Brother, Can You Spare a Buck

Last Saturday on NPR's Weekend Edition, I heard a wonderful story on the history of the Depression-era song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime." Pianist and composer Rob Kapilow took an in-depth look at the song to explore "why it was so successful in its time, and why it still speaks to listeners today." It's worth checking out. Both the audio and the transcript of the story are here on the NPR site. I suggest listening to the audio, because the story is "illustrated" with example passages from the tune.

Anyway, I couldn't get the song out of my head; so I decided to update the lyrics:

Once I built a Web site, made it shine.
Man, it brought me good luck.
Once I built a Web site. Now it's dyin'.
Brother, can you spare a buck?

Once I had a boutique in the mall --
Wind chimes, candles, wooden duck.
Once I had a boutique -- that was last fall.
Sister, can you spare a buck?

Once I owned a mansion in a nice suburb --
heated pool, gas grill, steak of chuck.
Once I had a mansion. Now I'm on the curb.
Brother, can you spare a buck?

Once in desert camo, God, we looked great,
Full of that with-or-against-us.
Half a million limbs we had to amputate.
And I was the kid most zealous!

Say, don't you remember? They called me "Dude."
It was "Hey, Dude!" you used to holler.
Why don't you remember? I just need some food.
Say, buddy, can you spare a dollar?

Copyright, Austin Bruce Hallock, 2008

My Big Wildcrafting Triumph

Wildcrafting is the practice of harvesting uncultivated plants from their natural or "wild" habitat. I provide this definition because I was not familiar with the word before moving to Oregon. I guess I was wildcrafting blackberries all summer, but to tell the truth my ambitions did not extend much beyond that. This changed today.

Yesterday I went for a walk in Willamette Park along the river in the early morning fog. After several days of solid rain, the sun had finally come out the day before, and more clear days were in store. Passing a large moss-covered oak tree, I noticed, about nine or ten feet up the shady side of the trunk where a large branch had been removed, a white, hemispheric mass about the size of my head. Its surface was not smooth but stranded in a way that looked familiar.

Over the past few months, Leela and I had been experimenting with various mushrooms, mostly obtained from the local farmers' market. It seems our area is rich in mushroom varieties. One of the varieties obtained from the market that we'd liked very much was the lion's mane, which is what I thought I'd seen in the tree. The ones we'd bought had been cultivated, though, and the one wildcrafter who sells at the market never had lion's mane. Today I told the wildcrafter what I'd seen, and she became very excited. She confirmed that it probably was a lion's mane, because nothing else looks quite like it. She said she'd never found one in the wild. She wanted to know where it was. She wanted me to take a picture.

Leela and I promptly pedaled our bikes out to the site. It was still there. We'd brought a stick to try to knock it down, but that crude tactic proved unnecessary. I hoisted Leela up on my shoulder, and she was able to retrieve it. It was incredibly heavy -- maybe five pounds. It had absorbed a lot of water. I put it in a sack and carried it in my pannier back to the farmers' market, which was still in progress. I wanted the wildcrafter there to confirm what it was before we ingested it. She declared it "a magnificent specimen" and wanted to hold it. I allowed her to do so. She said mushroom gatherers tend to miss them, because they're always looking down. It took an amateur to find this thing.
At home I cleaned it (you're not supposed to wash mushrooms, just brush them off, I've learned), sliced it, and sauteed it with olive oil, a little butter, garlic, and some red wine at the end. Of course the sauteing brought out great quantities of moisture. The aroma is fantastic -- nutty, buttery, and kind of vanillaish. We ate it with rice, toasted walnuts, and salad. We could only find one neighbor to share it with on the spur of the moment. Even so, there was enough left for two more generous meals for Leela and me.
A little searching on the Web, turns up lots of pictures and info about lion's mane (Hericium erinaceus). Wikipedia has a nice picture of it growing on the tree (mine looked even better on the tree, but we were too excited about getting it down to take a picture first). It's valued for its medicinal properties as well as its culinary charms (there's evidence of anti-dementia effects and the ability to stimulate nerve growth). One site said it's highly prized in Chinese medicine, and at one time could only be eaten by the emperor -- that's me.

