This is the first of many writings about what we see in Portland while we are out delivering farm fresh, organically grown veggies for the CSA Pumpkin Ridge Gardens. We may not end up doing a CSA ourselves, but Polly + James and Carlos are our farming idols. They have amazing energy, knowledge and intuition and grow incredibly delicious produce. They've been doing this for 17 years and we are very inspired by them.
Our house is on their farm and on Tuesdays and Fridays mornings they harvest 
and we head out as soon as they're ready to deliver the baskets door to door at each family's house/office. Right now Tuesdays have 75 different houses and is more city and Fridays have 53 different houses and is more rural and suburban, ie. very curvy, winding and hilly... The route will change as the new season starts and some customers change in the beginning of June. It is a year round CSA and a true model of learning to eat what can be grown locally throughout the year. Members who have been with them for many years having an even richer experience of seeing how different weather patterns and other factors affect the crops each year. Very neat.
So! Now that we are more comfortable with the route, I've started to note some of the wild things we see and other thoughts that come to mind. Some of the random thoughts, may appear quite random... and some of the things we've already seen seem surreal.
Sightings:
1) This may have really kicked it off - Sunny day around 3pm. We saw what appeared to be a white teenage girl, alone, who had strewn herself backwards across the front hood of what appeared to be a red Pontiac Sunfire or ?, legs sprawled, in a mini jeans skirt, with her shirt tied up in a knot above her belly. This was just barely off NE Ainsworth, a fairly main drag busy street with a decent sized boulevard near NE MLK. We have never seen anything else like it.
2) Hip man, 30's in slim black jeans and black t-shirt on his bicycle, with an awesome hot pink helmet with furry pink strip down the center. I was so instantly overjoyed, I thumbs upped and he smiled and waved.
3) A man simply mowing his lawn. Who smiled at us as we drove by. This may not sound odd, but I'm not sure if one of us is automatically smiling first or nodding at people we pass or they start it, but people are truly the friendliest I've ever experienced. We give and get a lot of nods, smiles and waves. Even when they're just out mowing their lawn. Love it.
4) This was nice, totally normal looking guy girl couple walking down the block, I think this was on SE Stark near 28th. She was walking normally, long blond hair, perfectly balancing a deep blue frisbee on her head as though it was not there.
5) The purple Irises seem to have all started blooming today. This is also a really neat thing about the route. Left to our own devices we would notice certain changes around our home, but when you are out covering 120 miles a day twice a week, you really realize what is in bloom, because you see it repeatedly all over town.
6) Little league is in action
7) Beautiful sighting of Mt. Hood today. Sometimes you just catch it and realize it's not clouds in the distance, it's a massive, snow-covered mountain.
8) Basketball Hoops. It is like there is a calendar or a city wide movement. Suddenly there are portable hoops lining the curbs all over the place. Even without children in the middle of the street - one of our least favorite things to see safety-wise - it is one more thing to look out for in addition to the TREES. And, no, they don't make these things fluorescent colored, they are black and not terribly visible.
9) TREES !!! They are beautiful. They are everywhere. Many diverse species represented. Some are cut to a 90 degree angle at 12' per the law. It can look really cool and when you are driving at this height you notice all the 90 degrees angled tree areas. Our truck is 10' 6". Many trees on side streets grow unabashed. You can do your best, drive in the middle of the street most of the time, you will still hit many tree limbs. It is a fact. We try to drive very slow in the lowest spots. When more trees were in bloom we really were pain-staking. A point for those in the street, their front home window or in low normal cars, please know that we delivery drivers are doing our best, but there's only so much one can do sometimes.
10) We cage in our rocks. I appreciate them not sliding down along the road. It does remind me what a funny animal we are. Caging our rocks so we can blissfully speed right by without thinking about their natural desire to roll down steep sides we cut into.
11) Okay, speaking of the basketball thing. You may think, come on Naomi, it's nearly summer. 
Spring fever at a minimum. Let people have fun in the street if they need to. Call us raging safety-prudes. Here's the worst example: Towards the end of the route we are up in NW Portland in the hills. There is a section where you drive as slow as you can, but you know at any moment someone can (and does) coming barreling down as though there were fluidly room for two. There is not. Many narrow, completely blind curves. Coming around one we come immediately upon an older fancy man with three young kids - hidden just beyond a madly blind curve, with a dog and one of these portable basketball hoops. There was NO warning. It was one of the most dangerous, insane things we've seen someone think it was okay to do. And we drive ssssllllooowww there. Hardly any other cars we see can be said to be zipping very slowly through there. We tried to smile, wave, wait for them to clear. The man gave us an ominous look as though we had to drive through his backyard. You DON'T get a backyard when you choose to live in the hills. You get a lot of neat trails and views, but the road is not your yard. Okay, that's my rant. Grown-ups, protect your munchkins. Use a flare or put a cone out if you really need to do something like this.
