Living a far-flung life

It’s been almost a year since I decamped to Portland and it continues to be one of the best moves of my life. Since that life, to date, has involved years’ long entrenchments in various cities around North America, as well as months in Mexico and Western Europe, I’ve had the opportunity to build and maintain connections in a variety of time zones…er, places. My work, too, involves, as it has for years, building and maintaining communities that exist in largely virtual spaces, with occasional face to face opportunities.

Because Portland is hardly at a cross roads of high travel for most of those dearest to me, my current life includes a lot of virtual socializing as well as in place reality. Some with whom I am emotionally close eschew the online world as somehow unreal, so I cope with that as gracefully as I can, and show in person when that seems to be the better part of valor.

This is how it works. The delights of the web that allow me to spend an hour of cost-free visiting with my son as we sit in flats located 3,000 apart, and that bring me into weekly chats with a friend who lives 3,000 miles in the opposite direction are balanced by needing to carve travel time and create a patchwork of transit forms to see another friend who lives only 40 miles out in the country from here.

I can do this because I enjoy where I mostly am, that is, where my changes of clothes and laundry room stay, where many of my books are shelved, where I am the one who chooses the prints and photos that hang on the walls. And I can wander off and know that the where of that off can be one where I know no one or where I can have dinner with someone I haven’t seen since last year or even last decade.

Time zones are like checkbook balancing: remembering when to add, when to subtract, when to allow for the interest of daylight savings and standard time changes, and the debits of those changing in one place and not yet where my here is on a given date.

A major aspect of the comfort of this place, to call home, is that no one seems to be ready to eyeball me as an outsider. Having lived in communities composed entirely of outsiders where this wasn’t true, I continually feel lucky to have discovered here.

And lucky that the infrastructure of the internet is, at least for now, fairly sound.

Serious upkeep

A couple weeks ago, my friend Readergrll and I were talking–as we have across a decade–about books that had marked our minds as children and how we’ve digested their cultural and political assumptions across the years. She’s currently on the hunt to identify an author she read assiduously as a black preteen in pre-Panther West Oakland and we’ve been spending moments here and there trying to track down who that writer was. We’re both librarians and the pursuit is fun, although, to date, unsuccessful because we have details that fit so many active juvenile novelists of the period: female, wrote about white working class kids and their two-parent families, and so forth…. We had each read dozens of such books and, we now know, took to heart their portrayals of what “insider” life was like and measured our own as challenged by all the points on which our own didn’t fit.

For me, one of the wonderfully exotic elements of these fictional windows on realities that didn’t square up to my own was how houses were painted, re-reroofed, gardened, and so forth by white men with shiny vans and long skillsets in the trades they wielded. Incidental storylines included newly painted steps, newly refurbished (low, friendly) fences, friendly masons who installed stone-lined pondlets in gardens, and so forth. Not my world. Not Readergrll’s either.

And then I moved to Portland and witnessed September’s slough of these very activities! Houses got painted, and beautifully, in the space of two or three days by one crew of white guys and the requisite shiny van, while in the same block an equally shiny van served as the mobile workshop for a carpentry crew redoing another house’s porch. Across the road, a steeple jack took down and repointed and rebuilt a chimney one day and a fellow expertly repainted an ancient iron fence a third day. These types of industry seemed to be happening everywhere I looked. The weather was glorious and just right for such projects. And the workers all seemed to be pros and proud of it and friendly. They weren’t casual day laborers being berated by a white boss in a language neither party could use clearly. They weren’t big bellied and slowed by alcoholism or jittery from lack of food or meth. Each project was undertaken beginning to end uninterrupted by intervening weeks of scaffolded buildings where work may or may not have begun and then had been delayed–or abandoned.

In fact, some of these worker bees weren’t even white guys–a few were men of color, fewer still and yet present were some women. Times have changed and inclusiveness in the trades being wielded seems to have taken some hold. Yet, the whole scene fit those stories we’d read half a century ago that neither of us had lived: sprucing up is undertaken seriously and those actually doing the labor look like the people who are the householders, instead of folks scraping by for their supper.

We still haven’t found that elusive children’s author and we’re still looking, Readergrll now back on the West Coast and me here where a whole bunch of dwellings are sporting fresh maintenance and a whole bunch of expert trades and craft workers have shiny vans.

Weather positivity

In the past few days, two very dear California friends dissed my local weather (yet again) with that sly tone that, whether applied to someone else’s choice of snackfood or politics, indicates both judgment of the other’s brain and alignment of the speaker with The Side of Right. Oy! It’s weather, people! And I happen to like it! And—

Negotiating different environmental conditions is exhilerating: change and adapting to change keeps me (and I wager a bunch of others with my leanings) alert and engaged in the here and now.

Mild complaints about a too high afternoon temperature or a too deep snow drift are transcient, the way one might complain that the post is late today or the store’s banana sale was last week.