Ten Years Ago

It was ten years ago this month (October 1998) that Leela and I first visited Oregon -- well, Leela had actually been here before, but it was my first time to set foot in the Northwest. My daughter, Iola, was living and working in John Day, Oregon. At the time she was a fire fighter for the National Forest Service serving in the helicopter rappel program. We visited her for a few days and then drove around to various parts of the state in our rented car. According to my notes from the time, we drove up Highway 99 from Eugene and spent the night at the Budget Inn in Corvallis. I don't remember looking around Corvallis at all; it was really no more to us than a cheap place to spend the night. The next day we headed west on Hwy 20 toward Newport and the Pacific Coast. At the time we had no inkling that ten years hence we would be living in Corvallis less than half a mile from that Budget Inn. I think I left a toothbrush there.

And it was just one year ago this month that we signed the papers and made the final commitment to buy our place here at CoHo.

Log Rhythms

Log trucks are a fact of life in this part of the country. They rumble down the interstate, career along twisting mountain roads, and trundle through town. I see loaded log trucks pass each other headed in opposite directions, and I wonder: Instead of hauling logs from harvesting points in the north to a southern sawmill and vice versa, why not take the logs cut in the north to a nearby northerly sawmill and those cut in the south to a southerly sawmill and avoid the expense of crisscrossing Corvallis? Maybe I could be a consultant.

Another thing about log trucks: Seeing those loads of just-cut trees summons images of the ugly clear-cuts that mar the hillsides hereabouts and brings a pang sadness. However, a truckload of milled lumber going down the road does not elicit the same feeling. Instead I'm likely to think: Hum, those are some nice two-by-sixes. I guess it's similar to the difference between seeing a cattle truck on its way to market and seeing a meat purveyor making a delivery to a restaurant.

About Our Abode

We live in a cohousing community, and Wikipedia and other sites provide good general descriptions of that concept, so I won't go into it here. There is much to say about our particular community, CoHo Ecovillage (not a very original or evocative name, but there it is). Unfortunately our CoHo Web site is way out of date, still featuring a lot of pre-move-in info. Construction was finished last October, and all 34 units were sold at that time. These units are distributed among nine two-story buildings. There is also the Common House, Bike Barn, and a large workshop. Some of the units are two-story townhouses, others are single-story flats. Whoever picked out the drab, earth-tone color scheme for the buildings did not share our sensibilities, but Leela and others are doing everything they can to bring some vibrancy to the place.

Our unit is an upstairs flat. With four bedrooms and two baths (just under 1,300 sq. ft.), it's the largest floor plan available at CoHo. We like it very much, although the kitchen is rather cramped. Leela and I each have an office. The fourth bedroom is a guest-meditation room, where we meditate on all the guests who will be visiting us. We also have a nice balcony, which Leela has festooned with flower boxes and hanging baskets.

Leela on our balcony entrance (sunflower shown actual size). (Click photo to see enlargement.)

The Common House has a big, commercial-grade kitchen and dining hall, where we have the opportunity to participate in four or five common meals a week, though with schedule conflicts and all, we only do about one every two weeks. The Common House also has a guest room, a children's play room, a living room, and a laundry room. Some residents have washer-dryers in their units. We have a washing machine but no dryer. So we either dry our laundry on racks or use the Common House dryers.

Our property is very nicely situated, with an old cemetery to the north, a huge city park and semi-wilderness area to the east, and residential neighborhood to the south and west. The buildings are connected by paved pathways, and there's usually a lot of activity out there -- especially kids. We have lots of gardening going on, and our common property also contains its own little wilderness preserve. A giant old oak tree used to stand at the east end of the path, but it fell just before move-in.

Lots needs to be done -- landscaping, building maintenance, paperwork, etc. In a cohousing community, the residents take care of a lot of stuff that a normal condominium would hire out. Everyone's supposed to put in four hours a week on community projects. This is a challenge for some. Yes, we have a lot of meetings and some disagreements. The upside is that our neighbors are a bunch of very intelligent people dedicated to improving their communication skills. Everyone moved in here because they wanted to make something like this work. It was about a decade in the planning. We joined right at the end of a long process, and I'm in awe of what these people have accomplished.

