Holding On for a Better Year

About three months ago, my wife Carole was diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s the kind of unpleasant surprise you naturally assume happens only to other people … until suddenly that’s no longer the case.

The weeks since have been a steady stream of lengthy visits to the clinic, side effects at home, bills in the mail, days of no energy and others when we could run an errand or visit friends, and a run (thankfully only the one) to the emergency room.

The first time you hear the word “cancer,” it is beyond belief. It floats in the air like a dandelion seed: weightless … yet menacing. There’s a brief period when you think about some of the worst possible outcomes, but you don’t spend more than a minute or two trying to imagine how you’d manage. At least I didn’t. That goes away permanently.

One surprise is how swiftly you adjust. What seemed impossibly difficult and frightening somehow manages to transform into the new normal: This is what we do now. A pair of painful biopsies and an MRI established that there was a tumor in Carole’s left breast, and an apparently infected node under her arm. The oncologist recommended chemotherapy first to try to shrink them -- a series of eight rounds, one every two weeks -- and then surgery to remove the tumors.

More Adventures of a Portland Streetcar customer service rep

I have now worked two and a half years for Portland Streetcar as a customer service representative. The job brings me into steady contact with all kinds of people, from retirees who are comfortably well off or just getting by, to young urban professionals living and/or working in the Pearl, and of course homeless folks . . . some of whom actually show me valid fare.

My experiences and observations amid this constant parade of humanity are wonderful fodder for storytelling on my Facebook page. Last April, I collected up and shared the best tales from 2015. More of course are coming from this year, but I went back and copied the memorable ones from my first six months on the job, from June through December 2014. This was back when streetcar fare was just one dollar for two hours of riding.

Enjoy!

July 23: Encountered a retired couple from Baltimore on the streetcar. They said they had saved “the best for last” on their West Coast swing (second time here). He said, “You know how in New York you say, ‘nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here’? Well, Portland’s a nice place to visit, and you WOULD want to live here.”

I love this town.

July 25: Tall young dude digging in his tight jeans pocket for his streetcar fare ticket: “It’s in there somewhere.”

Me: “Well, I’m not going in after it.”

Him: (Laughs) “I appreciate that.”

The Best Book I Read This Year

In an essay published recently in the Oregonian, I mentioned that I read between 110 and 140 books every year.

Naturally, people ask me what’s good -- in other words, what I’ve read that I’d recommend. I’m usually at a loss, partly because I read so many books that it’s hard to recall most of them offhand -- I even forget the titles of some of the ones I liked -- and partly because I don’t know enough about the other person’s taste to be able to predict what he or she would enjoy.

But I can unequivocally state the best book I’ve read this year, possibly in several years, is Secondhand Time: the Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich. It conveys the utter poetry and beauty, as well as the absolute horror, of ordinary lives caught up by extraordinary circumstances. You could pull the scripts for a dozen great plays and films out of the true stories it contains, if people could believe them.

SOME OF THE OTHERS

Don’t get me wrong; this has been a great year for reading, otherwise. I’ve read novels that were magical, including Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and two by Anthony Marr, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno -- any of which would be an excellent choice for a book discussion group.

Clubs is Trump

Tomorrow, the 2016 Presidential election officially ends. Despite weeks of folderol about a potential elector revolt, I expect Donald Trump will be certified as our next Chief Executive.

A friend of mine is acquainted with people who have had business dealings with the incoming President. According to them, he says, the President-to-be was unfailingly polite and professional.

I think the first time my friend told me this story, it gave me a little comfort. It appeared the GOP nominee was a form of performance artist: He tells people what they want to hear … or pushes their fear and insecurity buttons for leverage. In other words, he tailors his “show” to the setting and the audience, without necessarily letting anyone know what he really thinks, or where he stands.

RADIO SILENCE

I purposely did not write about Trump over the course of the campaign, at least not since last spring: not here on my blog, and not even on Facebook. I didn’t post or “like” any of the mocking memes about him -- at least no more than the fingers of one hand. I treated Clinton the same: I limited my firefights on Facebook to defending and advocating for the candidate who got my vote in the primaries, Bernie Sanders, and mostly on other people’s pages.

Harlan Ellison’s Already Immortal . . . But Let’s Make Certain

I discovered Harlan Ellison in the spring of 1975, I think, after the publication of his coldest, harshest collection before or since, Deathbird Stories. The tales were startling, vivid, often violent and profane. The writer clearly did not want you to look up from one of his tales and say, “that was a nice story”; he hoped to make you fearful, enraged, or energized to get up and do something!

