The target demo: We are not it; a reminder

Portland is a city of the young; that's one of its charms. We boomers have been so dominant, demographically, for so long, that any indication that we're no longer in the lead brings us -- me, at least -- up short. Case in point: the current Willamette Week's annual Outdoors Guide leads off with a short feature called "These Forests Ain't Virgin Anymore: A Guide to Doing It in the Backcountry." The tone is earnest and helpful: Watch out for poison ivy, poison oak, and fire ants. Check. Don't get caught. Right. Don't, in the course of your passion, suffocate any baby opossums or commit other permanent damage to the environment. Gotcha. "Happy trails, you perverts," ends the article, which gives me hope that it was intended as a tongue-in-cheek, so to speak, piece.

I gotta crow

Okay, one more (short, I promise) post and then I'll hang it up for today.

As you might recall, Jerry's gotten into the habit of feeding the neighborhood crows on our morning walks. Crows are no dummies; au contraire. Several of them have learned where we live, and lately they've been stopping by, asking, vociferously, to be fed. Our Columbia Gorge basalt accent column is now a bird feeding station. The crows are getting progressively tamer; when we go outside, crumbled dog biscuits in hand, they hop or fly just a few feet away, and swoop down on the goodies as soon as our backs are turned.

Apparently we now have a family hanging out in and around our pair of sweetgum trees; we saw one bird cramming bits of Milk-Bone (tm) down the throats of two marginally-smaller others. A couple have figured out how to soften up large pieces by soaking them in the puddle formed by our leaky irrigation sprinkler (which is another story). We love watching their antics, anthropomorphizing about their thought processes, and trying to figure out what their amazingly varied range of calls, caws, grunts, clicks and cackles are actually saying. I have to caution Jer not to respond in kind; god knows what he might be committing to.

Several crows have died of West Nile virus in our quadrant of Portland. There was another article in the paper this morning. I am in denial about this, of course.

Charismatic Microfauna

For the past several months, OMSI has been running something it calls Science Pubs. To me, the ex-librarian, a "science pub" is a scholarly journal. But this is Portland, and science pubs equate to monthly gatherings at Bridgeport Brewpub in NW where you order an adult beverage and something to eat, then settle in and listen to an expert in some branch of science discuss his or her field of interest.

This week, our neighbor Jay, who teaches microbiology at Reed, talked about e coli and infectious disease outbreaks caused by contaminated food. His presentation was called Spinach on the side: e coli in our lives. I learned the following: 1. The bacteria on and in the human body outnumbers the cells in the human body itself. 2. e coli 157 is the bad e coli; it's a much more complex organism than the good e coli that live in our intestines. 3. What actually makes you sick is shiga toxin, which is genetically encoded in a virus contained in the e-157 bacterium. A bacterium packin' a virus; no wonder it's so nasty.

Jerry did well in the food-borne disease trivia quiz that preceded Jay's presentation, and won this adorable plush e coli. It's sort of like winning a stuffed animal at the county fair, but employing a different skill set. I first heard the phrase "charismatic megafauna" from a biologist who explained that big brown eyes go a long way to making cows, ponies and puppies so appealing. I doubt that e coli actually have eyes, but this little guy is cute enough to have earned a place in our house. In the kitchen, of course.

By the way, I ordered the spinach salad at Bridgeport the other night. So did Jay. I guess that particular outbreak is history.

Yahrzeit

My mother died a year ago today, at the age of 89. She lived a remarkable life, emigrating from Germany, alone, at 17; learning English and graduating from high school in Chicago; meeting my dad-to-be, her one true love, on a blind date; and raising three pretty decent kids. Along the way she became a passionate advocate for the retarded (my sister was born with Down Syndrome; we didn't at that time call it "developmentally disabled") and a dear friend and mentor to dozens of people her age and much younger.

We had the usual mother-daughter "stuff," of course, but the turning point came when Mom and I traveled to China together in November 1996. The two of us turned out to be the only people on our tour. She was a trouper. Confronting a rural pit toilet, nothing but a hole in the ground, is a test of character, not to mention a real bonding experience. We were strangers in a strange land together, on an equal footing for the first time. Her sense of humor blossomed. We had deep, thoughtful conversations. We emerged from that trip as friends, with a much deeper understanding of each other and our respective foibles.

This morning I lit a candle, and picked out a few old photos from the hundreds that my brother Larry and my nephew Josh scanned last year.

I miss you, Mom.

Hertha Levi Basch, 12 December 1916 - 28 June 2006.

Am I butch or what?

Women on Bikes had a ride scheduled on the Springwater Trail this morning, heading out in the opposite direction from the section I hiked on Thursday. I was hoping to catch the group at the 45th Avenue trailhead but we didn't connect, so I headed out on my own.

It was another spectacularly beautiful day, sunny but coolish. The first part of the route goes through some funky industrial areas, but there's a lovely bucolic stretch even before you hit 82nd Ave. After 122nd it starts feeling downright rural. Wildlife doesn't scurry away from bikes the way it does from cars; biking is like kayaking that way. I saw a rabbit, a flock of red-winged blackbirds, and several flickers. Also Mount Hood. And, of course, lots of friendly Portlandians out for exercise, too.

