David Matthews

The weekend of the 22nd began with the customary Saturday morning run. I set out on a loop that takes me down to Hawthorne Bridge and past OMSI to pick up Springwater Corridor along the river. At Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge I cut up to Milwaukie and on home by way of Ladd’s Addition. My estimate of the distance is nine miles. Since Christmas I have used the Garmin GPS gadget Trani gave me to measure the exact distance on runs I previously estimated. Thus far I have been pleasantly surprised by the accuracy of my estimates. Rounding off the distance calculated by the GPS to the nearest quarter mile gives my estimate for each one measured thus far.

Alas, my efforts at precision on Saturday’s loop were thwarted when I hit a flooded area about halfway up the path through Oaks Bottom. The water presented no problem for two ducks happily paddling across the trail, but I saw no reason to slop through it, nor did three other runners who arrived there from the opposite direction at the same time I did.

Contrary to my nature I opted for the reasonable course, which is to say, I doubled back to Springwater Corridor, turning my nine-miler into something a tad shy of 10.5. It was a lovely morning, the sun shining, temperature in the low 40s when I left home, with the morning warming up noticeably by the time I headed through Ladd’s Addition and hit that character-building hill on Harrison between 20th and 30th.

This was my longest run since the marathon in November, and I was pleased with my splits. Cranking out the miles up to 15 or so is comparatively easy for me. Maintaining my focus so that I am running at a decent pace is the challenge. It is not about seeing how hard I can push myself, though that is a good thing to do from time to time. Rather, I have tendency when running alone, which is how I run most of the time, to fall back into a dawdling pace that goes beyond comfortable to something more near catatonic. Too often, without any intention to do so, just how it plays out, I slack off at a 10:00 – 10:15 minutes per mile pace when I can run a 9:20 – 9:30 pace fairly comfortably. Speaking in these terms is itself a bit of a blow to my foolish pride, but I can handle it. Way past are the days when I ran a weekly 15-miler with a couple of ultramarathoners who disdainfully considered eight-minute miles junk miles. For 2011 I will try to get my routine, comfortable pace on long runs down around nine minutes per mile, maybe think of them as recycle miles instead of junk miles. It is enough within the realm of possibility to merit taking a crack at it.

The remainder of the day fell into place rather nicely, through no plan or program, just doing whatever it is I do. After the multigrain, buttermilk-yogurt pancakes with real maple syrup for breakfast, I checked the film schedules at Hollywood, Laurelhurst, and NW Film Center. Two offerings at Hollywood caught my eye: Claude Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu, and Akira Kurosawa’s magnificent Kagemusha in a newly restored 35mm print. I passed on both, though not without hesitation, just not quite in a mood for either on that particular day. The morning I closed out with home office admin, making a batch of pots de crème, doing a load of laundry, and reading a bit on Heraclitus from Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, and a bit of the Henning Mankell novella The Pyramid.

In the afternoon I strolled up to Hawthorne and 37th Avenue, stepped into Powell’s for a quick look around, then walked west on Hawthorne, thinking I would make my way to Ladd’s Addition and stop at Palio for a latte. The heart of the Hawthorne district made for a lively scene on a sunny afternoon, a mix of young couples with infants in strollers, kids hanging out to see and be seen, aging hipsters, the chic and the shabby, small-business merchants and sidewalk vendors and musicians set up on street corners playing for tips.

Palio is a dessert and espresso place that bills itself as a little bit of Europe in the center of Ladd’s Addition. I frequented the establishment on occasion when I first came to Portland at the end of the twentieth century and lived nearby. Several years have passed since last I was there, and it seems to have become quite the happening place to be. Every table was occupied at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon. C’est la vie. Good for Palio, if not so good for me at that particular moment.

Undaunted by this minor setback, I continued on to Division, then back east along a stretch that is almost quintessentially Portlandish in its mix of fashionable, newer establishments and relics of other eras that are  maybe a little shabby and not all that hip except possibly after a retro fashion. Pizzicato now occupies the space at Division and 21st that was previously the short-lived home to a Starbucks whose presence was not welcomed with open arms by a neighborhood already graced by a number of locally owned coffee shops, not least among them Palio, Red and Black, an anarchist café just up the street a block, and K & F Clinton Street Coffee House. Red and Black subsequently moved down to SE 12th and Oak, and the space on 22nd and Division is now Bar Avignon, a pleasant spot for a glass of wine and good conversation. Pok Pok and Lauro Kitchen are thriving restaurants a hop, skip, and jump from the venerable barber shop at 24th, the Reel ‘m Inn tavern, Clay’s Smokehouse Grill up near 30th, and just beyond Clay’s a little second-hand store whose name I do not recall. Somewhere between Bar Avignon and Clay’s, I experienced an aha! moment and thought that Pix Patisserie on 34th would be an excellent place to pause in my wanderings for a latte and a bit of journal writing.

