The Chronic Malcontent celebrates clear sky

After nine long days, the stinky brown haze is gone from Portland skies. Nine days of smoking twenty packs of cigarettes a day gives me renewed appreciation for breathing. I promise I will never again take fresh air for granted. If I were truly a good global citizen (which I'm not), I would immediately stop driving my gas-powered combustion-engine automobile. I would stop buying and burning fossil fuel. I would park that Focus at the curb and live in it. I haven't done it yet, but I reserve the right to do that in the future. The time may be coming sooner than I think. 

What would put paid to 2020 so we can be sure without a doubt it was truly the most king hell bummer year of our lifetimes? (It's not over yet, whoops, be careful what I whine about.) Hey, I know. How about an earthquake? L.A. just had one. Or another hundred-year storm like the one that decimated Portland on October 12, 1963? Maybe a fire in the Gorge, like we had in 2017? It's still fire season—more wildfires are likely. More riots? Yeah, that's too easy: Now that the smoke is gone the protests are back. More police shootings? I hope not. How about a long drawn out election night, one that lasts for weeks? Maybe a flood? I know, how about a derecho? Jiminy crickets.

At this point, I would not be surprised to see hordes of locusts swarming over Mt Tabor or armies of ants commandeering my kitchen. I've heard that people are part of nature, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. I suspect we severed our claim to that haven back when we invented the internal combustion engine and spawned a bunch of oil tycoons. It's hard to turn your back on prosperity, even when you know it might kill you. So now that we aren't part of nature anymore, we must be against it, and thus we are fair game for anything nature might do to eradicate humans from the planet. It's a good time to be a virus.

Speaking of viruses, so far no Covid at my mother's retirement home. Nevertheless, we are moving her to a smaller place next week. I'm not sure she knows what is happening. I've got a countdown clock going outside her window—a number on a little card indicating how many days to moving day. Tonight it was four. Four days left. Four days until I find out what I'm really made of. I think I can do it. I keep reminding myself I successfully took her for Mohs surgery and got her back safely without turning the clinic restroom into a toxic poop waste dump. I made it through nine days of wildfire smoke, shuffling through the haze to deliver gluten-free bread upon request. I've booked the movers. I've paid the deposit on the new care home. I've made a plan, I've written a list, I've made the proper sacrifices to the gods that care for demented old mothers. My secret fear is that my mother thinks the countdown numbers on her window are the number of days she has left to live, that her internal battery will wind down and when the movers come, we will find her stiff and dead on her stinky old couch.

Speaking of stinky old couches, Mom has decided if she has to choose between taking the bed or the couch to the new place, she'd rather have the couch. It apparently has more "comfort spots." It's hard to argue with comfort spots, even if the couch is ten shades of grime grayer than it was in the Christmas photos from 1998. She doesn't care what it looks like. At 91, she should be able to sleep on whatever she likes, eat whatever she wants, and say what's on her mind, even if it makes no sense.

Tonight she told me she'd been to this new care home before. I wasn't sure what she meant. That seemed unlikely.

"You took me there," she said. I could hear her plainly through the baby monitor. 

"When was that?" I asked. 

"It was a nightclub of some kind."

"Oh, like, dancing?"

"What? I can't understand you." I'd just coached the Sunday night aide on how to replace the batteries in Mom's hearing aids, so I know she could hear me. I didn't think it was the baby monitor. The tall blonde-haired aide seemed to be able to hear and understand me okay as I gave her directions on how to open the hearing aid drawers and peel off the sticky labels on the tiny batteries. I must conclude it was Mom's brain misfiring. 

"Dancing?" I said. "Music?"

"Yes, music."

"Dinner too?"

She looked thoughtful. "No, I don't think there was dinner."

The care home she's going to next week looks a bit like a three-layer cake. It reminds me of the old River Queen, a floating restaurant we used to have near Swan Island in the Willamette River. I went to my high school prom on the River Queen. I made my long two-toned halter dress out of slippery orange and yellow lining satin. It kept coming untied at the waist while I was dancing with my boyfriend Steve. 

I don't know where Mom's memory went but mine definitely went someplace I haven't been in a while. 

The Chronic Malcontent is choked by luxury problems

Off and on over the past three months, people in other parts of the country have asked me if Portland is on fire. Each time, I scoff and say, "Don't believe everything you see on the Internet." I would think of the small areas on the city that have drawn protesters and picture the rest of the city going about its business, peaceful, untroubled, dusty green under summer blue sky. This week was different. This week, with the exurbs on fire, I started thinking about what I would be able to pack into my car if the wildfires marched across the county line toward the Love Shack.

