BIG PLANS FOR A SMALL TOWN

Big plans come with big responsibilities.

Such as?

Such as, if you buy stuff for a plan and fail, you’re stuck with the stuff and no plan.

Or, like so many, you pretend the fail was part of the original plan.

See how easy that was? All done, but . . .

When you fail in the big city you join a huge cohort of failed plans.

My big city years were spent in Philadelphia and New York.

I could say those years were lived in the big city, but it wasn’t living compared to what came after.

What came after? Oregon.

I came back to Oregon each time.

In Philadelphia I knew guys a few years older and into their big plans.

One was a school teacher writing a book to take him out of teaching. He hoped.

Another was a contractor buying abandoned row houses and living in them during his rebuild and eventual sale.

All I needed to do was get a teaching certificate, a contractor license, and their plans could have been mine.

New York was easier. Who’s ever said that before?

My buddies worked for litigation companies, back office Wall Street, or the mob.

All I needed to do was sit and read, sit and answer the phone, or hijack trucks full of cigarettes.

Both places promised a boring life at the minimum, and jail time at worst.

But none of it tweaked my interests enough to stick around.

 

Big Plans For A Big Timer

My big city plans were like my small town plans:

Avoid looking out the window and wondering why I still lived there.

The wrong answer meant time to move.

Before I put on my slippers and pajamas and called it getting dressed, I was a mover if not a shaker.

I moved to twenty-one places over a lifetime with the last twenty years in the same spot today, give or take a year.

From low-crawling down a smoke filled hallway during a fire, to finding cockroaches in every food package in the cupboard, to having surprise guests arrive after breakups, apartment living is far behind me now, so far that the wife and I talk about down-sizing to an apartment in the neighborhood where we met.

Talk about the circle of life, it’s the same neighborhood we started a family in. Those would be big plans.

Will we ever do it? Not likely, but we could.

How many baby boomers dream of a return to Portland baby boomer status after abandoning the city for the suburbs?

There would be more if the city’s interesting neighborhood weren’t sprinkled with mini-apartments in big buildings with no parking.

Bikes and Uber were supposed to solve the limited parking, but people moved in with their cars.

 

Portland, Oregon was just the right size for me after leaving New York. Now I had my own borough-sized city that no one knew if they’d never left and come back.

My first time back I moved to Eugene, which was the Big City where I grew up in North Bend.

Portland was a megalopolis we drove through on the way to Grandma’s house in Washington.

Getting apartments and learning how to live in Manhattan and Brooklyn shrunk Portland down to size.

Now it was my small town for big plans.

 

Life Plans On NW 20th and Lovejoy

First I met the girl of my dreams and asked her to marry me.

She said yes, her mother showed up a minute later, and we broke up.

My now ex-fiance of five minutes had had a plan before we met, and had a plan in case our plans didn’t work out.

There was nothing in her plan about returning to girlfriend status, and lots in her plan about moving away.

So we made up, got married, had a Portland baby, then a Tigard baby.

 

Are we a perfect couple? Best friends? Soul mates?

I’d have to ask for clarification since ‘husband and wife’ covers so much ground.

Besides, breaking it down to conventional definitions might be the jinx we’ve avoided so far.

Sometime marriage hangs by a thread. There’s no ‘mailing it in’ going on around here.

Every day is a challenge to meet, and it better be met with intention.

Fortunately we both understand the personal challenge without drawing a picture and putting ourselves in it.

But if we did draw it out, what would it look like?

We share the goal of getting up early and organizing the day.

Getting up early means getting to bed at a reasonable time in a reasonable mood.

“Oh look, boomepdx is saying David Gillaspie is old without saying he’s old.”

All I’m saying is drunk and high are not the best way to get organized, even if they are perfectly legal.

Neither is laying in bed until ten in an alcohol-induced sweat.

Good habits start with clear thought to reach shared goals.

After you reach the goals, dance with the lady in the picture, then make big plans for the next goal.