a little red hen

A (Portland) Bridge Too Far

By chance we discovered a one-woman show soon after our move here in Fall 2009.  Print junkie that I am, a promotional postcard, "The Bridge Lady: inspired by a true story,"  intrigued me.  This city is alive with bridges--eleven of them criss-crossing the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.

Sharon Wood Wortman, whose one- woman performance was the card's subject, has been leading school tours and writing about Portland bridges for a number of years.  But a note on the card indicated this one was not for kids. 

Hardly. Announcing that she'd never done anything like this before, Sharon told her life story of growing up harshly in the city.  Not a pretty story but a strong sense of survivorship and delving into the history of the bridges--plus a few good supportive friends--had led her beyond that to her current self at 65 years.  Joined in celebrating with her.

In connection with the 100-year birthday of the Hawthorne Bridge, she was giving her final tours for the general public, as part of  an incredible extravaganza for the bridge planned with the guy pictured next to her.  The bridge's calendar is gorgeous with artists' views of it.  It has been on our wall but I stopped turning to the next month when the drawn image to the right appeared.

As part of Sharon's tour,  we trekked to the bridge traffic control room with 70 other bridge enthusiasts to see how it all worked.  But it began so late that Ron and I  left partway through--before actually crossing the Morrison Bridge, being on it when it lifted.  It was the end of an exhausting couple of weeks.

Back to regular pedometer use, I'd racked up two days over 7,000 steps.  Walked every day to a Portland State summer class, "The Sociology of the Bicycle," which was terrific and met 8 afternoons over two weeks.  We managed a full week on foot:  no car!  Toward the end, Portland became summery and the air-conditioning in the classroom was a killer.

And so, I came down with another cold--several of these and/or allergy stuff since our move.  And I've been low energy.  It was a message:  having fun, moving fast is swell, but old ladies need to chill out a bit more than some of us are ready to accept.

Here's  the Hawthorne, oldest vertical lift bridge in U.S. and maybe the world, draped with fabric that gets lighted at night (Willamette Week ran great photos)...keeping missing that and only three days left to see it.  Oops, slow down, I tell self once again.

At the top of this post a view from an early evening walk toward the Morrison Bridge.  You cannot see us and our friends dodging the bicycle riders whizzing as we tried to take a leisurely walk  along the Willamette.

Though it seems I've been a blogging dropout, it is not the case.  Many wonderful adventures to relate in future posts--bike culture as religion, meeting Vincenza Scarpaci and reading her book  about Italians in America plus discovering an unexpected PDX gem, diPrimo Bakery and Restaurant. 

And a well known blogger is coming to town!

Emma Goldman-- reassurance, 1917... a question, 1919

 

Keep the spark of liberty alive,

the night cannot last forever.

A bookmark from The Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, Berkeley.  On the reverse side, a contemporary message about the importance of remembering our history of struggle,  "Stirring the embers of the past to inspire the future. 

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) and Alexander Berkman in a "Farewell, [to] Friends and Comrades," wrote this line before serving almost two years in prison for opposing the conscription of young men into the First World War.

Partial to her feisty spirit, I once bought a 1916 issue of Emma's publication, Mother Earth News.  It includes a reminder of the upcoming "Mother Earth Ball" to celebrate the publication's 11th anniversary (Admission 35 cents, Hat Check, 15 cents). Somewhere in my photos, there's one of me standing in front of a brownstone where she lived near Union Square in New York City. 

In the Portland Red Guide, I learn she came here in 1915 to speak, was arrested for distributing birth control information. A Portland Circuit Judge dismissed the case with the words, "There is too much tendency to prudery nowadays."  She also spoke at the Portland Public Library on "The Sham of Culture." A local blogger last year named her Portland's Fairy Godmother. Her spirit lives on!

A few years ago, the bookmark on the right arrived in the mail.  I've saved it for its message and its different, gentler view of Emma--feminist, anarchist, immigrant--to share among ourselves.  In these days when it often feels as if the forces of evil have taken over reasonableness, I offer her words to recall that we have survived narrowness of thought in earlier times.  Her message, as always, is pertinent to 2010.

"Sooner or later the American people are going to wake up.  --Emma Goldman, Detroit, Michigan, 11/26/1919, on deportation to Russia" reads a cup (mug)  on my kitchen counter.  Make sure you click on this image from her  1901 arrest, a frequent happening.

Celebrate her birthday on June 27, with a contribution to the Papers so you too can be a part of the ongoing effort to write women back into history.

BURNED BOOKS, Lair Hill, Portland, Oregon

  A week ago Ron wondered if someone down the hall had a cooking mishap.  Kept mentioning that his eyes were bothering him.  Maybe all the pollen this year.  Earlier in the day I went through another--the last--box of books we brought with us.  Some I cannot let go yet.  Others are on their way to Daedalus Books a kind of retro used book place on northwest 21st street, right next to Ken's Artisan Bakery.  What could be better than the smell of baking bread while you surf book shelves.

