Every year I volunteer at the Portland Marathon, and this year was kind of an off year. They put a weird music tent in between the medical station and the aid station that narrowed the road. That meant we couldn’t see each other and the aid station couldn’t really see who was coming. We actually had a medical emergency that required an ambulance, and it was hard to hear over the music. The ambulance took forever to show up and while only two people needed non-emergency transport, the second person gave up after 40 minutes or so and took the trolley back downtown.

The reason I say it was disastrous isn’t due to anything we did or didn’t do. There were people dropping like flies this year and ambulances were called repeatedly. This is NOTHING LIKE CHICAGO. I understand those poor people had a marathon in the unseasonable heat that actually killed one runner, but I think we may have been close to losing some people today as well. And the weather was ideal for running. I’m just hoping it was bad luck this year, and not something like toxins in the honey they were handing out. I shouldn’t speculate like that, but it was weird how many people were going down.

The spacing of the runners was weird as well. I even missed seeing my sister as she ran by.

Well, after a nap I went to my buddy Matt’s open house. I’m kind of an oddball at parties like his, because I’m one of the few non-parents there. People with kids tend to hang with people with kids. I’ve known him since high school and being an outsider now isn’t much different than being an outsider then. That’s life.

I found a bunch of stuff to recycle, including old National Geographic maps. I threw away historical documents including a book, in Japanese, from the 1930’s about the nutritive value of mushrooms. I’m sure someone could use them, but at this point I’m overwhelmed with the stuff that I’m NOT throwing away. Lots of books on Buddhism, Japanese history, etc. I even found what appears to be an English-language propaganda piece espousing Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

I also started going through my dad’s records and I found things I never knew about. He never supported the local Japanese gardens in Portland, but I found correspondence between him and Professor Takuma Tono, the designer of the gardens. I just skimmed the letters, but it sounds like he was quite involved in the early part of the design. My mom told me that he got in an argument with the head of the garden society or something, and that sounds like him, telling off some rich lady and then writing off the project completely. This also bodes ill for my plan to join the Multnomah Athletic Club for purposes of personal humor because it’s pretty evident that I’ve inherited his need to yell at rich people.

He did go on to build a small Japanese garden for a rich lady and I have pictures of that. I also have documentation on a magnolia that’s planted in SW Portland. I’m not sure what I should do about that.

I found medical records from when my sister got hit by a car in high school, a speeding “warning” ticket my mom got in the 80’s, records of my mom’s car accident from the early 80’s, his business licenses, his marriage license, and his divorce decree! I found out about his previous marriage when I was in my mid-20’s, and I never knew his previous wife’s name. Now I even know where her parents lived.