Pincushion

 It’s been five years today since Noodle died. First thing in the morning, I carry my coffee and sketchbook and phone and headphones out onto the balcony and start drawing a picture for her. I feel a drop or two, and look up in surprise. It rarely rains in July here- and while there are a few scattered clouds, they don’t look like rainclouds. What happens next surprises me even more. A rumble of thunder rolls over the hills, followed by a flash of lightning. The rain picks up and my page is soon speckled. I close my sketchbook and place it inside. but continue to sit on the balcony in my bathrobe. The thunder continues but I don’t see any more lightning. When the rain slackens I listen to Elliot Smith sing Rose Parade and am finally able to cry a little.

On a whim, I head out to Hillsboro. It’s a nice long train ride and there is an antique place I enjoy rummaging around in, even if the aisles are too narrow for me to use my scooter comfortably. A soon as I get off the train, I see a bunch of tents set up. They are having some kind of chalk drawing festival, with a couple dozen artists lined up and down the barricaded street. 

When we were kids, we often drew with chalk on the sidewalk in front of our house. We were poor, and a box of chalk was cheap. I won third prize in a chalk drawing contest in West Park when I was perhaps nine or ten. I have no memory of what I drew, and oddly my parents didn’t take any photos, but I remember kneeling on my assigned square on one of the paths that circle the park. And I clearly remember picking up my prize with my father at city hall. I won a plastic yellow carousel designed to hold Crayola art supplies.

Noodle and I would go to West Park occasionally. I’ve always loved it there; it’s a small city park, with a wide variety of trees and a bandstand and a spectacular fountain with frogs and gargoyles that spout water. They used to hold a yearly art fair in the park, with tents of arts and crafts just like the ones I’m walking past now. We used to talk about buying a tent and selling our art at one of these fairs, but we never got around to it. Chances are it would have been depressing; neither of us made the kind of art that people at a street fair are looking for. Still, I wish we would have done it. I wish we still could.

The theme of this chalk fair –or La Strada di Pastelli, as it’s called, in an attempt to sound classy, I guess- is outer space. Many of the drawings look similar, and I wonder if the artists had a choice to use a pre-made picture. They’re mostly rendered in a smooth, realist style. I overhear one of the artists talking about using Photoshop. Though it’s ostensibly a family event, here are a lot of portraits of sexy astronauts, the kind that used to grace the covers of sci-fi paperbacks. Most of the artists have teenage assistants kneeling on sheets of cardboard, drawing and blending. 

I scarf down a platter of okay enchiladas at the okay Mexican place, then roll down to the coffee shop. I have to be careful to keep from being bowled over by the distracted families strolling up and down the street. I sit at a picnic table and drink my cold brew and watch the passerby. A young woman scribbles intently at a cat in a space helmet, her shorts and legs smeared with pigment. I think of Noodle, covered in paint as she crouches on the floor of my apartment. I picture her kneeling in the street before me, drawing her big expressive figures, possibly wearing space helmets. 

Oh Noodle. I miss you so much. 

I stop at the antique mall, hoping to find some cheap trinket to commemorate the day. Noodle loved going to junk shops. I find a beige pincushion studded with silver and pearly pinheads that shine like jewels. It’s the same size and shape of a sea urchin with the spines turned inward. I was hoping for more, but it’ll do.

As I roll back to the train station, I pass a car covered with chalkboard paint for kids to draw on. I take a stick of chalk from a bucket and draw my usual cartoon of Noodle. Like all these pictures, it’ll soon be erased, by time or rain. Even though the sun is blazing, I feel the drops beginning to fall.

The Formula for Pi

 It’s hard to believe but I’ve been back at work a month. It has been a positive experience until Monday, when the difficulty of 

PARAGRAPH REDACTED 

But it’s Friday, and the moment I wake up I sit up in bed and say aloud, “This day is going to kick ass!” And I laugh at myself, because I don’t really believe that verbalizing your wishes makes them come true, and people who claim otherwise seem like either deluded, or charlatans. 

The day doesn’t kick ass, but it’s not that bad either. I’m happy to be leaving work early for my trip across town to get my cast changed for the third time. I’m already getting used to this new routine, and I’m really looking forward to going in and seeing my wound care family.

