Seventy

Pterodactyl decade**

    

Judy with black elderberry

   

Agatha Christie room

     My lady Judy turned seventy last week.   To celebrate we went to Newport, on the Oregon Coast.  Judy lived in Newport in the 1990s, and has fond memories of her time there.
      We stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel, a  Newport institution.  Twenty- five year ago, a bookish woman from Portland  bought and renovated an old, rundown single- room- occupancy hotel on the Nye Beach shore.  She asked her friends to help her decorate each room in the style of favorite authors.  Today, there is the Mark Twain room, the Colette room, the Dr. Seuss room, the Alice Walker room, etc.  The Poe room has a pendulum suspended over the bed.  The Ken Kesey room is spare and insititutional, with 4 cots covered in khaki blankets, and hospital charts on clipboards at the foot of each bed.

Relaxing with a modern book (Nook)

    Our room was the Agatha Christie room, full of chintz and hunting prints.  A  succession of clues hidden in the room and the bath led us to unravel the mystery of the missing Agatha.  The prize was a photo of Agatha, # 6 in the line of hotel cats, all named Agatha.  The bookshelves held the complete works of Agatha Christie, donated by Murder by the Book, a specialty bookstore in Portland.
     Dinner at the hotel restaurant, the Table of Contents, is seated and served family style.  We ate with six strangers who soon became delightful acquaintances as we played the traditional round of "Two Truths and a Lie."  When you are  "it" in this game, you tell the group three things about yourself.  Two are true and one is a lie.  Each member of the group then gets to ask you three questions to help her guess which statements are true and which is a lie.  You have to answer questions about the truths truthfully, but you can lie all you want to about the lie.  Each player then tries to identify your lie.  If you fool the entire table, you get a standing ovation.  Judy got a standing ovation for her three statements:  that she was a sharpshooter in the military, that she is a retired physician who worked with the homeless, and that she once swam with sting rays.

Fishing boats at Newport

     Newport is a working harbor, with seiners and gill netters and crabbing boats going in and out.  The murals on the wide walls of the fish processing plants depict the dangers and the terrors of life on the water.  Big orange helicopters from the Coast Guard Station are a common sight.  Judy and I lingered with our coffee overlooking the marina, and she reminisced about the boat she once had berthed there.

Heron

      When Judy had had her fill of boats,  we drove slowly around Yaquina Bay and up the river to Toledo. Judy's eagle eye spotted wildlife.  Three deer sauntered and then leapt across the road.   We saw cormorants  and kingfishers and many herons sitting in the tide flats.  It was idyllic.
     Then we drove round a bend into Toledo.  We saw and smelled   the Georgia-Paper Mill where Judy once worked as a medical and safety officer.  When I first encountered the plant in 1996, it made me think of Dante's Inferno. 

Backroads Oregon

      After leaving Toledo, we drove on back roads to Salem and then home to Portland,  enjoying the green of our Oregon summer.

We two

Hope

     On Tuesday Judy's pulmonologist  told us that her new CT scan showed that she has a subtype of pulmonary fibrosis that has a better outlook than the Usual Interstitial Pneumonia.  While the disease still has no cure,  people with Judy's type (Non-Specific Interstitial Pneumonitis) tend to live longer.  Instead of going downhill on a steady slope like people with UIP do, those with NSIP have long plateaus, with steep declines leading to the next (we hope long) plateau.  They go down in stair steps.  This is an improved prognosis inside a grim diagnosis.  Meanwhile, life is to savor.

** You might be a dinosaur, but you can still fly.