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
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 →
It is a newer expression, “Read the room.” It suggests that a person should have the sense of where others are emotionally and intellectually, how they view what is said and seen, and more critically, whether they agree or are inclined to wrestle with your words and actions and very presence, to be annoyed or even angered.
The sky need not be blue or cloudless, the earth need not be subdued, our hopes need not be limited nor contained. It is in us to maintain faith a kindness, generosity and compassion. We might share; we might see our duty to others.
Reading the room when I’m not in the room isn’t a skill I often possess. I misunderstand or fail to appreciate the inclination of my audience. However did I manage a classroom? Zoom didn’t exist. Determination to do right, to accept that my understanding, experience, and knowledge might be shared.
The scenario I detailed in class was based on a true story. It happened in the last century in a city back east. Baltimore, maybe. Brooklyn?
A walk to the park. Daphne blooming outside the Washington Park Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon..
A single mother has kept her sick child at home for three days. The little boy has the flu with a fever and coughing and listlessness. She’s fed him soup and crackers, whatever he would swallow and could keep down. He seems a little better this morning, the fever has dropped, but is not well enough to go to school. She has no one she can call to watch her child, but her boss has warned her that if she fails to come in today, she will be fired. Maybe he’s had to cover for her and is desperate for time with his own family or maybe he’s being a heartless jerk. I don’t know about that.
Mom sleeps on the couch in their one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up apartment. It’s payday and the rent is due. She can’t afford to lose her job, so she tucks her son into bed, warns him to stay in his room. She’s left him water and juice and crackers—all she has in her kitchen until she’s paid and can get to the store. The child seems sleepy enough to stay put. She rests her hand on his forehead and tells him she loves him. “You be good.”
Mom goes to work. She will run home at lunch to check on her boy.
Like last week, this post is late. I mean to write early, but it’s been a week of strong wind, heavy rain, an 18-hour power outage, some baking and planning and writing, and exhausting work on our rental. A friend sent me notes on the novella version of my book and I began a new draft. Good stuff. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I have no business doing that.
This morning the shore is littered with spruce and fir needles, branches, yard debris, and at least two Adirondack chairs, one red, one green, broken into sticks. We brought home a big bag of litter. We started out thinking we’d walk north for at least a mile, but at the first seasonal creek had to wait out a wave. The tide was coming in and we decided we might find ourselves caught between beach access paths by a sneaker, so we turned south. We didn’t get rained on, but you can see the next squat coming from the southwest in the photo.Continue reading →
I nearly didn’t post this week at all. But let me share a personal tradition that I miss while I’m sitting here on the sofa, the television paused. I had a writing assignment I shared but the most important thing I used to do this time of year, when I was teaching, was show episode 10 of season 1 of The West Wing. The entire series is playing on Netflix just now. A homeless vet dies wearing a coat that Toby Ziegler donated to charity. It had his business card in the pocket and for that reason Toby is called by the DC police to the Korean War Veterans Memorial in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C.. They hope he can identify the body.
As I began writing this on Wednesday, I was reading Helen Whybrow’s memoir, The Salt Stones, which focuses on her family, her ninety-some Icelandic sheep, and how as a pastoralist she lives within the rhythm of her animals, the trees and grasses, blueberries and shrubs, the soil microbes and those in our gut, and all that lives in and on, over and above that soil and makes of her two hundred acres a thriving ecosystem. Her husband is kind, her step-daughter has gone off to live her life, and soon her daughter will follow. Her mother has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t always know her daughter, but is the same kindly person for all that. I read the final chapter yesterday. I felt grateful for the beauty she shares.
On our beach walk, we found bits of litter on the sand and tangled in the rocks, enough to half fill our trash bag. Mostly this was bits of plastic and plastic foam smaller than my thumbnail, but also a comb, a sturdy mesh bait bag, several lengths of reusable plastic twine. We admired the local bald eagles scavenging onshore. This photo taken at a distance—the bird flew as a wave washed in.Continue reading →
“This is what makes the myth such a great lie!” Gary says. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. It’s always someone’s fault, not ours.
We tried to watch the right/left overview of the our political week on The New Hour on PBS. We’d previously vowed not to watch it anymore, but today I backslid, found it on my computer a day late, and was sorely disappointed. Two journalists talked about the Epstein files and decided that was a big nothing. [Really?] The more astonishing thing, to me, is that both Brooks and the democratic-journalist-of-the-week totally blamed the Democratic party for ending the shut-down. The Democrats should have stuck with it until they got subsidized healthcare, since it’s what people want. Brooks said that and the other person said it too. They were so disappointed.
I was thinking about a man, smiling and thankful for the gift of a few spoonfuls of honey.
It’s not my day to post, but this happened a few hours ago—the homeless vet and the arrogant journalists so sure about what others should have done.
Maybe I used this image already. It’s only a week or two old, and the rainbow on Castle Rock is such a hopeful thing. Continue reading →
THE MARTIAN (2015) is one of my favorite movies. Even though it’s romantic nonsense, even though, even though I barely care about a space program, even though Matt Damon. As I write, it’s playing on Netflix, and at this moment I am playing hooky from cutting and sewing my quilt border in order to focus on the ending. Every time his character Mark Watney follows the science, every time he goes to the numbers, I want to cheer and laugh. That determination to find a solution in listing what he has available to work with, to calculate how long till this or that runs out, and every time he recognizes an opportunity, my heart sings. Mark Watney, Space Pirate. “Everywhere I go, I’m the first.”
They are always bright and silvery, brighter than shows in this photo, even though “the little silver fish” are dead when we find them on the sand. Maybe this is a tiny bit of a missed pelican meal. There were still six pelicans fishing offshore that day.Continue reading →
