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March 10, 2018

Birthday Meditations

Today marks my 54^th birthday and I am writing this from a special place connected to my youth. Earlier, I saw a rainbow mist splintering above a mighty falls and considered it the perfect birthday gift from nature.

I’ve never gone in much for birthday celebrations. I might splurge for a $15 bottle of wine as opposed to $12. I might buy a new book as opposed to finding one in a street library.

Remembering birthdays has never been my strong suit. I’m getting better.

One of my greatest surprise birthday gifts was the cake presented to me by one of my senior econ classes at Beaverton High School in 1992. They lit candles and sang the birthday song. The smoke triggered the alarm and brought the Beaverton Fire Department. We didn’t report it. We didn’t get caught.

My high school girlfriend knitted me a sweater for my 18^th birthday. I wish I still had it.

For several years, my rock band Gravy played a gig on my birthday at Kelly’s Olympia in downtown Portland. Things often got strange.

I used to enjoy cooking myself and the dogs a grand meal on my birthday (fish for me, steaks for them). Recently, someone in authority told me it would have been better for my mental and emotional health if I had invited people I really didn’t want around on my birthday to join the party. Apparently, dogs weren’t enough. I wish I was cooking for us tonight.

Next year I can join AARP and move into one of the over-55 mobile home parks.

Last year on my birthday I was nearly bereft of hope and joy. I don’t feel that way this year.

My creative mind is stronger on my 54^th birthday than my 24^th, 34^th or 44^th birthday. When I’m 64…well, we’ll see.

I received some birthday calls and texts today. I appreciated that.

I took two groups of students to Powell’s Books on two of my birthdays. As I look back on that now, the bus ride, the presentations, the pizza and donuts, the supervision, the naifs in the big city, I must have been out of my mind.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.