Plaza de Soedad

Home has been a theme for me and this blog. It has been a fascination for me since I can remember remembering. I want to feel like I am home. For most of my life I have not felt that way. I always feel like a tourist, or a stranger, or an alien. Sometimes I have felt like a voyeur in my own bedroom.

In 1986 my parents bought a house in southwest Portland. It was at a winding road curve in a forested drive. The backyard had a pool, but barely past the pool was a wall of Himalayan blackberries with vines a thick as small trees. My parents just sold that house last week. That house is no longer part of my life.

There are many places that felt close to be a home. My grandparents had an apple orchard up on Bald Mountain somewhere between Forest Grove and McMinville, Oregon. You could see seven Cascade mountains from their back porch. My brother and I ran through the apple trees, played with apple jack the asshole pony, and in the forest that butted up against some BLM land. I got to have a childhood that older people think I didn’t have. I got to be Tom Sawyer. I would even trick my brother into doing some of my chores.

I even had a bedroom there. It was dominated by a four post bed with a canopy. My grandmother loved antiques. She especially loved the American Revolutionary War. There were paintings, sculptures, and china all from that era in that room. Right below were my toys. My grandmother bought me a lot of Star Wars action figures. It was a joy to go there.

Even as a child I knew Portland was growing. Every time we drove out to my grandparents house, the suburbs ate more and more of the farms and wilderness. It used to feel like we were driving back in time, but then it took longer to get out of the tracks of houses built one inch away from the other.

My parents house was kind of like a mini farm. It was forested and the neighbors were a little ways away. Trees and bamboo made the privacy even more secure. I changed so much in that house. I was a teenage junky. That house became a hostile environment – only because of me. It did not feel like home, but I wasn’t going to find a home high all the time.

I became attracted to the streets. I thought I belonged with the winos, the junkies, the gangsters, and the insane. I romanticized being a homeless junky. I was Burroughs and Bukowski wrapped up in a Jim Carroll shell. I’d rather die than live like a square, and I almost did.

There is nothing less homey than a treatment center or mental institution. The lighting makes reality suspect alone. Everything is on a strict schedule. Time and space is not yours. You are threatened with it and threatened to lose it. All the ideas of home become a fantasy to get through the day of shuffling from groups and cafeterias, and from med distribution to ping pong. The idea of a white picket fence and a dog become so much more than anything. It also becomes harder to believe that some kind of home is possible.

After a string of treatment centers, I moved back into my parents house. It wasn’t such a threat to my self-destructive life anymore, but a kind of beacon of hope. I started believing I could find a place in this world.

Before any of my 74 friends who are now real estate agents in the Portland area start hitting me up, the idea of home transcends the walls it holds. It is a place where I fit. It is a lot like the idea of love. It is where we go to find solitude.

There have been many places in the world where I have found minutes of that including a small mountain village in central Spain where there was a place literally named Plaza de Soledad. There was mysterious amount of peace there. It was in the shadow of an old castle and a village along a Roman road. There were signs of ancient civilization there. That ancient knowledge was in the faces of all the people who lived there milling around the plaza.

I lived in a house with two women in southeast Portland. That felt like home. We all took care of each other. There was a never ending parade of friends who came in and out of that house who also found solitude and love. People would show up early in the morning when it was still dark out and find me on the porch smoking cigarettes and would sit down on the stair and light up and we would talk. Not only did I feel like I was taken care of, but I felt like I was taking care of my community.

I lived in this house in southwest Portland with a couple of guys. It is the place I lived the longest outside my parents house. It was similar to the southeast house, but we were older. We played Dungeons & Dragons several nights a week, we would host movie nights. We had parties where we would shoot cigarettes out of Doug’s mouth with air soft rifles and smash electronics under the Terwilliger bridge.

These places and other places that I lived always had their moments, but I still would feel like the outsider who was visiting. I would feel guilty putting up any art. I would feel in the way when I was in the kitchen – even if no one else was home. It was always their home.

I lived in many basements. I was in other people’s homes. I was the roommate. I was the newest person in the home. I was moving in to an established home. Those were their pictures on the wall, those are their dishes, and those are their books. I am taking space. I am moving around their daily rituals. I am very aware of my existence in their presence.

Twice a year my parents would go out of town and I would be tasked to stay there for a week or so and take care of the dog. It was always something I looked forward to, even as I got older. It was like a mini vacation. It was where I could get some solitude. Life could slow down a bit and I could catch my breath. It was away from Portland without leaving Portland. The choices of restaurants and stores to go to change. I would hang out at Multnomah Village, the greatest beach town without a beach.

There was always something that made me feel okay knowing that my parents house was there. When I got sick, I went there to get better. Whenever I feel like life was getting really out of sorts, I knew that I could go there. It is hard to get used to knowing that there are strangers in that house.

I live with my girlfriend and two other guys in a house in north Portland. I love it here. Nicole and I have the entire upstairs. It is slowly becoming something of a home for me. I have the dog finally. I even told someone that owning a dog was one of my biggest life goals. We have a bedroom and an office. I have the desk and the crowded book shelves. I have the record player  and the Playstation. Everything is close to hand. My girlfriend has lived here for years longer than me, so it is more hers than mine.

Nicole and I talk a lot about buying a house. It is one of my dreams. I want something that is mine. I want to create something from the foundations. I want to not have a lawn. I want to build something with Nicole to make it ours. I want a place that brings me solitude.

The videos are my parents backyard and were captured four different times in a day to capture the birds’ singing.