It's official: The chronic malcontent is old

Welcome to the summer of carlessness. Mine, that is, I hope not yours (unless you want to be carless). I spent time this week embracing my new status as a professional pedestrian. It's all about framing the experience. Instead of bemoaning the fact that my car is a heap of metal and plastic sitting on four rubber tires and gathering dust, I'm saying, I'm doing something good for the environment. I'm shrinking my carbon footprint to the size of sweat droplets on the pavement. Look at me go! I'm a walking, bus-hopping, train-riding dynamo!

I could also say it's the fashionable thing to do. All the coolest people (my sister, Bravadita) are carless by choice. Both have been supportive, giving me tips on how to travel, what to carry, how to pack stuff...it's quite complicated, the pedestrian lifestyle. Suddenly I'm very conscious of the weight of my shoulder bag. Big questions: plastic water bottle or stainless steel?

How committed am I? Today my mother offered me a ride home from her place (we live maybe 2 miles apart). I was adamant: I had come prepared to walk: sneakers, hat, backpack, bottle of water... I was ready. For a moment, I thought, oh man, I could be home in ten minutes, well, five the way my mother drives. I shook my head. “No, thanks, I'll walk,” I said and set off on my journey.

What could go wrong? Heat exhaustion, strained knees, twisted ankle, upset stomach...I was sweating by the time I reached the end of her street, but I kept going, thinking, if it really gets rough, I can catch a bus part way.

I wandered through Montavilla Park, taking pictures with my old digital camera. The park has changed since I was a kid. The trees are bigger. The swings are gone, replaced by a fancy plastic structure swarming with screaming children. The outdoor pool was still there, not quite as big as I remembered it, crowded with splashing kids and parents. The sun was hot. The grass was green, dotted with little white flowers we used to string into bracelets and necklaces.

The world looks different at street-level. Walking offers time to think about what I'm seeing. It also gives me time to think about my mother and her recent declaration that life is no longer worth living and she wishes she were dead. I responded by making an appointment for her to see her doctor. Now she has a prescription for an anti-depressant. I hope she'll be willing to move into the retirement community in a few months.

Down the boulevard is the elementary school I attended in the late 1960s. The windows are new, but the brick walls are the same red-brown I remember. A tall chimney tethered with guy wires in case of earthquake pokes up into the sky (has that chimney always been there?). I crossed the wide playground in back of the school, snapping photos, and found the three ancient wooden portables still standing. These were supposedly temporary buildings set up to ease the overcrowding of little Baby Boomers. I remember practicing air raid drills in 1962, marching from the portable into the big brick building, sitting cross-legged with my face turned to the wall, one anxious child in a row of anxious children, waiting for the atomic bomb.

The hardest part of the walk was the final stretch, the trek uphill to the Love Shack. It's a long, fairly steep hill, which may account in part for why my old car died an early death: I felt my own internal carburetor overheating as I trudged, one step at a time, fighting gravity, sweltering in the sun, gasping in the shade, stumbling over curbs, until I reached the top, where my dusty dead car sat with its butt against the hedge, nose out, waiting for the tow truck.

In addition to being a professional pedestrian, I'm now officially old. Today I ordered a wheeled cart to pack my groceries home. It's red.

Always buy used and never fall in love

Christmas came and went with barely a burp. Nondescript weather, the usual array of cookies and relatives...nothing memorable to mark the passing of another holiday. No family feuds this year, no dueling duplexes. In the spirit of giving, I left my camera at home and did my best to be present. I survived. As usual, that is the best I can say. Now I hunker in the cave between Christmas and New Year's, waiting for the chocolate, sugar, fat, and salt toxins to exit my system, thinking about things like year-end bookkeeping, and wondering how I can somehow manage to wrangle an exemption from life. Oh, wait... maybe I should move back to Communist Russia.

It's the time of year when I expect things to go gunnysack. Mom's furnace. My life. My car. Yep. My Focus. My mechanic, Ping, told me my Focus is terminally ill. I'm not sure what that means, exactly, or how long I have. Will the thing blow up while I'm cruising down the freeway? Or will it simply sputter to a stop somewhere along Yamhill, leaving me to hoof it home? If I'm really lucky, it will take its last gasp as I pull it into its parking space. Hey, it could happen.

I knew that eventually my car would reach the end of its useful life, as do we all. No longer First On Race Day; now it's Found On Road Dead. Sigh. I would make a disparaging remark about Fords, but I have to admit, this car has been a really great car. It's lasted a lot longer than I expected, and not because of anything I've done. With all my cars, my plan is to drive them until they drop. So far that has worked out pretty well for me.

My dad's philosophy on cars was simple: always buy used and never fall in love. With cars, that is. The first part was easy. The second part was harder.

My first car was a 1966 Dodge Dart. Dingy white, of course, and shaped like a stocky rocket. Vroom. Bought it for $500 from a friend, sold it for $300 to a young kid who thought he could fix it up. I drove that thing all over Westwood, Santa Monica, and Bel Air, trying to find the homes of my wealthy custom clothing design customers. I wonder what they thought when they saw me puttering up to their fancy mansions and high-rise condos in a decrepit Dodge Dart. Oh, here's the help, is probably what they thought.

My second car was a poop-brown 1974 Toyota Corolla four-cylinder wagon. Bought it for $400, sold it for $400. I guess if you buy cars really cheap, you can sell them for about the same amount, that is, if they are still running on at least three cylinders, which the Toyota was. That car was intrepid. I drove it to Enseñada, Mexico, with three naked mannequins stretched out in the back. Long story. It's a wonder we weren't busted for drug-running.

