Posts tagged Oregon Stories

“You will never amount to anything. No one will ever like you and your life will be a hard road of disappointment.  You are unlikable. You are ungrateful.  You talk to hear your own voice.  You should just be quiet.”

I was witnessing the unraveling of my high school art teacher from my seat in the second row of the empty classroom, only the dim overcast daylight coming in from the windows to cast her into a shadow as she ranted from the front of the room.   

She had pulled me out of class for this individual lecture, the bell had rung, break had begun and ended, and the bell rung again signaling that we were both late for the next period, yet I was still in this seat, still being yelled at and still unbending in my stoic gaze, which sent a clear message that I knew nothing that she was doing was appropriate – which just seemed to fuel her fire.

Read more …

In the hall closet off the kitchen, 8 packs of tall bottles with colorful caps are stacked three high. Mostly Diet Dr Pepper, 7-Up and Tab.  Throughout the summer, empties replace full bottles, and cans are pulled off their plastic rings, and once spent, tossed into paper bags in the mud room.

She waited, not patiently in the least, for the sugary liquids to be consumed. All guests were offered a cold pop. The only thing she meticulously picked up after herself and her brother were the cans and bottles. She scoured the neighborhood on her bike, rescuing bottles from under playground equipment, cans from the side of the road.

In the empty bottles stacked up in the closet, her mother saw another item for her grocery list, but she saw 80¢ times 5 stacks - $4.00. In the bags of cans in the mud room her mother saw another thing to take out to the trash, she saw 30 cans per bag, a nickel each, $1.50 per bag and 5 bags $7.50 or $11.50 total.

In the hallway and mud room was money and that money could be a Barbie, or new markers or a Little Twin Star notebook or a cherry coke at Farley’s Pharmacy or a trip downtown on the Sandy Boulevard Bus to the Art Store in the Galleria and a slice of pizza after.

One hot summer morning she rode her bike to Grandma’s house to borrow the cart she used to get groceries. Towing it back home by tying the handle to her banana seat with a length of rope, it dragged against her back tire as she pumped up the hill at 69th to Fremont, down Fremont, across Sandy and through the neighborhood weaving towards 76th and Klickatat.

Once home, she loaded the bottles into the bottom of the cart, next she crush the cans so they wouldn’t overflow, each one precious and secured the top with some string to keep her contents safe.

Hands sticky, dribbles of orange pop down her legs and on her Nike’s, she tethered the cart to bike and set off. Every few feet a can was lost, she stopped, set the kick stand and retrieved it, shoving it down, and refastening the cover. This went on for blocks and blocks. Finally, she gave up riding and walked the bike.

When she made it to the Fred Meyers, she unhooked the cart and locked up her bike at the rack. She pulled the cart to the back of the store where a pimply faced boy would count her bounty, a rhythmic combination of grabing and tossing the cans into large bins that was almost music. Finally, he would pull a slip from his pocket, write a few numbers and hand it to her, with that she could trade it for cash or Sports and Shave Ken, or a packet of cookies and a 45 of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

An hour later she lay in the grass, pop stains on her legs, the buzz of nearby bees, the smell of blooming roses from the yard next door, and a cold bottle of Pepsi Light. The passbook for her savings account in her back pocket had a new entry, and she had cash in her pocket. Half for now, half for later, she thought, as she brought the bottle to her mouth and let the bubbles flow down her throat until it was empty.

10¢.

I looked at the sentence and thought - what is an “are” house?  Did she me art? Was I missing something hipster? Was I out of the loop? Or had my 27 year old sister decided that this photo caption on Facebook was her opportunity to showcase her education.

The grammar bothered me.  

Normally I would roll my eyes and move on, but then I looked closer, and it was a house I had never seen before.

That is not the front of our house.

I realized that it was the front of the house across the street from her grandparents house.

Twenty years ago, her mother loaded up her car and a small trailer and moved 140 miles south, from Tacoma to Portland and into the home that my father has owned since before I was born.   Twenty years ago, my home became her home, her house, and she has lived there since. 

She never went away to school. She never got an apartment on her own and moved out. Since that day in August, when she arrived in the family room with her Barbies in tow and moved into the room that was once my brothers, the house I grew up in has been her home.

She has lived there longer than I ever did. Slept more nights under that roof, felt the frame sway and heard the creaks as the East Wind bellows against her bedroom wall.

The front of our house.

