There is a rumor that the latest Weirdudes' production, another James Bond spoof, will be up on YouTube in the near future. As you may know, Portland is a major film venue for the fast-moving Dudes, who are, by all accounts, hard to keep up with.
My mother went through a period in her life, the middle-aged years, when she was hypersensitive to any critical comment she perceived from anyone. She used to tell me how they had "hurt (her) feelings." I, of course, hated the offending party, though my sense over time was that she was just being way too sensitive.
Fast forward to when I reached middle age, whatever the hell that may be these days, and I suddenly started feeling the lash of others' judgments of me like a whip cutting into my bare flesh. I started complaining about almost everyone in my universe, on various grounds. In retrospect, it was incredibly easy to offend me in those years; in many ways, I was always looking to be offended.
I lost some friends during that period. Lots of other things were going wrong, of course, because the Internet bubble burst at just the worst possible moment for yours truly, over-extended as he was in a housing market that suddenly froze in place, just long enough for an incompetent real estate agent to erase my life savings by selling our house way under market by exploiting the miserable fact that my wife and I were also breaking up while we were selling that house.
There I go again, see? Being hypersensitive, but I beg to receive at least one fair hearing as I tell this story my way. Bear with me.
***
Before I start, doesn't Mt. Hood look beautiful in the late afternoon light from my daughter's house?
Now, imagine you were me in the year 2000. You are 50ish, and your second marriage is shaky despite many years of couples' therapy. Your family has relocated, at great expense and trauma, from San Francisco just the year before, to a huge house in Takoma Park, MD.
You are the bureau chief of a Washington office for an upstart web-based magazine. Your job, as you perceive it, is to convince the Beltway community (one of the most ingrown in the world), that your publication is not some wacky left-coast collective but a serious journalistic enterprise.
Long story short: Mission unsuccessful.
But I did attract quite a few conservative voices to the website's pages in my one year there, as well as some terrific liberal writers as well.
At home, however, my wife was not happy. As nice as this most leftist of Washington suburbs was, and it was nice, it also most certainly was not San Francisco.
So, I obtained a new job, in Silicon Valley, leaving my old position to the scavengers who always show up when you become road kill in this society. For three months or so, I had to commute coast to coast almost every weekend so that I could be at my new desk in Redwood City but also see my little children (then 6, 4 and 2) in Takoma Park.
While I was away one day our cat, Jazz, died. He was pure black. A friend had rescued him as a kitten, starving, hiding inside a bulldozer in Marin on the site of a wetlands reclamation project. My wife had nursed him back to health with milk from a baby bottle.
He'd stayed with a neighbor when we moved east. He looked out the front window every day until I came back for him. Then, he came out and into his travel box and I took him eastward with me on one of my weekend commutes.
But he had had a fight in the neighbor's backyard one day, before he retreated to her front room, to stare outside and refuse ever again to leave that spot until I showed up. In that fight, he was bitten, and as it turned out, infected with cat leukemia.
He died. We buried him out back.
We all moved back to San Francisco. The "pink house" that I bought, in Noe Valley, looked to be the place we would live out the rest of our lives. I planted bamboo and I planted flowers. We had two fresh water fishponds in our backyard, courtesy of the little-known 28th street creek, one of seven secret rivers that still run beneath San Francisco.
None of it was to be. Now, only my 12-year-old remembers, truly. He has the burden of being the oldest of his cluster, which means he knows much more about these things than the younger ones.
We are here in Portland, with that magnificent mountain in our view, to visit their nephew and my grandson. But tonight, all I can imagine is my own children's pain, as one life fell apart, revealing another. Then, I see how the new world of "Mom's House/Dad's House" took hold.
We all need to feel safe at the end of the day. Looking at Mt. Hood doesn't inspire safe feelings but a sense of dread, mainly because of the fate of recent climbers who succumbed up there.
Yet each of us has to keep climbing, no, until we just cannot do it anymore. At that point, our story is over, but the Story goes on.
-30-
"Things got bad, and things got worse, I guess you will know the tune...Somewhere I lost connections, ran out of songs to play." -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
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