Chapter 14: Home for Good

 Six years have passed since I wrote a chapter of this story. I am now less than a year away from 80. But in 1994 I was happily 55. I had been in my new home on Nehalem St. in southeast Portland for six months and it felt like safety and pride. I am still there today, though it may not be much longer that I can stay. At this moment, the back yard is falling into disrepair. I had someone come to give an estimate on pruning the old apple tree that was there when I arrived. Because I can’t afford the cost of spraying it each year, it produces many apples which really cannot be eaten. It’s kind of a symbol of my life now - I have not the strength to achieve all that I am capable of. The apple tree has changed in another way I can compare my life to - in the year I moved in the trunk of the tree was standing vertical from the ground. I can prove this because I began to photograph family members standing in front of it at the same time each year to show their own growth. Today it has slanted way towards the west. This was caused by my allowing a young cherry tree upstart to grow over all the years to enormous full height, thereby cutting off sunlight from the apple tree which stands west of it in the center of the yard. As the apple tree has aged, it has been forced to adjust to outside forces, but it has succeeded. In my own journey, I too have had to adjust in many ways to the pressures from outside. Who knows where I might have ventured if I could have gone straight up into my intended space.

 

Cameron, my grandson who is now 27, was celebrating his third birthday in July 1994. Every year his birthday falls just six days before mine. That year we celebrated together for the first time in my new back yard. Josh built him a slip-and-slide with a huge piece of plastic draped on the part of the yard that slopes gently down in a section halfway between the house and the back fence. It was the beginning of years of me having enough strength and energy and delight to keep the grass green by watering it with sprinklers, and hovering over the strip of English garden the former owners had left behind straight down the middle of the yard. It is with deep sadness and a little fear that I have finally come to a surrender of my final efforts. It has been maybe half the time I’ve been here now that the grass goes unwatered, like most of my neighbors’ yards, as we work to conserve water and keep down the water bills. But that year it was like a little paradise in July. In the summer of 1994 I was still at OHSU and going to classes at PSU at night. I started my second year of majoring in French that term and in Fall Quarter got an A grade again. I wasn’t all that happy at work and was thinking about maybe finding a job at PSU. Jane and Brian were still married and Jane was nearing the end of her time at the Center for Community Mental Health in Portland as a child and family therapist by October. Josh was still working as Store Manager at the Foot Locker in the Lloyd Center but in October lost his job and applied for unemployment, according to one of my little journals, though his resume lists him at Foot Locker through 1995. 

We all gathered that Christmas at Jane and Brian’s house, including Ron in from California. Now comes the story of another death in the family. My father’s eldest sister, Marjorie McDonald, outlasted him by 16 years. There were six siblings in their family, all of them well educated. Marjorie taught English for 40 years at Washington High School in Portland and during the Second World War taught English as a second language to Russians who were in Portland shipping war materials. She then learned to speak Russian and became the first high school teacher of Russian in the United States in 1944. When she retired she turned to art to help with severe migraine headaches. After painting first, she developed a style of collage that became her trademark, using rice paper dyed with oil pigments and thinned with turpentine. In 1980 she moved to Corvallis to be nearer to my dad, her favorite brother. That was when I got to know her better during my years back in Corvallis until I moved to Portland in 1983. She was a tiny bundle of creativity and we always worried she would blow herself up by drying her collages with the turpentine and paint on them in her oven in the retirement home she lived in. Her art was distributed from several Oregon galleries and she became nationally known. 

