Stanley Fisher has been a writer working in advertising for 30-years. His plans to become a teacher after college took a detour just before graduating when his team won a statewide advertising contest and Fisher won a job writing for a top radio station in Portland, Oregon. His work in “persuasion, coercion, and propaganda” has earned a national Telly award for creative excellence in cable TV advertising. Fisher’s Simple Pleasures essay project continues and those who’d like to respond to the same request that started the project: “Tell me your simple pleasure, and why it’s meaningful to you,” are invited to do so by emailing Fisher at Stanley.fisher@aSimplePleasureAday.com.

NOTE: Stanley Fisher went off and joined those cotton clouds at the end of January, 2009. We miss him down here on earth and think of him whenever the sun breaks through.

Blue skies.

With those two words the heart lightens, troubles ease and imagination expands to hold half of heaven. If only we could have blue skies all the time. For much of the year you can, if you enjoy living in deserts of sand, or ice.

It’s not the blue sky itself that lightens some things and expands others; too much blue sky causes oxidation, wilt, sunburn. It’s the way the sky changes out of winter’s grey flannel into a new spring suit, or when it removes its rain clouds like taking off a broad-brimmed hat to show me its sunniest smile. And when that beautiful face is accessorized with a necklace and earrings made from huge clouds white as cotton puffs, I fall in love with the sky all over again.

My home state, Oregon, is a place immensely proud of its mythology and despite the pressures of truth and the inquiries of outsiders, meteorologists, and other doubters, we strive to preserve it. One of our greatest myths is that it rains here all the time. Another is that if you live here, you will grow webbed feet.

Truth is: the rain myth does not apply to the eastern two-thirds of the state. That Oregon is semi-arid high desert, a family secret of sorts hidden behind the slogan, “Cool Green Vacationland,” pressed into license plate frames and printed on travel brochures from the state’s department of propaganda and myth preservation.

But here in western Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the most populous part of the state, just ask anyone: it is oddly wet and blue skies are oddly rare. Cars don’t wear out here, they rust. And people don’t really get fat here they just absorb the atmospheric moisture and swell.

I have cousins in southern California; they wash their cars a lot. They like not having to think much about blue skies, they take them for granted. In Oregon we take grey skies for granted. We like not having to think much about washing cars; we know it’s going to rain.

When you’re a child you spend a lot of time looking down at the ground, at bugs and worms and things; and a lot of time looking up at clouds shaped like ships that turn into sharks that turn into ice cream sundaes. And in the middle of your life you spend a lot of time looking straight ahead.

Grey days and mid-life are much the same, a lot of looking straight ahead, cloudy with a chance of drizzle, not much momo to look up. Then it happens: one of those rare days to see ice cream sundaes in the clouds, one of those days to get wrapped in the embrace of bliss. The temperature draws me outside and my blue sky, home from some sunnier escape, presents herself bejeweled with cotton-puff clouds.

Rare days like that cover me like the lopsided boyhood tents built with sheets borrowed long ago from mom’s linen closet. Over cords strung from the top of dad’s favorite chair to a handle on the opposite cabinet hung a miniature sky of cotton percale and beneath it new worlds came and went.

Rare days like that nudge me off the course of myself and my own little world and my own brief life and make me look up and recall ships and sharks and connect with things greater. Whether it’s those fantastic scenes imagined beneath living room tents or today’s expansive reality, the effect is still the same. Calm hues, brilliant highlights, and soft shadows wash over me in currents that gather up troubles, fears, worries—and for a moment—sweep them away.

When one of those cotton puffs floats between the sun and I and day’s brightness suddenly darkens, it is the drawing shut of an eyelid in the sky. Heaven is winking. Someone, something, out there, seems to think I’m still worth flirting with.

Some tell stories about their “out-of-body” experiences. I’ve never had one of those but every time blue skies brush aside the usual grey backdrop and cotton-puff clouds distract me from the usual forward gaze, there’s an “out-of-me” experience that never lasts quite as long as I’d like. But as it departs it always does so cordially with a quiet promise of coming again another day.

And as real life reasserts itself I return to wherever I was before getting nudged off course; a little happier, a little saner and a little more certain it’s possible to face whatever troubles there may be by looking up at blue skies and cotton-puff clouds.

