I go past the St. Francis of Assisi Church on my way to work about once every two weeks.  It has a soup kitchen and other outreach services for homeless folks, and so there are always a few of Portland’s homeless milling about.

There’s a guy who has been building quite the structure a few yards from the church right on the sidewalk.  If I’d encountered his home in the forest, it would be a clever, cozy home carved out of a tree or into the side of a knoll – there is that look about it, though it is largely made of materials more easily found in a city.  Large branches create some of the structure, and a dramatic larger piece that looks like ancient driftwood is stood on its end near the doorway.  This piece of wood arches up and away from his structure.

As I went by the other day, I noticed the man had added something to the high tip of the driftwood.  I noticed its tell-tale bright red liquid first, then realized what I was seeing.  The man had hung a hummingbird feeder.  I hope he gets some visitors.

An odd thing happened to me yesterday.  I’d been biking, and for some now-forgotten reason, I’d gotten off my bike and was walking the last few blocks to work.  A woman caught my attention.  She strongly reminded me of a colleague of mine, only it was as if this colleague had encountered such a sharp curve in the road of her life that she had slipped.  This woman’s hair was mashed on one side.  She wore a loose, stained dress and slippers.  She shuffled.  Then I literally shifted my gaze, and there was a man who strongly reminded me of a client of mine – only as if my client now found himself living under an overpass.

I see down-and-out (what a benign phrase) people every day out in the world.  But something about seeing these folks, who called others to mind, reminded me of the knife’s edge of fortune.  I had a teacher in graduate school who asked us on the first day of class: “What do you think the difference is between you and your clients?”  Her answer: Suffering.  For those who find themselves walking through our ordered worlds with their torn slips hanging below the hems of their dresses, and who mutter to themselves without benefit of a cell phone as camouflage, their pain has so overwhelmed their system that they aren’t interested in or capable of putting on the dog for the rest of us.

My long-ago teacher then said, “Imagine for a moment everyone you love.  Then imagine them all wiped out in some catastrophe.  How do you think your mind would respond to pain of that magnitude?”  Her point was that, given enough pain, we might also find ourselves looking fairly mentally ill.  That’s what struck me about yesterday: since these two strangers put me in mind of people I know and care about, I was reminded that, under certain circumstances, any of us could end up like these folks.

A writing teacher of mine is a homeless activist here in Portland.  She once asked students in a writing class to think about what would happen if we lost our homes.  All of us named people we knew who would take us in and help us.  “So, imagine,” she said, “that all these people we see on the streets have gone through their list, like your list, and for various reasons, there is now no one to help them.”

I am thinking of how close any of us is to that slide into destitution.  I am also thinking of how we are all a balm to each other against that happening.

My last two years of high school, I lived in Sweet Home, Oregon, a small logging and mill town.  One highlight of my junior year was taking a creative writing class from William Johnson – a teacher so old he’d taught my dad decades earlier.  He was completely bald on top with tufts of white hair that stood out above his ears.  He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and button-down shirts and slacks when he taught.

Mr. Johnson was a great fan of my writing, and the warmth of his support continued after I graduated.  We corresponded erratically during my undergraduate years and for awhile afterwards, too.  Then one weekend in February, I was scheduled to meet my parents in Sweet Home to visit my grandmother.  I thought it would be a good chance to see Mr. Johnson, too.

I phoned to see if he and I could meet for an hour or so while I was in town.  “Sarah and I are having some people for lunch on Saturday.  You should come for lunch, too.”  He wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and that Saturday I left my grandmother’s home in plenty of time to drive to Foster, the adjacent town where he lived.

To get to Foster, one drives down the Santiam Highway and crosses a bridge by the reservoir.  What Mr. Johnson had neglected to tell me was that this Saturday, the reservoir hosted a four-wheel-drive mud race.  This is pretty much what it sounds like.  On the edge of the reservoir, contestants brought their four-wheel-drive vehicles and raced each other through a muddy course along its edge.

