Alien plant

These strange flowers, which look like alien creatures with eyes and antennae, are an Australian import called grevilleas. I’d never seen them before I came across these while out on a neighborhood ramble last week.

Small poem

Make me a bird

Make me a bird, Spirit,
Soaring and dipping
Up to the heights and down to the waters.
All of Earth’s secrets are hidden within me
How else would I know how to build a nest?

New in the neighborhood

Judging from the plain lines of the boxy new red addition, I was afraid I wouldn’t like the remodel of the Belmont Library. This library renovation is the last piece of an ambitious project that has transformed many libraries in the Multnomah County system.

Most of the renovations are beautiful, high quality, well-designed additions. The Belmont library, which reopened in mid-August, reaches for these goals, but does not always attain them.

One of my new resolutions—the most important one!—is to be less negative about things. But I can’t help myself when it comes to my neighborhood library. I loved that place and spent time there.

From my first visit to the new library, I’ve been disappointed by the atmosphere inside. This temple of books should vibrate with energy and soul, like the old library did. Instead it feels leaden and uninspired.

The old library was small but very approachable. It had the highest circulation of any library in the Multnomah County system. The new library has more space, but not all of it is used well.

Here is the lobby, a big box at the entry that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The many planes and angles don’t feel warm or coherent to me.

The colorful installation at the opposite side of the lobby features community artwork. Its static, boxy appearance echoes the staid angles and uninspired design of the rest of the building.

Maybe it’s just me

On opening day, August 15, I asked several patrons what they thought about the new building. They were mostly positive. Parents, especially, were happy with the sunny new children’s area, with its innovative seating, colorful mural and hands-on projects. It occupies the whole space of the original library.

The new addition has two floors. In the elevator lobby, a wooden beam intrudes between the two elevators to block a view of both cars. I’ve missed the elevator because the door of the car I couldn’t see opened, then closed before I could get to it.

This week, I made what may be a final trip to Belmont. I went to pick up a book on hold. It was misfiled but a friendly librarian found it for me. The holds area is sort of creepy. Its gray metal shelves sit in a claustrophobic gray-walled alcove with oddly dim lighting. The aisles are ADA accessible, but they feel narrow. I had to back up my wheelchair to avoid disturbing another patron.

I took my laptop with me, thinking I’d do some writing. But the space was daunting, and I couldn’t feel any energy. I tried again the next day—and this time I did get a lot of work done on this posting. I wasn’t comfortable, though.

On the way out the door, I have the vertiginous feeling that I’m going to tumble right down the front steps. These steps are so close to the door that I must maneuver my chair carefully to avoid a fall. I start the right turn toward the wheelchair ramp before I’m through the door. People kind enough to hold the door for me have to scamper out of the way, sometimes stepping down the stairs in the process.

Farewell, Belmont

I loved you once.

But from now on, I’ll be picking up my holds at the Central Library, which has more accessible, better-lit hold shelves. It’s not that much farther on the bus, and when I’m downtown I won’t have to wrestle with the narrow sidewalks that line César Chávez Boulevard near the Belmont branch.

Those scary sidewalks, only a few feet wide next to a street where traffic whizzes by, are another reason the library I’m leaving behind feels less comfortable to me.

Mostly, though, I just don’t feel I belong in the library I used to consider my own.

What was once the welcoming front door of the old library is now a forbidding emergency exit behind a permanent wire fence.

Other new libraries

I’m not universally negative about new construction in the Multnomah County system. I really like the remodels at the Albina and St. Johns branches. The new Northwest Library on Northwest Pettygrove is especially sweet, with curvy laminated wooden surfaces, stone floors and plenty of light.

When I’m out and about on the bus, I often work on my writing at the Holgate, Midland or Albina branches.

The Central branch has a quiet room just for writers, donated by Don and Julie Sterling, who were newspaper colleagues and friends of mine. The room is veddy old-school with oak paneling and desks. The windows are too high to see out of. I applied for and got permission to use the room, but actually, anyone can just walk in. It’s not locked.

Working at PSU

When I really need to knuckle down and get some work done, nothing beats the Millar Library at Portland State University. The public has access to this building. Wooden carrels with accessible power sockets line windowed walls with views of the campus or the huge copper beech outside. Inside are acres of shelves stuffed with books. I’ve never seen anyone browsing those books, but I have checked out a few. Did you know that you, too, can borrow books from PSU? Sign up for a PSU library card with your Multnomah County Library card.

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Another Substack venue

I occasionally write a prose poem for Juke, a Substack curated by Tonya Morton. This week, she published my meditation on the word “path.” It includes some pretty photos.

Juke

Path: A Creative Prompt

Path The poet Robert Frost knew about paths and ways and choices…

Read more

7 days ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Fran Gardner

A joke out of nowhere

I recently was stranded by the 14/Hawthorne bus because there were already two wheelchairs aboard. The next bus wouldn’t be for 16 minutes, so I decided to roll to my destination, which was only about a mile down Hawthorne.

I’m nearly there when a man on a bike, a delivery person for an outfit called Caviar, stops and asks me if I want to hear a joke.

Sure, I say.

“Why did the puppy fall down the stairs?”

When I say I don’t know, he just stares at me for several long seconds, and then for a few seconds more, before saying,

“Awkward pause.”

Back on the bus

Yesterday when I boarded the 14 bus I encountered one of my favorite drivers, Sean, who had been driving another route for the past months. He was glad to see me, too, joking that he only agreed to come back to driving the 14 if Fran was going to be a rider.

Till next time

This is issue 213 of Becoming. I’m still interested in writing about whatever is shot across my bow, and I’m grateful to you for reading it.

As always, you can read Becoming for free. A substantial number of folks pay to support my writing habit, however, and you can join them by upgrading your subscription to a paid option.

The cheapest Substack will let me charge is $50, or $5 a month. If that’s too much, you can also tip me in $5 increments on PayPal. If you go the PayPal route, you might drop me a message so I’ll know whom to thank. Otherwise I just know that someone donated, no name.

And please, visit a library this week. Or soon. Books need us.

—Fran

—30—

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Leo ends today, Aug. 22. Tomorrow, Virgo. I was once married to a Virgo, but he really had a Leo personality.

Cobwebs

It’s late summer, and spiders serve up vast platters of silken web on shrubbery. It seldom rains in August in Western Oregon, so nothing washes away the spiderwebs other than a careful gardener’s hosing.

I traveled far in my neighborhood looking for webs that I could photograph from the right angle and in the right light. Then I found some big ones on the bushes just around the corner. They are in the hedges in front of the Toothpaste Building. That’s what I call the apartments because they are painted minty green,

One thing I didn’t see when looking at these webs: prey. Maybe the spiders ate them already, or maybe the bug traps just didn’t yield many victims. Oregon’s dry summer keeps the insect population low.

What’s the difference between a spiderweb and a cobweb? Maybe nothing, although a cobweb might be older and dustier. Those are the ones that catch the light the best on late August days. They are also the sticky, stringy masses you find in basements and attics and unwashed corners.

Shakespeare’s character Cobweb in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of a group of fairy tricksters who torment the humans who have ventured into their territory. His fellows are Peaseblossom, Mustardseed and Moth, and his lines are among the easiest in Shakespeare: five words, including his name.

My own poem about cobwebs:

Cobweb

Stick your finger in a cobweb
Sticky, yes, with spider spit.
Leave one web be and make a wish
And that will be the end of it.

What is writing?

I’ve thought a lot about what I write and how I write. But somehow it had never occurred to me to wonder what writing actually IS. Besides your sitting with a computer or a notebook and spitting out words, what does writing actually entail?

I guess I just thought, “Hey, I have an idea. Let me write it down.” But there is more, and it’s important to notice.

Rose Horowitch shone the light on what writing is in the August 2026 issue of The Atlantic magazine. She was writing about “The End of Reading is Here,” but what she said about writing brought me up short.

Writing is hard, Horowitch says, because when you write, you aren’t just transcribing your thoughts. You are making them up as you go along. You are arranging and pruning, trimming and tucking, refining and developing.

As she puts it: “Writing is the way people figure out what they think.”

Now, that is profound. Writing is more than a discipline, a talent, a skill. As she writes, “the time and focus it takes to form thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs allow the author to make new connections and discover new insights.”

Writing, then, isn’t just a physical act, a notebook dump, a walk in the park of your imagination. It’s a way of being with your ideas, stretching them like taffy, pulling them into shape, twisting them into edible form and wrapping them in crispy cellophane for others to savor.

The joy of writing

Having to think and adjust and manage your ideas may be what makes writing hard, but this is also what makes writing so satisfying and fruitful. As you write, you come up with concepts you didn’t know where there. You are constantly uncovering new things, shiny things, things you can’t wait to share.

Everyone writes

Many of you who read my words each week are also writers. So you know what I’m talking about. But I also encounter folks with Substack accounts who would like to be writers. They are bumping up against beginners’ obstacles: What should I write? Why bother? Who’ll read it? Do I even have anything to say?

But you know what? Once you dive into the sea of words, actually start stroking one word after another, your brain does kick in. New connections form, bridges are built to new vistas, you blaze pathways to surprising new places

It’s magic. And it’s accessible. It’s there, on the page, the screen. The beast that is your idea is pacing in the cage of your brain, just waiting for you to turn the key and free it.

It’s not a fearful beast, but it is full of energy; hungry and greedy. Together, you and the beast within you share the journey, the discovery, the feast.

There is more to writing than you can imagine. Try it. Turn on the magic.

You’ll see.

The next thing, and the next

So change it already
The clock won’t go backward
It’s all up to you, you know that.

You know that the chess board
Hides traps and dangers,
And you know that you’ll find a way out.

Get up and dust your knees
Put away the marbles.
Summer ends, so do the games.

So change it already 
As the clock ticks forward.
Remember: it’s all up to you.

It’s all happening at the zoo

What if ideas were like zoo animals? How would you categorize your thoughts?

Idea animals

Are your ideas like . . .

• A ponderous elephant, slow to get going, but gaining momentum

• Prowling lion, fresh flashes of insight, meaty strength

• Reclusive koala, packing the idea away to enjoy in private later

• High-legged moose, stepping around puddles of meaning

• Growly bear, jealous, a hoarder, unwilling to let go

• Picky giraffe, nibbling only the most tender thoughts

• Lithe tiger, moving and smoothing and soothing

• Nosy rhinoceros, butting and poking, demanding answers

• Soaring eagle, with a view that encompasses all

• Or maybe a crow or an owl or a hawk

These days I’m tending toward the bear, although I’ve been in tiger mode while pulling this posting together.

Did I forget your ideal idea animal?

Leave a comment

Crows

I found a bunch of crows on the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland that were channeling their inner pigeons. Like pigeons, they gathered in a mass, strutting and hopping and pecking at the dirt, noticing one another while staying detached and blasé. They acted like a group of pigeons, only pigeons aren’t black.

Crows are also way smarter than pigeons. They know enough to fly away when I get too close on my wheelchair. I have almost run over pigeons that are so unconcerned about my approach that they just keep waddling in front of me.

But crows, whether through shyness or vigilance, are quick to vacate their lunch spot as I approach. They are nearly impossible to photograph.

I took some pictures, but I had to abandon them. When I tried to zoom in on the birds, the images became impossibly grainy.

Here’s an old crow photo.

It was a lot easier to take a photo of an empty bottle of Old Crow. You never know what you’ll find in my neighborhood. It was just standing there at the edge of a flowerbed.

Rocks

I used to give my mother grief about the large ceramic bowl of found stones that she kept in her apartment.

“Mom, “I’d say, pointing out the obvious, “those are rocks.”

I said this with great distain, and finally, when she moved to another apartment, the rocks were gone. Did she let them go to please me, or had they become another possession she decided to shed as she moved into her late 90s?

How wrong I was to complain! Of course she valued those rocks, chosen on her hikes in the wild over many years.

The memory of my callousness is one of dozens that batter me now that she is gone and I can’t apologize. I have to forgive myself, I know this. But it is so hard.

One way that I expiate not understanding my mother‘s love of those rocks is that now I pick up stones. I don’t have to choose them; the universe finds them for me. A few days ago, as I was tooling down my block, there was a big old striated stone sitting in the center of the sidewalk, just barking at me to notice it.

This stone fits in the palm of my hand like a tool. It may have a little fossil at one end, but I couldn’t get a good photo of that.

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Sometimes it’s subtle

The carton says “large” eggs, but, as is often the case, these eggs range in size from medium to jumbo. If I’m making a two-egg omelet, I choose one big egg and one smaller one. Otherwise, whichever is easiest to ease out of the carton.

Kindness

In my reading this week, I came upon a quote to share.

It’s from The Little White Bird, a novel by J.M. Barrie, who is well known for his play Peter Pan.

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

Yes, we should make that new kindness rule. The world really, really needs acts of kindness, and selflessness, and compassion. How much kindness is necessary? Endless kindness!

One of the reasons I like riding the bus is that I see kindness and compassion in action. People can be mean and small-minded, yes, but something about the “we’re all in this together” ethos of mass transit makes most riders tolerant.

Passengers move to free up seats for old people. They put up with huge, crackling black plastic bags of recyclable cans and bottles. They cheer when the driver makes a tight turn.

Portland isn’t like what I’ve heard about other cities, where eye contact is to be avoided. In Portland, on the bus or the train or the streetcar, folks look at one another and exchange pleasantries with strangers—along with little acts of courtesy and, yes, kindness.

More yellow

I’ve been writing about yellow, so my friend Kris diPaola, a fellow Berkeley alum, sent me a photo of yellow flowers. I like orange, too, and green.

Till next week

Thanks for reading Becoming! I encourage you to leave a comment. I’d like to know what you think about idea animals or how you feel about spiders. Got a favorite rock?

I’m running the “subscribe now” button because Substack always reminds me to add it. On PayPal, you can tip me in $5 increments.

Love,
Fran

—30—

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Overripe

We are now in the middle of August—a long, lazy month. The time of dog days. Ripeness and harvest. Leo, the sunniest sun sign.

My theme for August, penned last December, is the brightness of Leo paired with the bittersweet passing of summer.

August is the month when summer starts showing its age. We sense the approach of death—of leaves, of warmth, of early sunrises.

Things ripen in August. The big stone fruits are coming in, peaches and nectarines, apricots and plums. Watermelon swell to enormousness.

As we pass the hump of summer, we notice the days are already markedly shorter. Lawns wither, dry and brown. After weeks of no rain, dust coats trees and shrubs. Perennials past their prime pant listlessly in dry gardens.

Summer’s never been my favorite season. Too hot, too sunny, too overrated in the popular imagination. In the Midwest of my childhood, summer was wearily humid and infested with flying bugs—gnats, mosquitos and flies. I grew up before AC, when summer was a season of icky, sticky heat.

Of course there are good things about summer. Picnics. Parks. Riding in the car with the windows down. Swimming outdoors. Boats and festivals and sunburn.

It can be exhausting! But it will soon be over.

Only about a month remains till the fall equinox. And then it’s a rapid slide into the short sunlight of winter. Timeanddate.com says we can expect a mere 6 hours and 59 minutes of sunlight at the winter solstice on December 21 in Portland.

Enough with summer, this overripe season!

Yellow

I once wrote a whole post about the color yellow, and I still get chills when that color dominates a scene. I got off the FX2 bus at Southeast 124th and Division to capture this Toyota LG cruiser on my phone camera. It’s just another undriveable wreck, but the image is compelling. The sign adds to the interest.

Dilapidated

Near the yellow truck I photographed on Southeast Division is this blighted building. I like the oblique shadow line and the splotches of blue that match the sky.

Finally, a morning routine

I muse from time to time about morning routines, about how difficult it is to come up with one that works and then to stick to it. I never found one that worked, so sticking to one has not been an issue for me.

For most people, it’s no big deal to get up and get ready for the day. But the challenges of MS make it a lot more difficult for me to stick to a pattern.

Then this morning, while putting on my braces (ankle-foot orthotics, or AFOs), I looked at the clock. 5:45. Hey, that’s the same time as nearly every morning! No matter when I actually get out of bed or shower or do whatever to get vertical and dressed, somehow I always seem to be putting on my shoes at 5:45 AM. I’ve come to expect that.

Keeping to task

Every morning I struggle with inertia while I’m putting on the AFOs. MS fatigue often makes me put off little tasks because they involve movement. Simple movement.

When I’m putting on my shoes, it takes small bursts of effort to pull on each sock and maneuver my feet into the shoes that are already attached to the braces. I bend over to tie each shoe, then assemble and tighten the straps that secure the braces to my upper calves.

I’ve had to train myself over many, many mornings to resist the inertia, to keep working on the shoes. I don’t let myself stop to check email or look up something on the phone. No leafing through a magazine I left in the box on my walker. No picking up the tablet to play another game of solitaire with one sock off and one sock on.

No. Just put on the shoes. It takes two minutes, tops. Concentrate and focus. Watch my hands as I manipulate and tie. In at 5:45 and done by 5:47.

Ta-da! My morning routine.

The 20-minute read

Last August, in 2025, I wrote about breaking working time into 20-minute segments. I still do this—it’s especially useful for culling email—but this week I started a new practice, following a suggestion by the prolific Karen Rodriguez on her Literary Fancy Substack.

One of her many projects is to help people wean themselves away from the 10-second attention span forced on us by social media. She does it with 10-minute reading sprints.

Here’s my paraphrase of her method, using 20 minutes.

1. Choose a good book and get comfortable.

2. Read your book for 20 minutes. Let the outer world fade away as you allow yourself to become immersed in what you are reading. Don’t try for speed. Read for meaning, but also savor language, and format and pacing.

3. As you read, make notes in the book. It helps your brain engage and retain. I use a pencil; pens and highlighters seem like overkill.

4. When 20 minutes are up, set the book aside. Take a deep breath, and open your notebook.

5. Write a single sentence. Write about what you’ve read. About how you feel. About the weather. What you write is entirely up to you. It doesn’t have to be literary.

I tried this method with many books, and it worked for me. My responses aren’t sterling; I’m just trying to give you an idea how the process works.