The bus is running late again, but it turns out not to matter. Inside wound care stands a barricade of mobility devices, and I hear all kinds of voices carrying on from behind all three curtains. 

“Am I late for the party?” I call.

“Hi Seann. We’ll come get you when we can,” someone yells back.

I sit out in the waiting room. An old man with an Anton Chigurh haircut and pasty legs is watching something on his phone. It’s a program about the history of the AR-15 assault rifle, and it’s very loud and laced with profanity. I want to ask him to turn it down but just as I’m about to, he starts scratching his balls intently. I bury my face in my New Yorker.

After a half hour Kelly comes out and apologizes, says everything is backed up because their computers were down because of the CrowdStrike IT outage. A little while later she returns and says, “Okay Gerald,” and the ball scratcher hauls himself up and shuffles after her. One by one the mobility devices emerge, pushed by various old women. KC follows them, wheeling a device with what looks like handcuffs suspended from it.

“Want a ride?” she asks. “With this thing I can carry you like a baby.” I decide not to tell her how much I do, in fact, want that.

When I’m finally called in, it’s by Aaron. Aaron is the only male in the department. He’s kind and conscientious and always seems a little sleepy. He likes mountain biking and Dungeon and Dragons. As he’s starting to draw cut-lines on my cast, he suddenly stops and asks if I’d mind if the new nurse watched. 

Aaron is very slow and thorough as he explains what he’s doing to the new nurse step by step, which makes the entire thing take twice as long. I try to make small talk with her but she’s pretty reserved; it’s only her second day. Aaron does a good job with the saw and dressing my wounds, but I am hungry and impatient and I need to take a leak and just want to get the hell out of there.

Finally Dr. Ronda comes in and goes to town. She is in good spirits and I ask her why I can’t get a cool teal cast like the one I saw a girl wearing at the museum. “It looked great on her.”

“The cast looked great or she did?” she asks.

“Um,” I say. 

“I wish we could get the colored casts,” she says, “But they only let us have the plain ones.” 

As she slaps and smacks the cast into place, out of nowhere Dr. Ronda says, “I just read that they’ve found a new way to calculate pi. I don’t really understand it, but I’m not sure I’m ready to accept that pi has changed.” She doesn’t stop working this entire time, and water slops from the bucket onto the floor. “I sure do like to make a mess, don’t I,” she muses.

By the time they let me go, I’m extremely irritated, despite all the warm goodbyes from KC and everyone as I wheel away. I just miss the bus and have to wait forty minutes until the next one, which is full of twitchy guys with crinkling bags of cans. Nothing is really all that bad, it’s just not all that good either. The day certainly didn’t kick ass. I feel depleted, and disappointed that I didn’t even experience anything worth writing about. But I write about it anyways.

Medical Maggots

The bus is running late, and I get the woman at the desk who insists on asking tons of questions about whether I’ve traveled overseas (“Since I was here four days ago?”) or had any medical procedures done outside the confines of the continental United States (“Since I was last here… which was, again, four days ago?”). She always apologizes and says she knows it’s silly but she has to ask these questions, except that she doesn’t, because none of the other receptionists do. 

Regardless, I end up being fifteen minutes late for my appointment, and the first thing out of KC’s mouth is “Well, that’s pretty disrespectful. Now I see how little we mean to you.” Between being late, and pleasantly surprised to see her, I’m too flustered to come up with any snappy rejoinders. 

She closes the curtain behind us and then it’s just her and I; none of the other nurses come to help. They may be doing this to give us some time alone, but I more likely it’s because none of the other nurses like her all that much. Or so I gather; none of them have ever said as much, but they drop hints here and there, mostly in regard to her distractedness and lack of thoroughness in her tasks. Possibly they are jealous that all the male patients fall for her. But then, she’s the only single one working at the clinic. 

She is certainly distracted today, talking a mile a minute about nothing in particular, and while I’d like to think it’s because she’s sweet on me, there’s really no evidence to support that. She flirts with every guy who comes in here, there’s no reason to think I’m special, though I am younger than most of those guys. She complains all the time about not being able to meet anyone.