Seasonal changes mean a variety of natural emergences: colors and color contrasts among plants and birds; sound variations as wind passes through full and bare trees; the aromas of crab apples and the scents of lilac, each exquisite, in part, because they are transcient.

I love my friends. I even enjoy visiting the Eternal Spring of the Bay Area, in part, because of that Eternal Spring aspect. However, weather isn’t an incidental to my enjoyment of life’s variety. I like the bounty of seasonal changes, the natural dramas of atmospheric events we haven’t (yet?) controlled, the invitation to discover new light patterns and walking conditions. I’m not in need of placation because I enjoy this stuff. I am weather positive.

My battle with lightswitches

Okay, straight up: my difficulties with light switches are my problem, not theirs.The more general problem I have with them is poor muscle memory. Now why my ordinarily good and swift muscle memory finds light switch placement to be its stumbling block, who knows. If I’ve taken a route on foot across a strange town or a strange neighborhood, I can find my way back along it with my eyes virtually closed.  I can pick up a wire whisk once every decade and my wrist falls to with proper whisking whispery like nobody’s business.

But let me walk up in any given room for a week, a year, three years, whatever, and I am still lost about the lightswitch placement. Or where the kitchen lightswitch lives, or…. And I am one of those scrupulous turn-off-the-lights-when-you-leave-the-room midcentury children so I am fumbling for my household lightswitches most evenings and mornings.

My current abode came with a couple extra tricky lightswitches, sort of like putting a paraplegic into an apartment with exceedingly narrow doorways. These switches operate the ceiling lights in the dining and living rooms (The dining room as it was designed, not as it’s used). Lights in both those rooms was atrocious. Each ceiling fixture is designed with three bell-shaped sconces, all pointing down and out into the room. And turning on the lightswitch in either room produced about three watts of gloom.

A houseguest and I sat drinking coffee one gloomy (outside as well as in) morning. The table was piled with lightbulbs which I hadn’t got around to switching in the offending lights, mostly because the lights are a good ten feet off the ground and my step ladder brings me to something around almost-six feet off the ground.

“You’re going into the bulb trade?” she asked.

“Nah, it’s these damn lights. They must have single watt bulbs in them.”

“Huh, really? Even when you turn up the dimmer switch?” she asked, reaching over and sliding the infinitesimal shred of plastic running along the side of the lightswitch.

Oh behold, there was light.

And there is every grey morning when I can find the lightswitch.

Festival of lights…uh huh

It’s a big news day here in my apartment: the new owner assumes control (and hasn’t yet communicated anything to tenants, including where to send the January rent); the former inhabitant of my actual apartment introduced herself (and proves charming as well as willing to step up standard apartment wall palette choices); and, um, the dimmer switches on the dining and living room overheads were revealed.

My out of town guest promises she can milk that bit of dimwittedness on my part for years to come. The lighting in those two rooms was atrocious. I’d got as far as buying new bulbs but the step stool(s) in my possession still left me about a foot below being able to change them out. In fairness, MLC is the fourth visitor I’ve had here and two of the others have been here of an evening and railed along with me at the dimness in the public rooms. Nobody else had the eagle eyes needed to spot the itsy bitsy plastic tab huddled up next to the switch itself.

“New light bulbs unnecessary,” MLC announced dryly. Slide. Bright light! “It’s a dimmer….”

Like wow. Kinda like me.

Home visits

My household goods were delivered here, from California, only two weeks ago and already I’ve settled into the place with almost alarming speed: curtains on the windows, books on the shelves, sweaters and socks where sweaters and socks go when they are between being worn and the laundry hamper. More significantly, having been away for yesterday’s holiday, I returned today feeling that very specific softness of “home again.”

And tomorrow apparently brings my fourth and fifth visitors already. They are less expected candidates than visitors one and two (with visitor three being visitor two’s companion first and visitor by happenstance). In the case of tomorrow’s company–a middle-aged and recently widowed man and his school teacher daughter–I am opening the apartment door rather literally along with the highly figurative but nonetheless real door to a time and place long left behind. He is the younger brother–a younger brother–of visitor number one, my childhood and now lifelong-since-childhood friend who lives in Boston. And Boston is where I was, with her yesterday. And where he came by in time to get her knives properly sharpened for turkey carving. He lives in Ohio, while his daughter lives down the road a bit from my friend, his sister.

To say “I knew him when” doesn’t even seem real to me. Yet, I knew him when he was nine years old and had already talked himself into a regular job at the local Texaco–local, that is, to his house and about two miles from where Youngstown Sheet and Tube still was cooking steel. A long time ago. And not so very far away in the great geography of things, but 800 miles isn’t next door.

Except tomorrow, when apparently I am to be hosting a bit of a timeline collapse and geographic contraction. That’s doable, for me, best when I am at home. And now I know I am.