Ted Lasso barbecues a bully

Today's dispatch from The Dinosaur Notebook: 

It's my favorite scene in my favorite show.

In Apple TV+ fish-out-of-water comedy "Ted Lasso" Jason Sudeikis plays a college football coach from Wichita State who winds up coaching English soccer. 

The character's marriage has fallen apart. His estranged wife needs some space, so the relentlessly positive and unfailingly empathetic Lasso gives her a whole ocean.

The team's owner, Rebecca Welton, a rich blonde with curves like the hull of a competition speedboat, initially hired him to fail in order to spite her ex-husband, Rupert. She won the club in a bitter divorce settlement after he cheated on her.

By episode 8 of the first season Rebecca has been won over by Lasso's optimism and innate decency and begins to soften toward him.

Their friendship leads to this climactic scene.

You know, Rupert, guys have

underestimated me my entire life.

And for years, I never understood why.

It used to really bother me.

But then one day,

I was driving my little boy to school

and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman

and it was painted on the wall there.

It said, "Be curious, not judgmental."

I like that.

So I get back in my car

and I'm driving to work,

and all of a sudden it hits me.

All them fellas that used to belittle me,

not a single one of them were curious.

They thought they had everything

all figured out.

So they judged everything,

and they judged everyone.

And I realized

that their underestimating me...

who I was had nothing to do with it.

'Cause if they were curious,

they would've asked questions.

You know?

Sudeikis' monologue is perfect, a huge payoff for the show's legion of fans, who grow to see that Lasso's folksy charm isn't an act, because he's so consistent. 

In life people often mistake kindness for weakness. They make assumptions. They're dismissive. They send out subtle digs or judgments.

I love my work, the actual physical task of loading the bread into racks and rolling it into the proofer. It's meditative and satisfying. There's something soothing about working in a unit, doing something as elemental as baking bread. I come home smelling like 21 Whole Grain. My wife buries her nose in my collarbone and sniffs deeply when she kisses me. 

But there's an odd thing that happens in a blue collar workplace. It's as fiercely hierarchical as the streets of Mumbai. There's a caste system. Managers wear black shirts. Maintenance techs wear blue shirts. Office staff and administrators wear street clothes. Among the line employees, all wearing khaki pants and company tee shirts, Panners are the lowest of the low. There are people on the staff who don't acknowledge my presence, who will look right through me if I simply say, "Good morning, John." 

That's weird to me. I truly don't understand that mentality.

A portion of our work force are ex-felons. Guys with neck tattoos and a thousand-yard stare. 

People have been underestimating me all my life.

Every workplace has its rules and power structure. A man I know went to Stanford University and earned a degree in economics, built a successful career as a bond underwriter in Seattle. He raised three remarkable kids who went to prestigious schools, one a pediatrician, another a medical researcher, the third a fund raiser for a university in Alaska.

Once he told me, "I never liked my job. It wasn't my dream, I didn't have a passion for it. Every day I had to put on a suit and kiss ass, but I knew it what was I had to do to build a life for my family. So I did it."

He's retired now. This spring and summer he and his wife are hiking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Along the way I hope they find their two triple 20s and a bullseye, a moment of perfect clarity and peace. But I suspect the success and well-roundedness of their children has been the barbecue sauce, the thing that makes them smile deep in their souls. The people that underestimated them don't matter anymore.

That's the flip side of yesterday's childlike dreams. I have a lot of admiration for people who can recognize the bargain the world offers, choosing to stick to a course in a disciplined way because it's the right thing to do, even if they have to swallow a lot of bullshit.

Be curious. Ask questions. And don't let yourself be defined by others' assumptions. That's a waste of the precious days.

Pablo Picasso, The Helper Squad, and The Dinosaur Notebook

At the end of Jasmine Street in Willamette City where we live there is a thicket, a patch of fir trees under grown by holly with a trail running through it. It's an easement owned by the town, opening out on the other end to a large grassy field belonging to the Grace City Church.

Three children live on our block-long dead end street of single-family homes, ages six to eight. We'll call them Xena, Jack and Ella, for together they are a warrior princess, a legendary pirate and song belted from a mountain top, each in their own way.

(Both the place names and the identities have been changed to protect the children and their families, but their exploits are completely true.)

Jack's Wood is a vital feature of the neighborhood, for its quarter acre serves as a bicycle trail, obstacle course, hideout or the prow of a ship. Jack scans the horizon for villages to burn, churns clouds of dust on his bike, screams warrior screams as he zooms over the bump in the trail at the edge of the forest, the place where we first saw him on the day we moved in.

The three of them are each bright and exceptional with different gifts, cute as kittens, fierce as a stick-sword pressed into your Adam's Apple. 

Xena has dark, straight hair and brown eyes, a few months the oldest, the tallest of the three. She's thoughtful, a planner. For Halloween she put together a block party, complete with menus and activities. Handwritten invitations were tucked inside every screen door. Every household came, a table overflowing with chili and cornbread and three kinds of pie. Her father lit a firepit for marshmallows. The kids carved pumpkins. There was music on a portable stereo. Sharon made a pecan pie.

Jack's the youngest, a kindergartner with a  slightly crooked smile and Tarzan-length hair. His parents have bathed him in love and confidence. He's fearless and sweet. He charges down the hill where Jasmine Street passes the church on scooters, bikes and skateboards. His father takes him skiing, first cross country and this winter downhill for the first time. Once on a walk his mother asked how to ride the scooter. "You just GO," he said, neatly summing up his philosophy of life. He just goes. 

Ella is short and determined with a woolly mop of red-brown curls that explode out from underneath her bicycle helmet like fireworks. Her father is a professor of archaeology at a nearby college, her mother an administrator at the same school. In their garage is an electric car and a large telescope. Ella steers by the brightest, furthest star she can name in all things.

As you might guess, there are no betas in this group. They'll play agreeably for a while, have some disagreement as to direction or purpose, work it out or fly apart for a while. After a break to cool down they'll come back together, resuming play as if not much happened. Over the two years all alliances have proved temporary and no grudges have been kept past tomorrow's breakfast. They're a model for the world.

One of their latest ventures is The Helper Squad. The three decided they would knock on every door within their tether and offer themselves for chores and tasks, cleaning yards or windows for two or three quarters each. Mind you, they are 6, 8, and 8.

In their rounds they came to us and I invited them, with their parents' permission, to help us plant wildflowers in the 18x24-foot patch of ground at the front end of Jack's Wood. Earlier this year I'd chopped away the weeds with a pick axe and laid down a bed of fallen leaves to improve the clay soil. It's nearly ready to plant. At the first of the month my wife Sharon bought us six yards of good garden dirt, delivered, and we'll spread a layer of that this weekend.

It happens that yesterday was the start of spring break, so The Helper Squad will come by for wildflower seed spreading on Wednesday. 

On the porch after school on Tuesday they were jumping up and down with excitement about this choice assignment.

But they wanted something they could do right away, eager to get their business venture started, too ambitious to wait for summer lemonade stands. More jumping up and down, Ella eager for me to name an assignment.  I suggested that the wildflower patch needed more leaves, because there was a section, about a quarter of it, that was still bare. Maybe you could finish it, I said.

The three of them accepted. While I went back to my nap they laid out leafy compost over the bare ground. When I woke up there were three twigs arranged on our front porch in a rough tepee, intended, I think, as sign language to indicate they'd finished. When I walked out to the end of the driveway I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) at how thoroughly and carefully they'd finished the project.

