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?”

And twenty-five years ago next month, I went to the tearoom at The Heathman Hotel in downtown Portland for the first meeting of this proposed salon and met my future wife, Carole Barkley. There’s a lot more to that story (for one thing, Carole hadn’t been involved in placing the ad, but was dragged along to the first meeting somewhat unwillingly by a friend who had), as well as our subsequent courtship and marriage about two and a half years later, but this is a love letter to my adopted hometown.

Twenty-five years ago, I was unemployed, romantically bedraggled, and generally at loose ends. I worked various temp assignments for several months and hustled interviews until I landed an office job at Portland State University, where I worked the next seven years.

That was followed by a five-year stint in administrative support at the City of Lake Oswego. Finally, I filled a legal secretary/receptionist post for a small law firm for five years in the heart of downtown Portland, until I was laid off in July 2009 without warning, probably as a repercussion of the great recession.

Up to that point, I continued to pursue a career as a writer of some sort. I published a number of free-lance pieces in newspapers. I wrote book and film reviews for various websites, from Amazon.com, AllReaders.com, and the California Literary Review (no longer extant) to DocumentaryFilms.net. I also researched, wrote, and published a book about men and pornography.

But in the summer of 2009 I began the big shift, part of which I described on this blog under the title “Two Years Before the Cast,” in September 2011. I had been doing a lot of stage acting the preceding five years, and now I commenced to look for commercial video and independent film work.

Since that 2009 post, I have traded the online writing job mentioned there for two free-lance proofreading and editing jobs (and added a third last month) . . . joined Portland Walking Tours as a guide for “The Best of Portland” in March 2012 . . . and hired on as a customer service agent with the Portland Streetcar in July 2014. And of course, I started writing for this blog in the late fall of 2009 (though that, I hasten to add, is an entirely non-revenue-generating activity).

With Portland Walking Tours and the Portland Streetcar, I have two highly visible “ambassador of the city” jobs. I introduce visitors from all over the country, as well as Australia, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere, to the downtown, history, architecture, urban design, and green values of Portland; and I answer the questions of tourists, conventioneers, and not a few metro suburbanites who are trying to get around the city by local transit.

I’ve been here long enough -- as a member of Congregation Beth Israel, a volunteer for Lift Urban Portland (formerly Northwest Portland Ministries), an actor in local stage productions and video/film projects, folk dancer in the Christmas Revels (1994-2000), co-founder of Bridgetown Morris Men, (1992-2001; Carole designed that lovely embroidered logo that adorns every dancer’s chest and can be prominently seen at the top of the team’s website), baritone in the Portland Symphonic Choir (1992-1997), member of three different book discussion groups, and author of print articles, a blog, and (if I may say so) a highly entertaining Facebook page -- that during almost every streetcar shift or walking tour, somebody who knows me passes and calls out hi.

Now, I could complain about a lot of things in Portland. The “homeless problem” has gotten way out of hand: The irritation and outright threat posed by the panhandlers and beggars -- and the mayor and city council’s inability or unwillingness to do anything substantial about them -- is one of the main things that drove Carole and me to move out of our downtown apartment last September after more than 10 years there.

The city is not managing the growing crush of vehicular traffic, it’s not keeping up with infrastructure maintenance, and its low police-to-population ratio for a city of its size is nothing short of disgraceful. Too many people discard trash on the trains and buses as well as the streets and parks, toss their cigarette butts on the ground instead of disposing of them properly, run stop signs and red lights in their cars and on their bicycles (with pretty disastrous results last October, in the case of my wife).

In general, Portland has followed most of the rest of the nation, I’m guessing, in accepting a general deterioration in manners, public behavior, and civic responsibility. But as a lifelong resident I met yesterday morning said to me, “When you set the bar this high, it’s hard to think of another place you’d like to live.” Although I’m the native Oregonian, Carole has lived in this city ten years longer than I. She moved here from Ohio (after stints in New Mexico, California, Georgia, Colorado, Missouri, Florida, and Michigan) less than a year after Mount St. Helens blew its top.

Neither of us has any hankering to move.