It’s been a full month since I’ve seen her, and she looks especially pretty. Her red hair is shinier than I’ve ever seen it, perhaps freshly colored, though I can’t tell if it’s natural or not. She has a nice body, though her breasts are too small and her ass too big for her to be really gorgeous. She’s five years younger than I, and the laugh lines around her eyes crinkle up endearingly when she smiles, which is often. 

I ask her about the stray that had been visiting her condo, and she whips out her phone to show me photos, as well as a Facebook post she found identifying the owner. “That little bastard has been playing me!” She has a cat already, named Cathy. She shows me a picture of Cathy and the stray, whose name is Ghost, glaring at each other. 

“Now I haven’t done this for a long while,” she says as she turns on the saw. I laugh. “Oh, I guess that’s not what you want to hear,” she laughs. She’s left handed, and twists her arms awkwardly trying to cut the cast, until I contort myself in the chair to give her a better angle. “See, I barely even cut you,” she says when she’s done. She takes an instrument like a giant pliers and pries apart the two halves of the cast. She then pulls off the cotton batting and bandage and throws them on the floor. Just then Gladys comes in. 

“Are you just going to throw that shit on the floor?” she asks. Then she leaves us alone again. KC asks how work is going and I tell her. I don’t think she’s ever been to the art museum. 

It takes an inordinate amount of time for her to measure my wounds, take pictures, and soak them in Lidocaine, a local anesthetic, which they always do even though it’s unnecessary since I don’t feel anything in my feet. She measures the original wound and says, “Ooh, it’s so small,” then laughs. “Sorry, I guess that’s something else you don’t want to hear.” I tell her I’m used to it. She says that not only is the wound smaller, it looks just about healed over. 

She says she just took a week off and when I ask her what she did, she says she just stayed home with Cathy, had wine with the two old ladies next door who have more or less adopted her. “They kept me up till ten!” she says.

Dr. Rochelle finally comes in, strangely subdued. She was like this last week as well, and I chalked it up to the heat. She doesn’t seem as drained this week though, and chatters on pleasantly and laughs at my usual stupid jokes. But she’s not manic or loud. I wonder, not for the first time, if she has a mood disorder she takes meds for. Not that I’m judging. 

She’s very pleased by how my feet look, and doesn’t do any work on me. “I’m going to have to find some new things to try out on you to keep you from leaving us,” she says. “How about medical maggots? I just watched a video.” She tells me about how maggots are being used to eat infected tissue, since they only eat dead tissue, leaving the living flesh alone. “It works amazing, apparently,” she says. “They're really efficient. But I already get shit from the other departments every time they see a fly in the building, they say it’s because we’re using maggots. Which we aren’t.”

“Not yet,” I say.

“Not yet,” she agrees, and her eyes gleam. 

She leaves so KC can prepare the casting materials, and once again, it takes an inordinately long time because we keep talking. She says she’s been watching a documentary series about the history of warfare through the ages. She’s gotten interested in the Normans, the Iliad, the Crusades. This is a side of her I’ve never seen before; I got the idea she mostly liked watching rom coms. “Well, Josh Brolin narrates it,” she yells. "TEN!"

Finally she calls Dr. R. who comes back and puts the cast on with her help. I tell her about my experience with Dr. Ronda. “It’s interesting how different her technique is,” I say.  “Not bad, just different.” I tell her what Dr. Ronda said about being particular and she laughs.

“We come from totally different places,” she says. “She worked in an OR where she was used to ordering people around. I was in the ER where it’s every man for himself. That’s why I love it here, people actually help you.” She gazes fondly at KC, whose roll of casting has just slipped out of her hands and plopped into the bucket of water. 

It’s well past five by the time they release me; I’ve missed my usual bus. I ask KC if it’s weird that I miss the hyperbaric chamber so much. She tells me it’s common, that people get really attached to the experience. "It really becomes a family," she says. I want to say something about missing her as well, missing her ponytail and cackle and the way her scrubs hug her hips. 

“See you next time,” I say. 

It’s 98 degrees out when I roll into the sunshine. It feels refreshing; I hadn’t noticed how chilly it was in there. 

The Cast, Part Two

My brother and I slept in bunk beds when we were kids. When I was ten, I slipped as I was getting down from the top bunk and fractured my left ankle. They put me in a fiberglass cast identical to the one I’m wearing now, only it was kind of a puke-yellow color. 

