Today is the first day of October, and a lot is happening: The Portland Marathon [I am not running], sorting bins [yarn, stuff, and fabric], running, gallery show, and looking ahead.
THE DECLUTTERING CURE
MIDDLE DISTANCE
Three years ago, I thought if I could only run a mile, a complete mile, maybe semi-regularly… wouldn’t that be something! Then I did it. I ran a mile. I didn’t hurt or fall down or even feel sore the next day. Then that distance got easy and I tried a little further. Two miles.
PERMANENCE
Bees, long hoped-for goals, the illusion of permanence, photographs of the shore. The shifting tides and movement of sand and stone shoved in and out by the ocean.
GOOD NEWSs
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.
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.
Continue readingOh. DEER.
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.]
ANNIVERSARY
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”.
Our anniversary rings, more about goldsmithing, the Hood to Coast relay, and my preferred running conditions.
Continue readingFEARLESS fear less
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.
TIMES CHANGE
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.
GETTING IT RIGHT
Rocks, cougars, the Tortilla Race, ordering online, and typos.
Continue readingrunning@70
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.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 