Kendall’s Quest:

Streaked into Ashland under a bright sky in Jeremy’s cobalt blue Miata, top down, icy wind in my hair, sun splashing on snow-patched mountains and flowering trees. It was, as Seth says, “one of those moments you know you will remember for the rest of your life.” Jeremy is dashing. Think Peter O’Toole with a compact muscular body, a tidy white beard, sharp cheekbones and flashing vividly blue eyes. When we left Portland it was raining. We met hail and sleet and later clear sunny skies, we got acquainted and talked about books and art and music and Bob, and forty miles north of Ashland we put the top down. Ashland is a perfect little artsy hippie town, Victorian clapboard houses with clumsily-painted murals of happy hippie scenes on the garages, homemade sculptures in the yards among the daffodils, pretty little stained glass decorations hanging in windows. The town centers on the three theatres; the weather is below freezing at night but up to the mid-fifties (F) in the daytime. The production of August Wilson’s Fences was just right: well-acted and tenderly staged. God, what a powerful script. And I have been thinking since I got here of the life not taken: it’s as though I can see a ghost-image of myself in that other life, the one I dreamed of, visualized, and hoped for but didn’t get. Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow I’m off to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This is thanks to my old friend Bob, who taught math at Smith while I was teaching theatre there. Bob now lives in San Francisco, and he and his partner Jeremy, who lives in Canada and who I haven’t met yet, are regular patrons of the Shakespeare Festival down in Ashland.  Jeremy will pick me up tomorrow on his way down, and Bob will come up, and we’ll see four plays in three days. They’ll be at a hotel, and I’ll be at a lovely hostel in the dorm. This should be great fun, and it is charged with meaning beyond the obvious. In the 70s, when I was dreaming of making it as a professional actress, my most passionate and persistent fantasy was that I would get a job in the company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival–a real, regular acting job with benefits and everything. In my fantasy, I could take Seth with me, and eventually I would regain custody of Christopher, and everything would fall into place. If I could just get to Ashland and get a job in that company. It was one of those visions I believed in, my own magical thinking as a twenty-something, right on into my thirties. Every year I schemed and planned and saved in order to get to the auditions, which were held in New York City, and I never got there. It was one of the early proofs to me that visualization is not enough. Now I will really get there. Coincidentally, I read and re-read Shakespeare’s  Coriolanus at the same time (in my early twenties), and in the great sweeps of my romantic imagination I endowed Seth’s father with qualities of a modern-day Coriolan because of his combination of personal achievement (given considerable privilege) and his arrogant dislike of “common people.” Absurd to elevate a merely irascible man to the level of a mythic hero, but that’s the kind of girl I was. And probably still am, viewing the events and people around me as myths and archetypes. I’ve never seen the play performed anywhere but in my mind’s eye, so I’m really curious to see how they’ve managed to stage it for an “intimate” space. If I get a chance, I’ll send blog reports while I’m there.

Well, not a formal ode, but a big holler of gratitude. Sometimes I have to tear myself away from the beauties of the northwest to sit at the computer. And then what comes to me in the computer is so nourishing, stimulating, inspiring, hilarious, or provocative that I have to tear myself away from the computer to do anything else. There was a time when I was buried in academic administration and emails were a chore, a duty, and part of various silly intrigues (it’s amazing how people in the workplace will fight over trivial nonsense–and the less there is at stake, the more poisonous the language and the more devious the schemes). But that was then and this is now. Now emails are the main conduit for friendship in my life. Now I open the computer with a shiver of excitement and pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m stumped. How do I talk about discovering the great Pacific Northwest without sounding like I’ve joined the Oregon tourism board? I’m gasping in wonder at some of the most breath-taking natural beauty I’ve ever seen in my life. I sent Stephen a few pictures and he found it “Sublime, the visionary New World that inspired the philosophers and drew the huddling masses ….” I should just leave that on this entry and say no more. I don’t have that much restraint, but if you’re sick of me raving about Oregon, feel free to skip this and do something that makes you feel good about being where you are. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing like a few good juxtapositions to get a person going in the morning, like the big fat lazy snowflakes drifting through the Portland sky at this moment, falling on cherry blossoms and melting instantly. Eating breakfast at the table by the window, I saw a jogger in shorts, a long-sleeved T-shirt and tennis shoes, carrying an umbrella to fend off snowflakes. Or how about this news? My new home town has the world’s first vegan strip club. Or as a local newspaper put it, “Boobs with a Side of Soy.” Will this business be able to overcome the economic doldrums besetting the rest of the country? Only time will tell.

The world is so full of a number of things/ I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. –Robert Louis Stevenson

I doubt there is a king in the world as happy as I am with my life. The work on the book goes well. Chloe is curled warmly on the top of my chair. And nothing in the world is dependable but change. As Faust said, thereby damning himself to hell, “Linger a while, thou art so fair.”

