Family

If you think that it’s expensive to buy a home in Oregon, particularly in Portland and Bend, take a look at the listing for the Hollywood house that my daughter, Celeste, and her husband are in the process of buying. $849,000. Two bedrooms, two baths. 1300 sf. Built in 1922. Whew! And they’re happy to have found it. As they should be. It’s a cute house, nicely redecorated by the current owners. It’s just hard for me to get my head around the idea that this Hollywood house is selling for quite a bit more than double the assessed value…

After poking some fun at my daughter, Celeste, for letting Laurel and me leave her panting breathlessly in our dust during a hike in L.A.’s Runyon Canyon, I’m pleased to report that Celeste redeemed her hiking-self yesterday. She and husband Patrick flew up to spend what I had hoped would be a pleasant sunny Memorial Day weekend in Oregon. Pleasant it was; sunny it wasn’t. Nevertheless, we took them up to the Little North Santiam trail, guided by William Sullivan’s recently updated great book “100 Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades.” Though Celeste and Patrick had looked wonderfully fit and…

Here’s a contrarian Mother’s Day story about the one hour I spent with my father. Note: the one hour, period. This wasn’t the best or worst hour, nor the happiest or saddest hour. It was the only hour I spent face-to-face with him. Well, not counting a bunch of hours when I was a baby that I can’t remember. These are the only photos that I have of my father, John Hines. They always have been part of my Baby Book. I used to stare at them a lot when I was a kid, wondering what my father was like.…

Are you Lori Ferguson, born June 12, 1990, who lives in Concord, California, and whose parents are Cathy and Steve Ferguson? (Or do you know Lori? If so, pass this message on to her). I’ve got a message for you about your grandparents, whom you haven’t seen since December 1999..

Lori, I’m your great-uncle Brian. Yesterday I took this photo of your grandfather and grandmother—Bob and Carol Ann Gray—in front of the lilacs at our home in Salem, Oregon. They’ve been visiting my wife, Laurel, and me. We’ve talked, as we always do, about how much they would like to see you, to talk with you, to get a letter from you. Any connection with you would be better than nothing.

As I’m sure you know, since 2000 your mother and father have refused to let Bob and Carol Ann have any sort of contact with you and your brother, Bo. To put it bluntly, this is cruel and unusual punishment for grandparents. They love you a lot. This enforced separation has caused them a lot of pain.

You’re old enough to make your own decision about whether you want to see your grandparents again. I hope you’ll choose to contact them. Their phone number in Walnut Creek is 925-939-1474. Their email address is randcagray@comcast.net. It’s time, long past time, to bring you together with them.

I’ve still got a stack of correspondence from your mother and grandmother about the family rift that led to this hugely unfortunate situation. I tried to serve as a go-between. Obviously I didn’t succeed.

Lori, I have no idea what your parents have told you about why they don’t want you to see your grandparents again. And I’m not going to make any judgments about who is right and who is wrong here. My personal impression is that your mother made a big deal out of a small misunderstanding.

I’ll end with some excerpts from a letter I wrote to your mother on March 20, 2000 (see continuation to this post). Please read them with an open mind. I spoke my own mind quite strongly. I didn’t intend then, nor do I intend now, to disparage your mother’s and father’s religious beliefs, which you might share. I just wanted to have them do some thinking about what it means to be truly spiritual.

The guy sitting outside the Coffee House Café this morning looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. Gucci jeans jacket. Oliver Peoples designer eyewear. He looked like he belonged in Hollywood rather than Salem. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was saying on the cellphone, but I thought I heard “If you can’t get Leonardo and Julia for less than 30 mill, I’m out of this deal.” Or, maybe not. After I snapped the first photo, the guy smiled, motioned me closer, and took off his dark glasses. Now I recognized him! It was me. I just didn’t feel…

I'm not usually all that sentimental, but I wanted to share a 1985 Christmas memory of my mother this 2004 Christmas Eve. I posted it on my Church of the Churchless weblog. Life everlasting and joy. Christian or not, this is a message we all need to be reminded of. I'm thankful to the memory that did just that for me.

