Prose, obsessed upon for far too long. Judge kindly.
Taylor avenue, with its track homes and wide streets is the generic small town America. A strip of grass or artificial turf sits between the sidewalk and young maples lining the road. My friends, Loren, Matt, Nate, and Kyle lived a few houses away and we spent our summers as young boys causing trouble. Summers were filled with bike races, talk of the coolest BMX bikes, tree forts, and baseball cards. Rumors of a kid on the other avenue who could ride “no hands” around the block abounded, and evenings were filled with Super Mario Brothers. Nothing, besides maybe snow ...
This past Sunday I ran in my first Race for the Cure. I’d participated before, two years ago up in Portland, but this time I actually ran. I didn’t give the event much thought before I went. No really, two months ago in Japan I filled out the forms barely giving it a second thought. It seemed so far away, and there were so many other things to be thinking about. Between all the big moves I barely found a moment to think about the race.
Aagh, hmm, aagh, hmm, aagh, hmm…mechanical breathing apparatuses are so eerie. I’d spent the night at home. It’d been a long time since I’d slept at home. Work, school, friends, I’d find any excuse I could come up with to avoid spending a night there. It was too hard on me. She’d say she didn’t want me around, that if I just sat around being with her while she was sick it would be worse. Don’t let me hold you back she’d say. You’ve got to keep living. I didn ...
I drove. It’s one thing to be 15 and pull up to basketball practice with your mother in the passenger seat, new permit beaming from your back pocket, it’s quite another to be 21 and driving because she no longer can. The three of us, my dad drove separately, pulled into the Kaiser Interstate Medical Office parking lot in Northeast Portland. I pulled into the turn out and dropped her and my sister off and went to park the car. We’d been here a few times before but this was different—it was the first time all ...
In August of 1989 we moved. I had spent the first nine years of my life living in Longview Washington. A dreary mill town, where most high school graduates simply cross the street and attend Lower Columbia Community College delaying their entry into the lumber mills. Huge Ford trucks adorned with flood lights lined the streets, and the town always seemed cloaked in gray. If it wasn’t the overcast weather then it was the twenty-four hour mill stacks polluting the skies. I remember my mom breathing a sigh of relief when we left. “I was worried you’d end ...
Stumptown. Puddletown. Rip City. Great nicknames but for me Portland will always be the City of Bridges. Growing up both north of the city and just south in its suburbs, my life has crisscrossed them countless times. Each with its own character: the Ross Island’s narrow lanes begging for certain death, the Burnside splitting Portland while housing the homeless, and the Steel, a stout double lift bridge there to get the job done. Then there’s the mighty Fremont, with its large suspension arcs and mass of concrete. It’s the Fremont that contains the story, it’s this ...