I’ve just purchased a cremation policy that guarantees that wherever I die, anywhere on the planet, and whenever that happens, I’ll be picked up, cremated, and the ashes will be scattered at sea, and each of my kids will get two copies of the death certificate (necessary to claim anything left in the bank, if there is anything). This presumes that the insurance company that underwrites the policy will not file bankruptcy in the meanwhile, and that phones and computer systems will still be working at that time and the company will have a record of this purchase, since I will be–ahem–unable to request these services myself. It also presumes that nothing major in the way the world works will change (something it is never safe to assume), and that I will not be pulverized or vaporized by some cataclysmic event…but then, if that happens, no one will have to worry about how to dispose of the body anyway. I’m actually much more worried about the bats and the honeybees. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, enough of this head-in-the-sand, self-involved lollygagging. There are other things going on. Specifically, there is this obscene and pointless war in Iraq to make the world safe for oil billionnaires. I have never blogged about it before because everyone I know is dumbstruck by the horror of it, the obscenity of it; and not one of us knows what to do about it.  Nothing I can say will surprise anyone. But today, even if I say what everyone already knows, I have to say something. No one, not even Bush’s own people, has ever given a plausible reason for this war other than to take control of Iraq’s oil. The oil billionnaires who put Bush in power are now rolling in so many more billions of dollars that even they don’t know what to do with the money. Everybody knows this. There’s no point in even putting a link to the information. Now 4,o00 Americans are dead, about a million Iraqis are dead…a million, or at the very least 655,o00. So that would be everyone you have ever known in your whole life, and everyone they have ever known, and their families, and then some. A million dead people, give or take a few, and none of us can count that much suffering. Imagine that many bodies lying on the ground. My mind can’t hold it. How much grief is that? And the people who have lost legs or part of their brains, or who have gone mad with grief and horror, or the children whose lives are shattered by the loss of their parents, by hunger and despair–nobody even counts them.  This coming Friday I’m going to attend a peace action in a park near me, and there is a questionnaire they sent to the people who’ve signed up to attend. The first question is, “What have you done today to bring about peace?” Here’s my pathetic answer: for starters, I’m going to watch TV. Read the rest of this entry »

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”–Jorge Luis Borges

This is the inscription over the main door to the Portland library. I set out today to get to the river park, but I failed. I passed the Bearing Service Company, its walls lined with small compartments full of bearings of every conceivable size. If anyone wants to find their bearings, I know where to send them. I got as far as the library, wandered in, and ended up spending a couple of hours in it, enjoying the architecture, the proportions, the light, the long wooden tables and rather stern wooden chairs, the friendly librarians, the books on display, the arrangement of rooms, the bustle and joy. First there is that inscription, which made me smile, and then I stepped into the main lobby, with its large white-streaked-with-garnet marble columns and its grand art deco staircase, black stone stairs wonderfully etched with natural motifs (foliage, a trout, a bear, a monkey [?],  intermingled with a violin, a rolling pin, an envelope, an inkstand, with words woven into the design: CREATE, DISCOVER, HOPE, SEEK). The main reading rooms are two stories high, with fifteen-foot windows to let in the light.  I climbed the broad staircase to the third floor (domed, beautifully lit) past all the look-alike portraits of white men in black suits, to a colorful portrait of Dorothy D. Hirsch, a gray-haired woman surrounded by books and greenery, a woman who looks like everybody’s favorite well-informed, well-read, civilized librarian–someone you would expect to make outrageous, irreverent, hilarious observations. In the painting there’s a book by Ursula LeGuin on the table by Dorothy. Read the rest of this entry »

I make absolutely no claim to being a photographer, but this city is so gorgeous I can’t help pointing and shooting, and everywhere I aim the camera there is more beauty. So here is what I saw this afternoon. I uploaded everything to Flickr, including pictures of Chloe and one picture of the outside of this high-rise I now live in. Sadly, my little cheap digital camera cannot do justice to the shades of gray in the sky. The skies in the pictures just look white, but they are not white. They are at least a hundred shades of gray, rolling clouds and cloud-banks constantly changing like the sea. Every picture in this set was made within a ten-block radius of my new home. Don’t you wish you lived here?

I wrote the title for this blog post and then wondered where the phrase came from. Apparently it means “Establishing awareness of one’s position or situation relative to one’s surroundings.” That works. It also works for me to imagine that I have lost a great many little round pieces of metal and am trying to find them again. Starting work on the book is not a simple matter of sitting down and putting words on the screen. I diddled with it for a few hours yesterday afternoon while Chloe explored the apartment around me, mewing with rising inflections that sounded like question-marks and looking back at me expectantly, as if she believed I could answer those questions if I would just leave that stupid keyboard and apply myself. After a few hours of this, I looked at what I had written and found it abysmally stupid; deleted everything and sat down in my new yellow chair to pet Chloe, to gaze out the window at the sunset bathing layers of cloud in vaguely pink pearlescence, and to listen to Alfred Brendel playing Schubert. Read the rest of this entry »