The night when souls wander freely is fast approaching. The sky is clear and in this chill morning I can even read the constellations. Lights in sickly orange and violet shine eerily from rustling bushes and the withered, brittle leaves falling sound like footsteps following stealthily close behind. A black cat steals silently across my path, but I am not startled; I look behind to see if I am still alone in the black stillness. My gaze reaches out for the lone street light still beyond my rapid shuffle through the dark street. Was the crack in the wall always there or is it opening just for me. Finally. .. the bus. “Good morning, how are you?” “Great”, I say, as if nothing happened.
Author: eyeamdust
And now take the time to write, knit, weave and crochet... I eat good food, I walk the dog and I care about what people think about everything. While I have shelter and sustenance, I am calm and peaceful, but I'm not assured that the serenity I live in now will abide if I were to lose my income and lived under a bridge. I do not live under any illusions that life is fair. I have had too much heartbreak to believe in justice and so have you.
Love that Leads to a Breakdown ~ When Death Comes
If loving and being loved leads to the point of a mental breakdown, then let the breakdown commence.
There is nothing more lovely and wonderful than to love and to be loved. Yes, when a loved thing dies, no matter what the form it takes, be it human or animal, tree or rock, a work of art in the form of something to touch, smell, see, taste or hear be it physical or ethereal, there is nothing more transcendent than to have loved or have been loved by that thing.
Moon Madness
Tonight nature drove me nearly mad and speechless. Scott and I went to Rocky Butte so he could capture the sunset for a project he’s working on. We climbed the stone stairs to Joseph Hill Park. Lovers lay in the soft clover scented grass; some embraced, kissing on the surrounding rock walls. A man had set up his camera pointing east.
From Rocky Butte one has a near 360° view. I knew that the sunset would be spectacular but I did not know that the full moon would rise out of the south side of Mt. Hood as the earth turned. At 7:50 something, it’s ghostly paleness appeared.
I stood up from laying in the cool, green grass and was awe struck at its size, at the glory of it. I could not tear my eyes from it as it rose higher and higher, brightening as the sky darkened, as the sun, to the west, sunk behind the hills surrounding Portland.
Turning toward the sun, its brightness burned its image into my eyes, so when I turned to watch the moon again, its glow was superimposed on the eastern sky. I didn’t know whether to cry or shout out loud to the moon and the sun that I loved them.
These photos do not begin to tell the story I want to share. They were taken on an old ipad, so forgive their quality. Let your imagination soar but know that even then, unless you were there, you will not know what I know.
2017 August 17
Winter days begin with dark morning bus rides that travel downtown then wind up a forested hill to the
Surprise at the Leon Hotel or Don’t Trust Me with Your Children.
Once I invited two college-age girls to go with me to Leon for a rodeo and fair. It was a bus trip of a few hours from Queretaro, where we were living and going to university, to Leon. Every week, starting on Thursday, I would take a bus and travel all over Mexico without reservations or familiarity. It’s one thing when you’re willing to risk your own life, which is how I lived at that time, but these two inexperienced young girls might have deserved better… anyway, I digress.
Having accepted my invitation, we arrived at the bus station and we hopped in a taxi. My MO was to choose a hotel from my handy, dandy travel book; usually (emphasis on usually) it worked out fine. No reservations or planning ahead for me. Giving the name of the hotel to the taxi driver, he asked me if I was sure about my destination, explaining that he could take me to a better place, intimating that what I had chosen was not very “safe”. But, like a good taxista, he took me where I wanted to go. I thought that this hotel was not one in which he had a deal. I insisted that I knew what I wanted.
When we arrived, he ran into the entrance ahead of me warning the front desk that, “She speaks Spanish”. Taxi drivers get kickbacks for taking tourists to certain hotels. These might be owned by family or friends or are strictly speaking, “a negocio”, business, as usual.
The lobby was maybe 16ft by 16ft with a low ceiling. A man was running a wet mop around the floor. Behind the desk was a woman who was the epitome of a Spanish madam. She was in her 60s, hair pulled back tightly in a bun at the back of her neck, eyebrows plucked into high coal-black arches over large saggy brown eyes, ringed in black eyeliner and deep red lipstick. She sat rod straight with her dress pulled tightly across her ample body, revealing a large bosom and bloated stomach. She looked at us with a side-long glance and raised her expressive eyebrows as if confused and a little like she smelled something rotten. She gave us a price and a room. I paid up front. A woman in her 40s and two teenage girls? Not suspicious at all.
Marcelina (a fictitious name) handed me a key and sent us alone into a maze of dark hallways with single bare bulbs, hanging from frayed wires, to light our way. I should have walked out right then, but I was not one to run from a sketchy situation.
We found our room. The room number was scratched into the door jam, apparently, with a knife blade. The slatted door was not secure, having gaps on all four sides, not unlike most of the places I stayed. OK, so this is a bit more sketchy than I liked.
It was dark in the room. I blindly searched for and clumsily found the chain hanging from the one dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The one window was nailed shut and covered with a dust-covered shutter hanging by one nail. The one bed… for the three of us… was dirty and stained and the room smelled of smoke, mildew, and Pinesol. The bathroom was, as is usual in Mexico, a “wet” bathroom, meaning a shower head came out of the wall with no surrounding glass or curtain. There was no toilet seat, also normal in Mexico, and no toilet paper, also not unusual. The walls were moldy and the wastebasket had not been emptied. In most of Mexico, one does not flush anything down the toilet but human waste. Their septic systems cannot handle anything more. I dared not look in the waste basket’s direction. Besides the bare lightbulb hanging in the room, there was another in the bathroom hanging from exposed wires. Still, I was not deterred. The cockroaches were nowhere to be seen… yet.
After a few minutes, we’d had enough of looking around, so we decided to take our backpacks with us and set off for the fair. We had a great time watching vaqueros on dancing horses and wranglers wrestling calves to the ground and dancing to music played by mariachi bands. We ate spicy tacos and hot, sweet churros and drank beer and tequila.