One day though, on her way at 96 to have her hair done in the salon where she lived, she tripped on a doorstep with her walker and fell, breaking her hip. Surgery and a stroke quickly followed and, as the closest remaining blood relative, I got the call to come down to be with her in the nursing home as she died and to organize her trust actions. I have a handwritten note from March 9, 1995 that says: “ Sitting in Marjorie's room at Heart of the Valley watching her slowly let go of this part of the adventure. Drove down all by myself this morning. Lots of time to reflect. It feels so right to be here. This is what an Elder deserves – to have a companion on the road out.” And so her remaining collages came to me as inheritance. Over the ensuing several years, I found I could donate many of them to local galleries and private individuals. There are quite a few remaining, along with much written material about her. I suppose one day they will pass on to whomever finds their care an honor in my family. For now, her most majestic gift to me has been the example she set of finding joy in creativity well into her nineties. My path is writing and I think of her often when I sit down to sift the words out. That spring some additional inheritance money arrived so I could do some major furnace repairs and also pay for a big two-story play structure in the back yard with a slide and a sandbox beneath it. It cost a bunch but was so well made that today, over 23 years later, it still stands proudly in my back yard with only memories of the days that Cameron and Sierra and their friends played in it. But on that day of Cameron's fourth birthday it was what can be called a Joy to keep forever. During all the years of their childhood that I lived on Nehalem St., I still spent Saturdays with Cameron and later Sierra. It happened that just across the street was a little boy named Brady who was Cameron's age, and so he joined us for that fourth birthday party. He became the Saturday Best Friend for many years to come, but that year ended with a Christmas that included a visit from Grandpa Ron and the happiness of Sarah being pregnant with Sierra who was due in February. My journal note says the best part was taking Cameron to see Peter Pan. On February 3, 1996, when Sierra arrived, it was below freezing and the drive to the hospital was icy. There had been the Willamette Valley Flood starting in late January into mid-February that was Oregon's largest flood event in the 1990's. It was such a joy to welcome my second grandchild. I don't remember the details now, but sometime between Cameron's birth and Sierra's, Josh and Sarah had divorced and then remarried. And three months after Sierra's birth, they separated again. At some point in 1996, Josh began working at Standard TV and Appliance driving a delivery truck and remained with them for the next few years. I don't remember what their living arrangements were during that time but apparently the situation in our family was pretty volatile. Also, in May of that year Jane went to Europe again to visit her father. In the summer, sports began with Cameron at five years old playing soccer. It was how Josh gave what had worked for him, to encourage both his kids to keep at all the different sports in coming years, just like he had to find his place in his world. It was a good season for us all, many family outings, quiet times in my back yard and hikes into the woods with Brady along. That September President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty at the United Nations and in November he was reelected President. In January 1997, I was having health issues – acute bronchitis and also having various molars pulled. Eventually there were enough of them that I learned not to grin for good. I truly feel it has made a change in my personality, not grinning. Sadder, shyer, more withdrawn into myself. On the good side of that spring, I have many photos of Cameron at an easel making art. It was so rewarding to throw art materials at him because he was clearly at home with them, showing how his journey would wind out into the future. Everything visual – also piles and piles of legos. Whatever is the creative side of the brain, that's the one he worked. Jane began working as a child and family therapist for the Children’s Center in Vancouver, where she would stay until October 1999. On the other side of spring 1997, Josh's car was repossessed. In April he threatened to kill himself and fired off a handgun. The police took a rifle he also had, but not the handgun. He refused to go to therapy. For his birthday in May, I gave him a car and started up the insurance. Later that month he got a misdemeanor driving ticket and I canceled the insurance. When I turned 58 in July, Josh was staying at my house but by August he left with Ron for a trip to Europe. I am so glad they had this time together. There are many photographs of all the places they saw. While they were gone, I worked on a way to get Josh into a studio at the Wimbledon apartments nearby when he returned. By November he had moved there. That winter one of the fun things I did was taking Cameron, Brady and Sebastian to the Oaks Park Children's Theater for plays, and by Christmas Ron was visiting and we were together at my house. Jane, however, was divorcing Brian after seven years of marriage. Brian Arnell was a bright, kind man who came from Russian Jewish heritage. He and Jane met when they both worked at a bookstore in downtown Portland. Jane wrote afterwards: “I learned what it was to be known deeply, to trust a human, to commit long term. I also learned that safety can be less than empowering and ultimately that indulgence is not always helpful. We are still friends.” Jane also began studying Buddhism around this time. Then in January 1998 came my first experience with being a proctor parent. Through the Morrison Center, which took in teenagers referred by the court system and offered them rehab from drug addiction plus regular high school classes in a big building in SE Portland, I contracted to take Jamey, a very young redheaded girl with every kind of problem you can imagine into my home for an extended period of time. For this service, I received approximately $1000/month tax free, but was responsible to provide her a room in my home, plus travel to the Center every morning, picking her up at night, and making sure she got to a certain number of 12-step meetings and had a certain amount of entertainment and clothing, etc. that she needed. All in all, Jamey was a sweet girl, though she bent the rules when she could - smoking cigarettes, etc. By March, she had been prescribed Prozac for her own depression and the adjustment to being her caretaker was wearing me down too. That spring and summer Josh began to have some run-ins with the law. Two speeding tickets in March and April, a Misdemeanor Assault Harrassment charge in June, and child support garnishments in July. He was working at Casual Male at the time, one of many jobs in the retail clothing business. But in May I went for a Mother's Day drive with him and the kids. And by July, Cameron turned 7 and I turned 59. It was a beautiful summer – lots of trips to rivers and beaches. We set up a little pool at the bottom of the slide attached to the backyard fort and it saw hours of use. That Fall two students from Stanford named Larry Page and Sergei Brin incorporated Google and googling became a verb everyone knew. Madonna and Will Smith won the 15th MTV Music Awards. My time with Jamey Ray had ended when she graduated from her program and went home, and I began to have short-term stays with other girls from the Morrison Center. Jane turned 33 in October. Sarah had become engaged, though I don’t remember anything about him. We had a joyful Christmas that year. Ron visited and we drowned ourselves in beautiful gifts, including an actual small pool table for Cameron. Cameron was now 7 and Sierra 2. The year of 1999 began with increasing trouble dealing with referrals from the Morrison Center, sometimes two at a time to cram into the tiny bedroom prepared for them. They were often angry, sullen girls with every cause in the world to be that way but kind of scary to deal with as a 59-year-old woman. The tension was offset by my regular contact with Cameron and Sierra and their best friend Brady. In April the Columbine High School shootings occurred and became the hallmark for so many more. In the 20 years since then nothing has been done to curb gun violence because the NRA lobby totally controls our legislators. Money means more to them all than the lives of our students. As June that year arrived, I was dealing with many complicated money issues and applied for my first ever home equity line of credit to help make ends meet. I began attending Debtors Anonymous during this time and learned that this is one of the few kinds of loans they condone. It was a good education for the years to come as I spent my last years in the work force before retirement. My heart is bare footed. When night falls I tell the darkness that I only want a clear tomorrow where I do no harm and feel more love.