Author: buddycushman

This is a true story.

Sunday afternoon, my landlords off to the coast, I came up out of the chilly basement into the serious heat, and turned right – I couldn’t tell you why – instead of my plan to walk left through the tunneled shade of the huge sidewalk trees.

Ten blocks down Tillamook Street I saw a man attaching a paper sign to a flowered-fabric low-to-the-ground chair. There was a more beat-up blue chair off to the right. I walked over and asked if they were free and the man, maybe 50, said yes and I should try the blue rocker, I wouldn’t believe how comfortable it was. So I did and it was – the chair had me at hello – and I said, bummer, it won’t fit in my car and he smiled and said, “It will fit in mine.” He also said the chair had belonged in his family for 60 years, and inside his house was a picture of his wife when she was five sitting in the blue rocker with her seven-year-old sister.

“Finish your walk,” he said, “come back and knock on the door and we’ll bring it over the 10 blocks to you.” Which I did and we did and he – his name’s Jeff – helped me carry it into the basement, where it is just over there as I type this.

See. Kindness and compassion out to play on a hot Irvington Sunday.

Starbucks.

Right here, Sunday morning. Long chatterings with Gavin walking earlier, big tree wonder, enchanted neighborhood. Outside coffee table, old people one over, golden oldie here. Heat wave coming later, the basement’s cool. Upstairs, downstairs, fetched and fetched. Planning’s so old school. Wildly waiting on another hand-me-down. One of the old guys walks past and I really like his shoes.

Wondering if the thrift shop on MLK’s open. Not a drinking glass in the house.

I actually began living in a Northeast Portland basement studio apartment around two in the afternoon last Thursday. Friday morning my landlord, who lives in the rest of the house with his wife – Rick and Tracy – texted and said he’d like to come see how I have things set up. When he came down I noted that this was less than 24 hours into my life here, and it would for sure look different a month from now. I said I bought a table from a guy who’s delivering it in a couple of hours, and I’ve decided I want something like a coffee table under the window for plants, flowers, buddhas, kitties and other wondrous examples of life. And maybe another chair or two.

The guy came with the table – I bought from him on Facebook Market Place – and it’s way cool, and then I headed over to my new closest Starbucks for a coffee and to scribble a few memos to self. While I was there I got a text from my landlord who said he was out riding his bike and saw a free table-like piece of furniture on the sidewalk at Tillamook and 27th. So, as I pay attention to all offers, I drove over after coffee, and there it was.

I lifted one end and it was crazy heavy and then noticed an older man (older than me even) on a porch eating some fruit in a bowl. I asked if it was his piece of furniture and he said it was and would I like help and he put down his spoon and came over and helped me lift it and slide it into the tight-squeeze back seat.

When he was walking back to his house he turned and said he hoped I would enjoy the piece because it had belonged to his family for 80 years. I told him I would honor those years, and forever treat the piece with reverence.

See. See. My landlord wants to poke around, I tell him an idea I have, he sees a piece of furniture with a free sign on his bike ride, he stops to text me, I follow the invitation and drive over and there it is and the owner’s there and helps me lug it in and shares loving family history and I bow to every bit of the Universe as it comes to fetch us and hold us, and often it’s just saying yes.

I took a shower last night for the first time since March 3.

No wonder I ain’t got no dates.

2135 A NE 16th Ave Portland, OR 97212

At 6:45 Wednesday eve I said goodbye and thank you to my landlady. Her name’s Laura. I spent hangout time with the two kitties Wednesday. They are Ramona and Leroy. They ain’t no Connie and Weymouth.

Over and over trips back and forth SE and NE, sacred possessions hauled down one set of stairs and then down another. Clinical diagnosis is “badly cooked.” It’s in the book, you could look it up.

Not a clue in the sky regards how my life’s gonna go further. I’m consciously wildly grateful just plain old waking up. Broadway Books, four blocks from the basement, said they’d take my three latest books on consignment. Long talk with a guy about maybe a job down the road, an actual invite to a training coming up. A damsel fly landed on my left arm and we hung out at the Rhody Garden quite a while. There was a magnificent bald eagle high up on a Douglas fir branch, and an absolutely stunning copper beech leafing its copper and bronzy self out on the grounds of Reed College. The computer’s in pieces in bags in a basement closet. The state gave poverty-level me a food card, but it didn’t work at Trader Joe’s.

The next one here is gonna be from over there.

Northeast coffee shop time, every quiet street blanketed in the tunnels of lush spring green, I’m switching stations and there’s Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “September” and here’s the wickedest urge to pull over, jump out, the sidewalk becomes a field of wild dancing with moves so cool they’d make the Neverland kids blush. And so jealous to jump on in.

