Dry Ice Factory

Spent the four-day weekend in Portland. My cousin hosted Thanksgiving dinner at her house in Beaverton for the second year in a row. My dad made it this year despite feeling poorly after the triple shock of Romney's defeat, the University of Oregon's defeat (in football), and the trip from sunny Southern California to stormy Oregon. My brother capped the day with a funny story about how our aunt and uncle took him to get baptized when we were briefly home from Yap in 1968. Much laughter all around.

On Friday I went on a pub crawl with my brother, niece, and two nephews. The younger nephew isn't 21 yet, so he was the designated driver. It's nice that in this new world of microbrew pubs, which typically have food too, underage folks can hang out with the drinkers. We went to the Green Dragon, Hair of the Dog, and Hopworks Bike Bar, and that's just barely scratching the surface of what's on tap in Portland.

On Saturday we watched the Civil War football game (Oregon vs Oregon State), then I went out on the town with Dan and Lynn Steffan. I think we spent six hours together, and Dan told one great story after another. That boy should write more of this stuff down! Lots of Corflu XXX discussion as well. I caught the light rail back into the city center around midnight, and it felt so damned European.

In fact I used rail a lot this weekend, traveling by Amtrak to and from Portland and using the lightrail in Seattle as part of my trip to and from the train station. I love the train to Portland, and it was sold out in both directions. The only fly in the ointment was that King Street Station is a total mess right now as they go through a major renovation.

I guess the other thing of note is that I used my mom's glucose meter to do a fasting glucose reading one morning and got a 102. That's at the lower end of the range of the four tests in August, so I'm hopeful that I really have brought my level down. I'll have a lab test either later this week or sometime next week and find out what the doctor's verdict is. Fingers crossed.

This was another year of transition. It was nine years ago or so that my parents sold their house in Portland, and we started having Thanksgiving at their house in Central Oregon. This year they finally agreed to move back to Portland, so they bought a condo in the Pearl District. Because the condo isn't big enough for a Thanksgiving feast with both my mom's family and my aunt's family, we had it at my cousin's house in Beaverton. Then my dad wasn't feeling up to snuff because of the disruption of his schedule (or maybe as a protest against the changes), so he didn't come to the Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, there are a lot of dimensions to all this, with perhaps the main one being the aging of my parents. So many of my friends have lost parents in the past few years that it just heightens the feeling of transitoriness. Plus my sister-in-law just lost a brother-in-law to a sudden heart attack at age 61, and her other brother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. That would leave me as the last of her brother-in-laws, which is a weird feeling.

Still, it wasn't actually all gloom and a sense of impending mortality. For one thing there was little Celine, only eight months old and still fresh to this life thing. She's my niece's daughter. Also, I'm looking forward to spending time in Portland again after almost a decade away. This time I took advantage of the opportunity to finally visit Dan and Lynn Steffan, for the first time since they moved out here from Virginia over six years ago. I also hope to reconnect with old college friends in future visits. A bunch of us hiked over to Forest Park one day, and walked around Oak Bottom another day. My sister is trying to build up her hiking muscles in anticipation of hiking across England next April.

As usual there were plenty of jokes and laughter, teasing and stories. My nephews didn't spend much time with us, as they had other fish frying in Corvallis and Eugene, where they are respectively going to college. My niece and great niece were around every day, but in some ways it felt like we were returning to the old family unit before marriage and kids. A year of transition, which left me feeling a weird, restless longing underneath the happy sense of connection and belonging.

Thanksgiving weekend was a nice break from the seasonal blahs. Thanksgiving itself was a good time, with my parents, their kids and grandkids, and my mom's youngest sister and her husband, kids, and grandkids. Nineteen in all, with my cousin's daughter the youngest at three years old. She was cutest and highest maintenance as well. My aunt, the granny, wanted us all to take note when she said "no" to her for the first time ever. My aunt teased me about my beer belly, which she only just noticed this year. I think it took that long for it to break through her image of me as a skinny little boy. My sister was shocked to learn that I use reading glasses now. Hey, the baby in the family is turning fifty next year.

Other than that, the weekend was pretty mellow, except for one intense family discussion about my eldest nephew's latest flirtation with doing something stupid. The guy really needs to learn how to button his lip, at least around his grandparents, because there's no reason they need to know this stuff. I kept far worse from them in my own day. That aside, it was mostly getting caught up on everybody's latest plans. My sister is looking for another five-month teaching assignment somewhere in the world, maybe in Chile or Rwanda. My niece's photography business is slowly building. My youngest nephew wants to go to Tunisia for two weeks to study French. My parents had a wonderful time at a fifty-year reunion at the Mennonite college in Heston, Kansas. Mom was especially reflective on how their experience there was pivotal in changing the course of their lives from farm folk to white collar workers.

I read Michael Swanwick's Hope-in-the Mist, which is a short book about Hope Mirrlees. As the title indicates, it's an answer to the question, "Who wrote Lud-in-the-Mist?" Mirrlees was the daughter of a wealthy family, and she was a dilettante who was the friend of Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot and the companion (and maybe lover, nobody really knows) of the Cambridge classics professor, Jane Harrison. Mirrlees wrote an avant garde poem called "Paris" that some think was an influence on Eliot's "The Waste Land", and two novels that Swanwick is somewhat dismissive of, along with Lud-in-the-Mist. Neil Gaiman's introduction echoes Swanwick in seeming to think that Lud-in-the-Mist is an extraordinary book that stands head-and-shoulders above her other work. After it was published in 1926, she wrote almost nothing else except a handful of poems, although she lived another fifty years. A strange life, and a strange little book about it. I read it in one sitting. I'd say it's probably mostly of interest to fans of Lud-in-the-Mist, although anyone interested in the Bloomsbury group or Jane Harrison might find it worth reading too. I always have mixed feelings about biographies, but this one does at least shed some light on a fascinating novel.

I also read some fanzines over the weekend -- the latest issues of Banana Wings and Relapse, and a fistful of year-old issues of Vanamonde. Fanzines may be a dying form, but they're not going out with a whimper. I feel itchy to do something worthy of what my friends are publishing. What the hell, I do think the new Chunga can stand with these zines, but I want to do another one in response to what I've just read. Pete Weston's article about a boxful of old fanzines, in particular, makes my latest piece for Chunga seem pretty feeble and underdeveloped. The old man has kicked sand in my face! I'd better start lifting weights.

Well, so much for getting away from it all. Now it's back to work.