It seems like although she has no plans to leave, no plans to move out, no aspirations of getting a job, having a family, having a career, just continuing to work at Blockbuster until there are no Blockbusters left, watching her friends move forward in their lives, and she comes home, unlocks the same door with the same key in the same lock that she has since she was 7 and sleeps in the same room under the same roof between the same walls - but somehow that place is not her house.

That structure is not her home. 

After all these years, it seems like a rejection of our family.  Like we were a placeholder for a Seven year old who always wanted to know when she was moving back to Tacoma, to her Grandparents, and it makes me sad. 

Unless I am wrong, and reading too much into things and it really was hipster code for art house and in that suburban track home across the street from her grandparents is an underground graphic novel hideaway.

In which case, she shouldn’t post its whereabouts on Facebook.

Things on the stove, things on counters, things being worked on, recycling sorted into different bags ready to be taken out.  

In the oven is the chicken, on the stove the Keilbasa being cooked in beer and fresh rosemary sprigs.  Paper towels are everywhere, delicate green spinach leaves between their folds being dried for salad, she cut perfect crescents of apple kissed with lemon juice so they do not brown to join the pecans in the bowl when the spinach is ready to be dressed. 

She is at the fridge, she pushes pop cans into me, “Here, do you like this one? I got this and this too” suddenly I am cradling 3 cans of different italian orange and lemon soda. Does my husband like Italian orange soda, she thought he did, maybe he wants root beer, she could still go out. She frets about the glasses, they are clean, but they have been in the cupboard for three days, so she insists they need to be rinsed, more paper towels are pulled off the roll.

She is trying to make it perfect.  She spends the entire time apologizing. She makes us taste the brie to see if it is ok, good enough. She hands me boxes of crackers to lay out onto plates. I have to remove any broken ones and place them back in the box, those she can eat later she says. 

There is no relaxing.  There is no visiting. She doesn’t stop moving.  When you get her to sit still to give her a present, she pops up before she finishes opening it and asks if you want more Italian Orange Soda, she has another type, did you want it?  When you ask her to please relax she asks if you are cold, and comes back from her closet with 3 different sweaters that she presses into your hands and insists you take home with you. 

My Brother helps in the kitchen.  My Grandparents are 2 hours late. My Aunt wants to be waited on hand and foot.   

My mother never stops. 

She serves a beautiful meal on a gorgeous table and apologizes that it wasn’t good enough. Maybe we didn’t want the chicken this year, she didn’t think the skin was good enough on the thick breasts she bought, so she transplanted better skin from lesser breasts to these, and maybe it is ok. If it is not, we don’t have to eat it. 

The presents under the tree look like art. Never green or red, always beautiful jewel tones, and metallics, depending on the year, coordinated with the tree and decorations that make the tiny one bedroom apartment in a 90 year old building look straight out of a tony catalog or Macy’s advert. The corners on the paper are prefect, no tape is seen, the papers collected over years in different seasons. One year, she used antique hardware tied on with ribbon to decorate packages, I still have a brass lamp finial from the 1930’s that came on a box containing gloves.  I do not know where the gloves went.  

Inside, things she collected for you that she thought you would like based on something you said once in a phone call home. Attentive to detail, trying to anticipate what you would want to go with or next or need before you realize you need it. 

If you say you bought a Mission style coffee table, you get three books on mission style furniture, two on antiques, and inexplicably one on how to care for antique linens. If you say your feet are cold, you get 6 different types of socks, include a collection of rag wool, smart wool, and silk to see which will keep you toes warm so far away from her in the midwest. If you like hiking, you will get a bright orange mini shovel with which to bury your poop and biodegradable TP, along with a lecture that you must pack out your TP in some ecosystems, which is why there are little bags as well. 

She watches our reactions as we open the packages.  She wants to make sure we see the paper she selected just for us.  I tuck the ribbons into my purse, they will join my stash and I will use them when I make books through out the year.  She watches our faces to see if we are pleased, if we like what is inside. If we are not enthusiastic, she says she can return it, send it back, get a different color - no it is fine we say.  Except my brother, who wants a different model/color/size poop shovel.

She asks why we didn’t take the brie, this year it is creamier, here try it on one of these whole wheat crackers from Natures. 

My Grandparents enjoy the evening.  Grandma, an amazing cook, compliments the food.  My Grandfather talks in intricate detail about history or antiques or golf with my brother or my husband, or both.  My Grandma chats with my Aunt, and when she runs out of stuff to say, she looks at her shoes and says “Uh…huh…..”  

She is in the kitchen, whirling around, whipping cream with her hand mixer she got at her wedding shower in 1961, her relationship with the mixer having outlasted by several decades her relationship with the husband. 