We returned to our room quite late. It became obvious on the taxi ride back to our hotel, that we were staying in the red light district. As we entered, a man sat at the desk… the entrance was dark except for very dim light. He greeted us with a curt, “hola”, without looking up.
Walking down the dark hallways we sensed that we were probably in danger, at the least of being robbed. We were dusty from all day at the dry, and dusty fairgrounds and greasy from too many tacos and sticky from the churros but none of us was willing to undress to shower. We huddled on the bed with our backpacks, talking until the two exhausted girls stretched out, no longer able to stay awake.
I sat up all night as men knocked on our door, men whistled strange bird-like calls, footsteps continued in the hallway all night, doors opened and closed, there were an occasional scream and a crash or two and loud voices and the knocking on doors continued. I could see activity outside our door through the slats. I hoped that no one would come crashing through.
Eventually, the morning came. We had “slept” in our clothes and were wrinkled and dirty, not even having brushed our teeth. We dragged ourselves off the bed and into the hallway, grateful that we had survived the night. I returned the key to the desk and the “madam” was there again. She asked how we had slept, with an odd, half smile on her lips… more of a snarled sneer. I’m sure she had seen worse of what she was imagining had gone on in our room… a perverted middle-aged woman and two teenage girls.
We found a cafe for fresh orange juice and coffee before we caught the bus back to Queretaro. We were tired and dirty. I had an unforgettable time. Needless to say, Gabby and Malia never traveled with me again. After one adventure with me, no one ever asked for a second trip. But I delivered them safely home, no worse for the wear and maybe a bit wiser.
I was normally a lone traveler. That didn’t bother me at all. I often slept in open air bus stations, my backpack as my pillow. I would hop a bus heading, I didn’t care where. I would end up where the sea was different shades of green and blue; I walked on white, hot sand and lounged under waving palm trees. I felt that if I died, I would die happy.
I don’t travel like that anymore. I’m now 20 years older and I like my comfort and security… and a pool and showers and lights and toilet seats and toilet paper and a clean bed and relatively quiet and no cockroaches. Gawd, I’ve gotten boring in my old age. LOL.😛
Stay tuned for more true story adventures on Mexican Memories.
It’s Dark (and can be scary) in the Old Library
I reluctantly started work in the archives on the university campus.
This was not my choice. As I was taking classes in archival management, I was hoping for more diverse collections to work with as an internship but I was convinced, no, it was more like I was ordered, by my instructor/mentor that I would be going to work at the second oldest medical school on the west coast. I said no and he said yes. If I was going to pass my class, I had to acquiesce.
I was introduced to the part of the collections stashed in the Old Library, stored in a small dark and damp room of concrete block with a 12-foot ceiling and one opaque drafty window. There was a dim bulb hanging in the middle of the room and plastic sheeting covered the wooden cabinets. Before reaching what was known as the North Tower, I could smell the musty contents from the weird landing that twisted between the third and fourth floors, leading up 6 stairs to a locked door.
All disappointment faded and my excitement grew when I was shown what treasures were hidden there and I imagined the work that lay ahead.
I soon learned that there were other collections hidden in a locked room on the 4th floor known simply as 440. To reach that room from the North Tower, one must pass through a long room with windows along one whole wall facing east with a view of the sunrise over Mt. Hood. And lining the west wall were several small offices.
Then there was room 300, just below the 5 steps that led to the North Tower, this was to become my office. There was another storage space that held the museum collection in the Meier & Frank warehouse off campus.
The Old Library, built in 1939, was a maze of hallways, passageways, staircases, many, many rooms, partial floors, small and large storage areas and closets. It was now only used to store books in its stacks, for my office, and for the archives storage.
One enters the Old Library through the wide double bronze doors whose foyer leads to a beautiful auditorium which is frequently used for various events.
Up a few stairs from the foyer is the Great Hall, a wide lobby, with four beautifully appointed rooms that were rarely used when I first went to work there. In this wide room there once sat the Library director and staff. The rooms were set up for student study and behind the reference desk was a door leading to 4 floors of stacks and study carousels with a single elevator.
By walking through the Great Hall, one comes to another set of double doors that leads down a few more steps to another smaller space. At one end is another set of double bronze doors leading to an outside staircase and out to a courtyard surrounded by structures of various architectural design.
Just directly in front of the Library is the first of the structures built to house the medical school, then known as the Medical Science Building (1919). In this room, there is a staircase just before going out the doors that lead down to other study rooms, storage areas, and locked doors and small passageways and outside access doors.
Going back to the foyer, there’s also a small stairway leading down to locked doors leading to locker rooms and into the stacks and access to the single elevator and outdoor access.
From the long room, I described, on the 4th floor, one can access a hallway with rooms for study. In this hallway, there is a long staircase that leads to the Great Hall. There is also a dumbwaiter.
On the lowest level, accessed by staircases and the elevator is a subfloor, appropriately called The Pit, which also houses some of the archival collections.
At one time the Library was a very busy place. Built in 1939, it served until the early 80s when the Library moved into a new “high tech” building but leaving many books and journals in the stacks.
For a time, an access services employee sat at the reference desk to page books being requested. The stacks were closed. A rumor circulated that someone was urinating in the stacks. Soon the library quit staffing the reference desk and books were paged twice daily by a student. Occasionally, copies were made by a library assistant on the first floor where some older copiers were housed.
Students no longer used the library, faculty nor staff visited the once vibrant structure. It was quiet except for an occasional visit from maintenance or housekeeping or when researchers or donors came to visit me. It was just me having this old beautiful building.
Staff who paged books and who once sat at the reference desk often reported hearing strange noises in the stacks, doors opening, and closing, footsteps, and the elevator doors opening and closing and the elevator then going up and down on its own.
At this time, the buildings doors were left unlocked. Sometimes university staff hid away from their duties taking afternoon naps on the couches in the small space on the first floor. Rarely, I would find maintenance folks wandering around, or security walking through but this was unusual and sometimes startling since I was accustomed to the building being empty and quiet.
I arrived everyday at 7:00. This day was no different. This was before I owned a cell phone and the only accessible phone was in my office. The office door was always locked and secured with an old alarm keypad, which occasionally malfunctioned. The office held our highly valuable historic book collection. If I was stepping out, I never left the door unlocked not even for a minute.