Here's a glimpse of Venice and Florence through the camera lens of my daughter, Celeste Vos, and her husband Patrick. I've selected six photos from their Ofoto album that struck my eye. A self-portrait of Celeste and Patrick at Venice's Piazza San Marco. What a great-looking couple! Don't you think it's time for them to reproduce their obviously exemplary genetic heritage into the form of a child (and grandchild)? This father thinks so. Celeste lost at night in the streets of Venice. I like the gloomy atmosphere of this photo. Having been lost in Venice myself back in the late…

It’s dawned on me that I should pay more respect to Paris Hilton, my dear second cousin who, sadly, I have never met. In the past Laurel and I have enjoyed making catty observations about Paris’ seeming vacuousness. Though undeniably beautiful and sexy, her persona has a Barbie Doll quality that makes you wonder, “Is there anything there?” However, a recent Oregonian article about Paris led me to look on her in a different light. Her emptiness is the key to her recursive ability to be famous for being famous. Not just for fifteen minutes, but for…who knows?...perhaps a lifetime.…

OK, it’s unlikely that I’m going to find any buyers for a West Hollywood condo via my Oregon weblog, but I figured I’d take a stab at helping out my daughter and her husband. Theirs is the 950 Kings Road, #244 listing at $429,000 under "current listings." I figure that a percent or two should flow my way if I broker a deal, which would get me started nicely on a Mini Cooper S purchase. Celeste and Patrick, if you’re interested in moving from L.A. to Sisters (Oregon), I found a nice home for you at the same price. Doesn’t…

There is something magic about every wedding, though Britney Spears’ Las Vegas escapade just sprung to mind, which demolishes the universal applicability of my topic sentence. Okay, let’s make it: There is something magic about almost every wedding, including Brook and Corey’s here in Indiana yesterday (Brook is Laurel’s niece). Laurel got to read a poem that she also had read at the wedding of Brook’s parents, Dee and Jerry, more years ago than any of them would want to remember. We worked on her delivery the night before. Laurel’s performance was great, in this drama coach’s entirely biased opinion.…

A belated public thank you to Isaac (I’ve already thanked him via an email) for giving me some genealogy education—and, most importantly, for increasing the intimacy between me and Paris Hilton. As noted in a comment on a posting a while back, Isaac assures me that Paris and I are second cousins, not third cousins. Where I had gotten confused—and you have to admit that this genealogy stuff is indeed confusing—is that Conrad Hilton’s parents are my great-grandparents, whereas they are Paris Hilton’s great-great-grandparents. So I was looking at things from Paris’ perspective, kind of a scary thought, rather than…

I’ve come to feel that it finally is time to reveal the nature of my relationship with Paris Hilton. Laurel and I have been following her “career” (so to speak) with considerable interest, observing with wonder the marvel of how—as others have noted before me—it is so easy in America to be famous for being famous. While this tidy circularity implies that Paris’ accomplishment has been largely effortless, our research on E and VH1 tells us otherwise: Paris works very hard at partying, and she devotes much time and attention to looking naturally beautiful. Yet Paris is more than a…

We got back yesterday from six days in Kentucky—the annual reunion of Laurel’s family at her sister’s home outside of Lexington. Lynn and Randy were great hosts, as always, managing to keep many children, adults, dogs, and cats fed, entertained, and under enough control so nobody got seriously hurt. I did get scratched by the “good kitty,” which is a smidgen of what I would have gotten if I had ever met up with the “bad kitty” (never could get their real names straight; all that mattered was keeping their personalities straight). As soon as we arrived in our rental…

It was great to have Celeste (my daughter) and Patrick (her husband) spend the weekend, and part of Monday, with us. It was even worth driving through a seriously weird hail- and rain-storm on the way to the Portland airport Friday afternoon. The thermometer on my Volvo was at 48 degrees (outside temperature) just before the storm; it dropped to 36 degrees in the middle of the storm, during which I-205 was completely white—covered with hail—and cars were driving 30 miles an hour on an almost deserted freeway. Then, a few miles later, it warmed up, and traffic went 10…