Here’s the sentence I wrote after 20 minutes spent reading The Sum of Us, by Heather McGee: “It’s rotten, it makes no sense. I’m depressed and considering whether I can continue.” The book is partly about how Americans have allowed their own social safety net to be shredded rather than share benefits with people of color.

Or this. The novel Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino is about a woman who becomes obsessed with buying a house that she thinks will be perfect for her family. She’s already choosing furniture and decorating the nursery when the house isn’t even on the market yet. The reader suspects she may be nuts. “Immensely readable, but when do the wheels start to fall off?”

The plot thickens in my second 20-minute stint: I write, “Obsession is starting to creep around the edges.”

Reading everything

I had been flitting in my reading from email to books to magazines, losing attention, sometimes nodding off, not retaining much. Rodriguez’s process gave me a stated period—20 minutes—to focus on one thing. It helps.

I read for 20 minutes. Write a sentence. Can’t wait to get back to my book. I’m so engaged I don’t drift into sleep, an unfortunate trend that’s been annoying me lately.

I’ve tried this method with many books. With some magazines. It’s a good process. I recommend it.

I also recommend Literary Fancy. Much of it is free, but it’s well worth paying for a subscription. Rodriguez has a fun, facile way of discussing classic literature that will make you less daunted about tackling important books from the past.

How do I feel?

How do I feel?
How do I freaking feel?
Funny you should ask
Just go away. I don’t want to talk about it.

Feeling means hurting, isn’t that the way?
Lay out the Tarot and tell me what gives.
It tells me I like my pasta with the paler sauces. 
No bloody marinara. Too much oregano.

On neighborhood walks, I harvest herbs.
Rosemary bushes abound.
But once what I thought was delicate mint
Was its weird cousin lemon balm; ruined the dish.
Which was stuffed grape leaves with
Leaves from our vines. Just use the young ones.

Just use the young ones. And don’t bother to ask me
How I feel.

Repurpose

I’m always curious about gadgets and how they work and sometimes how I might fashion my own versions of them.

The point of this photo is not to highlight the remnant of scone on the plate but to show you the knife. As soon as I saw it, I knew it could be repurposed into another tool. A toothbrush needle!

Toothbrush needles are traditionally made by cutting the bristle end off a toothbrush and sanding the cut smooth. They are used to make rag rugs in the Amish style.

Today’s toothbrushes, though, seldom have a hanging hole in them, so they’re not much use as needles. Most folks just buy a plastic toothbrush tool. But I found one in the guise of a knife at a local coffee shop.

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Merle’s recipe

A few weeks ago I asked for recipes, and my good friend Merle sent me one for her favorite pancakes. I met Merle at The Oregonian the day I started working on the copy desk in 1976. We later worked together on the paper’s big FoodDay section. We shared a love of food, and I still think of her when I pass certain restaurants I know she liked.

Merle retired in about 2006 and now lives in Atlanta with her daughter. She periodically sends me photos of yellow things, like this view of her backyard.

Buttermilk pancakes

Buttermilk is famous for making pancakes tender. Adding sour cream kicks the richness up a notch. The acid in the buttermilk and sour cream reacts with the baking soda to give the pancakes an extra rise. Puffy and good!

The recipe, from Woman’s World magazine, calls for mixing 1 cup of sour cream with 1-1/2 cups of buttermilk, 4 tablespoons melted butter, and two egg yolks. Whip two egg whites and fold in. [Merle skips this step, just mixing in whole eggs.]

Add the wet ingredients to a mixture of 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon sugar.

A few lumps in the batter are fine. Just start pouring and flipping.

Looking for luck

On the South Park Blocks by Portland State University, I met a young woman with dramatic mascara and clutching a plastic bottle of iced tea. She was crouching by this chain-link fence, studying the flora.

Was she looking for four-leaf clovers? I asked her that because I spend a certain amount of time looking for them myself.

Yes, she was looking for four-leafers. She said she had found a whole patch of them a few weeks before. I’ve only found one so far this year, but not for a lack of trying.

I continued on. She was still looking.

For checkout, a tiny poem

The moth

Moth at my window wants to embrace my lamp,
But the glass frustrates him, poor fellow.
We always strain like that, bumping at
The invisible edges of dreams.

That’s it, folks!

Thank you for reading. Leave a comment, click on the “like” heart, subscribe for free. You may also pledge a paid subscription or tip me at PayPal.

Love you all,
Fran

—30—

Watch where you are going

This week, even today, maybe just for a minute, pay attention to what’s in front of you.

As you move through the world, in your home, along the street, even in your car, please notice and accept what the universe is offering you. Its richness is vast, unexpected and unexplainable.

See the reflection of sunlight on a building or on the sidewalk. The broken pavement that was whole just days ago. Bicycles. Dogs. Chimneys.

Watch the dance of people, how their bodies move, how they move in a crowd. How each one walks singly down a street in a different manner. Look at shoes, admire hats. See the flowers that cling to the gutter. Find stones that speak to you.

Forget the rules

Start living a beat slower.
Don’t streak down the road,
Skip instead.

Stop telling yourself
How you should order your life.

Breath, walk, watch nature.
Breath, stop, consider.
Breathe, feel your heartbeat.

Heart, remember what’s deep.
Stand still and wonder.

And stop typing so fast.

Driving to Emeryville

I’ve always loved exploring industrial districts. I’m fascinated by the plain, businesslike structures, old and new. Warehouses, grain elevators, rail lines. Concrete, metal, brick. Some buildings are featureless, with massive blank walls. Others have multiple windows, usually small, single panes glittering in the sunlight. I especially love the warm old brick buildings that are increasingly disappearing, though there are still many in Portland.

When I was in college at Berkeley, 55 years ago and more, we sometimes would drive through Emeryville, an industrial enclave on San Francisco Bay between Berkeley and Oakland. We’d pass miles of industrial development, seldom seeing a human being.

In Portland, I explored the brick warehouses of Northwest Portland, most of them now replaced by Pearl District development. I took photographs, especially of the texture of the walls. I think the loneliness of the landscape, the paucity of people, also drew me.

One of the sort of building that attracted me to the Northwest district burned on Sunday. The Centennial Mills building was empty and thought to be unstable. The owner will start demolishing the shell almost immediately. Amtrak service will be suspended while that happens, as the building is right near the train tracks.

This arresting photo of the fire, by Portland freelancer Joe Riedl, is notable for three reasons. It’s an example of the sort of decrepit building I would seek out, maybe less to photograph than just to admire.

It also had a wooden water tower on the top. I wrote about towers like that just last week.

Finally, the building was visible on a bus route that TriMet is eliminating later this month. The 16/Front Avenue/St Helens Rd line, which runs along the western shore of the Willamette past the Port of Portland and related development, will shut down August 23.

No more bus 16

After August 23, I won’t be able to travel past the old stables of the Portland Police’s now disbanded mounted patrol, or the long, long white building where Gunderson Marine builds its barges. I’ll miss the neverending lines of sleek black tanker cars sitting patiently on a side track. I never see them moving, although sometimes I can smell oil.

I won’t be able to sail over the Kittridge Avenue overpass, with its expansive views of rail yards on one side and downtown on the other.

The 16 bus route continues up St. Helens Road to St. Johns over the St. Johns Bridge, looping back over the bridge to visit Sauvie Island. That part of the route will still be served by the 15/Belmont line, which will run some of its buses up St. Helens Road to St. Johns and Sauvie Island. The part of the route on Northwest Naito Parkway and Front Avenue will be eliminated.

All those apartments

One strange thing about the current 16 route is that is passes plenty of residences. The early part of the route travels along NW Naito Parkway, home to thousands of upscale apartments and condos.

In all the time I’ve ridden the 16 past those huge blocks of buildings, though, only one or two people ever got on or off. True, the bus only runs once an hour, but I still think it’s remarkable that nobody from that neighborhood rides it.

After taking customer input, TriMet adjusted another bus route to serve some affordable housing on the southern part of Naito, near Union Station.

Other views

Even without the 16, there’s still plenty of industrial landscape to see from the TriMet buses and trains. The MAX Yellow Line train provides a good view of the Port’s operations on the east side of the river. Grain elevators, more tangles of train tracks, parked locomotives, marshmallow-shaped LNG domes—and the massive Union Pacific smokestack soaring skyward all by itself in the Albina Yard.

I get a good view of the Louis Dreyfus grain elevator every time I cross the Steel Bridge on a bus or train. There’s always something new to notice in its snarl of gangways and ladders.

The noive

Having MS, a disease, that affects the nervous system, I’m attuned to nerves.

Here are three meanings of “nerve”:

• The filament structure of the body that registers movement, pressure and pain.

• A metaphor for a finely tuned organization. Nerve center, for example.

• “Noive,” which the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz proclaims is what would give him the ability to stand up to adversity. In another word, courage.

Robert reminds me that he played the Cowardly Lion at summer camp in the early 1950s. He still remembers almost all the words.

A poem

Some more advice for nervous types.

Just stand there

Don’t be nervous
Stand on your own
Forget your troubles
Don’t suck your thumb.
All will come out perfect,
Or maybe all right.

Furry photos

I’ve been running so many photos of buildings lately, I thought I should get a shot of something that breathes. Here is Freyja, an adorable golden retriever who lives with my friends Heidi and John.

My neighbor’s cat Matilda is getting ready to pounce. Her quarry: a squirrel that’s about as big as the cat. News flash: The cat didn’t catch the squirrel.

There’s nothing like a good book

For Oregon ArtsWatch, I reviewed the book Variations on Life After 50: A Field Guide to Harnessing the Power of Creativity, Purpose, and Legacy in Midlife, by Jill Timmons. Her book is all about finding meaning and creativity in later life, a time she describes as “The Third Wave.” It is a time of richness and fulfillment, of working through grief and gaining new strength.

I’ve known the author, a writer, teacher, mentor and concert pianist, since I interviewed her for The Oregonian in the 1990s, when she was a professor at Linfield College in McMinnville. She’s written an amazing book that has meaning for everyone, even those not yet 50.

She’s 76 now and as full of furious life as ever. I enjoyed reconnecting with her and reading a book that seemed to speak directly at me.

You can find Variations on Life After 50 at bookshop.org. It changed my life.

For The Southeast Examiner monthly newspaper, Sandy Miller has written a review of Variations, too. Her review discusses the book in more granular detail, and is well worth checking out.

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Till next week

How many Substack postings do you read in a day? The number is definitely finite. Five is about my limit.

There are literally a million Substacks to choose from. Tons of good reading . . . No one can get to it all.

There are a few Substacks I always read: Amy Cowen’s, “Illustrated Life,” “Bookworm” by Amy Wang, “Very Quiet Custard” by a children’s librarian who doesn’t publish her name. Also, most anything by Katharine English, Eric Mortenson, Sonya Sanford, Shifra Sharlin, Amy Brown or Jeannette de Beauvoir. In “The Half-Marathoner,” Terrell Johnson writes about running, which I don’t do, but also about life, which I do do.

There are writers I just can’t keep up with because they publish TOO OFTEN. These include Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, “The Pugilist”; Karen Rodriquez, “Literary Fancy”; and Dishkitty, who publishes a beguiling daily cartoon about her life. I sometimes dip into the big-name writers, like Joyce Vance, but I usually don’t have time for Heather Cox Richardson or Thom Hartmann.

I’ve left out scores of other writers, like Your Local Epidemiologist, Tonya Morton’s “Juke,” “Ring Around the Basin” by Sue Cauhape . . . because I can’t list everyone. And I’ve certainly forgotten many.

You have your own favorites. If you’d like, stick them in the comments.

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Yet

With all this competition, you still choose to read Becoming. This is remarkable. I can’t really get my head around it. Some of you tell me you wait for me to publish every Saturday night.

Well, I hope you keep coming back. I try to make each issue fresh and surprising.

I’m feeling so good about all this love, I’m not even going to plead for paid subscriptions. Besides, I just got a couple more, and I am feeling very blessed.

Till next week,

—Fran

—30—

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Opposites the same

Curiously, “ravel” and “unravel “mean the same thing—to unknit or untangle something made of thread or yarn. You pull on a thread and everything comes apart.

In Shakespeare, Macbeth wishes for “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care.” Two things about that:

1. A “sleave” is a skein of thread; in Shakespeare’s day, probably silk. It didn’t mean the sleeve of a garment.

2. “Raveled” is sometimes written as “ravell’d” or “ravelled.” Spell check usually doesn’t care about whether a letter is duplicated. It accepts worshipped and worshiped, traveled and travelled, etc., etc. But it balks at “ravelled.”

I wrote about spelling rules and what happens when letters are doubled before a suffix in Lazy Summer, a few years back.

And here’s a poem with “skein” in it.

Caving in

Trying to write, I drown in the details,
A welter of words, a skein to untangle.
A jungle of precious thoughts, forgotten forever.
Pull on my nightshirt and blow out the light.

Painstaking photo

It took a lot of effort to get a good photo of this wall.

I was drawn to the wall by the geometrics—the flat squares of paint, the vertical vent, the curves at the tops of the window and the diagonal stairs with their intriguing shadows. The green garbage cans add a touch of color.

I first saw the wall and stairs, on Southwest First Avenue near Ankeny, from a MAX train, so I couldn’t take a photo then.

It’s a little hard to access this site, which is not convenient to any bus stops even though it’s downtown. But I made my way back a few days later, only to find that the parking lot in front of the stairs was full of cars! I couldn’t get a clear shot of the wall.

So I returned later, on an evening, when most of the cars were gone. But that wasn’t right, either. The wall faced east. I needed morning light.

Finally I went there early on a weekend day. There was only one car in the lot. I could work around that. But somehow, the composition that had so excited me just didn’t click. It’s a good photo. Just not a great one.

Serendipity in a water tower

I backed off across Ankeny and took another photo. That’s when I saw the water tower. I’ve been noticing water towers around town, and taking photos of them. They are often shy, disappearing from street-level view, hidden by the building itself.

This tower is on a building behind the one with the stairs, the United Carriage & Baggage Transfer Building, built in 1886. It’s on the National Register of Historic Buildings, so the tower will likely survive.

Old rooftop water towers, some metal but most wooden, can be found all over town. There’s one on top of City Liquidators in the Eastside Industrial District, and another on Schoolhouse Electric in the Northwest Industrial District. A famous one sits at the west end of the Burnside bridge, emblazoned with the words “Old Town.” It’s next to the White Stag “Portland” sign. There’s also a water tower at the Water Tower complex in Johns Landing in Southwest Portland.

I was thinking this cute little structure at Rossi Farms in Parkrose might be a water tower, but it has a door. I couldn’t reach them by phone to ask; the mailbox was full. Don’t you love a little mystery? Maybe gnomes live there.

Green giants

Some of the tall green water towers operated by the Portland Water Bureau have been decommissioned because they are old or the technology is dated. But I was reassured by a bureau employee that plenty of the tall ones will remain.

The towers aren’t needed to hold water. Portland has plenty of water storage, thanks to vast recently constructed underground reservoirs. But something has to regulate water pressure. That’s where the towers come in, using gravity to keep the pressure up. The Water Bureau employee me told me that some parts of town rely on pumps.

There’s a round green tower in North Portland’s Overlook neighborhood that is featured in a goofy kid’s movie, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. Detective Timmy’s partner is a polar bear, and his teacher is Wallace Shawn. This is a good movie. The book, by Stephan Pastis, is funny, too.

Rhythm work

I’m still working out the rhythm of poetry. This time, I’m trying to write in the meter called anapest. That’s two unstressed syllables and a stressed one.

Three-line stanzas, too; you may be expecting the fourth.

Some lines break rhythm. Live with it.

Emery board

Take an emery board to smooth down your prickles.
Make them smooth as a marble. Don’t stop
Until all of your savagery’s tamed by your will.

What comes next is magic, no wonder.
Keep focus, taste wisdom, feel clear
Of your worries, your crotchets, your glumness.

You are free, child, as free as created
In the galaxy mix of your soul.
String the pearls, set the gems, you are whole now.

Step into a world fresh created,
All of your doing, your choice.
Reborn, you are ready for—

The cycle to rewind, all your striving
Sets you back to rerun the same course
Here’s your chance to start over, anew.

Take it.

Broken open

After slicing it in half, I stopped to contemplate the perfection of this red onion. It was soon to become a part of a colorful salad with nectarines, cucumbers, almonds and fried halloumi cheese. This is the full frame; cropping it would ruin the magic. That’s lime juice in the measuring cup.

Gardening in the kitchen

I am a gardener, and not just because my name, borrowed from my first husband, is Gardner. Oh, it’s been years since I had my hands in dirt. The rich symphony of potted herbs and flowers I used to keep on the deck is long dismantled, the deck itself replaced by a wheelchair ramp.

Now I buy herbs at the supermarket.

Yet, I still garden. I grow living things in the kitchen, just not in pots. Last week, I put up a batch of kimchee, four pints. I grow micro greens, what we used to call sprouts, in a bottle with a mesh lid, washing them twice a day as they grow. In the past, I’ve made sauerkraut, kombucha and yogurt—all living things, alive with healthy bacteria.

For many years, I kept sourdough starter in the fridge, taking some and feeding it about twice a week, making bread each time.

We all garden when we make bread, whether with yeast or sourdough.

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A good book

Last week, Oregon ArtsWatch published my review of Rene Denfeld’s The Talking Bone. It’s the second book of hers I’ve reviewed for them, and like the first, Sleeping Giants, it is a great read, thought-provoking in a gentle way, compelling and well-written. It’s a fine summer read, but you could read it in the winter as well.

Tattooed message

A commuter on the bus had a phrase tattooed on his forearm that you could read as he raised his phone to his ear. It said: “The opposite of love is indifference.”

That makes me wonder: what is the opposite of indifference? I don’t think it’s love. It could be attention. Or longing. Do you have an idea?

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Farewell for now

Thank you for reading Becoming. Thank you for subscribing. Special thanks to my paid subscribers, who are more than a handful now.

Leave me a tip, if you like, at PayPal. And please, scroll back to the top and hit the like button.

Till next week,

—Fran

—30—

I thought it might happen. I’d hoped it wouldn’t happen.

Now it’s happened.

It’s Saturday evening, time to post to Substack, and I am not ready.