This day, like every other day, I walked through the entrance, climbed the short flight of stairs, walked through the empty Great Hall and up the flight of stairs on the far end of the large room to my office where I turned off the alarm, unlocked the door and reached to turn on the lights. I opened the blinds and turned on the computers.
Nothing seemed different than any other day. The Library was empty and silent and mostly unlit. I always felt that it was a shame that this remarkable building was left virtually abandoned. I would have loved to have turned it into a museum, bringing back our large artifact collection from off-campus.
I felt honored to be responsible for the large collections that our first librarian, Bertha Hallam, had collected over many decades. I often thought of her and felt that in actuality, I was responsible to her for the care of the collections. I was sometimes distraught to find that proper care had not been given to the physical evidence, the extant history of this grand institution.
I proudly cleaned, organized and described the collections now in my care. I forgot my objections to working here and delved deeply into each and every piece of paper, artifact, photograph and textile. I was happy everyday to go to work to discover what was in a box, on a shelf or table or on the floor or in a closet, in the North Tower or in Room 440. I happily climbed ladders, crawled around on the floor and lifted boxes weighing over 50 lbs. I had found my niche, no mind what disturbing medical apparatus, ghoulish photographs, mold, dirt, sharps and chemicals I might encounter. And, my skills and experience had earned me the trust of administration to work alone and independent of oversight. Hence, my aloneness in the empty old building.
I didn’t need much. I needed only computers and software, scanners and materials in which to house the collections. I was given a budget and I was satisfied to fill everyday with my work.
So back to this one day; a day that left me shaken. I left the office and walked up the stairs and into the long room heading to 440 to retrieve some boxes. I had locked the office door behind me and walked through 2 more doors that shut behind me, walking into the hallway outside of 440. I didn’t notice anything amiss, I put the key in the lock, opened the door and walked in, and as it closed behind me and before I could turn on the lights, something or someone grabbed the door handle and began to violently shake the door trying to open it.
It was immediate. I had seen no one, nor heard footsteps nor had I felt a presence… nothing. How could it have been there, so close on my heels, to grab the handle just as the door closed behind me.
Thank goodness the door had latched because whatever was out there was relentless. Something was trying to tear the door from its hinges and from its lock. It shook and shook.
The noise was thunderous as I fell to the floor. I wanted to hide out of view from whatever was trying to get in. If it stopped long enough to peer through the small window in the door, I did not want to be seen. I was certain that whoever or whatever was out there, had no good intentions. I crawled on my hands and knees on the dusty floor to a small closet room on the near wall. I dared not turn on the light. I was in near total darkness. I cowerd there while the door continued to shake, while the noise grew louder. I couldn’t think of what I could do. I could only imagine what it could do. There was no escape. I was trapped. There was no phone, no way that I could let anyone know the trouble I was in. My heart was beating wildly in fear. I waited for what felt like at least a half an hour. Whatever it was, it wanted in badly. Why? Why hadn’t I seen or felt or heard anything as I approached the room? Thoughts were assaulting my sense of reasoning. I was imagining the worst.
The shaking slowly subsided. The shaking grew less intense. There were intervals where the shaking stopped entirely then would resume once again. I really had no idea how long the assault had been going on. I had no watch and my sense of time was distorted by fear.
Eventually the shaking and noise stopped suddenly… as suddenly as it had begun. I was paralyzed and afraid to move. What if whatever was out there was waiting for me to emerge from the dark room? What if this was its strategy?
No one was going to come to find me. No one would suspect my predicament. If someone came to my office to find me gone… which was not unusual… I could have been anywhere. I could be meeting with donors or researchers. I could be in any one of our storage areas. I might have been out for coffee. More than likely they would have called first and finding me gone would have tried later.
When I got my wits about me, I began to think a little clearer as my heart rate slowed. But my mind was reeling. If it was maintenance or facilities personnel, they would have spoken to me in the hall before I entered the room, wouldn’t they have? If it was a human of any ilk, I would have seen or heard them, wouldn’t I have? How long can I sit here, hiding and waiting?
At some point my courage arrived. Leaving the light off, I stood up and crept along the wall until I got to the door. I leaned until I could see out of the small window. What would I do if I saw something looking back at me? What would I do if it was hidden in the hallway or in any of the small rooms, or on the stairs or in the doorway of the stacks area or hidden in the janitors closet? What should I do?
One thing I did know is that I couldn’t stay where I was. I would have to be brave and make a run for it. I took one last look through the window and put my hand on the door knob. I jumped back. I thought I heard something. I felt a chill.
I reached out again for the door knob and turned it slightly as I continued to peer through the window. Nothing. No sound. Nothing to see. I turned the knob all the way until I heard the latch release. Still nothing to see. At that moment, I gave the door a push so hard it hit the wall. I was hoping that if any thing or any one was there, I would hit it hard enough that I would have a chance to escape.
I bolted left to the stairwell leading down to the Great Hall, to the foyer to the front doors leading out. When I reached the stairs outside at the entrance to the building I fell on the last step, hoping no one saw me.
I was seriously shaken. Nothing about this made sense. I didn’t move for awhile until everything slowed down. Eventually I called Administration and insisted that I be given a pager and that they install a phone in that room. I gave the excuse that “anything” could happen with me alone in the building. And “anything” had already happened. It wasn’t long and I had a pager and a phone.
Though I love to tell this story, and it is true, it still doesn’t make sense. Beware those who dare pass through these hallowed halls.
I’ve Never Lived Any Place Long… Part I
…at least since I have been on my own. As a child, I lived in the same house, except for two years, until I left home at 18 years.
From the age of 18 years old until I was 21, I lived in many places while letting myself marinate into a form of maturity or immaturity. I lived in two different apartments downtown that were lovely vintage brickers with oriental carpets, built-ins with pull out Murphy beds, small kitchens with high ceilings and gas stoves and tiled bathrooms with clawfoot bathtubs and flocks of resident cockroaches. I reached my apartment on elevators like cages that climbed their way up to the 3rd floor.