Ellison’s writing was a sharp rap upside the head. Since that first volume, I’ve read just about everything he’s put between the covers of a book -- paper or cloth -- and collected copies of nearly all of them as well.

Now Jason Davis is proposing a mammoth effort to preserve all of Ellison’s unpublished and uncollected work. Davis is a comparatively young fan who became an editor and publisher and has overseen the release of new anthologies as well as lesser-known Ellison works over the past five years (including unshot screenplays and television episodes, and early pulp fiction from magazines such as Trapped, Tightrope!, Guilty Detective Story Magazine, Famous Western magazine, and True Men Stories).

Back and Swinging

I’m back!

Since the shocking election of the GOP nominee, I’ve gotten into a number of arguments on Facebook (not with my FB friends, but friends of those friends) on such topics as racism, immigration policy, and the anti-Trump protests in Portland the past two weeks.

I’ve noticed that Facebook has unhelpfully (but understandably, given the company’s interest in generating more traffic and clicks) unhooked the barriers between different parts of my page. Comments I’ve posted on one friend’s page get viewed by other friends of mine who are NOT friends of that person whose page I posted on.

This has increased the frequency of people with violently differing opinions encountering the comments of one another. Ideally, that might be a good thing; but not when we didn’t ask for or expect it, and especially not during this delicate period when people are in shock from the results of the election and fearful about what the new administration bodes for them, their colleagues, and their friends and loved ones.

I don’t mind the cross currents of debate personally, because I regularly seek out conflict, knowing from long experience that I can walk away from it any time with ease. But I don’t necessarily want my friends to get dragged in, because some are not accustomed that that level of battle (and the occasional vitriol).

Dorothy Roth Loftus, a Fairbanks pioneer

My biggest writing project over the past year has been a bio-memoir of my grandmother, Dorothy Roth Loftus. She was a year old when her father dragged the family from Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, to Fairbanks, Alaska -- a gold-rush boomtown that was barely three years old.

Rinehart Roth (he hated his name, and always went by “R.F.”) was a lawyer who would serve as district attorney in Fairbanks from 1916 to 1921 -- during the Woodrow Wilson administration -- but he sank everything he earned into worthless gold and coal mines. (That’s him, to the right.) Dorothy would grow up in Fairbanks, attend the brand-new local college starting on the day it opened its doors in 1922, and marry and raise her family before coming “Outside,” as Alaskans put it, in 1947 for retirement in Oregon: first in the upper Willamette Valley, and eventually Coos Bay. My family lived next door to her and grandfather when I was in my teens.

I refer to the book as a bio-“memoir” because the bulk of it is based on at least 13 hours of interviews I conducted with Dorothy next to a cassette tape recorder in 1984. The past year, I fashioned the transcripts of those tapes into a narrative that comes to about 140 pages in first draft.

The next step is to do the research necessary to incorporate supporting information from other sources that will fill out the narrative: newspaper reports, books about frontier Fairbanks and Alaska, tapes of interviews with other people who knew my grandparents, and so on.

The Choices of Hillary Rodham Clinton

  

My wife has an interesting theory about the career of Hillary Clinton. Carole believes young Hillary Rodham had the intelligence and drive that would have gotten her where she is today no matter what course she had taken . . . but she was born just a few years too early to believe she could do it on her own.

Instead, Clinton chose the route taken by most of the women of her era, and it cost her more than it would have if she had gone it alone . . . or if she had been born 10 years later and grown up enjoying the full benefits of second-wave feminism.

Carole’s theory comes partly out of her reading of a 1996 biography that was written by an initially hostile conservative journalist, David Brock. Brock had already done a hatchet job on Anita Hill, and broken the story of Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” scandal, but in the course of writing the new book, for which the Free Press gave him a $1 million advance and a tight, one-year deadline, he came to admire Hillary Clinton and wrote a largely sympathetic volume that did not sell well, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. He had disappointed his conservative fans but carried a history that made liberals distrust him.

Six years later, Brock published Blinded by the Right, his Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus account of his disaffection with conservatism and huge swing to the left. (The book was subtitled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” and Brock has since been a consultant on Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. He also called his book on Anita Hill “character assassination,” in which he “consciously lied,” and apologized to her.)

Ridin’ the (Downtown) Rails

For the past 20 months I’ve had a part-time job as a customer service representative on the Portland Streetcar. I regard it as my second “ambassador of the city” position alongside Portland Walking Tours, for which I’ve been a guide more than four years.

On the streetcar, I answer riders’ questions, help them purchase fares and figure out where they’re going, perform fare and transit surveys, do ridership counts, and just generally present a friendly face for the streetcar organization as well as the city as a whole.

