Another Year of Portland Streetcar Adventures - 2016 Roundup

Time for my annual roundup of memorable adventures on the job with Portland Streetcar. These are some of the things I experienced and observed in 2016. . . . 

Feb. 18:  There were a couple of dicey-looking characters when I got on the streetcar at 12:30. But one went digging around in his billfold and pulled out a couple of ragged but unused Trimet tickets, by which I gathered he was offering one for his companion as well. I took them and punched them in the validator.

When he finally gathered that a rider is supposed to validate a Trimet ticket with today's date in order to have valid fare, he said he'd been carrying around 20 or more of them that his P.O. (probation officer) had been handing out to him month after month. That’s good, I said; now you have a lot of future rides paid for -- just make sure you punch one each time so you don’t get caught and fined. Oh, I don’t need ’em all, he replied; I’ll give ’em away to other folks.

Even better, I said.

That's Quite Enough Out of You, Mr. President

That’s it. The President has disturbed my sleep.

I don’t say this to try to be funny. It’s a plain and sorry fact.

All my life, I was never the kind of person who had trouble sleeping. I’ve been a light sleeper, in the sense that many things could readily wake me up, but I nearly always returned to rest with equal ease.

Over the past several months, I’ve felt a mixture of rue and pity for my friends when they’ve declared on social media that they’re upset or terrified by the new President. Me, I’ve chosen the practice of steering clear of any “news” about him. I did my best to ignore him.

There wasn’t anything he had to say that I cared to hear, and I didn’t feel I should needlessly stir up my emotions by paying him the slightest bit of attention … not least because he seemed to crave it so badly and demand it as his due when he had nothing of substance to offer.

Much of what he did and said appeared self-aggrandizing and a performance mostly for effect, not as an expression of any deeply felt beliefs or aspirations on his part. So it was certainly not anything I needed to worry my head about, especially since there was nothing I could do about it.

I woke up early this morning after having gone to bed later than usual last night. I did everything I could to go back to sleep; even plugged in my iPod and programmed soothing progressive jazz by Oregon, but it was no go.

The proximate causes of my restlessness, I suppose, were a rebuke I posted to a slight acquaintance from high school who probably voted for the new President (although like many of his supporters, he’s not appeared to be all that proud of the fact but unaccountably cagey; he hasn’t been eager to come right out and say so) and had just posted an insulting witticism about Senator Elizabeth Warren, so I typed a stinging riposte just before shutting down my laptop and going to bed . . .

And the death of a friend.

Moving Forward with My Grandmother, Dorothy Roth Loftus

As I reported here, I made a pledge to myself to cut way back on my pleasure reading in 2015 to concentrate on writing my next book, about my grandmother. It took until March 2016 to pound out a 140-page first draft. Over the subsequent six months I read a lot of secondary research to try to fill the gaps (both in my knowledge and for the reader’s benefit) about the history of Alaska Territory and the city of Fairbanks.

I ran into some unanticipated roadblocks in each of the past two autumns, however. In the fall of 2015, my wife Carole suffered an accident that put her in the hospital and made the local news. In the fall of 2016, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and has been undergoing chemotherapy ever since. Both events knocked a bit of the stuffing out of both of us, and my book project was one of the things I mostly put aside.

Now I feel ready to get back to it. You can go back and read my first post about this project for the basic background. Here’s a collection of some of the best short excerpts I posted on my Facebook page last year for friends and family:

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The log cabin at 57 Second Avenue in Fairbanks would be Dorothy’s home for the next two decades, until after her marriage in 1928. In her judgment, “It was worse than sleeping in a tent.” Ice filled the corners, and long lines of frost “like railroad tracks’ could be seen along the dining room and sitting room walls where the logs met. Nearly all the nail heads in the walls looked “like a white Russian fur cap” because they were tipped with frost. “We were forbidden to pull at the ice because Mother said the oatmeal from the wallpaper would come off, too. Oatmeal paper was very stylish then.”

Dorothy often liked to place a cup of water on the stand next to her bed so she wouldn’t have to get up for a drink. It usually froze overnight. Known as a granite cup or enamel cup, it was made of iron coated with enamel, as were many cooking ware items then. The freezing and expanding water popped bits of the enamel off the surface of the mug. “I didn’t know we were cold, because that’s all I knew. But Mother really suffered. And we lived in that house from 1909 until she died.”