This is where I started to never smoke. As a young teenager, I looked forward to staying up late to watch Johnny Carson and to smoke when and if I wanted. These represented to me the symbols of adult freedom. So, the first thing I did when I left home was to buy cigarettes. They made me feel sick but I tried to ignore the nausea, and I tried and tried to be grown up. My boyfriend, on one of his visits, threw my whole carton of cigs out the window. I was saved from a life of addiction by him and a stranger who picked up this gift that fell from the sky before I could reach the street. Apparently, there were no other cigarettes to buy in the whole city.
It was here that I began to smoke a lot of weed and I dropped my first acid. This was a major turning point in my life from which I have never regretted nor have I returned from whence I came. It was this that blew my mind and I have never been able to see the world without realizing that there is much more than meets the eye. It was this that set me on a path of self-discovery. Mind you, I have yet to fully discover myself, but I was well on my way from this moment.
While living here, I worked at Import Plaza. The Nieto Brothers were wonderful to me. Shortly after I was hired, they began to groom me as a buyer and they entrusted me with the keys to open the store each morning. I violated that trust as I began to steal from them, both merchandise and money. “It is grand larceny”, said the detectives as they walked around my small but lovely apartment on 14th avenue. They ignored my marijuana stash, as they rummaged through my drawers, as I pointed out the stolen goods: smoked imported oysters, a rattan king chair from Indonesia, candles, and tapestries.
The brothers didn’t prosecute. I was released on my own recognizance. I was certain it was because I sent them a small card with Jesus ascending into heaven on gold-rimmed clouds. I wrote on the back, “If I have any debts to pay, I’ll pay them to God”. They called, just to say that they would not recommend me for a job working with money, but that I could use them as a reference. I didn’t work again for many years
From here, the chronology gets foggy, though I remember the houses well. Perhaps, it doesn’t really matter the order in which I moved from house to house but the interest might lie in the number of houses in which I lived in three short years. As I have looked back on this time in my life, it is hard to believe that it was only three years from the time that I left home, to the time when I was married and things slowed down considerably but not all together.
For a time I lived in a small Victorian House on NW Thurman St. with a couple that I had known since high school. We smoked weed and cooked and watched the two raise their little son. The house was dilapidated but like many old Portland houses, it was charming with lead glass windows, hardwood floors, and wooden gingerbread decorating the exterior. The story goes that as I was taking a bath when a part of the exterior wall in the bathroom collapsed exposing me to the elements. I don’t remember the incident but it seems that others do. I didn’t stay long at this house.
For a bit, I lived in an apartment just down the street on Thurman Street. Greg Brand, a local musician, while visiting, commented that the appliances lined up against one wall looked like an appliance store. It was true and though the apartment was in a refurbished Victorian, the owners had violated its integrity. Nevertheless, I was terribly embarrassed and Greg didn’t get what he had come for and I didn’t stay there long, as I couldn’t get comfortable with the fact that I was living in an appliance display.
From there, Laurel Lee, the prolific author, whom I met while working at Import Plaza, suggested that I could possibly stay with Jim Wilkins and Roger McKay in SW just across Babur Blvd. from Lair Hill Park. Listening to Jim play his giant 12 string guitar was magical but I couldn’t love him. Roger, an artist, had suspended his bed so it swung 6 feet from the floor of his bedroom. I cooked for us on a wood stove and we heated with wood. We lived in a lovely but funky little Victorian type house in the Lair Hill district. Lots of hippies had moved into this neighborhood and a local artist, Mike Dewade, was our neighbor. Art and music were being made everywhere. Bob Dylan’s first album with the Band blew our minds. 
Here, I contracted, first, a major case of the crabs. Then, after a night of eating with friends while sitting in a ritual circle and drinking peyote tea at a neighbor’s house, I came down with a bad case of hepatitis. I was carried home where I lay unconscious on a mattress on the floor while friends brought me tea and soup. Eventually, I woke up in great pain, I crawled to a pay phone and called Mom, who sent a taxi to take me to the hospital. As it turns out, I had the worse case of hepatitis that St. Vincent had ever seen to date. My liver did not recover for decades.
I soon moved out to an apartment in a house in NW Portland where two friends were living. We slept in one bed in a small bedroom. While smoking from a hookah, the feds came to the door looking for another friend who was dodging the draft. They’d heard he was living at this address. While the hookah belched smoke in the middle of the table, I threw my bell-bottomed clad legs over the pile of freshly cleaned marijuana on the table in front of me. The feds barged in the open door and came in the back door, looking for the draft dodger. If they noticed the weed stashed everywhere they seemed not to care. Mind you, this was probably 1967-68. Weed was a 1st class narcotic at this time. We were lucky that they didn’t have a search warrant for drugs or we might have all gone to jail.
Then together with several other people, I moved to a very large house, still in NW on Hoyt St. It wasn’t long that I stayed here. This was not a place for the living but rather a place where there was a death wish, it seemed, in every heart. Serious drug folks lived here. I remember seeing a friend tie off with the toaster cord. The upstairs bathroom leaked into the once elegant front door entrance way. One of the residents mounted a flag made of his own underwear on the roof and would stand and salute his homemade flag every morning. There was no sense in buying groceries. People weren’t eating and anyone who wanted my food would eat it. I got a German Shepard while I lived here. It was hit by a car and died.
From here, I moved to a small house in SW Portland, on Corbett Street, where two friends lived. I don’t remember much about this house and I didn’t stay here long but I do remember that here a strange man came into the kitchen handing out pills. He was no hippie. He was a drug pusher. He handed me some pink pills saying, “May the bird of paradise fly up your nose”. Why I dropped one, I’ll never know, but once I came down, I flushed those pills down the toilet. I was not looking to get high. I was looking to get clear. I thought we would stay here, but it was not to be.
The Vietnam war was in full swing and we hated it. I knew a classmate from high school who shot off his toes to stay out of the draft. Others were fleeing to Canada, while still others were hiding out in Portland, getting high, protesting, making art and music, trying to find meaning and trying not to be scared.