My new year’s resolution last year was to do more writing, which would necessitate cutting back on my pleasure reading. The biggest project was working on a book -- a sort of bio-memoir about my grandmother, which grew to a first draft of about 140 pages last month -- although I did a few good pieces for this blog as well, particularly the series about my wife’s unfortunate collision with a cyclist in Tilikum Crossing in October.

But it occurred on me recently that I’ve been doing a lot of creative writing on my Facebook page as well. I collected up my best puns and wordplay from that venue for this blog last month; now I present some of the best stories from my work shifts on the streetcar. Some are just observations of other people and events; others relate incidents in which I took some initiative, or illustrate the wit and good humor that help me get through a day, and (I hope) make the ride a little more pleasurable for the riders.

What Sanders Fans Don't Get About Bernie

There are two things that Bernie Sanders fans, far too many of them, are not getting. And if they’re not getting it, you can be sure most other Americans -- most critically, the ones whose support is necessary for Sanders to win the nomination and the White House -- don’t get them either.

The first is tactical:

1.    If you’re knocking Hillary Clinton as a person (or any other candidate, really), you’re not doing what Bernie does or wants.

Sanders has run the most gracious campaign for national office in modern memory. He has complimented his opponent, sincerely and without sarcasm or snark, multiple times over the campaign. As he told NBC’s “This Week” back on Nov. 8, “…on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be a better candidate and President than the Republican candidate on his best day.” He has repeated this in subsequent debates with her.

Mostly, he focuses on where we’ve gone wrong as a nation, his goals, and the job to be done, both in terms of winning the nomination and the November vote, but mostly where this country needs to go to become stronger and better. He has a vision and sticks to it.

The common wisdom -- handed down by highly paid election consultants -- has been that to win, you have to go dirty. The trick of course is not to appear to be going dirty; you get your supporters, ostensibly independent contributors, and strategists, to do the work while you, the candidate, pretend to be above the fray.

And Now For Something Completely Irreverent: Loftus puns and wordplay, 2015 edition

2015 was a pretty good year for original puns and wordplay. Here's a list of the best I reported on my Facebook page….

Jan. 10: He shipped out on a whaler that boasted a four-seater latrine. They called it the Pequod.

Feb. 27: It was a dogwood, a very sick dogwood. And sadly, its bark was worse than its blight.

Feb. 27: Every time my bladder fills, I suffer the effects of peer pressure.

March 18: It was as if the building was cursed. Renters kept expiring on the premises. Simply put, the address had suicidal tenancies.

March 31: Having cleverly disguised himself as an ermine wrap, Jethro headed up the road a fur piece.

May 22: We support the Thirst Amendment right to freedom of espresso.

June 17: The idea of acting in a stage production on cocaine was highly appealing to him, but he kept forgetting his lines.

July 10: Under questioning, the suspect claimed he had assaulted the woman because the sight of her made his heart stop.

So he was charged with a myocardial infraction.

How to Fill That Empty Seat on the U.S. Supreme Court

President Obama’s nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court bench is a solid, moderate choice. It’s also a canny political one.

When Merrick Garland was nominated to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals 19 years ago, eminent conservative Republicans from Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley to the late Strom Thurmond praised him in the highest terms.

Obama could have picked a groundbreaking candidate such as Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who would have been the first black woman to serve on the highest court; or Garland’s colleague on the D.C. Circuit, judge Sri Srinivasan, a South Asian American. The President could have nominated an in-your-face liberal such as Elizabeth Warren.

Looking Back at a Quarter Century in My Beloved City

Twenty-five years ago last month, I moved to Portland. As the character played by Marilyn Monroe in one of my favorite movies says, “That’s a quarter century. Makes a girl think.”

I had been a reporter for the daily paper in Roseburg, Oregon for more than three years, but I left town at the close of 1990 in what I like to call “a hail of bullets.” Before that, I had grown up in southern Oregon, traveled Europe for two years with my folks, and done a ten-year layover in Boston, where I went to school and started my adult working life.

Portland seemed like a good temporary landing place after Roseburg because I had two friends from my high school I could stay with while I searched for another newspaper job. I didn’t find one, though I interviewed with a number of papers up and down the Pacific Coast, from Bellingham to Albany.

But I never left Portland, either.

Twenty-five years ago this week I responded to a classified in the local alternative paper, Willamette Week, which read: “SFs seeking globally conscious SMs who are interested in reviving the endangered art of conversation for Sunday Salons at The Heathman. Send self description, telephone, thought provoking topics. We’re lively, healthy, over 21, professional, eclectic and ready for conversation. Are you?”