Every week, for the last 207 weeks, I’ve published a quirky meander through photos and poems, stories and recipes. For this week, I had many pieces to jigsaw together. But I couldn’t get them to fit.

Events got in the way.

As it seems to do every summer, fatigue flattens my energy and my ambition. Day after day, I stay home. No bus therapy trips. I just want to sit and meditate and read.

But also over this past week, I’ve had out-of-town relatives visiting. The weather was super hot for a few days. And a longtime friend died.

My heart is always with Becoming. It’s my North Star. But this week my body and my head and even my spirit have been otherwise engaged.

Simply put, I’ve been overwhelmed.

Restful image

Although much is going on in my life, at the core I am relaxed and restful. I’ve chosen photos in that mood for today’s posting.

Let your eye—and your heart—be drawn by this simple form. These leaves lie at the edge of death, brave to the last.

So today, instead of the usual complex offering, I’ll be keeping it simple. Just one item, really, but one that I worked very hard on.

The magic of “Stardust”

I often get into a rut writing poems. They most often come to me in dactyls, one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed.

Like this, from a poem I wrote called “Roadwork”:

Thank you for fixing the road,
Making it ADA pure
I never noticed the hump, 
But someone did, that is for sure.

Oops, there’s an extra beat in that last line. I often mess with the rhythm of a poem. Breaking up is good to do; it keeps a phrase from feeling shopworn and predictable.

My poems also tend to arrange themselves in quatrains, four-line verses.

So, even though a poem might have fresh language and unusual imagery, I sometimes feel there’s a sameness to my work.

You got rhythm, I can copy

One way to break out of the groove is to steal rhythm from someone else. Last August, I wrote a poem, “Forgive me” in the rhythm of “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell.

Then I wrote another, “That’s Life,” based on “It Ain’t Necessarily So” by George and Ira Gershwin.

Today’s break-out-of-the-rut poem is written in the style of the old standard “Stardust.”

To refresh your memory of this complicated song, sit back and listen to “Stardust” sung by Nat King Cole. In the second video, Carmichael plays and sings the chorus.

Hoagy Carmichael wrote “Stardust” in 1927. Later, Mitchell Parish1 added the words at the behest of Carmichael’s publisher, Mills Music.

I had to dig up the lyrics to remember how the meter goes. It is intricate: two quatrains followed by two nonets (nine-line verses). The rhythm changes from line to line, too.

Stardust

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart

You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by

Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely night dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song

Beside a garden wall
When stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale tells his fairy tale
A paradise where roses bloom
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of love’s refrain

Now I give you “Fran’s Stardust.” It may not be the best poem I’ve ever written, but considering the daunting challenge, it’s one of my more inventive poems. I stretched to write this poem, and I am the better for it.

Fran’s Stardust

We once were one, but now alone and free,
We still may be connected on our way.
Your music traps me, wraps itself around me
If only, if together we could stay.

I sit alone, my hair combed by the wind.
Breathing in the freshness of your song.
I am precious, this I understand, my heart—
May slip its bounds and bring us both along.

I’ve seen you running on the beach
And in the woods, singing with the birds.
The richness of the cooing turtle dove—
And once again we are complete
Where our limits meet,
And each time you spark a feeling.
In a thicket long ago,
My hands and heart were scratched
With the bloody thorns of love.

Beside a garden wall 
A fig tree blooms,
Laden with rich fruit.
I taste a few, born of sun and dew
And suddenly I miss the dance.
Frozen on the floor,
Time has stopped and closed the door
On our together times,
The scent of memory haunts me more.

Whew

This was a tough project. It taught me that not all poetry comes trippingly off the pen. I had to check the rhythm over and over again, and still some phrases are off by a beat. The rhythm of the original is highly irregular. I have a great appreciation of what Carmichael and Parish wrought.

An orange is orange

I leave you with another restful yellow-orange composition. The oranges are fresh; the plate is from the 1970s.

Till next time

I’m not getting rich from writing Substack. That’s never been the point. The point is sharing. Having other people read what I write and appreciate it makes me feel like I matter. Connection with my readers enriches me over and over. You could say that my outlook is self-centered, but without readers, my work would be meaningless. All writers crave to be heard, to be understood.

One way that you can help me attract new readers is to get my words out in front of other people. You can do that by restacking my posts, Click on the little interlocking arrows at the top. Add a note if you wish, saying why you are re-stacking or that you like the content—or why you hate the content. Even bad publicity is publicity.

Beyond that, please subscribe if you haven’t already. As always, I’m incredibly honored that you have taken the time to read what I write.

As always,
Fran

—30—

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Thunder

I awoke at 5 a.m. Thursday to a flash of lightning and some muted rumbles of thunder. No rain, just noise, a subdued growling in the distance.

Preoccupied by the odd weather during my morning writing exercise, I wrote this poem.

Thunder

A last little rumble as I’m trying to write.
Thunderstorms are rare in Portland.
Rain in the summer, too, not common.
Hark! Another drumroll. 
The sky holds its breath, leaves still.

Yellow light, lavender sky,
The stuff of storms. 
Hold your breath, great world.
Something is coming, we won’t know what till it arrives.
My words fall like raindrops, making divots in dry dust.
The sky growls again.

Catch up

Here’s a photo left over from last week’s posting about trees.

There’s something achingly sad about seeing a once grand tree in pieces, ready to be chopped into firewood or ground in a chipper.

Sharp reader

The week before that, I wrote about things that come in fours. How could I have missed an obvious group: the Beatles—John, Paul, George and Ringo. Thank you, Diane, for pointing that out.

Stoves

The year 1982, when I was 32, was momentous in my life for several reasons. The Oregonian newspaper, where I worked in the newsroom, merged with its longtime rival, The Oregon Journal. I got a new job out of it: assistant graphics editor.

I went through a divorce in this year, the 10th year of my marriage. My former husband and I sold our home in Northeast Portland, and I went looking for a smaller house.

I was charmed by a house on Northeast Fremont Street, even though the street is a minor arterial. More of a drawback, the house, built in 1907, was still on a septic system. And it was not in the city of Portland. This last point I didn’t understand until I’d signed the papers. Oh, no! Now I wasn’t a Portlander. I was an East County woman! I didn’t get to write in Bud Clark for mayor that year. He won anyway.1

Overwhelmed with all the changes in my life, closing down our house in Laurelhurst, selling furniture (through classified ads in The Oregonian, how quaint), and caring for my daughters, then 1 and 4, I had no time to deal with appliances. So, as part of the deal, I asked the sellers to provide a stove.

A beautiful antique

I moved into the house to find an old stove from the ’30s. It stood on four legs. The oven was small because the fabric-covered wiring for the burners took up so much of the lower part of the unit.

I’m sure the owners simply bought the cheapest old appliance they could find. But I loved that stove! It was the best one I ever owned. I ‘ve been a baker all my life, and that small oven baked like a dream. Heated evenly, no hot spots. Everything came out lovely.

Cooking with gas

When I built a house in Southwest Portland a few years later, I installed a standard electric cooktop with an oven beneath it. Not until 15 years later did I add a gas line and replace the electric cooktop with a gas model. It was the first gas stove I’d had since college. I’d always appreciated that a gas flame is immediate. No waiting for a burner to heat.

Yet I was disappointed to find that I didn’t like cooking with gas. I had become used to the slower way electric elements heat and wasn’t ready to go back.

Multiple sclerosis took care of the gas stove issue for me. Unable to keep up the house, I sold it and downsized into an apartment. With an electric stove.

Not long after I moved, I met Robert. We got married and I moved into his house, which was built in the 1920s. Here I encountered another old stove, this one from the ’40s. It, too, had a good oven, with no discernible hot spots.

All my cooking wore it out quickly and we had to replace it in about 2008. We’re now on our third replacement. The electronics on the other two models didn’t last. Kitchen appliances just don’t seem that reliable anymore.

Our house was built as a duplex and has two kitchens. Below is the setup in the kitchen I use. When we replaced the much larger white stove with a 30-inch standard model, it made room for the wire shelving, which provides plenty of storage and sturdy handholds. The toaster oven rests above the colorful drawers of a child’s desk.

The cute little stove in the upstairs kitchen is just 24 inches wide. Using the smaller oven takes less energy, and it preheats more rapidly.

It’s not much of a stretch to say I hate my present stove. It takes a long time to preheat the oven. The burners under the glass top have effectively two setting, high and not high. I can’t rustle up the patience to heat something over medium heat. It just takes forever on this appliance.

Four-burner blues

Like almost all stoves, mine have always had four burners. Ambitious cooks may have a cooktop with six. But I can count on one finger the times I’ve actually used all four burners at once. When’s the last time you did?

We rarely use the oven in the big range. When possible, I cook in the toaster oven, reserving the bigger unit for roasting a whole chicken or a sheet pan of vegetables.

Toaster ovens rule! I use mine for anything that will fit. I’ve roasted game hens and baked keto cranberry walnut bread in it. I have a great recipe for an easy casserole based on chilies rellenos that also fits in a 5x7 dish in the toaster oven. You can find this recipe in a posting called Pulling Back from July 2025.

I own a microwave oven, but I only use it for heating beverages. I like cooking with real heat.

Living without burners

When I was in assisted living for several years, our kitchenettes had no cooktops, just microwaves. I used my toaster oven for everything, like cooking a breakfast dish with kale and eggs.

Vegetables for breakfast

Anything goes with this healthy breakfast dish. Start with greens (usually kale), leftover meat or tofu, onions (green, red or white), maybe potatoes, peppers (hot or mild), tomatoes. Garlic if you dare, ginger if you care.

Set the oven temperature to 350. Chop the greens and mix with other vegetables, aromatics and herbs in a 6- to 8-inch cast-iron pan. Toss with some olive oil. Add a splash of tamari or soy sauce if you wish. Roast for about 12 minutes, then crack an egg or two over the top. Maybe sprinkle on some grated or shredded cheese—cheddar, parmesan, gruyere. Back it goes to bake until the egg is set the way you prefer, just a few minutes.

I like this dish with dashes of Frank’s Red Hot or Tabasco.

At Rose Schnitzer Manor, the chef, inspired by my creation, added a similar item to the breakfast menu. She called it the “power breakfast.” And yes, it is powerful.

Form and color

I was drawn by the intense colors of this food cart behind Harder Day Coffee/Steeplejack Brewing on Southeast Hawthorne. The vent on the top of the adjacent food cart looks like a coffee cup, with the cloud as steam.

A few days later, in Milwaukie, I found a forest of similar vents at a food cart pod. They remind me of the a carnival teacup ride.

Rabbit crossing

On one particular block at Southeast 28th and Harrison, new signs have recently appeared. Two of them acknowledge a new addition to the neighborhood: bunny rabbits. I’m not sure what the musicians sign is for.

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Grateful

Am I grateful for the same things
Over again?
Or do I make my things new 
Each day?
Each raindrop falls awry,
Each touch of fog an envelope 
For hiding, for embracing
For being good,
For being loved,
For being.

Miracle dog

On the 72/82nd Avenue TriMet bus, I meet a woman with a little black wiener dog and a bright yellow wagon. She says her name is Angie and that the dog’s name is Miracle. She says that Miracle reminds her to stay away from fentanyl. She’s been clean for nine months now—that’s how long Miracle has been in her life.

Barking dog

I can be grumpy about dogs in coffee shops, as in they shouldn’t be there. The reasons have to do with health department rules and common courtesy.

So last week, when I heard a dog bark in a part of a large establishment that was outside my range of vision, I complained about this to the staff. They whispered back that it wasn’t a dog, it was a customer who has Tourette’s.

I think I will shut up about dogs in restaurants now.

Goodbye and all that

Thanks for reading. Thanks for clicking the “like” heart and maybe even starting a conversation in the notes. If any of my writing touches you enough to want to share it, please, restack it by clicking on the arcing arrows.

If you’re not a subscriber, I encourage you to sign up. You can join for free, there are no paywalls, and you’ll be notified when I publish. Which is around 7 pm each Saturday.

Love,
Fran

—30—

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Three words

Sometimes I find a trio of words to write about. Today’s three words are mildly related. Why did I pick them? Because. Brio came to me in the shower and the other words followed.

• Brio

• Biro

• Brioche

Brio

Some days I have lots of brio, sprightly energy. The term is associated with music, where “con brio” means to play with vivacity. Thank the Italians for this fun word.

Biro

The British don’t write with ballpoint pens. They use biros. The name comes from the inventor Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian who fled the Nazis, landing first in France, then Argentina.

According to a fascinating essay at the Pen Vibe website, Biro got fed up with the fussiness of fountain pens (cartridges hadn’t been invented yet). He came up with a retractable ball-bearing system and figured out the right ink to use with it.

Biro sold his French patent in the late 1940s to a man named Marcel Bich. Bich improved on the design, creating a clear plastic tube that closed the tip with a cap rather than with a spring clicker. He dropped the last letter of his name and started production of the Bic pen in 1950.

Brioche

Brioche is a French bread made rich with butter and eggs. It’s a soft and yielding as a baguette is hard and chewy. The little round individual bun with a knob on top is brioche à tête. Have brioche for breakfast, a treat with more butter—and jam! And a side of café au lait.

Big trees

In my Portland neighborhood, Buckman, most of the housing is about 100 years old. And so are many of the trees growing here, some in people’s yards but most in their parking strips.

I wonder if those early homeowners knew how really big a tree can tower, or how the growing roots might crack and sway the sidewalk pavement. No matter. Big trees are everywhere in my town. And how glorious they are!

Two blocks from where I live, an aged cedar towers over an apartment building.

In downtown Portland I found a copper beech planted in the 1890s by Joseph and Mary Watson on land that later became a part of the Portland State University campus. The Branford Price Millar Library was designed and built around the tree. Inside the building, which is open to the public, you can sit at a window and read or work with the copper beech as your companion.

Replacing trees

As trees age and rot and succumb to disease and pests, the city of Portland, which owns the parking strips and has a say on what gets planted in them, has many suggestions for street trees that are not as big. You won’t be able to replant that heroic elm, showy horse chestnut or branchy catalpa.

We had to replace an elderly weeping birch that fell victim to a birch borer infestation. The city gave us two trees, one of which is a thriving redbud that’s decked out with heart-shaped red leaves all summer.

The Norwegian connection

Norway maples were a great favorite with the designers of Portland parks in the early 20th century, but they are out of favor now because they seed so copiously and crowd out native species. Plus, they are big, growing as high as 90 feet.

A common species in Washington Park, Laurelhurst Park and elsewhere, they are now on the city’s nuisance plant list. You cannot plant one anymore.

I took the photo of a Norway maple on Southeast 35th Place because I was intrigued by the hole cut in the foliage to keep utility wires clear. It looked a bit like a heart.

A week later, I visited the tree again to doublecheck the species—it is indeed a Norway maple—and found that utility workers had further mutilated this ancient individual.

You can find large trees all over Portland, in Ladd’s Addition in Southeast, Laurelhurst in Northeast, Arbor Lodge in North. They tower over the unpaved roads of East Multnomah County. The firs on the west side of the Willamette River tend not to be as massive, as many of the conifers are second-growth.

I took a lot of photos of very big trees, many of them within a block of my home. Then I got off the bus at Southeast 135th and Harold to photograph this multi-trunked pine. I’m fascinated by how the trunks twist and twine, like the tree is hugging itself.

It’s sad, in a way, that the next generation of trees won’t be as tall, but at least the city’s list of trees is varied—and the city will help with the cost, too. It’s in everyone’s interest to have a vibrant urban canopy.

Street ready

So if you own a house and need a tree, this is the time to plant one. Well, actually, fall is the best time to plant. The Portland Bureau of Parks and Recreation provides a list of acceptable trees and info on how to get them planted for free. Each year, they select a large handful of neighborhoods to plant. Click that link to see if yours is on the list.

The city explains its philosophy as “prioritizing species that are low-maintenance, climate-resilient, and well-suited to the planting site. These trees are chosen to thrive in the space, support neighborhood health, and mitigate issues with existing infrastructure.”

A free tree! Think of all the shade, the birds, the happy squirrels and the peeing dogs.

Help keep Portland leafy.

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Lost in the basement

I can navigate the stairs to the basement, with some difficulty. But I haven’t descended them for many months now. I know I need to be sorting and culling the accumulation of decades. It just seems so daunting.

Robert went down in my stead and took some photos.

My netherworld

The basement beckons with Stygian call:
Come now, come visit, see all your stuff.
Decades of cast-offs yet things that I value
When did I ever think things were enough?

What do we own, really, as life’s end approaches?
Our life force, our essence, our bodies, our brains.
What we have with us, not things of the outside
The cream, not the crumbs, not the dismal remains.

Toss things or give away, keep just what is needed
When we start sorting, we find need is not much.
Move things from the basement into our memory—
Like tasting that candy bar I never can touch.

So down to the basement, keeper of stories,
Quartermaster of all my discarded things
You hold my memories, but so does my body.
Cull much, keep little. See what time brings.

Farewell for today

Sometimes I think of all the things I could be doing if I were not writing every week, but I like writing the best. I write at my desk in the early morning and, as you, dear readers, know, at coffee shops later in the day.

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206 weeks of writing

If you have time, which most likely you do not, but still—you might take a wander through the archives at Becoming. Hit the “show more posts” button and dive down a few months or years. Pick something at random. I promise it will be worth it.

I occasionally revisit one of the scores of posts I’ve published, and I’m still pleasantly surprised by the writing. And I am a critical person.

Till next week,
Fran

—30—

Fireworks tonight

Today is Independence Day, July 4. A big anniversary: 250 years since the signing of our foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, kicked up a dust with the English Crown. This signing led swiftly to the War of Independence and the creation of our republic.

The strength of that republic may be weaker at the present moment than it has ever been in our lifetimes.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” wrote Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. Our present situation is, at least metaphorically, a civil war, and no less grave than in Lincoln’s time.

I remember 1976, already 50 years ago! I was 26 that year. In those 50 years I changed, and my country changed. What seemed sure and clear then (although it never really was) is muddied and sullied now.

I may not feel like fireworks, but I still wish a happy anniversary to my country.

We are created equal. Let’s celebrate the document that tells us so—even if it was written by and for prosperous white male landowners.