It's great to have the luxury of planning ahead. Not everyone in this west coast conflagration has been so lucky. I didn't seriously think my apartment was in any danger, but . . . well, my sister asked me if I had a bug-out bag ready. I said "yes" but then I thought, hey, when was the last time I checked that bag? There might be a jar of ten-year-old cat kibbles in there, along with some crumbling protein bars. Maybe a roll of toilet paper or two. Hmmm.

This has been a long week, and it's not over yet. I can't believe today that my biggest worry on Tuesday was a power outage. An unusual late summer windstorm blew in from the east on Monday. When I got back from my evening visit to my mother, I saw my neighbors standing in the gravel road in back of my apartment building, properly socially distant, staring up at a transformer on a utility pole. 

"You might not want to walk down this road," a new neighbor said, obviously not recognizing me in my dapper plaid mask. I ignored her and walked on down the road to peer up at the transformer with the other neighbors. 

Roger, our local sage, said with relish, "There was a crash and a pop. Then the power went out."  Great. I went inside and flipped some switches. Yep. No power. Good thing I had closed down all my open Word files before I left. The computer was now a dead dark hunk of metal.

The wind kept howling all night and all day Tuesday. I sat in the dark with a little battery-powered LED lantern, whining in brief texts to my Twelve Step friends about how terrible it was to be without power. Ha ha. Periodically I dialed the power company for an update and watched my phone lose a little more juice. We are aware of an outage in your neighborhood. It is currently affecting one-hundred and thirty-four customers. Because of the scope of the problem, we are unable to estimate a repair time. 

Two huge crane trucks and some other gear arrived at 10:00 pm on Tuesday night. I was so happy I went outside to welcome them with a happy dance. The air was breezy and balmy, clear and delicious. I watched them beep and bang and pound and rumble and three and a half hours later, like a miracle, my power was restored. 

That mighty wind wreaked havoc up and down the west coast, fanning any flames that might have been easily squelched on a normal day. Within hours, it seemed as through the entire world was on fire. Homes were destroyed. Lives have been lost, the tally as yet unknown. Houses, cars, trees, people, and animals have transformed in four days into an enormous smoke cloud that is now choking the air, blocking out the sun. It looks like hell. 

As I said, I'm one of the lucky ones. The wind died and stopped pushing the fires north. I put away my collected bug-out bag gear and battened down all the hatches to keep the smoke out. I thought I did a pretty good job. I didn't go out of the apartment for two days. I didn't even go visit Mom. Then I talked on the phone today and realized my place is not the hermetically sealed sanctuary I thought it was. I'd been coping with the bad air quality by shallow breathing. 

Today I got the dreaded text: Your mother needs bread. 

I knew it wouldn't be fun going outside, but I thought, how bad could it be? Lots of people are outside. Lots of people smoke cigarettes. Mom smoked for seventy-five years and look at her. Apart from dementia, she's in pretty good shape, for a ninety-one year old smoker. An hour in the smoke would probably not kill me. I checked the air quality. Hey, just barely into the Hazardous zone. Come on, Carol. Quit whining.

The stench of smoke hit me like a wall when I opened the door. My plaid face mask was just for show. It did nothing to keep out the smoke, of course—it's made from old cotton pajama pants, for crimony sake. The air sat white and heavy, like the worst L.A. smog I'd ever seen, and I lived there in the 1980s, so I've seen my share of smog. I trudged to my car. It was covered with a fine ashy dust, but that's normal for my car, since I only wash it once a year. I turned on my headlights to be safe and trundled off to Mom's with two loaves of frozen gluten-free whole wheat bread and the baby monitor. 

I left the bread outside the kitchen door. Mom was just back from dinner. We chatted through the baby monitor. Half of what I said she said she couldn't understand but it was still nice to see her. I started coughing. She told me to get going. I gave her the peace sign and headed for home. Driving up the hill I passed a bicyclist wearing a face mask. I had to be impressed. Not sure if it was supreme courage or colossal stupidity. I didn't linger to see if he passed out at the top.

Now I know I can go out into the smoke and make the trek to see Mom. However, I now know I must differentiate indoor clothes and outdoor clothes. The smell of smoke followed me into the Love Shack, and not that sweet campfire smell that used to cling to my brother's Boy Scout uniform when he came home from camping. This smell is terrible, maybe because I know what is in it. I breathed in a lot of horror and grief and even after a bath, I can still feel it in my lungs.