It was an alarmingly popular event, and when nearly an hour passed and I’d crept only a few yards toward the bridge to cross the reservoir, I turned back.  Nearly in tears, I found a pay phone and told Mr. Johnson I couldn’t make it.  He sounded impatient with me.  “Just go around the other way,” he chided.

When I finally wound my parents’ car up the twisty roads overlooking the reservoir, I found myself on a little knoll at a charming, rough-hewn cabin.  Mr. Johnson came out to greet me and gave me a big hug – the first in our history together.  “Come meet the rest,” he said, and flung his arm wide toward the front door.  Inside, his wife Sarah (“Second cousin to Katherine Anne Porter, you know”) sat at a round dining table with three other couples in their 50’s and 60’s.

Mr. Johnson said, “Katrina, I’d like you to meet Jim Mason; he’s a lover. And his wife Karen, she’s a lover, too.”  He went around the table this way, introducing everyone as a lover.  I felt paralyzed and off-balance.  Clearly I’d stumbled into some swinging, orgiastic small-town scene with my former grandfatherly English teacher at the center.

Was there some way I could beat a hasty retreat?  It seemed impossible since I’d exercised such tenacity to get there in the first place.  I clenched my jaw, already in a cold sweat and bracing for an excruciatingly uncomfortable lunch.

Then I realized it was Valentine’s Day.

The potato leek soup was delicious.

Being a kid can sometimes feel like those times when we mis-hear song lyrics.  Like going along thinking Jimi Hendrix was singing, “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy” and being impressed at how ahead-of-its-time those lyrics were – and then somehow you figure out what everyone else seems to have known already, that he’s singing “while I kiss the sky.”

The other day, I took a couple safety pins out of a pair of pants and caught myself treating these pins with great care.  Somehow, viewing safety pins and rubber bands and paperclips as a scarce commodity has endured from my childhood.  In that earlier world of mine, certain things showed up randomly and unreliably and therefore needed to be saved and watched over.  Safety pins and rubber bands were useful, and paperclips I simply adored.  With all of them, I wasn’t sure how they appeared in my house, and so paid particular attention to them when they did.

In A Walton Christmas, a package comes in the mail and Grandma Walton carefully unties the string  and wraps it around the household ball of string, which was made of other string that had come their way.  String was scarce and you didn’t pass up the chance to save it.  In fact, that Christmas special confirmed what I already believed to be true, that there were certain things you couldn’t just go to the store and get.  You had to wait for them to appear and then treat them with the greatest of care.  (I did not grasp that the Waltons could have gone to the store and gotten string; they simply didn’t because it was the Depression and during the Depression you didn’t squander anything that came your way because that meant you didn’t have to go out and buy it.)

My grandparents lived through the Depression and my parents, siblings and I benefited from the frugal habits that helped them get through.  It meant that, growing up, towels and sheets and pillowcases were considered usable as long as they weren’t yet falling apart.  It meant that, if the elastic on your underpants was shot, you just made sure to wear them with pants and not a skirt.  When I left home for college and other far-flung parts, I took with me some of the sheets and towels from my childhood because it meant no one would have to buy new ones.  And that was good because, somehow, I didn’t realize you even really could buy these things.

Imagine my surprise and delight at the age of 33 when I complained about a particularly threadbare towel I swore I remembered from age 9, and Garth said, “So buy another one.”

‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy.

When I first reconnected with Garth in late 1993, he lived on the top floor of a duplex that was built into the side of a hill like a sod house.  The first thing that struck me when I entered his space were all the books.  You who know Garth know that he tends toward excess in some areas.  This tendency was in no area more evident than in his collection of books – though collection may be too highfalutin a word for what I encountered.  Collection implies lovingly-cherished, sometimes-autographed hard backs.  Garth’s collection consisted mostly of paperbacks.  He’d constructed several bookshelves for them, carefully measured to accommodate mass paperback-sized books without wasting space.  He’d made the bookshelves in a flurry of activity and did not put backs or brackets on any of them.  The result was vaguely Seuss-like, bookshelves crammed with books, tilting dramatically to the left or right.

