Author: buddycushman

It was right around five o’clock in the afternoon yesterday when I realized my mind was blown. Not like blown out, call the cats in white suits and butterfly nets, but into some non-verbally state of stunnedness. I was looking out the kitchen window, my landlady was maybe in her room sleeping after an overnight shift, I hadn’t seen her for more than 24 hours, and I was looking out at real dark clouds in the distance and there was this kind of ‘Bang!!’ sense, I’m living in Portland again. I live here. It wasn’t a thought three months ago, and yet one week ago I was just beginning the big physiological bang of lugging heavy bag after heavy bag and a guitar and bundles of clothes and pretty much my worldly stuff outside of 19 boxes and loose art in a storage in Idaho from around a corner and up a bunch of steps to the porch and front door and through two doors of hanging curtains and then up a whole bunch of wood steps to the attic.

And at 5pm Monday afternoon I’m living in an attic in Portland, Oregon and looking out some lady’s kitchen window and there I was, me and my blown mind.

Yesterday I transferred my Camry car insurance from California to Oregon, effective the end of the month. I saved $150 over the next 12 months. Yesterday I also set in motion transferring my Medicare me insurance from down in CA to up here in OR, effective the beginning of next month – I lost $600 over the next 12 months. Hmmm. Then again, gasoline for the Camry is about 50 cents less a gallon up here than down there. Also then again, the CA sales tax is 7.25 while the OR sales tax is 0.00.

But, honestly, who’s counting. I wore my ‘Kathleen Hanna for President’ t-shirt to one of those meetings Saturday morning and someone made a (good) fuss over it, so Sunday I went on line and bought the same one in a different color – and approximately 75 less washings – for $31, just because. Saturday afternoon there was a piece of art I fell in love with on Division for $800 and I didn’t buy it. I haven’t bought a microwave yet either – there ain’t one here. There also ain’t a shower here, so I’ve taken my first baths since probably 1966 and it’s been kind of cool, especially yesterday morning when the sun peeked out for a while and the psychedelic material over the bathroom window brought a world of rainbow to my liquid trance.

I can’t make this stuff up – no way near enough brain cells. Oh, my first afternoon back in Portland, exactly one week ago on last Tuesday, my about-to-be landlady running late, I cruised over to the Rhododendron Garden – for who’s bench I’ve ached all these away years – and bought an annual pass. $35. I went there yesterday in the afternoon, and while sitting on the bench watched an eagle flying in lazy circles overhead. I posted a bunch of Garden photos on my FB page, which you could see here: https://www.facebook.com/buddy.cushman/

It’s supposed to rain four inches the next few days, and fortunately I have a bunch of Ch’an/Zen books and a guitar calling my name. And none of this is fiction.

I just want to write something now. It’s late Saturday afternoon, 5:05, and my whole life late Saturday afternoons have been my favorite time of the week. My whole life. And it has not rained today, and nearly all this day has been blue sky-y, dramatic white and gray-white clouds passing at their own pace. Which is exactly the way I’ve ambled through this day. I was just out behind my landlady’s house – Laura, 59 – and she was gardening in her lovely and rather unique garden and I had just come back from a sunny stroll down and back up Division Street, which is close by to the attic, and during which I said out loud to no one other than me – “I’m ambling.” And Laura’s two cats – Leroy and Ramona – were out in the day with her, for hours, and Leroy in particular rubbed my legs and smushed his nose and cheek against anything offering pleasant resistance, and by now any regular subscriber knows I’m in love with cats probably 73 years, so to be February fetched by Laura’s Saturday email in response to my post in search of new digs and find myself in an attic in a house with cats and a landlady who isn’t crazy about my getting up so early and drinking coffee and subsequent bathroom trips, above and next to her room, and who also says she feels like we found each other and she is glad I am here, and, um…….pretty great.

Now, writing this, it has been nearly exactly four days I’ve been back in Portland, and I keep finding myself stupefied by the all of it. And I’ve got to get Oregon plates and I need to switch my Medicare and probably car insurance, and while I bought two 4 x 4 colorful rugs from a woman at Morrison and 11th today to perk up these lovely brown floors, I am totally in need of a dresser and a bookcase and a most serious wicked comfortable chair.

And even days before the clocks all jump forward in about seven hours, I changed my alarm from 2:59 to 3:59, and still woke up at three Friday but slept all the way ’til four this morning.

And It’s just four days as I type.

This is some of Laurelhurst Park. Maybe a month or so ago Laurelhurst Park began whispering to me…….”Hey. Hey, remember me?” And with here-and-there flashes of its up and down paths, its forest of one amazing and giant tree after another, its very own lake, and the all-in sensation of being one with, yes, I did.

When the rain let up Thursday, after setting up the desktop, after coffee at the Starbucks where I’ve been all three Portland days now, after something like brunch early afternoon, I threw on my heaviest sweatshirt and my R.E.I. raincoat and flowed with Cesar Chavez traffic right over to the park – parked the Camry and elatedly walked in.

Every single footstep felt like affirmation. Every sway of my eyes, from the grove of Redwoods to the crazy green at both ends of the lake, said “yes, yes, yes.” And as I stepped out of the park where you walk beside the road for about 30 yards before heading back in, I was literally stunned that here I was – in Laurelhurst Park, in Portland, with a current mailing address. Come on! I was just in San Luis Obispo. And wasn’t I just in San Diego? And here I am, in the attic, reading messages from people saying, “Yay. Welcome back.” Too much.