Four by four

In memory of the Fourth, here are some things that come in fours:

• Earth, air, water, fire

• East, north, south, west

• Head, heart, hands and health (4-H)

• Winter, spring, summer, fall

• 00, 15, 30, 45

• Dogwood blossoms

  

• And hydrangeas

  

• Matthew, Mark, Luke, John

• Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Dylan

• Conquest, war, famine, death

• Four-leaf clovers

  

• Eenie, meeanie, miny, mo

• Four Weddings and a Funeral. Few movies with “four” in the title are memorable.

• Fat, sugar, alcohol, candy corn (the four food groups)

• Parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme

• Sweet, salty, bitter, sour (and now umami)

Four in one

I admire the old-school utility of this folding ruler, even though the connections are corroded and it’s broken off at one end.

What do I know?

I can count on my toes. I think there may be 10.
Dandelions will grow back no matter what you do.
Sometimes there’s a full moon, but where in the sky?
Tide pools are precious, likewise waterfalls.

Sun, moon and stars, rivers and roads.
Angling or circling, always running true.
Great ideas matter until their time runs out.
I hate cilantro, give me ginger instead.

Uncover the crystals, iron the creases
Don’t sweat or swear in my nicely groomed bed.
Some things I don’t know, how clouds move and muster,
How hot days can be cloudy, why sugar is sweet.

I’ve lived long and happy not knowing most things,
Just what’s around me, the salve of my senses.
I don’t know what comes in the very next moment.
Not knowing, 
It’s perfect.
Snuff the candle,
Sleep again.

Stage 4

Liz Scott, Ph.D., explores her fascination with death in the Doom with a View Substack. I have her to thank for recommending a movie about one man’s dying. “André Is an Idiot,” directed by Tony Benna, is streaming on Netflix.

André Ricciardi, a San Francisco ad man, artist and bon vivant with big hair and a loving family, put off having his “turning 50” colonoscopy until it was too late. The diagnosis was colon cancer, Stage 4.

The movie is about André’s subsequent journey through chemo, radiation and realization. The film is funny and poignant, never lugubrious, balancing heartbreak with some clever animation, like little fuzzy critters created from the hair he shed in chemo.

We’re sorry for André’s situation, but we admire his guts and panache and his indomitable spirit. “André Is an Idiot” is an portrait of a man facing death and going out in glory.

July

My goal, for July, stated last December, is “Wisdom from water.” We entered the zodiac sign of Cancer at the solstice, June 21. The longest day of 2026 is already in the rear view mirror, and we’re headed inexorably through the time when light diminishes. Fading is a powerful metaphor.

Cancer is a water sign, a sign of caring, assuaging, soothing. A time when we place our cool hand on the heated forehead of the world and murmur, “Hush now. Things will be all right. It’s okay.”

But it’s not okay and will not be okay.

But for now it’s July, the time of Cancer and then Leo. The days are still immeasurably long, the trees lush, the rabbits fat, fatter than the squirrels. People hold hands as they walk down the street, murmuring to each other, comfortable in companionship.

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Have an ICE day

Folks from various Quaker meetings line South Macadam Avenue in Portland on Monday mornings, waving flags and banners outside the ICE detention facility. The Tesla dealership is right next door. A coincidence?

Many passing motorists honked and waved back as we waved at them. I don’t remember any Teslas honking.

Time and poetry

Finding time

I can still thread a needle,
Face down a squirrel 
Drink tea without sugar
Sit in the sunshine
Liberate spiders
String words like beads
And maybe find time
To love my neighbor
Or even
On a good day
Read a book.

Until next week

Once again, thank you for reading. Thank you for pushing the “like heart” and for commenting. If you have time, take a walk through the archives. There are upwards of 200 earlier posts, all unique, each of them with surprises waiting just for you.

Subscribe for free to get a reminder when I post. Subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year to support me financially. Leave me a tip of $5 or more on PayPal, Unfortunately, PayPal doesn’t clue me in on who donates this way.

A few folks who know me just send a check in the mail. That works too.

Everything, from good thoughts to cash, is appreciated. What matters is that I commmunicate with you.

Have a wondrous week and enjoy the fireworks.

Love,
Fran

—30—

Weather notes

“In case you haven’t heard, the heat wave here has soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days,” Gina DeVee writes from Paris on her Divine Living Substack. “Even though my apartment (thankfully) has air conditioning, it’s French air conditioning which is the equivalent of a cat breathing on you.”

Much of Western Europe was trapped under an unprecedented heat dome this past week, with record-setting temperatures day after day. Portland suffered a similar phenomenon in 2021, with temperatures hovering above 95 for four straight days and reaching 116 at one point.

France endured a similar hot spell in 2019, with the mercury reaching 104. I remember that because my daughter Maggie was visiting the city with her two small children, who suffered greatly in the heat. Of course, nobody had air-conditioning. It wasn’t needed. Not then.

Summer rain

Meanwhile, in Portland, we’re entering several days of forecasted rain. This is unusual in Oregon, where the summers are typically so dry that unwatered lawns turn brown and you can go camping without a tent.

The lack of rain and humidity in summer sets the Pacific states, California, Oregon and Washington, apart from the East, South and Midwest, where summers are hotter and humidity makes the air sticky, encouraging bugs like mosquitos and gnats.

Air-conditioning is becoming a necessity in western Oregon as the summers become hotter. If it keeps raining, we might have to invest in mosquito netting.

Sleeping porches

One architectural feature that I occasionally see in older houses in my Portland neighborhood is the sleeping porch. These are more common in the Midwest, where I grew up with summers that are hotter and more humid.

The best place for a sleeping porch is on the north side of the house. The room is built out so that there are windows on three sides, increasing cross-drafts. Whole families used to share these quarters on the warmest nights of the summer.

Poem of change

Going, going, going

What’s coming we can’t know and it’s coming so fast— 
All our assumptions, our comfortable tropes
May be so consumed they fuse into glass—
Nothing left, nothing answered, the death of our hopes.

Who can tell, who can tell, the misery coming
A planet so hot that we cannot survive
Who can tell, who can tell how to end all our dreaming
Our art, our striving, what keeps us alive . . .

We’ll have to connect more, understand better
How all is a cycle, an arc of our past.
Oh, woe is us—yes, we are in a pickle.
But maybe, with caring, we can break through the glass.

An artist echoes my work

In its monthly “10-Minute Challenge” series, The New York Times featured a painting by Lois Dodd, who is 99. The painting is of a room in a cottage in Maine, where she goes in summer to escape the heat of her East Village loft in Manhattan.

I was drawn to “The Painted Room,” featuring a sunny window with yellow curtains and a mysterious backdrop of trees and dark shapes. The New York Times reader is invited to spend 10 minutes simply looking at the painting.

I can tell from this painting and others featured in the article that Dodd and I have the same sort of eye. She sees things—pattern, grids, flat space but mostly light—like I do, and paints them like I take photographs.

“You either enjoy looking at the world or you wander through it without seeing it, which I think a lot of people do,” she said in a story written by Larry Buchanan. “They know enough to look so they don’t break their neck tripping, but otherwise they may not see too much, just enough to be safe.”

Buchanan asked what was catching her eye at that very moment.

“The light on the floor and the window are kind of great right now. It’s what the light does. That’s the most exciting.”

She’s right about that. Art, and photography, aren’t about object or space or perspective. They are about light.

Buchanan asked where she had found the discipline to paint for all those hours, all those days, all those years.

“Oh, that’s not discipline,” she said. “That’s just being alive.”

The same could be said about writing. It’s not discipline. It’s playing.

My own window

Here is a recent photo that I don’t remember taking. I may even have taken it by mistake.

I’m fascinated by the contrasts and the oblique lines and even the scruffy blisters in the black paint. Perhaps this is a reflection in a bus window. I don’t know.

Another quilt

I’ve just finished a quilt for a friend. The block pattern, Tumbling Stars, is unusual because the stars point to the compass points. I found this pattern in the March 2006 edition of Quilters Newsletter Magazine and knew immediately that I would make my own version of it.

The woman who created the quilt featured in the magazine, Lorie Stubbs of Lakewood, Colo., pointed out that this block can be happily made up with the ugliest fabric in your stash. I had a lot of fun choosing fabrics I didn’t have any other use for.

I pieced the blocks by hand; that’s the best way to get the corners to align exactly. Lorie provided a unique way of piecing to get the stars pointed in the right direction.

Each block is the same pattern, but the fabric choices make them look different.

This quilt was long-armed by Nancy Stovall of Just Quilting using the Baptist Fan design.

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Writing in color

Substack just added a feature allowing colored type.

Here is a poem written in red.

From red

Red apples, red balloons, the setting sun.
A cardinal, a robin, a duck’s flat foot.
Nature brings us red but not too much.
Leaves eat red light, reflecting in green.

What color am I, beneath and under?
Not what you see, what you know and wonder.
Something rich, purple or chocolate.
Red at the core of me, reflecting the green.

Deep shades of blue, pulsing with color.
Deep shades of green, the nature I see.
Deep shades of red, blossoming outward.
The colors like jewels, the colors of me.

Bowing out for this week

Here’s the weekly reminder to subscribe for free to Becoming if you haven’t already. Maybe upgrade to paid if you haven’t done that yet. Or tip me a few bucks at PayPal. At any rate, keep reading. I love writing, I love having written, and I love being read.

—Fran

—30—

Crow poem

In July 2023, I published a poem, Crow Convo, about how crows gather along Portland’s waterfront. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen crows gathering like that.

Crow, Singular

Where are the crowds of crows?
Mobs of crows?
Their parliament?
I just see single crows,
Fat and shiny
Self-assured.
Strutting and hopping— 
Maybe they’re lazy,
Saving on wing-work.

Use to be, at twilight,
They’d fly to the river,
But on my hillside miles away
I can’t see them thronging there.

Clever crows, hiding their secrets.
Feeding their young in hidden nests.
Do they even notice me as I wheel past?
They hop, hop away, black and shiny.

Buses and neighborhoods

When I go on my bus adventures, engaging in what I call “bus therapy,” I’ve found some favorite destinations here in Portland, Oregon. I think of visiting them as “neighborhood therapy.”

Lents

I first explored the Lents neighborhood, in far Southeast in the shadow of the I-205 freeway, because I was reviewing a book set there, Tigers of Lents by Mark Pomeroy.

In Lents I find a thriving farmers market, where I started writing poetry for strangers. I write on my laptop at the Refuge Coffee House and work out in the purple-and-yellow-themed Planet Fitness gym. Lents is only about 20 minutes from my home. The 14/Hawthorne bus goes directly there, down Southeast 50th Avenue and then Foster Road.

St. Johns

On the opposite end of town, in the far north, I explore the St. Johns neighborhood. You can reach it on any of four different bus lines, each having its own particular charm. The 16/St. Helens Road skirts the west side of the Willamette River, sailing past the Port of Portland and the small town of Linnton before crossing the St. Johns Bridge. Sadly, much of this picturesque bus route will be discontinued as TriMet struggles with a cash shortfall.

Other routes to St. Johns include the 4/Fessenden bus that runs on iconic streets like Williams and Mississippi. The 44/Mocks Crest line follows the bluffs over the Willamette near the University of Portland. The 75/César Chávez tools up César Chávez Boulevard and 42nd Avenue before veering west on Dekum and Lombard.

In St. Johns, I visit the Taqueria y Panaderia de Santa Cruz, where customers pass through a Mexican grocery to reach a cafe with authentic Mexican food, like tacos with tongue or tripe. Sometimes I write with coffee at hand at the Two Stroke Coffee Co. There’s a Burgerville, too, where they will wrap my burger in lettuce.

Sellwood

The 70/12th Avenue bus takes me south to the Sellwood neighborhood, where I set up my laptop at the Sellwood library or Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters.

I may take time to visit the goats that live nearby on Southeast Lexington or the dino exhibit in a front yard on Bidwell. Sellwood has plenty of sweet small businesses to explore, too.

Hawthorne

I live near Hawthorne, a thriving street anchored by a Fred Meyer and a Safeway, with plenty of foot traffic and at least six good coffee shops. Buy books, vintage clothing or records, or find something to eat, maybe at one of the two McMenamin’s (Barley Mill and Bagdad) on the street. I’m partial to SeaSweets Poke. A new restaurant, Healthy Bite, at 3553 SE Hawthorne, has keto-friendly options.

Parkrose

My newest fun neighborhood is Parkrose. Like Lents and St. Johns, it’s a long trek by bus, about an hour from where I live. I’ve been hanging there since I started mentoring an eighth-grader at Parkrose Middle School.

After a recent visit to the school, I check out the Parkrose business district on Sandy Boulevard, about 12 blocks north of the school, by rolling north in my wheelchair on Northeast 109th Avenue.

There are no sidewalks on this street, but plenty of really huge trees, including a couple of giant sequoias and a towering monkey puzzle. I also encounter a pomegranate shrub, which I’ve never seen before. A neighbor tells me it doesn’t bear fruit; Portland is too far north for this Mediterranean bush to thrive here.

My ride takes me to a bustling business hub that houses the kid-friendly Parkrose Coffee Shop, several dive bars, a big independent thrift store, myriad nail and hair salons, and Genuine Bumpers, with its vast yard filled with discarded automobile bumpers.

Adding to the small-town vibe of Parkrose are businesses named after the owners. Here are Heidi’s Mobile Park, Ben’s Japanese Auto Clinic and, in the background, Deanz Greenz, a cannabis shop. Over on 105th Avenue, find Dan’s Cylinder Head Co.

Parkrose street fair

Last Wednesday, Parkrose held a little street fair. It was a real down-home event—by far the sweetest such gathering I’ve attended. Families and face paint. Small crafters selling t-shirts and bags and jewelry, candles and homemade hot sauce. Tables set up on a green under towering trees.

Amateur music acts included a brass band, with many members decked out in vintage marching band attire.

Also on the green with the band were hula hoop twirlers, and soap bubbles that didn’t make it into the photo.

From time to time, an airplane sailed through the sky to the north, on a landing trajectory to Portland International Airport.

Parkrose poems

Two attendees were brave enough to ask me to write poems for them.

Julia, who’s 3 and was eating pink ice cream, wanted a poem about her mama, who is one of the owners of the Parkrose Coffee Co.

About Mama

A warm lap
Just for Julia.
A teddy bear
Just for Mama.

We play in the garden
With rabbits and crows
Spiders come to play with
Me and my Mama.

Shelby asked me to write about hope.

Hope

H ow do we
O vercome our
P rejudices and
E arn our happiness?

Open the door, for a start.
Twist the knob and throw it back.
Hope for the thing unseen
While you pick through the pieces of your life.

Your life! Well lived!
Open to newness, ready to change.
Come to the table hungry
And feast on hope. Let Spirit bring you dessert.

Maywood Park

Finally, Maywood Park. It’s a small city close to Parkrose. Entirely inside the city of Portland, it was formed in 1967 in a fruitless effort to stop construction of the I-205 freeway. The freeway now forms the southern boundary of the 0.17-square-mile town, which has just over 800 residents.

Maywood Park residents are fiercely proud of their little town. Most homeowners are long-time residents. I didn’t see any houses for sale as I toured the small city.

Woodsy Maywood Park, with its few hundred mostly modest homes, has no commercial district. You can find info about life in Maywood Park on Substack, and read the newsletter.

Your favorite

If you live in Portland, do you have a favorite neighborhood? If you live elsewhere, what’s fine in your city? If you live in the country . . . what’s not to like there?

Leave a comment

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Rainbow dessert

June is Pride Month, and my church is in on the celebration. A parishioner made this striking gelatin creation for a recent coffee hour.

Valedictory poem

Fine and Fresh

I’m grateful for tiny things,
Bumps of acne on my nose,
Ringing in my ears, the start
Of something fine and fresh.
Fine and fresh, my mantra.

Everything is fine and fresh.
Sun washes over the horizon. Always.
Each day wakes curious as a hatchling
Peeping over the clouds, shaking its rattle.
Oh, fine and fresh! Pull on the sweater,
Knit closely of memory, old and worn.
But washed fine and fresh for this fine day.

Until next week

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All the best,

Fran

—30—

Get creative

Anything will do. 
Make a meal, peel a carrot. 
Break out the candles,
Eat candy in bed.

Push at your cuticles,
The world can just wait for you.
I am becoming,
Wait till I’m ready. 

Mysterious chunk

When I first saw this discarded stump, I saw a turkey, with the bump on the top as a head. But I can also see a rabbit, with the bump as ears and an eye southeast of it. The bump could also be a duck’s bill. Or a dog’s snout.

Talking to strangers

A fellow writer in the Zoom group I write with every weekday says she often strikes up conversations with strangers in Costco. An extrovert who lives in suburbia, she is hungry for connection, and Costco conversation is one way to meet that goal. She has met such extraordinary, interesting people this way!

As an introvert who lives in the city, I, too, feel the desire to connect. I strike up conversations where I can, at bus stops, on the light-rail train, in coffee shops. I ask other customers to reach items from high shelves at the supermarket. I ask workers on the street what they’re doing.

If you are shy, talking to strangers may seem impossible. But you can do it.

Working for a newspaper and thus having a reason to ask questions of someone I don’t know has made it easier for me. Now I know that most people are eager to talk about themselves, what they’re doing, what they like. It’s human nature to want to share.

As for the occasional sourpuss who doesn’t respond to your overature: that’s on them, not on you. You are sweet, inquisitive, sensitive and caring. Don’t take it personally; it’s not rejection. Go forth and meet someone else.

Children’s books

A few months ago, I found an unusual display in the Multnomah County Library’s Hawthorne Holds building. (That’s where you pick up library books while the Belmont library over on César Chávez Boulevard is being renovated. It’s due to reopen in August.)

The display showed books with the inside edges facing out. The designs are called “sprayed edges” and are a new thing in children’s and young adult fantasy books.

I picked one out at random, the lavender with the white feathers. That book was Underwild: River of Spirits. Hey! The writer, Shana Targosz, lives in Portland! I liked the book; maybe I could review it for Oregon Arts Watch. My editor said okay, and I ended up writing about River of Spirits and its sequel, Underwild: Thief of Relics. The review, which is here, also dwells on the subject of death in children’s books.