Return of the Geese

Great numbers of Canada geese like to overwinter in the farm fields around Corvallis and at the nearby wildlife sanctuary, but during the summer, they fly off to reestablish their Canadian citizenship. Now over the last couple of weeks, they've started returning -- at first in small low-flying groups. At first their calls seemed tentative, as though they were asking each other if they were sure this was really the place and would we be okay here. Maybe they were just tired after the long journey. Now they're settling in and flying higher on their daily rounds. They're still not all here yet (sort of like me).

Blackberry Blues

Although the Willamette Valley gets a lot of rain in the fall, winter, and spring, there's normally zero precipitation from May through September. The past couple of weeks, however, have brought some unseasonable showers, and I guess the blackberries have suffered.

About a week ago I started off toward my favorite blackberry patch with an empty pail and heart full of good cheer. There were still plenty of ripe berries, but up close things didn't look or smell so good. The pungent, fermentatios aroma reminded me of vinegar. The berries had lost their luster, and mold was overtaking them. In places whole clumps had just turned to masses of gray. The few that looked good enough to pick seemed to come off too easily and partially fall apart in my fingers. And the taste wasn't quite right. I groped for a while among the aura of decay and returned home with only a couple dozen berries in my bucket.

"Everything in its season," I told Leela, who likes to amass large quantities of various berries and freeze them so we can enjoy them year round. I've tried to convince her that if we go without them for most of the year, then we'll appreciate them all the more. Maybe. Or maybe the season isn't over after all. Yesterday I went for a walk in the park and found plenty of good blackberries in another place, with more green ones on the way. So goes the season.

Grackles and Crows

One thing I miss about Austin is the grackles. Here in Corvallis we have crows in great abundance, which have their own charm, but their grating caws can't quite match the marvelous electronic car-alarm call of a male great-tailed grackle strutting his stuff. (I once saw a tourist during the SxSW music festival trying to photograph a grackle.)

Now you might be excused for assuming that Corvallis takes its name from the crows, which are of the genus Corvus. In fact the name Corvallis was cobbled together from Latin roots that describe its position in the heart of the valley.

For years I had believed that grackles were also of the genus Corvus, along with jackdaws and ravens. In fact birds commonly called grackles are of several genera, none of which is Corvus. The great-tailed grackle that inhabits (or infests, depending on point of view) Austin, Texas, is of the Quiscalus genus. You have to move two steps down the taxonomic tree to the "order level" to find the common linage of crows and grackles in the Passeriformes, which includes most songbirds.

Although Corvallis has plenty of crows (there's even a watering hole downtown called the Crow Bar), the big black birds don't exactly darken the sky, as do the great wheeling flocks of Austin grackles. I've often thought that the grackle, rather than the armadillo, should be the animal emblem of Austin. One would be hard pressed to find an armadillo within those vaunted city limits, but grackles probably outnumber the human citizens by more than ten to one. Their very ubiquity likely causes them to be overlooked when people are considering names for things. They're so common, they're invisible -- or at least irrelevant. On the other hand, you see signs everywhere promoting Armadillo Wrecker Service, Armadillo Pest Control, Armadillo Tattoo Shop, Music, This, That, etc. -- but nary a commercial or civic mention of the loathsome grackle, which (along with the bats) actually contributes immensely to pest control. Yet atop of the signs and above the doors of those very businesses honoring the lowly armadillo are perched the gleaming black birds, ever watchful, always ready to swoop.

One time Leela was in an Austin boutique when a male grackle happened to fly in the door. The young lady in charge of the shop became very upset -- not because the bird might poop on her merchandise, but because she was afraid that black birds brought bad luck (they do have a rather menacing countenance). In complete sincerity, the woman wondered aloud if she should have the place exorcised. Leela tried to disabuse her of such thinking, saying: "Grackles -- they're party birds! They bring good luck."

And that's how I think of them -- party birds. While the city works hard to perpetuate its image as a good-times music capital, the grackles are living that lifestyle day and night, whooping it up in the trees and parking lots at all hours. Yeah, I miss that mess.

Potluck Moments

Last night we had a potluck dinner out on the CoHo walkway. Everyone brought out tables and chairs. Yummy food appeared. It was a beautiful, cool evening with all the wonderful components of a perfect summer picnic.