Robin Cody is the author of Ricochet River, a novel, and Voyage of a Summer Sun, winner of the 1996 Oregon Book Award for creative non-fiction. He lives in Portland with his wife, Donna. An earlier version of “Deaf Basketball” appeared in Northwest Magazine in November, 1988.

When you referee a deaf basketball team, keep in mind that the players are deaf. Blow the whistle and they just keep going. How would they know? Make crisp visual signals, and allow them a little more touching on defense. You wouldn’t think sound helps track a basketball opponent, but apparently it does.

I refereed the Oregon State School for the Deaf, from Salem, at Westside Christian School in Portland. Varsity girls. The deaf girls played basketball with exuberant energy and unthrottled emotion. They had fun. I’d forgotten there isn’t much laughing out loud in high school basketball. These girls emitted quick shrieks of surprise or pleasure as they went grunting and careening about the court. They lost badly but cheerfully to the Christians.

They did have one good athlete, a tall blonde with fine springs in her legs and a bright spark to her eye. Gazelle-like, she moved. She snagged rebounds that weren’t meant for her. She fired sharp outlet passes. On offense she had a nose for the basket, but her teammates seldom delivered her the ball.

Late in the game, this gazelle girl got the ball in the key. She took a couple of steps without remembering to dribble, and drilled a sweet hook shot.

My referee partner, Ed Denmark, a well-to-do hardwood dealer in real life – had whistled the play dead. Traveling. The poor girl’s celebration at having sunk her pretty shot was eclipsed now as she realized it wouldn’t count. She grabbed the ball and slammed it to the floor with sufficient force that – although she right away knew better and tried to smother it – the ball rebounded above her head.

The normal and accepted procedure here is for the referee to blow a T. A technical foul. It was Denmark’s call, not mine. What would he do? I held my breath. The kid was sorry. She’d already lost that neat hoop. Her team was getting crushed. Mercifully, Denmark decided just to warn her. He would explain it to her.

But she’s deaf.

The game stopped. We summoned her coach from the bench to sign this decision to the girl. She was contrite but thoroughly puzzled, expecting the T but getting words. So you see. Mercy was the wrong call, the same call I would have made in Denmark’s spot. When you referee a deaf basketball team, keep in mind the kids are just deaf. They’re not stupid. The girl deserved a T.

* * *

After the game I showered, changed clothes, and settled into the deaf section of the bleachers to watch the boys’ teams warm up. The gazelle girl was not wearing a cheerleader outfit, but she posted herself among the cheerleaders and joined right in.

Deaf cheerleaders have all the right moves, but they voice no sound. Here they trotted over to the opposite side of the court to face the home team fans. They mimed an introductory cheer that included acrobatic routines and finished with individual salutes — “Hi, I’m Deborah,” “Hi, I’m Judy” — you know that one. Each cheerleader, in turn, tried to say her name out loud. In most cases, you could tell what her name was.

When they came back to our side, an American flag appeared at mid-court. We all stood at attention, with hands over hearts. A chubby girl from the Christian school sang “The Star Spangled Banner” into a microphone. She was good. She was so good singing the anthem that a great wave of sadness passed through me. I’m not what you would call a sucker for the national anthem, but this was chilling.

When the anthem was over, the deaf kids knew it was OK to make noise. In fact the hearing-impaired can generate unseemly noise just taking a seat, unwrapping a Snickers bar, chewing potato chips and signing joy. While our section was preoccupied that way, the Christian fans across the court had bowed in silence. A young man at the scorer’s table was reciting a prayer.

Nobody else in my section knew it.

Soon the adult sitting next to me – probably a teacher – saw what was up. Her look of panic must have mirrored my own as our eyes met. She tried to nudge and sign silence through our rude section of the bleachers, but we probably succeeded only in drawing more attention from the prayerful. It was awful. What would these Christians think of us?

When their gaffe finally dawned on the deaf students, the prayer was over. They, too, felt awful. For maybe three full seconds. Just long enough for each cheerleader to face the home crowd and – apparently spontaneously, all at once – slap a palm to her forehead and roll eyes heavenward in a how-stupid-could-we-be-please-forgive-us gesture that would break your heart, it was so correct.

After having explored various professions and traveled to seven countries outside the U.S., Sione Aeschliman has returned to Portland, Oregon to work on her writing and make a positive difference in her small corner of the world.