Never say die

It used to be, when I was a kid, that kids didn’t die in kids books. Maybe an animal, like in Old Yeller, or a distant parent, like in A Little Princess (and that parent didn’t even stay dead!). Gruesome images were rare. Aslan might die in the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, but hey, that was an allegory.

Things changed in the 70s with Bridge to Terabithia, where a child dies in an accident. Modern kids read about the death of children in the Harry Potter books. The plot of The Hunger Games revolves around children killing other children.

Shana Targosz’s Underwild series is about the realm of the dead. The Underwild is a lawless subset of the ancient mythical Underworld where adventures lurk and nightmares come alive. Two 12-year-old kids wander among scary undead humans called mormos and encounter frightening water dragons known as chimera. Not to mention the occasional angry, friendly or demented Greek god.

The Multnomah County Library categorizes the Underwild books as juvenile, for middle-grade readers, rather than teen, or what used to be called YA, for young adult. The Beaverton library has placed the first book in the juvenile section and the second on the teen shelves.

I guess today’s kids can handle the creepiness of life in the Underworld. These books are best sellers. I like them a lot. Targosz is a great writer who crafts compelling stories.

The best books for children

At this site, you can check out the School Library Journal’s list of the 100 best children’s books and click on the titles you have read. I’ve read 53, ranking in the 94th percentile of those taking the challenge. The average was 31. My score would have been higher if I counted movies I’ve seen based on books. But that seemed like cheating.

I choked up as I went through the list, being reminded of favorite titles like The Dark is Rising, The View from Saturday, The Children of Green Knowe, Caddie Woodlawn (a favorite of my mother’s along with the Little House books), The Thief, The Book of Three, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Wind in the Willows. Even the books I haven’t read, I’ve hear of.

Here are the top 16. I’ll bet some of these are your favorites, too.

1. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

2. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling (that’s the British title; in the U.S. it’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)

4. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

5. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg

6. Holes, Louis Sacher

7. The Giver, Lois Lowry

8. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

9. Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

10. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

11. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

12. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

13. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson

14. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling

15. Because of Winn-Dixie, Kate DiCamillo

16. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

I’ve read all of these except for Anne of Green Gables and The Phantom Toll Booth. My best friend from college, Judy Weinsoft, a librarian herself, recommended The Phantom Toll Booth to me but I abandoned it after a few chapters because I thought it was too twee.

Complex tropes

Today’s young readers can handle dark, complex ideas and themes, sometimes horror. Think Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or R.L Stine’s Goosebumps. My attempt to read Garth Nix began and ended with Mr. Monday. I couldn’t handle the horror. I don’t understand the allure of vampires, either, so Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books are out. I love Maggie Stiefvater, but not her werewolf series.

On our library shelves, you can find juvenile books with gay and trans characters and teen books that deal with abortion, suicide and copious instances of the f-word. Really, everything goes with today’s plugged-in young readers.

I asked Amy Clark, the youth materials selector for books for the Multnomah County Library, how she chooses books. She relies on reviews from respected publications like Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and the School Library Journal. Designating a book as J for juvenile or Y for youth or teen is a function of weighing the age of the characters in the book and sometimes the age the publisher says the book is aimed at.

Color coded

Books for beginning readers, up to grade 3, are classified at Multnomah County in four levels by color, ranging from yellow for pre-readers, through blue, (sounding out words), red (reading more independently) and green (more complexity, fewer pictures).

Parents can check out colorful bags at the library with a selection of books and materials in each of the reading levels. The black bags contain “decodable” materials—books and games that teach reading skills through techniques including phonics.

On Substack, Karen Rodriguez at Literary Fancy has published a running series about “wholesome” children’s classics that actually traumatize kids. Her No. 1 example: Charlotte’s Web. She writes:

Charlotte was the best friend Wilbur would ever have. He outlives her. He has to live with that. We gave this book to children who don’t yet understand mortality and watched them learn what death means through a spider.

Your turn, dear reader

Do you still read children’s books now that you are all grown up? Which ones do you like? I discovered Megan Whalen Turner, Cinda Williams Chima, Susan Cooper, Maggie Stiefvater, Lucy Boston, Jonathan Stroud, Lloyd Alexander, Philip Pullman, Madeleine l’Engle and many other great children’s writers as an adult. Their stories have enriched my life immeasurably.

What books or authors do you like? What genres? Are they different from what you liked when you were little?

Leave a comment

Poetry break

Free form

Toe in the water
Time to explore
Writing without meter—
I’m not sure this will work.

How can words, just words, carry a poem?
How can wings, just wings, sustain a bird?

Beneath everything is music
Melody in my ears, rhythm in my heartbeat, my gait.
All the world a pattern, a symphony, living things tucked into the vertices of consciousness.

Lucky I am, that’s all. Lucky. 
To be in this world, feel earth breathe on my skin. 
To walk with Spirit, grand and encompassing,
Sharing and holding, our breath, our being.

Writing letters

Kathy (@kathy622729) on Substack wrote a note about President Barak Obama’s practice of writing letters.

Here’s my paraphrase of how it went:

Out of the 40,000 or so letters that arrived at the White House every day, President Obama would choose 10. He would take them to the Treaty Room, on the second floor, to work in private.

Every night, for all eight years he was in office, Obama wrote hand-written replies to the day’s 10 letters, using a black felt-tipped pen on a yellow legal pad. He then made a clean copy of each on White House stationery.

Kathy writes: “His lifelong correspondence director, Fiona Reese, confirmed that Obama often wept privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives.”

Adopting the practice

This weekend, maybe in a spare moment, consider writing a personal note to someone you love or admire and miss. Or to someone you have negative feelings toward that you need to let go. Jot a short note or a longer missive. Write a paragraph or a poem.

Then make a clean copy. Encase it in a comfortable envelope. Put a stamp on the front and maybe a sticker on the back and send it forth.

Writing a letter by hand, personifying the written word in this way, is so powerful. I hope you will do it.

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Streetcar calisthenics

More than once I’ve seen passengers use the bars and straps in Portland’s light-rail trains and streetcars as props and hand-holds for stretching and exercise. Last week, a man was chinning himself in a streetcar.

Sometimes I pull on the commuter straps dangling above me to stretch and strengthen my arms.

Next week, I’m writing about getting to know Portland’s Parkrose neighborhood.

Meanwhile, a group called Historic Parkrose is holding the Fifth Annual Summer Nights Street Fair and Night Market in the area. It’s next Wednesday, June 17, from 5 to 9 pm. Vendors and musical acts will set up at Northeast 104th and Sandy.

Till next week

Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll return next week. Becoming comes to you every Saturday at about 7 pm. If you subscribe, you’ll get an email notice when I publish.

—Fran

—30—

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Blue moon and a bunny

I bravely ventured out in my wheelchair at 3 am on June 1 to capture the blue moon, the second full moon of May, which shone in the southern sky on May 31 and June 1.

I got many shots of the moon, but I also captured this little rabbit, sitting on the sidewalk about a block from my home and waiting patiently for me to take its picture before hopping off. It’s lit by the headlights of my wheelchair.

Urban wildlife

Rabbits

I’ve started seeing rabbits near my house in the past few weeks. I’m used to seeing squirrels, but bunnies are new. I saw another outside Westminster Presbyterian on Northeast Hancock a few weeks ago. And there’s a lot of chatter on Nextdoor about rabbits in many eastside neighborhoods.

Should I worry about their survival? They seem so tiny and vulnerable. But rabbits multiply like rabbits. They will always be with us.

Raccoons

A few months ago, something dropped out of a tree near the bus shelter at Southeast 27th and Hawthorne and scurried away. It was this raccoon, hanging out in the middle of the day.

Years earlier, I had to take out the cat door in my house in Southwest Portland after my kids came home from school and found raccoons eating out of the cats’ food bowls. We lived close to a creek in a neighborhood with a lot of wooded spaces.

Opossums

I’ve heard them rustling in the bushes, and I glimpsed a pair of them once. I remember them having scary white skull-like heads, but the photos I see on the Internet show benign animals with pointy faces.

Coyotes

I’ve never seen one, but they are present all over town. Beats me where they live. The cat that went out the cat door and never returned to my Southwest Portland house was probably coyote food. Coyotes may keep the rabbit population in check. But what will keep the coyote population in check?

Nutria

Nutria are nocturnal, but I’ve seen them in daylight in Milwaukie, where they camp out in a pond behind the Milwaukie Public Library. This one was photographed in Westmoreland Park.

Bigger game

Last month, police were called when a black bear wandered into Canby. They tried waiting for wildlife officials to arrive with tranquilizer guns, but the bear was prowling near a Burgerville and a Saturday market and a crowd was gathering. So they shot the animal.

May into June

The month of May seemed to go on forever. I live in a neighborhood of gardens and growth. Every day some new plant begs for attention from the wild tangles of shrubs and flowers and grasses. Trees fence with the sun, shading sidewalks and streets and manicured lawns edged with annuals. The lushness is so overwhelming, it makes me long for winter. I can’t help it. I pine for those months of being able to see the structure of trees. But sometimes, shrubbery suffices.

Festival time

It’s June in Portland, the City of Roses, and the Rose Festival is in full swing.

Regardless how you feel about using pulchritude and a perky personality as a means of measuring the worth of children, Rose Fest offers some good community fun. The Grand Floral parade, with floats painstakingly decorated with fresh flowers, was a Saturday morning tradition for decades. It used to be my job at The Oregonian on parade day to take notes for the photographer who was shooting the parade from high above the crowds in the bucket of a cherry picker crane. I wrote about that fun experience a few years ago.

The parade is today, June 6.

Starting this year, the event is moving entirely downtown and has been rescheduled for the evening. The abbreviated route starts along the riverfront and ends up at Lincoln High School.

The Starlight Parade, with lighted floats, used to be on a separate evening but this year has been folded into the Grand Floral. Its contingent starts out two hours after the big parade, also at the waterfront.

That’s a lot of parade, stretched over hours. I hope they have adequate portable toilet coverage.

More June ceremonies

Father’s Day is the third Sunday of June. Midmonth, graduation. New starts, new beginnings, new lives.

I feel for our graduates, coming into a world that is so unpredictable, and in many ways so unforgiving and so unloving. College grads come saddled with debt, hoping for a break, a job, a meaningful life. Let’s cheer for them.

On to sports

Baseball season is in full swing. Go, Padres!

The World Cup starts Thursday, June 11, with Korea v. Czech in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Mexico v. South Africa in Mexico City. I don’t have a favorite team; I just root for whoever. I like getting up at weird early hours to catch games being played in faraway places.

June resolution

I have a resolution, a theme, for June. “Wispy whispers of inspiration, from both sides.” “Both sides” means Gemini, the schizoid astrological sign. Wispy whispers? I don’t quite believe I wrote that. Maybe I meant more mystical meandering, intimations, mutterings. That sort of thing.

June is the month of Gemini, an astrological sign I am ambivalent about. Sometimes I will initially really like a person who is a Gemini, and they will turn out to be, well, something other than what I first fancied. It’s an odd phenomenon, unique to me, and not a reflection on all the fine Geminis out there. I’ve just had a couple of rough experiences.

O, Creator! (I mean you!)

You were created to create. It’s what humans do, when we are not destroying.

When you create, you enter a dream where Spirit greets you and guides you. It is a place you should visit often.

Please write

Or knit or make birthday cakes. Draw with chalk on the pavement. Finger paint with the kids.

Make something. Anything.

I quilt and cook and engage in creative bus riding, but writing is my nirvana. I love being up to my elbows in words, tossing them around, waiting to see what comes next.

Because I don’t know what will come next. I may have an idea of what I will be writing, what I want or need to say. But the words don’t corral easily. Herding cats may be a frayed cliche, but that’s what writing sometimes feels like.

In this essay, the words are being unusually unruly, because I am forming it out of nothing. I sat down to write a cheer, an encouragement, an invitation to writing. And so it goes. . . .

I want you to move fearlessly to the keyboard or pick up a pen. Don’t think about the words. Think about feeling. Or don’t think at all. Just let the words come. Let the passion flow from you fingers, your hands, your heart.

Why write?

I write for publication, specifically for this Substack newsletter, Becoming. Sometimes I write book reviews for people who actually pay me.

But often, every morning, actually, I write just to write. I write to wake up my being, to oil the sinews of syntax, to get into the rhythm of creation.

My practice is write continuously for 20 minutes without pausing. I write—whatever. Random words, memories, poetry, little stories.

This morning writing exercise has been the foundation of my day for years. I seldom use what I write during this time, but neither the time nor the words are wasted. It is exercise.

What you will discover

For some folks, the best part of writing is having written (thanks, David Sarasohn, for this insight). Having written, you are clear. You understand more about yourself. You have moved the needle toward fulfillment.

When you write, whatever you write, you are a writer.

You don’t have to publish your work. You don’t have to show it to anyone, although I guarantee you others would like to see it. But you have written, and what you wrote is part of you, and you are enriched by it.

Even if all you write is, over and over, “I don’t know what to write,” once you sit down and pick up a pen or place your fingers on a keyboard, you are making a start. Just begin with one character, one word, one thought. Your heart, your mind, you hands will guide you from there.

Don’t be afraid. Stick with it and make a plan to do it again.

The next time you try it, you will surprise yourself.

Open a world of wonder. Please write.

Reluctant writing

The keyboard in my lap.
A nickel for my thoughts.
It’s hard to move my fingers.
The words seem gummy and stale.

In another world, long past.
I might have struck a smoke.
Lost in nicotine and ink, 
Tobacco on my tongue.

Now I sit with an espresso,
Waiting for my soul to wake up. 
Caffeine in my veins,
A kick to my creativity.

Just keep the fingers moving,
Clicking on the keyboard.
What comes today may be golden—
Tomorrow I’ll sieve through it,
Wash away the dross, and hope
A little yellow dust remains.

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What is it with Worchestershire?

A few weeks ago, I ran a photo of a broken bottle of Worchestershire sauce nestled in a pile of broken auto glass. Then I came upon another discarded bottle of this delicacy. Someone in the neighborhood must really love anchovies.

Hairy sign

A writing friend, Kelly Turner, shared these photos of a sign that appears to have grown a head of hair. The back, especially, could use a trim.

Bomb that yarn

June 11, Thursday, is national yarn bombing day, as it is every year.

Yarn bombing, wrapping objects in public spaces with knitted or crocheted art, has been a thing for about 15 years. On this day, knitting needles and crochet hooks become “weapons of mass construction” and you may find decorations on trees, poles, doorknobs or statues.

Here’s a traffic pole decorated with yarn opposite St. David of Wales Episcopal Church on Southeast Harrison.

Want to learn more? Check out Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti, by Mandy Moore, at the Multnomah County Library.

Goodbye for now

Thanks for reading Becoming. Thanks for liking it and leaving comments. Thanks for your loyalty and good wishes.

I’m keeping the yearly subscription price at $50 (or $5 a month) for now. Fifty bucks is a bargain for 52 weeks of lively writing and the occasional bunny photo. A few brave souls, dear to me, have ponied up $100 a year as founding members.

On PayPal, you can tip me in $5 increments.

But mostly, keep coming back. I have fresh content every week and I love sharing it with you.

Love,
Fran

—30—

Quotes

In my reading this week, I came upon two quotations that served as prefaces in novels. Both these quotes seem to be speaking to today’s world.

In Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen, the author makes up a proverb:

The little thief steals gold,
But the great one steals kingdoms
And only one goes to the gallows.

Priya Guns introduces Your Driver is Waiting with this quote from A. Sivanandan:

Those who have do not give, 
Those who haven’t must take. 

Burnside at 100

Portland’s Burnside Bridge, the one with the cute little red-roofed guardhouses, is 100 this year. Multnomah County, which owns and operates the span, threw a party on Saturday, May 30. It was like a huge street fair.

The bridge was filled with crowds craning at the rare view of the Willamette River from the middle of the span, chowing down on food-cart food and visiting information and sales booths.

The bridge’s recent history has been storied. You will remember the George Floyd demonstrations that roiled downtown Portland for hundreds of days and nights in 2020. In many instances, protesters lay outstretched on the surface of the Burnside Bridge for an indeterminable-seeming nine minutes, the time it took for George Floyd, a 48-year-old Black man arrested in Minneapolis, to die at the hands, or rather the knee, of police officer Derek Chauvin.

On this sunny Saturday in Portland, the protests seem a long way gone, although one of the informational signs shows photos from that time.

Bridge poems

As I sometimes do at an event like the Burnside Bridge’s 100th birthday, I took out my “Let me write you a poem—it’s free” placard and waited for takers. This afternoon, I was privileged to write poems for four people.

Judy asked me to write about falling in love.

Falling in love

What if we jumped into love, instead of falling?
Or leapt, or folded, or leaned?
Bring to me all of you, 
To me bring your worry, your trauma, your hope.

Bring me, bring me the blue moon 
Tomorrow on the last day of May.
Tumble, turn, pivot into love,
Jump the boundaries of alone.
Any way, I will capture you,
Lean into you, fold my hand around your heart.

Bridgette wanted a poem about kindness.

Kindness on a bridge

Build a bridge of kindness, a step, a stair,
An arcing to a summit.
It’s warm up there.

Be on the bus together, kind people.
Hold doors for children. Make time,
Make cookies, make a plan
To look another in the eyes,
To matter—just for an instant.
To breathe in the other, holding
Their essence in your hand,
Your mouth, your loneliness.

Sailor, who’s 7, has a stuffed dog called Biscuit. She says Biscuit is 2.

Biscuit

Two years old! Just a baby.
But housebroken, no doubt .
Loves to chase squirrels
And sleep under your chin.

Biscuit, do you like gravy?
Or rich butter, sweet jam?
Jam as sweet as Sailor,
Jam as rich as her love.

Good night, Biscuit!
Young dogs need their sleep.

Mira suggested a poem about summer

Summertime

Step into a time of richness and heat,
A swim in cold water, lying in the grass.
Waiting for fireworks, it gets dark so late now!
Hold onto memories, slow down, let time pass.

Time for reading, watching bugs on the sidewalk.
Music outdoors, swings, corn on the cob.
Watermelon, cherries, strange purple drinks.
No end to summer, just enjoy it, that’s the job.

