Well I dream you constant stranger

I met Amiable while reporting a story about a collective farm his family has helped start with a group of other African immigrants.

Both hands steal into the swollen summer air, a blind reach

Here's a little interaction I witnessed the other day while reporting a separate story.



Yves Mutara missed his first bus home. The next southbound 4 wouldn’t come for another few minutes. He spent the first of those moments staring at the beard.

In three decades of living in Democratic Republic of Congo, Mutara had never seen a beard like that. The hair was wild and white and seemed to float around, rather than protrude from, the dark face wearing it.

Mutara looked down the road for the bus. No sign of it. He approached the beard.

“Excuse me,” he said. His voice was soft with a trace of the French accent he learned in Kinshasa in school. “How old are you?”

A pair of eyes lit up underneath two equally wild and white eyebrows.

“In my soul or in my physical body?” the man asked.

“Your physical body,” Mutara explained. “Because, see, when I watch you, you look young. You have energy. You are strong. But as I get closer, you look …”

“Old,” the man finished.

He laughed and introduced himself as Thimmaiah. He was 67 and studying basic English at Portland Community College’s Cascade campus. Thimmaiah was born Tadaga Doddathimmaiah in a Southern Indian town called Mysore. He's still learning to speak, he said, but that didn't slow him down. Every word seemed accompanied by its own exclamation point. His eyebrows bounced independently of each other.

Mutara, still quiet, explained he was studying business at the school.

“Why are you white hair everywhere?” Mutara asked. “Is it fashion? How do you look so good?”

“I trained for wrestling. And I never smoked. And I never did drugs. And I can teach you tiger breathing right here,” Thimmaiah said.

“I also never smoke,” Mutara said, his voice rising.

His bus stopped, let off a few passengers, then continued down North Albina Street without him. He moved here two years ago, but moments like these, where he feels he fits, are rare.

“Are you 26?” Thimmaiah said.

“That’s right, 36,” Mutara said, mishearing. “When I see you,” he told his new acquaintance, “I see the glory of God.”

“You don’t have to tell me about God,” Thimmaiah said. “He’s in my soul. I was raised Hindu, but Jesus is the energy that brought me to this country.”

They exchanged email addresses and stories of the way God had pulled them from worse situations.

“I was lost,” Mutara said. “And now I am here with you.”

Thimmaiah lunged at Mutara, grabbing him in a hug. That white hair enveloped him. They pulled apart after half a minute. Then Mutara walked to catch the bus, a strand of white hair shining out against his navy button-up.

Back in our town

I'm working on a video project about a neighborhood. Here are some photos I took in the neighborhood.

Givin ends to my friends and it feels stupendous

What's better than one story about a barber? Two! Here's a different kind of barber, just half a mile away from yesterday's barber.

North Chautauqua's barber from Casey Parks on Vimeo.

Advertising looks and chops a must

Hot days are hair cut days. Darlene Robinette has spent plenty of afternoons in her Kenton barbershop, 7 Bucks a Whack, just goofing off, petting her 8-year-old peekapoo Elvis. But it seems like the whole neighborhood comes in on the days the thermometer shoots past 80.

Take Monday for instance: 90 degrees by 6 p.m. That’s normally quitting time, Robinette said. Half a dozen guys were still waiting to have their beards trimmed. She worked an hour later. Even though it was her 72nd birthday. Even though she had worn her bathing suit and a pair of waterproof shorts all day, hoping she could sneak out to Sauvie Island for a dip.

A regular came by late afternoon. Robinette had two clipper cuts waiting to be done, so he waited down the road at a Lottery machine. He reappeared half an hour later, $1,100 in hand.

“He said he’d buy me a drink at Kenton Station,” Robinette said.

A customer was still waiting at 7 p.m., but Robinette asked her to please come back the next day. That drink was waiting, “and I’d about whacked til I dropped,” Robinette said.

The narrow Kenton shop is Robinette’s third. She moved to the space 11 years ago from a space on Southeast Morrison. She misses the pompadours her Southeast customers favored, but otherwise, Kenton is perfect. She likes the library and the park, and when quitting time does, in fact, come, she can make it home to her Jantzen Beach house boat or to the water on Sauvie Island in no time flat.

