IMG_20201030_123001876 (2)

November 5, 2020

Museum of Old Names

A Saturday stroll through a Pioneer cemetery on the Secret Coast that doubled as a museum of old American names provoked some ruminations:

First, they poured a lot of concrete and laid a lot of marble to mark the dead. It seems like such a waste of time and materials.

How does a first name come into general use and then pass away into oblivion? What changes in our culture for a name to fall into disuse or one to skyrocket in popularity so that a teacher has five Ashleys in one classroom?

Who knows? Perhaps a new movie or reality show star takes off. A sports star or a cartoon character. A doll or rap mogul. Someone who dies for a good cause.

Perhaps Americans were duller a century ago. Perhaps less pretentious. Perhaps everything connected into our current destructive vainglory as a nation is somehow connected to these new names.

Something else to ponder: Certain Old Testament names have vanished while others remain. (e.g. Aaron versus Moses, Rachel versus Ruth). Why? Why? Why?

Let us consider the names etched into quasi permanence into the concrete and marble in a tiny disheveled cemetery that evinced no charm nor morbidity. Even the crows seemed indifferent.

Eva

Abe

Leonida

Ralph

Etta

Bonnie

Elmer

Constatine

Claude

Maude

Harriet

Fred

Gertrude

Esther

Pearl

Fannie

Gus

Dennis

Estelle

Effie and Elvin (married)

Why did these names fade away? Don’t we need a return to Elmer and Estelle? Yes, it seems we do.

Support Meditations Blog

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.