About a week ago, I started thinking about qualities particular to Garth, qualities that might feel mundane or even occasionally annoying in our daily lives, but that I would miss were he not around. It started one morning as I made tea.  Garth was in the shower off our kitchen, singing “Zombie” by the Cranberries at the top of his lungs, singing with gusto for the sheer delight of being alive; of having a voice he could raise; of having a hot shower he could stand in; of having a house, and a job he could be on vacation from.  Of having a family that waited on the other side of the bathroom door to plan the day with him and tease him about his singing.

My 14-year-old was home sick on my writing day this week.  At first, I hacked away at a particularly challenging piece I’m writing, meaning to carry on with my day’s plans.  Then I really took a look at her, my ill daughter, sitting on the couch, knitting a scarf to give away next week at one of the homeless shelters in town.  I thought, Well, I could do that, too.

I have possessed for years an entire grocery sack full of navy blue yarn, given to me by my mom, who was given it by her long-time friend, Charlotte.  I had not, before now, had a project for it.  Now I do.  It is a deep pleasure to use something that holds in its twists strands of that loving friendship, which included a shared love of yarns and textiles.

My daughter and I sat side-by-side and knitted scarves.  We talked.  We watched a movie about Darfur so that I could be better educated about the situation there.  She shared with me some of what she knows that wasn’t part of the movie.  We talked about this one precious world we have; we talked about wanting to make it better.  We knitted into the afternoon.

There are things that stump me.  Like socks.  Specifically, socks I have worn once.  To me, they are fraught with ambiguity.  I know what to do with underpants I have worn once: they go in the dirty clothes.  For other articles of clothing – pants, skirts, shirts, sweaters – the issue is not how many times they’ve been worn, it’s more a matter or whether they still look and smell clean to me.  This is how I determine whether their destination is the dresser drawer or the dirty clothes hamper.

And then there are socks.  I am so uncertain of them after I’ve worn them once that, in my puzzlement, I do not return them to my sock drawer on the off chance that they are now too dirty and will thus defile the other freshly cleaned socks.  Nor do I throw them in the dirty clothes.  I am loath to create more laundry for myself than absolutely necessary and what if they aren’t yet dirty enough to warrant being washed?.

So, currently, my socks reside on the floor of our bedroom.  Where, in awhile, when they have swirled around sufficiently with the dust bunnies, I will deem them too dirty to wear and throw them in the laundry.

I am unhappy with this solution to my sock dilemma.

Not that I mind sappy reflections on gratitude.  I like them, in fact (see previous entry).  I am just not in the mood to add my own to the queue. 

Instead, I want to say that I am impressed by the power of the brain. 

If one acquires an unexpected and rare four-hour block of time, let’s say, and yet one has been thinking that today will only have enough room in it to get work done and maybe not even that much, then by god the brain is likely to bring about that particular reality.  A person could get to 4:00, for example, and suddenly realize that if she’d carpe‘d the diem, she could have worked like a dog to get the work taken care of and thus managed to create a couple of those hours for writing. 

I’m not wallowing in self-pity.  Really.  But I do wonder what I might accomplish if I could only bring the power of my brain to heel.  Sigh.

A little known fact about Mark’s and my three-year live-in relationship is that it began because I was trying to say good-bye to him.

We’d known each other, up until that point, for more than seven years, and we’d dated off and on, mostly off.  Mark disappeared for chunks of time, then would show up unexpectedly and take me to a movie or a play.  Once, we hiked to the top of Iron Mountain.

It was during one such communication dry spell that I – earnestly following some New Age blueprint for forging a new life path for myself – wrote a flurry of so-called Completion Letters.  In these letters, I thanked the recipient for being in my life, and wished them well on their continued journey, which would not include me from this point forward.

Mark took the completion letter I wrote him as a come-on.  He wrote back that he’d always loved me and now that he knew I was fond of him, too, well, what were we going to do?  He was in graduate school in Austin whereas I was in retail sales in Portland.

There was something captivating about being told I was loved, that I had been loved for years.  In short order, I moved to Austin.

