We all want to be recognized: it’s right there in the third tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the rectangle labeled “belonging.”
But what’s it like to be a writer who wants other people to want to read what she writes? First off, the entire previous sentence is a giant redundancy, because even though some writers probably want to be read (and liked) more than others, I’ve never met one who’s ambivalent about it.
Shawn Marie Howe and her father, John Pihas, who passed away just last month.
The pain in my throat shifts from side to side, depending on which way I turn in the bed. I’m hot, and there is a sick smell in the room. All the muscles between my shoulder blades ache. It’s a bother to fully open my eyes, which are swollen but still sunken, and they sting, as if I’ve spent several hours in a chlorinated pool. I pry them open with my fingers, slowly, because the lashes are stuck together with goop from last night’s restless sleep.
I want to flee my bedroom, but at the same time I want to stay, burrow deeper under the comforter and turn toward the wall and the fading darkness. But I have to use the bathroom, and that decides it for me. Up I go. Continue reading
We’re grayer now, and longer in the tooth. Well, Elena is grayer, and I would be too if I didn’t still color my hair, which probably means she’s more honest than me, or at least a little less vain. But there’s no doubt we’re both older, owing to the passage of time and the things that keep on happening in our lives, tap-tap-tapping away at our sense of security but deepening our resolve to delve into life’s deeper mysteries with eyes wide open.
That’s what we do when we run together: talk, wonder, laugh and listen. Elena and I have run thousands of miles side by side over the last six years, and that’s a lot of conversation. I don’t know if there’s a topic under the sun we haven’t taken up, and we try really hard to give each other equal, or near equal, air-time. If something important is on my mind and I go on for more than half our run, whether it’s five, or eight, or sixteen miles long, I try to remember that the next time we hit the road. Same for her. There have been days when a problem I’m stewing over has needed an entire hour for its full hearing; ditto for Elena. Continue reading
Christmas is over, and I’m grateful that it is.
“Comfort” and “joy” were supposed to be the watchwords of the Santa and sensory overload season, yet neither seemed to apply. Now we turn the calendar page, where the traditional literary harbingers “anticipation” and “opportunity” point us toward what the New Year might, in the best of situations, turn out to bring. We’re encouraged to reflect on our lives and resolve to do better, act better, parent better or perform better at our jobs. Any one of those will do, yet I find I’m unable to buy into the zeal.
Our living rooms are littered with bits of wrapping paper whose Scotch-taped corners cling to the carpet where the vacuum won’t reach. Even though the tree has been dragged out the front door, pine needles linger like the liquored breath of the last bad holiday visitor, stale and unwelcome.
Sadness, punctuated by fleeting moments of peace, saturates the silence. We trudge on.
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Filtered staccato sunlight fell on the roadway during my morning run today. It was the first sun I’d seen in more than a week, and it fed me as I loped along, trying not to slip on the mossy inclines or trip on branches that have fallen from oaks and maples in the early winter rain and wind.
I’m different now, and so is my running. The impact has compressed my vertebrae and made me shorter. I used to be five-foot-three and now I’m five-foot-one, a little more wobbly, slightly bent over, slower. In all probability I’ll never again run a Boston Marathon qualifying time or break four hours over 26.2 miles. All of that’s okay, I tell myself as I push my body forward, reveling in the movement despite the sub-40 degree wind against my face.
Afterward, I reluctantly crack the front door of our neighborhood bakery and see Max standing there. “Hey — how are you?” I greet our grizzled, wisecracking 80-something Jewish professor friend. “Above ground,” he quips in his usual, sometimes-but-not-all-the-time off color manner.
“Yep, that’s where it starts,” I reply, bantering with him.
“But not where it ends,” he retorts, both of us knowing that is most certainly true.
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A little boy once was asked what he thought about the way life was going for him so far. “Mostly good, some bad,” he responded after a moment’s consideration.
Even though I’ve come to subscribe to the Buddhist principle that life is suffering, in recent months our family has endured just about all the Some Bad we can take. As we continue to struggle to find our equilibrium beneath the crushing weight of 2012, we search the sky for signs of gentleness and unrelenting goodness in 2013.
Something very significant has shifted. We can all feel it. The whole world is rousing itself awake this morning, with people taking great pains to get out of bed when the covers somehow feel like the only safe haven available in a place filled with shadows.
Birds, bugs and human beings, whether they want to or not after yesterday’s carnage in Newtown, Connecticut, are rising — across four time zones — and doing what they must do: feed their children, give presentations in board rooms, sit for chemotherapy treatments. They’re trying to figure out how to pay the bills, how to make it through the week or even the next day, when, as the President said on TV last night, the nation’s heart is broken. Continue reading
Signing the summit register on top of Kings Mountain in the Coast Range.
“It’s only about six miles,” J said casually into the phone, knowing that with those five words he’d have me hooked. In fact, I was pretty sure I detected a hint of a challenge in his voice, something that only encouraged me further.
Jared was itching to climb something, and that August afternoon in 2010, he wanted to trek to the summit of Kings Mountain with me. I was flattered, humbled and happy, because — though I’d had many interactions with J in the nearly nine years I’d been married to his dad — he was asking me. Not someone else, but me, a woman 22 years his senior and, though a regular runner, nowhere near his equal when it came to mountain climbing passion or prowess. Continue reading
They weren't fighting over newspapers in Tombstone, but they are in Forest Grove.
The trio made a local newspaper turf war sound like the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral — and in some ways, it’s eerily similar.
Interviewed during a high-noon segment of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Think Out Loud” radio program this week, Publisher John Schrag said, clear as crystal, that he intended for his paper, the Forest Grove News-Times, to stand its ground in town, despite a bullish play for Main Street dominance by the upstart Forest Grove Leader, now almost a month old. Continue reading
Born Oct. 13, 1991, Tim Krieves turns 21 tomorrow.
Well hello, Oregon rain — how I’ve missed you.
Just as some of us had begun to succumb to a trance-like state that more than three months of blue skies and warm temperatures had lured us into, teasing us into wondering if we’d fallen asleep on a flight from the Left Coast to the Midwest and somehow woken up in the Miami airport, the wet stuff began to fall from the sky today. Continue reading
Sesame Street's Big Bird found himself on the unemployment line after Mitt Romney called for the elimination of funding to PBS.
This just in from the Associated Press newswire:
Tarred and feathered by pundits for his performance as moderator of the 2012 presidential debate on domestic policy this week, Public Broadcasting Service legend Jim Lehrer has remained underground — possibly as a temporary guest inside Oscar the Grouch’s trash can — since Wednesday evening. Continue reading
Just as school children across America are returning to class in the pre-autumn period that is this presidential election season, another kind of mass movement is taking place out in cyberspace. Hundreds, and probably thousands, of regular Facebook users are fleeing the widely-used social media platform, pledging not to come back until after the polls close on Nov. 6.
They’re realizing that all the putrid political rhetoric appearing, uninvited, on their “walls” each morning isn’t doing anything for their mental health, their relationships or their digestive tracts. And as more and more angry people continue to toss their partisan barbs, like nasty little Velcro fish hooks, onto the Internet flannel board Mark Zuckerberg took public last spring, some of the site’s most fervent devotees are deciding to sit this one out.
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