OVERCOME LIFESTYLE? YOU CAN DO IT

The overcome lifestyle asks one question: can you overcome?

When every day feels like an overcome lifestyle day, it gets tough.

Can you overcome? There are no wrong answers.

You overcame growing up in a steamy one-horse town; you overcame growing up in the cold, cold, city.

Then you overcame feeling like nobody in the big world.

Feeling like anybody, even a nobody, is something. It beats floating in an endless void.

Instead you improvise, adapt, and overcome.

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My wife and I parked in NW Portland and walked to the Gerding Theater.

That night it was a Billie Holiday play with special seating arrangements.

I remember it well.

‘Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar And Grill.’

It showed Billie on a wasted night at the end of a hard life .

That was the night Billie Holiday and I met during ‘audience participation’ time. She gave me a lap song.

During the final bow at the end, I gave her a high five during her curtsy.

We both overcame the moment, but I still wish I’d faced the packed house and taken a bow.

It would have made a better Portland memory to share when I get old.

Overcome Lifestyle In Portland

Is there anyone who doesn’t miss the Portland without the homeless, the trash, and the graffiti?

Some old timers say it’s always been the way it is now, just not out in the open.

During the Great Depression in the early 30’s Shantytowns sprung up in the gulch, and it brought with it the first ”Hoovervilles.” The biggest settlement was near Grand Avenue with another one just east of NE 21st Ave. They eventually merged. They were self-contained “villages” governed by an elected mayor who forbade any liquor in the Shantytown. In 1933, there were 333 men living in 131 shanties in Shantytown. 

I remember Pioneer Square when it was a parking lot. Before that it was the Hotel Portland and it looked grand.

Now it’s Portland’s living room. Is it time to pull up a chair?

Overcoming Yourself First

When I showed up here I had a plan: Get a job, finish college, do things only done in Oregon.

I overcame shiftlessness, dropping out, and aimlessness.

In other words, I got married and became the better man I destined to be.

It was timing.

This year the clock strikes thirty-six years.

I’ve rebounded and continue rebounding from cataract surgery last month for faded vision, to hip replacement the next for a limpy gait.

I asked those familiar if they ever thought of me as handicapped.

“It’s been hard watching you grind through everything, but no, not handicapped.”

I checked because I’ve never been more crippled than I am today. Unless it was yesterday. But I hear it improves.

That’s the overcome lifestyle.