Gotta love Portland

New story, yet untitled, still unfinished

It was once a convent. In its heyday, it must have been imposing. Nuns in their black habits looking up to the wrought iron crucifix mounted to the roof as they came and went. Now it was just a three-story, rectangular red brick building with empty lots on both sides. The grass grew high in the summer and collected the trash that blew in from other parts of the neighborhood. That’s the thing about MollyOlga. It was the anchor of the neighborhood. The only building on a street of boarded up houses that had any life and it pulled everything toward it.

Four wide stone steps led to the front locked door. It was always a few degrees cooler at the top of the stairs. The doorbell made a shrill sound that hurt my ears, and usually summoned Duncan. He would let me in and then return silently to whatever it was he was doing.

You would think I’d most remember the paintings. It was an art school after all. But even more, I remember the smells. I learned to smell alizarin red, cobalt and ochre. The smell of ivory soap and the rusty tap water at the sink where you cleaned your brushes. The pungent fix solution from the darkroom. The smell of Bridget Robinson’s seldom-washed hair.

Bridget was a fixture on the second floor. She’d have already been there for an hour or two by the time I would arrive. She sat almost the whole day at a small table in between two floor-to-ceiling windows, only getting up to go the bathroom, I imagine, although I can’t really remember ever seeing her move.

Bridget would carefully choose one pastel and then another, working them into the thick cotton paper, stroke upon stroke, making tapestries of bright chalky color. She once drew seagulls resting on the shore. For anyone else a sedate subject, but her birds were giants, and she had them presiding over a raucous mosaic sea of red, violet and green. At noon, she’d pull out a crumpled paper lunch bag and without washing her hands, eat a bologna sandwich, dressed in the pigment residue from her fingers. It took me a long time to realize she was twice my age.

She was always the first person Molly would check on.

“Alright, Bridget?” Molly would stand and look over her shoulder.

“Yeaahh.”

“Nice. Very pretty.”

Molly loved Bridget. You could tell. They both saw the world the same way, I think. Even though Molly would never let me see her paintings, I could tell she saw things the world as big and magical.

The seed of the school sprouted sometime in the 60s when a group of neighborhood children knocked on Molly Bethel’s back door and asked her to teach them to paint. They kept coming. She used her own money to buy supplies and never asked for payment. Twenty-one years later, she and her friend Olga Lownie bought the former St. Boniface nunnery for $2,500 and called their new art school “MollyOlga.”

I loved the drive there. I’d leave my quiet white-bread town safely tucked 30 minutes away from Buffalo and head in on the 400, hitting the Thruway, then through the 190 toll booth requiring fifty cents to pass, and finally down to Locust Street where MollyOlga was located. I’d come off the ramp into the part of town called the “fruit belt” and you’d expect with a name like that the streets would be lined with the trees they were named for: locust, mulberry, peach, grape. Now I think of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “A Locust Tree in Flower”
Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

But then I thought of Biblical plagues and it seemed appropriate because the street was stripped bare. But I didn’t care too much because it stripped me bare too and I was glad for it. I was a young white girl in her mother’s cast-off Nissan Sentra but I felt like maybe I could be anyone.

Molly tried to shape me. She tried to stop me from holding my paintbrush like a pencil and instead hold it with my forefinger and thumb so I could use my whole arm, and not just my wrist to paint.

Thunder and lightning

It has thundered and lightning-ed two out of the three nights I've been in Chicago. After being away for years, the old nightmares started again last night: a tornado is coming. I am looking for shelter. Last night, I ran into a Safeway and headed to the back of the store away from the windows. But then I realized I forgot my brother. He was in the highrise across the street on the 40th floor. I needed to tell him to get out of the building.

Maybe the dream is telling me I'm worried I've left my family behind. Maybe I have. When I talk to my mother, she never asks me about myself. She doesn't know who I am. I might tell her about a movie I've seen recently, but that's it. She doesn't know me otherwise. We spend our time talking about her life. S. is easier. We have more in common. But still I feel so far away sometimes. If I just chose to live closer...in the same city even...where we could shop together, or eat in the same restaurants, or drive on the same roads, would we be closer? Why should I expect my mother to be any different than an old friend who I awkwardly begin a conversation with after 10 years apart?

I do like art. And so does S. We went to see Kelan Phil Cohran play at an almost non-descript Ethiopian restaurant. The chartreuse walls made it stand out. Phil was playing the thumb piano when we walked in, and from where we were standing, it didn't look like he was doing anything. Just rocking back and forth. But then he moved on to the trumpet and later the harp. He played for an hour, collected his tips like any street musician, and walked out the door without attracting the attention of anyone there. And maybe you don't know who he is, but jazz fans will, and you'd think they would applaud, or call out. Gather for autographs. But nope. Practically anonymous.

And then a day of walking from gallery to gallery in the early spring sun, before dropping me off at Northwestern for a business workshop. I get out of the car, and say goodbye, and I'm thinking as I stand in line to check in and see him drive away, "who am I?" and "who are we?" and "why do we know so little about one another?"

Bzzzzz...zzzzz..z....z.....

Tom was out to check on the hive yesterday. He proved my theory right. They are dead. We have a hive full of bee carcasses. It's been a very wet winter and they were infested by evil, honeybee-murdering mites.

I've been waiting to see some signs of life. Spring has arrived late here in Oregon. The apple trees are just starting to flower. But we've had a few warm days. I expected to see the scouts venture out into the sun. But it's been quiet. I even lobbed a stone against the side of the hive a few weeks back, to see if I could arouse the guard bees. But nope.

Poor little bees.

Poetry

Origami in my brain,
worries keep folding up.
Stupid human worries.
Red, digital numbers burn
into the back of my retina:
It is 2:35 in the morning.
I will get up at six
and drive through the blue rain
in a sea of more red taillights.
Asphalt highways flow into
other asphalt highways and
the steel girders, concrete barriers
keep us all moving in the same direction.

Once I saw a grey ghost cross the highway.
A floating plastic bag
caught in the wind—
No—a great bird
sailed over four lanes of traffic
into a meager stand of trees
and I couldn't stop myself from crying.
I felt its bones in the cold,
the way it tucks its head underneath
its wing for warmth, the hum
of traffic ten feet away from
its nest. My stupid human problems.
Nothing in comparison to survival.

I am thankful for poetry,
that insomnia and birds
can lie in bed together
while I stay awake.
No storytelling road to follow.
No chain of logic because
this does not make sense
and not much does.

Tell stories to the whales
trapped underwater with the din
of motors and beating drills.
They swim up rivers and onto beaches
to find some peace.