Next was a move to a very large house of four apartments perched high above the city on SW Montgomery St. Large windows gave us panoramic views of all Portland. The house is now gone, demolished to make room for highways 405 and 26. What a shame.
It was here that my brother drugged up to appear before the induction center officers. He was rejected, as were many other of my friends. (How they got their 4F classification is a story for another time). Here I sold marijuana making trips to San Francisco to score. Here I learned that dealing was not for the faint of heart and that those big dealers knew nothing of peace and love. But back in Portland, life for me was gentle. I sat on a couch one night looking over the city. We had dropped some acid and there were times when high that all of the answers to life’s questions were clear. The problem was that when one comes down, one can rarely remember the revelations, the insights. The key then might have been to have someone recording the thoughts and epiphanies that those that are high are having. I can recall clearly a thought that on this night, I announced to all that were within earshot, “Loud tomato raisin”. If only I had a clue. After 50 years, nothing of any consequence comes to me from this message given to me on that night.
But things were changing or I was getting a hint that life was not all roses or it never was. Reality came to my doorstep. We were sorely aware of the inequalities; we saw clearly that oligarchs were running not only our country but the world and that those who own the resources are in charge and it had always been so. I was falling into a pit of despair. I was waking up and I was not happy with what I was seeing and there didn’t seem to be any way to change things. People were trying but the expectation that anything would change was dying inside of me and I could see that others were losing hope, as well. If I was unable to effect change, then what am I doing? What should I be doing? So what if I was searching for “truth”. So what if many sages had asked the same questions for millennia? What changes had they been able to effect?
I walked all over Portland’s streets, and through its parks, went to concerts by Barefoot John Henry, The Great Pumpkin, the US Credenza, the Grateful Dead that were held in the Masonic Temple and the Pittock Building and the Crystal Ballroom and in the Folksinger Coffee House. I was introduced to psychedelic music and light shows. I walked barefoot and read, smoked weed and made and shared food with friends. I was looking for answers but so was everyone else. The Vietnam war raged on. People were dying everywhere to see civil rights instituted and honored. Women were seeking equality. The war machine could not be stopped. It fed our economy; we needed war to survive, and fossil fuels fueled the wars. The ugliness of Manifest Destiny was alive and well. I was giving up the pipe dream of a world where peace and harmony and responsibility towards one another and our planet existed.
We cried and we marched and we tried to live differently. I cleaned the weed from the plastic wrapped kilos I brought home from San Francisco, measuring it generously into baggies called lids, while hand rolling fat doobies to turn on my friends. I put the lids into a large, Oriental vase by the front door where people could come and grab a lid and leave me $10.00. I stopped selling when on a run, I had to meet the dealers on the docks of the bay. It felt criminal, it felt dangerous. I stayed in a dirty crash pad in Haight Ashbury, sleeping on the floor beside a man with a gun. Someone had died there the night before. On the way home, the car died and we threw the kilos off the side of the road while we slept in the car waiting two days for a part to arrive at a small podunk town gas station without a motel in the middle of nowhere. When I got home and broke open the weed, it was nothing but stems, seeds and shake. That was it. No more. Not for me. This was not getting high. This was about crime. Things were changing.
Where did I go from there? It’s vague but I remember living in North Plains for a bit. This was not for me and I got out of there pretty quickly even though there were animals and a lovely organic garden. It just never felt like home. So far, nothing had ever felt like home. I remember as a child feeling the same way. I have never felt like I knew where home was.
Then there was a place in Estacada, a small house on a creek in the country. What stands out to me there was a wildly ornate wood cook stove decorated in bright chrome and polished to a jet black, where I made fresh bread and my friend made pies. It was here I began to eat a macrobiotic diet… just brown rice and onions. I would lay down by the gentle creek, breathing in the fresh air and watching the clouds scuttle by overhead.
We made a huge mistake here. I’m not sure I can or should even relate this story here. Perhaps I will save it for another time and another place.
We had an old car and a Vespa. The car had a back seat like a living room couch and I would lay back in the lap of luxury while my friends drove us to and fro along the country roads. Gas was 25 cents a gallon in those days and we could drive for miles and miles on pennies. We would ride the Vespa to pick up bottles and cans to be able to fill the gas tank.
From here, I don’t know how or why, I moved to Grandma’s for a short while. While living here, we heard that the producers of the movie, Paint Your Wagon, with Lee Marvin, was hiring hippies as extras. So off we went to Baker City where we followed the roads to the movie location. I left Portland wearing a short flowered skirt, a t-shirt and a sued leather jacket and a pair of sandals and carrying not a lot more than that but perhaps a sleeping bag.
We hitchhiked over the Cascades and into the Oregon steppes. The landscape flattened out and you could see for miles. A local rancher in a pickup dropped us off in the middle of nowhere where ranches of thousands of acres stretched out forever. We stuck out our thumbs. Suddenly, you could feel the temperature and the barometric pressure drop and black clouds gathered on the horizon. There was nothing we could do but hope for our next ride. Lightning and thunder crashed from the clouds and rain was fast approaching. The late afternoon light turned rapidly into an ominous sky.
I was suddenly cold in my measly clothes. I wished out loud that I had a pair of pants and a bandana. A car was approaching but going in the wrong direction. As it got closer, we could see that it was a long black limousine with blacked out windows. As it approached, it drew up next to us. A little old woman stepped from the back seat of the car and said, “Here, I thought you could use these”, as she handed me a small packet. I took it from her and she got back in the car and drove off again disappearing down that long stretch of empty road. You guessed it. It was a pair of pants that fit me perfectly and a bandana. I had those pants and bandana for many years. I don’t remember what happened to them.
The storm bore down turning the sky as black as night, drenching us in a flash until we looked like two drowned rats. Why hadn’t I wished for a car? There was nothing to do but to stick out our thumbs again and hope for our next ride.
Before long the storm passed overhead and the air cleared and it was crystal clear as dusk fell. We saw the lights of an old pickup truck slowly approaching going in our direction. When it pulled over we were surprised to see an elderly man at the wheel. We asked him where he was going and he said, “home”.