My next car was a silver 1985 Ford Escort, a blunt little thing that was fun to drive when it wasn't having computer brain problems. Luckily my boyfriend at the time was handy with cars; he managed to keep the thing running long past its expiration date. I sold it to a guy from Ukraine and sometimes saw it tootling around Beverly Hills, spewing billowing clouds of exhaust in its wake.

My next car was a 2003 Honda CRX (formerly silver, now gray, probably repainted after an accident), the most fun car to drive ever made, except for possibly Minis and go-carts. That thing was a wild little demon. Or maybe I was the demon. It got me up and down the coast, from L.A. to Portland and back a couple times, and out into the wild deserts of Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Tucson. I moved back to Portland in that car. Driving the CRX was like skidding down the road on your butt, but without the skidmarks or road rash. That was the car I fell in love with. That was the car that inspired my father to advise me to never fall in love with a car.

The CRX, engine blown, died a sad little weepy death on the grass parking strip next to my parents' house and was later towed away by some charity, an event I watched, brokenhearted, from their living room window. My consolation prize was my mother's 1984 white Chrysler minivan, which was like driving a school bus after the CRX. Ironically, that was the year I was driving a school bus out in Gresham. I was grateful to have the van to get to work, and since Gresham was too far to drive home in the middle of the day for the long lunch period, I was grateful there was enough room in the van to sleep. I slept a lot in that van. I came to appreciate minivans as little four-wheeled houses. In my frustration at finding myself driving a school bus in Gresham for a living, I often thought about packing up my stuff in that van and heading south. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that the van was leaking transmission fluid.

True to my mission to drive cars until they drop, I traded the dying minivan for the shiny black 2001 Ford Focus hatchback (plus a lot of cash). I drove the minivan to Milwaukie, dripping red drops that looked disturbingly like blood (I only pulled over to refill the transmission twice), where I handed over a cashier's check and the keys to the minivan and drove off in my sporty four-year-old Ford Focus. That was almost ten years ago.

I used to be able to name all the makes and models of my father's cars. Now I only remember the few that I learned to drive on: the 1960 Oldsmobile Delta 88 whose speedometer was a strip of color that turned from green to orange to red (go faster, Dad, faster!), the sparkling turquoise 1961 Cadillac with the pointed tail fins, and a dark green Pontiac that was memorable only for stalling during my driver's exam... that's about all I remember now of the dozens of cars my father bought and sold in his lifetime.

I guess there is no point to remembering a list of cars, any more than there is a point to remembering the names of all my cousins kids and grandkids. Next year we will all be a year older and maybe a foot taller or a half-foot wider (hope not). Another used car, another happy new year.

Thanks for the condolences

I'm feeling a little fragile. Thanks for the condolences. First Davy Jones and now Thomas Kinkade. I can hardly write, I'm so overcome. With what, I'm not sure. Something, I'm feeling something, anyway.

I got home from work on Thursday and found a manila envelope on my front porch. Inside was a recent copy of People Magazine. On the cover, you guessed it—Davy. Sigh. My brother's girlfriend expressed her condolences by giving me something to remember him by, a sleazy tabloid magazine. So thoughtful. I called to thank her. Speaking through my brother (after fourteen years together, they have a polished ventriloquist routine), she said I would probably like to hang them on my bedroom wall. So perceptive. That's what I did when I was ten, so probably I would still do that now. Right.

The day after Davy died, my former significant other from Los Angeles emailed me to offer his condolences. He was being snarky. (I don't blame him, we didn't part on the best of terms.) But I took it at face value and wrote back a short acknowledgement. It's funny, I felt sort of sad when I heard the news, but not all that upset. After all, Davy was never my Monkee.

When I was a kid, there were four girls in the neighborhood gang. Four Monkees, four girls, what could be more perfect. Since Karen had all the Monkee records and the hi-fi stereo, she got first pick, and she chose Peter. Laurie was oldest. She got first dibs on Davy. Susie, her younger sister, chose Mickey, so by default, I ended up with Woolhat. At first, I was disappointed, but like with any disappointment, you learn to accept it and eventually love it. In time I came to believe that I chose Mike. And yes, his pinups were on my bedroom wall for awhile.

Once we all settled into our roles, we never switched. When Laurie wasn't around, the role of Davy was played by my younger sister, Diane. It didn't occur to Karen, Susie, or me to give up our characters to play Davy. We identified with our Monkees. So, when I say Davy was never my Monkee, that is what I'm talking about.

Having said all that, though, I confess that when I heard a Monkees song on the radio, sung by Davy Jones, I shed a couple tears. Not for him, but for my lost childhood. Davy was only eleven years older than me. I wept for the days when I was still ten and my little world embraced my creativity. I cried for the days before I was relegated to the role of second-class female. The days when my body was still my trusted friend. When I was confident in my conviction that I knew exactly what my life was for: to write, to make art, and to deliver it to the world.

Which brings me to the second death, that of Thomas Kinkade. I disparaged the man's art in a few of my earlier posts. He was apparently on a mission to bring light to the dark gloomy Satan-infested corners of the secular world. That deserves some respect, I guess. I certainly can't lay claim to such a lofty ambition. Most days, the closest I come to a mission statement is “Survive, then die.” So, while I can't say I'm feeling terribly sad that Thomas Kinkade, my personal nemesis, is gone, I am feeling sort of bereft. Who will I denigrate now? Who can I hold up as the bane of artists? There is a void now. Maybe it's my turn to carry on the legacy. Maybe I'll start painting on velvet.