THANK YOU SPRINGTIME!

PORTLAND

SEATTLE

SAN FRANCISCO

PORTLAND

Thanks Portland – just when I felt (happily) strangled in your blooming, soothing, green life there on the sidewalk, rough and permanent  “we torture.”

Thanks Seattle – amid the solicitations and  iPhone instant loves and the doldrums of listening to steampunk authors, in their home-shod Jules Vern gear, pontificating on how their nostalgia trip will change the world – there she was on the sidewalk begging the police to just let her pray.

Thanks San Francisco –  After the tight warmth of old friends and new beds, there at the Tea Party Tax Day Rally, a woman gave a full exorcism, in clunky, howling Latin,  to drive away that freedom hating demon called Taxes.  At home, a 23-dollar check was waiting. The first in 3 years.

Thanks Portland ­for the “Drug Take Back Initiative Day”.  In a mega-store parking lot the cars line up drive-thru style, arms reach out with bag after bag of orphaned medicines. On the tables, in boxes and garbage cans, the colors and abundance of the pills put the spring blossoms to shame. Obviously the terms “annuals” and “perennials” now apply to prescriptions as well as plant life.

And one more thanks to the home town  for a lonely night walk guided by Maker’s Mark and the compass of my camera lens, my head full of  filmmaking blues and the day’s footage – a hat box full of prescriptions, an amputation in a medical center in Abu Ghraib,  a swollen hand at prayer, and hotel sign after hotel sign.  My mind edits them to the ever-present sound of the trains passing from north Portland to the south east. There is a dark ferris wheel by the river, a soft fall of pink cherry petals, and all the words written on the city.