An Evening in Portland

This is our fourth time spending part of our summer in Portland but it is our first time  in an apartment rather than a hotel. It doesn't seem to make as much difference as I had expected, seeing as we are right next door to our favorite hotel. We're still going to the same restaurants,  dancing with the same people in the same places, hiking in the same park. 

So I don't have a lot of unique and new events to share. Living in a city is...... kinda like living in any other city. Which was the point here, as I am thinking I would like to live in a more urban city. The thing is.... the more time I spend here, the better Phoenix/Scottsdale looks. The housing is not as nice as back home, and the driving here is challenging, while the driving at home is easy or easier. Here there are one way streets, narrow streets, and stop signs every block or every other block. To say nothing of having to parallel park every time I move the car. It isn't that hard to find a space. I rarely have to circle a whole block, but they are building more apartments (good, more decent housing) but not building parking spaces to match so future parking in this nice neighborhood looks more challenging. 

Tonight I did something nice. I went to a concert of the music of Joni Mitchell. Since the name of this blog, From Both Sides Now,  comes from a Joni Mitchell song I guess you know I like her music and resonate to the words in her songs. I used that title because it seemed to sum up how I feel about life at this point in my life.  When I was younger I felt a lot more certain about what was good, what was bad, what was real and what was not. 
                  
                  I've looked at life from both sides now
                  From win and lose, and still somehow
                           It's life's illusions I recall
                        I really don't know life at all. 

The concert tonight was a young woman with a lovely voice playing all the songs from Joni Mitchell's album, Blue. This was an iconic album. Rolling Stones lists it as number 30 of the 500 greatest albums of all time. I remember when it came out very clearly. 

In the olden days, before iphones and ipods, before CDs and even before cassettes the best and probably only way to hear our favorite music was  to buy the album, preferably on the very day it was released. 

When Blue was released in the early seventies I was living in London.  It was during the height of the Vietnam War and civil rights unrest back home. It was a fine time to travel the world on $5 a day while I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I'd been traveling for several years and could really relate to the words of this music:
                       
                         Sitting in a park in Paris, France,
                    Reading the news and it sure looks bad.
                           They won't give peace a chance
                     That was just a dream some of us had. 
                               Still a lot of lands to see
                          But I wouldn't want to stay here
              It's too old, and cold and settled in its ways here. 

                                 Oh it gets so lonely
                               When you're walking
                    And the streets are full of strangers
                        All the news of home you read 
                         Just gives you the blues..........

Like I said, it was a difficult time back in the states and the American news was mighty dreary. Anyway, back to Joni Mitchell's album, Blue. 

One person in my crowd of friends in London bought the album first and we all met for brunch to listen to it. The party was very international; the hostess was Hungarian, there was a South African, of course a lot of Brits, a small handful of Americans and no doubt others too that I can't remember. I remember the event very well because I had never been to a brunch before and I brought raw eggs and raw bacon thinking we would all be cooking together. Oops. 

Just a few more lines of a favorite song to share: 
                         
                    I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
                         Looking for the key to set me free
                  Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling
                     And it undoes all the joy that could be. 
              I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun
                  I want to be the one that you want to see
                          I want to make you feel better
                           I want to make you feel free
                        All I really want our love to do 
                Is to bring out the best in me and in you too. 
               
Tonight's concert was a real walk down memory lane. Most of the audience was from my generation and I had a chance to chat with the folks sitting and reminisce where we were when we first heard this album. And we all sang along to Big Yellow Taxi:
                          
                              Don't it always seem to go
               That you don't know what you've got till it's gone
                 They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. 

I remember this album so well. I know the words of many of the songs, and by coincidence even met Carey (one of the songs is named after him) at a party in New York some years later. 

Anyway, right before working on my blog I posted a thank you to Joni Mitchell on her Facebook page. I wish I had thought to do it years ago as her health is not good. But better late than never, I guess.