Last Sunday we had dinner with Jack and his parents. He's a high school history teacher, she's a nutritionist. Marvelous, attentive parents, delightful people. They don't own a TV. Most nights after supper are devoted to reading and games.

Over salad, grilled cheeses and tomato bisque soup we learned Jack had just passed his first 100 days of kindergarten. He and his classmates had each made themselves a hat emblazoned with "100 Days Brighter," shaped like a native headdress. He'd made a "Happy St. Patrick's Day" poster, taped to the front door for our visit.

The next day I was in the Dollar Store shopping for writing supplies, and I snagged two Dinosaur Notebooks, one for me and one for Jack. I got him a congratulations card and my wife and I signed it. "Congratulations on being 100 Days Brighter," I wrote. In a perfect world, we all would be.

I put four singles inside the card. "Seed money for your business," I told him. "You and Xena and Ella can buy cleaning supplies or snacks."

Pablo Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The trick is to remain one when you grow up." In the same way every child is an adventurer, an explorer, a daredevil and an entrepreneur. The shameful thing is that life wears down our optimism and yearning to make grand plans, to be boldly childlike in our willingness to dream.

My father was a crass and violent man who died at the age I am now. He was driving a semi the day he died, delivering a load of coffee in Layton, Utah. The Old Man chocked the wheels, pulled up the gate of the trailer and collapsed on the dock, dead of a heart attack. He'd been a smoker well into his 50s and was overweight.

The relevant part of his story in this one is that all his life my father had dreams, a desire to start something big and be a big operator. He'd sketch out plans and budgets. He'd start projects. A trucking school. A barge for harvesting river rock.

Some of his ideas were remarkably ahead of his time. In the 80s he pondered converting an old school bus he'd bought into a mobile restaurant. An avid football fan who'd record games on his Betamax to rewatch over the winter, he'd sketch out plays for an offense: no huddle, with the quarterback in shotgun on every play, a concept that now dominates the game.

Everett dropped out of school after the ninth grade. He didn't have a dinosaur notebook, but by his chair on the lamp table there were invariably scraps of paper scrawled with notes and trial budgets. 

When he died, going through his effects, next to his shotgun shells and a stubby bottle of Mennen Skin Bracer, I found $20,000 in a Metamucil jar under his porch. Seed money for his business. I divided into six envelopes and sent an equal share to each of my siblings.

 

Take me to the river

On Sunday I  took my breakfast walking, like a character in The Canterbury Tales. My favorite Oregon fleece has pockets so I wrapped two slices of spiral ham in a paper towel, grabbed an apple, two boiled eggs and a chunk of crusty sourdough bread left over from the other night, stepping out into the bright, mild midwinter sun for a walk to the river.

I'm blessed to live just a couple of blocks from Meldrum Bar Park along the Willamette River. It's a 30-minute circuit around the park, almost perfect. I ate the ham first as I strolled out of the trailer park where I share an old but neatly remodeled older mobile home with Angie, a former girlfriend who has morphed into a good friend. She's kind and our schedules are opposite, so we rarely get in each other's way, except for the narrow driveway, which constantly requires an annoying shuffling of cars. She's so considerate she usually moves mine when she leaves for work in the morning, me being the night owl who typically sleeps late. Most of the time I'm so far out of it that I don't even hear her getting ready, still the oldest of seven in my ability to sleep through a blow dryer, the sound of a running shower and a blender. Only rarely do I stir, and even then it's easy for me to fall back asleep. Another blessing: both my parents were plagued by insomnia, and my father had a terrible, undiagnosed case of sleep apnea. His snores would rouse zombies. He'd die 50 times a night, not breathing.

Sleep is much on my mind these days, for last week I read an internet article about the power of sleep and its ability to serve as a "delete button" for our brains. I found the article on Twitter, from a newsletter called "Fast Company."

Have you ever woken up from a good night’s rest and been able to think clearly and quickly? That’s because all the pruning and pathway-efficiency that took place overnight has left you with lots of room to take in and synthesize new information–in other words, to learn.

It turns out that the brain uses deep sleep to prune and cultivate, strengthening some connections while deleting others. It resets and heals. Sleep is a superpower in our lives. There isn't much in our mental or physical health, be it weight, stress, sexual performance, problem-solving or energy, that isn't improved by better sleep.

A walk to the river, I think, accomplishes some of the same replenishing and re-sorting. It quiets me. It allows me to sort out my thoughts.

As I turned into the park I ate from the chunk of crusty bread, sourdough, my mother's favorite. The sun felt good on my face and shoulders. I thought about an old Talking Heads song, "Take Me to the River."

"Take me to the river...and wash me down." There is something cleansing, spiritual, healing about a simple walk to the river. In "A River Runs Through It" Norman McLean says "I am surrounded by waters." I think we all are. The river of grace. The river of grief. The river of time. The waters define us, lead us, comfort us and mark our path. The afternoon sunlight gleaming on the slow-moving current speaks to our soul.

I spent a lot of time on the opposite bank of this river, literally, when I was a young man. In high school I converted to Christianity in the summer between my junior and senior years, at a Young Life Camp called Malibu located in the Straits of San Juan, some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world. Mountains rise up straight out of the water, forming fjords. Orcas hunt and frolic in the still, cold, deep waters.

I had my conversion experience on a July morning at the dock with a counselor named Rick O'Bill. We talked a long time and he extolled the virtues of a personal relationship with Jesus, what it meant, how it would give me strength, understanding and comfort. His testimony had a big appeal for a kid from a nightmare family, where anger and anxiety clouded every waking moment. I could be free. I could trust someone. It was a beautiful morning, the water still as glass. I prayed the prayer.

All through the rest of the summer and the warmer days of early fall I walked to a spot in Mary S. Young Park, along the west bank of the Willamette in West Linn, to pray earnest prayers and read from a Philips Translation of the New Testament I'd bought at the Malibu Canteen. The book had one of those thick paperboard covers with a red, white and blue design cross-hatched onto it. Fervently, faithfully, searchingly I read sitting on the sand in a sheltered thicket, beginning with the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life and ministry, then Acts and the Letters. Revelation only confused me.

All through that summer I prayed as I walked home on Willamette Drive, Highway 43. It was about a mile to home. I'm sure those who drove by, including members of my community and even acquaintances from school, must have thought I was mad, crazy, insane or possessed. I wasn't, just an impressionable boy/man-child in search of passion and purpose.

Religion didn't stick with me. Over the next few years I became increasingly angst-ridden over all the guilt I felt, normal urges I didn't understand, the pull of the world. It seemed easier for my friends to make compromises and accept God's graces without questioning their own purity and behavior. My most frequent critic in faith lived with a series of women, yet he felt free to question my actions and motives with the fervor of a brimstone preacher.

I didn't find any comfort in the church. People seemed full of false piety, judgmental, artificial. For a while I attended a "Charismatic" church and the antics of people. "speaking in tongues," "prophesying," actually scared me. How could you trust that? What was real and what was merely performance and posing? It wasn't comforting to me, I only felt guilty and miserable over being "a sinner."

In college I encountered science, my own budding sexuality, alcohol and girls, and religion faded for me. I became the seed sown among the thorns. Any practice of faith or spirituality has to be ultimately rewarding and restorative or it will inevitably lead to bitterness and regret. It has to feel sound and authentic, in the heart, or it will just hurt.

The one thing I took away from my religious experiences was a practice of profound contemplation and a need to get away, to be quiet, meditative, and seek solace in my surroundings. It's good to moved to awe and silence, this much I know. I still find comfort in the river. Eastern religions have more appeal to me but I don't practice a specific faith. Much of the time I'm content to light a candle, put on an eclectic shuffle of music on my headphones, close my eyes and breath deeply. It's not quite meditation, and it usually turns into a nap.

As I walked along I stepped out of the shade into the full light, and the warmth on my face, rare for Oregon in January, this taste of spring, lightened my mood and my energy. I passed the soccer field and some parked cars. There was a group of children playing on the swings and climbing structure. An old man in a ball cap watched them from a bench. A pretty girl with cinnamon-colored skin and beautiful dark curls sat next to him. She reminded me of Kourtney, my granddaughter, when she was little. One of the children, high on the climbing structure called out to him, "Hi Grandpa," the little boy said. Children want to test their independence and take risks, but they want to be noticed and watched over. I called out to the old man, "Those are two of the most glorious words in the English language," I said, "Hi Grandpa." The old man chuckled.

I find as I grow older I am more prone to talk to strangers, to call out a greeting or make a humorous observation. It's the search for connection, the willingness to be engaged. What's the harm, as long as you're not saying anything threatening or intrusive? It's a form of blessing. When I pass couples with a small child in the cart at a store I will say, "What a cute baby!" or "What a beautiful child!" and smile a broad, welcoming smile. I like to think that the blessing you say into a child's life resonates like ripples from a small rock thrown into a still river. A small flower of pride and recognition planted, a ray of sunlight shone upon a seedling. In some cases not, but the effort is sincere. I shared the old man's delight in his grandchildren, and for a moment we were a community.

A little further along the road turns south and I walked past the community garden, still gated and padlocked for winter. A flock of fat geese pecked and picked contentedly, feasting on the shoots and seeds, making a banquet out of last year's waste and detritus among the once neatly-tended rows. Padlocks mean nothing when you can fly.

The river bends at the south end of the park. Sunlight gleamed on the surface of the waters. My brother Roger is a fisherman, an avid one with over a hundred rods and reels and two boats. He's spent countless hours on the rivers of Northwest Oregon, the Clackamas, the Trask, the Columbia and Buoy 10, the easy pickings near Eagle Creek and the spillway at the Bonneville Dam during the fall salmon and steelhead run. He loves to fish, but I suspect also he derives great comfort from those early mornings on the river, both the stillness and beauty and the community of men he's become a part of. Some of his dearest and most meaningful friendships have grown out of an online community he belongs to, posting for years. The group shares their fishing triumphs but much more than that. A beloved member died this fall and their posts back and forth included ribald stories as well as genuine grief and loss. These men were there for him when our mother died. They are a true church.

I turned up the path between the children's golf course and the softball fields, heading toward home. To my left two middle-aged men were taking batting practice. I heard the solid thwock of a deep flyball to left and walked over to the grandstand to peel my boiled eggs and watch for a minute. The pitcher had a full head of gray hair. He wore a puffy blue windbreaker, kept missing low and inside. The batter, thick and muscular, wore glasses. Right-handed, with a big kick in his swing, a serious player swinging an expensive aluminum bat. He sent several flies out to the 300 mark in the open field, not bad for the first workout in cooler January air. It was about 55 degrees, I'd guess. The ball doesn't carry as far in those conditions, not like summer. He blasted another deep fly on a good launch angle. 

I finished peeling one of the eggs and ate it. Another solid thwock! "That sound is a tonic to my winter-dulled ears," I said out loud to the man at the plate. He turned slightly but didn't look up. "Yep." he answered. I said, "Good job laying off those bad pitches." He smiled slightly and took his stance again, sent another one deep to left, a dead pull hitter.

I finished the other egg and left them, continuing up the hill along the 7th fairway of the pitch-and-putt and the south soccer field. I thought about sports and the large part they had played in much of my life. I'd been obsessive. For a long while, decades, softball into my 40s, golf in my 50s, it had filled a huge void in my life where most men placed family and careers. I trained 4-6 hours a day, hit off tees, did drills, lifted weights. I wrote journals, did affirmations, listened to subliminal tapes, playing 150 games a summer and then 150 rounds a year. For a time softball and then golf were my meditation and religion, deeply into the discipline of the body, the rhythms of the game.

I was a frustrated athlete. I was never able to let go and completely trust, playing with far too much anxiety and a deep fear of failure. I'd get monumentally angry over a pop-up or a sliced drive, alienate friends, abuse family members, enraged far beyond rationality or perspective. It was just a game, I knew, but my expectations and standards for myself were so sky-high it was completely impossible to enjoy it except in rare moments of perfection or serenity. 

My sports career was another failed religion, a different type of discipline and complete immersion. I've always been a fanatic, a fierce believer. As I walked up the path I felt the yearning of those old habits. Maybe I could play one more season or a few more seasons, do it differently, have more perspective, clean off the clubs, buy a nice fielder's glove and work oil into the leather until it felt like a part of my hand. Physically, I could do it. But there's a cost to every choice you make. I have to measure mine in terms of lost walks to the river, decisions not easily made.

At the top of the hill the path narrows between two fences, one to the rundown mobile home park where I live, the other to a crowded, cluttered, sprawling apartment complex. The apartments have little patios and nearly all of them are littered with junk. I found a brochure lying on the ground and I picked it up. "Fairway Village," it said. Even the sketchiest of apartments have fancy names. With my last wife we lived in a 30-unit building called The French Chateau, a drab place with little connection to the romance of French wine country. We called it The French Ghetto.

The brochure was unremarkable, but I considered whether it was a sign from the universe. Apartments are much on my mind right now as I would like to have my own "clean, well-lighted place" ( a Hemingway reference, what he said was necessary to write), somewhere with privacy and a sense of home, with room enough in the kitchen to dance. Fairway Village, named for its proximity to a pasture-like 9-hole par-3 golf course, is neither clean or well-lighted. The scrubby lawns are littered with broken trikes, the parking lot is a wasteland of oil stains and car parts. 

I decided that some things you find are not a sign, just a piece of litter on the walkway.

Even so, the housing search is very much with me these days. Portland is an impossible market. Vacant apartments are snatched up quickly. The average price of a stick-built home has passed $450,000. A studio apartment rents for $900 a month, with water, sewer and garbage on the side. Move-in costs often exceed $2000.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Lanie, the wisp of a girl who works at the convenience store, about the age of my oldest granddaughter. She and her boyfriend are losing their place. clinging to the hope of buying an RV. Their story moved me. I wrote her a brief note, saying I had been homeless a couple of times but now was experiencing some great blessings in my work and situation. I included three twenties and said I hoped the little bit of money was an encouragement for them.

On the river in those high school years I learned that Jesus said to do your charity in secret for a reward in heaven, so already I've blown that. I felt it was important to tell the whole story.

I called yesterday about a few studios but most were already rented. One had no oven in the kitchen, just a sink, a tiny counter top and a 2-burner cook top, as drab and depressing as Fairway Village.

With all this in mind I drove by a mobile home dealer to look, thinking it might be better to buy a place, pay for space rent and at least own something. I could live in a bigger place with new appliances and carpet, no neighbors above or below me or sharing a common wall, annoying each other with the sounds of dancing or lovemaking or fights or angry 2 a.m. rock and roll.

I made my way through the paperwork and promised to return today with a deposit, but in the evening I stopped by the office here at the trailer park. The officers from the park board told me the last two vacancies had already been taken. I called three other parks I found online but they too said there was no room at the inn. The mobile home purchase may have been an ill-conceived plan.

I'm still weighing that out. In spite of my hunger for my own space and privacy I might be better served to remain here. The rent is cheap and Angie is probably one of the nicest and most genuine people I've ever known, an absolute peach of a roommate. We can both use the money we save to pay off debts, which will only improve my credit rating and opportunity to purchase a home later. Sometimes I make the biggest decisions in the rashest of ways.

In my Twitter news feed last night there was a report out of Pullman, Washington about a young man who'd felt compelled to make the ultimate rash decision. Tyler Hilinski, the new starting quarterback for the Washington State Cougars, was found dead in his apartment, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, a suicide.

Details are scant, but Hilinski was by most accounts a friendly, out-going, energetic and talented young man with a bright future. It isn't yet clear what kind of guilt or isolation or despair that drove him to end his life. He was a good-looking young man and supremely gifted, a backup quarterback as a sophomore who'd led the Cougs to a big comeback victory over Boise State in overtime last September, slated to be the starter this year.

We've all felt the grip of despair, the awful pull of a struggle that seeps into our bones and threatens to pull us under like a hidden current. Sometimes we look out at the river and feel no answers, only hopelessness. We need someone or something to pull us away from the shore. The dark, deep part of the waters play a siren song. Part of us aches to simply surrender.

I finished my walk with the sun again on my aging face, content to have the warmth and the reflection even if I'd achieved no answers. Sometimes a walk to the river is a walk along your own river of time. Today is cold and wet, so I'll take my meditation inside, probably under a blanket. It will no doubt turn into a nap.

It's good to be moved to awe and wonder

When my daughter was about 10 she tried out for summer softball at a schoolyard near where she lived with her mother and stepfather in Southeast Portland.

It was a sunny day in April, the field soft from a rain shower. I sat in the stands with her Grandpa Jerry along the first base side, watching the girls go through playing catch, some infield drills and a turn at the plate. Jerry, a congenial man with a shock of wheat-colored hair that curled on his forehead in a way that made him look permanently boyish, chatted with me amiably about sports and goings-on at his bar, a beer-and-shot joint he owned at 52nd and Foster.

I'd been a poor father and a worse husband in my four tries, but Jerry, a fundamentally nice man, greeted me with warmth anyway, true to his nature, a cheerful guy whose life was run by three generations of dominating women yet he had the good sense to go with the flow of it. His strong-willed wife was sensual and smart, so why not?

Part of the heartbreak of a series of failed marriages is that you lose the families you once attached to, the closest thing to normal love and acceptance I'd ever known in my life. Wreckage, everywhere wreckage. And my sweet, resilient daughter had been the first injury in my long march to becoming a whole man.

At ten Stephanie was bright and wise-cracking, very much like her mother and grandmother in her speech cadences and humor. She had hazel eyes and dark hair, skinny, all legs, a quick bright smile. Despite her mother being a college tennis player and me playing sports actively throughout high school and all the way into my 40s, she had no athletic ability at all.

Stephanie took her turn at the plate batting left-handed  and the outfielders instinctively moved in. She was smaller, only 5-5 as a full grown woman even now. Her stance was all stiff knees and pointed elbows.

She whiffed at the first pitch, and the next and the next. A couple of her friends shouted out sweet, pleading encouragement. One of the volunteer coaches sidled up to her to adjust her hands and shoulders, but she still couldn't make contact. Finally the man held the bat with her and she managed a slow grounder to second.

I cried. I had to step away from the bleachers and turn my back to the small collection of parents and grandparents and started heaving dry, choked-back tears. I cried, maybe for the first time in my adult life and certainly the most significant time, not because I was disappointed in Stephanie but because I was so moved by the sight of her, trying, sweetly, to do something she simply couldn't do. She was ten by then and had little background in sports. I hadn't been around to play catch with her or teach her how to hold the bat. Most of the other girls had been playing since they were six. It was too big a gulf in skill level, particularly for a child without much natural ability.

Hitting or not hitting wasn't the point in that moment. I cried because I was so PROUD of her, at her courage, at her willingness to face that situation and still smile and try so bravely. I didn't care that she couldn't hit. She was my little girl. I wanted to march up to home plate and get on my knees and hug her, tell her it didn't matter. I cried because it was so beautiful watching her, being amazed at her strength, her independence, her remarkable energy and spirit.  I called out something encouraging but I don't remember what it was.

What I do remember was being awed by the moment, by the bigness of her heart and spirit, how we have these feelings and moments and they are overwhelming but our soul doesn't have the words to express them. The little that we do, is it enough? I came to the tryout, but I'd missed so many other things. I was filled with humility at the fragile beauty of watching her fail and still be completely herself, still just as beautiful and smart and funny and gloriously herself as she was before she struck out five times. For a long time my life revolved around being good at sports and throwing all my energy into them, and at that field I didn't care about sports at all.

It's good to be moved to awe and wonder, to be carried away with humility at the power of emotions or the grand sweep of your surroundings. We can reach the same level of prayerfulness of spirit with a trip to the ocean, the Grand Canyon or the Columbia Gorge. Or in watching a child play "Silent Night" from a window as Christmas lights dance on the snow. Be moved to tears. And tell someone why you cry at the memory of them in a vulnerable, poignant moment. Soon, for one day your tear ducts will close forever.

Just a corpuscle in a giant organism, flowing along the stream

The bread courses through the bakery like blood, mixed, panned, proofed, depanned, cooled and bagged over a four-hour cycle, trucked all over the Western United States, Alberta, Canada and Hawaii. We make artisan organic bread in a mass production environment, each stage of the process in groups of six to ten, becoming the corpuscles and platelets of a living organism, making a living product of whole grain flours, yeast and sugar, baked with care.

In the mixing department the ingredients are measured out and rolled station-to-station in 400-pound stainless steel bowls that gleam inside from careful cleaning. They roll like coal bins over a smooth red floor, a floor maintained at intervals with an industrial cleaning machine called a floor cat, which resembles a miniature Zamboni, stiff circular brushes rotating on its underside, a water vac and a large squeegee at the back. Driving the floor cat is a rank of privilege--only senior team members get the assignment, clearing their way with warning toots of the horn as they make tight circles about the production floor.

It's a regimented workplace. Safety glasses, hairnets and ear plugs are required everywhere. We wear plain brown bakery-issued shirts with snaps instead of buttons, the same drab color (just lighter than brown khakis) for our bakery pants, becoming an army of washed-out UPS men as we scurry about our tasks. It's very leveling and democratic, though managers wear black polos. Team leads and supervisors are all in brown like us.

The regularity and regimentation centers me. Monday night we made 30,000 loaves of whole grain bread, filling racks, rolling them into the proofer, mopping floors and scrubbing dishes and we rotated through stations. The bakery feeds us lunch and provides snacks like steel cut oatmeal, vegetables with hummus and yogurt for prework and breaks. Who does that? Around the country most large corporations are busy shelling out bonuses to upper management and sending jobs to Asia. Bread has to be baked reasonably near where it's eaten, but it isn't hard to envision a future where most of us will be replaced by robotic arms and sensors. The dough is no longer rolled by hand, and technology advances every year.

It seems like a reality our country is ill-prepared for. Revolutions are painful. The nature of work is undergoing a profound change. Whole industries will disappear over the next few years. Soon there will no longer be bakery workers or truck drivers or order pullers, only the technicians smart enough to maintain the machines. I'm nearing the end of my working life anyway, so I'd likely transition to subsistence living, reading, writing, taking long walks. It doesn't sound that frightening to me. But what about the millions of ordinary people abruptly stripped of a way to make a living and the foundation for a meaningful life? What will they do? How will they support themselves? The current political leadership seems ill-equipped to handle that massive conundrum with any kind of wisdom or compassion. Meanwhile change hurtles on. In Dubai they are experimenting with air taxis, self-piloted drones and helicopters capable of zipping passengers around the city. Our world isn't as organized and purposeful as the bakery: an egotistical, narcissistic fool threatens to destroy humankind with casual tweets about the size of his nuclear button. How did we come to this? How do we find our way out?

The truth is never simple. It has a few corners that can never be cleaned.

My mother was heroic for her courage, endurance and strength, but there was another side to her. She could be very cold and distant. She could wound with quick, harsh sarcasm, or an icy, uncrossable ocean of silence. She could be brutal and cruel, out of a fierce anger at the life she had come to, its complete lack of graces.

Growing up this way, at one turn her comfort and confidant, at another her profoundest disappointment, left me hopelessly, deeply scarred. I struggled all my life in my relationships with women and my ability to respond to intimacy. I wounded and used people, prone to irrational anger and abrupt changes of mood and tone. I too practiced an icy, cutting silence that built walls and distrust. I have been married four times, all colossal failures.

I carried around a baseline of anxiety that underscored and undercut every interaction with bosses, friends, supervisors and love interests. For a long time I covered it up with an impossibly wide, happy smile, determined to be the ray of sunshine no one could dislike. My insecurity, fear, temper and fundamental anger betrayed me again and again

It's taken a lot of self-examination to reach this point in my journey, where I could tell what I know of the story and look inward with frank honesty. I'm privileged to write every day. I want to tell stories, and not just a self-indulgent one of my own.

Her hands were raw, red and cracked

My mother cleaned with fierceness. She would scrub and scrape until her hands were raw, red and cracked, slathering them with lotions or bag balm only to start cleaning again. She would clean from habit and duty. She cleaned because it was ingrained in her culture, for Germans are a tidy people with a deep love of order.

But it was deeper than that. On the farm it seemed she cleaned determined to scrub away poverty and shame. She cleaned too to quiet herself, to wash the reality of her bad bargain and shameful mistake out of her mind, drive it away in a frenzy of work. Then too, she had six kids. Keeping them fed and cleaned was endless, especially when coupled with animals to feed, crops to irrigate and cows to milk. She had six children in 12 years, and at least one miscarriage. We were irrigating the watermelons when she told me. I was just ten, the summer after third grade. Through everything she kept working.

Rosemarie didn't drive. The few times the Old Man tried to teach her he lost patience quickly and started to berate her unwillingness to learn, her dense German stupidity. In his frequent absences we were stranded 8 miles from town, either relying on neighbors or packing the whole brood into a cab. On the way home everyone held groceries or a baby, or both. No one wore seat belts, and if Mr. Thompson or Mr. Douthit took us, the older kids rode sitting in the bed of the pickup. It was a much different time.

The start of her emancipation came in 1964 when he consented to buy her an ancient blue-green Nash, a squat four-door automobile with dusty beige seats that smelled a little from long storage.  A kindly family friend, Orville, patiently showed her how to work the break and the clutch. She practiced out in the pasture before taking to the road. Orville and his wife lived in Athena, a few miles east and then north. Hes invited one of the kids to stay at their home, but he only wanted the younger children. They had  chocolate graham cracker ice cream bars in their freezer, he said. Eager for adventure, I'd stretch up and say, "I'll go."

"I KNOW you would," he said, chuckling with his barrel-voiced, cigarette-soaked laughter. He only wanted the younger kids, but they were skittish about leaving home.

The Nash had a touchy clutch that had nearly worn out, so the standard practice was to roll through stop signs, including the one that led from East Walls Road to the main highway. Children were assigned as lookouts left and right, calling "Clear!" as mom sailed onto the main highway. A full stop and the car might die, and it was difficult to restart. Somehow we survived the clears.

Later that year she got her first job off the farm, working as a waitress at a truck stop in Umatilla, about 10 miles away. At 8 my sister Therese was in charge of the kids, oversaw bath times, made something for dinner. She did a marvelous, mature job, spooning baby food to Michael and then Monika, except for the time she coaxed Roger into drinking from a cup of bleach. Another science experiment, like the corn grown in a patch at the end of the trickle. A neighbor rushed him to Good Shepherd Hospital in town. The emergency room staff induced vomiting and he was fine. Years later the childhood near-miss is still holiday conversation. Therese, almost saintly in her devotion and maturity at that young age, still shrugs off her curious misstep. "I wanted to see what would happen," she said.

She had this prankster side, this coyote cunning that belied her bright, sweet disposition. One day I got a white straw cowboy hat as a gift and I was strutting around proudly as we played and then did the evening milking. She wanted to wear it but I refused. Therese snatched it off my head and plopped it in a fresh manure pile. Another time, she and my second-oldest brother (he's skittish about being identified on social media) were playing and climbing on some hardened stacks of concrete behind the milking shed. Therese pushed one onto to his head and it made him bleed, a gash, not serious.

How could anyone so ordinarily gentle and nurturing be full of so much devilment? Therese was a model student and startlingly bright. She's worked on the computers at the Portland Public Schools for 30 years.

We were a wild, brown bunch, scarcely ever wearing shoes in the summer. We outgrew them too quickly anyway. My smaller toes are still curled from wearing too-small shoes. At 20 I had the feet of an ancient.

In 1965 Rosemarie took the Nash to Pendleton, the county seat, to take a test for a government program called the MTDA, the Manpower Training and Development Act. Programs that don't exist anymore because they are "entitlements." She took me with her as moral support, to calm her nerves for the big day. If she passed, she go to Blue Mountain Community College and learn a skill, perhaps raise the family out of rural poverty.

In addition to the testing there were interviews, an entire day of qualifying. She wore her best blue dress. I was the smart one, her oldest child, a visual aid to show she wasn't merely a backward German with six children and her accented English. Yet all of my siblings have been more successful in their adult life.

Scraping away the crud

Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

The steady beat of the pan line is the sanest thing in my life right now. Work grounds me. Slinging bread pans and breaking a sweat. Earning a living. I'm grateful for the regularity, the rhythm and routine.

After the bread comes out of the proofer it's baked on racks in stand-up ovens, typically at 355 degrees. Another team rolls them in and out of the ovens, taking the baked bread to a conveyor called the depanner. One member of the ovens crew is assigned to load them off the racks onto a conveyor belt, where the still-hot loaves are blown free by a burst of air and then suctioned out of the pans.

The crew rotates in 30-minute shifts on the depanner position, the alpha job in the bakery. If you can run the depanner you're recognized as full-fledged crew member, a person who can hold his own. It takes strength, endurance and toughness.

They wear safety glasses, special sleeves on their forearms and long rectangular heat pads attached to their wrists by elastic. The ovens and racks are hot enough to burn skin instantly, as dangerous as unacknowledged grief. Quick, deep burns happen if you mishandle a pan or take a rack out of the oven without being careful.

Once the racks are emptied they are rolled over to a  double line along the north wall of the proofer to cool until they can be filled again.

The floor space where the cooling racks are stored becomes littered with fallen crumbs and seed from baking. There's a little oil in the recipe, so this builds up quickly, forms a layer on the floor.

Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

The line runs continuously. We bake more than a half million loaves a week, all day and all night in shifts. Periodically the line is taken down for cleaning, every conveyor, machine, corner and cranny swept, scrubbed, and sanitized, first with air hoses and then with buckets and brushes, blue plastic buckets for cleaner/degreaser, white for sanitizer, yellow buckets and brushes for the floor and floor-level surfaces.

After a few days the space under the cooling racks develops a layer of fallen detritus that has to be worked off with a tool, a four-foot aluminum handle with a  four-inch scraper attached to its business end, not sharp enough to cut but sharp enough to work up the crust of crud on the floor.

Scraping the crud is my favorite job in the bakery, along with taking a scrub brush the size of an outsized tooth brush to the fixtures, pipes, baseboards and stanchions along the walls and corners, making sure everything is clean and sanitized throughout the production floor.

It's deeply satisfying to me, left to work alone on a task no one wants. I love seeing the results, love being acknowledged or praised for completing it, making the grimiest, most ignored corners of the bakery clean enough to pass any inspection. We get them regularly, from corporate headquarters, from the state. They are called audits. Everyone snaps to attention for pending audits, but the standard of cleanliness is constant. We bake the staff of life, trustees of people's food.

No matter how careful we are, there's a crust of crud that falls to the floor in our lives, one that congeals to our souls over time. It has to be worked away. We have to find the neglected corners and crevices of our past and attend to them, scrub away the neglect. If we don't, something terrible grows within us, unclean and unexamined. A fungus of hurt, searing, tamped-down hurt, is the most toxic.

There's another level the cleaning assignments appeal to me in their solitude and simplicity. It's a connection to my mother.

Rosemarie Newton was a remarkable woman. She came to America at 16, a child-bride of an American soldier whose one mistake became a quiet international scandal in Darmstadt in 1955. She crossed the ocean in a slow boat to America with a squalling baby in her arms. She was sick and sorrowful for the entire crossing, wrest from her mother and two brothers, though bound to the land of Elvis, Hershey bars and Frank Sinatra. The baby was me.

The hastily-discharged private had very little except an eighth-grade education and a capacity to dream. They lived in rundown rented houses or a tiny trailer house while he raised watermelons on rented land and drove truck. One morning she spied a rat by my brother's ear in his crib.

Three children came quickly and four more followed.

When I was 5 Everett, my father, scraped up enough money to buy a place, a 60-acre farm 8 miles outside Hermiston in Eastern Oregon, the family crammed into a ramshackle two bedroom farmhouse with peeling linoleum in the kitchen and an ancient refrigerator and range, a tiny old-style sink. The dining area had a oil stove with a knotty pine wall behind it.

When I was 7 my grandfather built us a shotgun third bedroom to the left of the stove, a project he completed on his vacation while grandma made scrapple in the kitchen with cornmeal and the meat from a boiled hog's head, lifting the head out of large pot with a giant set of tongs. I was dubious and alarmed, but the fried scapple was delicious, though not a breakfast approved by the American Heart Association.

Four of us crammed into two beds. Michael, another boy with almost-white hair, made it five soon after, and Monika, a beautiful baby girl, arrived by the time my mother was 25.

This image from Steve Frazier photography; our farm,
though at the end of a lane, was less grand.

The lawn was weeds. An overflowing septic tank trickled out a few feet from the front porch. My sister Therese grew an eight-foot high patch of corn another 30 feet along the trickle, an observant scientific mind even then.

Farm life was mean in places, and we clung to each other. Soon we were old enough to be aware of my mother's growing despair, talking to herself in the kitchen in German as she prepared meals in the tiny kitchen. Mice scurried through the cupboards. We were horrified to have guests. "Your teeth are YELLOW," a little girl once said to me on the school bus.

Before long we were old enough for farm chores. I drove tractor and farm trucks by the time I was 8, milking a small herd of cows before school. One summer my brother and I were given charge of a plot of field corn, irrigating it every Tuesday with curved pipes that drew the water from a ditch. The Ditch Rider, a county employee, made sure you didn't take water any other day.

We became old enough too to hear and see the ugliness in my parents' marriage. Love wasn't safe. He had affairs, even a secret second family on the road. They screamed at each other. He raised his fists to her, beat us savagely with a belt. It wasn't about discipline, it was pure, raw anger at the world. The best he could do was far short of enough. A coarse, uneducated man, he would relieve himself in the toilet while we took baths, idly scratching his scrotum while he lectured us on carelessness or the occasional poor grade. I still remember the stench of him, discovering while still a hairless child that I did not love or respect my father; I only feared him.

Love wasn't safe in that household. Affection could be given or taken away in an instant. The searing ugly scenes we saw, brutal things that were nothing like The Wonderful World of Disney or My Three Sons. One summer afternoon a lineman from the electric co-op walked up the lane. He seemed a hero from the Old West to me striding in his jeans and massive tool belt with hammers dangling like six guns. I followed him like a puppy, peppering and pestering him with questions. He was there to shut off the electricity. For six weeks my mother cooked and boiled water over a fire near the pump shed. The Old Man was building a dam somewhere on the Snake River.

The ugliness grew and we clung to each other, inventing games that took us out to the junkyard and outbuildings, or hoeing and weeding in the Eastern Oregon sun until there were blisters on our backs. They would have strange, passionately intense reunions, fondling each other on a lawn chair in the shade. I couldn't understand the giving and the loathing, sometimes hours apart. The shouting. It was all so raw.

The crud accumulates until you scrape it away.

A landslide of the heart

I woke up around 9:30, called a couple of my favorite people, my best friend Eileen and my brother Frank, then straightened up my ridiculously messy room. I discarded the embarrassing collection of papers, old mail and wrappers, took wine glasses to the sink and washed them, folded the clothes and put them away. I unpacked from my Christmas trip. I feel lighter and more whole. I still haven't made the bed.

It took till 11:30 to finish the chores. By then I was massively hungry. In the kitchen I found two slabs of sourdough bread, cut off a half-inch slice of ham and four pieces of swiss cheese with some mustard and assembled a sandwich. I'm a big boy. I like to eat.

I took the sandwich to my desk and lit a candle. It's mealtime, and a candle invites the sacred. A person should never eat alone so I opened the blog to write a post. You are my company today, and I treasure that.

There's something about the combination of a long trip, calling special people, doing chores and eating a massive ham sandwich that makes you reflective. I particularly like this song and this version of it, "Landslide," performed by the Dixie Chicks in a live performance somewhere in Europe (Sweden, maybe? Not sure about that part.)

The song touches me and stays with me these days, for a variety of reasons. The beautiful clear voices. The crush-worthy lead singer. The tender strains of the mandolin. And of course the lyrics and their message:

Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older, too

We all have songs that become touchstones, windows into our hopes and soul. It's magical how music can do that, lift us to the best part of ourselves, express our sadness, longing, meaning and need better than we can ever hope to. This song plays in my Pandora nearly every day.

I was singing the chorus in my halting tenor as I did my chores, feeling a tremendous comfort.

I AM getting older, but getting bolder is a choice, I believe. A lot of people face their advancing generations and become more careful, which I think that is a tragic, disastrous, calcifying mistake. My grandpa was a vigorous man who built his own house with his own hands at 63. He got a little help with the plumbing and wiring, but structure and the carpentry were all his. Then he retired and sat in a chair. He got Alzeimer's. By the end of his life he couldn't recognize his wife of 60-plus years.

Getting older makes me think of the journeys I could take, the choices I might make and the direction they could start me toward in my life. It's exhilarating to see possibilities instead of sameness.

A list in forming in my head, and this is the first time I've sat down to put it to paper, albeit between bites of enormous, delicious ham sandwich.

These are choices I could make, some of them mutually exclusive. All of them will alter my path in marvelous ways, while certainly a few wouldn't turn out at all. It's wonderful to feel at 62 there are adventures to be had, that I can grow and learn and discover and make changes. I can pay more attention to the road I travel, the souls I touch along the way. Robert Frost said, "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

Frost's poems have been cited and recited so much that the metaphors have been worn out by less subtler minds, leaving a road with potholes and a crumbling stone fence at its edges. In "Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening" and "The Road Not Taken" he talks both about how one path closes another and the subtle seductions of merely giving up, letting yourself sleep, lulled by the rhythm of the bells on the harness as the snows fall.

Sorry for the mock profundity. Just trying to learn to write pretty. This is my list so far, with items that are both little and big in their scope:

Learn to play guitar (that's on everyone's list, I think. It'd be nice to play a song or three, sing them one day with my granddaughter,)

Join a writer's group.

Take a cross country trip. Read the historical plaques. Hike the Grand Canyon. Stop for pie. Flirt with the waitress. Attend college football in various towns and write a blog about it.

Own a place of my own, my own apartment, a 600-square-foot trailer, something. I've always wanted an office and a study, three bookcases, a good chair and reading lamp, a cherry wood desk like the one I had before the last time I was homeless. (Another story, preceded by bad choices.)

Get a job at Eastern Washington University, something simple, be a janitor or academic advisor or part of the landscape crew, attend classes one or two a quarter. It's close enough to my grandkids I could go to soccer games, far enough away that I wouldn't intrude on their family,

As an exercise, write a novel about Cullen Bohannon's journey East.

Open a bookstore, a coffee shop or a brew pub. I'd want it to be a shoestring business where the chief purpose was to have a pot of coffee on and talk to people. I had the thought earlier this week that a sense of community is disappearing from our lives, that no one is really good at it anymore except women, who seem to make and keep strong friendships in their lives that make a difference. Eileen is a whiz at it, whole communities of women in her life that support each other and have rich, healing, joyous conversations. I'd like to be a part of a place that fosters that for myself and other people, a church without a collection place or a ponderous pastor. Main street is gone in America, killed by Amazon, Walmart and the invention of the smart phone. All we have left is Facebook, a sad substitute.

The trouble with working in a bar or convenience store is that you are surrounded by smokers and drunks while you're not drinking.

Continue working at the bakery and save money for my retirement.

Get an online degree in counseling and establish a practice in a small town.  Base the therapy on the principles of Carl Adler, "warm, positive, acceptant."

Buy a motorcycle, learn to ride and maintain the bike. I am a ridiculous shell of what a man should be--I can't fix anything. I'd like to learn from the ground up. It'd be my Walden. I'm sure it would be good for me as long as I didn't hit a tree.

Take a long motorcycle trip with my brothers, although they are complete clowns and would probably steer me into a tree trying to keep up with them.

A risk I'm willing to take, because I'd much rather die with boots and helmet on than in a chair.

"Mary Jane's Last Dance" is on now, so I think I'll get up and dance. Gotta work off this ham sandwich.

I have been bruised by the roads I've taken, and I have been shaped by them. I don't regret any of my travels, even the ones I found painful and costly. I realize I have to choose carefully from this point forward. I only have time for a few more journeys and the miles are precious.

Disaster reorders our lives in marvelous ways

Henry David Thoreau was the first blogger. He set a very high bar.

I don't like reading my old posts, not at all. They sound whiny and glib and inauthentic. This is a different time than all the times before it, however. For me blogging is chiefly about developing a voice and learning to see in clear, genuine ways. Capture details. Be in the moment with experience. If I ever write about a woman/love interest again, please shoot me. That's tedious.

At the bakery where I work the pan line forms the beating heart of the make-up department. The pans come together on a conveyor under the roller with a steady tap. Tap. Tap. Tap Tap Tap.

Jack and Mario run the divider, the section of the work that includes the dough divider, a lift that carries balls of bread overhead, the roller, and then an electronic eye that drops the formed loaves into pans.

Names are changed here to prevent me getting nabbed for an immediate trip to HR.

Jack's the veteran of the group, the steady hand who commands the middle. He watches the bread line with his thumbs under his armpits and his legs spread wide, calmly until something goes wrong. He's serious, a man of average height with a Lincoln-shaped beard who used to work on a sub tender in the Navy. "Know what Navy stands for?" he asks, quickly providing the answer, "Never Again Volunteer Yourself."

Jack's an iconoclast and a skeptic. At the shift meeting he piped up, "It's my Friday. I've got my sarcasm face on so don't mess with me today."

I asked Jack about the tap, tap, tap, that it sounded like a heartbeat. He said, "When I first got this position I learned to listen for the sounds the pan line makes. If it's not making them  I know something is wrong." I suspect working on the sub tender was the same way. Men who are good at working with machinery understand the beating heart of it.

I came to the bakery at the end of the summer. I'd been driving for Uber for two years until one Saturday morning a young woman with no insurance backed blindly out of her driveway and plowed into the side of my car, missing my face, shoulder and ribs by about five inches. The passenger door collapsed but held, and my passenger wasn't hurt. I'd picked her up from the airport and we were about two blocks from her house. She was lovely about it.

Just like that, I had smashed car and no job.  Uber insurance only covered a third of the cost to fix it after a $1000 deductible and a cynical lowball of the claim, so I was stuck. My sister lent me a thousand dollars that got me through September. I didn't even ask her. "Pay it forward," she said.

I starting temping to keep afloat, until one day I got an assignment at the bakery shipping depot with a team from production. It was a great night. We worked in a sweat and plowed through 20 pallets of frozen bread, dating it and loading it into trays. It was like football practice. The positivity and teamwork were infectious. Three people, supervisors at the plant, said to me, "You're doing great. Are you looking for a job?"

I applied online the minute I got home, working four more times as a temp while I went through the screening and interview process. For the first time in ages I had a home, a place where the standard was simple, just work as hard as everybody else and be appreciated. They feed us lunch every day, steel-cut oatmeal at the steam table before shift. An army travels on its stomach.

When the worst possible thing happens, or what we think is the worst possible thing, it can be very liberating. Disaster reorders our lives in marvelous ways. It got me a home and a place to work, good money to travel to Idaho for Christmas and spend too much on presents.  I have dreams now. I could get my master's in counseling, or buy a motorcycle and take a cross-country trip with my brothers (be a hell of a book) or get my own apartment, my own kitchen to dance in, my own reading corner with three bookcases. Money is opportunity and choices, beginning with the opportunity to pay it forward.

Idaho Christmas

We keep on repeating the same lessons until we truly learn something from them.

Real human connection is the most valuable thing on earth. Our culture is starved for it. Technology, consumerism get in the way.

Most of us don't go to church anymore, and after Amazon and Walmart there is no Main Street. Structures that bound us together don't exist.

Talked to a young woman tonight. She and her boyfriend are getting evicted from their housing share as unauthorized guests.

Both have jobs, but together they don't make enough for Portland rents or $2500 in move-in costs.

They want to buy a rundown RV and live on the street. "Even if it has mold on the roof," she said, "I just want a place of my own."

Drove to my daughter's home in Idaho for Christmas. Got there on Christmas Eve around six.

The front window looks into the office, and at the piano I see my youngest granddaughter.

She's a picture of concentration, back straight, a ribbon in her pretty hair, playing "Up on the Housetop" and "Silent Night" in a beginner's cadence.

She's so focused on her notes she doesn't see me, and I watch her from the window for both songs. Snow shrouds the fir trees in the yard.

This is the most tender memory of my life.

You think you are doing one thing or another, until you discover your real life is about something entirely different.

What I learned in my 59th year

For the last year I have begun a simple ritual that has transformed my energy, my life and my outlook, and made me an intensely happy person.

It takes five to ten minutes, 20 if you're ambitious, 30 if you're an overachiever.

I light a candle and turn on Pandora to my favorite mix of music. I breathe deeply for a few minutes and listen to the music. You can call it meditation but it isn't necessary to chant or get mysterious about it.

I write two paragraphs or a page in longhand, in my best handwriting with my favorite pen, about the things I'm thankful for that day. It can be anything from breakfast to eyesight to my grandkids.

In a very few days you'll begin to realize how rich your life is, how precious. A new optimism and energy will flow out of you. It increases as you celebrate the abundance of your life, and your own courage, strength and hope.

Over time you can combine it with other exercises like compiling a dream book of images and words that inspire you, something to look at for a minute or two every day. Think a little about what you want, what you want to accomplish, the kind of person you want to be.

Living intentionally is a very powerful thing. It has brought me a lot of optimism, confidence and joy.

---

I am grateful for health, energy and an alert, inquisitive mind. I am grateful for a good night's sleep, good food, a good workout, and a warm pleasant day.

I am thankful for my clean, well-lighted place, the study that gives so much comfort and inspiration.

I am thankful for a job that allows me to write and learn, pays my way, gives me a daily practice of mental acuity in a pleasant environment.

I am grateful for the the comforts and conveniences of civilization, hot showers, clean clothes, a tooth brush, a home, a place of my own.

I am grateful for the opportunity to practice courtesy and spread light.

I am thankful for my lessons, failures and sorrows, for all they have taught me, for the unmined lessons of acceptance and discovery within their borders.

I am grateful for choice, for will, for the freedom to choose what I do and how I think, how I respond and react to what happens around me.

(Photo by nature photographer David Dennis.)

Hollywood stars are not going to use this secret trick

Yesterday was my birthday. I realize this morning that 59 is old. When there's leftover pie, you might as well eat some for breakfast. You may not get another chance.

Not that I am going to go completely crazy, but this is a time to loosen the rules a little. It occurs to me I am never going to look like Hugh Jackman, and that's okay. While I'm sure Mr. Jackman is an affable and decent fellow, and very talented, a big part of his job is looking good for a living. Thus he sacrifices, and he has an army of people to advise him about what he eats, wears and how much and how often he exercises.

I woke up at five this morning to write. There's nothing particularly virtuous about it; it was just that I'd slept long enough and there was nothing I wanted to do more than get started in my study.

A more disciplined man would start the day with a 3-mile run or a grapefruit, both of which would improve my chances of getting into last year's pants. Though I'll take some time for physical activity later today, it isn't my first priority at this point in my life, and I'm not going to be slavish or self-sacrificial about it.

I asked for a birthday pie, and Vicki is so kind and sweet that she made one, marionberry, my favorite, and it might have been her first. The filling was soupy, but you could spoon it over the crust and it was delicious.

I'm having a wedge for breakfast, and if Hugh Jackman is in the neighborhood, he can run over and have some too.

A good death

My sister is dying of cancer. She has two tumors in her chest, inoperable, and it has spread to her lymph nodes. The doctor gave her two years, and four months of that is spent.

K_____ is 15 years younger than me, the youngest of seven. Though my parents are both passed, she's the first of my siblings to face death, and she's doing so with a courage, dignity and strength that I marvel at.

She has 3 daughters, ages 11, 16 and 22, two grandchildren and a loving husband. She's made it a priority to seize the time she has left, enjoying every walk and dinner and night on the town for ice cream.

Her funny, thoughtful Facebook messages have been an inspiration to family and friends. She's gathered a community of Love around her, truly living rather than waiting to die. Middle daughter Tia is six feet tall and graceful, growing to be a beautiful young lady. She's a sophomore, trying to make the varsity basketball team. My sister has one, maybe two more seasons to watch her, and plans to cheer on every dribble and swish.

Friends drop off meals for her family. Trips to town in the small community where she lives are a hug-a-thon. She remembers to thank her nurses.

My sister's hope and optimism rests not in elusive miracles but in the commonplace ones: she's focused on living and enjoying her family and saying a long good good-bye.

Though I don't want to lose her, I marvel at the light, energy and joy she is sending out to the world around her.

The perks of being human

"But even if we don't have the power to choose where we came from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can feel okay about them."

      --Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Daily affirmation, November 11, 2014

Today I resolve to live stronger and let go of fear.

Beginning in this moment I will choose action over anxiety and gratitude over frustration.

I am a thankful, abundant, joyous, energized person, and that is how I choose to live.

Today I resolve to find the opportunity in my obstacles, and the hope in my challenges.

I will move, live, breath, and exercise with appreciation and thankfulness.

I will dance and hear the music. I will hold my friends and family close.

This is my one life. I am so grateful that it begins again today.

Daily Thankfulness, November 11th, 2014

I am thankful for joy and abundance. I am thankful for hope.

I am thankful for the fall colors, the changes and rhythms of the seasons, how they invite us to be quiet and reflective, more accepting of the changes and transitions in our lives.

I am thankful for a nutritious, simple lunch.

I am thankful for health, energy and activity.

I am thankful for books and their ability to transport and inspire me. I am thankful for inspiration, creativity and the pursuit of understanding and clarity.

I am thankful for my family and friends.

I am thankful for the opportunity to write and the challenge to grow. I am thankful for new beginnings.

photo from my long-time friend Jodene Rudolf, from her Facebook page.

Lower blood pressure, reduce stress and fight stubborn belly fat, without exercise

First let me say I love exercise and heartily recommend it, provided a person has the blessing of their doctor.

But even before you start exercising, you can do something today that will help you get healthier and feel better and even lose weight.

A simple practice of meditation, as little as five to ten minutes a day, can have wonderful benefits to your overall health and well-being.

Meditation works, and it's not difficult to learn. Google "benefits of meditation" and the search will return glowing reviews of its value in lowering blood pressure, reducing stress, improving creativity, empathy, and concentration.

To make a real change in your health and fitness, start with a change of outlook

Any real fundamental change in our happiness and well-being starts with a change of attitude.

This simple exercise will boost your energy and your motivation, but it takes a 30-day commitment.

Buy an inexpensive notebook at The Dollar Store or Target, or reuse a half-filled one from the top shelf of a closet.

For the next 30 days, at bedtime or in the morning when you wake up, write two paragraphs, in long-hand, in your best handwriting, about what you are thankful for that day.

If you haven't got time for exercise and hate the gym, do this

First light a candle, because it initiates a feeling of ritual and it's an invitation to the sacred.

Turn on some of your favorite music, either Pandora, your I-pod, cassette tapes, the radio, whatever you have.

Then dance. Let go of the compulsion to "do it right" and simply get moving to the music.

If you allow yourself, in 30 minutes you will be exhilarated and drenched with sweat, opened up to your sensual side, freed in body and soul.