My tongue, which had been asleep all my life, suddenly woke up three days ago after tasting a Thai curry. Since then it’s been alive and pulsating, aching to experience new textures and tastes. It longs to run itself up the smooth, salty neck of the footballer or to follow the sharp, perfumed jawline of the woman on the metro. It would like to creep into the shriveled mouth of the toothless old crone, to caress the withered gums and poke into the crevices left by the teeth that long ago abandoned their posts. It would feel the prick of bristly hairs of a man’s large nostril on its tip. It wants to know everything, all of life’s most intimate secrets.

Emily May recently moved to Portland from Burlington, Vermont to make magnetic poetry and the West Coast branch of her environmental non-profit. She blogs at mtremix.blogspot.com and is available for hire.

“That the world is not one, that the world is not whole, that perhaps I must decide to get away from all this, that if I want to make something of myself, then at the same time I must leave all that is mine behind me, all I can do and all that I know; leave these people sitting on the doorsteps outside the house where I live, drinking coffee and talking about all that they know, say goodbye to them forever. And if that is what I must do to develop myself, as they say, then what is the point of it all?”
-Per Petterson

This is leaving, being in an airport, left, there is no place or time in here but it is supposed to be California, but is a nation, a day, a life away from Home. Leaving is being alone at Yankee Pier, a classy restaurant for an airport, drinking pinot grigio next to a round-faced blonde man who recommends the clam chowder. “Some of the best I’ve had,” he says shyly, turning from his newspaper. I am immediately overcome with sadness for him and us and the airport and his rumpled news, but in the middle of my glass of wine, we talk at length about college (his daughter just graduated, an English major at the University of Portland), and Burlington, Vermont, whose young, wet green mornings I’ve just ripped myself from (it’s nice), wind power (a good idea, a growing industry), and Isreal in the summer of 1969 (he returned right before Woodstock). He is returning from Hawaii on a business trip, wishes his wife was with him, bought pineapples encased in brightly decorated cardboard and plastic handles. He is inquisitive and congenial and interested, mistakes me for an adult, thanks me for the conversation. I mourn his absence when he leaves to catch his plane home; I always become attached to the ever increasing mass of fleeting former strangers who reveal humanity and kindness and daughters who are English majors.

People who dine alone and drink alone usually have sharp jaw-lines and agendas, tailored pants and chic but comfortable shoes. They have an air of glamour about them, fashionable distraction, as they pore over their files or barely creased bestseller. They have places to be tomorrow and people waiting for them there. I feel like a fifth-grader, wide-eyed and nervous, accidentally dressed, in someone else’s old clothes. (No one is waiting for me where I am going).

I agree with the waiter when he suggests another glass of wine, then wonder if this moment of presumed celebration– I am a human, an adult, have made the choice to hurtle 30,000 feet above sea level toward a place 3,000 miles from where I was, to drink seven-dollar-a-glass Oregon wine served by a dapper waiter who says please when he places the glass squarely on the square napkin on the square table for one– is actually one of sad submission to this airport lifestyle that confuses me, tempts me, and I want to–do– loathe in its impermanence, uprootedness, embodiment of our fossil-fueled, self-indulged instant gratification that will soon bring this country, the world, down with it.

I call my sister, my twin, whom I’d deserted twenty-four hours earlier in a fit of poorly concealed regret and fat tears– no super-ego, all id. She is now three time zones away, probably eating dinner alone, while I am attempting to fulfill some outdated Romantic notion of finding something like oneself very far from where one comes from. The phone rings until her canned voice prompts a message. I hang up, choking, wondering how people all over the world continually complete tasks like leaving still in one piece. In the world now, children leave their mothers. Suddenly the world that we can travel, must travel, seems cruel and horrible, a twisted and monstrous negative magnetic force that pulls humans from one another, in airports people separate and cannot say what they have prepared to say.

People at other tables engage in miniscule talk with strangers seated far from themselves. All of these people have homes, people they love, but I imagine them perpetually awaiting their planes, always speaking to new strangers, running from the people and places they love, listening to songs that were on VH1 ten years ago in airport restaurants, the singers they can’t quite place.

Soon, the plane will ascend, souls floating untethered through space, bodies searching for a place to lay. In the air, the wings of the plane will reach back toward the earth, toward the smooth curves where the land and water fit into one another. The clouds stretch out before us, under us, like a field; the wings bounce and we’re at the mercy of gravity.

I think I might split in two.
-Per Petterson