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.