I use the scooter when I’m out, but when I’m at work or at home, I find myself hobbling around just like I did forty years ago. Dunk. Dunk. Dunk. The cast is slippery on the hardwood floor of my apartment, and I have to step slowly and cautiously. I don’t want to bother the neighbor downstairs so I try to treat lightly, but it’s not really possible. The cast is very heavy, and it’s still extremely hot out, and I would give a thousand dollars for the chance to rotate my goddamned ankle.

“I didn’t see you on Tuesday,” I tell Shelly as she opens the door to the clinic. 

“And you won’t see me next week either. I’m taking the kids to my in-laws in Illinois.” 

“Is that good?”

“Family drama. But I’ll get to see my best friend. I’ve known her since third grade. We’re going to have a sleepover without the kids. It’s only one night but I can’t wait.” 

It’s only been three days, but they want to cut the cast off and make sure it’s not rubbing my skin open. I understand the precaution but it seems like a huge waste. But I’ll go along with anything at this point. If they tell me to start wearing polka-dotted leg-warmers to aid with the healing, I will immediately get myself a pair. 

She wheels in a machine that looks like an industrial vacuum cleaner. Attached to it by a hose is the saw, the size of electric hair clippers. The head of the saw vibrates rather than spins, so it doesn’t cut into your skin, though Shelly says, “We’ve had issues with the other saw.”

“They told me there was only one saw,” I say. 

“We try to only use this one,” she says. 

“Well at least I can’t lose any more toes.” 

She makes a number of marks on the cast with a Sharpie, then slips a long, thin strip of plastic down my leg beneath the cotton batting. “It’s gonna get loud,” she says, and it does. The saw screams just like the ones in a woodshop. She slices carefully down the side of my leg, then along the front of my foot, then up the other side, following her lines carefully. When she’s done she has to go back over some of the lines, then pries off the lid. 

“You want to keep this? Make something creepy out of it?” she asks. I say I could put it sticking out from under someone’s car. 

She measures my wounds, then says, “Oh wait, I guess I don’t have to do this. Force of habit.” She says there is more drainage than she likes, and that I’ll have to come back in twice again next week.

Dr. Ronda comes in and looks briefly at the wounds. “These look very good,” she says. “I’m happy about that.” She disappears and Shelly gathers the supplies for the new cast. She tells me to sit sideways in the chair and dangle my legs off the side, because that’s how Dr. Ronda likes it. She’s a little particular about everything.” She fills a bucket with water, and says, “This isn’t quite as warm as she likes it but I can’t get it any hotter.”

And then the doctor returns, looking oddly regal in a billowing paper smock, her brightly woven African cap like a crown. She squats on a stool, then adjusts it, then asks Shelly to adjust my chair. She sticks her hand in the water. 

“It could be a little warmer,” she says to Shelly. Then she looks at me and says, “You may have heard I’m a little particular.” She dunks a roll of casting in the bucket. “That’s because I am.” She unrolls the cast around my foot, quicker and rougher than Rochelle did. She smacks and smoothes the fiberglass as she goes, then takes a stiff board and places my foot on it to keep it perpendicular to my knee. It’s all done very quickly. She takes the board away and stands up and holds my leg. “I’ll just let this sit another twenty seconds.”  The seconds pass. “Think I’ll go home and watch Fried Green Tomatoes tonight. Haven’t seen it in a while.”

“It’s always good,” says Shelly.

She leaves and Jenny pops her head in. “I just wanted to say hi,” she says.

“Is it weird how much I miss you all?” I ask. I want to ask how KC is doing, but I don’t.

“It’s totally normal. We all miss you too. You form bonds in there.”

We chat a bit then Jenny says goodbye. Shelly rolls down my pants and puts my post-op shoe back on. 

“People think I’m really mean, but I’m actually a very nice person,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “Good luck with the in-laws.” 

“Oh God,” she groans, and goes to get my scooter. 

Gladys comes bursting in and asks if I’m good with computers. I say not really, but what do they need? She says they’re trying to attach a new monitor to the old one. As I leave, Dr. Ronda is holding a huge monitor while the others fiddle with the dangling cables, all of them talking at once. I say goodbye as I wheel past but they’re all too distracted to respond.

