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The View in Portland

There are at least a dozen cities named "Portland" in the US, and three of them are in Maine (if you allow New and South to prefix it), but the largest and finest of them all is in Oregon, because that is where our newest grand-daughter lives.

Dan and Ellie could have named her Portland, but that would either require them to move, should another child happen along, or do as George Foreman did and name all of his children George, and Ellie and Dan did not want to name their children George.

She is Elliot.

She is four months old and--this being tax season--she is being listed on their tax forms as "Head of Household", and her income as "Milk".  

Everyone knows that it always rains in Portland, but God, in his Infinite Perversity, caused the sun to shine in Portland, unfaceted by falling rain, the whole two or three days we were there, and we were astounded again by how rich and wild Portland is with flowers and greenery in Springtime.

What sometimes is--let us be honest--a swamp on a hill is a glory and a delight in Springtime in Oregon, so much so that politicians in Oregon have proposed to build a big, beautiful wall all across their southern border and make Californians pay for it, in order to keep them out, especially since the University of Nike has better teams than Los Angeles, anyway.  It is only incidental that Californians seeking shelter from high taxes down south drive up home prices in Portland where prices are already too high because unfettered free trade and highway travel have allowed undocumented Californians to slip up over the Siskiyou mountains into the land of the free and the home of marginally lower tax rates.


We, of course, who are spending our dottering days in the Sonoran Desert, returned home to a forecast of several days of brutal occasional showers, and we have just had one of them!  But we are tough and uncomplaining even when refugee raindrops make dots and worm-tracks in the dust!

Elliot is unconcerned because she has her mind on better things:  things like lunch.

She is, as noted, only four months old, but she is our newest grand-daughter, and she already speaks, unintelligibly we do admit, but that is more a problem of our understanding than it is of her intention.

I do not want my children to know this, but as satisfying as being a parent is, between bouts of pique and poop, it is nothing compared to the pleasures of being old enough to know that while the days dwindle down to a precious few, there is a new generation just discovering how satisfying a snuggle and a dog and a flower are.

I watched Elliot stuff a foot in her mouth to see what it tasted like, while I contemplated what trying to do that would do to the hip I am having replaced later this week.  It would, I concluded, require the removal of bone splinters from my entire spine.  "Curdling" is how you might describe the sound of it.

"It is a long, long way," Mari said, "from Lake Mills, Iowa to Portland."  Truth be told, it is a long, long way from Lake Mills to almost everywhere, but the next generation is always a wonderful surprise, calling from us the kind of warm astonishment that our parents must have felt like this, too, and so will Elliot, someday, if we do not build that wall.

On our last evening in Portland, we had dinner with Daniel and Elliza, at a restaurant from where we could see far back, and something of the future.  It looked good.





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