I stood in the midst of it all, holding a half-empty bottle of Leela Devi's homemade Sweet Chery Mead. I'd been serving out tastes of the 10-year-old beverage, eliciting appreciative responses. Most of the eating was finished. Beside me Jeremy sawed out a soulful tune on his fiddle. Looking up the path toward the fallen old oak tree, I saw people chatting and milling about. Beer had been brewing in a heated vat. The serving tables still held plenty of tasty food. I turned my gaze west toward the Common House where children chased each other with handfuls of clover. One girl was in a tutu, another flaunted the gown of a princess, and another wore almost nothing. Scooters and tricycles weaved in and out.

There was so much motion and energy and such a variety of noises, I thought I could catch an interesting video shot -- one great sweeping pan of kinetic frenetics with the violin player in the middle. I scurried off to get my camera. When I returned, I asked Jeremy to play the same thing again. He agreed to play something else, and that was okay.

Alas my batteries were dead, and the moment passed with only these coarse words as documentation.

Climate Refugees

Climate refugees -- that's what we are, if the truth be told. "Amenity migrants" is another term, perhaps more precise because it covers a broader range of reasons for relocating. We moved to the Northwest not only to escape the heat and drought, but to trade the big city for small-town life. And for the adventure of a new life in a new kind of community far away from home.

At one time in my life, I dreamed of living on another planet -- Mars perhaps. The idea still holds more than a little allure. If I did move there, no one could accuse me of being a climate refugee or amenity migrant. It would be very cold and dryer than dry, and no natural-food store within walking distance. But perhaps adventure is an amenity. It's certainly a luxury I'm fortunate to be able to afford.

Whether the Weather Withers or Not

Yes, I really like the weather here in Corvallis. I like the rain and cold of winter. I like the cool mornings and evenings of summer. Once in a while it gets up in the 90s, even touching 100, but it doesn't stay there long. Evening usually brings breezes from the coast, and we're back down in the 50s or low 60s.

I keep the Austin weather page bookmarked on my computer, just so I can assure myself that I'm in the right place. Yep!

We don't have air conditioning, and most people here don't. At night I open all the windows. Before dawn I put fans in the windows. When the sun comes up, I shut the windows and trap the cool air. Sometimes I kind of overdo it, keeping the inside temperature in the mid-60s all day long. I've still got my Texas weather wariness -- worried that the house will get too hot. Maybe I overreact. But most of the time it's very pleasant inside our home. There have only been a couple of days when we wished it were cooler.

Extreme Berry Picking

Early morning. I walk the straight path, intent on my purpose, which is to get some exercise before the day's heat comes on, make my circuit and move on to other things. Blackberry bushes loom on both sides of the path. With each passing day, the fruits are turning blacker, juicier, sweeter. They're a blur as I stride along. But suddenly one berry, fatter and darker than the others, comes into sharp focus. And before I know what I'm doing, I'm over there, reaching. I get it, and it's tastier than I thought it would be. So I go for another. And another.

Then I'm stepping over the tangle of thorns, reaching for the clutches of berries farther back. I don't care that my legs get scratched, my clothes get torn. I barge farther in. I have an attitude: these are my berries and nothing will keep me from them. The plant's spiny defenses do not deter me; on the contrary, the pain and difficulty only stimulate my urge for reward.

I trip, fall. I'm down on my ass on a mat of thorns. If I try to push myself up with my hands, I'll get punctured palms. No matter -- I'll just eat some of these power berries and pop back up later. But first I'll take a nap, like a yogi on a bed of nails. My weight is distributed among the sharp points, and I don't feel much. I dream of nirvana.

The Art of Hanging Out

Having the time.
Taking the time.
Time to read the paper or a book.
Time to talk with a friend.
Preferably while sitting in a coffee house late into the morning. Or at a table on the sidewalk where others, in their hurrying, will see you and perhaps wistfully wonder when they will have time.

I have been among the wistful -- wondering, wishing, imagining that I could be reading a novel on the shady side of the sidewalk late into the morning, no other needs pressing in. Then maybe a friend shows up and we have a long conversation about the novel, or about love, or even the price of gasoline.

But my days have been full of errands and chores and little tasks I've set for myself, seemingly urgent stuff that takes priority over activities that smack of vacationing. Oh, yes, I take a furtive moment now and then to browse through a magazine or chat with someone. But where is the time for serious, intentional hanging out? I see others doing it all the time -- or at least I think they're doing it. They don't look as though they have anything more important to do, anywhere else to be. From my perspective they're suspended in a tableau of socio-intellectual titillation, poised between fellowship and solitude, doing and being, pleasure and fulfillment.

