Bee Lavender

Dennis behind the counter at Mississippi Records.

I miss these knuckleheads!

I was lucky to be in town for the launch of Drummer Town – a new project from STS. If you are in Portland check it out!

The first time I met Ana Helena we were standing in the backyard of 19th Street as experimental films were projected in the kitchen behind us. She was on a tear because she had just encountered the Jenny Joseph poem about aging. Despite the chaos around us, the punk show in the basement, the  drunk characters lurching around the yard, what I remember best about that night is Ana Helena repeating over and over at top volume “I will wear purple whenever I fucking want!”

Our friendship grew out of the shared view that life is for living, and that you have to make an effort every day to create the world you want to exist in. Ana Helena has been a brilliant friend ever since, as we separately moved away from Portland and around the world.

Ana Helena is also the practitioner who restored my sense of smell, a dozen years after my doctors told me to give up hope for a cure.  The world doesn’t always smell good, but I am grateful beyond measure to have that knowledge.

I stored decades worth of abandoned family objects in the basement of my Portland house when I moved away, and fourteen years later I still don’t know what to do with it all. Where did these suitcases travel before they landed in my house? I have no idea; my great-grandmother was a Saami woman and an illegal immigrant. She did not like to answer questions.

My daughter wore these golden shitkickers in kindergarten. She was (and remains) simultaneously delightful and dangerous.

My graduate school thesis, 1994.

I fucking love fiscal policy.

The bane of my youth. Twenty-five cents per page to print! The injustice!

I have every letter ever mailed to me, and most that I mailed to others. Every postcard, every photo, every court order and medical transcript, every shred of evidence that it all happened, exactly as described. Including the records pertinent to my teenage marriage.

I’m old enough now to feel generous, even if I will never be nostalgic. I want to believe we were just messed up kids trying to find a home. And I know that concepts like “love” and “forever” rarely survive cancer, or war.

My entire Barbie collection, intact, including clothes and accessories.