i'll learn to speak lion

Saturday morning, start of a three-day weekend, my little purple truck rolling through the lava fields of central Oregon, hot air blowing in the windows so loud it practically drowns out the stereo, bed packed to the gills with sleeping bags and folding chairs and a soccer ball and hiking boots, cab filled with me in my sunglasses singing and the AD in the passenger seat with his shirt off flipping through a map book and the AD’s daughter playing with her favorite Ironman action figure and the AD’s daughter’s fifteen favorite stuffed animals stacked on top of one cooler of string cheese sticks and soda, and here comes the high desert, here comes Madras and Metolius and Terrebonne and Deschutes, one shallow river and one deep cave and an impossible number of stars, but for right now just me and these people I love and the hot dry air and the highway. And I used to want other things from this life, I’m sure of it – but I can’t remember what they might have been.

Nine Great Things About My Truck Break-In

1. The thief left behind my stereo.

2. The thief also left behind my GPS. Apparently the fact that I had wrapped it in a plastic grocery bag was effective camouflage, despite the cord connecting the plastic bag to the cigarette lighter.

3. Less surprisingly, the thief left behind my CDs, including John Denver, Man of La Mancha, and several good mixes.

4. The only thing the thief did take was the emergency bag that I bring out on my volunteer calls. The contents included a flashlight, a bottle of water, several pens, a glue stick, hand wipes, and a hat. It also included a packet of tissues, which perhaps the thief made use of when he realized the bag did not contain a laptop.

5. I discovered the smashed-up window ten minutes before last night’s downpour – exactly enough time to find a trash bag and some packing tape.

6. I have the sort of job where I can shoot my boss an email saying “My truck got broken into – I’m taking a long lunch to get it replaced,” and he will respond, “That sucks.”

7. Halfway between the AD’s house, where the truck was parked, and my house, is an auto glass place called Apple Auto, and their office is full of apple-themed trinkets.

8. Next to Apple Auto is the Sheridan Fruit Company, where they sell very good zucchini crepes at lunchtime.

9. An hour later, I had a good-as-new window. I went back to work.


This morning I came across an article about the passengers of US Air flight 1549 – the plane that to any reasonable expectation should have disappeared under the Hudson River with everyone aboard, but which, thanks to a very talented crew and tremendous fortune, landed safely on top of the river instead. Now, five months later, the passengers are angry that cash is missing from their returned belongings; they are banding together to sue for emotional damages. I think its time for each of them to make a list.

magic the house

Winston Churchill had a daughter named Marigold. Marigold.

I wonder if I will ever have a daughter. If I do perhaps she will already come to me with a name. Maybe I will have two daughters, or three. I have a friend with three and they seem to bring her nothing but joy. Of course they are still small, and daughters – if I or this particular friend are any indication – can grow into quite a headache when we’re older. But I think if she has another baby it will be girl again, and secretly she will be pleased.

In a game of Life last weekend I filled my plastic car with little pink pegs, surprising even myself. Greg Brown has a lovely song about daughters. I guess she lives on air and sun and noodles. Greg Brown has a daughter named Pieta.

My friend in Los Angeles has a daughter who last week locked her out of the house, and this daughter is only two. She knew what she was doing. She laughed as my friend pounded on the door. My friend was furious, and proud. She does not want her daughter to be obedient. For this she endures many things.

The AD has a daughter who is eight. I’m not sure if she likes me, but I’m sure she doesn’t like the idea of me. It’s a complicated distinction to be able to make at eight, and for this I give her credit. It is strange to admire someone for their ability to not like the idea of you.

I think if I ever have a daughter, and if I get to name her, I will name her something silly and marvelous like Marigold. I will try to teach her about all the things that don’t matter and about the few things that really do. That’s what I think now. You have all these plans about what kind of parent you will be, says my friend in Los Angeles. But then you have a child, and it turns out you had no idea.

Happy mother’s day.

I'd buy whatever you would sell to me

The thing about Portland is that at two pm on a Tuesday afternoon you can decide you feel like Going Out, and you can flip through one of the two alternative weeklies, skim the readings and theater and film and music sections, weigh the potential fun of a Blazers game and darts in a neighborhood bar against three dollar Slumdog Millionaire in an old restored church that now serves up movies and beer, and decide finally on the alt-rock Austin band you haven’t heard about in seven years that’s playing again up on Mississippi.

And even though you live in a place with all these choices, you can drive there at five minutes to showtime, park half a block away right there on the street, walk up to the door and buy a ticket for fifteen dollars. The audience is small and on their feet already for the opener, and everyone is quiet and attentive. Between sets you sneak across the street to the place that serves southern food, open at ten to ten with a single waitress; you share a pile of fried okra as big as a basketball, and blackened catfish, and mac n cheese.

You hurry back in time to catch the headliner’s second song, and the room is more full now and vibrating, but still so small that you are reading the insignia on the lead singer’s t-shirt, admiring the bass’s crooked smile. Between songs the keyboardist chats with the audience like it’s a dinner party. He asks someone to look up a fact on her cell phone, and she does.