Once upon a lifetime I regularly engaged in minor wanderings about the city, bound for no destination in particular, but not altogether aimless either. My excursions may lead to an enchanting moment along the way, an unanticipated meeting with a friend or acquaintance from another world, a rendezvous with the marvelous. More often nothing special happens, but even then there is about it something that satisfies and perhaps even nurtures that best part of who I am.

When I arrived back home, I put some time in at my desk, making notes for two essays I have in mind. The notes may or may not bear fruit. That almost does not matter. What matters is faith that if I keep at it sooner or later something will come of it. This is real life, going in to the office a bad dream. Perhaps someday I will wake from that dream.

That evening I enjoyed dinner at India Oven on Belmont across from the old fire station. The people there remember me even when I have not dined with them in quite some time. Restaurants bloom like flowers in spring only to pass from the scene like leaves falling in autumn. A restaurant or café that endures, one where they remember you and make you feel welcome, as if you are a friend come to dine with them, now that is a treasure.

Then came Sunday, overcast, not forbidding, but far from inviting. The aimlessness that served me well the day before birthed only doldrums. Maybe it was too much football in the afternoon that did me in. They were good games, and I rather enjoyed them, as two of the NFL’s most storied franchises, Green Bay and Pittsburgh, claimed their conference championships on the way to the Super Bowl. Yet there was afterward a gnawing sense that I could have put the time to better use. I am not convinced this is a good thing. It may be all too easy to fritter our lives away on frivolities, but the sense that one must always be putting the time to better use strikes me as counterproductive to living a good life, whatever exactly our notion of a good life for human being may entail.

It is not as if the day was altogether unproductive. There was grocery shopping, more home office admin, a load of laundry, the Sunday housecleaning. I read a little more Heraclitus and polished off the Mankell and made arrangements for trip to Seattle in April for a poetry reading at the Green Lake branch of the public library.

In the middle of the afternoon I yelled at a man. I walked downstairs to dump some old magazines into the recycle bin I had pulled out to the curb earlier for the Monday morning pickup. A forlorn-looking fellow, possibly homeless, was about to walk away after spilling some plastic containers onto the ground as he rummaged through the recycle bin. I shouted, “Hey, pick up the stuff you knocked out on the ground.” He yelled back, “Yes, master,” and picked up the containers and tossed them in the bin. I said, “Thanks.” He ignored me and shuffled away. If I had it to do over, I would have said, in a slightly different tone, “Hey, man, you mind picking up the stuff you knocked out on the ground?” However he might have responded to that, I think I would have felt better about the encounter.

It seems that life grows ever coarser. One morning recently a poorly dressed, older-looking fellow, maybe my age, boarded the MAX Yellow Line a stop after I did. He asked the woman seated behind me if she had any spare change. She handed him some coins. Then he asked what I was reading. I said, “Greek drama,” without specifying Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. He stared, said nothing, then turned to the young man seated at the front of the car, held out a box, and asked if he liked chocolate. The young man declined the offer, which irritated the fellow no end. He cursed and pulled some trash out of his pockets and threw it onto the floor and walked to the doors and got off at the next stop.

In the mornings I pass people sleeping in doorways as I walk downtown from the bus stop at SW 5th and Washington to the MAX Yellow Line stop at SW 6th and Pine. On Saturday morning I run past people sleeping under bridges and camped along the river. This is the state of the union, America in the 21st century. I do not know their stories. My guess is there are many stories. Some are where they are through misfortune, bad luck, no fault of their own, others as a consequence of choices none of us would recommend. Drugs, alcohol, and mental illness are at least part of the story in many cases. Is the man who threw a tantrum and littered the train car one of those cases? If he is, does he bear responsibility for his acts? If he is not responsible, how can we not ask when it is meaningful for any of us to speak of responsibility for our acts? And where does that leave us when we try to consider right and wrong, ethical and moral actions, what it might mean to live a good life? However that may be, I do not believe the general coarsening of life relieves us of responsibility for our conduct. I am responsible for the kind of person that I am. Perhaps this belief is just an anachronistic superstition. Nonethless, I hold to it.