Boats on the river, maybe some fishing.
Leaves turn to leather, you get tired of heat,
Evenings seem endless, you wake in the sunshine.
Summer, eternal, no sense of defeat.

The bus is full

Twice a week I ride the 73/122nd Avenue bus in connection with the mentoring I volunteer to do at Parkrose Middle School, in far Northeast Portland.

Sometimes I feel guilty about riding the 73, because I’m taking up a wheelchair space and this bus is crowded.

TriMet says highest ridership in the system is on the 72/Killingsworth/82nd Avenue line, which runs north and south on 82nd Avenue and east and west on Killingsworth.

The 73 line has to be a close second. At the times I ride it, in midday, it’s very popular with folks who bring baggage—wheelchairs, walkers, wagons, dogs. Older Vietnamese ladies lug their shopping carts on board, along with men and women toting huge plastic bags of bottles destined for the recycling center at Northeast 122nd and Glisan.

Mothers board with strollers and babies. Occasionally, a stroller carries a dog.

Crowd right on

Most of the drivers on this route are lenient about letting folks board with their baggage, just hoping or assuming they’ll find a space. So sometimes there are walkers and carts in the aisle, although usually only for a stop or two. Passengers are friendly and accommodating, helping a mom fold a stroller or lifting seats to make room.

It’s a constant mill, on and off. By the time the bus gets to the end of its run at Southeast 95th and Foster Road, the crowds have thinned. I’ve arrived in Lents, with the Refuge Coffee House, a favorite of mine, on one side of the road, and my Planet Fitness gym on the other. I took this photo near there, with I-205 in the background.

The student I’m mentoring is moving on to high school, so I won’t be working with him anymore. I won’t miss the lengthy commute to Parkrose Middle School, about 50 minutes each way, but I’ll miss the dear old—and young—folks on the 73 bus.

And of course, I will miss my student.

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Contemplative photography

I found Kat, a Buddhist monk/nun (she describes herself both ways) from Salem, engaging in contemplative photography in the parking lot of Champagne Poetry on Southeast Hawthorne. She explained that she was trying to capture the reflection of a white electric box on the corrugated aluminum wall behind it.

I know exactly what she as aiming for. Here is a contemplative photo of my own.

200 weeks of writing

If you have the time, which most likely you do not, but still—you might take a wander through the archives at Becoming. Hit the “show more posts” button and dive down a few months or years. Pick something at random. I promise it will be worth it. If you care to, “like” it.

I occasionally revisit one of the scores of posts I’ve published, and I’m always pleasantly surprised by the writing. And I am a critical person.

Farewell for today

This is my 200th posting, according to Substack. It’s been a fun ride. Sometimes I think of all the things I could be doing if I were not writing every week, but I like writing the best. I write at my desk in the early morning and, as you, dear readers, know, at coffee shops later in the day.

Use the button below to buy a yearly subscription. It costs less than $1 a week. Or dip your toe in the water for $5 per month. On PayPal, you can tip me in $5 increments.

Meanwhile, if you enjoyed this post, click on ♡ to let me know. More and more readers are doing that every week, and I so appreciate it! Of course, you can read everything I write by subscribing to Becoming for free. As the old saying goes, why keep a cow when you can buy milk? Still, I’m urging you to invest in the cow.

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“I’m talking to myself. That’s all writers really do.” —Elizabeth McCracken

Talking to myself. Yes. That’s what Becoming really is.

The band plays on

A friend and I went to the Beaverton farmers market, where we saw breathtakingly fresh produce and happy people. We heard the Beaverton Community Band play “The National Game,” a march by John Philip Sousa. It includes a sound effect of a bat striking a ball.

Then I had a fantasy of playing clarinet in this ensemble. How hard could it be?

The Beaverton Band plays Sousa

One flautist switches to piccolo.
The euphonium player’s unbound,
His embouchure hot for the music,
On-the-beat oompahs ready to sound.

A bandmaster, a baton, the sound of a bat
From percussionists ready to play.
Swelling chords, simple notes, harmony,
On a sunshine-blessed farmers market day.

A little girl twirls with abandon,
Her fingers, her father’s entwined.
Old folks nod their heads in rhythm
The sun smiles down, gentle, benign.

Let’s play in the sunshine forever!
Forgetting our crochets and care.
Let’s play our trombones and triangles,
I want to play, too—do I dare?

The endless sea

I awake on a sleep-in Saturday with the understanding that I have been afraid, and that I do not have to be afraid anymore. A phrase comes to me: “endless sea of joy.”

I understand in an instant that this ocean of joy that washes the shores of the universe has always been there, surrounding everything, subsuming everything. But I have been afraid of diving into this capacious sea. Would it be selfish to have access to so much bliss while others may not share this? I say no. I give in to bliss, freely given to me.

So now, I am going to revel in my continuous connection with the universe. This is the state that Eckhart Tolle describes in The Power of Now, a book about a great truth: that every moment is a distillation of universal joy.

It is a great gift, this joy. So now I am going to accept it.

William Blake understood the simplicity of joy. In “Infant Joy” in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he wrote:

What shall I call thee?
I happy am 
Joy is my name,— 
Sweet joy befall thee!

Surrounded by joy

I make my way to a local coffee shop on a fresh morning, in a sun break after rain. In all that is around me, in nature, in the houses, even the asphalt and the sidewalks broken by tree roots, I feel astonishment. Astonishment that the soil is so moist, the sun so comforting, that all the green things and chattering squirrels and earthworms and downspouts and sparrows are engaged and involved. It is the great mystery of being. Everything connected, all joyous, all alive!

Acceptance

The first step in healing, of any kind, is acceptance. In my life, there’s not much that is difficult to accept, except for a chronic, debilitating condition, MS. But I do accept the reality of this illness. I’ve written before about the curious blessings that being disabled have brought me, and I take some pride in the workarounds I’ve figured out to deal with the limitations of not being able to walk well, or balance well, or stand without the fear of falling.

I accept. And with acceptance comes joy. Joy in living, in being, in moving through a landscape of beautiful images.

Nature begets joy, of course, but so do the works of humans. As I sit writing this in a coffee house on Hawthorne, I am moved by the patterns of the grids of the gateway and windows that give onto the adjoining apartment house.

On the move

I ride the bus, sometimes multiple routes, nearly every day. I’ve come to expect to see disturbing things from the bus or train: huddled homelessness, dilapidated buildings, trash on the street, and too many cars on streets and freeways.

I encounter disturbing things on the bus, too: individuals in need of a bath; a passenger slumped in slumber or stupor; huge, rattling plastic bags of cans headed to recycling. People with all their belongings in a collapsable cart or a baby stroller.

I feel grief, I have compassion for all these things I encounter. But I am filled with joy regardless. My bliss is mine. It does not take from the joy of anyone other. I would pass it on if I could. Indeed, I often pray that my blessings be passed to others. I cannot know if these prayers are answered.

Looking back, I can see how I once pushed joy away, denied bliss. How could I revel in life when life is so hard for so many?

It comes back to acceptance. I have to accept that there is suffering. I have to accept that I can’t always alleviate it. But I will also accept the present bliss that has been given to me. Given freely.

Stones and crystals

A poem about what the universe brings.

Talismans

Sanded and polished, the stones of our lives,
Smooth opals, bright sapphires, whatever we need.
Break open the geode to see the blue spires
Of crystal
Our crystal
Our lodestar.

Pick a stone from the gutter, rounded or pitted,
Ask it how it came to be there.
Was it once in a stream bed, molded by water,
God’s hands caressing it? See the blue spires
Of spirit,
Our totem,
Our North Star.

Quilt anniversary

I came late to quilting. I was in my 60s before I discovered how much fun it is to play with little pieces of fabric.

Big Pink was my first big quilt. I’ve been looking for an excuse to share some photos of it, because I love it so much. It dates from 2016, ten years ago, so this is its tin anniversary.

The pattern is a traditional one, churn dash. The edges of the quilt feature rows of squares and rectangles that I pieced by hand using cash-register tape as a guide.

Every block in this quilt is the same design, but because of the variations of fabric design, you might have to look for the pattern in some of the blocks. I like making quilts that have this semi-hidden quality.

Other quilt designs are sometimes confused with churn dash, which is named for the paddle of a tall wooden butter churn , which agitates the cream. One of them is “monkey wrench,” though the true monkey wrench has a larger center square with thinner sashing around it. I prefer the regimentation of my churn dash block, where all the piece are based on a 2-1/2-inch grid.

The label says Big Pink was designed and pieced by me, Fran Gardner, and long-arm quilted by Nancy Stovall of Just Quilting. The date was March 2016.

I found the pink calicoes I used for sashing and borders at a rummage sale at Epworth United Methodist Church, just around the block from me. I think I paid $20 for many yards of fabric, some of which ended up as backing.

Browsing through A People and Their Quilts by John Rice Irwin (1984), I came across this photo of Dolphia George Elkins with a quilt top that has a churn dash block. Elkins’s given name is Martha Rudolph, hence the nickname Dolphia. She lived in New Loyston, Tenn., and was in her mid-80s when this photo was taken by Robin Hood.

Mixed-up drinks

I stepped into a dive bar for happy hour. Drinks were a dollar off, so I ordered a Scotch and soda. A simple drink to mix, and I don’t mind cheap bar Scotch. But the drink, when it came, was suspiciously dark, and it tasted sweet. The young man who made it shrugged off my concern. Another bartender came over, squinted at it and said well, you wanted a Scotch and soda. Then the penny dropped. It was soda—RC Cola.

They were kind enough to make me a new drink with soda water, that is fizzy water. Which is how you make a Scotch and soda. You can look it up.

A few years ago I ordered a martini in the little bar at my assisted living place. It didn’t taste like a martini. Where was the juniper? I finally figured out the liquor was vodka, not gin. The bartender, a volunteer who had worked as a bartender at one point, insisted that that’s what a martini is, vodka and vermouth with an olive. Maybe it’s a West Coast thing, but the original martini, the kind drunk by Nick and Nora Charles in “The Thin Man,” is made with gin. It’s the juniper berries and other aromatics that make it taste so good.

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Poem for today

I end with a sonnet that speaks to our times. I started out sombre, but I couldn’t keep up the grimness.

Let’s not go there now

The earth is warming, glaciers slide away.
Drought and heat and anguish in our path.
Acceptance is weak, we need to join the fray,
Push back, resist, test out the power of wrath.

Or sit back, meditate, drink green tea.
Pet the hedgehog, watch the children play.
Remember breath, eat healthy, that’s the key.
Conserve our sanity, survive the day.

Empires build, go great, and then collapse.
Our era’s stones will someday wear to sand.
We ran the race, we triumphed—then we lapsed
Into the present chaos in our land.

History repeats, repeats and will again.
We persevere, for someday, we may win.

Till next week

These lines come from “So Happy Together,” recorded by The Turtles in 1967.

If I should call you up
Invest a dime
And you say you belong to me
And ease my mind
Imagine how the world could be
So very fine
So happy together . . .

When this song was written, a phone call cost 10 cents, while long-distance was prohibitively expensive. Now I can call my sister in Ireland through Messenger and talk for as long as I like for no charge at all.

Investing in Becoming, however, still costs the same as when I began publishing in 2022, 199 newsletters ago: $5 a month, $50 a year, or a tip in multiples of $5 at PayPal,

Think about upgrading to paid, if you can.

I’m glad you like Becoming.

Even though it’s just me talking to myself—and to you.

—Fran

—30—

Have you voted?

We don’t how much longer we will be able to freely vote in this country, so it’s important to exercise this right even in minor elections. The Oregon primary is Tuesday, May 17. I was at a town hall last week where Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read told the audiance—more than once—to put your ballot in a box at the library or the elections division. Don’t trust the mail.

Broken open

Lately, I’ve been living in a state of stasis, just letting things happen. My life, for the most part, is placid, unexciting and comfortable.

The news is full of stories about places where people are being killed, uprooted, starved and wounded. And in our own country, the quality of life for most people is being steadily undermined.

So how can I remain so comfortable? How do I deserve my tranquil life?

My recent reading helps me understand. Michelle Dowd, in her memoir Forager, describes how the bright red flowers of sarcodes, or snow plant, break through the earth in late spring, often through snow, “bursting with fire.” That image of a bright red growth emerging from white snow reminds my heart to thaw.

Eileen Garvin, in Bumblebee Season, observes the human heart closely, how it turns and stretches and breaks. How it reforms and renews. How it is empty and full, sometimes at the same time. I am trying to find that balance, a good balance.

Shana Targosz writes about children with hearts broken open by the place of death she calls the Underwild, where death lurks everywhere as life struggles to be preserved and cherished. I come away renewed, aware of death but also a fuller life.

In Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, (thanks for the recommendation, Amy Wang!) a clutch of London commuters break the stone-set rules of mass transit: don’t notice others. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t strike up a conversation. But then a life emergency shatters the rules, and their lives and hearts stretch and break and reform. This is a book about what I think of as “bus therapy,” but it goes beyond observation and meditation to examine what makes us human.

Urban blight

In my photo app, I caption images with keywords like “urban blight” and “urban decay” to keep track of photos I take of things falling apart. Most often, what I tag are buildings. But then I find an image like this one, taken behind a bus shelter on Southeast Belmont. I’m fascinated by the strange confluence of items: a cigarette carton, a broken bottle of Worcestershire sauce, and a page from a tenant’s handbook (I peeked), all laid out on what looks like a bed of ice but actually is broken auto glass.

I found this neglected garage on one of the many alleys in Ladd’s Addition. There’s a symphony of meaning in its dilapidation. I see pattern and destruction, tenacious weeds and an enduring cohesion.

Some houses nearby to me just aren’t kept up. Here is a duplex of doom. I think people may still be living there.

Urban decay can be bright and colorful. I took this photo near the Union Pacific yard in North Portland, but I forget exactly where. It was several years ago, when I was still driving.

Urban glory

Meanwhile, my Portland neighborhood bursts with stunning spring flowers: azaleas, rhodies, iris, lavender, roses. They are glorious.

A house and trees are glorified by the setting sun of early spring in the Hosford-Abernathy neighborhood.

A “glory” is an optical phenomenon where water droplets in the atmosphere cause a halo-type effect. This sunrise is not a glory in that sense, but it has a similar phenomenological effect. I shot it out the window of the hospital room where my mother lay dying in May 2011. This photo speaks of endurance and love and resilience.

About my poetry

I didn’t set out to write poems or write about poems when I started my Substack back in 2022. I thought I would just write interesting thoughts and ideas and maybe publish some pictures. But then poems keep coming to me. At odd times, sometimes awkward or inconvenient times, they begged to be let out onto the page. I would be mulling a topic and BAM—there was a poem.

Then I found that I had a real affinity for writing poems for strangers, at venues like farmers markets and street fairs and Tuba Christmas.

This is how poems became woven into the fabric of Becoming, and I like it that way.

Writing poetry in Montavilla

I went to the Montavilla farmers market last Sunday to write poems for anyone who asked me. Several folks took me up on my free offer.

Frankly, I was not at the top of my form when I wrote these. It had been several month since I last tried this technique and I was rusty.

Aubrey wanted a poem about approaching summer.

Summer begins

The roses are out, but squash
And eggplants—they’re later.
Buy it all at the market. Bring your dog,
Bring your basket, your smile, your goodwill.
Watch the days grow.

Fireworks at 10 pm, coming soon.
Dawn before 6. Places to go,
Boats to row, lakes for swimming.
Trees decked out in green dresses.
Watch the days grow.

You remember summer, seasons past.
A glittering, a gleam, a drop 
Of silver sunlight. Coconut smells
At the pool, at the beach.
And still the days grow.

Mauryn came to the market with Elicia, 6, and Lucian, 2 (almost 3)

Trio

Three in the family, kids playing with rocks.
Pet the dogs, smell the food, touch the plants.
What’s present today? A new world,
Sun and shadows, clouds and no clouds.
A future, a past, time to buy rhubarb.

Crowds grow and form, singles and pairs.
Our trio, intrepid, is off to explore.
Come out of hiding, a new world awaits,
Sun-washed and rain-drenched,
The stones of the market.

I may never go to the Montavilla farmers market again. The ground is gravel, not pavement, hard for my wheelchair to navigate. The little rocks are scrunchy and slippery at the same time. My wheels struggle to find purchase.

Susan, who was in a power wheelchair like me, agreed that navigating on gravel is hard. She asked for a poem about spirituality. I put strawberries in the title, then forgot to write about them. But I like the title, so I’m keeping it.

Spirituality and strawberries

Unkempt and upended, we nevertheless
Move forward, one corpuscle at a time.
The future claws at us, demanding.
We have no choice—but no!—
We have too many choices, thank the universe.
Each moment folds into the next.
Which to choose, which to let happen? Regardless,
We wobble our way toward Jerusalem.

Amanda said I could choose a topic. Instead, I chose iambs for rhythm. Oh, what the heck. Just make it a sonnet.

Chance meeting

We meet here at the market. Who knows why?
The universe conspires when we’re not looking.
Coincidences happen, then off they fly.
We can’t remember what a life we’re cooking.

Cooking? Like recipes, we think it’s written out—
All that we need to do, to see, to feel. 
But what, when all is done, can we control?
The universe is laughing—here’s the deal:

Take life for what it offers, question not
The bumps and jolts that come along your way.
The dance goes on, we step and skip and trot.
Enough, enough! we gasp. Another day.

Chance meetings, yes, and yet they are the sum
Of all our yearnings, all the times to come.

Sayel, 9, wanted a surprise poem, meaning I got to choose the topic. So I wrote about

Surprises

Balloons that go pop!
Dogs that poop on your yard.
New shoes with sparkles.
A pretty birthday card.

Every day is new!
Isn’t that fine?
Pop up some popcorn—
And look! There’s a
Woodpecker eating
Bugs 
In
A tree—
Right there!

Islah, sister to Sayel, asked for cats. She’s 4.

Cats

I like black cats
But ginger is nice.
Stripes or splotches, too.

Some cats look like tigers,
And all cats like
A good purr and a nap.

Do they come when you call?
Of course not! They’re cats!