She learned to cut hair from her mother in Lake Oswego in the mid 1940s. Irene Eoff had been studying to become a barber before she became pregnant with Darlene. Four other children followed, and though Eoff never finished her studies, she lined all the neighborhood kids up on weekends for a free buzz.

By the time Robinette daughter was 7, Eoff had her daughter doing perms. Eoff never had the chance to do hair for a living. She worked as a school bus driver and as a housekeeper for St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center. When she passed away in 1994, Robinette used the inheritance to buy her first shop, a walk-in street level spot in the Clifford Apartments. She moved to the Morrisson location after the apartment building burned down in 1998.

Robinette keeps a picture of her mom hanging on a wood-block clock above the barber chair in her Kenton location.

“That way she can see what I did with the money and watch me work every day,” Robinette said.

Yelp reviewers give Robinette decent marks, in part for her ability to multi-task.

“Darlene was actually boiling potatoes while cutting my hair (in between smoke breaks),” one five-star reviewer wrote.

She doesn’t have a favorite haircut. She does it all and offers a free eyebrow trim for the $7. She prefers not to use scissors. Shears have hurt her hands ever since she broke both wrists a month before the apartment fire.

She still does perms, though she doesn’t advertise them, out of respect for the nearby beauty salons. She doesn’t keep a look book. She has something better: a magazine that shows former Mayor Sam Adams on the cover.

“I gave him this haircut,” she said. “He told me, ‘Whenever I need something special done with my hair, you’re the one.’”

Sure enough, the former mayor gave the spot a 5-star review on Yelp.

“He has a lot of cowlicks,” Robinett said. “But they can be worked with.”

and I don't mind racing through our goodbyes

I've never felt at home anywhere the way I do in this apartment. When I was young, we changed houses the way some people change bedsheets. I imagined nothing different for my life when I signed a rental agreement for this 1909, wood-floored, big-windowed apartment. In three years, I'll be out of here, I thought. II stayed six, and though I'm sitting on the floor now, with Lafayette smelling every box as I type, I am finally leaving.

This is where I learned to take pictures, where we kissed the first time. It's where I said goodbye over and over again. I stocked my first shelves here with a bottle of Pimms and a tin of cumin. That first year, I bought a new spice with every paycheck. I made only $7.80 an hour, but when I saved enough, sometimes I bought a bottle of whiskey. I fell asleep to the rumble of buses and motorcycles, woke up to my cat chirping at birds. I watched at least eight cars crash into the tree outside.

I stacked my books two deep on every shelf, kept a string of Christmas lights hung across the window for all but the first six months. I lined the walls with snapshots and kept my nicest bowls in the liquor cabinet, filled with cat treats. After you left your aloe vera here in 2008, I let it die then brought it back to life again. I think that happened a few times, but eventually, I learned to keep a plant (or 20) alive without any Lazarus-like miracles.

This is where I held the Monday night dinners, the annual Valentine's party. This is where we danced and collapsed, where I grew too old to party anymore. This is where you said to me, so devastatingly in 2007, "It's a nice place for a 24-year-old."

It was a nice place for any age, except for those days when it wasn't -- when the ceiling leaked for two years, when the hot water went out every week, when silverfish darted underneath midnight steps to the bathroom. It was too hot in the summer, too hot in the winter, but I never tired of the view. The rounded arch moldings reminded me of jazz when I toured the apartment, and I dreamed I could become a great writer here. I never became great, but I won't hold it against the molding.

My new place is one mile north. It doesn't have the view of the Fremont bridge or the totally uncomfortable fire escape. It doesn't have my neighbors, Amy and Milan, whom I've spent half a decade getting to know in the two feet of hallway between our doors. But it has two more cats, a big backyard and a girlfriend who knew exactly all the right things to say to me on one of the worst days of my entire life. That is, it has everything I need, here at 30. I unpacked my shoes and my books first. It's already home.

But you'd rather make it hard

Stress days these days, but soon, I'll be fancy free again, lunging across sand, all my jowls flapping.