I decide this hanging out thing must be an art. I'll give it a try. Maybe I can develop my skill. So I stick a science-fiction novel in my fanny pack and hop on my bike. I plan to ride around town a bit, and then maybe stop at the Beanery or some other coffee shop with sidewalk seating and just read for a while, pretending there's no time like the present.

But once I get on my bike, my mindset shifts. I don't want to stop. This is a good time for zooming around on two wheels. My legs are loving this! Why would I want to stop and buy expensive tea that's not as good as the tea I have at home and sit in an uncomfortable metal chair and try to read with cars and other people shuffling about? Better to read in the cool peace and quiet of home, sitting on my comfortable couch with my favorite beverage at hand.

But then where is the fellowship, the cozy feeling of being among others enjoying the same activity? And isn't the surrounding hustle and bustle an essential ingredient in the process of throwing such timeless moments into relief?

Okay, so I don't quite have the hang of this public hanging out thing. I'll work on it.

Bicycling

I bought a bicycle a couple of months ago -- a very nice recumbent. I haven't been a bike rider since college. Now I'm all over town on this thing. I like to get up in the high gears and crank it like crazy!

And this is certainly the town for it. Corvallis has been cited for its bicycle-friendliness. There are lots of bike lanes and trails, paved and unpaved. Automobile drivers seem generally courteous. And downtown every block seems to have a bike shop. In with the crowd of normal bikes, I see many odd rigs -- extreme recumbents, tricycles, tandems, sidecars, trains of trailers. One of our neighbors made a bike trailer for his canoe.

Leela will get a bike soon. She bought a helmet today and promptly took off on my bike -- gone for over an hour. "I was starting to worry," said I on her safe return. "Like I do when you're out," she replied.

In Austin the idea of bicycling frightened me. It can be dicey here too, of course, but it's not overly intimidating. Many activities are less formidable in the doing than in the imagining.

Will the winter rains cool my enthusiasm? I don't know. Right now we have only one car -- our little Honda Fit. We don't plan to get another. The rain and cold don't keep many of the bike riders off the road. They just put on their gear and go.

Retirement of a Sort

So I had this job as a technical writer for the Texas Department of Transportation. I didn't plan to stay with it for 19 years, but they treated me well, and the pay was good, and it was kind of interesting -- so... Before that I had been doing freelance work -- technical writing, ad copy, video scripts. It was pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence. The competition started getting fierce. My daughter was getting ready for college, and I decided I needed a regular paycheck. I told myself I'd just stay with the Department until she got through college. She got through college in four years and took off. I stayed on and on at TxDOT. One thing led to another, and pretty soon it was 2007 -- time to move on.

Under the arcane rules of state employment, I was able to retire at age 60+ with a decent pension and benefits. I consider myself a lucky man. I'm healthy, happy, in love with my wife, debt free, living where I want to live, and writing what I want to write.

I had an odd career as a technical writer. I call it odd because it was unlikely for a person of my abilities and education -- slow reader, poor speller, and only three years of college. But I've always had a knack for grammar and syntax. Even the shapes of letters and sounds of words captivate me. And I loved stories and the process of their unfolding -- still do. Somehow by my late 20s, I had decided to be a writer. I'd done lots of writing before that -- comics, movie scripts, short stories, poetry -- so maybe it was natural, or maybe it wasn't. Everyone probably has a peculiar story.

Berries I Have Eaten

Exactly one year ago, Leela and I visited Corvallis for about a week with the explicit purpose of checking out the town as a possible place to live. We liked what we found, in spite of the fact that we both got very sick -- some kind of flu.

The illness didn't keep us from exploring, though, and one of the wonders we discovered was blackberries. It happened to be the height of the season, and they were everywhere -- an invasive species, we were told. Animal instinct compelled me to gorge on the messy fruit. I climbed right into the thorny tangles. My body needed this; the appetite was like nothing I've experienced before or since, an intuitive somatic need for whatever antioxidant or other special curative nutrient the plant offered.

So I partook of the fruit of the invasive species, and thus became one myself. Now we've been living in Corvallis since February, and I've picked four kinds of berries, each in its luscious season:

• strawberries
• blueberries
• raspberries
• and lately blackberries again.

