{from March 2011}  I like looking at people’s faces.  Maybe that’s why I am dismayed by how cell phones have profoundly changed our society.  No one looks up; no one looks out.  They’re just tapping at their damn little devices.  I guess I’m old-fashioned.  I don’t care.

With an hour to kill in Portland tonight I decide to drive up streets less familiar to me.  I get that feeling I sometimes get — an overwhelming wash of love for other people even though I don’t know them, for their unguarded faces.  A man at the end of his day with five o’clock shadow.  A group of young boys in vibrant red and blue socks playing ball, their coats piled in a huge mound against the fence.  Someone has taken a little kid’s bike and shoved one handlebar through the chainlink high up, a modern-day intepretation of a Shaker hanging a chair.  The perfectly-framed face of a young woman wearing a hijab, the wind gently stirring the loose folds of her long skirt.  A man with a bushy gray beard who flashes me a big toothy smile after we both watch his white and black dog scamper to catch up and then zoom past him.  People are out.  People are stirring their thoughts by walking.

Spring is coming; spring is one of my favorite thoughts.  And then the brief dazzle of summer, the dreaminess of bending over to pick warm strawberries, the skin on our arms bare to the hot sun.  But for this late afternoon hour of my day, it is enough to look plainly, directly, at faces wearing concentration, fatigue, and joy, and hope that the problems are working themselves out, that the conversations are going somewhere.  I’m glad that there are still some unswept streets in the city of Portland.  We’re all in chrysalis yet and we need a little more time.