Nomad

This is going to change Windsor Park as we know it. For the better. The much, much better.

Brunch

One significant thing happened yesterday: we had a brunch date. It was the first social engagement we've had since Christmas Day, and before that? I can't remember. It's been so long. We met David and Lisabeth at an awesome Thanksgiving feast my brother and some of his friends put together in Keene, and since they were visiting Portland they got in touch, and we had a great visit. (Food highlight: pea sprouts in the omelette, and very salty butter on the English muffins. Good coffee, too. Local 188. Remember that one.) There's so much to learn, because we don't know them hardly at all, except that she's from Corpus Christi and they met and married in Austin, Texas, before moving to New England in the late 1990s, but they felt like more intimate acquaintances. Plus we, or I, was hungry for social interaction. Misty and I are mostly hunkered down together, which has been a lot of fun & good for The Relationship, but brunch reminded me not to go too long or believe I can go too far without social time. What constrains me is a sense that, why meet anyone we'll have to leave? And building a social circle -- even a social dot -- can seem like a distraction from the work we both know we need this time to do. It's an old tension. But as it's familiar, it's workable. And as we're not overwhelmed with social opportunities, the tension remains productive and in balance.

Portland Rave

This guy raves about Portland:

Besides the good feeling I got from the conference, the charm of Portland Maine was the icing on the cake. Coming from Indianapolis, I am used to the standard set of strip malls, mega discount superstores, and chain restaurants. In fact, a visitor who was dropped in the middle of Indianapolis would be hard pressed to figure out where they were because, frankly, it looks like every other metropolitan city. Same billboards, same neon signs, same putrid grease smells, same everything. Not Portland. Granted, they had a few Starbucks but the real charm of this city comes from the small business owners who take great pride in their history and connection to the people. Walking downtown, I didn't see Office Max, instead I saw "Wigon's Office Supply" - a quaint supply outlet in the heart of downtown Portland. I did not see homeless people, I saw everyday people enjoying the sun and relaxing in the public areas with their well-groomed dogs.

Bike Box

Portland, Oregon is doing an interesting thing to promote bicycle commuting: making intersections safer by painting "bike boxes" on the road where cyclists can wait for traffic lights to change.

Calling it a "bike box" makes it seem really involved. Folks, it's paint on the street. Which is to say, 1) it's cheap 2) you don't have to physically change the road and 3) enforcement against auto drivers is going to be tough. Still, I don't see why Austin couldn't do something like this on its existing roads.

That said: apparently cyclists in Portland can be pushy, mean, and rude, just like drivers anywhere. But I'll never stop believing that cyclists are just more enlightened than auto drivers.

I believe that any one who wants a driver's license should have to spend 1 month riding a bicycle, so they can learn to give the proper right of way when they're driving their screaming tons of metal deathbox off to pick bluebonnets for baby. This is apropos of nothing; I just wanted to write "screaming tons of metal deathbox."

Food & Place

I'm in Chicago for business meetings and a conference, and food came up twice in conversations. The first one was about Chicago supermarkets, Austin supermarkets, Portland restaurants; the second was about the new word "locavore," or "eating around one's place," which is the Oxford University Press's new word of the year. On that theme of food versus place as a cultural focus of the moment, "locavore" blends the two -- though notice that it's the food that's chosen, not the place. And I fell asleep trying to think of the inverse word, where it's the place that's chosen for its food. I didn't get far -- I was tired -- but will continue thinking.

Another Windsor Park Blog

You might enjoy this Windsor Park blog: http://the-grackle.blogspot.com/

I am nearly certain that I used to walk the dog by these folks' yard and admire their plants.

Home

Being away from Portland for a few days prompted these thoughts, as did an email from one of my neighborhood interlocutors, who asked how someone so young could be so bitter about a place he's despised for so long.

My first reaction was, "bitter"? My second was, "despise"? I don't despise Austin. How could I despise Austin? But I have no defense against being called bitter, except to say that I think it's an emotion that's wasted on the old.

Here's the thing: Austin was the first place I felt attached to, the first place I called home. Before coming here, I'd been in New Hampshire, which I was eager to leave; before that, it was two years in Taiwan, a fascinating but forbidding place to which I was less attached than yoked. Before that, it was five months in the Twin Cities; before that, three years in the Berkshires at college, another forbidding place, though for other reasons; in between was a year in Colombia and summers in New Hampshire. Taiwan and Colombia played a huge role in other life decisions, and I dreamed about them constantly (and still do); if I hadn't lived there I wouldn't be who I am and am not. But they weren't home.

Before college, I went to junior high and high school in the Merrimack Valley, which I also wouldn't have called home. Or, I never let myself be attached. Reading Jack Kerouac and Andre Dubus made me more homesick than I thought it was possible to be, but when I left the place for college I was done with it. Anyway, all my friends had left. Maybe I was too lovesick and heartbroken to be homesick.

The place where my heart hung its hat was Colorado, in a 5-acre patch of land in the foothills of the Wet Mountains near Beulah, where my parents built a house in the 1970s, and in Beulah, where my sister and I went to school, and where we picked up water for our cistern in a 500-gallon tank on the back of the pickup. We lived there from 1974 to 1979. Not until I returned to Beulah in 1993 did I realize that the large orange rocks, the juniper scrub, the prickly pear cactus and the dirt road rolling off toward an inevitable mountain (usually Pikes Peak) was the landscape of my eternal soul. It was dust, not salt, that ran in my blood. Coyotes sang me to sleep. Cactus was my friend. Spending a summer in Alpine, in West Texas, where you can get lost in the desert washes tracing the ancient sediments and turning over stones, nailed that feeling true. Other places had entranced me. Colorado was the only one I felt a part of. From which I could fashion an origin myth. As if the place had cut itself and bled and I was that drop of blood. That's one of the reasons I felt so attached to Austin: it reminded me of Colorado.

You hardly ever met anyone who was actually from Austin; everyone was from somewhere else and happy to be there, because they were too creative, smart, tolerant, free, or ambitious than people where they came from could stand. Austin is an island in the middle of a forbidding sea, which also means that the people tended to greet the arrivals with a bit of disdain, worried there was too little space for everyone. Space, room, margins: that was all state of mind. If you shared the sense of relief, there was plenty of room, and you could afford to be generous.

I arrived in Austin with that same sense of relief. I felt as if I'd come home. I was 25 years old. So am I bitter? I lost that sense of relief. The feelings were reversed: I felt better when I was away, not when I was there. You can say I'm selfish: look, this city isn't yours, there are lots of people in it, it's a city, okay? But, my friend, the literature of the city has always engaged that tension between an individual's trajectory and the collective viewpoint and presses on that question of where the collective mind, and the objective eye's perspective, resides. So saying "my city" or "me and the city" is no contradiction and implies no possession. You could say, you needed a break, a time away. And I did that. But the more time I spent away the more time I wanted to be away.

Am I looking for another home? Given how I'm put together, I doubt it. The truth is, over the course of my life I've defined myself mainly by my departures. Not by my attachments. So I felt a little thrill when we drove back into the city. It was like visiting a new lover, someone you've met only six times or so. You don't know how long you'll be together, but you know that you will.