Except for the blackberries, these were all from you-pick-'em farms. I go crazy eating these little sweeties right off the plants. The blackberry plants are all over everywhere, including the park near our house. They're coming in late this year, as everything is, due to the protracted spring. I like the protracted spring.

Walkin', Talkin' Nostalgia Scrapbook

A few days ago, Leela discovered wasps nesting in a ventilator drain pipe next to the water spigot outside our building. We called a guy who advertises in the paper that he will collect wasps and yellow jackets for free. He sells them to a company that makes vaccine from their venom. Today he came over. He said they were paper wasps. He vacuumed out a couple of insects and then pulled out their little nest, which was just visible inside the pipe. He said he could hatch out the pupae. He squirted some clove oil in the pipe, and I covered it with a sock.

Conversing with this fellow, I learned he'd lived in Austin for 11 years -- 1974-1984. "The good years," I told him, and he agreed. We talked about various places around the city, and I realized Austin was frozen in time for him in the mid 1980s. He hadn't been back since, and in his mind nothing much had changed. For him the airport was still at Mueller, there were no toll roads or gigantic condo towers, things like that.

Well I guess it's too late for me to freeze Austin's good years. My experiential tea bag has steeped too long; I didn't pull out until after the end of bad-old 2007, with the impossible traffic, SoCo mania, and endless heat. I'm happy to be rid of that. But actually I must have all those other eras stored away as still lifes too. Otherwise how could I have so favorably compared Corvallis to Austin in the 1960s? I'm just a walking, talking nostalgia scrapbook!

Why I am Austin

Until this year, I had lived all my adult life in Austin, Texas. During that time my name was Bruce. Bruce is a fine name, but it was also my father's name. Before he died a couple of years ago, we'd often get each others calls (he also lived in Austin). And during my childhood, I went through stages when I wanted to change my name, in large part to distinguish myself from my father.

So I've always been fascinated with the idea of switching identities, and our move to Corvallis provided a good opportunity, especially since our new cohousing community already has an established Bruce whose last name also happens to begin with "H." I picked the name Austin because:

• I liked the name.
• I wanted to commemorate my hometown.
• It might have been my given name, if my mother had had sufficient foresight.

That last point needs explaining. I am the oldest of 4 boys. I was born in Austin; #2 was also born in Austin; #3 was born in Dallas; and #4 was born in Flint, Michigan (when our family lived there for a little while). We were named Bruce, Don, Gary, and Mark. But my mother has often mused that she should have named us Austin, Travis (the county that Austin is in), Dallas, and Flint. Well, 25% of her fantasy has now become reality.

It's taken some getting used to, and of course all my old friends and family still call me Bruce, which is fine. I've discovered I can be both. I am a city; I contain multitudes!

Why Leave Austin?

I was born in Austin, Texas, in 1947 and lived there all of my adult life -- until this year.

What happened?

I loved Austin, but the city's size and traffic were becoming more and more irksome. And the heat! I don't think I was made for months and months of near-100-degree days. And besides, I'd always wanted to find out what it was like to live somewhere else. I wanted some perspective on my hometown. I wanted a change.

In 2007 I retired from my long-time state job. My wife Leela and I sold our home for a good price just before the real-estate market went into a nosedive. Meanwhile we'd had our eye on Corvallis, Oregon, a university town of about 55,000 in the Willamette Valley. Concurrently we had also become interested in the cohousing concept and were delighted to find a new cohousing community getting started in Corvallis. At first we didn't think we could get in, even if we wanted to, which we weren't sure of. There weren't any units we liked available. But during a reconnoitering trip to Corvallis last year, we found that a CoHo unit just right for us had opened up (someone had dropped out). At that point the buildings weren't quite finished, and we got on the waiting list. After that everything just fell into place -- or snowballed -- or avalanched -- or pick your own cataclysmic, earth-shifting image. We rushed to sell our house, we ridded ourselves of mountains of stuff, and we made it out here to Corvallis in mid February 2008, somewhat befuddled and surprised at what we'd done.

Sometimes I don't think there is a why. Maybe we just landed here after a storm. But that's not true -- we really did make this happen. And if we can pull off this amazing transformation, we can accomplish a lot of other incredible things too.