We had hoped to get as far as Baker City but we were not willing to turn down his offer to take us home to feed us dinner. When we saw the small ranch house, we thought we had stepped into a fairytale. He invited us in and his wife, a perfect salt and pepper shaker match if we ever saw one, welcomed us to sit at the table, “dinner is ready”, she said with a gentle smile on her face, as if she was expecting us. We had fried chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans and we ate until sleepy eyes told them we needed a place to sleep.
We had been on the road a long time and had been soaking wet way too long. We washed up and she showed us to our bedroom. There was a feather bed, with feather pillows and a feather handmade quilt to cover up with. Really… she tucked us in and said sleep well and we will see you in the morning. We woke to the smell of fresh biscuits and eggs and bacon. I wonder who these people were. Were they real or had we really stepped into a fairytale? The old man took us to Baker City where we made our way into the woods where the movie was being filmed. What happened on site is a tale for another time.
When we returned to Portland, I stayed with Grandma for another short while until I moved into the House of Rainbows. What is the House of Rainbows? How in the world did I get there? I had seen enough at the movie site to make me want to change directions but where was I to go? What was next? Enlightenment and not even personal peace or satisfaction were in weed or in LSD or in the music or in activism or in study or in denouncing my parent’s lifestyle or in any of the other avenues I had been down. I felt like I was at a dead end. I needed an open door.
The House of Rainbows was in NE Portland, one of the many houses that were eventually torn down to the ground and what a shame it was to have the many beautiful houses in the Albina District destroyed to make way for the Memorial Coliseum, Emanuel Hospital, and the I5 freeway. For a long time, as the city and private investors displaced hundreds of families, many houses sat abandoned. We salvaged several stain glass windows from these houses, which we have to this day.
Obviously, it was called the House of Rainbows because of the many stained glass windows that reflected a myriad of colors throughout the house. Many young people lived here as did I for a short time. We were one of the many “hippies” invited to go to Maranatha Church by a young man who felt it was his mission to proselytize the “flower children”, the lost generation. Since I had been a spiritual seeker for years. I say spiritual seekers meaning that I wanted something different than what the American dream promised. We didn’t want a 9-5 or a materialist existence. We didn’t want war, we didn’t want exploitation, we wanted to see justice and fairness and love in the world. We weren’t necessarily seeing any of what we hoped for materialize so, when Adrian asked us to go to a church service, over and over again, we decided to go… why not? Let’s try the next thing.
Reverend Wendall Wallace was a fiery preacher and the music was really out of this world. When Rev. Wallace said, “Anyone who wants to come forward and accept Jesus as your personal savior, come on up.” I had smoked some pot and I was, as was customary for me, barefoot, in red corduroy pants and a beautiful red and blue button-up cotton shirt. I felt like I had tried everything else, why not this? I walked to the front, knelt at the altar and had an out of body experience. I was flying in the clouds so fast. I said, “Jesus if you are who you say you are, do something for me.” Something did happen. I don’t know what but I had been high enough that this was pretty much the same thing. When I finally stood, a rush of people hugged me including hippies and black church folk, everyone crying and laughing and shouting and singing. I was taken into a community that included a room in the House of Rainbows.
Staying in that house was not for me nor was staying in that church… or any church for that matter. But we had food and a roof over our heads until we figured out our next move. While there, I got married. I’m not saying that was a mistake but it was not my idea nor was it Jack’s. In fact, we probably never would have married. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have stayed in a relationship, or that we wouldn’t have had more children. We just would have been on a different trajectory of our own choosing.
Church put us on a difficult path for the next decade. And here is the place of divergence for this story. Yes, we continued to move about from house to house and from place to place but we were forced into a mold that we could never fit into. We could have left Christianity earlier but guilt is a devious and dangerous power.
The End of Part I
Part II upcoming…
There once was a girl… who became a mother
Can I be frank with you? I want to be perfectly honest. I’m not sure how to begin to tell the story, but I’ll just begin and here it is.
Do you know what he said to me; what my high school counselor said to me when I went in to talk about my life, my future after graduation? It was our senior year, and we were all being called in. Not even looking at me, but shuffling papers around his desk, he said that it didn’t matter because I would be pregnant before graduation anyway. That’s what he said. Just like that. What is he, like some prognosticator, like some fortune teller, like some shell casting vodou man, like some tea leaf reader?
Was it written on my face? Does he read it in my young body? Was it my short skirt? My pointed-toed shoes? The way I walked? The way I talked? Something particularly nasty about me?
But hey! Maybe he saw something, in spite of the fact that I loved learning, or was he a fucking jackass? Literature, writing, calligraphy, painting; I excelled at many things. I loved music and played in the band and orchestra, but my future was already determined according to my high school counselor. I was just going to get pregnant, so “get out and don’t waste any more of my time”. Anyway, that’s what I heard him say. Get out and don’t waste any more of my time. So I got out. No college applications, no discussion of financial aid, no what do you want to become, do… nothing. Nothing. Thank you, man. Thank you, a hell of a lot.
So, I made him a prophet. Maybe he later patted himself on the back that he had me pegged. But I showed him. I finished school and I could have gone to college; I could have done a lot of things. He doesn’t know… this is what he doesn’t know.
Aunt Wilma said. “You tell her or I will”, as she met me at the front door one day after school. Mom was in her bedroom. Aunt Wilma was important.
“Are all girls who get pregnant out of wedlock bad?” “YES!”, Mom said. She’s sorry now. She did the best that she could. She wants me to forgive her. I do. What I didn’t know then was that she had gotten pregnant while in or shortly after nurse’s training and given the baby, her baby, up for adoption.
Why couldn’t she have been more empathetic? Why couldn’t she admit that she could relate to me? Take me in her arms and cry with me. Why would she wait for another decade to tell me her story? I know why really I do. She was ashamed. Always, we are ashamed. We are shamed by language. Bastard. Illegitimate child. Unwed mother. What were the fathers called?
Instead, I was left alone with my heart, my heartbreak, my fear, my dilemma. I wasn’t ashamed. But Mom was ashamed to let anyone know. I was hidden away from the family, from the neighbors, the school, the church. Dad was silent but I know that I had disappointed him. That was papable. Mom knew how to deal with the dilemma.
