Celebrating My Beloved Wife, Carole Barkley

Yesterday (Monday, April 24, as I write this), was Carole’s birthday. It did not start out auspiciously: We were scheduled to meet with her oncologist first thing in the morning to go over the results of an MRI last week (her third in seven months) and probably undergo her tenth round of chemo for breast cancer.

But her oncologist came in to tell us the tumors had shrunk so much that they no longer show up on the MRI. Her recommendation was to continue with two more rounds of chemo, including that day’s, and consult with a surgeon about two remaining lumps that were likely nonmalignant cysts.

Dr. Rebecca Orwoll actually sang the good news to us to the tune of “Happy Birthday” and my eyes filled with tears. So after the chemo, we went to see a feel-good movie (“Going In Style,” a stylish piece of comedy-caper fluff with delightful performances by Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin, and nice supporting turns by Ann-Margret and Matt Dillon).

In celebration of the happy news, a selection of recent verbal snapshots from a fun marriage:

My Work as a Portland Walking Tour Guide

Five years ago, I became a guide with Portland Walking Tours. It was the first of several “ambassador of the city” jobs I do now (the other is Portland Streetcar, which I joined as a part-time customer service representative two and a half years later, in June 2014).

Since my first tour in early 2012, I’ve introduced the city to visitors from Palm Springs and Detroit, Berkeley and the San Juans, Iowa and Alaska. I’ve had guests from Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, Paris, Brazil (both Rio and São Paulo), the Ivory Coast, Stockholm, even a UN interpreter from Tajikistan. Just yesterday my tour group included two young women from China and third from New Delhi.

Every December and January, I host tourists from Brisbane, Perth, and Sydney, because it’s their summer break. More than once I’ve had guests from Fairbanks, Alaska who said they’re familiar with Loftus Road, a short street near the University of Alaska campus that’s named after my grandfather and his brothers because they had a cabin there while attending school in the late 1920s.

There’s a small but steady stream of guests who have either recently relocated to Portland, are visiting because they’re thinking about it, or are scouting local colleges with their parents. Every once in a while I get a longtime resident, even a native Portlander, who is finally checking out our tours, either for herself or to show the city to an out-of-town friend or relation.

It Was a Blizzard . . . of Postcards; You Didn't Hear?

It’s been a tough week for the White House.

Democrats and news sources are trumpeting the “failure” of the President and the Republican-led Congress to ram a replacement for what they call Obamacare through the House.

Characteristically, the Chief Executive laid the blame anywhere but at his own door, and in this case, far from where it belongs. He blamed the Democrats . . . when in fact it was primarily the most conservative Republicans who dug in their heels and said “repeal and replace” didn’t go far enough to suit them.

But the White House could potentially claim one victory this week . . . though nobody’s talking about it publicly -- not even the Oval Office, which would probably prefer to see absolutely no mention of it whatsoever, anywhere -- so that’s what I’m going to discuss.

A BIT OF PREHISTORY

On the day after the President’s inauguration, the Women’s March on Washington drew at least 500,000 people to a rally on the National Mall against him. A total of about 2 million took part in D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle alone, and all were peaceful; no arrests were reported.

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:

 *     *     *     *     *

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.”

Where I Am, How I See It

I wrote the tidy passage below in late August 2015 -- almost 17 months ago -- as the conclusion to the report to my college graduating class that the school invites us to submit every five years. It was printed and published with my classmates’ reports and contact information in a paperbound book by the reunion committee for our 35th reunion last June. I did not attend.

So its official publication date might be said to be 2016. A few things have changed since: my wife was struck down and injured rather dramatically (and not just because it made the local news) by a cyclist less than two months later, then diagnosed with breast cancer a year after that. On a more trivial level, I can no longer claim not to own a smartphone; my carrier forced me to get one last May, but I’ve never surfed the Web, read a book, or watched a video on it. I have sent text messages, though; probably fewer than a hundred in eight months. Mostly I call my wife.

I can’t say the three paragraphs below are necessarily the best thing I published last year, but they’re probably the most significant: the most pointed and honest. I think about them more often than anything else I’ve written in many a year. Not a few times in conversations, I’ve tried to reproduce the gist from memory to someone because it sums up where I’m at in my life and in the world. I usually forget one essential detail or another.

So, only slightly edited, I offer the following as my statement of position for this year and, undoubtedly, a number of years to come . . . 

More Play With Words

Last March, I gathered up the best examples of puns and wordplay that flowed across my Facebook page in 2015. Another good crop developed last year, but (everybody could use a good chuckle, right?) here are my best from the year before, 2014:

Jan. 10: So, we're talking a mega-crossover with the Star Wars franchise for the final Hobbit movie. They won't let us use any of the major Lucas characters in Middle Earth, but they'll let us have the Wookie.

He would be the Tolkien Chew.

Jan. 28:  I think my favorite mixed metaphor will always be “you’re beating your head against a dead horse,” but I just ran across one that’s almost as good: “There are four ways for habitual wallflowers to come out of their shells….”

March 7: If you have twin redheads in high school, is the one who was delivered second when they were born the beta carrot-teen?

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.