No, Thursday's Out....

SOLVE had a city-wide cleanup this morning, and I went down to Peace Park, between the Convention Center, the Steel Bridge, and the Esplanade. I drive by it weekly, but have never thought about getting there on foot. It’s a sweet little corner   I thought the SOLVE event would just be the usual trash cleanup, but it turned out there was an option to paint over graffiti, and I went for that instead. Sign me up! I know the graffiti painters will be right back at it, likely tonight. I know that I was, essentially, just preparing a fresh canvas for them. I don’t like graffiti, I do think most of it is just vandalism, and I wish they’d knock it off.    And yet for all that, I couldn’t get depressed over the absurdity of our efforts. I was content to create a moment of visual calm, however temporary.  Maybe it was because my friend’s mom, a nice lady I’ve known since I was twelve, is in her last days, and I was thinking of her. Somehow, moping over a voluntary-yet-Sisy...

Once again, I’m celebrating the late harvest as my mom did, by letting our last homegrown green tomatoes ripen until Thanksgiving. This year the Sungold cherry tomatoes were abundant, and now their Thanksgiving stragglers are filling up bowls and baskets. We've gone from Hang on, little tomatoes to Bravo, little tomatoes! Thanksgiving garden tomatoes make me think of mom. She grew up in Oakland, where tomatoes were easy, and then moved to Seattle, where green tomatoes were easy, but red tomatoes were not. She took ripening some tomatoes until Thanksgiving as a personal challenge, much the way some people baby a delicate house plant. I don’t do house plants, but I accept the tomato challenge. It only lasts a couple of months. I’ve also been thinking of Mom in the wake of seeing a documentary about dementia last week, “Keys, Bags, Names, Words,” that was showing down at OMSI. It’s not in theaters yet, but it’s touring around the world, fundraising. My dear pal Lori went with me, s...

It's Leaf Day, so my 80 year old neighbor Susan was out raking at dawn. This was just a touch-up, since she had raked many leaves into piles already, had begun compiling a couple of weeks ago, and then had even put out orange traffic cones to guard the piles overnight and dissuade anyone from parking in front of her house until those piles are gone. But more leaves had fallen overnight! They were stil falling! I went out to join her, just companionably, because seeing Susan in the street alone gives me a pang. Also, she got to gesture around in dismay at the unceasing untidiness, and I got to remind her there will be one last Leaf Day in December, when the rest of the crop has fallen. We do this. She said Yeah, but clearly December is in the dim future, and of little comfort. Leaf Day is Susan's glory. She doesn't put up Christmas lights or Halloween pumpkins, but she celebrates Leaf Day with gusto. We stopped when the first trucks went by, and now I'm inside on the cou...