This wasn't the adventure it sounds

My guiding principle for my work life has always been something Diana Sugg said at a conference a few years ago. "Follow your ghosts." My mother had me as a teenager 30 years ago.

That said, work, recently:




The playroom became a beauty salon when the bell rang. It was 2 p.m. at Roosevelt High School, two weeks shy of summer, and the teen mothers whose toddlers attend Albina Early Head Start at the school were prepping for family pictures.

Anna Baldwin-Sanders, a part-time teacher at Head Start, twisted 17-year-old Lourdes Castillo's hair around a curling iron, while another teacher finished up a perm nearby.

"Luis," Lourdes called to her boyfriend, who was feeding their 11-month-old son, Christopher, a bottle. "Find his tie."

Outside, members of West Linn's SouthLake Church had transformed a school courtyard into a portrait studio. The church has volunteered at the St. Johns school for five years. Each year, members ask Ariana Altieri, the Portland School District's teen-parent coordinator, what the teen mothers need.

After the church bought diapers, box fans and clothes, its members had one more question for the parents: What do you want?

Family pictures topped the list, so Wednesday church member Karen Bonelli-Sanquist brought her Nikon and spent three hours making portraits of 11 families. The church congregation will print each family's favorite photographs.

At 2:30 p.m., Lourdes emerged in ringlets. Christopher's onesie had given way to a three-piece suit, complete with a blue tie and a tongue stained cupcake-blue. The wind blew Christopher's tuft of hair into a fauxhawk like his father's.

Lourdes and Luis met four years ago during a soccer trip to Mt. Hood. They started dating a year later, and when Christopher came, Lourdes transferred to Roosevelt from Benson to be closer to her family and to enroll her son in Head Start. Luis took a year off to earn money working full-time at McDonalds. The 19-year-old said he plans to enroll in Roosevelt in the fall. The couple will graduate together next year, just as Christopher hits his terrible twos.

Those tantrum days seemed far off Thursday, though, as their boy beamed for the pictures, revealing all eight teeth at once.

"He's a natural," said church member Beth Romes, who, 37 years ago, was a teen mother herself.

"I take a lot of pictures of him," Lourdes said, motioning toward her phone. But the trio hadn't had a photo taken together since Christopher was only a month, she said.

Lourdes drops Christopher off each morning at Head Start then picks him at 4 p.m., after school and after homework. Two weeks from now, the family will be on its own for a few months.

This summer, Albina will discontinue its summer program for the first time. Before federal budget cuts, teachers such as Baldwin-Sanders visited the mothers once a week for half-an-hour at their homes. They also hosted monthly socials for the families. Baldwin-Sanders and the Southlake members are trying to create a volunteer program for this summer, but they're not sure yet if it'll work out.

As the afternoon neared 4 p.m., Bonelli-Sanquist turned her camera to show the family a sneak peek of the photos. The family had knelt to fit on a child's-sized bridge, and the pictures made the school brick look picaresque.

At the right angle, you couldn't even make out the cafeteria windows, the students spilling out from afternoon activities, just a wall away.

making it possible to swim / his way out of Compton

The gym had changed since the days Denmark Reid averaged 23 points a game for Jefferson High School. So had his jumpshot. But Reid and Mitchell Jackson played as if they were boys Friday night, trading shots with a girls-sized ball.

"That's OK, my hands are small anyway," Reid, a former shooting guard, said before sinking a three-pointer.

In the early 1990s, the men played on powerhouse Jefferson teams that led the city in scoring. Their lives diverged after they left that court.

Reid went on to play college ball then settled back in Portland. But Jackson never had the precision his best friend did -- he sold drugs instead. After a prison stint, he changed his course. He graduated from Portland State University then moved to New York City, where he works as a writer and professor.

They came together last week to shoot footage for Jackson's documentary, a film that will accompany his forthcoming novel, The Residue Years. In a two-hour session, Reid, Jackson and current Jefferson coach Pat Strickland talked about the good old days, the legends who never became great, the games they almost won.

"Basketball was it for me," Reid told Jackson. "It gave me options.

Jackson wore a decidedly New York get-up -- a black shirt buttoned to the neck and a pair of gray, fashion-forward slouchers that vaguely resembled sweatpants -- an avant garde uniform that did not go unteased. But Jackson and Reid are cut from the same cloth, 30-somethings reared on basketball and a particular North Portland flavor that has influenced the rest of their lives.

More than 80 percent of the neighborhood around Jefferson High School was African American in the 1990s. Today, less than half is.

But young black men still suit up in Democrat blue, hoping that ball will lift them somewhere else. So much so that a Nike film crew spent the winter documenting the team's season, ending with its 5A state championship.

