(photos: cindy and randy at dignity village, portland; david rovics, his daughter leila, and new wife/partner reiko on their wedding night!)
after a good night's sleep, in a real live bed, in my own room, i'm writing this from a very pleasant (and different) commuter type train that only recently began to travel all the way to vancouver rather than requiring a transfer to an amtrak bus from seattle. we're travelling right alongside the ocean. it's stunningly beautiful. i'm feeling better about amtrak.
although ... it's still rather crowded (isn't it interesting how we love public transit, especially when hardly anybody's riding it), but at least there's good ventilation and i'm not required to share a tiny amount of space with a large man i don't know. it is a bit cold in this dining car (and the three conductors tell me it's colder here than the other cars because "we like it that way," they need it cold so they can stay awake, and i'm welcome to sit in another car if i'd like, though there are repeated announcements about only sitting in your assigned seat and i'm assigned a table seat with three other people and there's no leg room and my computer might get beer spilled on it. at least they're selling a decent local oregon beer, a porter, and i have a yummy vegan wrap thingy i bought at portland's co-op. but still i have to wonder .... when did "the customer's always right" become a part of history rather than a good business model? (now the conductors have all left this coach and are, presumably, falling asleep somewhere ...)
i sure felt different last night, getting off that overnight train in portland ... i don't think i was ever so glad to get anywhere in my entire life. david wasn't far away (i've discovered the ironic convenience of the earth-destroying carcinogenic cell phone) and i was able to load all my gear into a car (rather than attempt to navigate public transit in a new city, which i don't mind if i have some prior knowledge of how it all works) and stop at a food co-op and learn that he was getting married.
married! that very night! i hadn't a thing to wear ....
i've heard about reiko, i knew he'd met her years ago in japan, and that she'd recently moved to portland, but i was rather surprised when he asked if i'd be a witness at his wedding.
turns out it was all very casual. richard, their reverend, stopped over for a lovely japanese (vegan) dinner prior to loading his van with building materials destined for the burning man which is, this year, somewhere near reno nevada. my caravanista friend, gerry the vegan, had told me a bit about burning man. apparently about 50,000 people gather in the desert each summer, build a city, do all manner of things (richard told me if you want to get really drunk and party all weekend you can do that, or if you want to experience meditation in virtually any religious tradition you can do that), dismantle the city at the end of it, and leave the desert as if nobody had ever been there at all. oh, and at some point there's the ritual burning of the man.
i asked why it's not called 'burning person' since women do attend. richard said it all started, i think he said in the 90s, when a newly divorced man burned an effigy of his wife's lawyer. it seemed a bit ironic to be talking about all this on david and reiko's wedding night, but she was busy creating lovely little japanese pancakes and david was playing his guitar or talking to debbie, the other witness, or chasing his lively young daughter leila around (i can't quite remember all the details ... i'd hardly slept the night before and had almost a full beer in me by this point).
after dinner (i brought a frozen vegan pizza some chips and salsa for sharing, it was international cuisine) we all signed the documents and talked about what it is to be a universalist minister and how that's different from the unitarian universalists who are both very progressive about marrying people of varying compositions. richard said he mostly concerns himself with whether the people look as though they really mean it, as though they'll stay together for a while.
i read over the documents, it was all very straight forward, and it seemed obvious and a loving relationship exists between reiko and david (and leila loves her!), and signed.
richard excused himself and headed off to help build a city in the desert, debbie and i chatted about politics and obama and changing the world while david played his guitar and reiko spun leila around and around and around in a chair.
and then i slept.
this morning we went to a place called 'chaos' where they served vegan breakfast and then we drove to dignity village. the whole point of my stop in portland wasn't really to see david and reiko and leila, though that was a lot of fun (especially the informal wedding part). i was actually wanting to check in on the wonderful and inspiring dignity village.
i learned that tim, the guy who'd given me a dignity village tour three years ago, had finally settled with the government over some disability cheques they'd held out on, and bought a house. he was one of the original tenters, who insisted homeless people have a right to create shelter to protect themselves from the elements. finally the city agreed, and voila --- dignity village.
to those who say tent cities result in nothing good .... get your head out of your ass.
the cubans would completely approve of dignity village. it's pretty much how they do things. get people together, get some building materials, put a house together. construct a functional community. participate in it. watch out for others, protect your friends. be careful who you let in. be good neighbours.
there are people in this world who think i'm crazy. what's crazy is that there are homeless people. what's crazy is that homeless people are arrested for falling asleep in public. denied an opportunity to create a habitable living space of their own. what's crazy is that the whole world knows that canada is a northern country, with cold winters, and they let homeless people die. and they do die, on the streets, because they are victims of a cold and uncaring economic system that creates them, throws them away, chews them up, and silences their disappearances.
they are the disappeared.
and fidel is not a dictator.