I ended up at Linnemann Station, which is waythehellandgone -- in the vicinity of Gresham, actually. Hey, I biked to Gresham and back! Door-to-door, as near as I can figure, about a 17-mile round trip. I feel like such a jock.

Actually I didn't bike quite all the way home, since the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Garage Sale is on this weekend and the streets were (and probably still are) jammed with cars and zoned-out bargain-hunters. Before I left on my ride, I put our old flatbed scanner out on the curb, with a sign saying "free." Nobody bit when I listed it on Freecycle a couple of months ago, but it was gone within an hour. I don't care if whoever scooped it up is planning to sell it on eBay; I just needed the closet space back.

Speaking of butch, I got a very short haircut yesterday. I took a picture of Laurie Anderson in to my haircutter and said "make it look like that." It will, when it grows out a bit.

Happy Solstice

I observed the summer solstice by showing up for jury duty. Jerry dropped me off at the courthouse downtown. It was a relatively painless experience, as these things go. Comfy chairs, no blaring TV, free wi-fi, a good book to read, frequent communications from the staff about the status of our potential empanelment (30 names were called, mid-morning, none of them mine) and, just before noon, blessed release. In the eyes of the law, I have done my service, and I'm off the hook for the next two years.

It was a beautiful day, sunny but not hot, and I decided to walk home, or at least see how far I could get before calling Jerry to pick me up. I went over the Hawthorne Bridge, along the East Bank Esplanade, and connected with the Springwater Corridor Trail. Wildflowers were in bloom everywhere -- purple, fuchsia, yellow. I saw ospreys nesting, herons wading and geese paddling off Ross Island, and a professionally-printed sign glued to a bridge support that said "You could be a millionaire... if you stopped fucking gambling."

Jury duty doesn't lend itself to photography, and I didn't have my camera with me anyway, so instead of wildflowers and waterfowl, you get a picture of a cool twiggy structure I found that has both moss and lichen on it, and another cactus flower shot. Oddly enough, this is from the same plant as the one that bloomed so spectacularly in May, but the blossom is twice the size and white instead of pink.

Looking at the map after I got home confirmed my hunch that cutting through Oaks Bottom and over to Bybee would have shortened my hike by a couple of miles. But I wanted to go all the way through Sellwood so I could familiarize myself with the portion of the trail that reverts to city streets between the Sellwood Bridge on the west and Three Bridges to the east. Plus I was starving by that point and realized that SoTac Coffee and Cream, which I'd been wanting to check out, was just a couple of doorways off my route east on Umatilla. Plus I get into this macha mindset sometimes where I just have to do things the hard way.

So, fortified by a double scoop of Tillamook's fine lemon sorbet and wild mountain blackberry ice cream, I finished my journey. I did a shade over seven miles in a shade over two hours, including osprey-nest ogling and ice-cream buying time. A pretty good pace, considering that I wasn't even thinking about power-walking. In the back of my mind I've been pondering the best way to get downtown and back by bike, and this was an opportunity to scope out a likely path. It would be a fairly easy trip, I think; it might take half an hour.

I actually wouldn't have minded being picked for an average-length trial. Average = a day and a half, according to the judge who greeted us this morning and explained the jury selection process. It probably would have been an interesting experience. I was summoned a couple of times when we lived in the Bay Area but, like today, just sat until they dismissed us. We were excused outright at Sea Ranch because of its remote location.

Really, though: Given a choice between courtroom deliberations and a long, lovely walk with wildflowers, birds, and ice cream to sweeten the last leg of the trip.... well, you know which one I'd pick. And not a jury in the world would convict me.

Three small joys

One of the less prepossessing plants that Grace installed in our garden -- okay, it looks like a rangy piece of grass -- decided to strut its stuff a few days ago. I noticed that it had flowered; from the living room window, though, it didn't look like much. But then I inspected it more closely, and holy moly, what a show. Worlds within worlds. It's gone now, but hopefully it'll perform again.

My Moo cards arrived, and I love them. I'd been thinking for a while about upgrading my business cards from the plain D-I-Y style I've been using since the advent of laser printers and perforated stock. On Kaua'i, my pal Art, Flickr God and photographer extraordinaire, showed me the perfect solution: Moo cards let you upload photos of your choice, or import them from Flickr or a number of other applications, crop them, and add the appropriate text to the other side. Voila; cards with art, almost instantly. You can use as many different images as you want; the more you upload, the more variety, obviously, and the fewer copies of each. One or two favorite pictures, and you get 50 or 100 of each. Like that. I had lots of fun using the cropping tool to select provocative sections of some of my quilts and favorite scenic vistas. They're about half the size of a regular business card, which I suppose might create some problems, but which I think just adds to their distinction. They print and ship from the UK; I had my order, in a neat little plastic box, in less than 10 days. I am so pleased; I can't wait to reorder. Here, would you like my card?

The retaining wall outside my studio window is in its full green glory. The delicate viney thing with tiny flowers is cascading over the stones, and the ferns are at their peak. Later in the season it'll all dry out and look not so wonderful, but right now it's exquisitely lush. I must get back into the studio, if only to spend more time staring at the wall.