Dozens of downs and ups and ups and downs and so, so, so, so, tired, landlords down to check the kid’s moves, and the day’s just cranking up as a few hours later I’m off to a laundromat for the first time in about 15 years. And it’s cool, the woman staff person’s a bundle of gushing help, even a little handsy. All the while my computer’s crying mercy, You tube and Prime about all that’s left, and just like that, as quick as a dazzled-brained cat, I hit the “place order” and score a new one.

I’ll tell you, me and Janis Joplin – Get it while you can.

So, here I am in an attic and this time next week – if the creek don’t rise – in a basement. Life falling out in front of me. I’m leaving because I’m leaving. Wild adventures arriving. Connie and Weymouth knew this stuff before me. Doug would laugh.

I’m typing this only an hour after yesterday’s post – my love letter to an old friend – on my laptop because my desktop, the only device I’m comfortable with, continued its journey toward failure after adding Windows 11 a few months back by coming up with some pretty evil reality virus-thing yesterday. Suddenly there’s no access to my blog, my credit union, and most of my saved pages. Most of the most important. Jorge has offered to magically appear inside my computer and poke around for problems, but even the emails won’t open. Annie Hall would say, “Ladeeda.” I’m kind of there too, add a smidge of puff the magic dragon.

This promises to be a wild and physically demanding week, and now my primary tool of navigating through my day-to-day world is ready for last rights. Fortunately I’m all in with the glimmer and wonder of strolling the path – my eyes focused on what’s working – all that abundance – and not on what isn’t.

So, this post, if it finds its way to your email, and any others in the foreseeable future, will be flying out from here, likely less wordy.

Me and Chicago – “Does anybody really know what time it is?”

Doug.

Dr. Douglas Martin, PhD in Urban Studies UCLA, founder and CEO of the Westside Center for Independent Living – CIL – the second in the state of California and almost surely the country. Polio victim at age six, the remainder of his life in a chair until he passed away in 2003. One of my all-time best friends. Not enough space here for the next month of weekdays to begin to explain why.

Twisted for sure. Incredibly lovable. Filled with courage. Bravery in all ten directions. Kind, generous, funny, irreverent. He’d be on Wilshire Blvd in West LA, I’d be on School Street in Somerville, MA, my phone on the kitchen wall would ring, I’d pick it up, and Doug would say this — “Bud. Thompson Twins.”

The entirety of our conversation. If someone should ask me this Monday what was my original face before my parents were born, I’d hold up a picture of Doug.

“I can’t get enough of de Kooning.” It was my first thought when I opened my eyes.

In the summer of 1977 I was sleeping on a floor in my friend’s cottage in Venice Beach, a block off the ocean. I was 28 years old. I was crazy for de Kooning, saw myself one day as a great abstract expressionist. Otherwise I didn’t care about much else. In three hours I had to open up Zeppy’s Pizza on the walkway. I had the key.

At quarter past ten Gabe and I were sitting on stools at the counter in Mary Lou’s, a greasy spoon off Pacific Ave and about 500 yards from Zeppy’s. We’d worked together in a runaway house on the grounds of a crazy hospital back in Massachusetts. First Gabe moved out to California and I followed a year later. By then he had a good job and roomates, which was why I was sleeping on the floor of his bedroom. But we’d decided to get a place together, and had filled out applications for a second-floor apartment just off Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Gabe was saying, stuffing the last third of a cigarette in a glass ashtray. “My boss. His name’s Doug, I think you two will get along. He’s slightly twisted.” Gabe gave me a corner-of-the-eye look. “Know what I mean?”

That Gabe, a laugh a minute. But it turns out he was right on both counts — Doug was slightly twisted; big time and in the flesh. And we for sure got along just fine. We stuck together like glue.

Doug.

The past two days I have been stopped at the front door of interviews for positions for which I was entirely qualified three times because I wouldn’t work all of the posted part-time hours. Like – We posted for 20, you’re offering 15, no thanks.

Um, What’s the goal?

In his book, ‘The 4-Hour Work Week,’ Tim Ferriss makes the case that if you hand someone a 40-hour, full-time job description with a list of specific objectives it will take that person all 40 hours to get it done. Yet, if you hand someone the same description of objectives to be accomplished in their 20-hour, half-time work week, she/he will get it done exactly as successfully.

My mischevious mind thinks the result’s are probably better in the less-time-to-get-it-done schedule. More of, “What’s most important?” as the daily/hourly starting point.

But who cares? So what if I remain an unemployed, now what do I do, considering asking for quarters on the corner of 15th and Broadway, abundance of time to hang out with trees and birds, undiscovered treasure trove of heart-mind human service Ch’an cat who’s under-employed mind gets looser and looser each Spring day.

So what?