The Cast, Part One

 There’s no way it can possibly get any hotter. And then, of course, it does. 

Everyone is used to me leaving early on Tuesday for my weekly appointment, so no one asks when I leave at 2:30. I wheel past a smashed drone lying on the sidewalk, past a man with a blanket over his head, flapping his arms slowly like a dying bird. 

The woman at the front desk of the hospital remembers me and waves me in. Up on the fourth floor, the clinic is nearly empty. I ask where everybody is, and Deborah just shrugs.

I haven’t mentioned Deborah before because she’s the least colorful of all the nurses. She looks like she plays a nurse on TV. She’s nice enough, but scattered, and very, very slow on the computer. She’s not my favorite, but I believe in doing the best with what you're given, so I always try to engage her in conversation. The dullnes of her life is mind-numbing. All she wants to talk about today is the heat. It’s all anyone wants to talk about, which annoys me more than the actual heat does. And the heat annoys the living hell out of me. 

Carol joins her; Carol is at least funny and cynical, even if she quotes lots of shows and movies and expects me to get her references. 

Carol leaves and is replaced by Dr. Rochelle, followed by Gladys, who is always shadowing her. Gladys immediately starts hiccupping and can’t stop. “It’s the diet soda, it always does this to me,” she says, as Dr. R. starts in on the callouses. She asks Dr. R if she  knows a cure. The doctor says she doesn't, aside from the usual folk remedies. I ask if she wants us to scare her. She says no. 

Dr. R. asks if I mind if they open the curtain, since I’m the only patient and there’s no other staff. “But what will I read?” I ask. The curtain is covered in words such as Peace, Honesty, Charity. Gladys hiccups and yanks it back on its runners. 

Energy in the room is decidedly low. The wounds look slightly better than they did last week but no one seems to care, including me. I suddenly feel drained, and stop making feeble jokes. 

After spending a longer time than ever slicing and carving, Dr. R. says, “Okay, are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” I say, not totally sure what she’s talking about. 

She senses my uncertainty and asks, “We’re still doing the cast, right?”

“Hell yeah. Cast me up,” I say, with forced enthusiasm. 

“Great. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.” 

Deborah gathers the material and applies the layers of the undercast. First she bandages up my wounds like usual, then she sticks some round cushions on my ankles, and finally she starts winding the cotton batting that will keep the Fiberglas from rubbing my skin. She asks if I’ve had a cast before, and I tell her the story of when I was at Kaiser and they changed my cast but it was so thick I couldn’t get my pants off, and they told me I needed to just cut the pants off. I loved those pants.

Finally she puts what looks like a small inflatable life raft over my toes, and then they call in the doctor. Dr. Rochelle lights up a bit as she unspools the pale Fiberglas and softens it in a bucket of water before wrapping it around my foot, then my ankle, then... 

“I thought this was just going to be my foot,” I say.

“Oh my no,” she says, and within a few minutes, I am sheathed in a heavy shell from where my toes should be to my knee. Fuck, I think. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. “This will take like ninety percent of the pressure off the wound when you walk,” she says. “Not that I want you to walk on it. But just in case you do. Though, again, I am telling you to really try not to. Any more than you have to.” 

I suspect that those last six words are going to be the only things that might possibly get me through this with a modicum of sanity. 

And now long will I have this one?”

“Until it heals up.” I don’t ask her how long that will be, suspecting I won’t like the answer. 

“It’s not supposed to hurt at all, so if you have any pain, I mean even a little bit, if it’s after hours, go to the emergency room,” she says. “And when you get there, tell them that we have the only cast saw, so they should send someone up here to get it.” 

“The only one in the entire hospital?” I ask. Doctor R. nods slowly. 

They finally release me, after giving me a new post-op shoe, which is comically small. Doctor R holds a small in one hand and a large in the other. “Don’t we have any mediums?” she asks. 

“They stopped making them,” says Gladys. 

The doctor sighs and hands the small shoe to Deborah. “They don’t make shoes for people without toes. It’s discrimination. Anyways, remember, if you draw on the cast, we’re going to save it, and sell it and make a lot of money when you get famous,” she says.  

