Category: Uncategorized

Doing Things for the First Time

Dear Liza,

Walking in the neighborhood last evening, noticed this new sticker on a very well-stickered sign, and it got me thinking.


Retirement is usually seen as not only a chance to stop working, but also to start doing other things. And THAT is the sticky part. What to do?

One of the reasons I’m glad we moved to Portland after I retired is so that I was in a different place to start my different life. Transplanted, so to speak, into bigger pot. If I had stayed in Salinas, I might have felt the need to substitute teach, work at the same volunteer spaces, to do the comfortable, familiar things.

Being in a new place required me to learn new ways to get around (I gave up driving when we moved, so my mass transit IQ has gone up).

I also got to meet new people, which was becoming harder in small Salinas.

With you living abroad, me learning a new language made sense, and needing to get across town to do it and meeting a whole new community is a new thing.


And ART! I don’t know if I would have thought to do art in Salinas… it wasn’t who I WAS there. But away from my home roots, it felt natural.

Doing things for the first time is easier in a new place. Even when it feels a little scary.

So I’m off to do some more.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Fall Writing Busy-ness

Dear Liza,

I missed a day of writing the blog! And believe it or not, part of the reason was that I was printing some blogs. Let me explain.

Our friend Jennifer reads Dear Liza and told me that my kids and grandkids would probably like to have the stories when (in many, many years, of course) I check out and go to join the ancestors. This reminded me of your Mommy Olga’s prodding to write the Grandma Judy Commandments, which I also think is a good idea.

So I’ve been scrolling though 1,500 blogs, deciding which to print. It is a process, taking about 15 minutes per blog. Copy the text, put it in a Pages file. Then find the photos in IPhotos, and drag and drop them into the file. Fiddle with the format so it looks good, then print, date, and re-set for the next one.

I’m also taking time to read and re-read the Commandments, trying to make them the best they can be. Do they need pictures? Do I have pictures that could work? It’s all a process. And a history lesson! Here is my adopted Grandpa Phil in about 1983 with his brand new Dodgers hat and Grandpa Nelson. I Will probably use this one.

But every day I take steps towards my goals: Edit the stories, print the blogs, learn some Danish, manage the garden, and take care of my people.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Fall on the Way

Dear Liza,

Portland is changing with the seasons, as it should. Fruit is becoming ripe all over the neighborhood, and folks are more than willing to share!

A house a few blocks away has a gigantic Asian Pear tree with more fruit than they can handle, so they offer a ladder, a nifty bucket-on-a-stick grabber, and even paper sacks to take your fresh fruit home. Thanks, neighbors!

As we walk around, we keep having to look UP… to see flowers! Sunflowers have hit their growth spurts and some are ten feet high!

And then there are Amaranths, these red feathery beasts, taller than me and absolutely magical looking.

Even Laurelhurst Park is getting into the change. While some late linden trees are still blooming, giving the scent we call “Portland Summer”, some others are already turning yellow.

Soon this part of the park, which we call the Middle Heights, will be bathed in cool autumn sunshine as all the leaves turn the ground bright yellow.

And of course, the roses are still with us.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Happy Birthday Bridgett!

Dear Liza,

We got to spent Sunday celebrating Auntie Bridgett’s birthday! It was a lovely sunny day, just for her.

To celebrate, we went to some of her favorite places. First, we stopped at The Bake Shop up on Sandy to get some sweets. They carry a figgy buckwheat spiral that she just loves, and I got their croissant au chocolate and a chocolate chip cookie for Grandpa Nelson.

We tucked the sweets in the car for later and went for coffee at Case Study, just next door. They have good coffee and a delightful vibe. High ceilings, huge plants, and lots of people without a lot of noise. And as a surprise, our table was right by a print by Gail Owen, a talented friend from SideStreet Arts.

And just because life is sweet, right next door to Case Study is Cosmic Monkey Comics. We wandered around and found their up-in-the-loft vintage comics section where Bridgett found Le Pain, a compilation of comics in French! She absolutely giggled with delight!