I have thought about publishing a poll, asking readers whether I share too many poems, or too few, or just the right number. But in the end that doesn’t matter. The poems come. I share them. That is the essence of Becoming.

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Bus discomfort

Coming back home from Lents on the bus, I watched as the driver started to slow for a yellow light, then gunned through the intersection on the red.

At the next stop, she picked up two obstreperous men, who were immediately in each other’s faces. They were standing right in front of me, exchanging threats and curses.

“You, the guy in the hat. Off the bus. Now!” The driver wasn’t having any of their drama. The man in the ball cap, who was probably a little drunk, stumbled off the bus, gesturing furiously and obscenely at it as it pulled away.

The driver asked if I was okay. I asked her if she was, but she brushed me off. “I don’t go there,” she said.

It’s unusual for me to feel uncomfortable on the bus, but I did feel uncomfortable on this bus for the rest of the ride home. I don’t know why. I didn’t feel threatened by the two men. Their focus was on each other. Maybe it was running the red light, maybe that the driver, who handled the altercation with such aplomb, was unwilling to admit that she might be rattled.

I was glad to finally get home.

Over and out

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That’s everything that fits for this week.

Love, Fran

—30—

Mother

Maybe I am three or four years old. Toddling about the neighborhood in International Falls, I see small yellow flowers in a vacant lot. “What are those?” I ask my mother, and she says they are buttercups. More than other mothers, my mom always knew the names of all the flowers and all the trees.

In those early days of my life, I was Mom’s little Francie, whom she loved, who loved her back, and was proud of her, and she was proud of me. As I grew, I loved her and helped her and dismissed her and misunderstood her, and distressed her and discouraged her, and loved her. And was proud of her.

I was so proud of her, she who overcame so much and accomplished so much. She grew up homeless and in an orphanage. She served as a nurse in England during WWII. After a divorce, she raised four children by herself in an era when there was little support. She and a group of seniors hiked around Mount Hood when she was in her 70s.

I’ve written more extensively about her in a posting called Wilbur and Denver. Wilbur is her maiden name.

Pearl Augusta Wilbur Pollak died at the end of May, this month, in 2011, 15 years ago. She was 97. I miss her.

Mother’s Day is tomorrow. Remember your mother. Wear a red rose if she is living and a white rose if she has passed. Or honor all mothers with pink.

You’re gonna die . . .

I thoroughly enjoyed Liz Scott’s You’re Going to Die But Not Me! I wrote a breezy review of it at Oregon ArtsWatch in which I tried to capture the fey nature of her work.

Scott, a Portland psychologist, wrote this book as a way of dealing with her increasing awareness of mortality (she’s 79). Turns out there’s a lot to say about death. As I said in the review, Scott takes a big bite out of many deathly topics :

She covers just about everything related to death and dying. How to dispose of a body. Near death experiences. What religions say about death. Whether Tarot and psychics can help. Whether her dog, Billy, can help. Quizzes and forms to elucidate one’s feeling about mortality. Books to read. An interview with a life insurance agent.

Why not poke fun at death? We’re all gonna die. We might as well exit laughing.

. . . The day after I turned in the review, I found a mural with the message “I will never die” on a building near Southeast Ninth and Stark in Portland.

Quintet

I often feature a triad, a series of three words, related by sound or sight. This week, my quiver grew to five words: a quintet.

• Rift

• Drift

• Grift

• Thrift

• Shift

Rift

A rift is caused by something cracking and splitting. The connotation is of a major rending, like an earthquake or an unraveling personal relationship. As it deepens, the rift becomes a chasm.

Rift is a heartbreak word. Something precious is torn, rent, cloven. The shards may never be reconciled.

Rifts in my life have come from a divorce, a disease, and dismay over instances I’ve observed of unconscious racism.

Drift

Often, after the rift, comes the drift—unmoored, aimless, sliding. These days, we often find ourselves riven, the driftwood of society. Lacking communication, coordination, human embraces, we drift until we wash up . . . somewhere. We can only hope that it will be the sandy beach of recovery and not the jagged rocks of despair.

Grift

Grifters are scammers. It used to be that petty swindling had a romantic, folkloric tinge. Robin Hood is easy to love. But these days, grift most conspicuously attaches to the very wealthy, who are not lovable people. They take from the poor and give to the rich. They say their wealth creates jobs and lifts all ships. The problem is, the ships of so many of us are mired in silt and mud. The river of money that could provide for all our needs has been diverted into elite channels for the yachts of the ultra rich.

Thrift

What a comfort it is to move to a word with positive connotations! Thrift can descend into miserliness, but I prefer to think of it as careful stewardship. Conserving resources, conserving our souls. I shop thrift stores for just about anything—clothing, housewares, even fabric and yarn. I have found the smoothest, most comfortable cotton sheets at Value Village, ones I never would have been able to afford new. But beyond the great deals, thriftiness is a soul practice. Cut back, conserve, recycle, reuse.

Shift

Shift is a powerful word. When we shift anything—position, perspective—we gain new insight. We can start over. Sometimes the shift is a centimeter, sometimes a furlong.

A shift is a magical act. It reveals new pathways, new outlets, new ways of living. Joyous, we are enchanted and enriched. Shift often.

Coffee and pens

At Coava Coffee on Hawthorne, a perfect cortado and the writing tools I carry with me. Two fountain pens, one using a cartridge and the other filled with ink from a bottle. My mother’s Parker ballpoint. What’s left of a well-loved Blackwing Pearl pencil. Blackwings never smudge.

The Golden Shovel

This week, I encountered the Golden Shovel, a new, interesting form for writing poetry. I found it in One Last Word, a book of poetry by Nikki Grimes that uses the work of Harlem Renaissance poets as bases for new poems. Each poem in her volume uses the Golden Shovel technique, honoring a favorite poet by using that poet’s words to write a new poem.

Here’s how it works: Choose a line from a favorite poem, or even the whole poem. Line up the words, one by one, along the right margin of the page. Then write a fresh poem using those words to end each line.

The Golden Shovel form was created by Terrance Hayes, whose 2011 poem “The Golden Shovel” uses the technique to honor “We Real Cool,” a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks that begins with this epigram:

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

The poems in Grimes’s collection, some of which use an entire poem’s worth of words, are rich and rewarding, surprising, heartfelt, beautiful. She notes:

This is a very challenging way to create a poem, especially in terms of coming up with something that makes sense, and I love it for that very reason! In this form, the poet is bound by the words of the original poem, but the possibilities for creating something entirely new are exciting.

In my first attempt with the Golden Shovel method I chose “No worse, there is none,” the title and first line of a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins. First, I lined up the words to the right:

no

worse

there

is

none

Then I wrote these poems.

Grudge

You asked forgiveness, I said no,
The worm in the bud is worse. 
I never should have brought us there.
If all there is is all there  is.
Forgiveness, ha! You know there is none.

Winter fishing

Ice fishing—the cold, the wind, no
Other weather, no sudden thaw or worse.
I crave the solitude, the stillness that’s there.
Where the fish swim in darkness, where transformation is
Fully enhanced, where I love, where I perish, breathing in none.

Darkness

No kindness, no judgment, no love, no
Comfort, imagine what's worse.  
Of all our options, the humanity there
Comes with our passion. Our passion is
Crisp-burnt, our days march out, we are left with none.

Midnight poem

In this poem, the first line echoes Hopkins.

Middle of the night

No sleep, there is none.
Try not to watch the clock.
Resting comfortably, as they say,
Just not crossing to dreams.

Clear the mind, soften the muscles.
Breath and heartbeat, fine and smooth.
The room is dark, the blanket luscious.
No sleep. 

Okay, open a book, read for hours.
It used to be reading put me to sleep.
Often it does, just not in the middle of the night.

Three a.m. and I finally succumb,
Dreams find me now, someone screeches—
"Where is the dog?" Hey, I don’t know.
I smile in my dream. I’m home now.

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Baby quilt

I’ve thought about selling quilts that I’ve designed and pieced by hand, but I don’t have the heart or the time. So instead, I give them away, pretty much to anyone who asks for one.

I made this baby quilt for a pregnant Somali woman who was working at Rose Schnitzer Manor while I was living there. But by the time I finished it, she had left RSM and I lost contact with her.

So this little quilt sat in a cupboard without a baby for a few years, until a fellow parishioner had a baby shower at my church. I gave it to her.

The three sheep (one black!) and one lamb are paper-pieced. I designed everything else myself and, as usual, pieced it by hand. Nancy Stovall machine quilted it.

Wrap up

Today’s posting is pretty heavy on the poetry. Happens. Next week’s offering will be different. I have photos . . .

Thanks to all my subscribers, paid and free. I write for you.

An annual subscription to Becoming remains $50, a relative bargain when other Substacks are charging $70 or $80 or more.

As an alternative, you could buy me a metaphorical coffee. Here’s the tip jar link at PayPal, where you can donate in increments of $5.

Love to all,
Fran

—30—

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May goals

I still don’t why I keep doing this, but last December, as in past year, I cobbled together a list of “goals” for each month of 2026. Now it’s May, and my goal for this month is a cryptic one . . . “hobbies, hazards, handholds and habits.” I don’t know how or where I came up with this particular conjunction. But here goes trying to make sense of it.

Hobbies: I’m still cooking, just not as much. Still quilting, just not as much. Watching a little baseball—is that a hobby? Or maybe a just a pastime or an addiction.

Do you have a hobby? Fly-tying counts. Playing video games doesn’t. Not even Candy Crush. I hope you do something creative, like needlepoint, playing the piccolo, painting pine cones. I think daydreaming should count as a hobby if you are serious about it.

My husband, Robert, has a hobby, teaching himself languages. He knows Spanish, German, Turkish, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish, all very well. The past few years he was immersed in Russian. Most recently, he has taken up Arabic, the most challenging of them all. He’s fluent in English, too.

Hazards: Every month, not just May, has hazards. Every moment has them. But . . . I’ve found that the less on the lookout I am for hazards and pitfalls, the less they manifest. Except for falls. There’re a hazard I always try to avoid.

Whether you are actively on the lookout for hazards or not, caution is always good. Remember to buckle up; wear a veil and gloves when tending bees; keep the potholders off the stovetop. And no smoking in bed!

Handholds: Handholds are useful for avoiding falls. I’m always seeking places to put my hands as I sit down and get up, as my legs don’t have the power to raise me.

In a broad metaphorical sense, handholds are those ideas and signposts that help us navigate life. For some, the handhold is faith in a higher power. For others, it’s bourbon. Without a bear claw to hold hands with, I don’t know how my life would go.

The fourth “h” that was included in May goals is “habits.” That is a bigger topic. Let’s tackle it next week.

A sonnet about falling

I am not bereft, ah, no, I am replete,
Brimming with good feeling, loving all
The earth can offer, yes, it’s all complete.
All the world loves me—until I fall.

My feet get in the way, they trip me up.
Catching my toe on stone, I fall through air.
My hands, not nimble, fail to grasp a cup,
Which smashes in the sink, shards everywhere.

If I could have one thing it would be—nothing
That I don’t already have within my grasp.
These minor setbacks, really, they are no thing,
What matters more is how I love the rest.

Small slings and arrows, let them fall away,
For love redeems me, fills my every day.

New neighborhood

I thought I was getting tired of my neighborhood. I felt I’d visited and revisited all its glories—sidewalks, plants, trees, houses, gardens. I needed a change of perspective.

So now, as I move through it, I make myself look with new eyes. I challenge myself to notice new things.

My unclouded eyes notice rooflines, utility poles, trees I’ve never seen before, houses I’ve passed by dozens of times without really seeing them.

My neighborhood is not the same old, same old after all!

A change of perspective, a decision to look at things differently, and the world is new.

Hold the camera

I am trying another practice, too: Being receptive to what’s around me without consciously trying to hold on to every impression. More experiencing, less photography or writing.

In her Substack Smudge!, Shelley Lieber writes about how when she and her husband visited the Portland Rose Garden, with its 10,000-plus varieties of roses, many of them in bloom, he took a single photo. Just one! He is a professional photographer, and one shot, of a single bud, was all he needed.

I am trying this discipline, resolving not to whip out the phone as often to capture a moment or an image. Instead, letting the moment and the impression live in me.

Colors

This spring, I’m noticing purple. Deep purple hellebores, almost black. Hyacinths, lilacs, violas and pansies, some irises and tulips.

Poet Ellen Goldberg’s garden in Southeast Portland includes dark purple peonies (top photo) and purple tulips.

Below are two purple plants that are often confused. In the foreground, purple sage, or salvia. The other plant is lavender. At the very bottom, the small white flowers with purple spots on them are Nemophila menziesii var. atomaria, commonly called baby blue eyes. (Not to be confused with the crooner known as Ol’ Blue Eyes.)

Reading to children

After I wrote about poetry last week, a reader asked me what poems he could read to his 6-year-old grandson. Here are some suggestions.

If you can find it, The Golden Treasury of Poetry has hundreds of great poems, including “The Highwayman.” Louis Untermeyer, the compiler and editor, wrote about the poem:

The Highwayman is probably the most popular story-poem of the last half-century. Written in the traditional, romantic manner, it is a headlong heroic tale which can never lose its appeal.

The headlong nature of the poem is well captured by Joan Walsh Anglund’s illustration.

The Golden Treasury dates to 1959. I wore out the copy that I had and loved as a child and teen, but was able to find a used copy in the 1980s. I wish this timeless collection of poems were still available.

I also remember a smaller volume, The Golden Book of Poetry, with poems like “The Raggedy Man,” by James Whitcomb Riley and “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” by Edward Lear. These books from my childhood are available at the library.

In a more recent compendium, A Child’s Introduction to Poetry, Michael Driscoll includes poems that are challenging for children: sonnets by Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example, and Night Mail by W.H. Auden. Poets who did not appear in my old favorite books include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz, Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. This book includes a CD.

The Multnomah County Library research staff suggested several other poetry collections. I haven’t reviewed them.

• Recognize! An Anthology Honoring and Amplifying Black Life, edited by Wade and Cheryl Willis Hudson

• The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog and Other How-to Poems, compiled by Paul Bryan Janeczko

• The Poetry of Us: More Than 200 Poems that Celebrate the People, Places, and Passions of the United States. Poets include Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman and Gwendolyn Brooks. Compiled by J. Patrick Lewis, a former U.S. Children's Poet Laureate

• The Mistakes that Made Us: Confessions from Twenty Poets (about the mistakes of their youth). Compiled by Irene Latham

• She’ll Be the Sky: Poems by Women and Girls. Classic and modern poems assembled by Ella Risbridger

• No Voice Too Small: Fourteen Young Americans Making History. Edited by Lindsay H. Metcalf, Keila V. Dawson and Jeanette Bradley

• I Remember: Poems and Pictures of Heritage, compiled by Lee Bennett Hopkins

• Thanku: Poems of Gratitude, edited by Miranda Paul

I further recommend How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, a gentle guide by Ken Ludwig.

Single voices

There are many wonderful books of poems for children with a single author. Shel Silverstein comes to mind, and Dr. Seuss, each of whose books is one long poem. I especially like A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, by Nancy Willard, with illustrations by the esteemed husband-and-wife team of Alice and Martin Provensen. And, of course, the classic A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Poems to share

Some other poems to share with children:

• “Casey at the Bat,” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer

• “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Lewis Carroll

• “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” Robert Browning.

• “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost.

And there are many, so many more. You might note your favorites in the comments.

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Intense bus therapy

As my readers know, I ride the bus everywhere, often just for fun. I’ve gotten very familiar with bus routes, especially on the east side of the Willamette River.

Sometimes, I might travel a complex route on multiple buses, as well as trains and streetcars, without having any real plan. Here’s a recent trip that went that way:

I’m on my way to Parkrose Middle School around 10 am when I get a call from the school saying the student I mentor there has gone home sick. It takes about 50 minutes to get to PMS, and I am already more than halfway there, on the 15/Belmont bus approaching Northeast 102nd and Glisan.

Heavenly Donuts is at that intersection. I make an instant decision to get off the bus and buy a doughnut. I am so tempted!

The universe, however, quells my temptation when I look up to see a 15 bus going back downtown. Besides, it’s starting to rain, so I ditch the idea of the doughnut and get on the bus.

What next?

My morning has opened up; where should I go? Maybe I can stay on the 15 all the way to the stop just before the river. From there I could visit Scrap, a store that sells recycled arts and crafts materials, where I volunteer.

But as the bus approaches Belmont and César Chávez Boulevard, I make a quick decision to get off there. My new plan is to take the 75 bus north to the Sullivan’s Gulch Fred Meyer. I need a new wallet.

On to Freddie’s

I ride the 75 line up César Chávez to Sandy Boulevard in Northeast Portland, where I get off and hail the 12/Sandy bus for a brief trip to 28th Avenue.

Oops! I miscalculated. The store Fred Meyer calls Hollywood West is usually accessed from Broadway, not Sandy. I’ll need to cross Sullivan’s Gulch on my own power to get there.

Sullivan’s Gulch really is a gulch, a depression where Union Pacific laid its east-west tracks through Portland in 1882. In the 1930s, it was famous as the site of Portland’s Hooverville, an encampment of homeless, mostly men. It later accommodated the I-84 freeway and TriMet’s MAX light rail.

I pass over Sullivan’s Gulch on a bridge spanning the freeway and train tracks, rolling my wheelchair about six blocks north to reach the store.

Train and streetcar

New wallet in hand, I exit to Northeast Broadway, where I figure I’ll take the next bus that comes along. That turns out to be the 77/Broadway/Halsey. I board it, but I want to go downtown, and the 77 goes to Northwest Portland, crossing the Steel Bridge and continuing into the Pearl District.

So I get off the 77 bus at MLK Jr. Boulevard, still on the east side of the river, near the Oregon Convention Center. I stop in at the Burgerville there for a lettuce-wrapped cheeseburger. Delicious!

Next, I figure I’ll catch a streetcar going south. What I don’t know is that the streetcar doesn’t run as far north on MLK as where I am at the Convention Center.