I had imagined Mark showing me around town, sharing his favorite places with me, introducing me to his friends and fellow grad students.  It became clear right away that this was not how it would go.  Mark spent most of his waking hours at the University chipping away at a PhD in theoretical chemistry and returned home between 2 and 3 in the morning.  His cupboards were filled with Kraft macaroni and cheese, and cans of tuna, corn, and peas.  His refrigerator held only Shiner Bock beer.

But, hey, this was fine with me.  I’d do the exploring, I’d meet the people, and then they’d be Mark’s friends, too.

Armed with The Austin Chronicle to guide me, I soon shopped for our groceries at Wheatsville Food Co-op, worked at Book People, and regularly suggested we spend our Friday night splurge at Ruby’s Barbeque.  For good measure I also discovered the most petite library I’d ever seen, and learned, first, how to push-start my car, and, second, how to shop for a new car battery.  Who would have thought I could be so resourceful and independent!

Our fatal flaw of ours as a couple was that Mark felt he must say what was true for him, and I felt I must ignore what he said.  Before moving to Austin, I’d told him how much I looked forward to meeting his friends and he’d answered that he couldn’t help me much in that department.  Perhaps I thought he was being modest or simply underplaying the truth.  The idea of living where one had no friends was unthinkable to me.

At night, I’d wake up at three in the morning to find Mark sitting up in bed in the dark drinking a Shiner Bock before going to sleep.  Early on, I’d wake myself up enough to ask how his day had gone, and he’d laugh affectionately before explaining that it had been fine and nothing much had happened.  After months of this, when his return from work awoke me, I’d just go back to sleep.

My close perusal of The Austin Chronicle gained me another significant discovery: a women’s support group.  After attending for a few short weeks, I could no longer pretend I was happy with Mark’s and my arrangement.  I tried to become happier with it by suggesting that we eat dinner together regularly, go on day trips to out-lying areas, get a larger apartment – anything that might shift our slide into a deepening rut.

Perhaps that was my intention one Friday when we sat at Ruby’s in the soft evening air drinking Shiners and waiting for our barbeque to come.

“Mark,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“I’d like to have a baby.”

He drank a large swig of beer and took his time swallowing it.  Then he stared at me, expressionless.

“I want a baby,” I said again.  “I love hearing Christine talk about Willa and –  I think I’d like to be a mom.”

Mark set his beer on the table.  He looked at his hands.  He coughed, and picked the beer up again.  “If you’re set on it,” he said, “I guess we could do that.  But you’d need to understand: it would be your project, it’d be your deal.”  He took another swig.

I tried to imagine the life of this child.  What would it be like to grow up with such a ghostly father as Mark described?  I was aware of the absent father phenomenon, but Mark’s idea took it to a whole new level entirely.

This was one thing Mark said that I couldn’t ignore.

It took awhile to end that relationship but I did and eventually found my exuberant husband who thought the kid idea was a good one – one he wanted to be an active participant in.  Recently,  I Googled Mark.  Hundreds of miles and twenty years from Austin, we’ve ended up in the same town.  I live in a ramshackle house with a wacky husband, our kids, and a sprawling array of family and friends.  Mark runs a million-dollar company.  Three guesses who I think is the richer person.

I remember the first time I got that deja vu feeling.  I was twelve years old and had just come upstairs to our bathroom to take a bath.  I’d brought a Granny Smith apple with me to munch while I bathed.  In the tub, I took a couple bites out of the apple and set it on the edge.  Looking over the tops of my knees at the beautiful green Granny Smith against the white porcelain of the tub, I experienced a certainty that I’d been in this exact place before, that I’d somehow seen this tableau before.

I am not here to argue what deja vu is or is not – brain blip or momentary detection of alternate realities.  What I want to reflect on is how almost every single time I’ve experienced that feeling, it has been in a moment as mundane as the one described above.  I find that delightful.  Whatever deja vu is, it is certainly an opportunity to notice the moment we are in, and it pleases me enormously that we should experience the preciousness of each moment – even the seemingly innocuous ones.