The 2015 Reading Report

A year ago, after nearly a lifetime of reading more than a hundred books every year, I resolved to cut back.

Generally, reading is a respected activity—friends often speak admiringly of my reading load—but for me it has sometimes resembled an addiction. I read to forget, I read to escape, I read to avoid my more challenging responsibilities, I read to pass the time. It’s comparatively harmless if you place it against smoking, heroin, compulsive shopping, or sugar cravings, but anything pursued to an obsessive degree will inevitably crowd out more potentially rewarding pursuits.

Ultimately, We’ll Just Have to See Who Votes for Bernie Sanders

From the day Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy on April 30, 2015, we have heard repeated variations of: “I like what he stands for, but I don’t think he can win.”

This seems to be offered as a rationale for choosing not to vote or campaign for Sanders, but if you think about it hard, it makes no sense.

Before we break it down, let’s remind ourselves of the end game. If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee this summer, most current Sanders supporters will (or should) vote for her against anyone the Republicans are likely to nominate.

We must, if for no other reason than to keep a reasonable balance of justices on the Supreme Court bench. Plus, many foreign nations will be accustomed to dealing with Clinton from her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, which is another advantage. (Can you imagine Germany or Jordan or China trying to conduct talks with Trump or Cruz with a straight face?) And “most” Sanders supporters, if they don’t fall prey to disgust and choose not to vote at all in November, should be enough to keep the GOP from winning the White House.

I seriously doubt Sanders will choose to run as a third-party candidate in the fall if he doesn’t win the Democratic nomination. I predict he’ll throw his support to Clinton. He knows the stakes as well as anybody, and I don’t think he would risk playing the kind of spoiler Ralph Nader did in 2000, which may have put George W. Bush in the White House. (The surprising news in the wake of that debacle is how much effort Karl Rove and the Koch brothers put into encouraging Nader’s campaign in order to hurt Al Gore.)

Coughing in the New Year

Happy New Year.

When 2016 opened, I was already a couple days into a powerful cold virus that had been making the rounds. Earlier in December, my wife had a round of sneezes and runny nose, and I seem to recall another small cold of my own before that, but neither was anything like this.

For at least five days, I’ve had a very wet cough, unlike any I can recall in my life, that makes me sound like a lifelong tobacco smoker (which I’ve never been). I’m constantly having to blow my nose, and the coughing regularly brings up “stuff” out of my lungs, or at least my throat.

This is hardly the sort of thing I would have preferred to write about for my first post of the year (anything from Bernie Sanders and gun control to new year’s resolutions and the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a couple of young Nevada Bundys and their crowd the day before yesterday would have done), but this is where I find myself.

When I was younger, I used to have a notion—I can’t really call it a fantasy or a daydream, since it was not an appealing thought—of a day in the future when the human cold would be permanent. It seemed possible: viruses fight to survive as much as any living thing, and the better they got at it, the longer they’d be likely to hang on.

I thought of attempting to write a science fiction novel (or a short story, at least) in which such a cold would feature—every human being on the planet had it, and it never went away—but it didn’t seem much of a hook for a thrilling tale. In fact, it’d be downright dreary. Where could you go with it?

For much of 2015, though, my fantasy seemed to have become reality for me. Not that I had a cough, sneezes, or runny nose, but I heard my lungs a lot more than I used to. Especially when I lay down to sleep, and everything was quiet, I picked up tiny clicks, whistles, and/or wheezes in my throat; sounds I wasn’t accustomed to hearing, as my breaths went in and out.

Unlike in the past, my sinuses weren’t plugged, let alone infected. Whatever was going on inside didn’t adversely affect my acting work: this year I shot several web ads for Intel, a couple of short indie films, and training videos for the Oregon Lottery and Friends of Trees; and I participated in staged readings and table reads of plays in progress. I also did voiceover narrations for a series of eight training videos on aging and elder health issues produced by the PSU Institute on Aging and Oregon Health Authority.

Although I sort of sounded as if I had asthma when I breathed deeply, I have no history of that condition, and I never felt as if I wasn’t getting enough air. It was very peculiar. When I went for a general health checkup late in the fall, my doctor listened and looked me over, but didn’t find anything specifically wrong. Yet the unusual sounds went on. And they’ve been especially prominent the past week.

What could it be? A semi-permanent allergy to growing air pollution, perhaps? Who knows. Perhaps it may never go away. But once I’m over this awful cold, I have nowhere to go in 2016 but up.