Midlife Meditation

If you lived in Portland in the early 2000s, you may have seen a bumper sticker with the legend "Bring Major League Baseball to Portland," and this logo: The umbrella plays off Portland's reputation for rainfall, but does it in a distinctly un-Portland way. While our city does have plenty of rainy days, the precipitation is rarely of the drenching variety, and realizing that, Portlanders tend not to carry umbrellas. Yes, we'll wear water-resistant jackets (we also eschew true raincoats), but no bumbershoots for us, thank you very much. Carrying an umbrella on a typically misty Portland day almost guarantees  one to be an out-of-towner, in fact. We're so inured to rain that it comes as a surprise how unprepared we are to drive in it. The first rainy day after a dry spell sees far more accidents on the highway than rainfolk should be having. Add a cold snap, and things become nightmarish; which is why freezing rain shuts this city down. I was supposed...

Travel brings perspective. I just got back from a music education conference in Nashville. All our sessions were held in the downtown conference center which, on in the inside, could have been located anywhere in the United States: a brown and beige interior, indirect lighting, no pictures, posters, or even room names to suggest we were just a block from the crackling honky tonk culture of Broadway. Had I attended every concert and meet & greet, and had I been staying in the adjoining hotel, eating my meals in its restaurant, I could've gone all four days without seeing any of the city. Fortunately, that's not how I was disposed. I was staying off site, and got out of the building for lunch and dinner, as well as to see some live music. That taste of the city made me hungry for more, and I wish I could've spent another day or two experiencing it apart from the rigid conference schedule. The evening I spent in the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar, in part...

    Marathons are storytelling gold. Here I am, posing next to my baby daughter Sarah (she's under the blanket in the stroller) just before my first marathon, The Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, Father's Day, 1989: And here's the after shot, again with Sarah, one of her blankets covering my badly sunburned shoulders, my aching feet clad only in socks, me barely conscious, she sleeping in my arms:   I had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up for that marathon. It was still early in my running career--I'd been doing it for less than five years, and had only run in one other race, a 5K--and I was still gauging the lengths of my runs (and the speed with which I ran them) by counting steps. In 1985, I had taken a few loops on the track at Willamette, and decided I was taking 700 steps to run a mile. I had no notion at all of the variability of stride length, and my experience in the 5K bore it out. Of course, running all out for twenty minutes, my...