I’d love to know what to say…
Johannah? I named her Johannah. I left her when she was only 3 days old. Put her into the arms of strangers. Don’t cry. Have never cried. I don’t feel anything. In the White Shield Home for Unwed Mothers. Alone. Bursting waters. Dead from the waist down. Shaved, slit open.
Tiny feet just like Jack’s, his fingers too. Fuck him. No! don’t fuck him. Why should I hate him? He’s only a boy like I’m only a girl. And I am not too young to know that love is not enough to make a family. We could make a baby but I had no way of knowing how to make a family.
What was my mother thinking to put me away like this? Hide me. Give away my baby. Old enough to get pregnant but not old enough to take care of the tiny baby, take care of the tiny baby.
Kristi has hers. She started at 15. Steve has his. He started at 17. I don’t have mine. Should I die for this? Suffer for this? Be punished? Shamed? It was out of my hands but I understood that this was right. Better for the baby. Better for me and Jack.
Apple Jacks in the morning. Girls masturbating in the night. Sobs coming from the cots in the overcrowded dormitory. There were too many girls. Cots were lined up one next to the other. Sobbing. We were crowded, pregnant and each with a sad story.
Visitors. I had only Mom; she came on Saturday and bought me a banana popsicle. It was never enough. I wanted, I thought I needed, tuna fish. She couldn’t come in because of so many secrets and the shame. She was forbidden. We ate in the car.
Salvation Army officers with stern faces. Classes about what? I don’t remember. I think I quit thinking then. While I waited, nothing. Just empty days and empty nights.
I borrowed dresses and waited for Jack to come. He never called but when I called him, if he answered, he made promises at my pleading. Me, I was waiting all day.
My house, my world was across the river. I could see my neighborhood from the windows. I was put on hold. They tried to shame me by the words that they spoke: repeating the words, illegitimate, unwed. Like that. But it didn’t work.
Does my body echo my pain today? I know that parents do damage unknowingly. Mom and Dad tried but what about me? What kind of damage have I done? How did that tiny baby feel? She knew only my heartbeat, my smell, the sound of my voice. She didn’t know I was only 17. Then she was in the arms of strangers. New smells, new heartbeats, new voices. Did she miss me? Did she yearn for me? For how long did she cry for me?
I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t even know if she was dead or alive. A prostitute or a doctor, or if she was loved and had siblings. Was she addicted to drugs or have children of her own. There was no way of knowing. I signed a paper saying that I would never look for her. My files would be sealed. She came from me, but I gave up all rights and blocked all roads that would lead me to her or her to me. I was told only that she was going to a family who raised horses and had a son but could have no more children. That was good enough, I thought. But that was a lie. A big, fat lie, even.
I left the home without her and went on with my life. I worked, married Jack, had two more children, went to school, divorced after 27 years, traveled, had other relationships. But what was Johannah doing?
Oregon’s 1957 statute sealed the birth certificates of adoptees though it violated the State’s Bill of Rights. These were and are stored at the State Department of Vital Records. This act reflected the social mores of the time, the social stigma of the shameful act of giving birth to an illegitimate child. This act would keep the secret whether the mother wanted it or not. A separate birth certificate would be created with the new name, new mother’s name, and new address and the original birth certificate hidden from the eyes of the adoptee.
In 1984 Oregon created the State Adoption Registry. But I didn’t know that. Initiative 46. So, as soon as I could, I updated my files at the Boys and Girls Aid Society, so if she wanted to find me, she could.
Throughout the years, some people in the family and some friends wanted me to look for her. More shame. More shame. What have you done? they said. I didn’t know if I should look for her. What if her parents hadn’t told her she was adopted. What if, what if, what if… Other women shared that the same thing had happened to them. The same shame, the same sadness, the same wondering. I did tell Hannah and Jesse, my other children, her brother, and sister when they were 11 and 9 years old, that maybe there might be someone looking for us and I told them the story. Hannah was mad, “If you can give one baby away, maybe you can give another baby away too,” she said adamantly as she stomped out the door. I don’t blame her. I understand that for her it was not at all understandable. Here stood her loving mommy, telling her that she had given away a baby to someone else and she didn’t even know where she was.
Many years passed. Fifty to be exact when I received a message on FaceBook. I’m helping my wife look for her birth mother. We think you might be her, it read. My heart skipped a beat. Maybe more than a single beat. I could barely breathe. I called Jack and said I had received this message but I thought it might be a scam. Jack had always been in favor of looking for our long ago baby. “Answer”, was his simple response. So I did. My baby would be fifty years old now. The response came back, and her name was Johannah. There was no doubt, our child had found us.
No, I had no trepidation. I had no fear. I had no reservations. I wanted to know her. I wanted to see her. We emailed each other and we both had so many questions. She had been looking for me for a long time but she found Jack first through Ancestry.com. Then Facebook confirmed that I was her mother, attached to Jack, though we had been long divorced, and Hannah and Jesse were there too. She was anxious and ready to know us. She wasn’t about to wait. Within two weeks, she was on the doorstep with her wife, Raquel.
Our family is complete now. I only regret that Mom and Dad and my sister Kristi will never know her.
Though I am sorry for any pain I caused my beautiful Tracy by handing her over to strangers. I could not have known the love and joy that she would bring to this family that missed her forever. Thank you, Tracy and Kelly, for not giving up.
The Reminder: A Night-time Visitor
I live alone in a large house. I sleep on the second floor just over the garage, with windows facing the street. I have been in bed for I don’t know how long.
I feel (or can I see?) something is coming in the window. My worst nightmare is about to happen. I’m going to be robbed, raped, maybe killed.
I’m paralyzed. I can’t move. I’m wide awake; I’m asleep; I’m dreaming. Something dark is coming in the window. It’s on the bed. A tabby cat is swirling on top of the covers. It’s huge, big and not entirely tame. I touched it and it disappeared from under my hand.
My heart is beating so loud, I can hear it. I feel cold. I want to move but I want to lie as still as I can. I pray this is not really happening.