Before I moved here from Eugene I had this Portland fantasy, and the fantasy went something like this: Portland will be what I love about Oregon, plus what I miss about New York. It will have things to do on a Tuesday after dark, but these things will not require reservations and the right outfit and copious amounts of cash. And here I am dancing around in my blue sneakers with stars, and once in a while my boyfriend slips his hand into my back pocket like we’re teenagers, and I can’t believe my fortune.

draft

On our first night in the desert we slept in the front of a convertible that the lonely Enterprise late-night countergirl had upsold us in the Palm Springs airport parking lot. We had landed late, and then gone grocery shopping, and then stopped for food n’ drinks at a candlelit patio bar. So by the time we rolled into Joshua Tree, past the darkened ranger station and the shuttered guardhouse, it seemed like the sleep of least resistance.

We pulled over by the side of the road and left the top down. The stars were out but the back was full of bags and the seats didn’t fully recline, so for at least two hours I curled up in the passenger footwell. It was perfect.

In the morning the ranger caught me leaning over the trunk in my slippers, and she should have given us a ticket but didn’t. After that we hardly saw a soul. We parked the car by a trailhead and scrambled over rocks for three days straight, sleeping out without a tent and heating soupcans on a sterno. There were a lot of lizards. The cacti and dry little wildflowers were in bloom.

We crouched in the shade in the late afternoons, waiting for the sun to sink behind mountains after a long day of heat. We drank our heavy water. We talked. The AD read to me chapter after chapter of the book we brought along. This I could do for a long, long time, I thought.

On our last day in the desert we packed it out, passing a palm grove and a tortoise in the path who watched us watch him eat a flower. Like him I feel dried out and delivered, ready and in no rush at all.

Portland in the third week of April.

They said it was going to be seventy-five and sunny but they’re liars, all of them – it’s gray as far as the sky and raining cold wet rain and it’s soaking through your sweater. It’s been this way for every day you can remember. You can’t even call up what you thought might be different, how the sky could look any other way. This is the part of Portland that makes you cry. Makes you cry at the smallest thing and sometimes nothing. Because you realize it is never, ever going to stop being gray. Every day from here on out, this is the sky that will greet you when you finally pull yourself out of bed, this is your permanent atmosphere.

And you will never fall in love, or if you do it will wreck you, and you will never succeed at your job, or if you do it will be at unreasonable expense, and you will never choose an electrician. Your outlets will always be two-pronged and sparky. The kitchen switch will dangle from the rafters. All is lost.

So you sit up straight and breathe to the bottom of your lungs and focus on the little lettuce and kale starts you pressed into the damp earth only yesterday, how they wilted at the shock of relocation, how they crumpled under assault from the hose. And you know that this is the day that will revive them, this spitty foul rain is the very climate they would each request to live out their lettucey days. And you think of the peas that you pushed in one knuckle deep beneath the climbing trellis, which is really just a stapled length of chicken wire, and of the beet seeds like little comets, and the radish and carrot seeds nearly too small to count out. This rain, right now, is floating them into some sweet little crevice inside the compost you’ve been tending since autumn. It is wetting their dull shells and inciting aspirations of red and orange sugar.

It is hard to remember.

3 years later

Drinking Diet Coke makes me feel like a bitch, just the sound of the name Diet Coke all hard with edges, and the slender silver can, like I should pop the top with long painted fingernails and slump back in my chair with boredom. I’m not much of a soda drinker.

I’m not much of a soda drinker but when I do drink soda it’s because I’m in Guatemala, say, and they are selling tall glass bottles with real cane sugar, bottles chipped from being stacked in sticky crates, or because I am at the movies with a big bag of popcorn. Then a few weeks ago I spent the weekend at a friend’s house with a fridge full of Coke Zero and since then the craving just comes up.

The craving just comes up and mostly I push it back down but today I gave in. There’s no Coke Zero in the lobby shop so I picked the closest thing, this Diet Coke with the word Diet in special script for women, a soda a man would never buy. I paid the eighty cents with a five even though there were two crisp ones folded in my pocket from when I meant to take the bus to work this morning.

I meant to take the bus to work this morning but as I was coming down the stairs I couldn’t ignore the clear blue sky, and I couldn’t help feeling I’ve been making too many excuses. So I got on my bicycle and halfway the rain started falling, pok pok pok on my helmet, splashing my jeans with fat spots. My fingertips and ankles stung with the cold, and my whole right shin. I was red-faced and damp by the time I got here.

I got here and it’s been the sort of day where I’m not sure what I’m doing at my job besides accruing experience, and by experience I mean days spent sitting at this desk. Last night I was planning a trip to Rio, a trip that will last one single week, and it makes my stomach turn – to fly all that way and not get lost in Brazil, not take long bumpy bus rides and pick up Portuguese riddled with errors. Instead I am going down and checking it off, turning around before it’s touched me. All because of vacation days. This is not what I am supposed to be doing. But raise your hand if you feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. I am not supposed to be rationing vacation days and I am not supposed to be drinking Diet Coke. Drinking Diet Coke makes me feel like a bitch.