Oregon

Multnomah Falls (top half, above the portion pictured yesterday), Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

One of my friends commented that we really got around when we spent our three days in Oregon, and I guess we did.  Three college visits, one each morning.  An afternoon of wandering around Portland, taking the trolly, visiting Powell's Book's (incredible!), eating gelato, and then driving a little way down the Columbia River Gorge. An afternoon trip to the coast, with a long walk down the beach and a fun walk through the artsy little shops.  An afternoon lunch with two internet friends of five-plus years -- a wonderful chance to connect names and voices and children to longstanding screen names and personas.  An evening at the Portland Timbers' soccer game -- a young man whom we have watched play soccer from grade school through college has realized a lifetime dream of going pro in Portland.  The only thing we missed from my list was dinner with friends who recently moved to Portland with their son who is a friend of my boys.

And yes, I would love to climb to the top of Multnomah Falls.  Next time I'll know to arrive earlier and bring food!

Walked:  4 miles.

Offbeat

This is a strange evening.  My daughter's at a soccer team party -- "a bonding experience," she told me, before their first scrimmage tomorrow.  My sons are in Amsterdam and Chicago.  My husband is en route to Chicago -- the Camp Counselor went from work in North Carolina to friends in Atlanta to friends at college for the summer, but he's coming home tomorrow!  So the animals and I are home alone, and this is what's happening in Florida:

Thursday Thinkers

A new game to play, this one courtesy of Aunt Nub's Empty Head!  OK...

1)  When did you last sing to yourself?  Where was it (shower, car, etc?)  What sort of songs do you usually sing?

"And I dreamed I saw the bombers, riding shotgun in the sky; They were turning into butterflies above our nation."    Claire's slightly nutty aunt was playing Joni Mitchell''s Woodstock  in an episode of Six Feet Under   that we watched a day or two ago, so I guess that's what I've been singing to myself.  I don't actually sing to myself, being pretty much tone deaf, but I do, kind of.

2)  Would you rather be a member of a championship sports team or be the champion of an individual sport?  What sport would you choose?

I would be a Wimbledon champion, I think.  I last played tennis more than 20 years ago, so we all know how likely that would be.

3)  If you were at a friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner & found a dead cockroach in your salad, what would you do?

I would surreptiously slip it into my napkin, excuse myself to go to the bathroom, flush it, and never say a word to anyone, except maybe my husband, who wouldn't be interested and would forget about it immediately.

4)  What was your best Halloween costume ever?

Santa Claus.

5)  What's the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you & how did it make you feel?  What's the nicest thing you ever did for a stranger & why did you do it?

My friends and I used to hitchhike some when we were in high school.  So probably the nicest thing a stranger ever did for me was give me a safe ride to a safe place with no hassle.  I can think of one occasion in particular that it would be better to forget.

I think maybe the nicest thing I ever did for a stranger was to take a set of photographs for her during her Cesarean.  This was maybe 18 years ago (ok, so I don't do nice things all that often) and I was supposed to be her labor support person fer her second childbirth experience.  I did it because someone asked me and I like going to births. Her first delivery had gone well, but her husband was a cardiac surgery resident on call and she couldn't count on him showing up.  As it turned out, she had a breech presentation and her OB made a very quick decision to go with a Cesarean.

We had talked about about the photos I would take during her planned natural delivery, but we hadn't anticipated the surgical turn of events.  I was a little nervous about taking pictures of the surgery without her permission, but I remembered how much the pictures of my twins' Cesarean birth had meant to me, so I snapped away like crazy.  I got them developed that night, and hesitantly took them to the hospital the next afternoon. 

I don't think she and her husband could have been more thrilled.  She had had a rough time with pain during the surgery, and her surgeon-to-be husband had been completely traumatized by seeing his own wife shaking and crying through most of it, so neither one of them remembered much about the actual birth of their child.  They poured over those pictures with utter delight.

I haven't thought about that day in a long, long time. but it's a really nice memory for me.  That baby must be in college now!

And a little present for anyone who waded through all of the above:

Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

Whoooooaaaaaaaaa.......

Both Hurricanes (Yesterday) from www.nasa.gov:

Raging Ocean

Today:

(http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20030905222709990001)

In my search for some images of the power of the ocean as it is making itself known today, I discovered that exactly eight years ago another Hurricane Charley was wreaking havoc on the East Coast. 

Stay safe out there.