After dinner I went to my desk and worked a bit on a piece of fiction, tentatively titled Until We Remember to Dream. The story draws on Fellini’s 8½ and La Dolce Vita, more a matter of mood than anything concrete, and occupied me a for short time back in 2010 before I drifted away after some 12 thousand words and never got back to it. That night I went back to page one and revised part of the first chapter and think perhaps I will get back to it.

It is funny how the writing goes sometimes. Wednesday the 19th Ric Vrana emailed to offer a ride to the January Paper Tiger poetry reading the next night. I considered it before declining for reasons not worth getting into. Before I reached the decision, I looked through the 2010 poems for something I might read and to my surprise found a few that might be keepers. Granted, I could have read the 2010 oeuvre in its entirety at Thursday’s open mic. That anything at all turned up in the files is a pleasant surprise. I close with one I kind of like, nothing major, but it does not have to be.

Blank the page seems
So much more truthful
Or at the least less false
When each orphaned thought
Conjures its contrary
To birth a mess
Of equivocation and backpedaling —

David :: Jan.30.2011 :: House Red: Miscellany :: No Comments »

I am not a man of practical bent, though it might be reasonable to expect otherwise from someone of my heritage and upbringing. How I came to be who I am, to stand where I now stand, rather baffles me to this day. The old nature-nurture distinction is far too simpleminded. Nature by way of genetics, brain chemistry, biology, plays a role, as do family, community, education, environment generally, and pure, dumb, blind luck, chance, call it fate if you like.

I grew up in rural South Carolina on what had been in the youth of my mother and uncles a small farm where my grandfather, Mr. Dave Haltiwanger (1882–1956), as he was known, and my grandmother, Miss Sue (1892–1990), eked out an honorable but fairly meager existence. Granddaddy started out as schoolteacher, which is how he and Granny met. She was his pupil. It was said that Mr. Dave used to spend a lot of time helping Sue with her schoolwork. They married shortly after she graduated from high school. That kind of thing would be a scandal today. It seemed to have worked out pretty well for them.

Uncle John told me that my grandfather was ill-suited to be a farmer. He took over the family farm because it was his responsibility to do so, but he had no aptitude for it. My grandmother could drive a nail or saw a board straighter than he ever could. People always said I was image of Mr. Dave Haltiwanger, for whom I was named. Perhaps I took after him in other ways too.

My only memory of my grandfather is from his death in 1956, the year I turned four. After lunch Granddaddy lay down on his pallet to take a nap, and I went with Granny out to the pasture to count the cows, make sure they were all there. When we returned, he was gone. I do not recall my grandmother’s reaction or my own, but I can see vaguely old mid-1950s cars parked in the yard and Dr. Pinner getting out of one with his black doctor’s bag.

After Granddaddy’s death we moved from the house in Ballentine into the old family home with Granny. Elaine was three years younger than I, and Trani came along two and a half years after her. We grew up for the most part in a home with two generations of remarkable women and no male father figure. Mom worked for insurance companies most of her life. She was the kind of person who routinely stayed late when work needed to be done. On occasion she brought work home, stuffing envelopes while we watched television in the evening. Similarly I can see Granny in her old denim coat and galoshes slogging through the mud and winter rain to feed the cows. When there was work to be done, they just did it.

Granny kept cows and chickens, a garden, and some lovely flower beds. We helped put seeds in the ground each spring for corn and green beans, tomatoes, butterbeans, squash, and whatever else she grew. As summer played out we did some hoeing and weed pulling, put in stakes and tied up tomato  and bean plants, and picked it all when the time came. Sometimes at night we shelled butterbeans or peas while watching TV, Red Skelton, Andy Griffith, Bonanza, The Beverly Hillbillies, McHale’s Navy, Lost in Space. Not exactly high culture, but we delighted in it.

In the fall we filled big wicker baskets with manure from the stables and fallen leaves from the pecan and oak trees and spread it all out over the garden to fertilize it for the next year. I am reasonably certain that none of that ever sank in enough for me that I could have handled it on my own without Granny’s hands-on instruction. I could identify corn and beans and tomatoes, the roses, the magnolia and pecan trees, and I knew a cow when I saw one, but not much beyond that. I also remember once, when I was very young, someone tried to teach me to milk a cow. The lesson was not successful.