"If you walked into the street today and asked any kid, they would say they want to play in the NBA," said Strickland, the state's 5A coach of the year.

Basketball was the reason Reid never joined a gang. Basketball was the reason he earned a degree. Reid played only three years at Jeff, but he is third on the school's all-time points list. When he graduated in 1993, his SAT score kept him out of the University of Portland. His 1,490 career points at Jefferson earned him a scholarship to New Mexico State instead.

"Without basketball, there's no telling where I would have been," Reid said. "I just wasn't the smartest guy in the room."

Scouts started following Reid as a middle schooler hooping at Beaumont Middle School. Back then, students could attend any school to play ball, and newspapers covered Reid's decision as if it were LeBron choosing Miami.

But none of the glory, even the later glory of averaging double digits in a Division 1 season, compared with the North and Northeast Portland park games, Reid said.

"Back then, you got your grit in the park," Strickland agreed. "Kids today don't have that park grit. The superstars today are prima donnas. They say, 'That asphalt would hurt my knees.'"

The three were playing in Peninsula Park in 1997, the day Jackson was busted for selling crack.

"What were you thinking when you learned I was slinging dope?" Jackson asked Friday.

"I was in a state of shock," Strickland said. "Square-bear Mitch? This dude is like Urkel, and he's out here doing this?"

Crack was always around the neighborhood then. Jackson's mother used, too. But that wasn't supposed to be Jackson's story, Reid said, because Jackson, now 37, could always write.

He was a decent shooting guard -- "You shot 21 against Benson, but it should have been 50," Reid reminded him -- but he shined in the classroom. The drug charge was shocking. The book deal with Bloomsbury was not.

When it came time to pen his first novel, Jackson called Reid for details. The former star works at Cascadia Behavioral Health now. He has the memory of an elephant. He remembers every stat, every ball that bounced off the rim.

Tell me about the old legends, Jackson said. For hours, they talked about all the hoopers who went through Jefferson. Some ended up in jail. Division 1 dreams disappeared with drugs. A few went to college.

"We were the lucky ones," Reid said.

Then he picked up a ball, headed to center court and shot. Jackson had words, the kind of poetry a publisher noticed, but this was still their language.

And you were 20,000 underneath the sea

Thursday's work day:

Telling me how you're going to outlive your body

Two years ago I lost my best friend. I didn't know I was mad til last night, hearing the news that she wants to go, too. Can't you all just take better care of yourselves, stick around for me?

I still see him everywhere, though. I still think to write him. Anytime something is good or bad or pretty. Even if it's not.

Get up off the pavement, brush the dirt up off my psyche

A month is long enough. But what do you say to silence, to feelings without hard edges? How can anyone put words to anything? So here I am, atop a washing machine in an empty laundromat, your number on my fingers. It doesn't feel brave.

We are trying to make a year out of four days, a month out of 12 minutes. Both feel irresolute. But this is blood we're talking. The same in you, in me. And I love you. The rest will work itself out.

Turn the wind to gravel roads

I gave up a life of crime. I gave it to a friend of mine. Something else was on my mind.

Caldwell, Idaho

The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done.

I am shy, but you can reach me

Spent the weekend at the beach with C, watching the last light fade off summer.







Look for me another day.
I feel that I could change,
I feel that I could change.
There's a sudden joy that's like
a fish, a moving light;
I thought I saw it
-- Innocence Mission, "Lakes of Canada"

Object of affection

l: Amanda Allen, r: Casey Parks

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie

Another slice of Needful Things:



l: Amanda Allen, r: Casey Parks

awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed

The second installment of Needful Things, my summer iPhone project with Amanda, has wrapped up. Here's a preview.



l: Amanda Allen, r: Casey Parks

in the interval called slam clicker, Realm of Pacific

Haters going down for the count

Pictures from the AU / Starfucker / Girl Talk concert Saturday night. My feet still hurt even though I was wearing my orthopedics. We arrived early to be near the front, but the rowdy young crowd went a few steps too far with me (one boy actively shoved me), at which point we declared ourselves to old to be close then retreated to the back.

And then you take off, your name aloft

All my lies are always wishes

He gave me gasoline

My friend Claudia has a neat, interactive show up at the U of O's Whitebox gallery this month. Half of the installation is this room filled with old cassette tape players. The viewer can stop and play and rewind the tapes, each of which is either a recording of water or a sound Claudia composed to evoke water. Here are some scenes from the show.

now I'm haunted by geography

Apparently the Willamette Falls are the nation's second-largest by volume. But they aren't exactly a natural get-away. On the way out to a camping trip last weekend, C and I stopped to check them out.

Salt my wounds; chlorine my eyes

The dog days of summer are here, for a few weeks at least.

I go to bed feeling the same way