I ask a friendly Trimet worker at the Convention Center MAX light-rail stop about the streetcar. His solution: board the train that’s just pulling in, ride one stop to Lloyd Center, and take the streetcar from there. I do this, and discover that the streetcar turns onto MLK at Oregon Street, which is only a few blocks south of the Convention Center. I could easily have just rolled down a few blocks to catch it.

I ride the streetcar south to Southeast Stark Street, exiting to visit Push X Pull Coffee at 9th and Stark. There I indulge in a wonderful double espresso with a side of mineral water. I pull out my laptop and get in some quality writing.

At last, it’s time to head home. I travel up Stark to 11th, where I board the 70/Milwaukie bus for a short hop to Hawthorne, ending up in front of another Burgerville. From there, I catch 14/Hawthorne bus home.

Bottom line

This day’s adventure involved seven buses, a MAX train and the Portland streetcar. Most of the lines I rode have frequent service, so I never had to wait very long.

During my time out riding the bus and trains and streetcar, I faced many decision forks. Mostly, where I went next was the whim of the moment.

TriMet drivers sometimes ask me, as I board, where I’m headed. Often I just don’t know.

Who would have thought that simply riding the bus could be so much fun?

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Ice out

Maybe my local supermarket should consider not writing the word “ICE” in all caps.

It might be okay

You know how on TV shows they always comfort victims of trauma by saying, “It’s all right” or “It’s okay” when it so patently is not all right or okay? Here’s another example, found in a restroom

A poem about sleep

Rested

Old folks and sleep are often at odds.
Lumpy mattress? Old pillows? Or just
Trying to nod off and not quite being there,
There in the secret special womb of your heart.
Sleep come to me, don’t be shy—
Carry me away, just for the night, just till the dawn.

I may have dreams. Sometime I do not.
Last night a woman in red. Stop! I begged her,
But she flew away. 
Tonight’s a new night, I may nap today.
Take sleep when it comes. It will come. 
Sometime, it will come. Soon, soon.

Good night.

Thanks for reading

Inflation, as you may have noticed, is galloping, but I’m holding the yearly subscription to Becoming to $50. It’s the least Substack will let me charge. I am grateful for all the loyal readers who pay that each year, and the others who send in $5 a month. A few founding members grace me with a larger figure, and on them I heap unceasing praise.

On PayPal, you can tip me in $5 increments.

However you do it, I hope you will keep reading.

Till next week,

—Fran

—30—

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Fawx fixes me

I was having a wretched day. My leg hurt so bad I couldn’t stand on it, and the pain medication was making me sick. I wanted coffee but couldn’t make it at home because I wasn’t able to stand long enough on my damaged leg. The closest local coffee shop was so full there was no place to write. Good for them. Bad for me.

I had the idea to try another coffee shop. Oh, wait, it closed at 4. It was now 4:25. About the time I remembered another shop, the bus to take me there slid right past on Hawthorne Boulevard. I was stranded at the bus stop in my power chair, feeling defeated.

With the next bus some time off, I struck up a conversation with a man who was selling Street Roots, a paper produced by street people and sold by street people, in front of Safewayt. I gave him $5 for the $1 paper but told him I was too dispirited to consider reading it. He kept the paper but gave me a couple of stickers, and some love.

He told me his name is Fawx. It’s Irish and means “kind.” Fawx came to the U.S. as a teen, then joined the military to gain citizenship. He’s missing several teeth, some of them lost because he was a fighter for a time and took blows to the face.

Fawx (pronounced “Fooks”) impressed me with his great spirit. He’s full of vigor and life. Talking to him, even briefly, lifted my own spirits.

I went back to the first coffee shop, now less crowded, and found a place to write.

Thank you, Fawx. I feel better now.

Time for poetry

April is poetry month. The New York Times ran a “poetry challenge” this past week—encouraging readers to memorize part of a poem every day. They made quite a production of it, feeding the readers a stanza a day of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One,” which they refer to as “a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.”

The daily readings, accompanied by essays, were read by the likes of Matthew McConaughey, Ada Limón, Ken Burns and Tracy K. Smith.

This is a swell idea. I would be great if we all memorized more poetry.

We should remember poets. We should read poems to our grandchildren. We could read poems to strangers on the bus.

From my archives

In December 2022, I wrote a long Substack entry about memorizing poetry. I had been asking friends and acquaintances if they had to memorize poetry for school. Surprisingly few of them said yes.

Over the years, especially in my teens, I’ve memorized a lot of poetry on my own. I tend to go for the stuff that rhymes—it’s easier to remember. But mostly I just memorize what I like. One quotation that was especially fun to memorize is from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, 
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, . . .

Many years later, in a book called How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, by Ken Ludwig, I saw the same passage. But it was slightly different; the phrase is “luscious woodbine,” not “lush woodbine.”

I checked it out and found that my version had been edited by a well-meaning scholar in the compleat Shakespeare I had been referencing since college. How audacious, to mess with the Bard! I gave that book away.

I especially delight in these words from later in the same monologue, spoken by Oberon, king of the fairies:

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in. . . .

First lines and middle lines

This list of poetic quotations includes titles from the list I published in 2022. I considered making a new list, but I like the old one so much I will just share it again, with only a few additions.

Do you know any of these poems, these lines from the beginning or the middle?

A few of them even start with April.

• April is the cruellest month

• Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

• Oh, to be in England now that April’s there

• The world is too much with us

• I saw this morning morning’s minion

• The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees

• Lives there a man with soul so dead

• When that I was and a little tiny boy

• A damsel with a dulcimer

• The little lame balloon man

• I celebrate myself

• I’m nobody, who are you?

• Once upon a midnight dreary

• The woods are lovely, dark and deep

• I must go down to the sea again

• There is no joy in Mudville

• The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts

• He hath put down the mighty from their seats

• ’Twas brillig

• Between the dark and the daylight

• A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon

• Death, be not proud

• Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The poetry of song

These lines tug at you with cords—or chords—of remembrance.

• April in Paris

• You must remember this

• My life goes on in endless song

• Lift ev’ry voice and sing

• One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing

• Only you beneath the moon and under the sun (oh, that rhythm!)

• O beautiful for spacious skies

• Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine

• Love me tender

• West Virginia, Mountain Mama

• Mounds and mounds of angel hair

• Scarlet billows start to spread

• I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

• Don’t change a hair for me

• This’ll be the day that I die

• I’m impressed with my attorney Bernie

• Just before the battle, Mother, I am thinking most of you

• I see trees of green, red roses too

• It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

• Make new friends, but keep the old

• Ne me quitte pas

• Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble

• I love Paris in the springtime

Poetry is everywhere. It reaches for us every day. Take it where you can get it—in the dust of old books, the tinny sound of store speakers, or the crisp pixels of your trusty tablet. Encounter poetry. Read a poem. Smile. And remember.

Even if you don’t memorize, you remember.

Poetry in photos

How to visually capture a poem? Here are a few tries:

Poetry of people

We are all connected, even when we are moving parallel to one another.

Poetry of light

Sun flares with pretty blossoms. Spring courses through our veins.

Poetry of dreams

A puddle’s reflection could be an entrance to a fairy world.

A final note

“Once by the Pacific,” a powerful poem by Robert Frost, contains these lines that speak to today’s political climate:

You could not tell, and yet it seemed as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.

I typed those lines from memory before I double-checked them at Robertfrost.org. Just putting my fingers on the words gave me a power thrill, making me smile in memory and appreciation. Thank you, Robert Frost. And William Shakespeare. And W.H. Auden. All the poets. All their insight, their passion, their words.

How bereft we would be without them!

Make way for greatness

Great poets are Olympians.
I stand on the strand admiring them,
Aloft on their cloudy mountain,
Imagining daffodils and hell.

Crossing to Brooklyn on a ferry,
Clashing on Crimean soil,
Stopping by woods on a quiet evening,
Counting the ships of the Greeks . . .

Oh, to be in that number,
To count with the meter of immortality.
I kiss the hems of their garments
And remember their words, forever.

Public words

Sometimes in my travels in the neighborhood, I find a poem posted in someone’s front yard. In a recent Substack post, “In the Wild,” Drew Myron of Push Pull Carry writes about finding poems in public places—buses and laundromats among them. A poem by Myron is included in the Indian Creek Poetry Walk in Hood River, on display through September.

More from Hood River

Novelist Eileen Garvin lives in Hood River, and her newest novel, Bumblebee Season, is set in that town, the surrounding orchards, and Mount Hood National Forest. Bumblebee Season continues the narrative of her popular 2022 book, The Music of Bees, but you can read it as a stand-alone work.

Jake Stevenson, a paraplegic beekeeper, returns in this new book, set five years after The Music of Bees. His partners in the business are off-stage, making room for two new characters. One is a deliciously drawn neurodiverse biologist who studies bumblebees; the other a skinny 14-year-boy who has traveled to Hood River alone from Mexico, sent by his mother to escape being “recruited” by the local cartel. Their stories braid together in rich contours and are bound in a satisfying conclusion. This book is heartfelt but not sentimental, a great, comfortable read from a writer who uses language as poetry.

Read more about Bumblebee Season in my review at Oregon ArtsWatch.

Homesteader

Also at Oregon ArtsWatch, find my review of A Homesteader’s Portfolio by Alice Day Pratt. This astonishing memoir recounts how a 38-year-old single woman leaves Manhattan to plop herself down on a barren plot in Harney County Oregon in 1912, ready to farm 320 acres for five years so she can claim the land as a homestead. In the Oregon outback, it’s just Alice, her dog, 90 baby chicks she’ll raise to sell eggs, and a lot of grit. Oh, and she’s a great writer.

The publisher, Oregon State University Press, has reissued the book with an introduction by Molly Gloss.

Till next time

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I’ll be back next Saturday with something new. Don’t know yet what I’ll write, but I’ll bet it will be . . . Different. Divergent. Unusual. Surprising . . . Becoming!

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Thanks to Eliot

The title of this posting contains the first words of T.S. Eliot’s great poem, “The Wasteland.”

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

The Poetry Foundation uses the British spelling of “cruellest,” with 2 l’s.

However you spell them or read them or write them, a poem is always about more than its words. Poetry transcends language. Poetry is emotion.

How do I feel?

I never used to ask this question of myself. In my earlier life, it was all about thinking, not about feeling. But now I do ask myself how I am feeling, especially in my morning writing exercise. And the answer usually surprises me.

Pause for just a moment. How do you feel?

Today, I feel crunchy and chewy, taking naps and trying to shake this rhinovirus, now settled into my chest for the fourth week. I feel it is time to get a grip.

Woman up

Step up to the plate, bat left today
Keep your eye on the ball, hear the fans
Cheering for you, the important one.
Everyone strikes out, do not mope.

Step up to life, flick the rain out of your eyes
Concentrate on the next step, beyond that
Possibilities range, forks and twists.
You follow, you lead, you mess up.

Ten steps forward, a dozen back,
But who’s counting? Why keep track?
The universe knows where you’re headed—
Or maybe, absurdly, it doesn’t. 

Three words

Today’s triad features of simple, earthy words that play off one another in dance of letters and meaning. How close they are in spelling and pronunciation!

• Spit

• Split

• Spilt

Spit

Ah, the expectorant word. The noun is “spittle,” the verb “spit.” I think it’s so gross that folks, mostly men, spit their phlegm on the sidewalk. In her children’s book Underwild: River of Spirits, Portland writer Shana Targosz gives vent to her disgust at this practice. In a scene that takes place in the land of the dead and the undead, a clutch of piratical sailors have captured the heroine and her friend. These sailors, who are always spitting on the deck, are undone by all their slippery excretions when their ship hits choppy seas. They slide and tumble in comic pratfalls, and the girls are able to escape.

I’m working on a review of Underwild, which is a swell book. I’ll let you know when it’s published.

The noun “spit” might refer to a little finger of land that sticks into the ocean. It’s also the stick you stick a piece of meat on to roast it.

Split

“Split” as a noun has many meanings: a chasm caused by splitting; a splinter; a rift, as in a political party; a divergence of ideas; something to weave a basket out of; the gymnastics move (ouch!); the blackjack card game maneuver; the division of a financial stock; a half-bottle of wine. And so on. . . . I almost forgot banana split.

As a verb, you can split your sides laughing, split the soil with a plow, split the difference, split your ticket when voting. And while we’re at it, let’s find an infinitive to split.

Spilt

This one’s easy. It only has the one meaning, a version of the past tense of “spill,”which is more commonly “spilled.” We’ve all heard of spilt milk.

Spilled or spilt? Split the difference. It doesn’t matter worth spit.

Drizzly weather in Oregon is sometimes referred to as “spitting.”

Spits and sprinkles

Rain in Oregon
Is seldom heavy
More like steady
For several months.

Then the weather
Takes a breather
Summer’s grass turns
Brown and sere.

Nothing’s perfect,
Not even Oregon weather.
Gray one day
And green the next.

Our little tree

When our old weeping birch succumbed to birch borers a few years ago, the City of Portland helped us plant two new trees. One of them is this little redbud, with its cheery springtime color.

Spring cleaning, life cleaning

Like lots of people, I became fascinated by the idea of feng shui back in the 1980s, when this concept was being popularized over here. Feng shui is a Chinese philosophy that considers how objects, buildings, or worlds are oriented in space in the most harmonious way.

I remember a news story from that time about a skyscraper in an Asian city that was reviled because it had a sharp edge that pointed knifelike toward other buildings. Nobody wanted to work in the offices that faced that knife point.

Though I’m no expert on feng shui, I am still highly attentive to energy flow in a space like a home. I’ve never chosen to use water features or mirrors, yet I find myself making small adjustments.

For instance, if a knife on the counter is pointing outward, toward me, I’ll turn it to point away. Even amid the clutter of books, papers and fabric in my home, surfaces are cleared and plenty of space is reserved to let energy flow freely.

April clean

Most people seem to feel that clearing clutter is a useful April endeavor. When I came up with a list of monthly goals for the year, “Spring cleaning, life cleaning” was the subject I chose for April.

So I’m going to clean out and clear out, at my own pace. Not through stricture but with self-compassion.

Be mindful in cleaning, take joy in straightening, laugh with the dust bunnies and dance with your broom.

A children’s book

The drawing above is from Mystery of the Hidden Cat, by Brent Locke. It is the first chapter book I remember reading. I must have been around 8; it was published in 1957 and I was born at the beginning of 1950.

I recently borrowed this book through interlibrary loan. It came from a tiny library in Georgia, the Sparta-Hancock Library, part of the Azalea Regional Library System (which until 2020 was known as the Uncle Remus RLS). Meghan Fleming, the collections manager for the library system, told me that Sparta-Hancock represented a small rural community and that among its approximately 20,000 books were many older volumes like Hidden Cat.

I remember the easy spookiness of the story, three girls finding hidden rooms and strange staircases in a crumbling mansion incongruously situated in a tiny town in Texas. They are looking for a “little treasure” to try to save the house from foreclosure.

The three girls have distinct personalities and share an understanding of how to manipulate the grown-ups. Jane, the most studious of the trio, at one point drops the word “intrinsically” into the conversation, which the others comment on.

The puzzle of the old house is not simple or easy to decipher. Part of the solution is a map that includes South Vietnam, which one girl recognizes had only changed its name (from French Indochina) a few years earlier. A few years after I read this book, I recalled that scene when the Vietnam conflict was all over the news.

I am happy to say that I had as much fun reading this book at age 76 as I did in the first grade.

The story also involves an overgrown forest of four o’clocks, a plant that was new to me. Yes, four o’clocks, which bloom in the evening and overnight, do grow in Western Oregon, according to the Portland Nursery. Every time I hear of four o’clocks, I remember Mystery of the Hidden Cat.

And oh, yes, there are cats in this book, but not in a cutesy way. It’s just a good read.

Nap poem

Four o’clock is a good nap time.

Indolent

Some folks never nap in the day,
Keeping the shut-eye for dark hours.
Some of us sleep when we meditate,
Hoping the others won’t notice.

Take sleep when it’s offered,
Dozing is prayer in its way.
A vision, a daydream, you startle awake.
Once more keeping Morpheus at bay.

Fair fallen

I’ve fallen thrice in the last few weeks. This is unusual; my last fall was nearly 2 years ago. In all three cases, I fell backward in the kitchen while trying to do a task requiring both hands.

Usually my balance allows me to handle two-handed chores, especially if there is a counter or wall nearby to rest a hip against. But lately, something’s gone wacky with my inner gyroscope. I can’t straighten as easily as I used to—sometimes I tip over backward.

It’s an MS thing.

So now, I compensate.

For example, I just used my teeth to turn on my wireless keyboard while standing up. I held the keyboard one hand and grabbed my desk with the other while pushing up on the little switch on the lefthand side with my bottom teeth. It worked.

Daily, I crouch forward when I peel an onion on the counter or wash dishes in the sink. (I don’t have an electric dishwasher, don’t want one, end of discussion.) Sometimes I lean my forearms on edge of the sink while washing out a glass or scrubbing the silverware.

Two-handed tasks

In moving about the house, I mostly use the walker, but when I need to hang clothes in a closet or do some other two-handed task, I have places where I can grab for balance. Like the sturdy wire rack that holds pans and utensils next to the stove. Or a shelf in a bookcase where I’ve pushed the books back so I can set my hand there. I lever myself out of bed or off the sofa or a chair with the aid of various handholds.

I make the disability work for me.

But once in a while, I knock something off the counter. Or I fall.

It’s an MS thing.

Paper towels

I use public restrooms a lot. This, too, is an MS thing.

Of course, you’re supposed to wash your hands after using the toilet. But drying them can be a challenge. I’ve come to appreciate electric blow driers because they are usually situated where I can reach them easily from my wheelchair. Like you, I hate the racket they make.

Paper towels are another matter.

Also not useful for me is the well-intentioned workaround for a nonfunctioning towel dispenser: putting a stack of paper towels on TOP of the dispenser. Dudes, I can’t reach those. I just have to dry my hands on my pants.

Check out

Locked grid

These two buildings, one older, one newer, have the same shaped windows, rectangles. The sun, peeking from behind the Moda Tower at the left, creates a reflection of the Willamette Building that you can see on the lower floors of the tower.

Over and out

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I hope you can come back next week. Every posting is different, sometimes even surprising. You just never know.

Love,
Fran

—30—

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