I should be clear that it is not as if we put a lot of time into these farming tasks. We probably did as little as we could get by with and spent considerably more of our youth playing ball, riding bicycles, watching TV, and in my case reading, than we ever did working. Perhaps I should speak for myself here. Elaine and Trani may well have more industrious than I was. I certainly did not set the bar at a high level. It was in school that I was conscientious and did well. I imagine that led people to cut me some slack in other areas.

We were not poor, but as I look back on those years now I realize we may not have been not all that far from it. I imagine the purchase of a set of World Book Encyclopedia when I was in elementary school was a significant expenditure. Of that I have some memory of Mrs. Ballentine, the fifth-grade teacher at Dutch Fork Elementary School, sitting with Mom and Granny in the yard on what must have been a summer evening explaining the value of the encyclopedia for our education. That would settled it if there had been any question about making the purchase. It was certainly a wonderful thing for me. Those books with the red covers with their grainy texture occupied a good portion of the bookcase in my bedroom, and I went to them routinely whenever a new subject of interest caught my attention or sometimes when just at loose ends, reading them as I read any other book, for the pleasure of it.

Mom was the school secretary at Irmo for a year or maybe two when I was eight or thereabouts. Irmo had grades one through twelve all in the one building in those days. I attended Dutch Fork, a small elementary school in an outlying corner of the district for the first six years before moving on to Irmo for seventh grade. One day Mom brought home two seventh-grade textbooks a sales rep had left with the principal. One was geography, the other U.S. History. I was in third grade when I picked up the history book and read it cover to cover. It was like reading a novel, an adventure story.

At about that same time there was a school program where we could order paperbacks through a company called Scholastic Books. A program like this was tremendously important because there were no bookstores to speak of. Some of the downtown department stores had book departments, but those were a far cry from Borders or Barnes & Noble or anything else that would come down the pike for a long time, and like the public library they were sixteen miles away in Columbia and not readily accessible, except second-hand after Mom left the school to take a job with an insurance company whose office was just a few blocks from the county library. I gave her lists of books, authors, and subjects, and she went to the library on her lunch hour and brought home what she found.

One of the books I discovered early on through the Scholastic program was Revolt on Alpha C, my first science fiction. No doubt the book was every bit as juvenile as its title. No matter. It cultivated a thirst that is yet to be slaked.  This would have been around 1960, at the beginnings of NASA and the first manned space flights, an exciting time when so much seemed possible. For the next ten years I devoured that stuff. Let me see, said the blind man. There was Isaac Asimov, the Foundation trilogy and the robot stories; Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End and a slew of other novels; Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers and a slew of other novels; A.E. Van Vogt, Slan; Andre Norton, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delaney, Harlan Ellison, and a host of others, along with a fair share of biographies, history, adolescent sports novels, comic books, and popularized science. I read in my room on summer afternoons, in a t-shirt and cutoffs, when every now and then a hint of a breeze would break through the stifling heat to rustle the curtains and cool my bare legs, and I read on the school bus and while watching TV and in bed at night until I fell asleep.

As chance would have it, yesterday evening after I had written much of the first draft of this essay, I happened to read a short sketch written circa 1916 by Isaac Babel titled “The Public Library.” The story’s opening paragraph sets the stage.

You can feel straightaway that The Book reigns supreme here. All the people who work in the library have entered into communion with The Book, with life at second-hand, and have themselves become, as it were, a mere reflection of the living.

There follows a series of brief descriptions of various library employees and patrons, a diverse and fairly motley lot, before the story concludes with three short paragraphs:

There are all kinds of other people in the public library — too many to be described.

It is evening. The reading room is almost dark. The silent figures at the tables are a study in weariness, thirst for knowledge, ambition….

Soft snow weaves it weft behind the large windows. Nearby, on the Nevsky, there is teeming life. Far away, in the Carpathians, blood is flowing. C’est la vie.

The implication is that books offer a second-hand life to be distinguished from real life on the Nevsky or in the Carpathians where blood flows. Is reading books, and by extension the life of spirit and intellect, really a lesser kind of human living than putting in eight hours at the office, going to the grocery or liquor store, kayaking, mountain climbing, going out to dinner or the symphony, drinking and whoring, cheering one’s favorite sports team? The stakes may not be as high as they are for a soldier in Afghanistan, an opposition leader in Burma, or a human rights activist in any of a number of places around the world, but that is true of most activities in which most of us engage pretty much all the time. In another sense though, the stakes are as high as they can be, for it comes down to the person each of us chooses to be and the values we would embody.

