ORCAS is gone, I bike across town

Peggy drove across town today, and I later went to meet her on my bike. It was a two-hour trip—the way I did it. I biked streets that I hadn’t been on in a decade and others that I had never been on. I passed the Oregon Center for Applied Science (ORCAS) where I worked as an on-call handyman for years. Several blocks later, I realized that I hadn’t actually seen the two large buildings, so I biked back to discover that they were gone, torn down, all the way beneath the ground. Only the trees and parking lot remained. I could see where I parked, where I set up my sawhorses, and where I entered the buildings. I never imagined that all my work would be so quickly destroyed, and I felt bad about it, although the knowledge quickly came to me that I was but a minor player at ORCAS and therefore a minor loser. The irredeemable devastation before me became a metaphor for the end of all things as I stood in the gray overcast.

Shortly afterwards, I passed the Shari’s where Don and Dorrie took Peggy and me to eat. They were millionaires, so I expected something better, but Shari’s was their favorite place. Don died twelve years ago, and Dorrie soon followed; leaving their money to a son who is characterized by the arrogance and sense of entitlement that follow most rich men’s children.

On one part of my journey, I passed through a residential area of curving streets, most of which were named for trees that don’t grow naturally within a thousand miles of here. The day being cloudy, I might have lost my bearings if not for occasional sightings of the Coburg Hills. I forget how big Eugene has grown, how many hundreds of thousands of people carry on lives that I am in utter ignorance of, all within a short distance of my home.

I wasn’t exactly lost in these suburbs, but I didn’t know my route out either, and the thought came to me that a flat tire would present quite a problem. It would prevent me from either meeting Peggy or letting her know what had become of me. I saw no place except people’s yards to leave my bike; and I doubted my ability to walk out. I knew that I would have to knock on doors; and I knew that if I were the people behind those doors, I probably would not open them for fear of a home invasion robbery. I resolved to carry tools in the future.

Later, I passed two teenagers on a bike path. I studied them as they approached because they were on bikes that were so tiny—and with seats so low—that their knees practically touched their chins on the upstroke. One smiled at me and said, “Hi, how are you doing?” The other also smiled and said, “Do you want to fight?” I said nothing, and they screamed profanities. I took comfort in the thought that I could easily outrun them, not that I bothered to look back to see if they were in pursuit. I later wished (or half-wished) that I had talked to them in an effort to understand why they would abuse an old man (for I must have looked old to them) on a bike path; but this would have put me at risk of underestimating both the extent of their meanness and the extent of my ability to elicit their goodness. Riding a bike exposes a person to things he would never experience behind two tons of steel.

Cheap versus frugal

A year ago to the hour, I was having knee surgery. Today, my application to an experimental drug study for people with severe arthritis was accepted. I feared it might not be because, after all, how severe is severe? Surely, there are people who are worse off than I.

I upgraded my order for a new bike, putting it at $1,700. If my father knew I was spending that much on a bike, he would declare me a fool. The difference between us is that I am frugal whereas he was merely cheap. It’s a distinction that few people make. I rarely eat out because I place no value on eating out and because I can eat more economically at home, but when I do eat out, I order a cheap entrée. If the cheap entrées cost too much, I order a cup of soup or even a cup of coffee. I know plenty of people who think nothing of spending $30 on a meal but would turn pale at the prospect of a $1,700 bike. Few of us have unlimited money, so we must either prioritize or spend until we run out.

My father took another route. He carried thousands of dollars in his billfold (he never much trusted banks), rarely bought anything he didn’t have to have, and spent as little as possible on that. Even his carpentry tools were chosen more from a standpoint of price than of quality. But as I see it, he could have done worse. He could have said to hell with tomorrow and lived in debt. If he had, I would have pronounced him the fool, although being a fool in one area doesn’t disqualify a person from being brilliant in others.

Peggy and I share what I suspect are the two most important values to a happy marriage. We value money about the same, and we value housekeeping about the same. She’s a little freer with her spending than I, and I’m a little more opposed to clutter than she; but at least we’re in the same ballpark. We also excel in that each of us encourages the other to loosen the purse strings from time to time—as with this bike. If Peggy had balked about the price, I wouldn’t have ordered it, but the only time she balked was when I returned to the store to make an alteration, and she somehow thought I was going to cancel the order due to the cost. When I came home after spending hundreds of additional dollars on a stronger and more versatile frame, she was as pleased as I with my prudence.

I study Spanish to keep my brain young

I’ve been studying Spanish for two hours a day for the last ten days. I heard that it’s important to exercise your brain as you age, so I figured I should either do math or learn Spanish, and Spanish seemed the more practical.

Spanish has a lot of charming words like la falda (skirt) and funny words like el excusado (toilet), and it seems logically constructed compared to English, which is more like a house that was added onto by each of its twenty owners, none of whom had any talent for carpentry or design. This isn’t to say that I don’t love English. I adore English, but that’s because it’s my language and the language of my cultural forbearers. On the other hand, if I were a Spanish speaker who was trying to learn English, I would be pulling my hair out. The only thing that bothers me much about Spanish is that every noun in the whole language is either a boy noun or a girl noun. Who thought that up? The wall (la pared) is feminine, but the floor (el piso) and the ceiling (el cielo raso) are masculine. Go figure.

My first peace rally

I just came from a neighborhood candlelight peace vigil. We were two men, four women, two kids, and a dog—a peaceful dog, unlike my dogs, which I left at home. We stood in the middle of 17th and Van Buren; lit candles; sang a song; ate cookies; watched two nutria amble by; and were kept on our toes by four passing cars. I went mostly to please the woman who invited me. I had only met her once before (ten years ago), and found her to be true to her reputation as aggressive, argumentative, and all around obnoxious. Still, she lives but a block away, so when she interrupted my work to invite me to attend an event that she was hosting, I saw a chance to mend our relationship. I doubt that the event contributed anything to world peace, but maybe it helped on a smaller scale.

I daresay that I was the only person at the peace rally tonight who would want to do other than help society’s enemies, and this is one of the reasons that I rarely attend peace rallies. In fact, I don’t recall having ever attended a peace rally. Six adults, two kids, and a dog…guess I started out small enough. I suggested that we start a riot, but peaceful people are more, well, peaceful than they are amused by my offbeat humor. Of course, I am more prone to making sweeping generalizations than I am to peacefulness, so I guess we’re even.