12) To end on a positive, Salem passed a Pro-Family Bill - see the Human Rights Campaign for more details. It is about time that we grant more equal rights not less ! "The Oregon Equality Act, which passed the state House by a vote of 35 to 25, will outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations." and this one's not perfect, but it's a great start - "The Oregon Family Fairness Act, which passed the state House by a vote of 34 to 26, would (will) establish domestic partnerships for committed same-sex couples and provide all the same state-granted privileges, immunities, rights, benefits and responsibilities for same-sex couples entering a domestic partnership as are granted to married couples."
1920 - Women celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment granting them the right to vote.
Not that long ago.
They put forth the amendment in 1878. It took 42 YEARS for WOMEN to be granted the right to simply VOTE.
A legal right that needed to be 'rationalized' and vigorously fought for, which is now taken for granted.
Something to seriously remember.
I'm trying to figure out why we are not more accepting today as a people.
As a society, a herd of people animals, we must stand up for equality and fairness for our fellow people. Work towards greater care + protection and not at expanding discriminatory laws.
The rights for many of us are fairly new. And people today cannot pick and choose who they like and who they don't and enact laws to bar legal rights from them, right?
It is no longer acceptable keep down and subjugate with laws: women, non-white ethnicity, related to age or dis/ability, it happens, but you better keep it discrete. It is okay to discriminate at your darndest, one last little corner of the population people can sniff out.
People who choose to love a person the 'majority' don't approve of, as though it is any of anyone else's business what goes on in another person's bedroom. Wow. But that's what it is. It is acceptable today to be against 'gays' in a legal fashion. And even, or especially, those so recently in the same discrimination boat or still in it, need one last group to step on and try to rise above. And they do so with an often venomous righteous fervor and a blindness to the sad irony.
- japsgaysblacksspicks - Short biting words. What is this instinct for ultimate superiority? And why has this spread from mainly those good ol' boy white men as discriminators to the vast population. Why has the superiority over the "other" disease spread to Women and to every version of European/Latin/African/Japanese/Chinese/Etc.-American and other specification we make of person - to seek something we can be far better than. The Gays. You can't walk around saying you're against The Japs anymore. That's not cool. But against The Gays, super chic in public in most of America.
It's okay, come on now, we can ALL get together on this one and publicly hate GAYS.
Why is this so often fueled and certified by Religion ?
Voices of Civil Rights is a concise view starting in 1868 with the all important 14th ammendment, and the long road from 1875's Civil Rights Act, which still today does not quite cover us all?? through today.
1929, The League of United Latin American Citizens formed to fight discrimination, segregation and abuse. The Japanese Civil Liberties League also forms for similar purposes to encompass Chinese Americans and other people of 'color' as well.
1954 which was quite a year with Hernandez v. Texas - the first Mexican American case which turned the tide in striking down discrimination based on ethnic and class distinctions, primarily between "white" and "Hispanic." 1954 you had the White Citizen's Council, proud anti-desegregationists. While also in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools.
The work of Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association in the 1960's. Finally the 1965 Voting Rights Act and The Age Discrimination Act of 1967.
What about that good old Equal Rights Amendment? Now reffered to as the Women's Equality Amendment (& Washington Post article) as of March 26, 2007 when it was reintroduced. The original was introduced in Congress in 1923, written by Alice Paul as:
- Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.
- Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
It has never passed after 84 YEARS.
Now it says (since 1972 to today):
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
These simple 52 words are still not a law. Men, I'll go out on a limb and say Wealthy White Men in Political Power, some of them have all sorts of reasons to be afraid of this simple, logical consitutional right (of Women) and have argued against it for 84 years through today.
Yes, there are other protections that have been enacted, but not this blatantly basic one which should have been granted ideally in our initial Constitution, if not in 1923 or any year leading up to 1982 or right now in 2007. Right after the man gender kindly, after 42 years, decided to let the other woman gender - the one that bears the human babies that keep this race of strange animals going, simply have a vote. But hey, constitutionally Men and Women are not equal, it is not actually that simple of a matter. Who knows what might happen if they were! Horrors!
What if we then moved forward and said hey, no really, EVERY PERSON is actually equal no matter what !
How can we live in, as they say, 'This Day and Age,' and not believe that equality is a core societal value. A - I dare say, actually a deeply moral value.
The biological impulse that appears to drive so many people's righteous superiority/survival of the viciousist nature is a doomed one. So much like the often companion belief that we are not on the path of causing detrimental climate 'change.' Consume. Consume. Consume. And look after your own tail. And your own tail alone. And every once in a while take some actions to make sure no one catches up and has a chance at your pie in any way.
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Anyway...
Yippee! to Oregon for taking progressive action. It is about time. All of these steps make a difference.
I do love the diverse majority of progressively positive, kind, intelligent people here.
The benefits of a good bed are profound.
He was awesome. He subscribes to Mother Earth News, would love more Oregon specific heirloom vegetables and told us he could give us a lot of free plastic in the future if we can use it, because they don't have a good way to recycle the plastic they move mattresses in. We've picked up some already and used it to shelter our hardening off area. We hope to get more and try to stitch big pieces together for a hoop house and row tunnels.
We heard a man on the radio talking about how cheese may affect dreaming. Okay I had to go find it, here is the link to a short audio clip on a study by the British Cheese Board on how Eating Cheese Can Alter Your Dreams