David :: Jan.10.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 2 Comments »

Three major projects occupied me in 2010. That there were three, and these particular three, was haphazard. New Year’s or any other resolution had nothing to do with it. I would not fare well in the world of business management, for I am not much given to setting goals and objectives amenable to quantitative measurement, benchmarks, metrics, and so on. There are realms where this kind of analysis is appropriate. Nowadays, though, this thinking spills over into spheres where it is not fitting. Not all aspects of life are quantifiable. This is not to suggest that we should dispense with reflection and critical thinking about these things. Thinking can be rigorous without being calculative and productive even when in the end things remain unsettled.

My 2010 revolved around the Brontë girls, the San Antonio Marathon, and the one-volume condensation of Joseph Frank’s award-winning five-volume Dostoevsky, the condensed version weighing in at just under 1,000 pages. I took up the Brontës toward the end of 2009 and focused on them through the first third of the year. At a party chez Ric Vrana in April, Neil Anderson mentioned that he thinks Anne is the best novelist of the three sisters. To that point I had given her short shrift as my attention centered on Charlotte and Emily. Next time at Powell’s I picked up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and through the opening chapters thought Neil just might be right, no surprise there, as he has long impressed me as an astute fellow, along with being a talented writer. Alas, shortly thereafter I was distracted by a raft of Scandinavian crime writers, Steig Larsson, The Girl Played with Fire, picked up to read on the train to Vancouver, BC., Arnaldur Indridason, Åke Edwardson, Åsa Larsson, Jo Nesbo, each a delight.

Then I happened on a review of the newly published one-volume Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky has long been dear to me, and Frank’s take on him is a pleasure, part intellectual history, part biography, and part critical examination of Dostoevsky’s stories, novels, and assorted nonfiction. Once I began this indulgence, the deal was sealed on getting back to Anne Brontë anytime soon. She remains a bit of unfinished business.

I began ramping up for the marathon in late spring and embarked on the 18-week training adventure in mid July. The marathon training led me to increase my mileage to a level it had not seen in years, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. That was the main good that came of it, really a pleasure. The marathon itself was almost anticlimactic, though it certainly was satisfying when I found the finish line.

I do not think of running in terms of goals. Running is just what I do. I am leaning toward a 2011 marathon, though I have not yet committed to that. When I told a friend of this, she responded, “You drank the Kool-Aid!” Well, it was more I drank the Gatorade, I suppose. If I do take a crack at another marathon that will just be what I do, who I am, someone who runs, ponders, takes pen in hand, agonizes and anguishes over how to be the person he would have himself be, and perhaps from time to time takes a crack at a marathon.

If I have a goal for 2011, it is to find ways to be more content with life than I have been. I have some sense of what is required for that to be possible but am without a clue how to get there. Even this is not so much a goal as something I have in mind. In fact, looking at it as a goal might well be counterproductive.

My thinking runs in terms of living the good life, in the Aristotelian, not the American, sense of it. Just what would constitute a good life and how to go about it remains problematic. Reflection on the eternal and unanswerable questions may breed discontent with our lot. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the contemplative life is one aspect of the good life, whatever that may be.

This winter’s project will be to take a look back to the Greeks, who took an interest in matters of this sort and much else besides. I began recently with a brief history, H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, and Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers. After these I will read a little Plato, a little Aristotle, some Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes, and perhaps go on from there. The treatment will be somewhat hit or miss. No doubt I will miss much. Even so, it will be fun.

Gary Snyder touches on what my ruminations here have been getting at with this observation from a Buddhist perspective:

I’m a fairly practical and handy person; I was brought up on a farm where we learned how to figure things out and fix them. During the first year or two I was at Daitoku-ji Sodo [in Japan], out back working in the garden, helping put in a little firewood, or firing up a bath, I noticed a number of times little improvements that could be made. Ultimately I ventured to suggest to the head monks some labor- and time-saving techniques. They were tolerant of me for a while. Finally, one day one of them took me aside and said, “We don’t want to do things any better or any faster, because that’s not the point — the point is that you live the whole life. If we speed up the work in the garden, you’ll just have to spend that much more time sitting [practicing meditation] in the zendo, and your legs will hurt more.” (The Gary Snyder reader: prose, poetry, and translations, 1952–1998, p. 104)

Doing things better and faster not the point? Now there is a subversive thought for the new year.

David :: Jan.02.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »