Whether one prefers the misty, cloudy twilight for photography or the dramatic contrasts of shadow and sunlight, mid-Spring is an unsurpassedly excellent time to visit the Olympic Sculpture Park.
Rainy, a day may be, but from the Z-Path, the views are awesome of the clouds dissolving into ocean rains, or remaining on high, drifting overhead.
Among the tall pasture grasses, orange poppies proliferate, especially against the East Meadow’s heat-radiating concrete walls.
Darker colors of blue and purple Arctic lupins rise up in the meadows and Aspen Grove. Oregon sunshine and even dandelions are as yellow as anything short of a painted yellow sun.
A meadow is much more than amber waves of grain, which we have too: ambers and browns among brighter and darker hues. Not instead of green, because, greens, we have. Long, wide lawns of perfect blades of green grass.
Fireweed purple– color like that? Yes, it does deserves its whole own brand.
Snowberry green is evocative of olive. Salmonberry green is richer, with the ridges and serrated edges of that leaf. Dark and tiny are the individual greens of ground-covering kinnickinick. Long, dark and pinpointed, fronds of ferns. Of that sort of green are the leaves of Garry oak. Soft is the green of the quaking aspen tree. Softer still, red-twig dogwood. Mahonia leaves are glossy, and unabashedly prickly. To mention just a few.
Textures of leaves– as varied among these plants as their shades and colors.
Approaching the Cloud Bridge from the north, one turns right, downward onto the path along the train tracks, into a brisk ocean breeze stirring up aspen leaves, and feels, this is a lively moment, here and now.
White and gray, the clouds beyond the Olympic mountains, above Puget Sound, upon the Olympic Sculpture Park, and whether the sky be shiny or clouded, each engenders its own particular advantages for photography in the park. Or a hands-free walk.

You never know what you’ll leave with when you go into the grocery store.
QFC had its glory days long ago in 1970s Lake Hills and I still go there a lot although I wish it hadn’t disappointed me those times I couldn’t even get a can of cream of potato soup.
I too worked for companies that were sold to bigger companies that cared only about short-term profit, not the past, or the people, or the present, so I can’t blame the store for no longer being what it used to be.
I went to the Northgate QFC one day and heard REM’s “Man On The Moon” on their stereo. I, a guy who was no longer the guy I once was, listening to a song by a band who was no longer who they once were, in a store that was no longer what it once was, in a neighborhood that never was much of anything and probably never would be– saddest song in the world– not weepy sad, pathetic sad.
I would have gone somewhere else if I’d known that sad, sad thing was going to happen.
I’m always under time constraints when I go into the 3rd and Union Bartells, so I don’t anticipate that I’m walking into a muzak environment, but I’m often amused by the sometimes-familiar, sometime-not pop music they play. The variety of people in that Bartell’s, it’s pleasantly corny to think that management somewhere has decided, “Our customers will like this middle-of-the-road pop music.” Except that we’re all at Bartell’s, it creates a bond anyone would be embarrassed to admit and that only exists in my imagination. And maybe 3 or 4 people at any given time.
That’s different from QFC, as the city is different from the suburbs, and there is no QFC in the city.
In the suburbs live all of us who often feel we’re silly living out in the suburbs among people who disdain any hint of big-city danger, which includes the youth culture of rebellious music, be it so-called or not.
So surprised I was at 7:00 that recent Sunday morning in the local QFC, so quiet an hour that from a ceiling speaker an aisle away there was no mistaking Television’s “See No Evil.” I remembered “Man On The Moon” and thought maybe I could reach my heart before it fell and got all trampled, but it stayed, and would have soared if it still could, listening to that song that wouldn’t be tarnished by the incompatible surroundings. “It’s so early that somebody in back probably has that on before they have to play the regular stuff,” I rationalized.
But this morning, 11:30 on a Monday, “London” was “Calling.”
Maybe you saw years ago when the Grammys did some sort of Clash tribute and all these heavyweights played that, sweating, grimacing, chopping away at a song that is actually rather subdued, enough so that I’m grateful the Clash never did “MTV Unplugged” (did they?)
Now, the Clash, in my mind, “punk” though they were, were musical and idiosyncratic enough that to say they were punk is to give them short shrift.
People back then dismissed them and countless others on the basis of that one word, without any consideration for their merits as an individual group of musicians. Many of us thought it ridiculous that a group would be dismissed on that superficial basis, but we also liked being different from people who lacked our sophistication and sense of rebellion and adventure.
The Clash is long gone, and so many things that once seemed far-fetched have come to pass.
Youth of today, listening to the so-called wild music of yesteryear, thinking the music you listen to will never play in a supermarket….
Life is long.

As a long-time culture of one, “family” is an elusive concept, the identity one inherits at birth, so (apparently) easily transcended but so impossible to identify one never knows how much of who one’s self has been predetermined by particular jigsaw puzzle pieces that might come from any of a number of unknown people.
With a child, a lot of talking is done about who the child resembles. A parent can buy into that, and expect one’s child to take after himself, although, to observe the child, the idea that my son at the age of three and myself at the age of three would be at all similar seems unlikely.
To extrapolate back from adulthood to childhood, and vice versa, can’t be done.
Until recently, the idea that I am somehow a combination of my parents never occurred to me. That I would be much like my three brothers also seems way overly simplistic. Although how often I’ve wondered at myself, how I ever came to be this combination of characteristics, if maybe this predilection for implosion comes from my mother and my fondness from music from my father, my fondness for drink from my father, my fondness for literature from my mother.
That family is a great special thing has never been an experience of mine, and the idea that I should prize the companionship of family among any other group of people rings hollow, although very nice it is to be acquainted with companions, say, people from school, people at work, and describe them as being like family in a positive way.
The commonality of people seems the most telling thing of all. Aboard a bus, on the street, in traffic, I’m struck by how people can be both so individual and anonymous. I walk past someone and think how sad that I know nothing about him or her, although somewhere in the world, there might be a mother, father, son, daughter, long-lost friend, who would give anything to trade places with me so they could be close to this person whose existence gives his life its greatest meaning.
Maybe in Heaven people will have a type of transparence, so everyone knows everybody else, and one is always among people who have the truest appreciation of each other, with no distinctions of family, race, gender, any of the attributes we falsely identity with in this life. In Heaven, we’ll have our humanity, as we have it in this life, and to recognize that common humanity in everyone is to be a member of this one big family.

I’d have a $20 bill and I’d be set for a week in those mid-’80s days. Ten-pound bag of potatoes, a few cans of soup, bags of rice and noodles from the food bank, and enough money left for a six-pack of Schmidt and a couple of candy bars for the weekend.
Finally got a decent, full-time job in the late ’80s and moved to my first decent apartment in Fremont, next door to the Fremont Classic Pizzeria. I still remember the cashier…. Every Sunday I got a large pizza to build up my credit ranking.
I loved going to Marketime every day. Now I’m buying good beer, in bottles, the weird microbrews suddenly, miraculously rampant. Twenty dollars a week spending money? Not any more, baked potato breath! Fifty dollars wasn’t unheard of.
Now we go to PCC every Sunday with the goal of staying under $140. Don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that.
When I was a boy, food could be trusted, we thought. If food was in cans, that had to be because cans (and plastic containers) would shelter and preserve the goodness of the food.
All those chemicals– science, right? Although soft drinks– we would read the ingredients sometimes and try not to think about it. What is the taste of Coca-Cola, anyway? Can’t really think about these things.
Enter the new Puritans. My wife is one of these shoppers whose approach amounts to an overturning and reinvention of the food industry as, in my life, it has been known.
Food will not come in cans or plastics. Obviously, those materials consist of substances that just might, by the tiniest bit, contaminate the food with pollutants that will accumulate and not play nice with the human body. (Glass, paper, and some other things are okay.)
Non-vegetarian food is mostly horrific, meaning, all those rows of canned meat products, benign though the many varieties of chili seem to be, one must answer to the reality of the so-called lives of the chicken, cattle, sheep, pigs, overfished fish, lives truly “nasty, brutish, and short.” At some point, one wants nothing to do with all that, especially with relatively humane alternatives available.
As some people sensibly eschew any type of drugs in their lives, nowadays the default choice of sustenance is to choose food grown in clean soil, not exposed to pesticides and questionable fertilizers, grown by people with a kindred philosophy of prioritizing a clean environment, relocating human agriculture within a greater web that allows a full spectrum of ecosystems.
Buying the cheapest stuff, eating anything without thinking about it– I miss those days. Not because they were better– just because, I guess, I had the best of that world, as I knew it, as I have the best of the world now, as I know it, this world in which one always longs for a better future for this world, this life that is never without a taste of deep sadness.