Then I feel something larger get into bed, under the covers. I can’t move, I can’t scream, I’m terrified. It’s long, bony legs and feet touch mine. It’s naked. I try with all of my strength to talk. I keep trying to say, “Who are you?” But all that comes out is a croaking sound. I am slightly on my side, turned away, so I can’t see it. I try with all my might to turn over. I try with all my strength to talk but still, only raspy, throat grating sounds come out.
I don’t want it to touch me but it’s feet and legs are trying to rub against mine. I make one last effort to roll over and succeed, but too well. I find myself lying on top of a dark figure. The teeth are brilliant white and he/she is so dark that I can’t make out whether it is a man or a woman. I know it is human and real. It is in my bed and I’m staring into a face that I cannot see. But my body, I cannot roll off.
I finally am able to say, “Who are you?” It responded, somehow because the voice was not coming from the mouth, but it clearly said, “The Reminder”.
The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back. I was again, paralyzed. I felt the cat again on the bed, swirling on the bedsheets. I reached out and it was, again, a giant cat but this time it is orange and in an instant, it disappeared as before. I fell immediately to sleep as though dead not waking until late morning.
When I awoke “The Reminder” was so strongly embedded in my mind, I cannot shake it to this day. I have never been so afraid, even though I don’t believe it was evil nor did it come with mal-intent.
I think about this visitation every day and wonder what it means. What am I to be reminded of?
In response to you, dear voter. It’s not even close to all I want to say.
This post is in a short response to a Facebook post made by a friend. I won’t include it here but suffice it to say that it released a floodgate of words. This is relatively unedited, so you will read redundancy and ill-composed sentence structure, but I couldn’t care less.
Most of my readers enjoy reading about my misadventures and I am well aware that when I get serious, my “likes and comments” plummet. That’s O.K. I will continue to spout off when the mood strikes because I don’t want to stand silent when our voices are needed. And our voices need to be raised right now.
The post had to do with whether or not your opinion of people changes based on who they support politically. It suggests that it should not. This is my response to, first, the poster and then to a friend of the poster, who agrees with the premise of the post. The name has been changed to protect the innocent.
This is easier said than done, xxxx. The fact that a person would vote for someone who is a known racist, a misogynist, a liar, without empathy for the poor, who is homophobic, anti- immigration, anti-Muslim, etc., and continues to support such a person, says alot about that person who you consider to be a good person and worthy of your friendship. I have friends and family who support such people and I don’t believe I can still hold them in respect or in a close relationship. I choose not to associate with people who hate or support those who hate and are a danger to the health of this planet. I will take a stand against it and cannot look into the eyes of others who can tolerate for the briefest moment those who don’t stand against it be they acquaintances, long time friends, or family.
My comment was not meant as sarcasm. I cannot stand with others who vote for a government of hate, warmongering, whoremongering, scaremongering, and that is spending money, 25 billion dollars, on a wall, and increasing billions on the military, increasing coal mining, oil drilling, dismantling the EPA, using our SS monies to continue wars that serve no one but only to fill the pockets of the already rich, who lie about everything… the list goes on and on. For me to continue in a relationship with someone who supports “not my president” and his band of criminals would be like me saying, as Trump did about the white supremacists and neo- Nazis, that there are some fine people among them, that those who support them are fine people. That would be ludicrous and hypocritical. No. If one hates like he does and supports his policies and refuses to see what damage he is doing, I do not, cannot, see them as who I thought they were. I see them as what they are, in collusion with a would be dictator and so much worse.
I won’t compromise. I didn’t say I voted for Hillary. I didn’t mention my vote. Our history is bloody and I’m not just talking about the U.S. Genocide, oppression, inequality, injustice, xenophobia, are what characterize the human race. Power corrupts and an oligarchy we are. The constitution was written for the benefit of the white landowner. America was built on the backs of slaves and indentured servants, on the backs of the poor and dispossessed.
From our first steps on this continent, from England, Spain, France, Portugal, we have been trailing blood from our hands and feet. We continued the bloody wars that were taking place in Europe, fought over land and resources and we have never stopped. If you want an eye opener, simply read the basic facts on Wikipedia on the US history of war. Peace, freedom? For who? At what cost? What a joke!
The American dream has never been and will never be. It is an illusion created while we were sleeping. Ask a native American, ask a Black man or woman, ask the working poor, ask the homeless, ask the deported, ask the refugee, ask someone in prison on charges of marijuana possession, ask the dispossessed who can no longer afford rent and even less, buy a house, a car or take a vacation. Ask a single mom who has to choose between paying rent or buying food, ask a promising student who can’t afford college… Ask, ask, ask some questions. Then ask whether 25 billion dollars should be spent on a wall when our roads, highways and byways and bridges are crumbling. Ask why we need billions more spent on the military? Could it be because we are hated around the world? Could it be because the government is afraid of civil war if they take our Social Security, our health care, our homes, our land. Have you read why there was a provision for a militia in the constitution? Read it and weep.
Trump isn’t and never was a politician and he’s ignorant and selfish and worse. He’s just the fruit of the horror that we as a country, a white nation, have sown. Take a good look while you still can. And weep. Weep because the human race, at its core, is homicidal. We have devised ways to finish off life on this planet. What an accomplishment. Way to go guys. Let’s see which homicidal leader will start the final war. Let’s see what unregulated chemical manufacturer will pollute the last of our drinkable water and fertile land, what under-regulated oil company will drill and frack away our oceans and lands, what plastics will clog everything including marine life and forest dwellers.
I could go on, but I won’t. Read it for yourself. I don’t need to school you. You’ve heard it all before but you refuse to open your eyes. There’s no way that the will of the people prevails. Never has, never will.
Rise up people and face the torture chamber, the lynching rope, the chopping block, imprisonment, the firing squad, the reservation, or banishment, if you’re lucky. Many already have.
Rise up if you dare. Fill mass graves. Fill the newscasts and newspaper headlines with your death. All this while the rich line their pockets. Do you think they care about you? Why would they, except as you serve them? You answer that question.
eyeamdust 