Midlife Meditation

If you've been out on a country road in Oregon anytime in the last few years, you've probably seen this sign: The sign's design and wording single out bicyclists as the travelers most in need of understanding and patience on the part of motorists. The main reason for making this distinction is that cyclists have fewer accident-avoidance options than walkers or runners, who can usually step off the road surface without risking injury (though, as I've pointed out in a recent post, this is not always the case, especially in areas with raised road surfaces and limited shoulders). The sign does suffer from a lack of specificity, however. An especially aggressive driver might interpret it to mean it's up to the cyclist to do the "sharing" by getting out of his or her way. In fact, Oregon law specifies exactly what a driver must do when overtaking a bicycle: ORS 811.065 Unsafe Passing of a Person Operating A Bicycle (1) A driver of a motor vehicle comm...

My last post, on the dangers of running or cycling on Germantown Road, generated a response that had me scratching my head and, ultimately, doing some research. One of the nineteen people who read the post put up a comment on Facebook to the effect that, under Oregon law, all those cars attempting to trim my arm hair were, in fact, in the right, and by obstructing their commutes with my soft body, I was actually committing a traffic infraction. As proof, he cited ORS 814.040. Oops. Wrong statute. That provision is only about crossing the street in town. It's Oregon's crosswalk law: pedestrians have the right of way if they're crossing the street at an intersection, whether or not there's a marked crosswalk. If there's a walk signal, they're supposed to obey it, but otherwise, the crosswalk is implied, and cars must yield to them. Crossing in the middle of a block ("jaywalking" in the vernacular), pedestrians must yield to vehicles; if they don'...

Let's start with the disclaimer: roads are for cars. That's why they're paved and marked the way they are. Engineers design roads to accommodate drivers, not walkers, runners, or cyclists. Now for the rant. This morning at 7 a.m., I headed out the door of my suburban home for a summer run. Amy and I live at the far north end of Bethany, an unincorporated area within the Beaverton School District. Running or cycling, it takes me just a minute to leave the spec houses of my neighborhood and be on a lovely country road, looking out across pastures, fields, and valleys to the hills beyond. This morning I surprised a trio of young bucks, and snapped pictures of one before continuing my run. My runner's high was kicking in early as I breathed the fresh air, drank in the long sunrise shadows, and celebrated all the best things about rural life. I was planning a run around the "block," a loop that includes Kaiser Road, Germantown Road, NW 185th, and f...

The gun lobby wants it both ways.  Whenever a child dies of an "accidental" shooting, whenever a disturbed individual takes a gun into a school to kill a dozen children, whenever anything happens that leads to an outcry against our lax regulation of firearms, the response is the same: don't blame us! We're the responsible ones, the ones who take safety classes, always lock up our guns, teach our children to respect them and never ever play with them. That would never happen in our home, my kid would never do that, it's the nut cases and the irresponsible gun owners who are the problem.  That may all be true. In fact, I'm willing to stipulate that the vast majority of gun owners are as obsessed with safety as a Tote 'n' Chip trained Scout with a pocketknife. But here's the problem: even if all the murders and suicides and accidents are exceptional, that's 11,000 exceptions a year, 3 exceptional deaths for every 100,000 people in this...

"You're going to tell one of your stories! I can't stand to hear another one of your stories!" (Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln ) For a good chunk of my life, I was a preacher. Preachers use stories to illustrate. It's a practice that goes back millennia. Jesus told many a parable, as did Buddha. The points made by the stories are not always obvious, and in fact, it's often best if there's not a simple, one-to-one correspondence between the story and the lesson. Parables, in particular, are stories that come at a teaching from an odd angle, and may contain multiple lessons, some of them not even intended by the storyteller. The sign of a great story, as with any work of art, whether performed or visual, is the life it takes on independent of its creator. A truly masterful story will have a different meaning for every person who hears it. This can be frustrating for people who would rather have something simple, de...

That's Gyp Rosetti, a very scary gangster in HBO's Boardwalk Empire. He spoke that line during a tense standoff, one of the few times in the series when everybody having guns didn't end in a shootout. In Boardwalk Empire , guns exist to be used on others. It happens a lot. The third season climaxed with a citywide gun battle, bodies piling up all over Atlantic City. Everybody having guns is a symptom of everybody being scared. For the last twelve years, Americans have been afraid. Someone sent me this graphic in 2002:   With planes hijacked and crashed into buildings, anthrax in the mail, terrorist organizations plotting further attacks, perhaps we had cause to be afraid. In such a climate, it should be no surprise that Americans are buying guns, that people who previously would never think of owning a killing device would want one in the nightstand. But there are some real problems with that kneejerk reaction. First, none of the people we were afraid of in 200...