 Toward evening we learned the true source of the smell in the air-- the fire in Lair Hill, an historic neighborhood close by.  The flames destroyed an old church which had been bought by book seller, Phil Wikelund, to continue his former store, Great Northwest, as an online business. This link leads to a 2003 newspaper article that illuminates the vagaries of life in the book lane.  I recall we had spent hours wandering  around in his former store on Stark Street...many black and white images of early life in the Northwest along with the books.

Visiting the site a few days later, we met Marilly and Fred Morton who had lived in the neighborhood in the 1970s and were members of the now-gone non-denominational church.  It was where they'd been married.   They described the neighborhood as a typical hippy  and scruffy place.  Now gentrified but with traces of earlier times when it was home to  Jewish and Italian immigrants in the early 20th century. 

The church was part of the scene with potluck dinners, great music and dances, and a custom of inviting homeless people to dinner.  They were patient with us as we asked many questions about how the church had supported itself, "Everyone pitched in the way most churches do," Marilly explained.  Mysterious to us who had never considered the idea of a church without a large superstructure behind it--somewhere.

  Ron who is deep in all kinds of history reading rescued "The Age of Transformation, 1789-1871" though he's not sure he will actually read it.  Felt like  homage to the loss.  It's still in our car trunk drying.

With his building and 100,000 books gone, 57 year old Wikelund was philosophical.  "I have a life to live...I will move on some way. ... I'm considering this my sign that I need to retire."

Hattie's Web arrives in real time...

Last night Marianna, of Hattie's Web, and I had our third Portland encounter.  This time, however, she and spouse Terry could visit us as voting Rose City residents.  No more Powell's or Pearl Bakery--lovely as those sites are.  Ron and I revealed life in a retirement community, Dagen/Bloom style.

It has been a very, very hectic week.  After dropping out for a bit for low level illness, I'm back to Water Aerobics twice a week, with the glamour of my new bathing suit (partial view)--a tankini as Marianna once suggested from her superior experience as a water baby in Hawaii.

Tuesday school started again at Portland State--two classes back to back.  The quarter system is more intense than the semester one of my past; two hour sessions with no break.  And there's Blackboard to learn--more life in the electronics lane.  When the men separated from the women last night, Ron tells me that Terry was intrigued by this online approach to class readings and assignments. Thursday much cooking for a delayed Seder, first time for us, at our daughter's.

Marianna showed me her much-loved Kindle and I countered with a favorite old book, the beautifully illustrated temperance autobiography, Frances E. Willard's Glimpses of Fifty Years, published in 1889.  This is a good a time to begin my long-planned project of writing about the temperance movement and its contemporary relevance.  [We enjoyed a bottle of Beaujolais-Villages brought by our guests.]  As I pointed out, Willard was known to drink a little wine. That's the true meaning of temperance,  a concept with little currency in the U.S.

We talked about making changes to blogs over time--whether they are a very new concept that will continue to evolve stylistically or on their way out as some recent reports claim.  Marianna has recently changed her blog's look--impressive effort.  When I said my instinct is to write more about food, her right eyebrow raised.  I sensedalarm in her plea, "Please don't become a foodie blog!"  Ah, I answered, you must read The Blog that Ate Manhattan (doctor who cooks and talks about women's health) and another with much more than recipes,  A Chicken in Every Granny Cart.

Using her Kindle, Marianna attempted to alter my recent dismissive attitude toward Michael Berube's writing, expressed in a comment at Hattie's Web.  I warmed to his idea that the CIA influenced European attitudes about American art produced during the years of the cold war.  But he goes on too much in a certain academic style that is very familiar to me.  

   Attempting to memorialize our evening, we passed around cameras.   Marianna models one of Ron's growing collection of knit hats and inspects my latest knitting pattern for an elephant toy...the two Elderbloggers examine my lost art of neckpiece-making and demonstrate the lost art of  talking with hands sans electronic objects...the men explore nuances of Yiddish vis a vis German.  It's unlikely we will get to Hawaii but  I forgot to mention this idea--that we meet up on Marianna's  next Seattle trip with that other blogger/thinker/grandma, 20th Century Woman, who like me admires chickens (scroll down).

Ron Bloom Celebrates Another Birthday!

All my love and thanks for all the places we've been, crises we've survived,  children and grandchildren we've loved...

...and your great patience in teaching me too many things to list...what I've learned from your pleasure in sharing with everyone who comes within your range.

  All of us look forward to many more June tenths with you--

most especially yours truly ...

