A Life Under Construction - My Life in Oregon

I think of this as my Oregon chapter, but the first year and a half (2001 and 2002) represented a particularly unhappy time in Los Angeles, when Leora and I were simply done with the city we had grown up in, the city we owned a house in, the city where the police helicopters swirled nightly above our roof, the city of foul air and obscene divisions of wealth and poverty, and the city in which I worked a job that was no fun anymore.

We were, by 2002, so very and completely done with Los Angeles. So we put our house on the market and with the proceeds were able to fund a move to Portland Oregon and a prolonged job and career search in our new city.

In 2003 Leora and I purchased a house in Northeast Portland, next door to Leora's mother Judith, who moved to Oregon about when we did, and some time after her brother's family moved here too.

In the course of our first 2 years here in Portland I tried doing a little portrait photography, and then began to look around for work, as a grant writer, as a webmaster, and in various other capacities.

I am now working in a local think tank and software development organization, and very satisfied with my work. I'm also working on the weekends and evenings on Portland Ground, my documentary of Portland Oregon.

In the mean time, Leora and I are immersed in the work of parenting. Our children are reasonably happy in a good local school, and are busy growing up situated in the unique socio-cultural matrix that is Portland Oregon, just as my parents grew up, respectively in the mind/heart shaping environments of 1930s Kansas City and the 1930s Bronx, and just as I grew up in 1970s Los Angeles.

My children will think that Portland Oregon of the 2000s is normal, and someday they will probably flee it for something that seems more sophisticated. So be it. Portland is a place that seems to work for Leora and me and our children will work out their own lives sooner than we expect.

Connecting the Past to the Future in the Moment

I have rewritten the story of my life several times since I started this project, but I always seem to leave these somewhat melodramatic words as the last word on the present. They strike me still as an appropriate way to sum it all up.

What has my life amounted to until now? I suppose I've just been making the mistakes I needed for the next stage of my life to be possible.

If history, whether of the world, or of the self, did not enable prophecy, why would we practice it?

The only science of the future is the study of the past.

But when it comes to ourselves, we are loathe to admit this.

We prefer to believe that other people's pasts are prologue, but that we have autonomy.

The myth of individual autonomy is too central to my own idea of selfhood to allow myself to imagine that I am locked in some pattern that was established in the first few decades of my life.

And so, I think, at mid-life, as you might predict I would, and as perhaps any sane person must, that my Chapter Seven, 2001 to 2007, is mine to live and complete as I will.

It grows on the roots I have established until now, and is limited, constrained and directed by the structures of power in which my life is embedded, but as a typical American, as a believer in the autonomous power of the self, I believe that I have choices.

I don't know whether that is false consciousness, or not, but it is what I believe.

Everything that has happened until now becomes the ground on which I stand as I breathe in the moment and face the future.