“You can use the money to buy a second saw,” I say. No one laughs, then they usher me out, Gladys still hiccupping, and I roll, feeling like a wilted plant, toward the elevators and into the smothering heat. 

Stand and Pivot, Part Two

 I am extremely nervous as I sit in the waiting room. In a few minutes I will know if my gamble has paid off. Not that this means my troubles are over, but if I can get Dr. Rochelle to back down on the threats she made last week, I might feel like I can function again, which all week has been beyond my ability. To calm myself down, I stare at a wheelchair access button on the wall. It looks like a blue blob marred by white blemishes. I keep taking deep breaths to try to control my shaking. 

I wait a while before Kristin pops her head out. Kristin is probably the oddest nurse there, which is saying something. She often listens to what the other nurses are saying through the curtains, and yells to correct them or add commentary to their conversations. I haven’t seen her for a while though, and when I ask how she is, I’m filled with warmth when she answers, “Well I’d be fine if I didn’t have my children to contend with.” I don’t think she’s just saying that, I think she really does hate her children. 

“Ooh, callouses,” she coos. Kristin has a fascination with callouses that borders on fetish. To be fair, she’s not alone; Dr. Rochelle can barely hide the gleam in her eye at the chance of shaving away some tough, crusty skin. Kristen starts slicing but stops after a minute. “I know, I know. I shouldn’t.”

Jenny is here as well, for the second Tuesday in a row, though she usually has them off. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, my schedule’s all screwed up,” she says, and asks how my cat’s doing.

They take my vitals and measure my wounds, and for once I don’t have to wait a while long before Dr. Rochelle pushes aside the curtain. Usually I can hear her coming from across the office, but this time she just sort of appears. She looks at my feet, and says, “Okay, well these don’t really look all that bad.” My heart leaps; these are the exact words I was hoping she would say. 

How does the rest of the visit go? Who fucking cares? There is no talk of going on disability, no talk of wheelchairs. No talk of never being able to walk again. She says she’s going back to her original plan top put me into a cast to try to get the stubborn wound to heal. It’s still going to suck, but I’m practically giddy. Soon I have them all screaming with laughter, until the guy in the next stall yells, “Will you be here all week?” I yell back that I sure as shit hope not. By the time I hit the elevator I’m more subdued, sobered by the prospect of all that lies ahead, and how inconceivably shitty it’s going to be. But I catch the bus with a minute so spare, and get home and heat up some soup and stare dazed at the ceiling. I took a chance and it worked. My life is not yet over.

Ghosts of the Imperial Arms

     In 2014, my landlords, an Afrikaaner couple, retired to tour the country in a Jetsream trailer. They sold all their properties to a management company, which promptly kicked us all out. It had by far been the nicest place I’d ever lived, a spacious apartment in the charming Sunnyside neighborhood, which was filled with brightly painted houses and lush gardens. I lived there nine years, and during that time, Portland’s rents had been steadily rising, and I was shocked when I started to look around for a new place. A coworker suggested I try her old building, The Imperial Arms, which was only six blocks from the museum. 

It was an old, five-story brick building on the edge of the freeway. I could only afford a studio, but I figured it would only be transitional. That was ten years ago. After two years, I moved across the hall, to a unit that was the same size but facing the hills rather than the freeway, and, crucially, it had a balcony. It was an okay size for a studio and had two closets, one a large walk-in and the other long and narrow enough to hold all my paintings. It was nice, but I always longed for another room, and to move up to the top floor. I got my wish when this apartment opened up, and I was finally making enough to afford the upgrade.

    The Imperial Arms was built in 1916, and at the time was one of the fanciest apartment buildings in the city. There were 54 units equipped with “disappearing beds” (also known as Murphy beds, which had been recently invented), opalescent doorknobs imported from France, and electric stoves. 

    When I first moved in, I did some research and found an interview in the Library of Congress archives with a woman who lived here. Her name was Henrietta D. Crawford, and she was interviewed in 1938 as part of the WPA’s Folklore Project. The interviewer describes her as “A remarkable, intelligent woman, with little thought of the past and vivid interest in the present…hates Nazis, fascists, Communists; tolerates Democrats because believes in liberty.” 