We took our treasures home and enjoyed a brunch of sweets and eggs, then read and rested for a while. Grandpa Nelson enjoyed the Doonesbury collection I had brought for him.

Bridgett and I walked around the park and got a FaceTime call from Cousins Owen and Charlotte, who told us all about their baseball games and upcoming Halloween costumes.

Dinner time came and Grandpa Nelson joined us for yummy pizza at Dov Vivi. Their cornmeal-based crust makes their pizza extra special and crunchy, and the weather was perfect for eating outside. We people watched and giggled with the young family at the next table.

When we were full and exhausted, we headed home for home, where the Birthday Girl had a nice long phone call with her Mom in Ohio. Even when we are quite grown up, it’s nice to hear from our Moms!

Happy Birthday, Auntie Bridgett!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Belmont Street Fair

Dear Liza,

This weekend was the last of our street fairs, and it’s the one closest to us! Just a block down the street we found all sorts of fun things and yummy food.

First off, this character was doing an old-fashioned silly magic act, making balls disappear under cups and pulling coins from behind kids’ ears. It was fun and felt just right.

Street fairs need craft booths, of course, and this one fit the bill! An entire army of six-legged Monster Barbies was walking across the table of this booth. Well-done, certainly. But a bit too creepy for us.


We listened to some good jazz, saw little kids dancing with their dads and watched this lady cook about a million chicken kabobs on her small grill. They smelled heavenly, but we needed a place to sit down and get some shade.

Paradox, the vegetarian restaurant up the street, was just what we needed. Air conditioning, soft seats and smiling folks let us recuperate from the bright street. Lemonade for Grandpa Nelson and fresh, cold carrot juice for Bridgett and me held us until lunch got delivered.

I found a kindred spirit in Sienna, one of the servers! She has a tattoo of one of my favorite illustrations from Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends”. This one is called “My Beard”.

My beard grows to my toes

I never wears no clothes

I wraps my hair

Around my bare

And down the road I goes.

The fact that this lady, younger than either of my kids, has memorized one of MY favorite poems, just makes me smile. Poetry is like that, I guess.

We enjoyed our lunch and then spent a little while returning a set of lost keys thanks to the NextDoor website, which let me post pictures of the keys and get notes from people who recognized them. It was amazingly simple and ended up happily for everyone. Hooray for community!

Then, happy, tired and well fed, we headed home.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Cowbell Cheese Shop

Dear Liza,

You know I love cheese! Sharp, stinky Parmesan and runny baked Brie and cool mozzarella… they’re all good. I even take pictures of it when we travel. Here is some Peppery Gouda smiling for the camera in Utrecht.

And last week, we found a new place to get some really good, imported, (if slightly expensive) cheese.

Auntie Bridgett and I bussed down to Variable Creatives to pick up the Robot Bookshop picture by Brian Johnson that we bought a few weeks ago and there, just across Alder Street, was the Cowbell Cheese Shop.

The shop is tiny, and the front is stacked high and wide with fancy sauces, sardines in oil, and dried pasta. It looks like an evening in Tuscany just waiting to happen.

I noticed the small fridge in the shop and the larger fridge behind the counter, holding pounds of cured meats and wheels of cheese, and my mouth watered.

The hand-written cheese list told me that theirs is not “sit in the shelf forever” cheese, but a rare and perishable treasure.

But….. the shop was full of people with long lists, the day was very warm, and it was time to head home with our art purchase. So now I have a place to shop for cheese and fancy fun food! Maybe for my birthday?

Love,

Grandma Judy

Making a Dictionary

Dear Liza,

With you living in Denmark and me trying to learn Danish, I thought I would put some effort into developing our vocabularies.

To get along in any language, you need to understand how the words go together, and your teachers will know more than I do about sentence structures and grammar. But I can help, too.

So, I am making an dictionary. I will learn words as I make it, and once it is done I can send it to you and it can help you develop your Danish vocabulary. As you can see, I am hunting pictures FIRST, and I will look up and write the words NEXT.

Pictures make everything easier to remember, so this is an illustrated dictionary. The pictures come from magazines and my collage box, and it is organized by TOPIC rather than ABCs.

