The summer when I turned 15, my family moved from outside NYC to Albany, Oregon.  We went from an east coast life where we were less than an hour away from “culture” and where we partook of symphonies, theater and dance performances a few times every year.  During that hey-day, I saw the Martha Graham company and the Pilobolus Dance Company; we saw The Wiz on Broadway (thanks, Tom and Kathy), the Boston Pops and the NY Philharmonic.

In Albany, our fortunes crashed a bit.  Albany, Oregon is almost as different from Yorktown Heights, NY as Kenya would have been, only it was less interesting to me than Kenya.  Where NY had felt expansive – an environment well-matched to my emerging adolescent sensibilities – Albany felt closed and constricted.  That first term of my sophomore year felt like an endless slog.

Then right around the winter holidays, miraculously, my mom scored tickets to see Linn-Benton Community College’s production of Godspell.  She got three tickets, one each for my sisters and me.  I’d seen the television production of this play in my 8th grade class in NY.  Sitting in the small, modern theater the night of the performance, I was someone who hadn’t known she was thirsty until she was offered a drink.

The cast danced and sang through the first act and I was entranced.  At intermission, joyful rock music played and the cast invited the audience up on stage to dance.  The guy playing Judas beckoned to me and that was all I needed.  Up on stage I hopped and we started to dance.  He asked what I thought, and I said, “It was great.  You guys are great.”  “Where’re you from?” he asked.  “New York,” I said.  “In fact, I saw Godspell when I lived there.”  “On Broadway?” he asked breathlessly.

How could I turn this guy’s enthusiasm aside?  “As a matter of fact, yes,”  I said.  “And you are way better.”  “Really?  Wow, thanks.”

Fast forward a couple years.  It’s my senior year in high school in Sweet Home, Oregon.  My friends, the Steiners (Jacquie, Julie and Mike), start telling me about a cousin of theirs who’s an actor.  He’s gone to NY to try and make it.  His aspirations had been encouraged two years earlier when a member of the audience during a performance of Godspell told him she thought his performance was Broadway-ready.

I really hope he’s glad he followed his dream.

Yesterday and last night, part of the Arctic front that’s been moving through the upper States arrived in Portland.  It made for a restless night.  People had set out their garbage cans and recycling bins next to the street for trash pick-up this morning.  The wind was so strong, it picked up the occasional recycling bin and sent it crashing down the street like the noisiest ever tumbleweed.  The wind shifted here and there, and from some angles it thrummed through the house with a sound like  distant helicopter rotors.  It brought with it a freeze, or at least a near-freeze.  This morning has dawned impossibly bright.  The ground crunched a little as I walked through the yard to the garage.  The maple, oak and aspen trees in our yard shimmer with fall colors and the air feels freshly scrubbed.  I have always been in love with November.

Simone Carolyn Shel Upshaw, July 09, 1995 – Oct. 05, 2013. Simone Upshaw, 18, best known for her amazing unique cupcakes, quick wit and penchant for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, died Saturday of untreatable sarcoma. Simone graduated from Pacific Crest Community School where she excelled in theater, writing, art and cupcakes. She had planned an ambitious year at Portland Community College that included first-year Japanese, one of the many steps she’d taken to fulfill her dream of traveling to Japan this spring. As a native Southeast P-towner, Simone was known by neighbors and local shop-keepers as sophisticated (they didn’t know about the My Little Pony obsession), sweet and very polite. But, behind the well-insulated doors at The School of Rock, she belted out Stevie Wonder or Christina Aguilera with a gusto that belied her composed demeanor. Simone’s complexity cannot be fully described in these few simple paragraphs. The kitchen is full of giant tubs of unsalted butter, enormous bins of granulated sugar, every imaginable cake tin and unanswered requests for vegan unicorn cupcakes. The saddest thing is not remembering what she accomplished or how many lives she touched in those few 18 years, but to imagine, given who we knew her to be, what greatness, what beauty, what love has been left undone.

One of these days I’ll actually write something of my own.  In the meantime, I heard the most inspiring Radio Lab show yesterday – in particular, about the amazing strength shown by California Congresswoman Barbara Lee a few days after 9/11 to vote her conscience.  I so admire anyone whose behavior challenges me to be the best person I can be.

Enjoy: https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/394676

I felt a little like Odysseus the other day.  I was near the river in one of the more industrial-feeling parts of Portland.  Blocks earlier, I’d bought a banana and eaten it.  Now only  the peel was left.  I said to myself, I will walk with this banana peel until I see somewhere to throw it away.

Not unlike for Odysseus with his oar, it was quite a journey.  I did not meet sirens or the cyclops but I did walk by hipsters drinking beer in the blasting sun at one of our warehouse turned brew pubs.  I also passed a tall skeletal elderly woman with fly-away dandelion fluff hair, black bangles on one arm and an aquamarine-colored tattoo of a VW bug on the other.

I walked 15 blocks before I encountered a trash can.  As Odysseus said when his journey finally ended, Whew!

Last week in Orion magazine, one of my favorite essayists, Anthony Doerr wrote the below.  Enjoy.