    Pert is the word for Etta. Well preserved features with a lovely skin. Brown eyes that dance with the merriment of life. Approximately five-feet four. Delicate hands and feet. Coquettishly tosses her head sideways and looks at you smilingly. Spry, alert, intelligent. Her philosophy of life can be summed up in two statements: "No matter haw big the hurt, it's how you take it that counts"; and "Do the best you can, with what you have, wherever you are". Her sense of humor is most entertaining. Thinks the youth of today lacks certain qualities that are necessary: courage, fortitude, ambition. Glad that she doesn't have to start out as a young person in the world today.

    Etta refuses to give her age, citing a lady’s privilege not to do so, though she must have at least been in her seventies at the time of the interview. She was born to one of the original pioneer families in what was then the Oregon Territory. Her father was Captain Medorem Crawford, who moved from New York State to Oregon City in 1842, where he established the first public transportation system in the state, carrying people and goods around Willamette Falls. He was conscripted into the army, and served to escort settlers across the Great Plains before returning to Oregon to work as a tax collector and becoming elected to the newly formed Oregon House of Representatives. 

    Etta grew up here but lived in New York and Washington D.C. at various points in her life before returning to Portland. She never married and claimed to have few friends. She was very interested in politics and was an avid fan of the symphony. When a good radio program was on, would tap on the wall or call down the service elevator to alert her neighbors. 

    I wondered which apartment she had lived in. I decided to look up the interview again last night; I hadn’t read it in years. I hunted for a long time –search engines had changed a lot in ten years- but when I found it, I saw that it did indeed cite her apartment number. 

    It was 504. This very apartment. I couldn’t believe it.

    The interviewer describes the apartment and its furnishings in detail. “An interesting mahogany table that she uses for a desk was once a melodeon.” Most of the woodwork and fixtures in these units are the same as they were 100 years ago, aside from the stoves, and the disappearing beds, which have…well, disappeared. But to think that she placed her hand on these French doorknobs, she pulled out these sliding doors! She crossed these same hardwood floors to turn on her radio. Perhaps her melodeon desk sat in the very nook where I’m writing from now! She sat out on the balcony, which the interviewer says contained several flower boxes. It must have been a wonderfully tranquil place; the neighborhood was sleepy and dotted with Victorian homes, all of which were demolished in the sixties to build that infernal freeway. I tried in vain to find out when she died. The last record I could find of her was in the 1940 census. I wish there was more, but even this glimpse into her life, to be able to grip that slender thread connecting to the past, is exciting. 

    On the opposite corner of the building lived another remarkable woman named Betty Steenson. She had by far the best unit in the building; two bedrooms, on the Northwest corner, sheltered from the highway, overlooking the hills. I would run into her in the occasionally and I could get her to smile but she wasn’t terribly friendly. 

    She died in January 2020. Notices in the hallway announced that her belongings would be given away if anyone wanted anything. I went up and looked around. There wasn’t much; old, ugly furniture for the most part. I did take a small bookcase painted with trompe l’oeil books and a couple of collections of Doonesbury cartoons inside, which struck me as odd. 

    One of her nieces was greeting people, and I was floored to learn that Betty had been 93, and had lived in the Arms since 1969. She must have moved in right when the highway was under construction. According to her obituary, she was born in North Dakota and moved on her own to Portland when she was 22. She worked for the Department of Veteran Affairs for forty years. She was a frequent visitor to the art museum, and to neighboring restaurant Higgins, where the staff called her Aunt Betty, and where “many patrons assumed she was an eccentric millionaire with her big wigs, glittery jewelry and wardrobe ensemble of mostly black and animal prints, leather jackets and cowboy boots.” I had never noticed her wearing cowboy boots, but then again I mostly saw her in the elevator on the way to the laundry room. 

    I was deeply saddened that I hadn’t tried harder to get to know her. She sounded like an extraordinary person. But after ten years, I really don’t know anyone here. The few people I’ve gotten to know have moved out, except for the sexy Cherokee woman downstairs, and she’s …a lot. The best I can do is imagine that both Etta and Betty haunt this place, the spirits of two independent and uncompromising women walking the halls in their cowboy boots, banging on the walls when a good program comes on.