By the early 1980s, my mother had taken her baccalaureate, quit her nursing job, and scooped my brother and me from day care in hopes of opening a natural foods store with two partners she’d drummed up (men who, before the doors opened, blew the start-up money up their noses). These were optimistic times, riding a chunk of cash my father’d relented on, as sick as we were of his one-and two-thousand-dollar disbursements every six months. Money we’d erupt into the streets with, paying off back rent, gas accounts, one-two-three, bills slap in the palm out the window of our Volvo. My brother and I rode upright and buoyant in the sunlit backseat, headed for the finest clothes boutique in town where we’d pick out a shirt, maybe a pair of pants if Mother could finesse the owner. We’d spend it in a day. No pensioning. I recall touching the fine cloth of an imported shirt hanging in my closet, the rest of my shirts flung to the far end of the rod. Hearing the neighborhood kids in the street, I pulled an old t-shirt over my head, paused in the doorway for one last look at the shirt, near shivering, and shut the light, three steps at a time down and off the porch. This was Oregon, but Ashland, Oregon. Translation: Mondale/Ferraro, Keep Tahoe Blue, Shakespearian Oregon.
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