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Writer Fuel: You Can’t Go Back

pearl - deposit photos

We got a good lesson this week in “you can’t go back.“ Twenty years ago, we first visited Portland and its shiny new district, the Pearl. It was built in an area that used to be an industrial wasteland, one of the blighted areas near downtown Portland. It started out with a conversion of a couple old single story brick warehouses into condos, with the cement loading docks serving as their front patios. Portland had some very smart urban zoning policies, including forcing developers to include storefronts / windows on the ground floors of all buildings, encouraging public art, and … Read more

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Point of View: Diving Into the Past

time travel - hands and clocks - deposit photos

You reach a certain point in your life, and the years you have behind you start to number more than the years you probably have left. This leads to introspection, and I am no exception to that rule. In recent days, I have found myself reflecting on my past a lot. No particular timeframe, just little memories that keep coming up in my mind. It may be because Mark and I have just started reading a new book in Italian by a fairly well-known author. We’ve previously read two of his fictional works, but this one is an autobiography. We’ve … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Blood Moon

Last night we saw the blood moon. Okay, technically it was a “super” blood moon, as it was at close approach to the earth, but it actually looked kinda small to me. But it tickled a memory, something from a very long time ago. When I was a kid–maybe four or five years old–we lived in a quiet residential neighborhood in the middle of Tucson, Arizona. This would have been in the arly to mid seventies. I remember lawns and small houses there, the oleander bushes and lone saguaro cactus in the back yard surrounded by a chain-link fence, the … Read more