Her present, on the chair where she left it, the ribbon still around the corner of the box, the wrapping exposing partially the box inside.  She will finish opening it later, after everyone is gone. 

I wonder if she will like it.

Moving east, the road follows the water’s edge and slowly rising up beside us is the first small cut in the land becoming a hill, rolling and growing into cliff faces, sheer to the top of the vistas, overlooking dark green and gray, white capped mountains of the Cascades, water, and all that is beautiful.

Moving east, the road takes us up I-84 into the Gorge, until we hit the exit and trade the Columbia for the Sandy, and make our way through the golden canopy of the trees up through the forest past the riverside dives and Tad’s Chicken and Dumplings, up the back way the road built in the era of the WPA winds.

Moving up. No other direction, just ascent, up switchbacks, up the sheer cliff to the top, towards the vista, past the horses grazing on steep green pastures, past the small rain stained houses, up to where the road levels off and settles on top of the world, in the clouds.

It has been a long time since I passed this way, since I took this journey. 

It has been a long time since I walked down from the red ranch house to the barn to play among the hay bales looking for the Mama cat and her kittens in their nest near the top.  It has been a long time since we put on our rain coats and set out into the dark on Christmas night to find the cow that got past the fence and made her way to the neighbors next door.  It has been a long time since I went looking for the broken down model-t left to rust in the exposed Oregon air that was grown over with saplings, young trees and ferns.  

It has been a long time since collies nipped at my feet, then trotted ahead on old dirt lanes paved with fir needles.

It has been a long time since I have been to Corbett.

My memories of that place are entwined with those of my father’s older brother, my uncle and his family.

Those memories, and the scent of fir trees and pasture lands warm in the afternoon sun on top of the world are the memories of him, and so I mourn them today as I mourn his passing.

The yellow pencil had been worn down over the years until it was only a few inches long, eraser hard and waxy could no longer erase, but that didn’t matter, since she was always deliberate in her marks, erasing was unnecessary. A grove in the wood where a string was tied attached the pencil to a red ribbon that hung from the head of the long, old, ledger, columns running down its pages, and numbers scrawled in the pencil in my Grandmother’s hand.   

Dates, names, figures, pages of them, dates names, figures… Dates went back to the 1940’s, names were familiar and unfamiliar, figures, balances getting smaller and smaller until <0>.

My Grandfather sat in the yellow vinyl kitchen chair, his hand resting on the dark brown fake wood formica table, digits on fingers missing, dark sunglasses over the eyes that no longer saw, having lost their ability to function to diabetes. He was always quiet in situations like this, listening until he spoke. 

I sat next to him, looking at the broken plastic spoon she kept in the bran cereal in a tin on the table that she sprinkled on her breakfast every day.  I wondered why a broken spoon, and only realize now, it was so that when the tin was full, she could close the lid with the spoon inside. 

My father sat between his parents.  She had something cooking on the stove.  Around her waist was an apron, her pants, polyester, a blouse she made herself in her sewing room, and on her feet one of the pairs of heals that she kept in a neat row in the kitchen by the phone.  

She had reached in the the drawer to grab the ledger.  In a few decades time, my brother would find a pamphlet on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack from the 1950s among the pencils, rubber bands, string, cloth measuring tape and other like items in that drawer under the ledger on the day she moved into assisted living. 

My father was there to have his name added to a new page.  She wrote the date at the top, a series of numbers, the agreed upon terms.  They spoke in low voices, German, and I could tell, it was hard for my father to ask for the money.  I could tell it was serious business, that this was a loan, that this would be repaid. 

Grandma got up and checked on what she was cooking on the stove; dumplings in milk and chicken broth.  She came back to the table, with the large checkbook, like a corporate check book with several checks stacked on a single page.  She wrote out in her ancient script the information, signed the check and tore it neatly out of the page, putting it in the ledger as a book mark, she returns the checkbook to her drawer. 

Coming back to the table, she looks at my father, then hands him the slip of paper, which he quickly places it in his wallet, and gives her a fast kiss on the cheek. 

The ledger goes back into the drawer, red ribbon marking the place where my father’s name has been freshly written. It is not the first time she had dedicated a page to him; it would not be the last. 

She grabs huge soup bowls from the cupboard, four of them, and filling them with dumplings and milk, our favorite meal together, a treat.  She serves her husband first, then her son, then herself and me. The dumplings are soft and the milk warm in my belly.  

Over the next few years, we would go to Grandma’s on Saturday and she would get out the ledger when my father handed her a check, writing the date on his page, the amount, and the balance.