment and additions by several or many people.
Not necessarily so. The human capacity for memorization is astounding.
This vase from the British Museum (c. 480–470 BCE) was decorated during Athen’s classic age three centuries after the story of Odysseus was known and eight centuries after at least some of the events described may have occurred in ancient times.
They used to say, Nice guys finish last. Right about now, we need more than neutrality. The world could use a dose of niceness.
My brother said our mother was the epitome of “nice,” and that is true. Mom always tried to be nice and sometimes she went above and beyond to be kind to other people just because. She once followed a car that had dangerously cut her off and ended by holding the poor driver while they sobbed out their entire life tragedies on Mom’s shoulder. My husband Gary is like that too. Saturdays in the 1970s we walked through every pawn shop on First Avenue in Seattle looking at guitars. Homeless men would tell him their life story and he would hand them change and sometimes they cried too because someone cared enough to hear them out.
That is my model for decent behavior. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Where have I heard that before?
There’s a bald eagle in the snag near the top of this photo, but she’s often there in the higher branches. We suspect her favorite perch is rotting and that’s why she’s taken the lower branch. Anyway, that’s not the reason for this photo. At the bottom, this photo shows the drift of sand in front of a shallow cave we pass most every morning on our beach walks. It looks like kids piled that sand up more than three feet high, doesn’t it? But this is what the tide did a few days ago. There are four sandbars running along our shore, five if I count the one that came up this spring nearly to the green line—more sand than we have seen in 40 years or so. The dune grass that was introduced to Gearharrt a few lifetime ago, was also introduced here but has not thrived the way Siberian blackberries, montbrecia, and English ivy have.Continue reading →
June is ridiculously busy, which is not something I can say about most months. Most months my busy is entirely self-inflicted. I read, sew, knit, run, post online. Scrub floors. Gary and I drive to Portland and home from Portland, we walk across the city or walk five miles north on the beach. [We did this recently. Once. Ten miles round trip. Probably not again.]
This is the hollow in sandstone facing the ocean that I call “The Little Altar.” Usually by this time of year there is a circle of green algae on the back. This year, there are three green penguins. Can you see them? Two looking south, a youngster flapping and pointed north? (And yes, there is a Big Altar a few feet north. No penguins.)Continue reading →
I was reading an upbeat story about a species of dove native to a Pacific island that had become extinct in the wild since 1972 due to human activity and human-introduced species. Cats are often cited as the cause of the birds’ extinction, but the real damage to the birds’ survival had been domestic sheep that destroyed their habitat, explained a scientist with Mexico’s Institute of Ecology who is leading habitat restoration efforts on the island. The cats merely finished off an already decimated population. What is missing may be another cause, too often ignored: human-introduced rats.
“I hear you have an opening?” Leakey invited herself into our home a couple of weeks after Zora Neale Hurston Cougar Cat, “Zora,” died at age 19. It was January and we learned that Leakey with two other cats had been dumped the previous late summer. There had been sitings, but the cats were shy. My theory was that the cats had managed well enough, feasting on wild rodents until winter when the chipmunks were estivating. By the time she showed up at our door, Leakey was starving, weighing less than half what she should. She quickly put on weight with us, but never lost the habit of hunting. Leakey had a small meow and a loud purr and developed a love/hate relationship with our Saluki, Yeti. She was gentle and sweet-tempered but also had the longest and sharpest claws I have ever seen on a domestic cat. Rodents were her prey of choice and like Zora before her, she often ate her catch, but not the rats laid out for Gary to dispose of. [I did try to coax the other abandoned cats to join the family, but no. Only Leakey.]Continue reading →
When I cross the street I look both ways, even when I’m in a crosswalk, even with there is a light telling me I may, and I look both ways even at a crossing of two one-way streets where I shouldn’t have to look. Drivers in the early morning aren’t always paying attention to someone like me.
People like me are concerned about where our country is headed, but first: Safety while running.
On our way home from the Farmers’ Market,last Saturday morning, I noticed my favorite rose was already blooming. This pink climber is a “volunteer”—that is, no one deliberately planted it in the narrow crevice between sidewalk paving and concrete building. However it sprouted, it’s grown to be enormous! It is also gorgeous, as is the woman at right. Gary called out that I wasn’t taking a photo of her but the rose, and she laughed. She’d moved out of the frame by then, but I wish I had a photo of that grin!Continue reading →
My mother said those words to me hundreds or thousands, or perhaps only a few dozen times. They were the words that stuck, the instruction that carried over into my dreams where I routinely switch characters. I might be me for a while, but then the other person. I consider how the other person feels. This hasn’t always meant I was as kind or considerate as my mother intended. It did mean that I sometimes see another’s side so clearly that I feel what they feel. That is what I like to think she hoped for.
Oystercatchers make a sound like a squeaky toy. We know this pair at Hug Point very well, and have watched them successfully raise their babies. The black oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani) doesn’t eat oysters in our area because we have none locally. According to Wikipedia, “It forages in the intertidal zone, feeding on marine invertebrates, particularly molluscs such as mussels, limpets and chitons, but also on crabs, isopods and barnacles.” You can see barnacles and mussels in the photo. What you can’t see in this photo, taken predawn, is the oystercatchers’ red beaks, reddish legs, and bright eyes in dark gold and red-rimmed like enamel on copper.Continue reading →
It was still dark the second time I woke this morning, and I remembered the screaming man. We’d walked to Portland State University to the Saturday Farmers Market. I was hoping to find organic rhubarb, which would go fast. We arrived just before it opened and walked all the way around, but only one booth had rhubarb and it wasn’t organic, so we went back to the south end to buy our favorite breakfast. Nathan smiled and asked, “Two?” because we always order the artichoke and cotilla cheese tamales with everything but the hottest sauce.
Here is the sky from the other morning, but we’re in Portland this morning. Gary checked in with Mary who, we learned, was home after ten days in the hospital. I baked cranberry bread from berries in the freezer here and Gary took some to a neighbor. Our family is busy with work and school so we won’t likely see anyone but our immediate neighbors here in Portland I am scheduled to run, once the sun is up. Today is supposed to be warm, in the 70s, but we’ll be back at the beach by then.Continue reading →
“More than 3,200 events took place across the country on Saturday [March 28, 2026], from New York City to Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in a state Trump carried with 66 percent of the vote. Nearly half of the protests took place in Republican strongholds. Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 events. Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah had events in the double digits. Rural communities that have never hosted a political protest before, from Seward, Alaska, to East Glacier Park, Montana, showed up for the first time. The protests went international, with tens of thousands marching in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, and London, and in countries with constitutional monarchies, they called the protests ‘No Tyrants’.”
These allegorical figures hold dead babies. War always makes dead babies. I used to teach Mark Twain’s antiwar story, “The War Prayer” and ask my students to guess which war Twain was responding to. [The best answer: all of them.] The satire was tough for the high school juniors I was teaching; they almost never understood the story without help and maybe rarely guessed which war. (As a junior in high school, I would have got the satire—it was different war and I read newspapers, plus I’d been a solid fan of Twain since I was eight.) It was lies that took us to war in Twain’s time. It was lies that took us to war in my grandfather’s time, and in my time too. Over and over again… it is always lies that take us to war. Even the “righteous” wars begin with deceit.Continue reading →
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 