On my second time around a tank-top guy (which would have brought me to hypothermia) walked across my path and over to the lake with a big bag in his hand. I stopped to watch, and before he made a move, every duck and goose in the zip code came a-runnin’. It looked like this:

Far out.

So, I’ll end this week – one in which I wasn’t even sure I’d be posting – with another song. Exactly the right one:

I had forgotten how beautiful Portland is. The neighborhoods, the tree-lined streets, lawns covered with daffodils and newly emerging crocus -splashing a Wednesday in white, lavender, and so-deep purple. The majesty of Douglas firs, I can see some out of every attic window, the almost perfect Christmas-tree-like symmetry of other firs or cedars or whoever they are.

It was raining when I got up later than usual to sit on the cushion Wednesday, the Zen question, “Who is hearing the rain?” wildly relevant. “You and me and rain on the roof.” And it rained through the day. But there were sun breaks, the sky clearing in spots, splotches of blue, light streaming through, the Portland day glimmering with glorious gold until the clouds and rain filled in again. People everywhere, strolling, my soul sister Janis – “Get it while you can.” I’d forgotten how special these sun breaks are.

Mostly, at least so far, I had forgotten the everywhere, all-over-ness of moss: splotched on sidewalks, running up front walks, climbing almost every tree, covering roofs. Green, green. So green. So substantially green. Kermit would be impressed.

I sure am.

Monday — Up into the attic space I’ve rented, have a place to sleep, sit zazen, and type fun things the next 30 days. Being an attic, I have wacked my head five times the last few hours. Landed in Portland at 1p and couldn’t move things in until 5 when the new landlady got home. Used the in between time wisely, moved most of my California credit unions money (not much, not nothing) into my original credit union here, which I have always kept, where my social security lands, and took advice and opened a nine-month CD – again, not much, not nothing. The woman who helped me was the same woman who helped me and then-wife Susan open our credit union accounts in 2011.

I also went to the Rhododendron Garden and bought a pass for the rest of the year, walked as if I could do it blind-folded to the far reaches and my sacred bench. I took the Rhody bench. $35. I traveled to my favorite Starbucks over at Burnside and 28th, only to find it closed. Wah. So I cruised across town, as if I knew the way, and into the only other S’bucks around, bacon egg bites and a promise they’d be getting to know me.

My back hurts, my legs were shaking, my heart pumping overtime, still managed to attend my long-standing Tuesday night Koan gathering, though the truth is I wasn’t really there. Life, life, life, life, life.

It’ll be weird (so Portland). It may be marvelous.

Sometimes the attic shakes when cars drive past down on Cesar Chavez.

I was listening to The Beach Boys on CD when I drove into Oregon at 12 minutes past 10 Monday morning.

Pink Floyd sang, “They flutter behind you, your possible pasts.” That’s kind of cool, not sure how it fits, Dylan’s, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” feels closer to it. The “it” being this old life of mine. Waking up Saturday in San Luis Obispo, Sunday in Oakland, Monday in Arcata, and here in Florence, Oregon today. Many rivers have been crossed.

I’m perched high above another now, The Siuslaw. And if the creek don’t rise, I’ll travel just a smidge further north on the 101 (all the way from San Luis) and hang a right onto the 126, itself traveling along the Siuslaw, and shortly passing through the town of Cushman. Which strikes me as more Jimmy Cliff than either Roger Waters or Mr. Dylan.

I want to tell you something most encouraging. Much of the drives both Sunday and Monday I wound and dipped up and down through forests. Endless forests. On and on and on. Many of them Redwood, each massive tree a huge sentinel of the dark and the shade and sun-splash and undergrowth, forever oxygen, their very being profound evidence that good goes on, beauty goes on, what matters most in this often messed-up world stands taller than tall. Resolutely. So green.

There is a final line from a verse in a Zen Koan – “On South Mountain clouds gather; on North Mountain rain falls.” And now I’m in Oregon.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1241098067552374

Oops, incapable of bringing this video to this place., and it’s the only post worthy here today. Perhaps it’s easy enough to grab from the above, or please stroll over to my FB page at https://www.facebook.com/buddy.cushman/

yup, 500 miles away, still hanging with the girls.

For months and months and months I have had coffee every other Sunday morning with Jorge. Last Sunday, after an hour and a half of that lovely and most wonderful magic, I had tears in my eyes hugging and saying goodbye in the parking lot. Jorge’s been my only true friend here in San Luis Obispo.

I first met him in a mandatory first aid/cpr training on a Saturday morning maybe two weeks into my Channel Island YMCA career. We were sitting next to each other and so, whimsically you could say, became partners. I think Jorge would agree we’ve come a long way since 15 compressions and two lifey breaths.

We worked a bunch of Saturday mornings together, and at some point I said something like, “We should get a coffee sometime,” and maybe a couple of weeks later, Jorge showing up to relieve me on a Tuesday shift, he said, “You want to get a coffee this Sunday?” And I said , “Yes.”

It’s been something like five-and-a-half months of every other Sunday, and I honestly cannot imagine my life here without those times. Cows on hillsides, trails through the woods, and all these coffees with Jorge.

The world came to fetch us even before we knew it.

2819 SE Cesar Chavez Blvd – Portland, OR 97202

This is my new address. Please feel free to mail cards, letters, checks of varying amounts, notes advising get it together. And scribbles, doodles, smiley faces, poetry you just wrote. Did I mention love letters?

Winston or Buddy – both seem to find me where I’ve gone off to.

I’m listening to The Doors “Strange Days” while I type this, but “Toys In the Attic” would do just as well.

Subscriber note — Tomorrow’s post may/could be the last one in a while. And I’m so grateful to share it.