“What are miracles? Miracles are avocados in winter and starling swarms and the handwriting of children. They’re bridges that let trucks carrying toilet paper for thousands zip across uncrossable rivers and books that contain the voices of the dead.

“Once, my scientist brother showed me a housefly under an electron microscope. Savannahs of small hairs grew out of the fly’s nose. Rows of perfect domes arced over each compound eye. There was as much intricacy in a barb on one of the fly’s legs as there is in a Shakespearean sonnet.

“The towels in my hotel room are deeply, amazingly white. The lotion smells like paradise.

“We sit for a minute on the bed, my caveman and I, dusk on Miracle Day, the lamps off, and watch the Seattle skyline bloom out of the fog. Gulls cry invisibly. Out there, beyond my windows, people are eating ground-up cows from Argentina. They’re reading Whitman:Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from the jambs! They’re building towers of glass, dreaming of mackerel, studying gridlock, falling in love. Above us, above the mist, 50 sextillion Earth-like planets swing around 50 sextillion Sun-like suns. Galaxies fly away from us. Mica glitters on a trillion rocks.

“My telephone rings, and I study it for a moment before answering. It’s as much curse as marvel: a wafer of glass and plastic that embodies rare mineral mining, carbon emissions, slave labor. And yet, when I answer, my sons want to show me, in real-time, the snow falling in our backyard five hundred miles away.

“They hold the phone out into the darkness. I can just make out clumps of flakes falling on the foothills. Everything, if you study it closely enough, is a miracle.”

Here’s the link if you want to read the whole thing.

A couple weeks ago, I went to my favorite used clothing store hoping to find a tunic-lengthed shirt to go with a skirt I have.  I found a simple black, scoop-necked, empire-waisted number and loved how it fit.  It wasn’t until I got it home that I looked at the tag and saw if was the brand called Motherhood.

In other words, the shirt that fit my specifications was made for pregnant women.

Did this make me cry?  Au contraire!  It opened doors, because now I had a heretofore unrealized resource for comfortable clothing that fits my body.  Praise be.

This, then, is my Mother’s Day offering.  Making babies changes our bodies in a way that keeps on giving.  And how could it be otherwise?  Portland dads often mark the transition to fatherhood with tattoos of their kids’ names and birth dates.  Mothers are marked already.

When I bend to touch my toes, and then tuck in my chin and look back up at my belly button, the folds and puckering of my skin can look almost like a thick-skinned tropical flower, my belly button the center, my thick, stretched belly skin fanning out like petals.

The illusion works better if I squint, but I like thinking of my round, sagging belly as a flower my children left behind to remind me they were there.  As if I could ever forget!

I saw the man first.  He rode his wheelchair in the street the way people do when there aren’t adequate curb cuts in the neighborhood.  His state-of-the-art wheelchair looked like an elliptical machine, and he sat in its midst like Captain Kirk in his captain’s chair.

I put his age at close to 70.  He wore his hair in a crew cut, and that, along with his horn rimmed glasses, evoked another era.

He rolled along the street, and eventually he moved into my full view – at which point I realized he was walking a dog.  The dog he walked, however, was not the dog I would have imagined for this large, rectangular man.  Rather, moving with the perkiest trot imaginable in front of the wheelchair on a nearly taut leash pranced a toffee-colored West Highland Terrier.

If ever a gait could communicate sheer delight in being alive it was this dog’s.  Watching them together, I felt happy.

When I was 15, two-thirds of the way into a miserable sophomore year at West Albany High School in Albany, Oregon, I flew to San Juan Capistrano, California to live with our family friends, the Pitskers, and finish out the school year.  I had never been to southern California before, and I was entranced.  It was warm and sunny, which contrasted greatly to the soggy, cold Willamette Valley winter I’d emerged from.  My first full day there, my friend, Amy, and a friend of hers and I rode horses all day in wide, flat, dry irrigation ditches.  Orange trees grew in their yard, and kids wore flip-flops to school in March.

One of the ways I demonstrated my deep pleasure at being in this tropical paradise was to play the Beach Boys’ double-album set, Endless Summer.  Yes, I played it endlessly.  I’m not kidding.  Every day.  Several times a day.  Something about the boppy beat, the twangy guitars, and the bright harmonies captured southern California for me, and the hope I felt about my life just being there.  I only stopped (or at least toned it down) when I heard one of Amy’s brothers – Paul or maybe Jack – say to their mom, “Why does she keep playing that?”  Polly made some terribly compassionate reply, but I realized I’d been annoying others who might not want to hear “Surfin’ USA” one more time.

Fast forward 37 years to this morning: snow day, no school.  I have already heard “I Get Around” three times and “Help Me, Rhonda” twice.  But I don’t think Paul or Jack would feel vindicated.  I love it.  I love hearing the songs again, I love remembering all the different ways those songs meant something to me when I was a teenager, and more than that, I love that they mean something to my kids right now.  I’m having a fresh new experience, hearing the songs through fresh ears that haven’t been hearing these songs for 40-plus years.  It is one of the great gifts of having children: something old becomes new again.