Wintery Night and one red shoe

 

While on the Oregon coast we ran into Portland for a few days. Just a quick peek into the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in Portland.  Check out the yellow platter by Ken Ferguson in the slide show. Also Lucie Rie and Peter Voulkos bowls.  There's more info about this exhibit at their website.

 and then.........

Brisk walk up a slope to Powell's Books to check out shelves and shelves of books---new ones, old ones, used ones, used up ones, paper or hard bound.  Dumb ones, dull ones, visual candy tomes, too cheap, too expensive, not my cup of tea ones. I draw in a deep breath, fill my lungs with that particular perfume that books have and Nooks do not.  I know just where to go, which floor first to explore. The first time I walked into Powell's City of Books I wandered (in a daze) up to a cavenous  room and pulled out an used copy of  Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.   That's when I began to really think about fate and faith and coincidences.  How uncanny, how silly and how wonderfully wonderful.  To find myself in this treasureland, reading titles as though landmarks and finally finding Italo Calvino tucked in one of the twelve foot stacks in the designated Blue Room. 

                                                             and now........

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. ”

                                             from Italo Calvino's  If on a Winter's Night a Traveler