For example, Numbers…..

Animals…….


Faces…

And like that.

For the book itself, Auntie Bridgett has let me have an old sketchbook that she doesn’t care for. Cousin Kestrel drew in it when she was little, so I am keeping her drawings so it will be more special. I will ask Auntie Bridgett to alter the cover a bit to say “More than 140 Danish words…”

With everyone’s help, we can meet this new challenge.

Love,

Grandma Judy

The City Reader

Dear Liza,

This is Auntie Bridgett’s birthday week, so we headed down to her favorite frozen yogurt shop, Eb and Bean. Eb and Bean is in a larger building called D Street Village that includes a taco shop and Bollywood Theater on the bottom floor and offices upstairs.

It also includes a wonderful magazine stand, which has been hiding in plain site in the front hallway! The City Reader has been here for ten years, and we have been walking right past it for five. It never registered as a shop. Closed up, it just looks like cupboards.

But today it was open and Karen, the owner and sole employee, was tending shop and showed us all her lovely things.

She carries about 150 different magazines, she says. She only has room for a few copies of each, but the publishers and magazines she orders from don’t have an order minimum.

Her magazines are wonderful. Quality paper, artwork, and writing. She has some nationally popular magazines, like Architectural Digest, and many others that I haven’t heard of.

Some of her magazines are local. The Nib, which we own several issues of, is mostly political satire in graphic novel form. It is published right here in Portland. We have even gone to their release parties! Matt Bors, the main brains behind it, has decided to move on, so there will be no more. By stumbling on The City Reader today, we were able to buy the last issue of this smart, funny magazine.

Another local magazine is Kitchen Table, all about food and drink. The content is delightfully specific to this area and the graphic design is charming.

In discovering The City Reader and meeting Karen, I feel like I have a new favorite place tucked inside an old one. Frozen Yogurt AND magazines! What’s not to like?

Love,

Grandma Judy

Too Many Tomatoes?

Dear Liza,

As the summer winds down, tomatoes are sort of stacking up. And since they are basically little water balloons, they don’t last long.


Today I picked another pound and looked up how to dry them in the oven, since our damp northwest weather makes “sun dried” impossible. To start, I rinsed off the tomatoes and cut them in half.

Then I squeezed each half over a bowl to get out the squishy middle and the seeds. This is a messy job, because they squirt all over the place! Once they were done, I sprinkled them with salt and put them in the oven at 170 C.

They look sort of like soggy little shoes, don’t they? The recipe said to start with a period of 4 hours, so I set the timer and went about my day. A Giants game on TV, a nice long walk, writing to my friend Jennifer, and lunch took most of the time.

And, sure enough, after four and a half hours, the pound of cherry tomatoes had turned into a cup of these odd little raisin-y things. I ate a few, and they were delicious! Sweet and chewy and very intense.

To keep them moist and delicious, I put them into a jar and poured in some good olive oil. The recipe says they should be good for a few months, but I don’t think they will last that long. I’m going to put them in salads and on toast and in pasta!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Cloudy Sunday in the Park

Dear Liza,

Walking through Laurelhurst Park last Sunday evening, we noticed several unusual, delightful things.

First was this precise and colorful geometric chalk design on the pathway. For the whole summer, these pieces have been showing up, and getting more complex and well-done. Thank you, anonymous artist!

Then, a section of the park we call The Living Room was full of silent folks with headphones on. Some were sitting with friends, some dancing, others practicing with juggling equipment.

This was the Heartbeat Silent Disco. Each person rents a set of wireless headphones and can tune into three different music tracks run by the three DJs. All these folks were listening to music and enjoying each others’ company without disturbing the neighbors! Not a bad idea.

We people-watched for a while, then continued around the lake and into the forested part of the park. We noticed definite signs of fall, like these bright red leaves that very easily become art when stuck to the bark of a fine tall fir tree..

On the way home, we passed an old house that has recently burned down. Its burnt out walls and chimney are sad and lonely in this busy neighborhood.

In the cloudy grey evening light, it feels like the house could be haunted, if you go in for that sort of thing.

Love,

Grandma Judy