Oceans

A dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,                                

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth

And time and place are lost  

                                                                John Milton, Paradise Lost  (1667)    

I didn't think I was going to make it to the ocean this year, and I didn't know what I was going to do about that.  With the three kids and I all having completely different school vacation schedules, our annual tradition of spring break in St. Augustine has evaporated.  The last time we had been there was for New Year's 2002-2003.  The beach was no less beautiful for being cold, and the outdoor hot tubs were evening more inviting, and the Ancient City beckoned with tiny white lights shimmering everywhere, but the teenagers pronouced it too chilly for a beach vacation.   

Of course, the ocean does not have the same meaning for them that it does for me.  They take it completely for granted, having been there every year as a family.  They take the family for granted, too.  But I don't.  

When I was in kindergarten and first grade, we lived a couple of blocks from the beach, in Vero Beach,  for the second half of the school year.  My father was trying to get going in the construction business; we moved into the house that he built for usin April or May of my first grade year. After school let out we headed back to Ohio.  My mother and baby brother were killed in a car accident the following October and we never returned to live in our house.  Florida became for me that magical place where my family had lived together for part of the abbreviated time that we had.  

When I was 15, I started going back, to spend a week or two of spring break with my grandparents, who spent the winters there.  I was usually alone -- my brother and cousins had different vacations -- and I walked for hours and hours on the beach.  It became one of the treasured places where I had time with my grandparents, who lived next door to us in Ohio and had taken such good care of me after my mother died.  Regardless of the condition of my family -- which was repeatedly reconfigured, with the death of my first stepmother, my father's remarriage, and the resultant new set of step-siblings and a half-brother -- the power of the ocean was relentless.  

My grandparents were there for the last time the winter after my boys were born.  My grandfather was close to death, so my husband and I took our three-month old twins down to spend a week with him.  He was moving in and out of periods of dementia -- in the evenings I listened to him ramble on, late into the night, about his business worries (he thought it was the 1930s); in the mornings I bathed and played with the babies in his room during his periods of lucidity; and in the afternoons I walked on the beach.  It was really cold and windy, but we took the babies down to dip their toes in the ocean, telling them that their grandfather had played in it as a boy and someday they would, too.

The next year we initiated our annual family trek to St. Augustine.  Sometimes I wondered where my sanity had gone -- packing up a double stroller and 2 Port-a-Cribs to drive 16 hours to spend a week in a condo where I couldn't find anything and shop in a grocery where I REALLY couldn't find anything was hardly relaxing.  But those little kids sure loved the beach -- every shell and washed-up ray equalled adventure.  As they grew, the ocean was at once a source of  peace and playtime and terror; peace at 6:00 a.m. when I took my walks, playtime in the mornings when the kids ran around in the shallow waves and collected shells and starfish, and terror as they grew older and scoffed at my warnings of the undertow.   

Now that we are in this period of transition-to-adulthood, everything is changing, and beach vacations are no exception.  Teenagers stay up all night and sleep all day, and have to be practically dragged down to the ocean (the pool is just so much more convenient!).  And they are in constant motion -- long and lazy family days, let alone weeks, are almost memories from the past.  

But I did get lucky, as it turns out.  I've been to THREE sets of beaches this summer: Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Pacific.  It seems that, while I have a lot to miss, I have nothing much to complain about.  The Atlantic was at rest the whole week we were there, much to the chargin of the would-be surfers, and Lake Michigan was a sheer surface of glass.  But the Pacific; that was something else entirely:  

Cannon Beach, Oregon

Walked: 4 miles.

Terrific Journal Entries (Week-End Assignment # 19)

I have been having such a blah day.  I did finish cleaning, or at least picking up, the first floor of the house this morning, and threw in a couple of more loads of laundry, but it's getting cloudy, I haven't been for a walk, and I had to do 2.5 hours of carpooling today, a task I really hate.  Plus -- and this might be the real reason for my funk -- I'm in the middle of watching the second season of Six Feet Under, and it seems like an entirely dark and haunting series this time through. 

But this assignment has perked me up a bit.  I've read some excellent writing since I've started following a smattering of journals -- some of it thought-provoking, some lively and fresh, some bizarre and some heartbreaking.  And I've seen some photography that should be commanding the big bucks.  But I've decided that my favorite entry so far, the one that pulled me out of the doldrums today, is this one:

http://journals.aol.com/staceyandbern/NomadicMusings/entries/520.

It's the June 23, 2004 mostly-photos entry from Stacey's journal about her through-hike on the Pacific Northwest Trail.  No politics, no family angst, no college application process -- no, this one is a reminder to focus elsewhere, at least some of the time. 

And the trip that she and her companion Bernie have made is the focus of a trail assocation newsletter series -- exciting for them and for us, too.