Celebration: High-Rise Style...Last night--a building party where we live. Lee Morgan, Ron's co-chair and great party-giver, suggested this one as they wrapped up their term of office, turned it over to another pair. Singing the Birthday song was a high point of the pot-luck evening...who says New Yorkers don't care about one another?

Poem in Your Pocket Day: What's Yours?

How just-right this casual window at the Bank Street Bookstore --usually carefully arranged with children's books.  For April 30, last day of National Poetry Month, they chose to celebrate "Poem in Your Pocket Day," a New York thing, with an offer of just that.  Don't you love the vintage manual typewriter --much like the one I lugged on the train to  college.

Got my poem, "A Rabbit Reveals My Room" by Nancy Willard:

    When the rabbit showed me my room/I looked all              around for the bed./I saw nothing there/but a shaggy     old bear/who offered to pillow my head....

I'd been on a walk through Central Park's Conservatory Garden, with the Thursday morning walking group (reconvened from last year).  We thanked the volunteers who keep the place so gorgeous. 

Then back to Broadway, past the bookstore, the street seller reading his own merchandise.

On to the Columbia Greenmarket for my favorite wholewheat doughnuts.  And a little lemon thyme plant to try for cooking and keep my yellow begonia company.

FIX-UP NOTE:  Thanks to Kay and her Thinking Cap, the links have been straightened out very early Friday morning.

Nick Bloom Hits NY Times on Groundhog Day

I was about to get in the shower this morning when my cellphone rang.  It was my friend Audrey calling from New York.  "Have you seen the Times?  Nick's on page 8 in the first section!"  Our son had told us last week about his upcoming appearance on the Time's blog to answer questions about the City's public housing.   But we had no idea that it would be announced in the daily paper this way.

Since the publication last spring  of his book, "Public Housing that Worked:  New York in the Twentieth Century," he has received attention in public and academic quarter for his even-handed approach.  Many are suprised to learn how successful public housing has been in New York City--and why it needs to  be supported. 

Today, nearing the end of our long visit in Portland we are far from Nick in New York.    This afternoon our grandson Zach was excited to see Uncle Nickel's picture on my laptop.  There are similarities between the two of them besides looking alike as young children.  Both have great eye to hand coordination and worked together on a book about China when Nick, Leanne, and Roxie visited this summer.

Of course, this special event for our family has nothing to do with Groundhog Day.  Except that we will remember February 2, 2009.  For an entirely different take, check out today's  Mason-Dixon Knitting.  Kay Gardiner can really put a spin on the every day.

UPDATE:  The affordable, paperback edition of "Public Housing that Worked" has just been released by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

We Meet Again...Powell's, City of Books

The Grandmothers met again...this time in a less amiable climate than before.  Marianna coughed.  I sneezed.  Hers-- the result of visiting her young grandchildren in Seattle.  Mine, my entire  Portland family has  colds.  I have a vision people all ages along a trail  through the Northwest as a noisy and nosey cacaphoney, tissues in hand.

We talked about politics in this city where she once lived.  Currently there's  the sad story of Portland's new Mayor.  Will his recent disclosure end his career?  My knitting led to an explanation of the way  needle-wielding  women had emerged in a virtual explosion over the last 15 years.  Groups, yarn shops everywhere.  We want to make things with our own hands.  An accomplished cook, surrounded by great fruits and vegetables in her current home in Hilo, Hawaii, she understood.  

Elderblogging had brought us together.  What would Ronni Bennett reveal from her time off from the practice?  She thought I'd met Claude in her hometown, Paris.  No, we had an in-person visit when she came to the U.S.  Marianna knows a great deal about European cities unfamiliar to me like Barcelona.  It's quite noisy I learned.  Oh, Portland is wonderfully quiet after New York.  I've only heard one car alarm in all these weeks.

Our spouses began their own conversations.  That worked for us.  Ron was the major cougher in our group.  Terry, partner to Marianna, seemed to have escaped the popular illness.  We envied him.

I realized afterwards that it would have been fascinating to hear what each of them would say about one of my recent Powell's purchases--she from a literary perspective, he from a scientific one.   Our time together was too short!  It's the green one pictured here I refer to.  ( I've only just begun the one on dieting.)  Still trying to figure out what fuels my robot interest.

Photo at top features two abandoned books outside Powell's.  A friend suggested maybe the bookstore's secondhand desk would not buy them, so they were left for the taking.  Very Portland.

My plan for this posting  included a link to our first meeting last year shortly  before Obama's election, once again I've been undermined by TypePad.  Something else Marianna and I have in common is our shared struggle with TP and their unhingeing of our posts and comments.  Too much innovating, I've told them.

They've lost the photos from that post, also  rendered  it unlinkable.  So here reposted is my snapshot  of her and Ron from that balmy day, outside Pearl Bakery in Portland.